The event, titled “Celebrate, Debate, Prepare!” and sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists, drew some 260 people. It coincided with a two-day class that culminated a summerlong program to study basic works of Marxism and the history of the party. The class focused on the book Speeches to the Party by James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the SWP.

The weekend program also included meetings of the Young Socialists and of supporters of the communist movement who organize the production of books on revolutionary politics published by Pathfinder Press.

The Militant’s Washington correspondent, Sam Manuel, chaired the public meeting. He noted that the event was taking place one year after a similar gathering in New York, held at a time when a massive social catastrophe had begun to unfold in the Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina. Some 1,500 people died in New Orleans and the region, and millions were left to fend for themselves by government officials at all levels. “What was revealed to working people was the stark reality of what we face under capitalist rule,” he noted.

Manuel, who headed a Militant reporting team that spent a week and a half in the Gulf region when the disaster first unfolded, recalled how the socialist newsweekly “gave a very different story from what the capitalist media reported. We talked with working people who described how they worked together to minimize the loss of life and organized collectively to secure food, water, and medical treatment.” Today, he added, the Militant continues to report the truth about developments in New Orleans, and socialist workers collaborate with working-class fighters they have met there.  
 
Promoting, using ‘Our History’
Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and editor of a 17-volume series of books by Pathfinder Press on the Cuban Revolution in world politics, remarked on the continuing “non-news” on Cuba in the capitalist press. She cited an August 31 Miami Herald article reporting that one month after Cuban president Fidel Castro delegated powers to Raúl Castro and other leaders, “There has been no visible indication of political change” there, which has “left some Cuba watchers wondering what is really going on.”

The problem of these “Cuba watchers,” Waters said, “is a class problem.” They cannot see or understand the capacities of workers and farmers in Cuba who continue to carry out their work and defend the revolution. The answers to the questions about Cuba these reporters cannot understand are contained in Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, she said.

Since it was published eight months ago, this book “has enjoyed a reception unlike almost any other Pathfinder book on the Cuban Revolution,” Waters noted. She pointed to favorable reviews in several publications and what is shaping up to be an important meeting on September 9 to promote the book, sponsored by the Chinese Historical Society of America in San Francisco.

The four regional meetings held in March and April to launch Our History Is Still Being Written, Waters said, were just preparations for the opportunities now beginning to open up for organizing a new round of broadly sponsored events, as the September 9 meeting in San Francisco indicates. One important opportunity to sell and promote the book will be the second National Asian American Student Conference, to take place November 3-5 at Northwestern University in Chicago. The interest in the new title “is not a fluke,” Waters said. “It’s a sign of the political ground under our feet shifting a little.”  
 
Success of Marxist summer school
Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, explained the achievement registered with the graduation of the 35 students from the Marxist summer school, which he said was the first such systematic program by the communist movement in four decades. The Young Socialists and others who took part in the classes over three months studied books such as The History of American Trotskyism and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by Cannon, In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky, sections of Capital by Karl Marx, Imperialism by V.I. Lenin, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Barnes, and The Structure and Organizational Principles of the Socialist Workers Party by Farrell Dobbs.

The students, concentrated in four cities for the summer, prepared the questions for discussion and presented the material themselves. They successfully organized to set aside sufficient time to read and study. They held special weekend regional conferences on topics such as the fight for women’s liberation, the Black struggle, and Lenin’s explanation of imperialism. The Communist League and the Young Socialists in the United Kingdom organized a similar effort in London.

“They integrated into their study the one thing no academic institution would do: the history of the party as the concentrated history” of the line of march of the working class, he said.

Barnes discussed aspects of the class struggle in the world today, including the Israeli assault on Lebanon and the imperialist drive against Iran. He noted that many in the audience had read the feature articles published in the previous two issues of the Militant on the crisis in the Mideast and the breakup of the world imperialist order, titled “We are for whatever strengthens the confidence and capacity of the toilers” and “For a democratic, secular Palestine” (see September 4 and 11 issues).

To respond to these and other political developments at home and abroad, Barnes said, the communist movement needs to build on the success of the Marxist summer school in order to advance what it set out to do following the June national convention of the SWP. One such decision was to expand and maintain the subscription base of the Militant among working people, as a form of carrying out effective political work in the unions together with fellow militant workers. The ability to gain subscribers at a given plant or mine is a criterion to determine where socialist workers should be working, he said.

Other decisions along these lines included regularizing Militant sales at plant gates; shifting the balance of Militant sales a little more toward Black communities; acting on the opportunities to sell and promote Our History Is Still Being Written as outlined by Waters; broadening the party’s involvement in the proletarian movement for the legalization of immigrant workers; and instituting regular Marxist education in the branches of the Socialist Workers Party.  
 
‘Learned to study and think’
Barnes introduced the 27 graduates of the summer school who were sitting on the platform. He also mentioned four other graduates in the United States and four in the United Kingdom could not attend. During the discussion period after his talk, prompted by a question from the audience, several got up and spoke about their experiences in that study program.

“The most challenging thing was fitting in the time to read—learning to balance political activity and study,” said Maura DeLuca, a garment worker and organizer of the Young Socialists in New York who took part in the summer school here. There was a lot of reading to do, and it took work to absorb, she said.

“Learning how to think dialectically and putting what we do today in a historical perspective” was perhaps the biggest gain, said Becca Williamson, a meat packer in the Twin Cities and a Young Socialist.

“We conquered some of the communist movement’s program,” said David Argüello, a Young Socialist in San Diego and a guitar factory worker there who was part of the Los Angeles summer school. “It made the Young Socialists more homogeneous as a revolutionary youth organization that looks politically to the SWP.”

The following day the Young Socialists held a meeting. They voted to establish a three-person national steering committee, and decided that, whether there is a local chapter or just one member in the area, an organizer will be designated in each of the 13 U.S. cities where YS members are now active.

At the September 2 meeting, a party-building appeal brought in $11,500 in contributions or pledges. Many of those present stayed for a couple of hours after the program for a delicious dinner, informal discussion, and dancing.
 
 
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