Joel Britton, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and one of five workers at the meeting who are part of the fight against AMPAC, welcomed the 146 participants to the meeting at the Casa Juan Diego, a youth center in the Pilsen community, a workers district. During a reception and dinner preceding the program participants began discussing and purchasing Pathfinder books and volumes from a special sale of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, as well as the Collected Works of Russian revolutionary leader V.I. Lenin.

Britton explained how AMPAC bosses suddenly closed down Chicago's last slaughterhouse in November, claiming they did not have to abide by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act because they were complying with a U.S. Department of Agriculture order to shut down over unsanitary conditions. Since that time the workers have organized a protest at the plant and meetings to demand severance and vacation pay. Britton said that a press conference is planned at the Federal Building in Chicago April 17 to announce the filing of a lawsuit as part of the fight.

"Workers at AMPAC are part of a social movement against the devastating loss of jobs, pensions, and health and other benefits working people are facing in this country," Britton said. Also attending the event were SWP and Young Socialists members from across the country who are meat packers, most of whom belong to the United Food and Commercial Workers union. They met over the weekend to discuss their work in the union and industry. Members of the Communist League and YS in Canada, Iceland, and the United Kingdom traveled to Chicago for the conference.

Britton announced to cheers and applause that 2,000 people had marched that day in Chicago to condemn the murderous Israeli regime and Washington's aid to Tel Aviv. He pointed to one of the displays lining the walls of the hall on the Palestinians struggle. "One picture there from several decades ago is as true today as it was at that time," Britton explained. "The photo shows Palestinians and the wall of a building where it is written: 'We fight Israel because it occupies our land.'"  
 
Defending their revolution
Socialist Workers Party leader Mary-Alice Waters began her presentation by reading part of a letter received by the Militant earlier that day from Ramón Labañino Salazar. Labañino, 38, is one of five Cuban revolutionaries jailed in the United States for between 15 years and life after being framed up on conspiracy charges by the U.S. government (see letter page 11). At their trial the five testified they were in the United States in order to gather information on the activities of counterrevolutionary organizations that have carried out violent attacks against Cuba from U.S. soil in order to know what assaults were being planned and to help defend their country against them.

The names of the five "will become as familiar to you as others in the struggle," Waters said. "Their real crime was to accept their assignment and help defend the revolution wherever that might take them. The five have been named Heroes of the Republic of Cuba," she said, the highest honor for revolutionary fighters in that country. "They are part of and on the front lines of the struggle of working people here in the United States. But their struggle and history is little known. That is where our job lies," she said.

Waters said that the 300 men kept in brutal conditions by the U.S. government at its illegally occupied naval base in Guantánamo, Cuba, are also victims of the U.S. empire. "The greatest terrorist power on the face of the earth has no right to act as judge, jury, and executioner of those in Guantánamo any more than in the case of the five Cubans," said Waters. "In the eyes of the imperialist rulers, we are all German Jews. We are all 'Muslim terrorists.'"

Waters is the editor of the Pathfinder title, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution by Víctor Dreke. Dreke has for half a century been a leading participant in Cuba's revolutionary movement--from the struggle to overthrow the Batista dictatorship to the battle against the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba; to internationalist missions in the Congo and active membership in the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.  
 
Not a story of the past
Dreke's book, said Waters, "is not a story of the past, but of the present and future." Waters and an international team of socialist workers and Young Socialists spent a month in Cuba in February and early March organizing Pathfinder's participation in the Havana International Book Fair. Meetings to present the new book by Dreke were held at the fair and at a subsequent series of events in several provinces.

Dreke would say to audiences, Waters explained, especially addressing the younger generations: "We have not written this book for ourselves, but for you, who will have go into the mountains once again to defend the revolution. That time is coming."

There is an intensifying class struggle in Cuba, Waters said, which "takes different shapes and forms than in imperialist countries where our mortal enemy holds state power. In Cuba, workers and farmers hold state power and their most important weapon is that government."

The Battle of Ideas in Cuba is a battle to win a new generation of the working class and working farmers to the side of the revolution and to slow down the inroads of counterrevolutionary forces at work due to the fact that the Cuban Revolution lives in a world dominated by capitalism. There are also growing inequalities arising from the introduction of the U.S. dollar and the "idea that comes from capitalism itself that 'me and mine' rather than 'us together' can overcome."

Waters pointed to a speech presented by Cuban president Fidel Castro to the 40th anniversary celebration of the Union of Young Communists earlier in the week. Castro said that the Battle of Ideas "is not only about principles, theory, knowledge, culture, arguments, rejoinders and counter-rejoinders. It is to destroy lies and to sow truth. It is about deeds and concrete acts."  
 
Turning to younger generations
The leadership of the Cuban Revolution, Waters said, is turning to younger generations and youth who have been among the most alienated and suffered the worst under the blows of what is called the Special Period during the 1990s, during which Cuba confronted the devastating collapse of trade and aid from the Soviet Union reinforced by the tightening by Washington of its economic embargo. The Cuban leaders, she said, are challenging the younger generations to help lead in finding solutions to the social and economic problems the revolution faces today.

The strengthening of the working class and increased political discussion is helping to put a spotlight on and to celebrate the real history of blacks in Cuba, the SWP leader said, which reinforces the foundation upon which the unity of the working class is based.

This campaign brings out how it was only the socialist revolution that made possible the dramatic strides forward over the past 40 years in combating institutionalized discrimination and racism. These include affirmative action measures in health care, education, and employment. They are at the center of what socialist revolution is all about, she said, and have benefited workers and farmers who are black the most.

Prior to the revolution, in the 1950s, racist discrimination in Cuba was similar to that in the United States--and more like the U.S. south. The enormous strides towards leaving behind racism and national oppression in Cuba since the revolution, Waters said, can be seen in the wide interest among working people in the country in books such as Habla Malcolm X (Malcolm X Speaks) and the identification with revolutionary leaders such as Víctor Dreke.

"If much of this is coming to the fore today," Waters concluded "it is a registration of the fact that Cuban revolution is moving forward and is advancing."  
 
Central place of Pathfinder titles
"At the book fair in Havana many Cubans were drawn to the Pathfinder booth by the international character of the team and the internationalism of the books," said Linda Joyce, a volunteer in the Pathfinder Reprint Project in Atlanta. She said two tourists from Norway who happened to be visiting the La Cabaña Fortress where the book fair was being held came up to the booth to find out what was going on. "When I told them it was an international book fair they said they couldn't believe it! 'Look at how many people are here and how many books everyone is carrying around with them!' the two exclaimed."

The success of the book fair and three separate presentations of Pathfinder titles, Joyce said, added to her appreciation of Pathfinder reprint project. "These meetings were full of fighters in the revolutionary armed forces of Cuba. There was real history in the room," she said. "It drives home why the lessons of the revolutionary battles of the Cuban people of this era need to be put in print while they can still be told in first person."

In addition to turning Pathfinder books into digital files ready for printing in the printshop of the publishing house, a number of reprint volunteers work with SWP members in local areas to help distribute books to libraries, bookstores, and other outlets across the United States, Joyce explained. The increasing interest in Pathfinder titles can be seen in the results of these efforts so far this year in Atlanta. Joyce said that nearly $4,200 worth of books have been ordered by various stores in the area since the beginning of the year.

Arrin Hawkins, a leader of the Young Socialists from Chicago who is an illegally terminated AMPAC worker, also spoke at the evening event. As part of the team at the Havana book fair, Hawkins said she was able to talk to young people from around the Americas and Africa who are studying in Cuba. "We were able to describe developments in the class struggle in the United States," she said, "and what we do as communists among working people and students. I found a lot of young people interested in the situation in Venezuela today. And I met a person who had read books by Malcolm X and identified with him as a world revolutionary leader."

The YS leader said that one young woman who visited the booth said she was "not political," but ended up staying around and carefully looking over the books. Hawkins described to her the conditions facing women in the United States, including discrimination and lack of child care. In turn, the woman explained the accomplishments of the revolution in organizing child care and the enormous difference it made in her ability to hold a job and organize her life.

Since her return from Cuba Hawkins has spoken on several college campuses and at other meetings about her experiences. "Many young people I talk with agree that there needs to be a revolution in the United States and are looking for a disciplined organization to join," she said.  
 
Giving their lives to not be dispossessed
Jack Barnes, SWP national secretary, was the final speaker of the evening. He said he rose to speak on behalf of the party in response to the April 4 presentation on Israel by U.S. president Bush, who said he spoke on behalf of the people of the United States.

"Praise and honor to those who give their lives and continue to give their lives to say they will not be dispossessed and their nation will not be absorbed in the 21st century," Barnes said of the Palestinians.

Responding to Bush's assertion that "when an 18-year-old Palestinian girl is induced to blow herself up...the future itself is dying," Barnes said that when 16-, 17-, and 18-year-olds stop giving their lives in the struggle, the future of Palestine will die. "It is when the oppressed stop being willing to offer their lives--to get up every day as the Cubans say and kiss your family good-bye not knowing whether or not you will return that night--that is when the future will die. It will die with the murder by imperialism of everything that is beautiful and that is human in the world."

The Palestinian fighters are not the terrorists, Barnes said. The goal of the Palestinians is the liberation of their people. They are a people that live in the daily horror of being dispossessed of their land and homes. And then they are called upon to "negotiate" their future after the fact. The goal of the Israeli state is the death of the Palestinian people, the SWP leader said, just as the goal of French imperialism was the death of Algerians as they held the country in colonial bondage. The death of Blacks in the United States was the goal of the racist lynchers as well.

"The president also rises in fear and in confusion," Barnes said. He pointed to the fact that several years ago the ratio of Palestinians killed to Israelis killed was 36 to 1. Today it is 3 to 1. Several years ago no Israeli armored vehicles had been blown up. Today a half track and two tanks have been destroyed, he said.

In his speech Bush urged the Israeli government to "distinguish between the terrorists and ordinary Palestinians seeking to provide for their own families." Barnes pointed out that "there is no distinction to make any more. For first time we are told that Israeli armed forces are taking stashes of water and food from Palestinians" who had stored up some supplies to maintain their families during the military occupations.

Bush urged Israeli officials to "be compassionate at checkpoints and border crossings," Barnes said, "but it is impossible for cops to be compassionate at border checkpoints of imperialist oppressors."

In Israel, for the first time, one of the best armed forces in the world of an oppressor nation is being transformed by the capitalist rulers into a repressive police force, bringing with it corruption, a breakdown in morale, and fissures within the oppressor nation. The blows already dealt to the Israeli army, he said, are destroying its fiber as a professional fighting force.

"Israel must be defeated, removed, and replaced with a democratic and secular Palestine with the right of return for every person whose families toiled for centuries on the land," Barnes said. "They must have the right to come back and live where their family lived or was buried. But this is the single most important thing that cannot be tolerated by Israel."

He noted that one commentator recently bemoaned the "problem" that Arab nations did not "absorb" the Palestinians. "But a people is not an absorbable piece of dissolvable suture," he said. "Our goal is the demoralization of the Israeli army and recognition by growing layers in Israel that they are in a death trap, and that Israel is a death trap for other Jews around the world as well."  
 
'There is no war against terrorism'
The SWP leader noted that there is no "war against terrorism," simply an Israeli war against the Palestinians and a war by U.S. imperialism against Afghanistan. The men shackled and caged in Guantánamo "are our brothers," he said, "who were fighting against the imperialist attack on Afghanistan." Washington is trying to turn the prisoners into something less than human to justify the use of torture to "protect America" from future terrorist attacks. Their brutal treatment of the men is an example of what the U.S. rulers will have to do to try to humble, and attempt to defeat, the working class.

And Washington is preparing to wage war time and again to try to impose protectorate regimes wherever the U.S. rulers deem they are needed.

"This is the civilized world," Barnes said. "Israel is a kind of democracy. It simply shows what 'civilization' will do for working people around the world. 'Civilization' is the source of all the horrors of the 21st century. 'Democracy' was the source of the gratuitous use of the dirty nuclear bombs on the civilian population of Japan at the end of World War II," he said, not by a rightist or conservative party, but under the administration of a liberal Democrat in Washington.

It is working people who are the bearers of culture into the 21st century, the SWP leader noted. The civilization and democracy of imperialism "must be replaced by a revolutionary alliance of regimes of working people throughout the world," he said.

The communist movement does not fight for socialism, Barnes said, but battles to guarantee that struggles of working people can finally be successful and open up the social use, not the private domination, of the labor of humanity. Working people and youth join the communist movement when they become convinced that if they don't fight for a revolution, the gains made by workers and farmers will be eroded and taken away as the capitalists use any form of brutality necessary to defend their outmoded social system.  
 
Callous brutality of imperialist rulers
To highlight the callous brutality of the imperialist rulers and the future they hold for humanity, Barnes addressed several developments since the regional socialist conference in Atlanta two weeks prior to the Chicago gathering.

The road ahead, he said, holds great horrors for working people, as well as a long period of heroism as struggles and revolutionary upsurges challenge capitalist rule. The drive toward greater assaults by the employers and their governments is the final consummation of the laws of imperialism and the necessity of deepening its domination of the world in order to prevent a destructive crash of the banking system.

He noted that William McDonough, president of the New York Federal Reserve, remarked optimistically that the devastating default in Argentina caused little turmoil in financial markets and helped make it clear "that there will be situations in which a country will go into default. That lesson had to be established," he said.

The callous disregard by McDonough for the lives of working people in the city and countryside in Argentina, who have seen the peso become worthless and inflation skyrocket, is a good gauge of the views of the superwealthy ruling minority. Barnes said that the experience of Argentina, once held up by Washington as a model for "emerging countries," shows that under the imperialist system semicolonial countries will "always be emerging, and never emerge." The division of the world into a handful of predatory imperialist powers and oppressed nations, has remained unchanged since the early 1900s when Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin explained that there will never be another imperialist country to emerge in the world.

The approach of the U.S. ruling class towards Argentina shows their determination to "make the bourgeoisie and peoples of country after country carry even more weight of the workings of the capitalist system," Barnes said.

On April 5 the Bush administration announced a new workplace safety "policy" of dropping all mandatory requirements for industry and to instead "rely on" voluntary actions by companies to reduce injuries from repetitive motions on the job. John Henshaw, the director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said the new "rules" provide the "flexibility needed to reduce these injuries." A New York Times reporter noted that such injuries over the last decade "have hurt millions of Americans including seamstresses, secretaries, nursing home aides, journalists, and poultry plant workers."

That same day the Times reported that for the first time working people are putting more money into their pension plans than are their employers. The number of retirement plans that have a guaranteed benefit and federal insurance to protect retirees if the company goes under has fallen from almost 40 percent to just over 20 percent. As the recent disaster for workers at Enron showed to millions, seemingly secure 401 (k) and other plans not guaranteed and insured can go up in smoke in a matter of months or weeks.  
 
'This is murder'
Barnes noted that as the federal government chops away at Medicare and HMOs, driving members off the rolls, Veteran Administration hospitals are becoming a provider of last resort for tens of thousands. In St. Petersburg, Florida, 4,429 veterans are scheduled for their first doctor's appointment in October 2005. "This is murder," Barnes said.

The SWP leader pointed to a recent UN report that was met with alarm in capitalist newspapers and bourgeois circles. The study warned that a million people turn 60 every month, "a demographic revolution that will mean older people will outnumber the young for the first time in history." A Times article said that "even rich nations have long wondered how they will continue to finance pensions and health care for future generations."

The thousands of years of human labor and the advances in medicine that have increased longevity and decreased infant mortality, Barnes said, have become a horrible crisis for humanity under capitalism, emphasizing its dog-eat-dog character. The capacity of the social labor of human beings to become more productive, more varied generationally, and more energetic for a longer number of years--this becomes the greatest crisis of all for the capitalist rulers.

In these developments over a two-week time period, "We see the future capitalism has to offer," Barnes said. But within these assaults, working people find a way to begin together resisting the employers' drive and demonstrate a growing tendency to reach out and know about other struggles. Many start discussing battles of other sections of working people, and want to seek clarity on questions of crucial importance for the working class. This is one feature of recent demonstrations in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, he noted, where more workers on their way home stop by and pick up a flyer when they see a protest action.  
 
Books not about ideas
Pointing to the wealth of Pathfinder titles and other revolutionary books on the literature tables set up in the meeting room, Barnes said they are not primarily about ideas. Instead, they are a story.

To write The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had to find the "line of march of the working class, and find it out factually, in order to become conscious fighters and start to generalize from their experiences and draw lessons. Communism is not a doctrine or a blueprint," he noted. "Communists are in the forefront of all battles. To the degree communism is a theory it is a generalization of this line of march."

Within the working-class resistance today, the SWP leader said, communists begin being born before they know they are communists. The goal of the communist movement is to hasten the bringing together of an incipient movement that is unconscious of itself and to build a proletarian party capable of leading tens of millions to redeem the struggles of all those toilers who have come before and will come in the future.

Barnes said working people "should judge the SWP by what it does," and encouraged all present "to join the party and Young Socialists in order to build a communist movement that can be worthy of all the heroes we are celebrating tonight."
 
 
Related articles:
Youth and workers attend conference
Brisk sales of books that workers need  
 
 
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