Vol. 73/No. 26      July 13, 2009

Some participants had just visited Latvia on a Militant reporting trip to learn about workers’ response to the slashing of government employee wages by 20 percent and pensions by 10 percent. Others had recently returned from Iran, where they participated in the Tehran International Book Fair.

Many had been part of vigils in the United States following the May 31 killing of Dr. George Tiller by an antiabortion rightist. Tiller operated an abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas. Still others had just come from picket lines protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 15 refusal to hear the appeal of five Cuban revolutionaries, known internationally as the Cuban Five, who have been held in U.S. jails on frame-up charges for nearly 11 years.

The Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists sponsored the three-day meeting. Participants came from the United States, Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.  
 
Students and Cuban Revolution
SWP National Committee member Mary-Alice Waters presented the first political report, titled “The Cuban Revolution, Communism, and the Socialist Workers Party.”

Introducing the Cuban Revolution to young people on college campuses is one of the best ways to win them to the communist movement, Waters said. This fall Armando Choy, one of the generals interviewed in the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution, will conduct a speaking tour of universities in Canada, she announced.

Waters reported on the importance of building the international conference on Cuban independence fighter José Martí, U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, and Mexican president Benito Juárez, scheduled for October 15-17 in Monterrey, Mexico.

The SWP and YS are actively helping to build participation in the Monterrey gathering. To strengthen their ability to politically explain the conference to students and academics, many took advantage of classes here on “José Martí: The Class Struggle in the United States After the Defeat of Radical Reconstruction and the Fight for Cuban Independence”; “Benito Juárez and the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution in Mexico: The Fight for Independence and the U.S. Civil War”; and “Abraham Lincoln: The Revolutionary War to Abolish Slavery and the Defeat of the European Colonial Powers in Mexico.”

A class on “The Frame-up and Imprisonment of the Cuban Five: An Assault on the Rights of U.S. Workers” also took place. Classes were given on the Pathfinder Press books Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? and Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa.

The day after the conference the YS held a meeting here focused on stepping up political work on campuses, particularly around the Cuban Revolution. A priority will be helping sponsor talks at universities and colleges where students can learn about the difference it has made for workers and farmers in Cuba to take political power and use it to advance the interests of the vast majority.

The YS will also step up its work on campuses to defend the Cuban Five and to promote the Monterrey conference. Four young people at the conference decided to join the YS.  
 
Defense of abortion rights
In her report, Waters pointed to the political challenges confronting Cuba’s revolutionary government in face of the worst capitalist economic crisis since the 1930s. Much progress had been made in overcoming the severe shortages in Cuba in the early 1990s, she said, but three devastating hurricanes over the last year have taken their toll.

The absence of revolutions in other countries poses the challenge of politicizing and mobilizing Cuban youth who neither took part in battles that won the 1959 revolution nor have had an opportunity to see other socialist revolutions around the world.

In her report Waters also addressed the importance of the fight to defend the right to abortion, which remains the cutting edge and the precondition for women’s liberation. She underscored the degree to which this right has been pushed back because of the lack of a fighting women’s movement. In the absence of such a movement, many women today who support abortion rights are afraid to use the word “abortion” openly.

The killing of Tiller is a reflection of the sharpening class struggle in the United States, said SWP national secretary Jack Barnes in his report to the conference. Events like this are a test for proletarian revolutionaries. Communists react to such assaults by asking, “What is to be done?” not “What is to be afraid of?”

“Courage and discipline,” Barnes said, are the two most important characteristics of a revolutionary. He pointed to the role that engaging in combat to defend abortion clinics in Buffalo, New York, in 1992 had in transforming young members of the communist movement.

Leading up to the conference, participants studied a chapter from a new Pathfinder book by Barnes, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, which was serialized in the Militant. The chapter focuses on the “meritocracy,” the middle-class social layer—sometimes referred to as the “cognitive elite”—that Barack Obama represents and that helped him win the U.S. presidency. This social layer is completely anti-working class; it fears that class and wants to control it, Barnes said.

The political significance of this social layer and the continuity of the Marxist movement on the fight against national oppression were discussed further in a class entitled, “The National Question and the Line of March to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

In his six months in office, Obama has shown just how much his administration will be a continuation of his predecessor George Bush, Barnes said.

In addition to the escalation of the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Washington is making progress in bringing the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) back onto campuses in exchange for dropping its “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuals in the military.  
 
Events in Iran
During the conference, Iran was the scene of demonstrations by students and others protesting the election results that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to office. While communists do not back either Ahmadinejad, or his main opponent in the election, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, they join with all those fighting for democratic rights and to open up political space in Iran, Barnes said.

Thirty-five books published by Pathfinder have been translated into Farsi, Iran’s official language. Nearly 50,000 Pathfinder titles in Farsi have been sold in the last decade.

These accomplishments were highlighted by a display in the conference hall. A class on “Iran Today and Its Impact on Developments throughout the Middle East from Beirut to Tel Aviv to Baghdad to Kabul” also took place.

In Latvia, Barnes said, the rulers are drastically slashing wages and pensions to increase the percentage of surplus value squeezed out of the working class. With all proportions guarded, this is also what is happening in the United States.

The U.S. economy is in a depression, not a recession, he said, with nearly 10 percent official unemployment now, which is really closer to 20 percent when all those who have stopped looking for work or are working only part-time are included.

At a rally concluding the conference, SWP leader Dave Prince reported that pledges of $190,000 had been made to the Capital Fund, which finances the movement’s long-term publishing projects.

Jeff Powers, a leader of work of supporters of the communist movement, reported that they had produced 10 new books last year and 106 reprints. Among the next books to come off the press are Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, an Arabic edition of Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun, and a Swedish edition of New International number 14.
 
 
Related articles:
Education, skills training feature of conference
Socialist conference extends support to Cuban Five  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home