BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
On behalf of Pathfinder Press, a thank you to the organizers of the 2004 Havana International Book Fair and to the compañeros of Ciencias Sociales for the opportunity to participate in this exchange among editors and publishers. It is too seldom we’re able to do this outside of Cuba.

To initiate the discussion, we have each been asked to say a few words about the titles, topics, and authors we publish, how we respond to the demands imposed by today’s world, what guides our editorial decisions, and how we meet the pressures of the capitalist world market within which none of us avoid operating.

It might be most useful to concentrate on a couple of the concrete criteria that guide Pathfinder’s publishing efforts and for the most part distinguish Pathfinder from other publishers.  
 
Born with October Revolution
Several years ago, based on a presentation to a similar conference here in Havana hosted by Editora Abril, we published a pamphlet entitled Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution. I hope some of you have had, or will have, an opportunity to glance at that little work, which is available in Spanish, French, and English here at the Pathfinder booth. It explains more broadly and more fully than I will be able to today the main lines of our publishing efforts.

When we say “Pathfinder was born with the October Revolution,” we are pointing to the continuity that has underpinned the editorial policies of Pathfinder and our predecessors for almost eighty-five years. We do not begin by looking for titles or subjects that some entity in the increasingly monopolized capitalist book trade might profit from and would thus promote. Nor do we keep in print only those titles we know we can sell hundreds or thousands of copies of in a relatively brief time. As we explain in Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution:

We have one and only one objective: to publish and distribute as widely as possible the books, pamphlets, and magazines that are necessary to advance the construction of a communist party in the United States, an objective that is inseparable from the building of a communist movement internationally.

A good example is Rebelión Teamster by Farrell Dobbs, one of the new titles Pathfinder is featuring here at the book fair. First published in English some 30 years ago, it is now available in Spanish for the first time. It is the story of one of the most important strikes and trade union organizing drives of the 1930s, told by a central leader of that fight, a young man still in his twenties when this class war broke out. Through the battles they waged, the labor movement in an entire region of the country was transformed—from Seattle to Minneapolis, from Minneapolis to Oklahoma and Texas. A union with a conscious, class-struggle leadership was born, and a broad, fighting social movement that unified workers, farmers, and the unemployed was forged.

The significance of that history lies not in the past, but in what is happening in the United States today and—even more so—what is coming. The economic and social conditions we face in the world today bear increasing similarities to the overheated financial bubbles, underlying capitalist stagnation, sharpening trade conflicts, increasingly violent verbal assaults among capitalist politicians, and imperialist offensives that culminated in the Great Depression and brutal struggles of the 1930s. In this world, the example set by the Minneapolis Teamsters becomes more important each day—what they did; how they fought; how they recognized limits, reorganized, and regrouped; how they were seen in wider and wider circles as incorruptible and selfless; and how, as a result of all this, they were able to win.

Driven by the inexorable workings of capital to sell their labor power wherever they might, the ranks of Spanish-speaking workers from across the Americas swell by the hour in the United States. More and more from New Jersey to Florida, from Minnesota to California and Utah, these workers—no longer concentrated in the large metropolitan centers and agricultural fields, but working in every industry and living even in the smallest towns—are engaged in increasingly sharp battles with the bosses and the bosses’ government. They need this history, this example of what is possible, including in the United States, when the working class has the leadership it deserves.
 
Voluntary labor and financing
Rebelión Teamster will not be a “profitable” book by any capitalist yardstick. Its initial print run is fewer than 1,000 copies. And Pathfinder, moreover, is not a “profitable” enterprise. It survives only through contributions—of volunteer labor, as well as of funds necessary to produce and distribute the books—from those in the working-class movement and others who share Pathfinder’s goals. And it’s largely the very same people who contribute on both fronts.

As Che Guevara explained in such depth and detail, however, “profitability” is not a category the proletariat can use to decide the allocation of labor and resources necessary to advance its goals.

Health care, education, social security, broad working-class access to culture —“goods” such as these are not compatible with a dog-eat-dog system driven by the whip of profit and the production and reproduction of the social relations demanded by private property. The contrast between Cuba on the one hand and the United States on the other is today demonstrating this to the world; they are truly antipodes.

All the more reason, of course, for a publishing house like Pathfinder to pay close attention to holding down costs and to constantly pursue ways to produce books, pamphlets, and other needed materials with a more effective use of resources and available technology. To keep the books rolling off the presses and into the hands of those who need them, however, we count on the disciplined effort by Pathfinder’s supporters, not “efficiency” in the capitalist sense. Over the last six years Pathfinder has been engaged in an intensive and systematic effort, organized worldwide, to recreate all our 400-some titles in digital form: text, formatting, photo sections, maps and other graphics, covers, ads, everything—including the tail and the squeal! Every file necessary to reproduce a book, all on a single CD for each title. This transformation has enabled us to have our books produced by printers that utilize the newest digital printing technology, which is more like a high-end photocopying process, using toner in place of inks. This process makes frequent small runs of 50, 100, 500, up to 1,000 copies possible. Among other things, the digitization of this revolutionary political arsenal means that should conditions preclude for a time the publication of these books and pamphlets in North America, they could be printed virtually anywhere in the world.

This entire effort, now more than 75 percent complete, has been organized by a team of more than 200 volunteers spread around the world in ten different countries—and even more time zones!—working together across the Internet.

Both the volunteer labor organized through the international Pathfinder Printing Project and the financial support that sustains this publishing effort are truly “priceless.”

I want to emphasize one thing, without which nothing I’ve explained makes sense. Not only do the Pathfinder volunteers do all the work necessary to prepare every completed manuscript for printing. Their financial contributions cover all the costs of that work. What comes back to Pathfinder from the sale of books and pamphlets barely covers the costs of printing and shipping. Fewer than half a dozen people work full-time for Pathfinder. And those who direct and do the final editorial work on all titles simultaneously shoulder multiple other political responsibilities. Without this enormous international volunteer effort that I have described, what others think of as Pathfinder Press could not exist.  
 
www.pathfinderpress.com
One final point on “markets” and sales.

Another advance for Pathfinder in the last few years has been the use of the Internet as a vehicle for sales. Our entire catalog is now to be found at www.pathfinderpress.com—and only there. Stores or libraries placing orders for Pathfinder books can do so by going to our web site—not by mail, fax, or phone. That’s how we handle all “mail orders” by individuals as well. The only exception we make is for prisoners. But even if we didn’t do that, I’m sure our five Cuban brothers, Gerardo [Hernández], Antonio [Guerrero], Ramón [Labañino], René [González], and Fernando [González], would find a way!

Once an order is placed through pathfinderpress.com, the processing and shipping, just like the production of the books, is organized entirely by volunteer labor. That’s how libraries and retailers, including Pathfinder bookstores in more than 30 cities and towns around the world, get their books. And that’s how new ones are introduced to these books. This policy too is driven by necessity, not the search for profits. Pathfinder must have a pattern of sales and distribution that is sustainable, one that minimizes the transfer of our limited resources to the capitalist distributors whose business practices are crafted to maximize that drain, directed toward bankrupting us, not them.

This transformation of our production and distribution over the last half decade has entailed a substantial allocation of leadership time and resources that has affected the scope of our editorial production. But the results are giving Pathfinder maximum flexibility to meet the radically changing conditions of our world today.  
 
Books by revolutionary leaders
The second issue I want to address are the criteria that guide us in deciding what authors to publish, what subjects we give priority to.

Pathfinder is not the publishing house of a political party. It is run by a board of directors whose members are known and respected for their own writings and editorial and political work. What guides our decisions are the criteria that have guided the modern workers movement for more than a century and a half, first presented by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. Pathfinder gives priority to the speeches and writings of leaders who are on the front lines of revolutionary struggles of the toilers the world over, those who speak and write with a sharp and critical mind from within those ranks.

Pathfinder is not the publisher of “critics” and “analysts” who abound on the left and whose essays are sometimes witty and almost always a touch cynical. We seek to publish proletarian leaders for whom criticism is the by-product of revolutionary practice, a weapon earned and wielded in the unceasing effort to advance along the road of the class struggle—toward the workers’ and peasants’ own government, own country, and own revolution. In short, toward the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx accurately described Capital as a handbook for workers, a critique of the capitalist system—and a critique of the critics of capitalism, as well as apologists for it—that would arm us in our struggles. It’s the best example I can think of. It was intended to be used by workers.

That’s the same reason Pathfinder uses our scarce resources to publish not only Fidel and Che, but men and women whose entire life trajectory embodies the heart and soul of the Cuban Revolution, revolutionists such as José Ramón Fernández, Harry Villegas (Pombo), Teté Puebla, Víctor Dreke, Néstor López Cuba, and Enrique Carreras. That is why we publish Grenadian revolutionary leader Maurice Bishop, Malcolm X, and Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso; V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Rosa Luxemburg; and leaders of the U.S. communist movement like James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs.

That’s why we produce new titles indispensable for the competent guidance of revolutionary activity in today’s world, titles such as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, and issues of a magazine of Marxist politics and theory, New International, in English, Spanish, and French.

The impeccable accuracy, honesty, and transparency we strive to maintain in our translations serves this same end. Without it there can be no genuine exchange of ideas and experiences as equals among those who speak different languages. The same is true of the care we give to other editorial questions—from proofreading to fact-checking to the preparation of annotation, glossaries, chronologies, photo captions, and maps. For us, this care is a class question, one that flows from the same need of those on the front lines of revolutionary struggle to be able to share, discuss, and assimilate the lessons of our common struggles.

For me, these are the same as the issues at the center of the revolutionary measures to transform learning and expand access to the greatest conquests of humanity’s cultural heritage—the process that began in the Sierras, exploded to world attention and admiration as the Cuban Revolution launched and advanced the literacy campaign, and is continuing today under the banner of the Battle of Ideas.  
 
Cuba in today’s world
Let me close with a few words on the place of the Cuban Revolution in the world today, and therefore in Pathfinder’s publishing priorities. We start from the world, from the class struggle as it actually unfolds, not from preconceived notions, and not from our druthers.

The other new title that Pathfinder is presenting here in Havana, published at the same time in both English and Spanish, is Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground, 1952-58 by Armando Hart. It is an account of the political battles and revolutionary action led by cadres of the July 26 Movement in cities and towns across Cuba, as they simultaneously organized support, supplies, and reinforcements for the Rebel Army in the Sierra. Together, under the leadership of Fidel Castro, these forces forged a united revolutionary movement capable of leading Cuba to a victory that opened the door to Cuba’s socialist transformation and a quarter century of revolution in the Americas.

Aldabonazo joins some 70 other titles related to the Cuban Revolution that Pathfinder maintains in print, many of which you may be familiar with. Our purpose, however, is not to become a “Cuba” publisher. It is to bring the Cuban Revolution into sharp focus as part of the world. Those everywhere, including in the United States, who are trying to advance along a class-struggle road need the writings and speeches of the men and women who made—and make—that revolution, explaining firsthand what they did, why they did it, and how they emerged victorious. That is our priority. All other questions related to Cuba pale before it.

It is the revolutionary victory that we must understand in order to emulate its lessons, today, in today’s world. Thus for us, defense of the Cuban Revolution is not a question of solidarity, but of necessity. Proletarian internationalism is not a luxury, nor even solely a moral obligation. It is the question of our very future, the future of productive and creative humanity.

Above all, we hope that the facts and trajectory of our publishing efforts reflect this reality and advance that goal.  
 
 
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