The meeting was part of a weekend of political activity by dozens of supporters of the communist movement, many of whom had come from cities around the country as well as Canada. They joined teams to do construction work, organize political files, and pack and move boxes. This was part of a final week of work to reorganize and relocate the editorial offices of Pathfinder and the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, as well as the national office of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). Some of the volunteers also participated in the large antiwar demonstration that Saturday.

On March 24, socialist meat packers, coal miners, and garment and textile workers from across the country met to discuss "joining with fighting co-workers to find ways to resist the bosses’ offensive at home, abroad, and along the borders," as the flyer for the meeting described the culmination of the three days of activities.

Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes was the featured speaker at the event. Also speaking were SWP leaders Joel Britton, James Harris, and Mary-Alice Waters. Naomi Craine, chairperson of the SWP in New York City, moderated the meeting.

James Harris, a member of the SWP National Committee who works as a sewing machine operator in Atlanta, described the participation of socialists in the antiwar march of the previous day, where they had met a number of young people interested in a revolutionary perspective who had purchased the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, and Pathfinder books to find answers to their questions (see article on page 15).  
 
Cuba in Washington’s crosshairs
Mary-Alice Waters described the importance of moving the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial and the SWP national office into offices suitable for their political needs. A $13,000 fund was launched to make the reorganization and move possible, and participants in the meeting responded by contributing or pledging almost $9,000 (see article on page 5).

Waters also drew the audience’s attention to Washington’s current moves to intensify its pressure on Havana, including new restrictions on Cuban representatives and stepped-up meddling and provocations by U.S. diplomatic personnel on the island. These actions are part of a 44-year-long campaign of economic, military, and diplomatic aggression by the U.S. rulers that does not cease. "Cuba is always in their crosshairs because of the example the Cuban Revolution represents in the world," she said.

The U.S. government’s latest efforts to isolate and break the spirit of five Cuban revolutionaries jailed on frame-up "conspiracy" charges are part of these attacks, she noted. The five were recently thrown into solitary confinement.

Washington is attacking the five patriots, Waters said, because of the effective political work they are carrying out among fellow inmates and their contact and collaboration with other revolutionaries and political activists across the United States.

She explained that the refusal by U.S. authorities to grant visas to two Cuban youth leaders is part of this stepped-up U.S. pressure. The two were supposed to have arrived in the United States March 19 to start a speaking tour at several universities across the country. Waters reported that at a campus in Long Beach, California, where the Cuban youth had been invited to speak, a public meeting was held to protest the State Department’s actions.

Joel Britton, a member of the steering committee of the Socialist Workers Party’s national fraction of workers in the United Food and Commercial Workers union, explained the centrality of the resistance by workers and farmers in the United States today, particularly in face of the bosses’ demands that they subordinate their struggles to "national unity" and "homeland defense." Meat packers in the Midwest have stepped up their struggles for union rights and dignity, he said. Union fighters, from those involved in organizing drives in Omaha to the supporters of the campaign to stop the deportation of Militant staff writer Róger Calero, have an important struggle to reach out to right now, he said--the strike by 450 meat packers in Wisconsin standing up to Tyson.

Publicity released by the striking local declares that "failure is not an option," said Britton, "and that captures the spirit of these strikers." Broadening their experiences through traveling "Truth Squads" and on the picket lines, they are working through how to defeat the company’s scab-herding efforts, and have been impressed by the role played by immigrant workers in union-organizing drives in other cities they have visited.

Meanwhile, he said, the bosses at Dakota Premium in St. Paul, Minnesota, have started to bring the war home, blocking workers’ relatives from bringing them meals onto the site, citing new "food security" measures announced by the Homeland Security Department.

"Wars don’t change the underlying trends of politics," said Jack Barnes. "The curves of capitalist development are determined by deeper laws of the class struggle." What wars do, he said, is accelerate, as nothing else does, the unfolding of that struggle.

Throughout a century of imperialist history, he said, a vanguard of conscious workers has not wavered from the understanding that the capitalist system breeds war, most fundamentally among the imperialist powers. But for decades after World War II, the idea of an interimperialist war seemed unimaginable to most people. Because of the more open tensions today between Washington and London, on one hand, and Paris and Berlin, on the other, such a conflict between the imperialist powers is more apparent to millions. To many, it is more evident than before that the ultimate logic of the current war over the Mideast is toward interimperialist war.

The idea that nuclear weapons would never again be used is also being shattered, Barnes said. The growing spread of nuclear weapons, which Washington has used and will use again, threatens to increase the destructive impact of such conflicts.

The imperialist rulers will win more support for their current war as the U.S. and British body count goes up, Barnes said. Yellow ribbons to "support our troops" can be expected to reappear, he stated. This combines with the "orange alert" decreed by Washington’s Homeland Security and other "terrorism" scares under which the National Guard and cops have increasingly been deployed at train stations, airports, bridges, and highways in the United States.

The war now becomes more difficult and bloody, as the rulers anticipated, Barnes said. Over the coming days, he said, the "surgical’ strikes" would give way to massive bombings typical of imperialist wars, and the "war of liberation" would become a slaughter.

The Gulf War of 12 years ago was marked above all by sharpening competition among the major imperialist powers, Barnes said. In 1991, having used their armed forces to pulverize Iraqi cities, expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and organize a slaughter of retreating soldiers and civilians, he said, "the U.S. ruling class blinked." A narrow majority decided against a drive to Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein, thinking they could hold together their "alliance," including Paris and Berlin, and complete the job with a bigger coalition than they have today. "They won’t make that mistake again," he added.

"Toward the end of the 1990s, Barnes said, "the economic boom came to an end," further accentuating the interimperialist tensions. We are in the "very initial stages of a world depression," he said, notwithstanding the "prayerful buying of stocks" since the launch of the Iraq assault that sparked the biggest stock market rally in two decades.

In fact, the day after the New York meeting, the stock market suffered its worst fall of the year to date. Investors’ euphoria was shaken by news that the imperialist advance in Iraq had slowed in the face of tough resistance by Iraqi soldiers and civilians. The 300-point loss wiped out more than one-third of the previous week’s gains. "The market’s no place for investors right now," said one "senior equity analyst."  
 
Shattering of old institutions
Battered by round after round of trade, diplomatic, and military conflicts among the major imperialist powers, the "civilized edifices" of imperialism--among them the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union--have started coming apart, Barnes said. For example, today two NATO members--the U.S. and Turkish governments--could end up in a military confrontation at the Iraqi-Turkish border. Likewise, the United Nations can be used less and less as an effective instrument of imperialism because of these stiffening conflicts.

The relations between the rulers of France and the United Kingdom have deteriorated most sharply of all, said Barnes. Tensions have built up over the past several years and more, as London has kept its distance from a "united Europe." The British capitalists have refused to submerge the pound into the euro--dominated by the German mark and French franc--because they would lose the enormous advantage of retaining a national currency.

British deaths in combat ensure that London’s armed forces are being "blooded and wed together" with those of Washington.

As these conflicts sharpen, he said, the big-business media in the United States has suddenly discovered the bloody record of French imperialism. No doubt the French press will also be publishing revelations about the brutal history of the U.S. rulers, who offer them an embarrassment of riches in this regard, said Barnes.

The French diplomatic links and trade ties with the government of Saddam Hussein, worth billions of dollars, are major factors in the sharply conflicting interests of Paris and Washington in the Mideast, the SWP leader said. It was French capitalists who supplied aid and technology to Iraq to build the Osirik nuclear reactor. Paris has never forgiven the Israeli regime for sending the bombers that reduced the reactor to rubble in 1981, Barnes said.

If Washington gets the victory it is driving toward, it will be in position to threaten and shape many of the semicolonial governments of the Gulf region, Barnes noted.

Washington would get its hands on more than the Iraqi oil deposits, he said. Even more importantly, its victory would protect and reinforce the monopoly position of the dollar as the currency with which this key commodity is traded. Members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) only accept dollars for oil--except for Iraq, which has only accepted euros for their oil since 2000. Iran, too, is considering a switch to the euro for oil.

A U.S.-British victory against Iraq would set the stage for the preparation of a military assault against Iran and/or north Korea, which, together with Iraq, are three points along the "axis of evil" proclaimed by President George Bush. Other unnamed points on this "axis" include the Cuban Revolution, Barnes said.

While Washington and London are strengthening their position against their imperialist rivals, he said, the notion of a united Europe under German domination that is able to increasingly challenge Washington in the imperialist pecking order is disappearing.

The German capitalists are fatally handicapped by their inability to assimilate the workers state in the East, "like a python that cannot swallow the biggest meal imaginable," said Barnes. The incorporation of the workers states of central and Eastern Europe will not strengthen the European Union as an imperialist pole, but rather will bring more conflicts, he said.

For Washington, however, this outlook is clouded by the fact that, from a historical rather than short-term point of view, its uncontested economic power is coming to an end, undermined by depression and other inherent weaknesses of the capitalist system. In this context, working-class struggles today have special importance, he added.

The coalescing of a working-class vanguard, including the Midwest packers, is a sign of the times, he said. The potential for this development to strengthen can be seen in the actions by a number of fighting workers in the Midwest who have taken up Róger Calero’s defense campaign as their own.

Into these unfolding experiences, said Barnes, worker-Bolsheviks need to bring the lessons of the past and their understanding of politics today. "We need to find ways of discussing with others the dynamics of capitalist politics," he said, "including its tendency toward more violence and the use of extralegal gangs by the bosses" as the social crisis sharpens. In doing so, vanguard workers can prepare politically for the time when the workers movement will need to build its own self-defense guards, a step that underscores the necessity of organizing a revolutionary struggle for political power. Strike pickets are the basic nuclei of such a proletarian army, he stated.

From among the ranks of the young antiwar protesters as well as young working-class militants, he said, will be those driven by their experience in the class struggle to read and study Marxism and broaden their vision. The communist movement will win new recruits among them.  
 
 
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