Vol. 74/No. 24      June 21, 2010

Author Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, draws lessons from a century and a half of the U.S. class struggle, describing how it is the revolutionary conquest of power by the working class that will make possible the final battle for Black freedom and open the way to a world based not on exploitation, violence, and racism, but human solidarity.

“That new state power,” he explains, “provides working people the mightiest weapon possible to wage the ongoing battle to end Black oppression and every form of exploitation and human degradation inherited from millennia of class-divided society.”

Barnes underlines the fact that “workers who are Black will comprise a disproportionately weighty part of the ranks and leadership of the mass social movement that will make a proletarian revolution.” Malcolm X, he writes, “became the face and authentic voice of the forces of the coming American revolution.” The book has already been published in English and Spanish.

The first 10 days of presenting and selling the new French edition in Montreal, whose population is in its majority French-speaking, triggered a real interest among working people and youth looking for ways to respond to the attacks they see coming down on our class here and around the world.

Four workers in one food plant and another in a printing plant, one born in Congo and the others in Haiti, bought the new book from communist coworkers. Discussions turned around the crisis of the world capitalist economy, imperialist wars, growing attacks on social programs, racism, and what workers can do about it. The example set by Cuban workers in taking power and using it to end capitalist exploitation fit right into these discussions.

So far 28 copies of the book in French have been sold in Montreal. Several of these sales came from calling back some 40 people met during the previous months who had bought the introduction to the book published as a French-language supplement to the Militant.

These were people met during the Montreal tour in March by Armando Choy, a retired brigadier general in Cuba’s armed forces; at a series of labor and student demonstrations; at various political events; and at literature tables set up by distributors of the Militant and Pathfinder books.

Among those who bought the book is a nursing student from Haiti who met Militant distributors during their regular campus sales. Another Haitian woman bought the book from a nearby literature table while she was waiting in line to catch the bus.

A university bookstore buyer in Montreal ordered five copies of the French edition of the book as soon as he heard the title.

Distributors of the Militant here adopted a goal of selling 50 copies of the new book by June 17.
 
 
Related articles:
Read, Sell, & Discuss: ‘Malcolm X, Black Liberation, & the Road to Workers Power’
Store orders for Pathfinder up  
 
 
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