The gathering took place in conjunction with meetings of the SWP National Committee and of the national fractions of socialists active in the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees.

The main speaker at this public event was SWP national secretary Jack Barnes. Also speaking were Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International magazine; socialist coal miner Alice Kincaid; Ma’mud Shirvani, Farsi-language editor of Pathfinder Press; Steve Clark, editorial director of Pathfinder; and Young Socialist leader Arrin Hawkins.

Printed below are excerpts from two Militant articles reporting on this meeting. They appeared in a special International Socialist Review supplement in the October 22, 2001, Militant. Readers will find that the main political themes presented at the meeting hold up well in light of the events of the past year. Since the U.S. rulers exhausted the momentum of September 11, they have continued to justify their war drive by targeting an "axis of evil" of Iraq, Iran, and north Korea.

The one-year anniversary of the response by the communist movement to these events will be marked by a public meeting in New York City on September 28 (see front-page ad).
 

Waters, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and editor of the Marxist magazine New International, chaired the event, "Communists and the Fight against Imperialism Today." The response by more than 350 workers, students, and young people--from up and down the East Coast, and from as far away as Tucson, Arizona, St. Paul, Minnesota, Omaha, Nebraska, and Vancouver, British Columbia--was evidence of their determination to deepen that campaign.

"The class struggle doesn’t go into remission," Waters said, as the propertied ruling class and their government in Washington exploit the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon to rationalize use of massive U.S. military might to maintain their world domination and continue attacks on workers’ wages, job conditions, and democratic rights. To the contrary.

As the meeting convened, Waters said, tens of thousands of state workers in Minnesota were preparing to strike October 1 against employer efforts to reduce medical benefits and maintain wage increases below the rise in the cost of living. She also pointed to the response by members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) who are organizing to expose company responsibility for the September 23 deaths of 13 coal miners in two methane explosions at the Jim Walter No. 5 mine in Brookwood, Alabama. And she called attention to recent protests in Cincinnati, condemning the acquittal after a one-week bench trial of the cop who killed Black youth Timothy Thomas last April.

Communist workers are more deeply involved as part of the rising resistance by a broader vanguard of workers and farmers against capitalist assaults on their living and working conditions, Waters said. SWP members are also teaming up with members of the Young Socialists to reach out to students on college campuses who are attracted to this increase in struggles by working people and can be won to the revolutionary movement.

"The determination by layers of working people to press forward with their strikes and other struggles, to refuse to be cowed by what will be increasing patriotic demagogy that ‘now is not the time,’" Waters said, "is at the heart of the fight against imperialism and its wars...."  
 
Patriotic fervor is ‘skin deep’
Jack Barnes, the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, was the final speaker at the event. At that time, a week away from the Bush administration launching its bombing of Afghanistan, the patriotism the U.S. rulers and big-business media was trying to whip up was still "skin deep," Barnes said.

To really crank up war fever, the socialist leader said, "the U.S. rulers need the blood of American GIs killed in combat. They need body bags to start being unloaded on tarmacs at U.S. air bases.

"The death of 5,000 civilians at the World Trade Center is not enough," Barnes said. That’s "the slaughter of the innocents": something "abhorred, in word, by all three of the desert monotheisms--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Despite the spectacle of ‘national mourning’ the superrich ruling families have promoted and sucked dry since September 11," he said, "they truly care little or nothing for the lives of civilians.

"It is class-conscious workers and fighters for national liberation who draw a hard-and-fast distinction between the killing of innocent civilians and the deaths of soldiers in combat."

To get a war hysteria rolling the rulers need one of two things, Barnes said. Either the assassination of a top bourgeois figure, or a substantial spilling of the blood of soldiers--such as the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898, used by President William McKinley as a pretext to go to war against Spain, the first war of the imperialist epoch, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941, utilized by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt to advance the U.S. rulers’ aim of declaring war against their imperialist rivals in Japan and Germany.  
 
‘We’ versus ‘they’
In the meantime, Barnes said, the U.S. rulers have sought to stir up a patriotic whirlwind of emotionalism and sentimentality to reinforce the illusion that "we Americans" have common interests--whether we’re among the hundreds of millions of workers and farmers exploited by a handful of capitalist families in this country; or a member of one of those exploiting families and their hired servants in top echelons of the government, big business, the church, schools, and press.

"This classless ‘we,’ for example," Barnes said, "embraces both death-row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal and Pennsylvania governor Thomas Ridge, who has signed Mumia’s death warrant and refused to grant him a new trial." Barnes pointed out that President Bush has named Ridge the new, cabinet-level "czar" of "homeland security."

The U.S. rulers, Barnes said, want working people to ask: "How can ‘we’ protect ourselves against ‘fanatics’ around the world? What are ‘we’ going to do about stopping ‘terrorism’?"

But for workers and farmers here or anywhere else, Barnes said, the only "we" is other working people the world over with whom we share common class interests and a common class enemy--first and foremost the capitalist rulers of the United States, the earth’s mightiest and most brutal military power, and its most ruthless exploiters.

"From the standpoint of working people," Barnes said, "that ruling class, its twin political parties, and its state and other institutions are not ‘we’ but ‘they.’ It’s they, the capitalist war-makers, out of whose hands the working class must organize our fellow toilers and those we can win from the middle classes into a revolutionary struggle to take power--or else they will never stop terrorizing humanity."

The imperialist rulers want to hide from workers and farmers the truth explained in the statement released September 11 by the Socialist Workers Party through its candidate for mayor of New York, Martín Koppel. After calling on working people to oppose the U.S. government’s war drive and deepening assaults on workers’ rights, and explaining that revolutionists reject the use of violence against innocent civilians such as that in New York and Washington, the statement said:

The U.S. government and its allies for more than a century have carried out systematic terror to defend their class privilege and interests at home and abroad--from the atomic incineration of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the 10-year-long slaughter in Indochina, to the war against the Iraqi people in 1990-91, to the burning to death of 80 people at Waco on its home soil, to other examples too numerous to list. In recent weeks, the White House and Congress have stood behind Tel Aviv as it escalated its campaign of both random killings and outright murders in its historically failing effort to quell the struggle by the dispossessed Palestinian people for the return of their homeland.

Half a century ago the revolutionary workers movement and other opponents of colonial outrages, racism, and anti-Semitism in all its forms warned that by waging a war of terror to drive the Palestinians from their farms, towns, and cities, the founders of the Israeli state and their imperialist backers in North America and Europe were pitting the Jewish people against those fighting for national liberation in the Middle East and worldwide; they were creating a death trap for the Jews, which Israel remains to this day. By its systematic superexploitation of the peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America; by its never-ending insults to their national and cultural dignity; by its ceaseless murderous violence in countless forms--U.S. imperialism is turning North America into a death trap for working people and all who live here.

"Workers and farmers in the United States have now entered the world," Barnes said.

"For a century the U.S. rulers have largely succeeded in convincing American working people that, at least on home territory, we were exempt from the mass slaughter and misery inflicted worldwide as a result of capitalism’s inherent drive toward imperialist domination, fascism, and war. That’s the source of the dangers to human civilization in today’s world, not ‘fanatics’ or ‘terrorists.’ Our class has now joined the rest of toiling humanity."  
 
To politically arm working people
The party’s September 11 statement was written for the present, to politically arm class-conscious workers, farmers, and young people to act. Because revolutionaries know that if working people act, if we organize to fight, Barnes said, "we will transform the possibilities before humanity."

That’s what communist workers and youth have done in the weeks since September 11, he pointed out. They have taken the campaign against imperialism and its war drive onto the streets in workers’ districts; onto the job in plants, mines, and mills; onto the campuses; and to union events and social protests.

As during the opening days and weeks of Washington’s war drive against Iraq 10 years earlier, Barnes said, worker-bolsheviks across the United States and around the world were immediately confronted with decisions about what to say and how to conduct themselves on the job. They came under pressure from their employers, and often from some co-workers as well, to observe patriotic moments of silence called for by the Bush administration, to take American flags or yellow ribbons, to attend church services, to join in union-organized blood drives or collections--all organized under the banner of public mourning to mobilize support for the U.S. rulers’ chauvinist militarization drive.

Barnes called attention to the example set by communist workers, who held their ground, stuck to their principles, and steadfastly refused to join in these patriotic displays.

In doing so, these workers established where they stood from the outset, won respect from co-workers, and laid the basis for ongoing discussions and political work as the U.S. war and its consequences unfold.

These workers were prepared above all--in their minds, in their habits, and in their gut--by their accumulated experience as disciplined cadres of the communist workers movement. Equipped with that training in proletarian politics, Barnes said, the timeliness, tone, and communist clarity of the Socialist Workers Party’s September 11 statement undoubtedly stood them in good stead, as well.  
 
Same policy in peace and war
Returning to the themes that had been struck by Mary-Alice Waters in opening the New York public meeting, Jack Barnes noted in his closing remarks that during an imperialist war, strikes by workers and other actions in which working people oppose the oppression and brutalities of capitalism are the cells of the most fundamental counter to the rulers’ patriotic course.

"Communists are not organizing an antiwar campaign," Barnes said. "As the Bolsheviks put it during World War I, we don’t have a revolutionary policy in peace time and a peace policy in wartime.

"Instead, in the midst of Washington’s war, we are organizing a stepped-up campaign against imperialism, against what Lenin taught us is the final stage of capitalism--the stage we’re still in. We keep our eyes focused on the class struggle."

It is in the course of class battles, Barnes said, that the illusion that "we"--the ruling class and working people together--need to "equally" sacrifice for the war effort is challenged in practice by the actual experience of growing numbers. Workers who go on strike or stay the course in some social or political struggle, despite the pressures of imperialist war, are refusing to sacrifice their rights, wages, union organization, or life or limb to the needs of the capitalist exploiters, Barnes said.

For communist workers, Barnes concluded, it is both possible and necessary to turn more deeply toward the resistance of working people in the United States in response to the imperialist war against Afghanistan. At the same time, a new generation can be won to the Young Socialists and the communist movement if revolutionary workers collaborate with YS members to go out to college campuses and elsewhere to meet young people repelled by the course of the imperialists and who can be attracted to the working class and revolutionary struggle.
 

In his remarks to the meeting, Clark responded to the assertion trumpeted by much of the big-business press, and echoed by many middle-class radicals, that Washington’s post-September 11 militarization drive registered a fundamental policy shift.

"This is simply false," Clark said. "The U.S. rulers are taking the opportunity to put into play the course they have been preparing for, step by step, for some 15 years. With ongoing tactical differences over how far and how fast to move, the Congress, Clinton, and Bush the elder and younger have been pressing along this bipartisan course ever since the deepening crisis of the world capitalist order signaled by the 1987 stock market crash and collapse of the Stalinist regimes across Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union a few years later.

"With the collapse of those regimes," Clark said, "also came the collapse of the capitalist rulers’ hopes that they could defeat the toilers of the world through a ‘cold war.’ But accomplishing that goal will take gigantic class battles and a ‘hot war’--a coming conflict in which the toilers, with revolutionary leadership, can triumph."

The war against Afghanistan, Clark said, "is not some ‘turn’ in U.S. policy, but another step--and a new opportunity for the rulers--to try to recoup some of what they failed to accomplish in advancing imperialist interests during the bloody 1990–91 war against Iraq."

Similarly, the rulers’ accelerated assault on political rights in the United States does not involve primarily new legislation or executive orders, but "the implementation of what was put in place over the previous eight years by the Clinton administration and Congress." Clark pointed to the reinforcement of a so-called homeland defense command structure; the use against immigrants of "secret evidence," "preventive detention," and curtailment of review and appeal rights under the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act; the bolstering of commando and SWAT-style squads on the federal, state, and local levels; the establishment of a White House "counterintelligence czar"; and other such measures.

"They’ve had all this ready for use for several years, in anticipation of the rise in struggles by workers and farmers they know is coming in the United States," Clark said. "Now they have the pretext to ratchet up the pace."

Even the layoffs of airline employees and other workers the bosses are blaming on "terrorism" were largely planned well beforehand, as profits were being squeezed by overcapacity and increasingly volatile world competition, and as capitalism headed into its first worldwide recession since 1990–91. "The employers just seized the opportunity to wave the bloody flag against workers and unionists who stood up to defend the rights and livelihoods of working people," Clark said.

None of this would come as a surprise to anyone who’s had a chance to read and think about some of the books and magazines referred to by Waters at the opening of the meeting, Clark said. He pointed to several others, including "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" in issue no. 11 of New International magazine, and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, published earlier this year.

Working people and youth in the United States who want to combat the social evils we see accelerating all around us, Clark said, need to look for revolutionary solutions and reach out to the struggles of workers and farmers the world over. The impoverishment and lack of industrial development in the countries where the great majority of humanity lives, and the vast inequities in social and cultural conditions, are the product neither of "conspiracies" nor "chaos," Clark said. "They are the inevitable result of how capitalism works, not how it doesn’t work."

When the leaders of the victorious Bolshevik revolution in Russia launched the Communist International some 80 years ago, its statutes said it was breaking "once and for all with the traditions" of most previous organizations that claimed to be socialist "which, in reality, only recognized the white race." In the new communist world movement, it said, "are fraternally united people of all colors--white, yellow, and black--the toilers of the entire world." Clark welcomed those at the meeting to join with the Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialists, and their supporters in the ongoing effort to build such an international movement.  
 
 
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