Vol. 73/No. 4      February 2, 2009

Participants in the panel presentation of the books will include two Cuban trade unionists—Miguel Toledo, general secretary of the National Sugar Workers Union, and Martha Martínez, of the Americas section of the World Federation of Trade Unions. Also speaking will be a representative of Cuba’s Federation of University Students and Róger Calero, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee. Calero is a former meat packer and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers union in the Midwest.

Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? contains a presentation that Waters, editor of the magazine New International and president of Pathfinder Press, gave at the central forum on the theme “The United States: a possible revolution” during the 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas. Waters answers “yes” without hesitation to the question posed by the title of the book.

She explains the impact of the deepening world capitalist crisis, at that time only beginning, and the spreading imperialist wars. She points to the revolutionary legacy of the working class in the United States, from the Civil War to massive fights today for the legalization of immigrants, noting that, “a fighting vanguard of the working class has emerged in action.”

The expanded edition includes Waters’s remarks at a panel during the 2008 book fair in Caracas, which launched the publication in Spanish of Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by the Venezuelan publishing house Monte Avila. There she reviewed how well the perspective presented a year earlier looked in light of the deepening contraction of capitalist production worldwide.

Teamster Rebellion and Teamster Power are the first two of a four-volume series by Farrell Dobbs, a leader of the communist movement and a central organizer of the 1930s Teamster strikes, organizing drives, and political campaigns that transformed that union throughout the Midwest into a fighting industrial union movement.

The first volume describes the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes, which helped pave the way for the rise of the industrial unions in the United States. Teamster Power details the 11-state over-the-road organizing campaign that extended union power into much of the region.

Rebelión Teamster was published in 2004, and the second volume, Poder Teamster, was released in 2008.
 
 
Related articles:
Longshore workers union local joins fight to free Cuban Five
Lebanon meeting hails Cuban Revolution
‘Declarations of Havana’ sell at Lebanon meeting on Cuba
Restructuring an industry: when workers decide
Former sugar workers in study-as-work program in Cuba
are ‘more confident in what we can accomplish’
Women’s combat platoon in Cuba’s revolutionary war  
 
 
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