A three-day Active Workers Conference sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party June 13-15 in Oberlin, Ohio, will bring hundreds of workers, youth and other participants together from across the U.S. and around the world, active in political struggles, to learn from talks, classes and informal discussion.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party in the U.S. The conference will celebrate the SWP’s revolutionary continuity back to that founding, based on the Bolshevik Party and its leadership of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes will give the main political report, “Party and Program Are One,” on the opening afternoon of the conference.
A talk the next day by Steve Clark, a member of the party’s Political Committee, will be on “The Middle East and the Jewish Question: Acting on the Communist Program.”
There will be two panel discussions focused on the work of the party, “Tribunes of the People and the Turn to Industry” and “Our Election Campaigns Drive the Wisconsin Turn.” These will focus on how party members speak in the interests of all the exploited and oppressed, helping the party deepen its activity in the working class — from the unions to going door to door in working-class neighborhoods in cities, towns and countryside. They take up the central questions facing working people — from Washington’s wars abroad to the fight for amnesty for all immigrants in the U.S.
In the introduction to the new book Tribunes of the People and the Trade Unions, Barnes writes that “organizing to strengthen the unions is not only essential to the fighting unity and political striking power of the working class. It is central to party building as well.”
“The activity of a proletarian party neither begins nor ends with the trade unions, however. It begins by extending the party’s political reach in all directions. … With broadening our cultural horizons and our knowledge of history and the world.”
Other conference sessions will feature Q and A sessions with the main speakers, classes and time at buffet-style meals and evening socials for informal discussion and recreation.
The final session Saturday night will feature summaries bringing together the political themes and discussions at the conference.
The next day organized supporters of the party will meet to discuss their work designing, getting printed and promoting Pathfinder literature; making book placements at colleges, bookstores and libraries; and raising funds for the work of the party.
To find out more about the conference, please contact the SWP or Communist League branch nearest you.