Vol. 73/No. 14      April 13, 2009

The panelists were Ramón Pichs, deputy director of the Havana-based Center for Research on the World Economy (CIEM); Adilén Roque, a professor at the national leadership training school of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP); and Jonathan Silberman, organizer of Pathfinder’s distribution center in London and a leader of the Communist League in the United Kingdom.

An earlier event during the 10-day book fair featured “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X,” by Jack Barnes, the lead article of New International no. 14 and Nueva Internacional no. 8, which are distributed by Pathfinder (see article in March 30 Militant).

Silberman and Pichs both focused in their opening remarks on the New International article “The Clintons’ Antilabor Legacy: Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis,” by Barnes, who is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.  
 
Internationalization of working class
Highlighting some of the main points in the article, Silberman addressed the unfolding world capitalist economic crisis today. He noted that imperialist governments from the United Kingdom to the United States are responding with protectionist and anti-immigrant measures that seek to pit working people against each other. He cited the Labour Party government’s call to protect “British jobs for British workers” as well as the recent reactionary strikes organized by the trade union officialdom in the United Kingdom that opposed the employment of foreign-born workers in the construction of several power plants in Britain.

“The fight to win the majority of the working class to defend the interests of all workers irrespective of national origin,” Silberman said, “is a fight for the soul of the working class. It will decide our future.”

He added that the internationalization of the working class through massive immigration is making it easier, not harder, to break down these divisions as workers of different nationalities work shoulder to shoulder. For example, “I am the only shop floor worker of British origin in the garment shop where I work, outside London. My coworkers are from Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, China, India, Pakistan, and Iran,” Silberman noted, as some in the audience shook their heads in amazement.

“The barriers begin to fall as we work together. And it’s been Polish workers in Britain who have been among the vanguard of the resistance to the rulers’ attacks.”

The deepening crisis “will drive the ruling class in each country to even sharper assaults on the wages, working conditions, and rights of working people at home,” said Silberman, “and to more military conflicts abroad.” This will fuel working-class resistance.

“But unless the working class and its allies are capable of taking power out of the hands of the rulers, there is no crisis from which the capitalists cannot finally emerge, by dealing devastating blows to the working class and destroying sufficient capital to prepare the way for another expansion,” Silberman said. That is why the living example of Cuba’s workers and farmers and their revolutionary socialist course is so important, he concluded.  
 
‘A structural crisis’ of capitalism
Pichs highlighted some of the major points in the article on “The Clintons’ Anti-Labor Legacy” and recommended to the audience “that you read this article and the others that make up this issue. For us, exchanges like this are very useful because of the message and the ideas contained in the magazine.”

Pichs reviewed the record of the Clinton years as the U.S. rulers stepped up their offensive against the living standards and rights of working people. He pointed to the gutting of welfare, attacks on immigrants, the stepped-up use of the police that led to a rapid rise in the prison population, and the tightening of the U.S. embargo against Cuba through the Helms-Burton Act.

He emphasized some of the facts the article underscores, pointing to the Clinton administration’s “manipulation of statistics such as minimizing much of the unemployment and inflation—for example, by not including so-called discouraged workers.”

Pichs called attention to the Clinton administration’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which facilitated a massive expansion of derivatives and debt. “This growing speculation meant a significant increase in the vulnerability of the financial sector,” accelerating and intensifying the financial crash that unfolded last year, he said.

“This was the beginning, not of a strictly financial crisis, but of a much broader crisis, a structural crisis, one that has social and environmental consequences and affects questions of energy and the food crisis in the world… . And no one knows how long or how deep it will go.”

It is a crisis that “reinforces the economic and social gap between the underdeveloped and developed countries,” he noted, with devastating consequences for millions in the world.  
 
Protection of farmers and environment
Adilén Roque addressed the New International article titled “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor.” She focused her remarks on the role the National Association of Small Farmers has played since the victory of the Cuban Revolution in organizing and advancing the interests of small farmers and protecting the country’s natural resources.

One of the first and most decisive steps taken by the revolutionary leadership and implemented by the massive mobilization of the toilers was the 1959 agrarian reform law, followed in 1963 by the second agrarian reform law. These actions “put an end to landlordism and exploitation in the Cuban countryside,” she said. In 1961 peasants organized into the National Association of Small Farmers, which today has 331,000 members.

Roque explained the work done by ANAP to advance diversification of crops, conservation, and other measures to restore degraded soil and promote reforestation.

She described ANAP’s program to develop “plant health activists” at each local farm cooperative, individuals “who are trained in the use of biological pesticides, which has reduced the use of chemicals that contaminate the soil and water and affect the health of working people and consumers.”

In Cuba, she said, applying such techniques “does not mean going backward.” Wherever possible, “we use the newest achievements of science and technology.”

This issue of New International and of Nueva Internacional was one of the most popular titles brought by Pathfinder to the fair. More than 340 copies of Nueva Internacional no. 8 and New International no. 14 were sold and distributed during the course of the book fair and related events.  
 
 
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