The Militant welcomes the release of nine new books and pamphlets by Pathfinder this spring and summer. They are adding to the political arsenal workers, farmers, and youth have at their reach in a growing number of languages to help draw the lessons of class-struggle experiences, and the tumultuous wars and assaults imperialism will increasingly drag humanity into in the decades ahead.

One striking aspect of reports from book fairs, meetings such as the celebration in Montreal of the publication of the first French-language edition of The History of American Trotskyism, and other events is the international interchange and back and forth going on among youth and working people. And Pathfinder books are finding their way around as well, essential building blocks of the international communist movement.

In addition to The History of American Trotskyism in three languages, Pathfinder is releasing new editions in English and Spanish of Their Trotsky and Ours and the third English-language edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions; and the Organizational Principles of the Socialist Workers Party in Spanish. The first edition of New International in Icelandic, which includes "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" and We are the Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara are already being distributed around the world.

The expanding number of books available in English, French, and Spanish, as well as Icelandic and Swedish, that address communist strategy and theory are playing a crucial role in constructing a world communist movement. Working people who read in these languages have access to the same party-building lessons and revolutionary continuity of the workers’ movement.

Revolutionary-minded fighters the world over are being introduced to the communist movement through Pathfinder books and New International--in countries where socialist parties exist; at book fairs from Tehran to Havana; at international events related to the World Federation of Democratic Youth; through Militant reporting trips abroad; and many other avenues.

The field is wide open to get out these and other books by revolutionists. In spite of accelerated moves by Washington to try to curb workers’ rights, the political space for workers to organize resistance to the employers’ assaults and discuss revolutionary ideas remains open.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Stalinism--which masqueraded as communism while subordinating the class struggle and national liberation movements to Moscow’s attempt to find an accommodation with imperialism--is no longer the roadblock it once was for the construction of proletarian parties. Workers and youth involved in resistance against the assaults by the employers and their governments are beginning to reach out and find each other, and start down the tumultuous road of building a common international movement.

Socialist workers and Young Socialists in the United States and internationally have already begun using several of the new publications, studying them as part of intensive socialist summer schools. They are gaining a deeper understanding of the need to prepare proletarian parties in anticipation of battles to come in the years and decades ahead. Using that precious time today to advance that process is a precondition to leading working people and their allies to overturn capitalism and take political power during periods of sharp social crisis and imperialist war. BR> 
 
Related article:
Meeting celebrates new French edition of ‘History of American Trotskyism’  
 
 
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