Vol. 72/No. 48      December 8, 2008

In face of today’s accelerating contraction of capitalist production and employment, Barnes said, it is this perspective—the working-class fight to take power—that communists must explain through the Militant, through the 2009 SWP election campaigns for state and local office, and in other ways. And it is to this course, he said, that revolutionary-minded workers and youth will be politically attracted, and the basis on which they will be won to the party and the Young Socialists.

The event, titled “The Crisis Has Barely Begun! … and the Workers’ Fight to End the Wages System is Posed,” was sponsored by the Newark and New York Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. Some 375 workers and youth came from throughout the United States as well as from Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Militant editor Sam Manuel and SWP National Committee member Diana Newberry, a meat packer in Des Moines, chaired the program.

Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee and editor of the Marxist magazine New International, also spoke. Having just returned from the Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas, Waters described the public presentation there of the pamphlet Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?

The pamphlet answers yes to that question—the question that was the featured debate at the central forum during the book fair held in 2007. The discussion at that event led Pathfinder Press to publish the title, centering on Waters’s talk, which opened the five-day forum.

“This year we returned to this debate in a very interesting way,” said Waters. The pamphlet was launched in Caracas jointly by Pathfinder and the Venezuelan publishing house Monte Avila, which printed and distributed its own edition. Monte Avila made 1,000 free copies available to book fair participants and the title has been placed for sale in bookstores throughout Venezuela.

The question under discussion, said Waters, is not just the possibility of socialist revolution in the United States, but anywhere in the world. “There was more interest in what we had to say than at previous book fairs,” she said, pointing to the more than 1,600 Pathfinder books and pamphlets sold at the fair—60 percent more than the previous year—including 320 copies of Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible?; 125 of issue number 8 of Nueva Internacional, featuring the article “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X”; and 100 of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution.  
 
Book on Africa transformation
Waters said that Pathfinder’s next book will be on the big economic and social changes taking place in Africa and the internationalist example of Cuba’s socialist revolution. The book is based on 2005 and 2008 reporting trips to Equatorial Guinea that Waters and others took part in.

The working title had been Imperial Plunder and the Transformation of Africa. But the editors decided this should be changed, said Waters. There are many books about the imperialist plunder of Africa. This one, she said, is about how capitalism is transforming Africa today—as it always does, “dripping with blood and dirt from every pore,” as Karl Marx wrote. And how, in the process, a working class is just beginning to be forged—a class capable of leading the fight for the social and economic advancement of the toilers throughout Africa.

The book will be available at the February 2009 Havana International Book Fair, as will Habla Malcolm X (Malcolm X Speaks), a new edition by the Cuban publishing house Ciencias Sociales of the book originally published by Pathfinder.

A political highlight of the Venezuela book fair was the presentation of La paz en Colombia (Peace in Colombia) by Cuban leader Fidel Castro. The book, said Waters, contrasts the longstanding course of the Cuban leadership—the revolutionary struggle for political power—to those political forces backing the “prolonged guerrilla warfare” course of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), including the FARC’s treatment of prisoners and policy of taking and holding civilian hostages.

Meetings broadly sponsored by academic departments, professors, and student groups to discuss the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution have taken place on campuses across the United States, the United Kingdom, and in other countries.

Waters described the upcoming opportunities to reach out with the book as part of participating in the upcoming international conference on José Martí, Benito Juárez, and Abraham Lincoln scheduled for May 17-19, 2009, in Monterrey, Mexico. As part of that event, Pathfinder will be making available for the first time ever a Spanish-language edition of the writings of Marx and Engels on the United States.

In December, Moisés Sío Wong, one of the Chinese-Cuban generals interviewed in Our History Is Still Being Written, together with Waters and Martín Koppel, who participated in interviewing the generals, will travel to Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities in China to present the newly published Chinese-language edition of Our History Is Still Being Written. “This is the first time in decades anything like this has been published in China,” said Waters. The book presentations will be part of activities there to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution.

The book “opens opportunities especially in Asia,” noted Waters, pointing to the International Conference on Overseas Chinese that will take place in July 2009 in Auckland, New Zealand.

The experiences at the Venezuela book fair, in Equatorial Guinea, and in promoting revolutionary literature from Havana to Beijing show how a proletarian party reaches out to the world as an indispensable part of planting its feet firmly in the class struggle in the United States, said Waters.

This was also illustrated by the large, attractive displays on reaching out to the world through promotion of books like Our History Is Still Being Written; charts and articles explaining the roots and consequences for workers of the current economic crisis; announcements of the 2009 SWP mayoral campaigns; and lessons from the bourgeois “New Deal/War Deal” policies of the U.S. rulers during the depression years of the 1930s. This included a number of photos highlighting working-class resistance, such as women strikers occupying a Detroit lock factory in 1937 and sit-down strikers at a General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, that year.  
 
Proletarian revolution
In his talk, Barnes said capitalism is drawing working people into conditions like what the United States and the world entered into in 1929, the year of the stock market crash in the United States that triggered more than a decade of depression, social crisis, and intensified class conflict.

Socialism is not inevitable, he said, but proletarian revolutionary struggle is. Whether those struggles culminate in the working class and its allies taking state power will determine the prospects for the advance toward socialism—and the very survival of humanity.

“The greatest fight the working class has is to get rid of the picture of itself inculcated by the bourgeoisie,” said Barnes.

Above all, a proletarian revolution opens the revolutionary transformation of the working class. Workers learn how to run society only through their own struggles, their own capacity for civil discussion and debate, their own shared labor. Out of this comes the political experience necessary to begin organizing the production of goods and running the government in the interests of the toiling majority.

The contraction world capitalism has entered into is not at its root a banking or credit crisis, Barnes said. Rather, it’s the exhaustion of the possibility of using a greater and greater expansion of credit—including of winning those in the working class to becoming debtors to a degree never before seen in history—as a way of countering declining profit rates, and the capitalists’ incapacity to find lucrative outlets for capacity-expanding investments in plant and equipment and increasing employment.

The unfolding social catastrophe, however, also produces working-class resistance. Barnes described the victory won last week when some 1,000 workers at the JBS Swift meatpacking plant in Hyrum, Utah, voted by a two-thirds majority to join the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), winning an organizing fight that had been going on since the 1980s.

When six Swift plants, including the one at Hyrum, were raided by immigration agents in 2006, UFCW officials never said a word in defense of workers at the Hyrum plant, since it was nonunion. That the Hyrum workers—despite the denial of simple working-class solidarity by top UFCW officials—nonetheless fought to join the union shows they have “a higher caliber of leadership than the entire labor movement officialdom,” noted Barnes.  
 
Bailouts no answer for workers
“When industry resumes production it will have the advantage of substantially less labor costs,” wrote the editors of the Wall Street Journal. That wasn’t a 2008 editorial, said Barnes, but one from 1931!

Like then, bankruptcies today will declare labor contracts null and void. “We’re against the bailout of the auto companies,” he said. “This is not how workers will defend themselves and other working people. They will defend themselves by realizing they don’t have a union.”

Only as the unions are transformed in struggle to “organize the organized,” he said, will they be able on a broad scale to organize the unorganized.

Commenting on the expanding U.S. war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Barnes noted that conditions there are very different from Iraq. The war will be decided and fought in Pakistan, already the sixth largest country in the world and growing. It will be a hard-fought war, one that Washington won’t be able to win by transplanting its “surge” tactics from Iraq. The U.S. rulers are beginning to recognize that a volunteer U.S. army will not be enough to defend their imperialist class interests in the Middle East, Asia, and worldwide. Washington will be probing possibilities in the months and years ahead to reinstitute the draft.

Dave Prince, a member of the SWP in Atlanta, spoke about the launching of the Capital Fund for the coming year. Already $105,000 has been contributed. The Capital Fund accepts donations of $1,000 or more to continue the communist movement’s publishing program.

A fund appeal by Ben Joyce, a leader of the Young Socialists, raised more than $18,000 to help the party continue its work. Discussion on the themes of the afternoon’s talks continued at a sit-down dinner at the hotel and a lively party that followed.  
 
 
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