Prairie, who is also the director of the French-language publication program for Pathfinder Press, made these remarks as he welcomed some 50 people to a May 8 meeting here organized by the Communist League.

Participants included communist workers from Canada and several U.S. cities. Supporters of the Communist League from Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver attended, as did young people involved in building a delegation from Canada to the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students taking place in Caracas, Venezuela, in August. A janitor at the Steelworkers hall where the meeting was held also joined the meeting and workers taking part in other activities at the union center stopped by to purchase books and talk.

Another 20 people had attended a similar celebration in Montreal two days earlier—including four youth who participated in a recent Quebec-wide student strike.

In addition to Prairie, who chaired the forum, speakers included: Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) National Committee in the United States, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, and president of Pathfinder Press; Jim Altenberg, an SWP supporter in San Francisco and a member of Pathfinder’s Printing Project steering committee; Natalie Stake-Doucet, a leader of the Communist League and the co-chair of Canada’s Preparatory Committee for the Caracas world youth festival; Marie-Claire David, a Montreal supporter of the Communist League; and Joel Britton, a member of the SWP National Committee.

Prairie pointed out that this year marks the 20th anniversary of sustained efforts by the Communist League and its collaborators internationally to publish Pathfinder titles in French. “For a socialist revolution to succeed,” he said, “we need to fight to overcome the divisions within the working class in Canada. One-quarter of Canada’s population speaks French and Quebec is an oppressed nation. To build a communist party in Canada, class-conscious workers need to come together on an equal footing regardless of the language they speak. Translating and publishing in French the books and pamphlets of Pathfinder is indispensable to that goal. Nowhere else are the lessons of the modern working-class movement accessible to us.”  
 
Building proletarian parties
Waters began her remarks calling attention to two events that had been on the front pages of papers in the United States and Canada that day. One was Washington’s belligerent threat that it was closely monitoring what it called “rapid, extensive preparations for a nuclear weapons test” by north Korea, and briefing U.S. allies on the measures it intended to take in response.

The second was the announcement that the debt of General Motors and Ford had been reduced to junk-bond status by one of capitalism’s biggest credit agencies. “GM suffered the additional indignity of not even being deemed the highest quality junk,” Waters added. “Many of the $450 billion worth of bonds in question are held by entities such as your pension funds,” she noted, and the financial press predicts that the reprocessing of this debt will “ripple and roil the fixed income markets for some time to come.”

These two events, Waters noted, “capture some of the titanic forces shaping our world today. But this is a world in which we are active agents, not observers. This is the world that The Changing Face of U.S. Politics prepares us not to accept or adapt to, but to confront, by organizing a revolutionary working-class party, the only instrument through which the working class can lead itself and its allies out of the ceaseless turmoil and brutality that is capitalism.”

It is almost 25 years since the first edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics in English was published in 1981, Waters continued. “It was part of leading the SWP and the forerunner of the Communist League in Canada to recognize that the long period of capitalist expansion that had begun with Washington’s preparation to enter World War II had ended. That the autumn, preceding what has become capitalism’s long hot winter, had begun. And we acted on that basis. We organized to get the overwhelming majority of our leadership and our members into industry and the industrial unions. Had we not done that when it was possible we would have ceased to be communist parties.”

The second edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, published in 1994, was born in war, Waters said. “It came out of the experiences of our party and our fractions as we met the test of fire during the first U.S.-led war against Iraq in 1990-91, as we campaigned against imperialism and its wars on the job and inside the trade unions, standing up to the chauvinist pressures of the imperialist war drive.”

In his presentation at the end of the program, Britton, who was a member of the SWP’s trade union fraction in the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers at the time of the first Iraq war, described the party’s experiences. “With the test of war we lived this book,” Britton said. “We didn’t just read and study it. We found out what ‘political space’ means,” he added, “why communists must and can move even deeper into the working class in time of war.”  
 
French publication program
Waters also spoke about the communist movement’s French-language publication program, which has included the six issues of the Marxist magazine Nouvelle Internationale. She talked about the importance of the work now under way to rapidly produce two new issues of Nouvelle prior to the world youth festival in August.

She drew attention to the fact that “without the efforts of members of the Communist League in Canada Pathfinder would not have been able to publish the books and pamphlets by Thomas Sankara, the central leader of the 1983-87 Burkina Faso revolution, and much of the powerful communist legacy would have been lost.” French is the most common language in Burkina Faso, which was a colony of France.

“As a young Quebecoise I saw the effort being put into publishing these political weapons in French,” said Natalie Stake-Doucet in her presentation. “It was important for me that the Communist League understood the weight of the Quebec national struggle—seeing the fight for Quebec independence as an integral part of the working-class line of march to establish a workers and farmers government in Canada.”

Doucet, the Communist League candidate in the coming federal elections in Canada, said the CL election campaign offers a working-class alternative to all the capitalist parties in the country.

On behalf of the Pathfinder Printing Project volunteers, Jim Altenberg thanked the supporters in Canada whose collective efforts have been decisive to the success of the French-language publishing program.

Marie-Claire David, in her presentation, described some of the accomplishments of the committee based in Canada and France responsible for promoting the sale of Pathfinder’s French-language titles internationally. This includes contacting high school libraries in Quebec, having Pathfinder titles available on databases used by libraries and bookstores across the French-speaking world, and helping to staff Pathfinder booths at events like the Montreal Book Fair and the Fête de l’Humanité in France.  
 
Militant Fighting Fund
Joel Britton concluded the program with an appeal for endorsements and contributions to the Militant Fighting Fund. The fund was set up last fall to defend the Militant and the SWP against a harassment lawsuit filed by C.W. Mining, owners of the Co-Op mine in Utah. Defendants in the suit include the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA), 16 Co-Op miners, two of Utah’s main dailies, and other unions and individuals who have backed the 20-month-long fight by the Co-Op miners to win UMWA representation. The Militant is targeted in the lawsuit on charges of alleged “defamation” of the mine owners because of its accurate and consistent reporting on the labor battle and its backing of the workers fighting to organize a union, Britton pointed out.

Since last October, Britton noted, almost every dollar contributed to the Militant Fighting Fund has already been spent just in preparing briefs for the first court hearing, which has not yet been scheduled. “Between now and the hearing on the motions by the Militant and SWP, and the rest of the defendants, to dismiss the lawsuit, which is expected later this summer, we must raise another $75,000 to do the necessary work,” he said.

Participants in both meetings responded generously to the appeal, contributing $5,600 to the Militant Fighting Fund.  
 
 
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