The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 69/No. 25           July 4, 2005  
 
 
Socialist Workers Party holds convention in Ohio
(feature article)
 
BY MARTÍN KOPPEL  
OBERLIN, Ohio—Days after the conclusion of the 43rd constitutional convention of the Socialist Workers Party, held here June 9-11, socialist workers, young socialists, and others were hitting the streets of Seattle and Pittsburgh, campaigning to put SWP mayoral candidates on the ballot. In New York, socialists are organizing a similar effort that will start mid-July.

Socialist workers and youth also signed up for teams in late June and early July to the Western coalfields, Midwestern meatpacking factories, and auto plants in the South to sell the Militant and the Marxist magazine New International to working people.

The convention, attended by some 400 people, was a springboard for the home stretch of the campaign to sell the two new issues of New International. The drive continues through the end of the world youth festival, which takes place August 7-15 in Caracas, Venezuela.

Delegates also voted to redouble the party’s efforts to win the widest support possible in the unions and beyond for the Militant Fighting Fund (see lead front-page article and editorial).

The convention helped prepare the final push to build a large U.S. delegation to the Caracas festival. For several dozen youth present, the convention sessions, classes, and informal discussions were valuable political preparation for the international gathering.

Among those at the convention were members and supporters of the Communist Leagues and Young Socialists from Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the UK.

The delegates adopted a political resolution guiding the party’s work, entitled “Their Transformation and Ours,” which had been printed publicly in New International no. 12 in April. Party members had discussed this document in local branches over the three previous months. They had also been part of weekly classes—which included Young Socialists and other interested workers and youth—on the resolution and other readings from the New International.  
 
Battle over Western coal
The convention opened with reports on “The Battle Over Western Coal and Its Producers Continues to Widen.”

Bill Estrada, one of the workers fired by the Co-Op mine bosses last year, explained that he had come to Ohio a few days after participating in an important event hosted by the United Mine Workers of America in Ludlow, Colorado, on June 5. Coal miners from throughout District 22 in the West and from other UMWA locals, and members of the union’s International Executive Board joined many area unionists in a ceremony to rededicate a monument to miners and their families who were massacred by the National Guard and company thugs in 1914. That monument was badly vandalized in 2003. The UMWA spearheaded a two-year effort involving many groups and individuals to rebuild the life-size statue of a coal miner, his wife, and child.

Estrada said he appreciated having the opportunity to address the Ohio gathering of more than 400, which included trade unionists, students, and others from the U.S. and eight other countries. He described the union organizing potential today in District 22 of the UMWA, spurred by the union battle at the Co-Op mine. He said District 22 is looking forward to soon welcoming a new local, UMWA 9957, at Co-Op.

SWP National Committee member Norton Sandler focused on the defense campaign being waged in response to a harassment lawsuit by C.W. Mining, owners of the Co-Op mine, against the UMWA, 16 miners, Utah’s two main dailies, the Militant, and the Socialist Workers Party, among others. “The heart of the case against the Militant,” he said, is to limit “the paper’s ability to quote workers about their job conditions, about the union they want, and to write editorials or other opinion pieces in support of the miners’ fight.”

In the discussion, SWP national secretary Jack Barnes noted the big stakes involved for the working class. He said progress in defending the Militant and the other papers coming out of the June 14 hearing in Salt Lake will be a boost to defense of the miners and UMWA, who are the main targets of the lawsuit. He urged supporters of the Militant Fighting Fund to be prepared for the possibility of a positive outcome from that hearing that can strengthen the fight by the miners against the coal bosses and widen potential for a deeper convergence of the defense efforts on the part of those targeted in the lawsuit.  
 
Their transformation and ours
In the political report to the convention, Barnes moved the resolution, “Their Transformation and Ours,” for discussion and vote and addressed the central questions of world and U.S. politics and revolutionary working-class strategy it analyzes. These included:

• the intensifying rivalry between and among U.S. imperialism and its competitors in Europe and the Pacific, including currency conflicts between the U.S. dollar, the weakening euro, and others;

• the world capitalist economic decline, including growing overcapacity in the auto industry and the auto bosses’ union-busting drive in the U.S. South;

• the restructuring and redeployment of the U.S. armed forces to wage more brutal and lethal imperialist wars, whether in the Mideast and Central Asia, or in Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas;

• Washington’s bipartisan “homeland defense” measures directed against the rights of working people;

• why Stalinism, the counterrevolution that marked the 20th century, is dying;

• the vanguard place of Black workers in the line of march toward conquering power and establishing a workers and farmers government;

• the ongoing centrality of the family and oppression of women to the maintenance of the capitalist system.

Barnes explained steps the SWP leadership took in the weeks leading up to the convention. These put the party on a sounder footing to follow the lines of resistance in the working class and unions and to recruit workers and youth.

Barnes noted the steps taken to improve the journalistic discipline, quality, and accuracy of the Militant as a weekly “published in the interests of working people.” These steps include shorter and more concise articles and continuing to draw on the paper’s political continuity. The now-expanded “25, 50, and 75 Years Ago” column, he said, shows a revolutionary political integrity and consistency over decades that no social-democratic, Stalinist, or centrist current can claim.

Barnes reported steps to strengthen the organization of the party’s trade union work in garment factories and textile mills, coal mines, and meatpacking plants. Doing so puts the party in a better position to be part of efforts where workers are organizing or using union power to resist the bosses’ attacks on wages and job conditions.

Barnes also outlined a reorganization of the party aimed at strengthening SWP branches around the country with the transfer of a number of cadres, including from half a dozen cities where the party recently closed branches.

Political clarity combined with proletarian practice in the mass movement is transforming the party, Barnes said. The SWP is becoming more integrated into a fighting vanguard of the trade unions and is in a better position to attract worker militants to its disciplined activity and revolutionary program.  
 
‘Mission accomplished’
Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee and editor of New International, presented a report on “Communist ‘Space’ and Communist Propaganda Work.” She opened by celebrating the “mission accomplished” by supporters of the communist movement—completion of a seven-year-long effort to convert into digital form 390 Pathfinder books and pamphlets. This feat makes it easier to print the books anywhere in the world under whatever political conditions the communist movement may confront.

The convention was also a celebration of how this victory was achieved, Waters said. Several hundred supporters of the communist movement worldwide transformed themselves into “a disciplined army of volunteers that is an auxiliary of the party and can be counted on to do what’s needed.”

Waters also described the next major stage of this work: to reformat many of the books and issues of New International with larger type, indexes where they don’t exist, and wider margins to make them more readable and useful.

Waters presented proposals, adopted by the delegates, on the campaign to sell 3,350 copies of New International by August 22, and on regional sales teams this summer to get the New International and the Militant into the hands of thousands of working people.

The SWP leader took note of the response to a letter from the Young Socialists to the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), replying to a proposal by Stalinist youth organizations in Europe to focus the last day of seminars at the Caracas youth festival to a celebration of the end of World War II as an “anti-fascist people’s victory.” The letter argued for strengthening the anti-imperialist character of the festival and separated myth from reality on the causes and outcome of World War II. (See May 23 Militant.)

The discussions of the letter among participants at a recent meeting in Lisbon to prepare for the festival, Waters said, point to the continued weakening of the Stalinist movement and its reduced ability to close off space for political discussion and exchange.  
 
Classes on Marxism
Discussion on political questions addressed and voted on by delegates continued in conference classes, two of which were given in both English and Spanish. Topics included: “The Place of Black Workers in the United States in the Line of March toward the Dictatorship of the Proletariat”; “Back to the Foundations of Marxism: Women, Class, and Family”; “Bolshevism and Stalinism: The Proletarian Struggle for Power in Face of the Counterrevolution that Marked the 20th Century”; and “The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: An Introduction to Socialism.” The classes fueled interest in further reading. More than $2,000 in books were sold at the gathering.

Dagoberto Rodríguez, chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., and the Central Committee of the Workers Party of Korea, sent written greetings to the convention. Delegates also heard greetings from a representative of the Revolutionary Socialist Nucleus of Paraguay who took part in the gathering.

The convention concluded June 11 with the election of the party’s National Committee.

A closing conference meeting was chaired by Norton Sandler and Arrin Hawkins. Speakers included Martín Koppel, the SWP candidate for mayor of New York; Karl Butts, a farmer in the Tampa, Florida, area who is moving to Birmingham, Alabama, to get into industry and build the party; Angelica Worth, who described recent teams the Communist League in New Zealand has organized to take the Militant to coal miners there; and Jim Altenberg from San Francisco, a member of the Printing Project Steering Committee.

Paul Mailhot from Salt Lake City described the broadening support for the Militant Fighting Fund. Those present contributed or pledged $41,000 toward a goal of $60,000 to be met by August 15.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Convention helps me see world in class terms’  
 
 
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