Vol. 72/No. 30      July 28, 2008

The gathering took place as rising prices of food, gas, and other necessities continued eating into wages, unemployment mounted, “productivity” drives by the bosses maimed and killed more workers, and the U.S.-led war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region intensified.

In the opening political report to the conference, Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, said that the course of the class struggle in recent years confirms that labor remains at center stage in U.S. and world politics. Industrial workers are the main target of the rulers’ attacks in the United States, and an emerging vanguard of workers is at the center of resistance to these assaults.

Barnes pointed in particular to recent struggles in the Upper Midwest, including those by union meat packers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, and other packinghouses, as well as fights in defense of undocumented workers and for legalization by working people in that region and beyond. Everywhere socialist workers have joined in these battles, he said, they’ve found growing interest in the Militant and other revolutionary literature.

A panel of union fighters and youth involved in struggles in the Upper Midwest drew out lessons of recent fights there and the place of communist workers who have been part of the vanguard layers leading them (see article on facing page). Both in his opening report and closing conference summary, Barnes called special attention to that panel as a living example of what’s possible for class-conscious workers to accomplish in politics today. He pointed to the significance of the fact that two of the leaders of the Dakota fight participating in the panel, Rebecca Williamson and Julian Santana, are members of the Young Socialists still in their twenties.

The job of communist workers, Barnes said, is not to dwell on the horrors of capitalist exploitation. The task is the opposite. Workers are much more aware of the conditions our class faces than we are of own capacity to transform these conditions. As communists join in working-class resistance, he said, we above all organize to help fellow workers recognize our own self-worth and revolutionary capacities.

There is a gap, Barnes said, between the pace and acceleration of the capitalist crisis and the rise of a powerful workers movement. “The capitalists get the first shot,” he said, “but the presence of conscious revolutionaries in the resistance that develops will be decisive, as it always has been.”

Several workshops took place during the conference where experienced sewing machine operators and butchers helped those with less experience to improve their skills so they are able to work together to more easily get and keep jobs in garment shops and meatpacking plants.

The skills training is part of a renewed campaign by the socialists to carry out consistent political work in these two industries, where the bosses’ attacks have gone the furthest and workers have been engaged in the fight for legalization and union battles. Longtime veterans of the Socialist Workers Party joined with young people and workers new to the communist movement in taking advantage of these workshops.

Yvonne Lee, who has worked as a sewing machine operator for 22 years, was one of those training others in the sewing workshop. This is the second time Lee has attended one of the annual socialist conferences. She said she found the panel on the union battles in the Upper Midwest especially interesting.  
 
Accelerating economic crisis
Pointing to the plunging stock prices and shrinking capital base of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the federal government takeover of IndyMac bank, Barnes said there is no “policy” the capitalist rulers can adopt to solve what is now their worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. That crisis is inherent in the workings of the capitalist system, he said, and will increasingly interact with convulsions in production and trade. The future will see growing protectionism and more wars, Barnes continued, with working people bearing the brunt of the blows by the employers, their government, and their political parties.

He noted that the U.S. government is trying to convince working people to lower our expectations of higher wages, with Federal Reserve officials and others raising fears of a “wage-price spiral,” which they argue would be the result of pay increases for workers. Barnes pointed out that, in fact, real wages have actually gone down for the last seven years and are no higher today than they were in the mid-1970s. Higher wages are not the cause of inflation, he said.

Having made substantial military progress through its “surge” in stabilizing a client bourgeois regime in Iraq, Washington is now escalating the war in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, Barnes said. “There is not a scintilla of difference on this” between Democratic contender Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, he noted. Both candidates also support the accelerating attack on workers’ rights, Barnes said, including the new legislation that significantly broadens the government’s powers to spy on phone and e-mail communications of individuals it claims are connected to activity it deems to be “terrorism.”  
 
Cuban, American revolutions
Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee, gave a talk on “Cuba and the Coming American Revolution.”

“We’re on a proletarian course in which we find ourselves in the same trench as Cuban revolutionaries,” she said. This is true, for example, of the work by the party and Young Socialists to free the Cuban Five—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González, and Antonio Guerrero.

It is not just a question of extending solidarity to fighters from another country; it’s directly part of the class struggle in the United States. “Five of our comrades are serving time, framed up on conspiracy to commit espionage and murder, because they are communists engaged in activity in defense of Cuba’s revolution and of workers here in this country as well,” Waters said.

Recent meetings on college campuses about the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution show that “objective conditions have shifted, with young people more open to socialism and to action to resist capitalism’s grinding exploitation,” Waters said. Even compared to meetings about Our History in late 2006 and 2007, discussions this spring about the Cuban Revolution more rapidly turned into discussions about the class struggle in the United States and the possibility of a revolution here, she noted.

Both Waters in her talk, and Barnes in his report and summary remarks, addressed the revolutionary example—and political and moral high ground—demonstrated by Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro in his recent remarks calling on the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to release all remaining hostages held in the areas it controls in Colombia (see article on page 3).

Waters also rebutted the misinformation in the big business media in the United States and elsewhere this spring that recent economic measures adopted by the Cuban government—measures that have been in the works for several years—had been taken because Fidel Castro stepped down from the presidency early this year.  
 
Classes series
Classes on a variety of topics were interspersed with the main sessions throughout the conference. Four were based on themes from the newly published issue number 14 of the Marxist magazine New International. These classes were titled: “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X,” “The 1990s Bipartisan Convergence in an Accelerating Assault on the Working Class,” “Roots of the 2008 Financial Crisis,” and “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class.”

Other classes included “China’s 450-Million-Strong Working Class and Coming Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Alliance,” as well as classes presented in English and Spanish on the Pathfinder titles Teamster Power and Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? (Translation into Spanish and French was provided at all conference activities.)

Aaron Bleich, who had helped organize a meeting this spring on Our History Is Still Being Written at his campus, Iowa State University in Ames, was attending his first socialist conference. Twenty years old, Bleich told the Militant he grew up in a community of 30 people in northwest Iowa and had worked as a farm hand when not in school since he was 14. He was excited to learn in the class at the conference on Teamster Power about big battles by Teamsters in the 1930s “right where I grew up.” Bleich, who recently joined the Young Socialists, said he plans to help strengthen the communist movement this fall by joining in efforts to organize political meetings on Our History in Chicago and Minneapolis.

First-time participants in the conference were able to discuss the politics of the weekend’s events over meals with the conference’s welcoming committee. Mealtime gatherings were organized for questions and discussion by new participants on the capitalist financial crisis, the social weight of the industrial working class, and other topics presented in the political reports.

Those attending the conference included members and supporters of the SWP and Communist Leagues from around the world, Young Socialists, and workers and youth interested in learning more about the communist movement. Participants came from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Greece, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The presentations, panels, classes, workshops, and discussions all culminated in a windup rally opened by the SWP’s 2008 presidential candidate Róger Calero, who spoke about the road ahead for the campaign. “My running mate Alyson Kennedy and I plan to go where we see opportunities to spread the campaign to workers engaged in fights,” he said.

Later in the meeting Kennedy reviewed the successes the campaign has had in reaching working people in struggle over recent months, including workers marching for immigrant rights on May 1, truckers demanding relief from rising diesel prices, opponents of hospital closures, and those taking to the streets to oppose workplace raids by la migra.

Ben O’Shaughnessy, a leader of the Young Socialists, described the educational programs the New York YS has participated in along with friends and members of the SWP since 2006. He also pointed to the participation of young socialists in many of the job skills workshops leading up to and during the conference.

Also on the panel was Freddy Huinil, a worker from Atlanta, who spoke about the successful building of public meetings to discuss Our History Is Still Being Written, including one he attended in Miami in April that drew more than 100 people, as well as a meeting in Atlanta that will take place September 25 at the Auburn Avenue Research Library.

Arthur Mitropoulos from the YS in the United Kingdom spoke about the successful presentations on Our History in the United Kingdom as well as the socialist summer school in London.  
 
Expansion of Pathfinder titles
Mary-Alice Waters reported at the rally on the expansion of Pathfinder titles over the past year. Forty-three new books, new editions, and newly upgraded editions have been published, as well as 80 new printings. She pointed to the expanding number of languages in which Pathfinder titles are now available, ranging from English, to Spanish, French, Greek, Arabic, and Farsi.

The rally ended with an appeal by Martín Koppel, the SWP candidate for U.S. Congress in New York’s 15th District, for volunteers to participate in the New York State ballot drive for the Socialist Workers ticket.

Participants at the rally donated $30,000 to a fund appeal to finance political activity by the SWP. A literature table featuring Pathfinder books sold about $3,500 during the conference.
 
 
Related articles:
Panel of workers, youth describes union struggles in the Upper Midwest
Socialist conference sends greetings to Cuban Five  
 
 
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