OBERLIN, Ohio — The SWP opened its 2026 International Conference here June 11-14 under a large banner reading, “The Socialist Workers Party exists, born in class struggle. Build it!” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, at podium, gave the political report. Seated, from left, are SWP leaders Paul Mailhot, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. Three days of plenary sessions, classes and wide-ranging discussions, formal and informal, followed. Almost 300 people came from seven countries, the U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Greece and New Zealand.
Barnes described the growing interest in the working-class course forward being advanced by the SWP and the international communist movement today. The U.S. and its rival capitalist powers are building up their militaries as they fight to gain advantage in their ruthless fights over profits, world markets, labor power and natural resources, which threaten to drag humanity into another world war.
The two other main reports to the conference were: “Defending Cuba, Defending Cuba’s Socialist Revolution,” given by Waters, and “Iran, Israel, and the United States in the Imperialist Epoch: Two Wars in One,” by Clark. Workshops were held to discuss each of the presentations, alongside four classes expanding on the conference’s central themes.
An added feature of the conference was discussions on party-building, informed by the just-published new edition of In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky. The book, with a new introduction, documents how the Russian revolutionary leader, in exile in Mexico, collaborated with the majority leadership of the SWP to win a decisive political struggle to advance a course forward based on the example of the Bolshevik Party in Russia. They fought against a petty-bourgeois minority in the party buckling to the patriotic war pressures of the U.S. rulers at the onset of the second world imperialist slaughter.
After a concluding rally, participants left the gathering better politically armed to take advantage of the new opportunities to sink roots in the labor movement and recruit. More detailed coverage will appear in upcoming issues of the Militant.