Vol. 77/No. 28      July 22, 2013

BY JOHN STUDER
The June 22-24 meeting of the Socialist Workers Party’s National Committee adopted a course of action to advance the party’s program in face of today’s deepening capitalist crisis and the openness communist workers are finding among working people to discussing a working-class alternative to capitalist rule.

The leadership committee’s decisions focused on fighting to free the Cuban Five alongside other supporters of this international defense effort and as an integral component of the party’s working-class activity, as well as using SWP election campaigns to chart an independent political course for workers and their allies against the capitalist government and parties, the Democrats and Republicans. In each case, the party’s efforts are built on a foundation of door-to-door sales of the Militant and books published by Pathfinder Press in working-class neighborhoods from big cities to small towns across the country.

The five Cuban revolutionaries framed up by Washington — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González — are our comrades, SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes told the meeting. None of us can know how long it may take to win their freedom, he said, but we do know they conduct themselves as revolutionary combatants behind bars, as participants in the class struggle here in the U.S., among fellow workers railroaded to prison.

Participants in the meeting reported that while most workers they talk with haven’t yet heard about this fight, it resonates with many, particularly among the millions with family or friends who’ve been run through the U.S. “justice” system of stop-and-frisk, plea-bargain frame-ups, jacked-up sentences, solitary confinement and other indignities.

Party members are stepping up efforts to introduce fellow workers to the defense campaign, going house to house, apartment to apartment with the Militant and revolutionary literature, including the book The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free. In New York, Militant supporters sold 55 copies of the book during the just concluded subscription drive.

In her report to the National Committee, SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters pointed to expanding opportunities to join with others in initiating and building defense activities — from exhibits of cartoons and paintings by Gerardo Hernández and Antonio Guerrero to public meetings to educate and mobilize support for the fight. This includes joining efforts to build the campaign worldwide, from the upcoming VII Continental Meeting of Solidarity with Cuba in Caracas, Venezuela, July 24-27, to the 18th World Festival of Youth and Students in Ecuador, December 7-13.

Lessons of other defense fights

“There is no way on earth,” Barnes told a defense rally for Curtis on the eve of his trial, that the packinghouse bosses, cops and city officials “will succeed in their goal. They will not prevent him from continuing to be the same person he is today, fighting for the same things, believing the same deeply held convictions, saying them openly to the entire world.”

The Cuban Five conduct themselves in the same exemplary fashion.

These working-class fighters, Barnes said at the SWP leadership meeting, are examples of the caliber of revolutionaries needed to build a workers party here in the U.S. that can emulate Cuban workers and farmers, who overthrew the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in 1959 and transformed themselves by the millions as they wrested political power and wielded their new revolutionary government to transform all of society in the interests of the toiling majority.

SWP election campaigns

SWP candidates and their supporters — from Seattle to New York, from Miami to Des Moines — are explaining the deepening capitalist crisis of production and trade and the bosses’ efforts to shore up their profits on the backs of working people here and the world over. They present a revolutionary working-class political alternative to combat these mounting assaults on our class.

The workings of capitalism take a grinding toll on the conditions — and the very dignity — of workers in the U.S. The percentage who have a job has fallen. Millions have been pushed into lower paying, part-time or temporary work, face attacks on health care and retirement, as well as speedup leading to more injuries and deaths on the job.

Party candidates and supporters join and urge solidarity with workers’ resistance to attacks by the bosses, from coal miners fighting Patriot Coal’s effort to break their union and slash health care for working miners and retirees alike, to school bus workers in New York who face the loss of job protection at the hands of the city. They support social protests in the interests of the working class, from fights against cop brutality to actions in defense of women’s right to choose abortion, like those in recent weeks in Texas.

SWP election campaigns champion the massive popular outpourings in Brazil against fare hikes and for other demands that were mounting as the party leadership was meeting; the overthrow of the widely hated Morsi government in Egypt a few weeks later; and the massive actions in Turkey for political space to practice politics. They call for withdrawal of all U.S. troops and military forces from Afghanistan, Korea, Guantánamo and elsewhere in the world.

When SWP candidates knock on doors and take time to talk with working people about what our class faces and what we need to do about it, Barnes said, it’s not uncommon for workers to comment that this is the first time a candidate has ever come to their home and taken an interest in what they had to say.

This stands in stark contrast to the “canvassing” carried out by interns and volunteers fielded by the bosses’ candidates, such as New York Democratic mayoral candidate Christine Quinn, who instructs them to knock on 100 doors an hour!

The SWP runs its campaigns to set an example of independent political action for the labor movement to break from the bosses’ parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and chart a course toward the revolutionary fight for workers power.

SWP candidates raise the need for workers to fight for a massive government-funded public works program to create millions of jobs for those thrown out of work and to build things working people need — schools, hospitals, day care centers and basic infrastructure.

They join with others to fight for a big increase in the minimum wage. For workers, wages are determined from the bottom up. The lower the bosses can keep them, the more they drag down all wages. For the labor movement to campaign for this demand alongside determined efforts to organize all workers — without regard to whether they have “proper papers” — would strike a blow against the bosses’ superexploitation of immigrant labor as a bludgeon against all workers.

Axis of door-to-door propaganda

This is how workers who help get the Militant around talk politics with thousands of working people each week, find out what they are involved in and what we can join together to fight for.

This weekly rhythm of door-to-door efforts to win new subscribers to the Militant aims to expand the paper’s regular readership and sales of revolutionary books from Pathfinder Press. It provides a vehicle for SWP candidates to discuss the road forward for the working class. It broadens the number of those the party fights shoulder to shoulder with in the defense campaign for the Cuban Five. And it helps lay the basis, as the class struggle heats up in years to come, for the construction of a revolutionary workers party that can successfully fight for political power.

The SWP National Committee meeting took place as members and other supporters of the Militant were entering the last week of the paper’s spring subscription effort. The course adopted by the party leadership to advance the reach of its program among workers helped bring the drive to a successful conclusion.

Coming up next is the Active Workers Educational Conference July 19-20 in Oberlin, Ohio, where members of the SWP, Communist Leagues in other countries and workers helping to expand the circulation of the Militant will come together to discuss how to take these working-class perspectives forward.  
 
 
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