Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, was the main speaker at the meeting, which took stock of developments in world politics and the class struggle as illuminated and accelerated by Washington’s assault on Iraq and the war’s aftermath.

The event was hosted by the New York SWP and Young Socialists. It was part of a series of activities of the communist movement that weekend. These included meetings of socialist workers in the coal mining, meatpacking, and garment/textile industries who are active in the corresponding unions; a gathering of Young Socialists and YS-age youth; and a meeting of the SWP National Committee.

Barnes was joined on the speakers panel by Róger Calero, an editor of Perspectiva Mundial and staff writer for the Militant; Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press; Ma’mud Shirvani, Pathfinder’s Farsi-language editor; Joel Britton, a member of the SWP National Committee from Los Angeles; and YS leader Diana Newberry.

“If the U.S. government had gotten its way, our first speaker wouldn’t be here tonight,” said John Studer, coordinator of the Róger Calero Defense Committee, who co-chaired the meeting with YS leader Arrin Hawkins. On May 22, nearly six months after U.S. immigration agents had arrested Calero and initiated deportation proceedings against him, an immigration judge ruled he was “not deportable.”

“I’ve been called many things in my life, but I’ve never been called ‘nondeportable,’” said Calero when the applause had died down. “I offer my victory as a weapon to all workers in the same position.” (For details of Calero’s remarks see “Calero kicks off national tour” in last week’s Militant, and further coverage this week in ‘Houston activists prepare Calero victory tour.’)  
 
Cuba remains target of imperialism
Mary-Alice Waters focused her remarks on the latest imperialist-orchestrated campaign against the Cuban Revolution. This campaign led by Washington is aimed at dividing and isolating the communist vanguard in Cuba and around the world, she said, “to see who will jump out of the trenches under fire.”

The most recent attempts by the U.S. and other imperialist governments to brand Cuba a “repressive dictatorship” have put a spotlight both on the strengths of the Cuban Revolution and on the lines of fissure the enemy is trying to explore, she stated. Waters pointed to statements by prominent individuals and groups that have campaigned against Washington’s economic war on Cuba who have criticized or taken their distance from recent actions by the Cuban government. These actions include the jailing of some 75 people convicted of collaborating with Washington in its campaign to subvert Cuban sovereignty and overthrow the revolution, and the execution of three men who were the ringleaders in the hijacking of a passenger ferry from the Havana harbor in April (see article ‘European Union governments adopt punitive measures against Cuba’ in this issue.)

Among those who condemned the U.S.-led anti-Cuba campaign but opposed the executions of the three hijackers was the Communist Party USA, on the grounds that it “opposes the death penalty, and joins the call for its universal opposition,” as a statement by the group’s national board put it.

At this year’s May Day rally in Havana, Pastors for Peace leader Lucius Walker stated, “The death penalty demeans Cuba. I call on Cuba to, by example, lead a world campaign to end the death penalty.”

But the action taken by Cuba in executing the hijackers advances the fight to accomplish just that goal, said Waters. It pushes forward the struggle against the very system that uses the brutal weapon of capital punishment against working people, she said. The acts of these hijackers, holding passengers with knives and handguns and threatening to toss them overboard, could have caused the “slaughter of the innocents.”

Waters pointed out that Washington had encouraged a spate of hijackings of Cuban boats and planes since last summer by not granting visas to thousands of Cubans who applied to emigrate, granting any Cuban who reaches Florida’s shores virtually automatic residency regardless of the means they used to get there, and refusing to prosecute hijackers who reach the United States. Since the executions, no more hijackings have been reported in Cuba.

Like many others in the United States who speak in defense of Cuba, Walker also exaggerated the immediate danger facing the revolution today, Waters said. He described the actions of the Bush administration as the “worst provocation by any U.S. administration in history.”

“If you think about the actions of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations in the revolution’s first years it is easy to see the inaccuracy of that statement,” said Waters.

Those administrations oversaw the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion by 1,200 U.S.-organized mercenaries, which Cuban militias and the Revolutionary Armed Forces defeated in 72 hours, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust against Cuba during the October 1962 “missile” crisis.  
 
U.S. rulers weaker in relation to Cuba
President John F. Kennedy backed off his invasion plans in October 1962 for the same reasons that his successors have continued to reject the option of a military assault on Cuba, said Waters—“because of the politically untenable casualties that U.S. forces would suffer in a very short time.”

Despite the omnipotence the U.S. rulers try to project in relation to Cuba, Waters noted, they are in a weaker position today than at any time since the opening years of the Cuban Revolution to attack Cuba militarily. The Cuban toilers are less alone, partly because of the “smoldering volcano of the class struggle in Latin America and even in the United States,” she said.

Washington’s hands are more tied than ever, Waters stated, including by the growing size of the Cuban population in this country who have arrived in Miami, Union City, New Jersey, or other U.S. cities. The majority in recent years have come for economic reasons, not out of determination to subvert the Cuban Revolution. Many Cuban-Americans would not support a U.S. military attack that would cause many of their relatives on the Caribbean nation to perish.

Washington’s provocations today are simply one more chapter in the continuity of the U.S. rulers’ 44-year-old campaign against Cuba, the socialist leader said. Cuban workers and farmers and their government have unflinchingly stood down all attempts by U.S. imperialism to overthrow the revolution, she added. “Cuba-U.S. relations remain one of the more unchanging elements in politics. The situation calls not for shrillness, fear, or panic, but for the most modulated tone and for confidence and calmness.”

Waters said she disagreed with Cuba solidarity activists and groups in the U.S. who say that Washington’s recent provocations against Cuba are carried out by an “ultrarightist” or “fascist” president. This is not accurate, she stated. The current U.S.-led anti-Cuba campaign is carried out by the “plain old garden variety of democratic imperialism.” The difference is not about semantics, Waters stated, but is decisive. Those who are campaigning to “stop Bush” are trying to draw others behind the bandwagon of “lesser evilism,” of supporting the Democratic Party in the 2004 elections, one of the two main parties of the U.S. rulers that’s as responsible as the Republicans for Washington’s economic war on Cuba.

Victories registered in the last two months in the U.S. Navy abandoning its base and bombing practice in Vieques, Puerto Rico, the U.S. government dropping its effort to deport Róger Calero, and the Federal Bureau of Prisons releasing from the “hole” five Cuban revolutionaries framed up by Washington on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage would not be possible if fascism was on the rise, she said.

The SWP leader also cited a May Day statement by Alain Krivine, a longtime leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) in France. Slanderously describing the arrests and executions in Cuba as a “wave of repression” and a “parody of justice,” Krivine also attacked the Bush administration for its “domination of world markets.”

“He makes no mention in the statement about French imperialism,” said Waters. “In fact, what is astonishing about the statement is not Krivine’s attacks on Cuba, which are not new, but the degree of adaptation it displays toward French imperialism.” Pressuring individuals and organizations who function in the workers movement to adapt further to the bourgeoisie in their own countries is part of what this imperialist offensive against Cuba is about, Waters stated.

Men and women like the Cuban Five, and Víctor Dreke and Ana Morales, who toured the United States last fall speaking about the Cuban Revolution, set the limits on what Washington can get away with in its attacks, said Waters.

Dreke was second in command to Ernesto Che Guevara during Cuba’s internationalist mission in the Congo in the mid-1960s. He later led the Cuban volunteers who joined African fighters in the successful struggle to rid Guinea Bissau of colonial domination by Portuguese imperialism. Morales, who teaches at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, has led Cuba’s medical missions in a number of African countries, including Guinea Bissau.

This is what the proletarian vanguard in Cuba is like, Waters noted. Washington will have a very hard time in its efforts to divide the communist vanguard or the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Cuba.

A couple of weeks earlier at a public meeting in Philadelphia to discuss the Cuban Revolution, Waters said, she had shared the platform with Gerry O’Hare, an Irish republican fighter, among other speakers. O’Hare put it well, she said, when he pointed out, “If the imperialists try to go looking in Cuba for weapons of mass destruction, they’ll find weapons in the hands of the masses who will cause their destruction.”  
 
Women’s rights books popular in Iran
John Studer displayed a copy of In Defense of Marxism by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky in introducing the next speaker, Ma’mud Shirvani. This was the first book produced from beginning to end by supporters of the communist movement—from putting together the entire book on a CD-ROM, to selecting a commercial printer, sending the book to the printer through the Internet, and organizing its shipment to Pathfinder’s new distribution center in Atlanta, which is also run by volunteers.

“A group of women in Tehran launched Farsi-language editions of Pathfinder’s Problems of Women’s Liberation and Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women, on March 8, International Women’s Day,” said Shirvani, “the first time since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the U.S.-backed shah that this anniversary has been celebrated publicly.”

The March 8 celebration was put together by the organization of women publishers in Iran. Books on women’s emancipation were among Pathfinder’s best sellers at the fair. The two titles were translated and published by the Iranian publisher Golâzin. A representative of the new enterprise told Shirvani that “something clicked” when she read Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed. She said Golâzin plans to publish a Farsi-language edition of Pathfinder’s Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in Cuba’s Revolutionary War, 1956-58.

Shirvani reported “renewed interests by young people in the history of anti-imperialist struggles in the region”—especially the 1945-46 revolution in Azerbaijan, which forged a workers and peasants government only to be betrayed by the Stalinist movement. He displayed a special issue of a magazine published by Turkish students at Tehran University commemorating that revolution. The issue included a biography of Jafar Pishevari, a founder of Iran’s Communist Party at the time of the October 1917 Russian Revolution.

“This was the first time I have heard of a magazine in Iran celebrating that event and not facing prosecution,” said Shirvani. “It is an example of how new generations are reaching out to the past to learn.” These realities are part of the reason why U.S. imperialism would have a hard time launching a military assault on Iran, he said.

Joel Britton and Diana Newberry reported on their recent visit to Sweden and the United Kingdom for political collaboration with communist workers and Young Socialists there.

“Workers and youth are building communist leagues in Europe that follow the lines of resistance in the working class,” Britton said. Progress is being made, he reported, in building fractions of worker-bolsheviks that carry out collective political work in their workplaces and unions, where attacks by the bosses and resistance by workers are intense. “As they do this they get a response and help from fellow workers, including in conquering the skills needed to hold down jobs in the garment industry.”

In Scotland, members of the Communist League organizing committee introduced the socialists from the United States to dairy farmers fighting a price cut. In Gothenburg, Sweden, Britton and Newberry attended the opening of the new Pathfinder bookstore, met public workers on strike, and exchanged ideas and experiences with several Iranian immigrants, “one of whom had bought a copy of Problems of Women’s Liberation at a book fair in Vienna,” said Britton.

Newberry gave further examples of this joint political work, particularly with the Young Socialists in Sweden. In introducing her, chairperson Arrin Hawkins reported on the efforts by dozens of youth in California, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere to organize delegations to the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange this summer.  
 
U.S. gov’t initiator of political conflicts
In his feature presentation, Jack Barnes addressed the overall themes of the meeting. “We have little to alter from what the communist movement described 10 weeks ago when we got together in the midst of the buildup to Washington and London’s assault on Iraq,” he said. “Our anticipation that wars don’t change political conditions but accelerate existing trends and contradictions has panned out.

“The U.S. government is the great initiator of political conflicts today,” Barnes stated.

The invasion was inevitable, given the course of the U.S. government under the Democratic administration of William Clinton, his Republican predecessor, and the current Bush administration—and given the hostile stance and actions toward Iraq of all the imperialist powers over the previous decade.

The war showed “the power and organization of the U.S. armed forces,” Barnes said. This is not just a question of destructive weaponry, he emphasized. This is not a draftee army. The U.S. armed forces today are made up of volunteers, overwhelmingly young, who are not only highly trained, but motivated. They are driven partly by prospects for promotion.

The morale of these troops will not take big blows until they strike the kind of unbending resistance and take the kind of terrible casualties that were inflicted on the U.S. armed forces by the workers and peasants of Indochina in the Vietnam War, Barnes said.

During the discussion period, Barnes also explained why the U.S. rulers and their officer corps are no longer plagued by the Vietnam Syndrome—a phenomenon in mass psychology stemming from U.S. imperialism’s defeat in Vietnam that has mostly died out with the older generations that were directly affected by it.

The U.S. armed forces swept quickly from Kuwait to northern Iraq with few casualties, taking advantage of what had been prepared beforehand, the SWP leader said. The treachery of Stalinism allowed a Baathist dictatorship to come to power in the 1960s and ‘70s—a form of party-police state—which affected the morale of the average Iraqi.

In Iraq, the modern U.S. army came up against the armed forces of an exhausted and widely hated capitalist regime. In contrast to the practices of its imperialist adversary, promotion in the Iraqi army had little to do with any ability to rise from the ranks, and far more to do with tribal connections and obsequiousness toward the officers.

“You also see what happens when weaponry is mostly imported and its maintenance is left up to others,” Barnes stated. The Iraqi army used largely outmoded and creaky armor from the former Soviet Union. Baghdad’s officer corps, said Barnes, “showed a dual tendency throughout recent history: run in the face of a powerful enemy, and murder innocents at home.”

These facts need to be pointed out not to exaggerate the power of the U.S. armed forces, Barnes stated, but in order to understand the enemy and the implications of what’s necessary to defend any conquests of the toilers under assault by imperialism.

The Iraqi military defeat was further confirmation of the exhaustion in history of the ability of semicolonial bourgeoisies to defend conquests that came out of national liberation struggles, he said. It also showed the failure of secular bourgeois nationalist regimes in semicolonial countries to stand as an alternative to capitalist governments cloaked in clerical forms, as long as these secular governments are modeled on the police-state methods of Stalinism and what it has in common with fascism.  
 
Drive to more wars
Difficulties in organizing a U.S.-run occupation regime were going to occur no matter what, said Barnes. But Washington is not facing a “quagmire” in Iraq as liberal critics of the Bush administration and many in the U.S. petty-bourgeois left argue. Far from being paralyzed by the fact that U.S. forces have discovered no “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq—one of Bush’s main justifications of launching a war against Baghdad—the White House has simply asserted that this was just one of the main reasons for assaulting Iraq. “Regime change,” one of Washington’s main aims in Iraq, was a goal shared across the bipartisan capitalist political spectrum.

Having accomplished their main aims in the Iraq invasion and occupation, they are continuing along the same course, stealing a march over their imperialist allies and carving out a bigger piece of the resources of the semicolonial world.

“The clock is ticking on ‘regime change’ in Iran,” Barnes said. Right now U.S. officials are pressuring the government there to deepen any concessions it can be forced to make—above all, to pull the plug on the Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon. Acting in broad concert with the Israeli government, the U.S. rulers also have Hamas, the Palestinian organization, in their sights.

Ever since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah, one of the main bastions for imperialism’s interests in the region, the U.S. rulers have tried to find ways to overthrow the Iranian government. Even though the government that came to power in 1979 is a capitalist regime wrapped in clerical forms that has pushed back most of the gains the toilers made through that popular uprising, the expectations and self-confidence of working people have not evaporated, and Washington can’t rely on the current regime to act as its reliable cop in the region.

The imperialists’ approach towards Tehran is following a different path than the war on Iraq, Barnes noted. The U.S. command knows that invading forces would meet resistance in Iran, where the masses of working people are not demoralized by a previous crushing defeat as they were in Iraq. Rather than an invasion, Washington is threatening “forceful intervention.” This approach includes economic sanctions, naval and air interceptions of “suspect cargo” exported from Iran, intrusive inspections of nuclear plants and related facilities, possible cross-border raids by the Mujahedeen anti-Tehran group based in Iraq, and, if all else fails, military strikes against nuclear plants.

The imperialists do not intend, either, to install the shah’s son back on his father’s peacock throne, said Barnes. That’s excluded by history. But they are determined to impose a more pliant regime that consistently defends their interests in the region, rather than obstructing them, even if it’s a regime with a bourgeois nationalist character.

While targeting the alleged nuclear arms programs of north Korea and Iran, Washington is developing “bunker-busting” nuclear bombs designed to destroy deeply buried nuclear installations and military defenses. North Korea has placed many of its defensive resources underground or set into mountains, out of the reach of “conventional” weapons.

At the same time, the Pentagon has announced that it will pull 18,000 U.S. troops south from the so-called Demilitarized Zone dividing the Korean peninsula and out of range of northern artillery. Watching these various moves, said Barnes, “The north Korean government can only assume that Washington is preparing the option of nuclear attacks.”  
 
Increased danger of nuclear war
Barnes pointed to a recent speech at a university graduation by William Clinton, where the former U.S. president claimed that one of the main accomplishments of his administration is that youth today don’t have to worry about the danger of nuclear war.

In fact, said Barnes, “we do have to worry more about this danger today than in the past,” given the capitalist crisis and the increasing conflicts among the imperialist powers. Imagine the possibility of an ultrarightist regime coming to power in France, which is a strategic nuclear power with the capacity to devastate humanity, he pointed out. That could pose a real danger of nuclear war. “This is a battle, not a given,” Barnes said. “Working people need to wage the battle for socialism or face the possibility of the destruction of humanity down the road.”

The course of U.S. imperialism has nothing to do with the idiosyncrasies of the current administration, Barnes said. It is rooted in the long-term decline of average rate of industrial profit in the world capitalist system, the downward curve of capitalist development that begins in the early 1970s, and the resulting sharper competition among the major imperialist powers over division and redivision of the world.

The aggressive course of U.S. imperialism adds up to a “dreary prospect for the French and German rulers,” Barnes said. Their relative weakness is exposed each time Washington exerts its military might. “Germany in particular has no strategic armed forces,” he said. All the powers of continental Europe—even France, with its many imperialist military interventions and its nuclear arsenal—“face the consequences of having depended on the U.S. military umbrella during the decades of the Cold War.” Now Washington is pulling away that umbrella, or is making the price tag for continuing to offer protection much higher, Barnes stated, at the same time as these capitalist powers are faced with greater need to take on the social gains of working people at home.

One example of this is the recent announcement by the Pentagon that it intends to dismantle many of its forces in Germany and transfer them to Poland. Many of the armies of the powers in the European Union are made up of draftees who serve only brief stints in uniform, a fact which makes them very badly suited for combat in their present state.

Berlin and Paris’s approach to the Iraq war is one example of the contrast between “appearance and reality in world politics,” as highlighted by the title of the meeting. While the German and French rulers opposed the U.S.-British assault on Iraq, recognizing it as a threat to their own investments and contracts with Baghdad, their course over the past decade made the invasion inevitable—including their promotion of UN sanctions and “weapons inspections.”

“We should remember that the war on Iraq was not simply set up by George Bush,” Barnes said. “It was prepared by NATO, the G-8, the UN Security Council, and the European Union, including all of Washington’s imperialist competitors.” Since the conclusion of the war on Iraq, the representatives of French and German imperialism voted to ratify the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq at the United Nations and approved a U.S.-sponsored resolution targeting north Korea and Iran at the G-8 summit in France. At the same time the interimperialist conflicts continue to fester.

The worldwide economic depression, now in its initial stages, is more advanced among the imperialist powers in Europe than in the United States, Barnes said. The desperation of these capitalist rulers provoked by their declining position is driving new assaults on the social wage won by working people, he said. Impelled by their deep crisis, the rulers in Germany “will assault the working class as a whole, in both the west and the east.”

The fall of the U.S. dollar against the euro is a short-term phenomenon, said Barnes. Neither the euro nor the Japanese yen can replace the U.S. dollar as the main currency for international trade and investment. Behind the dollar stands U.S. imperialism and its armed forces. Behind the euro, by contrast, stands a disparate collection of 12 states, soon to be almost doubled in number. The most powerful among them, Berlin and Paris, have failed to meet EU commission targets purportedly designed to underpin a stable and strong currency; meanwhile German imperialism, the largest power and leading force in the early stages of the push toward a European Union, is mired in economic stagnation. “It is not the euro that threatens the dollar long-term,” said Barnes. “The threat comes from the economic depression.”  
 
Left reacts in fear at U.S. power
The imperialist victory in Iraq helped expose the political bankruptcy of the radical-liberal left in the United States and Europe, the SWP leader said. Among others, the forces in or around Stalinist organizations, social democratic currents, the Greens, and most centrist groups act out of fear towards the power of U.S. imperialism, he said. These political currents are now more energized to campaign for lesser evils among capitalist parties and politicians.

By contrast, said Barnes, the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists will launch a slate of candidates for the 2004 presidential campaign that points in the opposite direction, to the need for independent working-class political action. “The communist movement acts without fear and with integrity,” he said. This slate will be announced at an international consultative conference sponsored by the SWP, which will take place at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, July 10-12.

The Socialist Workers campaign will address, among other issues, the questions raised by a “great debate” that has already opened among forces in the workers movement worldwide, Barnes said. This debate has begun to focus on the main strategic questions of the working-class line of march towards power and how to defend conquests by the toilers under attack by imperialism. The debate has broken out to a large degree because of the latest imperialist-orchestrated campaign against the Cuban Revolution and because of the character of the Cuban communist leadership and the Cuban people and their refusal to bend their knees to U.S. imperialism.

Along with trying to hypnotize working people with their foreign policy course, the U.S. rulers are carrying out an offensive against the toilers at home not only on the economic but other fronts, Barnes said. We can expect more brutality from the police and other repressive government agencies, he said. Barnes also pointed to ongoing resistance to these assaults by working people demonstrated in strikes, union organizing drives, and other actions across the United States. “To accomplish their goals, the U.S. rulers will have to launch a real fight against the working class, not a one-sided assault,” he stated.

The successes of the U.S. military abroad should not obscure the historic weakness of the imperialists, emphasized the SWP leader. The broader historical trends are in favor of the working-class and the line of march of the toilers towards overturning capitalist rule and joining the worldwide fight for socialism, Barnes stated.

“One is the broad trend toward secularism and a scientific understanding of the world,” he said. This is dealing blows to the mystification and brutality of all forms of clerical domination of social life.

The growing participation of women in social and political life across the globe, and their collisions with the discrimination and constraints imposed by capitalism, form a vital part of this transformation. “If the key line of the 20th century was the color line, the line of the 21st century is the sex line, the struggle of women for emancipation,” he said.

“Ma’mud Shirvani earlier told me something about his observations in Iran that he didn’t mention tonight,” said Barnes. “In Tabriz, the capital of Iranian Azerbaijan, he saw young men and women holding hands in public—an act that would have been difficult to imagine just a short while ago.

“That kind of progress, and the possibility of deepening and generalizing everything it promises, makes the whole effort of building the communist movement worthwhile,” said Barnes. “Join us.”  
 
 
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