By the time the convention was over, all those attending the gathering had been able to size up what the communist movement had accomplished over the last few years, see the political strengthening of the movement both in the United States and internationally, and turn to more fully meet the wealth of opportunities to broaden the reach and influence of the communist movement within the working class today.

Young socialists took the lead in kicking off the post-convention work. Within days, they and other supporters of socialist candidates in the 2002 elections produced a flyer for Young Socialists for Koppel and Hawkins, the party candidates for governor and lieutenant governor of New York (see coverage on page 5). They began speaking from soapboxes on street corners here and carrying out campaign activities in other places across the United States. The young socialists and party candidates aim to win other young people to campaign together with them as partisans of the revolutionary working-class alternative in the elections. Through this kind of outreach, revolutionary-minded youth will be won to the communist movement over the coming months.

Socialist workers employed in textile mills, coal mines, meatpacking plants, and garment shops drew together their experiences during the final weeks of the subscription drive for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial in July. In light of the convention discussion they came out with renewed confidence and conviction in the opportunities to talk socialism on the job and deepen their political work within the industrial working class--inside the factories and mines, at plant gates, and within initial elements of proletarian social formations that arise to fight against the offensive by the superwealthy ruling class.

And branches and organizing committees of the party are pursuing lines of resistance by working people they can join--from the Western coalfields to following the trail of New York City’s construction union rats. They are looking to establish new organizing committees to widen the geographic spread of the movement and be a part of more centers of struggle.  
 
West Coast longshore dispute
Branches of the party and young socialist campaigners plan to sell more than 200 copies of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial this week to longshore workers and others backing the fight shaping up on the West Coast docks. The employers, who are driving to force through concessions on the workers, are backed by the U.S. government, which has threatened to invoke the antiunion Taft-Hartley law in order to block the longshoremen from striking. As they sell the Militant, the socialists will introduce workers to pamphlets such as The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning and other titles published by Pathfinder Press.

The day after the convention more than 100 supporters of the party held a series of workshops on the next steps in organizing the production line of Pathfinder books and a nationwide Pathfinder sales force and distribution center in Atlanta. A report on this meeting and the workshops will be run in next week’s Militant.

Nearly 400 people attended the convention and participated in the classes, social events, and panel discussions. The gathering was enriched by members of the Young Socialists and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, whose representatives contributed to the discussion on the convention floor, and in the classes and panels.

The entire movement is planning to head to either New York August 24–25, or Atlanta August 31–September 2, for two Red Weekends of voluntary labor. In New York they will make further progress in transforming the editorial offices of Pathfinder and the area housing its printing presses, and the offices of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. They will load up trucks with the entire Pathfinder stock, which will be driven to Atlanta by supporters in time for the Labor Day weekend voluntary work crews to set up the distribution center of the publishing house.

The world that the capitalists have in store for working people was brought home by daily reports to the convention from a team of two socialist coal miners, Tony Lane and Jason Alessio, who left Oberlin and traveled to Somerset, Pennsylvania, in response to the flood that trapped nine workers underground. Lane, the party’s candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, issued a campaign statement condemning the mine bosses for their contempt for workers’ safety. Alessio reported on the flood and the rescue at a rally following the conclusion of the convention.  
 
Victory of third campaign for the turn
The convention definitively registered the victory of the effort launched at a July 1998 Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh to transform the work of the party branches and fractions, known as the third campaign for the turn to the industrial trade unions. This campaign focused on increasing the number of party members in meatpacking jobs organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW), garment and textile jobs organized by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE), as well as rebuilding a national union fraction of coal miners organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

Five months later at a conference jointly sponsored by the YS and SWP in Los Angeles, SWP national secretary Jack Barnes presented a talk, "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," which is now published in Capitalism’s World Disorder. Barnes noted that since at least 1997 "a new pattern is being woven in struggle as working people emerge from a period of retreat, resisting the consequences of the rulers’ final blow-off boom, of ‘globalization’--their grandiloquent term that displays imperial arrogance while it masks brutal assaults on human dignity the world over."

He noted that "we are at the beginning of struggles that will bring profound changes," and the necessity for the party to change "the understanding, and--above all--the timeliness with which we act today from our starting point within, and as part of, a militant vanguard of working people."

The party charted a course to "transform our movement together," Barnes said. "We will find ourselves in small towns as well as big cities.... Political openings and responsibilities will determine organizational forms."

This framework and political course was simply assumed by participants in the convention and surrounding meetings. It provided the basis for the quick steps out of the gathering into the openings among young people and the working-class movement today, acting on the knowledge that the world economy has entered into depression conditions, and that the U.S. rulers will unleash new wars in a desperate attempt to hold together the system of imperialist domination.

The SWP and Young Socialists are politically prepared for the period of accelerating imperialist assaults on working people around the world, for the implosion of paper values in equity markets, and economic stagnation in the major imperialist centers. They have been discussing the underpinnings of this crisis with working people and youth for some years, and are gaining a wider hearing from workers, farmers, and youth seeking answers to the onset of a world depression, military assaults, and interimperialist conflict that mark the world today.

Communists have presented a scientific explanation of these trends in the world economy and their political implications in Capitalism’s World Disorder, and articles published in New International magazine, including "Imperialism’s March Toward Fascism and War"; "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold"; "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington’s Assault on Iraq"; and "U.S. Imperialism has Lost the Cold War."

Although spokespeople for the imperialist ruling classes in the United States, Europe, and Japan would not acknowledge today that they will use trade and currency assaults and capital controls to defend their national economies, they will be driven to do so as conditions worsen, helping to trigger a collapse in industrial production and a world depression, as happened in the 1930s.

What the communist movement does before such eruptions is what is important, Jack Barnes said in a political report to the convention. "During economic and political upheavals a mass revolutionary party can be forged--but only if it has understood, organized, and acted beforehand." Rather than fear the violent events that are being prepared by capitalist development, worker-bolsheviks organize to meet them and make the most of the opportunities they entail.  
 
U.S. power is a ‘snapshot’
The "snapshot" of U.S. military power and economic weight that is taken as gospel by forces outside the communist movement hides the fact that Washington moves not from strength, but from weakness, said Barnes.

Today, Washington is being forced to use its military power to reinforce its domination of semicolonial countries and the system of imperialist relations, and as a warning to its imperialist rivals, as it feels the fore-shocks of the greatest economic crisis since the 1930s.

Barnes proposed that party branches organize a winter school to study Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, written by V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and the Russian Revolution, and related material. "Lenin wrote that imperialism would be a system in crisis, and would develop through both monopoly and the violence of competition," he said.

The Russian revolutionary leader explained that "the essence of imperialism" is the division of the world "into a handful of usurer states and a vast majority of debtor states"--a trend that has accelerated in the decades since the pamphlet’s publication in 1917. In the chapter entitled, "Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism," he quoted a bourgeois economist, who stated, "The creditor is more firmly attached to the debtor than the seller is to the buyer."

The huge outstanding loans on the books of major banks, coupled with massive holdings in derivatives, lie at the heart of the financial threat to the banking system.

One indication of this trend is the slump in the share price of J.P. Morgan Chase, one of the largest and most prestigious of the U.S. banks. It has fallen in large part because of reports that its credit rating is about to be downgraded. This central institution of U.S. finance capital is effectively bankrupt, Barnes noted, and others are threatened by the bursting of a debt-driven "gigantic bubble in financial instruments."

Although the business cycle will continue--along with big fluctuations, including "hopeful" upward swings in the stock market--the world capitalist economy has entered into a long winter, in which a "hard rain" will continuously fall. As has happened with the economic stagnation in Japan, there is no internal mechanism that can bring capitalism out of its malaise. Even imperialist wars against semicolonial powers, such as that being prepared against Iraq, will not solve the capitalists’ crisis.  
 
Revolutionary political education
What is opening up for the communist movement with these events is a period of revolutionary political education of the working class, in which the distribution and study of revolutionary books and pamphlets produced by Pathfinder, along with socialist newspapers and magazines, will play a decisive role.

The political logic of the effects of the onset of a devastating collapse in industrial production is to shut off the lines of resistance within the working class. While temporary setbacks are to be expected, history has shown that the rulers cannot turn back the struggles of working people in a period of growing crises without taking them on and defeating them, Barnes said.

Imperialist war and economic depression will not immediately engender a revolutionary struggle for power by working people in the United States, Barnes noted. The U.S. working class has no historic experience of a pre-revolutionary situation, a nationwide workers party or general strike, or a political tyranny. It must go through such experiences over the coming years before it can mount revolutionary struggles that challenge the ruling rich in a contest for power.

In the years ahead the working class has strengths to draw on that it did not have in the 1930s, the last time the workers movement confronted a deep crisis, Barnes noted. This includes the strength, character, and potential of women in the revolutionary proletarian movement, both in its cadre and its leadership. The weight of workers who are Black is completely different today. Another is the size and character of immigration into the United States, and the links to workers around the world this influence has given the working class, Barnes said. In addition, the great obstacle of Stalinism--a factor that played a decisive role in the defeats of revolutionary struggles in the 1930s--will not block the road as before.  
 
Working-class solidarity
"Workers who are resisting become immediately open to forming an alliance with those opposed to the wars and assaults by the bosses," Barnes said. The period ahead will not be one of relative prosperity in the United States as was the case during the Vietnam War, giving the U.S. rulers the ability to provide both "guns" and "butter." Instead, Washington will carry out its assaults abroad while having to take on the social conquests of the working class at home, opening a completely different dynamic and range of possibilities than existed in the 1960s or early 1970s for revolutionary struggle.

"The most important thing in this situation is the resistance to imperialist brutality worldwide," Barnes emphasized. He pointed to the Palestinian people, who through their refusal to kneel before the vaunted military prowess of the Israeli state have deepened its crisis. In Palestine, where Israeli soldiers have to deal with "multigenerational resistance," watching their backs against not just children but grandparents, "we see not horror but glory," he said.

Among other "magnificent examples of the absence of fear" are the revolutionary vigilance of the government and working people of Cuba against Washington’s four-decade-long hostility.

James Harris, a garment worker from Atlanta, said in the discussion that the shocks in the capitalist economy has "changed the way a layer of workers think about their future and how they fit into the working class."

Delegate Francisco Sánchez from Chicago said that he is employed in a plant where the party is known by some workers. He has been welcomed into the plant by one worker "who treats me like he’s known me for years. He sees me as someone with the same politics," he said.  
 
Welcomes winter school
Susan Rose from Birmingham responded enthusiastically, like other delegates, to the proposal for the winter school and another chance for collective study over a number of weeks. Referring to the twice-weekly summer school on communist continuity and party history completed just before the convention, Rose said party members in Birmingham at first thought "how can we do it?" given their other activity. But now, "I think, ‘how can we not do it?’" She described an upturn in interest in Pathfinder books on the job, and said she often brings a stack of them into the break room for co-workers to look over.

Nan Bailey from Los Angeles told of a person attending the Militant Labor Forum series in Los Angeles who said that he "wants to believe you about the weakness of imperialism. I even feel it, but I need you to provide the ammunition so I can explain it."

Party leader Mary-Alice Waters explained that Washington’s next war against the people of Iraq has nothing to do with the September 11 events, but is a continuation of its 1990 military assault and the opening guns of World War III. Far from September 11 changing anything in the world, the U.S. ruling class simply took advantage of the attacks to accelerate their assaults on working people. The invasion being planned by the U.S. government to topple the government of Iraq is unfinished business from the 1990–91 war, she said, which has been rankling with them for a decade. Now the U.S. rulers aim to send their military back to finish the job.

Argiris Malapanis from Miami, who had just returned from a Militant reporting trip to Venezuela, said that a "serious depression is already under way in Argentina, Venezuela and other parts of Latin America." He also described to the convention the wide-ranging political discussion the international reporting team was able to engage in with young people seeking ways to fight imperialism, and the actions of workers and peasants who are standing up and fighting the impact of the capitalist economic crisis.

Martín Koppel, the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of New York State and editor of Perspectiva Mundial, spoke about the just-concluded trip to Paraguay and Argentina by himself and Romina Green of the Young Socialists.

"In these two countries, both gripped by capitalist crisis and working peoples’ resistance, we introduced ourselves as communists from the United States, set up literature tables on campus, spoke at a forum, and made the most of the opportunities for political discussion," Koppel said. He, Green, and Malapanis each said they had underestimated the thirst for revolutionary literature among working people and youth they had met, and needed more Pathfinder books that they had brought with them.

Anne Lane, of the Communist League in New Zealand, said that a team of Young Socialists will be going to Kanaky (New Caledonia) on the invitation of Palika, an organization that is fighting French colonial domination of that South Pacific country. The YS reached out to Palika, as well as other organizations in the Pacific to participate in the 2001 World Festival of Youth and Students in Algiers, Algeria. They subsequently met up in Algiers and exchanged experiences of their struggles fighting against imperialism.

The reports from teams to Latin America reinforced the international character of the communist movement in reaching out to meet and collaborate with layers of revolutionary minded youth and workers, along the road to rebuilding a world communist movement.  
 
New openings internationally
SWP leader Jack Willey, pointing to the experiences of the teams to Latin America, said the communist movement has not faced similar openings for several decades, at least since the revolutions in Grenada and Nicaragua in the early 1980s. He had just returned from a meeting of the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest, Hungary, which discussed the venue of the next world youth festival. Willey’s report was titled, "Revolutionary youth and communist nuclei."

Willey noted the trips to Latin America came out of a decade of work in the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the youth festival movement. YS members from a number of countries first met and collaborated with anti-imperialist fighters from Paraguay, Haiti, Western Sahara, and elsewhere at the anti-imperialist youth festival in Havana in August 1997, at meetings of the Organization of Latin American and Caribbean Students, and at last year’s festival in Algeria.

Willey had joined a team of socialists from the United States and Canada that had participated in a May conference in Haiti on the invitation of Young Socialists members in that country. "As part of the discussions, we sold a wide range of books, from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels titles to Capitalism’s World Disorder by Jack Barnes," he said. "The experience helped justify the commitment of the movement’s time and financial resources to publish books by revolutionary leaders, and the extraordinary effort to translate them into French, Spanish, and other languages that make them more accessible to the fighters we meet."

Pierre, one of two representatives from the Haiti Young Socialists attending the convention, brought greetings to the participants. "Since the youth festival in Algeria," he said, "the Young Socialists members have read many books." Thanks are due to those publishing Pathfinder titles, he said, which have allowed "those who are discouraged to regroup their forces and to fight."

The Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and the Revolutionary Socialist Nucleus in Paraguay sent greetings to the convention.

Leaders of the Communist Leagues spoke on panels or in convention sessions about the strengthening of their work along the same lines as discussed at the convention. Kevin Jónsson, a leader of the Communist League in Iceland, founded at a convention on June 30, explained the steps the organization is taking to integrate itself into sections of the industrial working class, as well as to knit ties with farmers.  
 
Broadening reach of worker-bolsheviks
In his report, "Communist branches, fractions, and recruiting vanguard workers," Joel Britton drew on the party’s recent progress in building political trade union fractions, and local units based in working-class districts. "We have reaffirmed that we are building a party of worker-bolsheviks, described in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics," he said.

The work of the party’s industrial trade union fractions was discussed at meetings the day before the convention, as well as a meeting of the national fraction steering committees the day following the convention (see page 10).

Britton stressed the importance of organizing regular political work at plant gates and mine portals, reaching out to meet workers and discuss politics with them. The weekly teams sell the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder literature, and bring the party’s elections campaigns and information on political events they seek to get workers involved in. Socialist workers inside the workplaces are more and more finding that by joining the team outside they not only help increase sales, but become better known as political people by a wider layer of workers in the plant.

At the conclusion of the convention Barnes discussed the next steps in building and recruiting to the communist movement. "We need to take a richer look at recruitment to the party" and the crucial role of the Young Socialists, he said. "Young people need a bridge to party membership. We will also recruit older people, but not if there are not youth around. To the older worker, youth represent life after eight or more hours of death in the factories. Recruitment can’t be done without this dual approach."

"We welcome young people who take their time about their decision whether to be a Bolshevik for the rest of their life," Barnes said. As they do so the party and Young Socialists will find ways to work together in revolutionary activity, organize classes and schools, and deepen their common class-struggle experience.

A rally at the conclusion of the convention included representatives of the Communist Leagues in Sweden and the United Kingdom; two party supporters leading the Pathfinder Distribution Center and the party supporters’ financial efforts; party candidates for public office Arrin Hawkins, Martín Koppel, and Sam Manuel; national campaign director Greg McCartan on campaign perspectives and the party’s battle for workers’ rights in elections; and YS leader Jason Alessio on the work of the party in the coalfields.

Jack Barnes introduced the members of the National Committee. Rally participants joined in launching a Pathfinder Fund, which will run to November 15. Some $55,000 was pledged toward the overall goal.

[Further coverage on the convention and how the communist movement is reaching out to working people and youth will be featured in next week’s Militant.]
 
 
Related articles:
Socialists step up sales, political work on job, in unions
Young socialists discuss impact of convention  
 
 
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