Vol. 73/No. 9      March 9, 2009

These three books were among those that drew the most interest at the Pathfinder booth. Discussions at the 11-day cultural event have been marked by a thirst for understanding the world capitalist economic crisis today, with particular interest in developments in the United States.

The speakers at the February 18 presentation of Pathfinder books were Miguel Toledo, general secretary of the National Sugar Workers Union of Cuba (SNTA); Yankiet Echevarría, international relations secretary of the Federation of University Students; Martha Martínez of the Americas region of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU); and Róger Calero, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and SWP candidate for U.S. president in 2004 and 2008. The event was chaired by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder.

Luis Martell, former long-time general secretary of the sugar workers union, was one of the special guests at the meeting. Also participating were 40 trade unionists from several Latin American countries who were in Havana attending a two-week course organized by the WFTU in collaboration with the Lázaro Peña school of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), Cuba’s trade union federation.

Miguel Toledo spoke about the two Teamster books, which are now available together in Spanish for the first time. Teamster Rebellion describes the 1934 Minneapolis strikes that helped pave the way for the rise of the industrial unions in the United States. Teamster Power tells the story of the 11-state campaign to organize over-the-road drivers that extended union power into much of the Midwest.  
 
‘Who was Farrell Dobbs?’
“As workers, we identify with the account compañero Farrell Dobbs offers us,” said Toledo. He cited the vivid descriptions in Teamster Rebellion of how trucking workers in Minneapolis, including many Scandinavian-born immigrant workers, organized into Local 574 of the Teamsters, standing up to deadly assaults by the bosses’ thugs and cops and “turning 574 into a battle cry.”

“Who was Farrell Dobbs?” Toledo asked. “This union and party leader was a worker who, while in his 20s, became one of the main leaders to emerge from the 1934 strikes. That year he joined the Communist League of America, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party.” He noted that Dobbs became “a citizen of the world, a proletarian internationalist,” and who “together with other comrades from Local 574 and the SWP, was locked up in a federal prison for opposing the imperialist aims of the United States during World War II.”

In Teamster Power, Toledo noted, Dobbs tells how the class-struggle leadership in the union led a campaign that organized some 200,000 over-the-road drivers throughout the region.

The account by Dobbs “documents a concrete experience in the class struggle,” he said, and today provides “an encouragement to continue the struggle of the dispossessed around the world.”

Toledo also thanked the Militant for “allowing us to be informed about important developments in North America and the rest of the world” and for its defense of the working class.

Over the past decade, SNTA leaders have worked with Militant reporters from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries, organizing visits by them to sugar mills and farm cooperatives. A recent two-part series in the Militant on the reorganization of the Cuban sugar industry was one of the products of this collaboration.  
 
Socialist revolution in United States
Yankiet Echevarría focused on Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? He quoted the author’s statement that to think such a revolution is not possible, “You would have to believe that there won’t again be economic, financial, or social crises on the order of those that marked the first half of the twentieth century. That the ruling families of the imperialist world and their economic wizards have found a way to ‘manage’ capitalism” so as to preclude depressions, imperialist wars, and fascist movements.

Echevarría said the perspective of a socialist revolution in the United States was “one of the most attractive and probably one of the most controversial questions” to be posed today.

While class battles were unfolding in the United States during the 1930s depression, he said, Cuba in the 1920s and ’30s was “a hotbed of revolution.” Radicalizing students joined with workers in a revolutionary upsurge that led to the end of the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He pointed to Julio Antonio Mella, a student leader who, two years after founding the Federation of University Students, went on to found the Communist Party of Cuba in 1925.

A subsequent generation of Cuban youth joined the movement headed by Fidel Castro that led a socialist revolution. Young people today, Echevarría said, need to study the lessons of these struggles.

Today, he concluded, “Pathfinder is launching a new book on the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Revolution. I hope that in 50 years, when we reach the centennial of the revolution, Pathfinder Press will be at the book fair presenting the book entitled, Socialist Revolution in the United States Was Possible.”  
 
Glad Teamster books now in Spanish
Martha Martínez expressed her pleasure that the two books on the Teamsters organizing drive are now available in Spanish. The accounts by Dobbs sweep up the reader, “from the fighting enthusiasm of the masses, to the suffering and outrage over Bloody Friday,” she said, referring to one of the 1934 street battles in Minneapolis between striking workers and the bosses’ cops and thugs. Readers like herself are impacted by the vivid descriptions of strikers shot in the back, workers’ efforts to save the wounded, and the solidarity, resistance, and ultimate satisfaction at the victory for the union.

Martínez said these books show how workers were able to organize an effective fight that overcame efforts by the union bureaucracy to demobilize them and “defeated the bosses and opportunist politicians.”

She pointed to the world economic crisis today, “whose effects are already hitting thousands of laid-off workers and impoverished families.” Capitalists “attempt to convince the exploited that the bourgeois order is the only one possible.” But the class struggle continues, “the result of the irreconcilable antagonism between capital and labor,” Martínez concluded.

Róger Calero addressed the question posed by the title of Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? The answer is unequivocally “yes,” he said, and this conclusion is based not on hopes but “on the capacities demonstrated by working people in United States.” The Teamsters organizing drive and broad social struggles they led offer a graphic example of how workers, if they have the leadership they deserve, “can transform the unions into instruments of revolutionary working-class struggle.”

Calero noted that today, as the capitalist contraction deepens, working people are at first stunned by the layoffs, home foreclosures, and other blows. “The first reaction is to think the crisis will be brief and things will soon return to ‘normal,’” he said.

The U.S. trade union officialdom is more concerned with making companies profitable than defending workers’ interests, he said. While the trade unions now represent barely 7.6 percent of workers in private industry, Calero noted, it is not because the fighting capacities of the working class have been diminished. To the contrary.

Defensive struggles will be initiated not by workers and farmers but “by the crisis-driven attacks of the employing class,” he said, citing examples of working-class struggles he had joined as the Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. president in 2008, such as the protests by workers in Postville, Iowa, who were targeted by a massive immigration raid at a meatpacking plant there. He also pointed to the victorious sit-in in December 2008 by workers at a Chicago window factory who were laid off without the back pay owed them.

“What working people around the world face is decades of intertwined economic, military, social, and political crises, with the explosive class battles that will accompany them,” said Calero. Revolutionary struggles are inevitable, he insisted. “Their victory is not. That depends on us.”

At the end of the meeting, audience members rushed to the table at the back of the room to buy the three books on sale.

Presentations on the same books will take place at the University of Havana, the José Antonio Echevarría University, and other campuses, as well as at meetings sponsored by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.
 
 
Related articles:
Building fighting unions: lessons from the 1930s
 
 
 
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