Vol. 78/No. 23 June 16, 2014
The conference will be a unique opportunity to discuss working-class resistance, world politics and how the working class and its allies can chart a course toward the revolutionary conquest of power and open the worldwide struggle to bring an end to capitalist exploitation and oppression in all its forms.
Participants will come from the U.S. and Canada, from several countries in Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Since the end of last year working people and others in Ukraine have stepped onto the world political stage, toppling the pro-Moscow regime of Viktor Yanukovych and fighting to defend the country’s sovereignty against provocations by separatist gangs. Working people in Ukraine are taking advantage of greater political space they have won to fight in their own interests. There is more space today for working people in Russia, as demonstrated by defiant protests by members of Pussy Riot.
The conference will also help participants continue to win support among workers for the fight to free the Cuban Five and learn about the moral and political example of the Cuban Revolution in the process.
“My opinion matters and I want to meet some of the fighters I have read about in the Militant,” Sydney Coe, a forklift driver in a steel fabrication plant in Kent, Washington, told the Militant June 3. “I also want to meet the people who write the stories and who are behind the books I’ve been reading.
“I am looking forward to the classes to learn about what Cuba has done in helping the children of Chernobyl, and the changes being made by the working class in Canada,” he said. “Capitalism is our problem worldwide and I want to see how we can join together to change the system that is oppressing us.”
Coe, a member of Teamsters Local 117, started reading the Militant more than two years ago during a strike he was part of at Davis Wire.
“I can’t do what I do without the Militant. We wouldn’t be where we are without it,” he said. “And I need it because it keeps me in contact with fighting comrades around the world.”
The proletarian course of the Cuban Revolution will be at the center of two classes: “There Are No ‘Laws’ for the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism — Nor from a Degenerated Workers State to Capitalism” and “Chernobyl, Angola, Rectification and the Course Led by Fidel and Che: The Weight of Subjective and Moral Factors in the Proletarian-Led Transition to Socialism.”
These classes point to the sharp contrast between the counterrevolutionary Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the course of the 1959 Cuban Revolution and its proletarian leadership, as well as what the course of the Cuban Revolution shows about the place of consciousness and the actions of toilers in the fight for socialism.
A class on “The Westward Expansion of Communism in Canada Comes Closer” will discuss the significant developments in the working class in Canada as decades of struggle has pushed back the national oppression of the Quebecois and what this opens up for the working-class struggle for power across Canada.
The class on “The Fight for Women’s Emancipation, 1986 and 2014: What’s Changed?” will examine how the working-class struggle is advanced through the fight for women’s rights.
“Defending the Party and Its Program: Socialism on Trial and 50 Years of Covert Operations in the U.S.” and “Communism and Revolutionary Centralism: In Defense of Marxism and Struggle for a Proletarian Party” completes the class program of the conference.
Throughout the gathering — in the reports, during the closing conference panel and illustrated in prominent displays — attention will be brought to the efforts to build the worldwide campaign to free the Cuban Five, how to increase the working-class readership of the Militant, as well as the leverage of books distributed by Pathfinder Press in nearly a dozen languages.
Over the last year, members of the communist movement from North America, Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and Greece have taken part in reporting trips, book fairs and political events — bringing the Militant and Pathfinder books with them — in Burkina Faso, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon, Mali, Malaysia, Ukraine, Venezuela.
For information, contact Militant supporters in your area, listed on page 8, or write to the Militant, 306 W. 37th St., 13th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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