Vol. 77/No. 41      November 18, 2013

These activities are essential to building the party today, concluded the party’s National Committee in adopting reports by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes at a leadership meeting here Oct. 19-21. They are part of the party’s political response to the sustained openness to communist politics among working people, whose lives and outlooks have been shaken by the deepening crisis of capitalism on a world scale.

The propertied rulers of the U.S. and worldwide have no solutions to the deepening crisis rooted in a slowdown of capitalist production and trade. They are blowing up giant financial bubbles, chasing after higher returns through speculation as they seek to shore up their industrial rates of profit by squeezing more from our labor and driving against our living standards under conditions of persistently high unemployment.

An integral part of these assaults is chipping away at workers’ rights and more open contempt and coarseness toward the working class. One stark example is the Oct. 3 cold-blooded murder of Miriam Carey by Capitol Police after she ran into a White House barrier, and the standing ovation her killers received by Democratic and Republican party legislators in Congress.

The conditions imposed on working people in the U.S. and the social crises they see unfolding around the world foster both distrust of those in power and interest in a fighting revolutionary perspective. This is true, despite the current lack of any major working-class resistance or sustained social protests.

Over the last several months, the party’s propaganda work has been supplemented and strengthened by SWP election campaigns for public offices organized in 10 cities through Nov. 5. The party’s socialist campaign platform has complemented door-to-door discussions and Militant sales, and has allowed the party to reach a broader audience through media coverage, debates and other election campaign events.

Campaigners talked with working people about the party’s immediate demands to fight for a public works program to provide millions of jobs and for a big raise in the minimum wage, aimed at strengthening the unity, confidence and fighting spirit of labor. Campaigners engaged questions of world politics from the point of view of the interests of workers and their allies, from the civil war in Syria to workers’ fight for life and limb in the garment shops of Bangladesh.

The candidates sought to distinguish themselves as tribunes of the people, addressing the real questions of concern to workers posed by the election contests. The SWP candidate for Seattle Port Commissioner, John Naubert, for example, stood out as the only candidate who took a stand for workers’ safety on the docks and pledged to use the commissioner’s office to defend and build solidarity with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union under assault by the port bosses.

Socialist workers, the National Committee concluded, must be attuned to joining in labor actions, social protests and other political events. Such actions often draw workers and young people looking for ways to confront the social problems and crises bred by capitalism, whether they be meetings on developments in world politics or demonstrations against any of the myriad assaults on the living standards, rights and dignity of working people — from defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion to fights against police brutality or deportations of immigrant workers.

Members of the party in cities across the U.S. had been organizing Militant Labor Forums every other week or so as they concentrated their attention and energy on carrying out consistent sales of the socialist press and other literature to a broad cross-section of the working class, with a focus on door to door campaigning. Having made substantial progress in this regard, organizing and building weekly Friday night Militant Labor Forums as a regular political institution in more than a dozen cities across the country has become a top priority.

These public meetings provide a platform for fighters with various points of view and a venue for participants to discuss political questions of interest to working people. For example, this issue of the paper includes an article on a forum held in New York Nov. 1 titled, “Defend the Rights of Workers Behind Bars,” which featured a panel of speakers on the fights to prosecute the cops responsible for the death of Kyam Livingston in police custody, to free Lynne Stewart, a framed-up lawyer who dedicated herself to defending workers rights, and against efforts to censor the Militant in prisons.

The listing on page 3 includes eight forums for Nov. 15-16 on topics ranging from the civil war in Syria and women’s right to choose abortion to struggles of farmworkers, Machinists and Teamsters in the Northwest and the New York cop’s stop-and-frisk practices.

Defense of the Cuban Five

Immediate opportunities include organizing events around showings of political cartoons by Gerardo Hernández and paintings by Antonio Guerrero, particularly the most recent work by Guerrero titled, “I Will Die the Way I Lived.”

The collection of 15 watercolors depict the Five’s first 17 months of imprisonment, including six spent in solitary confinement. They speak to the fight for dignity and against the type of brutalities and indignities meted out to millions of working people behind bars today and bear witness to the kind of exemplary working-class fighters the Five are.

An example of what is possible was the exhibit of “I Will Die the Way I Lived” that opened Sept. 12 at the Pillsbury House community center in Minneapolis, hosted by Obsidian Arts, backed by American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3800 and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1189, and promoted by Insight News, an African-American community newspaper.

At the same time, participants at the National Committee meeting discussed the gut reaction among party cadre around the country who, without exception, have declined to take part in a campaign being promoted by some defenders of the Five to co-opt the wearing and display yellow ribbons as a symbol of support for the international campaign to free the Five. In the United States — and by extension the rest of the Western imperialist world from Canada to Europe to Australia — the yellow ribbon has and continues to represent support for imperialist war. It has become the most prominent symbol of support for the foot soldiers of the imperialist armed forces — “our boys” — which often includes a strong dose of resentment for the hated officer corps that “let them down,” supposedly led them to defeat, or abandoned them in the trenches and prison camps.

While the yellow ribbon appeals primarily to those least likely to back the Five and everything they represent, the gut aversion to it exists among many of those who are most inclined to support them and their fight for freedom — from supporters for Puerto Rican independence and Black rights to opponents of Washington’s wars, militant unionists and the many working people with their own experiences at the hands of U.S. capitalist “justice.”

Among the political opportunities and responsibilities the National Committee discussed under Waters’ report is helping build and participate in the delegation from the U.S. to the World Festival of Youth and Students this December in Quito, Ecuador, where thousands of young people from around the world will gather to discuss and debate the next steps in the struggle against imperialism.

‘Tradition makes us’

The basic criteria for membership is the same as that established by the Bolshevik Party, which under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin led the workers and farmers to power in Russia in 1917: “Every person who accepts the program of the party and agrees to submit to its discipline and engage actively in its work shall be eligible to membership.”

“We do not make tradition,” Barnes said. “Tradition makes us.”

The struggle to build any revolutionary working-class party must be rooted in continuity with the political conquests of the communist movement won in the course of struggles from those led by Marx and Engels to the Russian and Cuban revolutions. The major lessons of two key turning points in the fight for such a party in the U.S. are codified in The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, first published in 1943, and The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions, first published in 1981.

The key accomplishments in building a communist party rooted in the working class in the late 1970s, as laid out in The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, are not registered primarily in the colonization of basic industry carried out universally by the party cadre at the time, but in the political conquests recorded there. Among these was the recognition of Malcolm X as a revolutionary leader of the working class and of the 1959 Cuban Revolution as the first example since the early years of the Russian Revolution of a genuine socialist revolution that brought the working class to power and used that power to advance a proletarian internationalist course in the interests of toiling humanity. The course of the Cuban Revolution stands as an example for workers and farmers the world over.

The National Committee meeting also voted to call the 47th Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party for March to build on the work being carried out now and debate the next steps forward along this course.  
 
 
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