Vol. 78/No. 13      April 7, 2014

The following Books of the Month excerpt is from Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice Waters, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press. The selection is from a presentation by Waters at the 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas. Copyright © 2008 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
Workers in the United States, wherever they were born, face the same class enemy, and determined struggles on any front tend to pull workers together in face of the attempts to divide us. That is what is beginning to happen. The massive, national, Black-led march on Jena, Louisiana, two months ago by some 20,000 demonstrators — Black, white, Latino and more, native-born and immigrant — protesting the unjust treatment meted out by the courts to six Black teenagers in that town, is a good example of the ways in which the growing proletarian resistance in the United States has already been registered in the strengthening of a broader fighting vanguard. It was the first national action of its size and character in decades in the United States, and the march on Jena was undoubtedly nourished by the power of the recent May Day mobilizations and related actions. …

We learn from the traditions of struggle coming together from all parts of the world. As we fight shoulder to shoulder, it becomes harder for the bosses to pit “us” against “them.” It becomes more possible to see that our class interests are not the same as those of “our” bosses, “our” government, or “our” two parties.

As decades of deepening crises and intensifying class struggle open ahead of us, we have something else in our favor. The revolutionary potential of the great radicalization in the 1930s was squandered and diverted into support for capitalism’s “New Deal” and then its inevitable accompaniment, the “War Deal” — the imperialist slaughter of World War II.

It was the resources and attraction of a powerful bureaucratic social caste in the USSR camouflaging itself as a communist leadership on a world scale that made this possible. Today, however, that enormous political obstacle no longer stands across the road toward independent working-class political action and revolutionary socialist leadership. Imperialism can no longer rely on it as enforcer of peaceful coexistence, of “spheres of influence” around the globe. And the most combative and courageous leaders of working-class battles, of national liberation movements, of radicalizing youth, will no longer be drawn toward that Stalinist negation of everything Marx and Engels and Lenin fought for, falsely believing it is communism.

The lessons of the Russian Revolution and the Communist International under Lenin will be sought after once again as new generations of vanguard fighters search for historical experiences from which they can learn not only how to fight but how to fight to win. That is why, as these battles politically deepen, the real history of the Cuban Revolution too will again be increasingly sought after.

Why has the Cuban Revolution followed a completely different course the last twenty years, salvaging and fortifying its socialist revolution, as the bureaucratic regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union — which many falsely thought Cuba resembled — imploded?

How has it been possible for the Cuban people to hold at bay the most powerful empire history has ever known — or ever will know — for almost fifty years?

Why to this day, despite decades of struggle throughout the hemisphere, does Cuba remain the only free territory of the Americas?

To state that fact is not to diminish the importance of the space that has been conquered by the people of Venezuela these last years, nor the new ground still being taken in struggle. It simply registers the indisputable fact that what will be Venezuela’s January 1 [date marks victory of Cuban Revolution] lies ahead of us, not behind. …

As the Cuban people have proven in practice, a better world is indeed possible. But in any radical or enduring manner, only through socialist revolution.

The stakes posed in the questions we are discussing here at this forum are immeasurable. We confront not only the destruction of the health, welfare, and environment of the earth and all toiling humanity — the destruction of land and labor, the wellsprings of all human progress and culture. Those are and will be the inevitable, devastating consequences of the workings of capitalism. The limits we can impose on those consequences are and can only be a by-product of our revolutionary struggle. And should we fail, we can be sure that we all ultimately face a future of nuclear devastation as well.

Every revolutionary struggle, anywhere in the world — not least important right here in Venezuela — is a vital piece of the international battle. But until power is taken from Washington’s hands by the workers and farmers, and Yankee imperialism is thus decisively disarmed, nothing lasting is settled.

That is why it is no small matter to answer: Yes, revolution is not only possible in the United States, it is coming. Yes, revolutionary struggles are on the agenda — but their outcome depends on us. Yes, fighting shoulder to shoulder with others determined to triumph along this course is the most meaningful life possible.  
 
 
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