The meeting was organized by a newly-formed group of revolutionary-minded university students and workers in their early 20s who have been working with Casa de la Juventud (Youth House), a youth group in the capital city of Asunción. San Ignacio is a rural town of 35,000 in southeastern Paraguay.

The youth organized their U.S. visitors to be interviewed live on two radio programs at Radio Libertad and Radio Arapysandú. Koppel and Green described the political work carried out by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists in factories, in workers districts, and at university campuses to win others to the communist movement. Some people heard the interviews and the announcement of the meeting and came to the event from nearby towns.

"As the working-class resistance to the employer offensive grows in the United States, socialist workers are finding themselves in the midst of labor struggles breaking out among meat packers, coal miners, and garment workers, among others," Koppel said at the public forum. "And as we fight together with fellow workers, we are getting a positive response to the revolutionary perspective we explain, using our newspapers and books."

The presentations given by Green and Koppel were followed by a lively discussion and debate. Questions ranged from the Marxist perspective on protecting the environment, to the collapse of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union, to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. In reply to a question, Green said that, as the fights by coal miners for safety show, workers and farmers are the only social force that has both the class interest and the power to protect the environment, which is devastated by the profit-driven actions of the capitalist rulers.

Laws protecting the environment that are won through struggle will continually be undercut by the capitalists, the YS leader said, and working people will have to make a revolution to take political power out of the hands of the exploiters. Marx and Engels were the first to take up this issue as a social question and offer a way forward, Koppel added.

One questioner asked whether communists think religion is a political obstacle to building a revolutionary movement, especially in countries such as Paraguay where the Catholic church hierarchy long has played an influential role.

Koppel explained that communists have always organized working people to fight together regardless of their views on religion, and pointed to the example of Cuba’s revolutionary leadership. Liberation theology and other forms of religion are not a vehicle for progress, however, and communists always fight to raise the broad cultural level of working people as part of gaining a scientific understanding of the world.

After the meeting more than a dozen youth, including high school students, continued the political discussion. Many browsed through a table covered with Pathfinder literature. One older forum participant argued that the guerrilla campaign launched by Ernesto Che Guevara and other revolutionary fighters in Bolivia in 1966-67 was an adventure, and he pointed to the writings of Noam Chomsky as a correct interpretation of the world.

Several students listened closely to communists who explained why Guevara’s course in Bolivia, far from an adventure, was oriented toward linking up with the mass revolutionary developments that were brewing in South America--including Bolivia--at that time; and that what working people need is not an anarchist critique of capitalism such as Chomsky’s but a working-class course of action to change the world, as working people did successfully both in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Cuban Revolution, by fighting to replace the capitalist government with one of workers and peasants. In response, a high school student decided to get a copy of the Pathfinder title Che Guevara and the Imperialist Reality by Mary-Alice Waters. Other books purchased ranged from the Communist Manifesto to James P. Cannon’s Socialism on Trial in Spanish.

The meeting was the first public forum organized by the group of youth in San Ignacio. They viewed it as a success in being able to discuss politics and attract more revolutionary-minded youth toward them. Among other activities, the group has been organizing classes on basic works of Marxism. They recently studied Pathfinder’s edition in Spanish of the Communist Manifesto.
 
 
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