Vol. 80/No. 28      August 1, 2016

 
(feature article)

SWP tells workers, ‘Our party is your party’

Conference presents road forward in face of irresolvable crisis
of world capitalism

 
OBERLIN, Ohio — From Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to the coal mining region of Utah, from small towns in Vermont to big cities like New York and Los Angeles, members of the Socialist Workers Party are going door to door in working-class neighborhoods saying, “Our party is your party.” They are finding more openness to communism than in decades, with many workers interested in what the party has to say.

This party-building work and the political foundations for it were the focus of the Active Workers Conference here June 16-18. Some 320 people participated from across the United States and other countries, including from Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The conference discussed how Socialist Workers Party members invite people they meet door to door to join them at protests against police brutality, in defense of women’s right to choose abortion and on picket lines of workers on strike or locked out by the bosses. And they invite those they meet at protests and picket lines who are interested in a revolutionary working-class perspective to join them going door to door.

Intertwined with this campaigning, the party is organizing to get more members into industrial jobs and unions to strengthen the fight to organize the unorganized, to help get unions involved in social protests and to carry out communist political work in the unions.

Covers of the book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes — newly published in English by Pathfinder Press and coming soon in Farsi, French and Spanish — adorned the speakers platform, along with covers of “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class.

These books explain how the economic crisis, wars and other brutalities of capitalism point to the need for the revolutionary conquest of power by the working class, said Mary-Alice Waters in her presentation “Party Building and the Cuban Revolution,” which opened the conference.

Defending the Cuban Revolution in the face of unrelenting attacks by U.S. imperialism is an integral part of building a revolutionary working-class party in the United States, she said, and has been since the workers and farmers of Cuba took power in 1959. What workers and farmers in Cuba have accomplished in the course of making the revolution is further proof that working people are capable of doing the same in the United States and around the world.

Irresolvable crisis of capitalism

In a talk on the “Changing Face of U.S. Politics,” Barnes described the unprecedented and irresolvable worldwide crisis of capitalist production, trade and finances. The imperialist world order is coming apart, from the Middle East and Afghanistan to Europe. And as capitalist competition and conflicts grow, the illusion of a “European Union” on the road to becoming a superpower is being torn apart.

The capitalist rulers and their parties and candidates have no solution. These are among the factors fueling the deepest crisis in bourgeois politics in our lifetimes, reflected in the turmoil of the 2016 elections. It’s why the party finds such receptivity among workers to discussing a road toward ending this dictatorship of capital and reorganizing society to meet human needs, not profits.

A half-dozen classes expanded on various themes of the conference — from the SWP’s experience and continuity in the trade unions, to the party’s longstanding call for unilateral U.S. nuclear disarmament.

The class titled “Puerto Rico is a U.S. Colony: SWP’s Communist Continuity in the Fight for Independence” was “a real education for me,” Chris Steffen, a worker from Lincoln, Nebraska, told the Militant. “It’s such a long history of exploitation that just gets covered over in the press.”

Several displays helped bring the discussions to life. Panels highlighted the experiences in the weeks leading up to the conference campaigning for the party in working-class neighborhoods. They included graphics illustrating the character of the crisis, such as the drop in the portion of the working class that is employed in the U.S., and the anti-working-class character of the hysteria over Donald Trump’s campaign. Other photos pointed to the party’s rich experience participating in labor and political struggles, from the 1930s to today, and to activity in defense of the Cuban Revolution and opposing U.S. imperialism’s attacks on Venezuela.

Other panels focused on the shifting relations within and among states in the Middle East and the growing place of Iran in the region. A feature of the display was a description of the work by Tehran-based publisher Talaye Porsoo, which publishes translations in Farsi of some 45 books from Pathfinder Press. Farsi is spoken or read in Iran, and by half the population in Afghanistan and many others in the region. SWP leader Steve Clark gave a presentation to the conference on these questions.

Yasemin Aydinoglu, who works as a nurse in New York, was impressed by the scope of this publishing effort in Iran, which has helped these books get distributed throughout the region. The conference presentations “helped me understand better how what’s happening in the Mideast is connected to what’s happening in Turkey, where I’m from,” she said, such as the Turkish government’s repression against the Kurds.

The work of supporters of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues, who volunteer for the Print Project to produce the books published by Pathfinder, was the theme of another display.

Along with the full range of Pathfinder titles, used and discount books gave those new to the communist movement an opportunity to build their libraries.

“I really liked the $1 books — I got 27 of them!” said Pierre Luc Silion, a young worker from Montreal. “And I learned a lot from talking to all kinds of people with years of experience” in working-class politics. These discussions convinced him to join campaigning teams following the conference.

Campaigning for the party

The final conference session laid out perspectives for the coming months. The Socialist Workers Party’s candidates for U.S. president and vice president, Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart, were among the speakers. The activity they and others described is not an electoral campaign, but to build a party that can educate and organize the working class to take political power. A collection raised $30,000 for the campaign.

Rose Engstrom was one of many participants who joined campaigning teams right after the conference. “Huntington, Utah, which has been devastated by coal mines closing, was eye-opening,” she said in a July 10 phone interview from Minneapolis, where she’d just been at a protest against the police killing of Philando Castile. “I live in a predominantly Black community here,” said Engstrom, who is Caucasian, “and many see poverty and unemployment as a problem of racism. Utah made it even clearer to me it’s a working-class question.”

The conference was followed by a meeting of volunteers in the Print Project to discuss their work, and a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party’s National Committee to organize implementation of the conference perspectives.  
 
Related articles:
Workers need own party, independent of the bosses
‘Capitalist crisis is going to get worse’
‘Join us,’ says Socialist Workers Party candidate
Join the Socialist Workers Party campaigning
Are they rich because they’re smart?
 
 
 
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