The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.25           July 7, 1997 
 
 
SWP Holds National Convention  
OBERLIN, Ohio - More than 500 delegates, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists, and guests from around the world gathered here June 11- 14 for the 39th Constitutional Convention of the SWP.

At the heart of the reports and convention discussion were the increased openings for socialists to link up with workers and young fighters who are resisting capitalist austerity - from the organizing drives of strawberry pickers in California to the explosive struggles by students and workers in Argentina and demonstrations for jobs and in defense of social welfare payments in France and elsewhere in Europe.

The delegates discussed how to respond to stepped-up war preparations by Washington and its imperialist allies, particularly the occupations of Yugoslavia and Albania and the drive to expand NATO to the borders of Russia. The imperialist powers are carrying out these war moves from a position of weakness, the delegates concluded, having failed either to restore the domination of capitalism anywhere in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union or to break the working class and its unions in the capitalist world.

In response, delegates reaffirmed the course of building a revolutionary workers party more deeply rooted in the industrial unions, one capable of convincing greater numbers of young workers and other rebels to join the communist movement and become more effective fighters as a result.

The convention is the party's highest decision-making body, held at least every two years. Fifty-five voting delegates were elected by party branches across the United States, following three months of written and oral discussion on proposed resolutions and platforms. Participating in the convention deliberations as fraternal delegates were members of the outgoing National Committee, a representative chosen by the Young Socialists, and representatives of sister communist leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, and supporters in Iceland.

One sign of the weakening of imperialism that delegates and guests celebrated throughout the convention was the July 1 return of Hong Kong - a British colony for more than 150 years - to Chinese sovereignty. Participants from the United Kingdom painted a banner that was hung in the convention hall the second day of the gathering, declaring, "Hong Kong is China." It pictured a Chinese dragon chasing away a cowering bulldog, a symbol of British imperialism, and counted down the days to the end of colonial rule.

Workers say `nó to more sacrifice
SWP national secretary Jack Barnes opened the convention with a welcome and world political report to the delegates and guests. He also presented a summary the final night of the convention. The results of the recent elections in France and the United Kingdom, Barnes said, show the rulers have been unable to convince working people to accept the bosses' demands for greater sacrifice today, supposedly for the common good tomorrow. In both countries, the conservative parties were voted out of office, ushering in social democratic-led regimes.

When the government says, "If you don't tighten your belt the national currency will go down the drain," workers in growing numbers respond, "So what - that's your problem not ours."

Workers in France, where the conservative president miscalculated and called snap elections, have made clear they will continue to press their demands under the new Socialist Party-Communist Party government. The day before the convention opened, 70,000 people marched in Paris demanding jobs and a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, and protesting the closing of a Renault auto plant in Belgium. The last few years, workers in France have repeatedly rallied in the streets, including a wave of strikes and protests against government austerity plans at the end of 1995.

Unemployment in France today exceeds 12 percent. In his first policy speech to the French parliament, the new prime minister Lionel Jospin said the 700,000 jobs he pledged in his election campaign could not be created soon, the promised lowering of the workweek from 39 to 35 hours would not take place for five years, and announced a mere 4 percent raise in the minimum wage.

Two political forces recognize the significance of these events, Barnes said, communists and the ultrarightists such as Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Patrick Buchanan in the United States. The SWP leader noted Buchanan's commentary on the French elections, which the rightist politician celebrated as "part of the baptismal ritual of a more coherent French party of the right," instead of the weak leadership of French president Jacques Chirac.

While there are not yet large-scale battles in the labor movement in any of the imperialist countries, the election results are an important indication of the working-class resistance that is welling up across Europe and North America. The June parliamentary vote in Canada, where the union-based New Democratic Party more than doubled its seats and the right-wing Reform Party also made gains, was part of this phenomena, as were the recent elections in Iran to a degree.

The fissures and competition among the various capitalist powers are also clearly visible in the conflict within the European Union over the "euro," the proposed common currency. As the SWP convention was meeting, top officials of the capitalist powers in Western Europe were headed to Amsterdam for a conference where they were supposed to negotiate the next steps toward European monetary union and greater coordination of immigration and foreign policies (see article on page 7). They could reach no substantial agreement, however, and the prospect of a strong, stable European currency that can challenge the U.S. dollar seems further away than ever.

The debates over the European Union within the ruling classes in Britain, France, Germany, and other imperialist powers are never between nationalists and "Europeanists," as is generally portrayed, Barnes noted. None of them want a common currency that would replace the French franc or the German mark or the British pound in a unified, border-free Europe. Each bourgeoisie has as its starting point the desire to gain the best position for its own national capital, denominated in its own national currency, and defended by its own national army against its competitors. To advance these aims, they form various shifting blocs against their rivals in Washington and Tokyo, and against each other. They fetishize economic institutions like the EU to draw the working class into defending "national interests," in reality, the interests of the home bourgeoisie. And each ruling class is using the criteria for the monetary union as a pretext to demand much deeper sacrifices from working people.

No to imperialist blocs!
Both Barnes and Argiris Malapanis, who presented a report on "Europe, NATO, and U.S. imperialism," stressed that communists have an obligation to oppose entry into and demand withdrawal not only from all imperialist military alliances, such NATO, but also economic and trade blocs such as the European Union. A delegate from Britain argued that communists should not campaign for withdrawal from the EU by the governments in their countries, since most capitalist politicians and petty-bourgeois socialists who campaign around this today do so from a nationalist "Britain first" or "France first" perspective.

This question had been posed in a May 8 statement issued by the Communist League in Sweden that took a position of abstaining on a proposed referendum for Swedish withdrawal from the European Union. The statement, which the Militant ran as an editorial in its May 26 issue, pointed out that those campaigning both for and against Swedish participation in the EU and European Monetary Union (EMU) did so from the standpoint of advancing the "national interest."

Socialist workers do need to explain there is nothing progressive in campaigns against the EMU centered on how best to protect "British," "Swedish," or "French" jobs, convention delegates concluded. At the same time, revolutionaries must take a clear position rejecting all imperialist trade and economic pacts. In fact, doing so is among the most important political preparations revolutionary-minded workers can organize today to counter the rulers' attempts to soften up the working class for war by getting workers to think in terms of "we" the nation - "our currency," "our industry," and "our exports," - instead of "we" the workers versus "they" the employers, two classes with diametrically opposed interests.

Malapanis said that class-conscious workers in the United States take a similar stance of opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which is aimed at consolidating U.S. dominance over its weaker imperialist rival in Canada and intensifying the exploitation of Mexican labor and resources by U.S. capital. At the same time, socialists explain why the chauvinist campaigns against NAFTA waged in the United States and Canada by the trade union officialdom, a minority of business interests, and capitalist politicians of both liberal and ultrarightist stripes damage international working-class solidarity and the labor movement.

Increasing trade wars and currency wars among rival capitalist powers lay the basis for full-scale shooting wars, Barnes said. Workers at home and abroad are the victims every step along the way, and have a stake in joining together across borders to organize unions to defend their interests and to forge revolutionary organizations to combat capitalist rule.

Malapanis, who led a Militant reporting trip to Albania and Yugoslavia earlier this year, took up the problems imperialism faces in attempting to restore capitalist property relations in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the other workers states. He described the daily protests in Serbia from late 1996 to early 1997 that forced the Stalinist regime there to restore election results it had overturned, and won other demands.

Resistance to `market reforms'
As the demonstrations in Serbia were still unfolding, working people in Albania took up arms against the openly procapitalist regime of Sali Berisha. "They were, and still are, resisting the disastrous results of the `shock therapy' prescribed by the wizards from Harvard, not only in Albania but throughout Eastern Europe at the opening of this decade," Malapanis said.

The working class and their conquests in overturning capitalist rule in these countries is the target of the occupation of Yugoslavia and Albania, and the expansion of NATO being pressed by Washington. Malapanis pointed to a June 5 speech by U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright at Harvard's commencement. "Albright said that Washington is today trying to bring the entire world under `an international system based on democracy and open markets' -in other words world capitalism." He quoted Albright's remark, "We know not every nation is yet willing or able to play its full part in this system. One group is still in transition from centralized planning and totalitarian rule. Another has only begun to dip its toes into economic and political reform." Albright's message is clear, Malapanis said, "Washington will use force to try to make that happen, through its military might."

Washington's projected enlargement of NATO, he said, was prepared on the blood and bones of the toilers of Yugoslavia. In the early 1990s, as rival European governments fanned the flames of war between competing layers of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Yugoslavia, the U.S. rulers put on a show of pious concern for the Bosnian Muslims. All the while, Washington actually worked behind the scenes to make sure enough weapons got in to keep the slaughter going, without resolution. The U.S. rulers urged their French and British counterparts to intervene under the United Nations flag, while sabotaging every accord proposed by powers in the European Union between 1992 and 1995.

Meanwhile, Washington built a military ring in and around Yugoslavia - with hundreds of soldiers on the ground in Macedonia, agreements to deploy U.S. forces from Albania and Hungary, covert links with the regime in Croatia, and the U.S. Sixth Fleet off the Yugoslav coast in the Adriatic. Finally, after letting the people of Yugoslavia bleed for three years, organizing the first sustained bombing raids over Europe since World War II, and repeatedly humbling its imperialist rivals, the White House dictated a set of accords at the Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. These accords spelled out the partition of Bosnia and its occupation by 60,000 NATO troops, a third of them U.S. soldiers.

The Dayton accord was a "symbol of the new level of U.S. hegemony in Europe," Malapanis said. It coincided with the Clinton administration's announcement in 1994 of the plan to expand NATO, bringing imperialist forces closer to the border of Russia. "Since its founding in 1949, NATO's purpose was to defeat the Soviet Union," Malapanis noted. "Today that is still NATO's purpose."

But NATO, at the same time, has been weakened by the deepening conflicts among its members and between them and Moscow. That is why Washington is repositioning its military forces on a stronger footing vis-a-vis Russia, and is strengthening its place as the dominant "European power."

The problem for Washington is that with thousands of troops on the ground it has remained unable to overturn noncapitalist property relations in Yugoslavia, or even stomp out the desire among layers of working people and youth of various nationalities to restore the Yugoslav federation. That's why NATO forces are less and less likely to be withdrawn from Bosnia as planned next year.

When Washington sent its troops into Yugoslavia, Malapanis said, socialist workers in the United States "deepened work in the trade unions," campaigning among fellow workers and others to explain the imperialist war drive and why working people should oppose it.

This was in sharp contrast to the big majority of organizations on the "left," he noted, who either bowed to imperialism and backed the NATO intervention or apologized for the Stalinist regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade. Since 1993, sales of the Pathfinder book The Truth about Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention total some 6,700 copies, he reported.

Argentina and the Cuban revolution
The second evening of the convention was turned over to a special program, "The Growing Explosion in Argentina, the Cuban Revolution, and the Changing Face of U.S. Politics." The speakers included Martín Koppel and David Corona, just returned from a Militant reporting trip to Argentina (see articles on page 16), and longtime SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.

"The working-class revolts that have swept through several cities in Argentina indicate something new that's happening in that country," said Koppel, who is the editor of Perspectiva Mundial. "It's a sign of what is coming in the rest of Latin America.

"A new generation in Argentina is beginning to react to the brutality, to the economic and social turbulence that increasingly marks capitalist society today. They are saying `nó to imperialist prerogatives. They are standing up to the employer class and its government. They are not afraid of the cops with their billy clubs, tear gas, and rubber bullets."

The working class in Latin America, including the industrial working class, "has shown its revolutionary potential before and will again," said Koppel, "especially in economically more advanced countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico."

For communist workers in North America, he continued, "these developments are not a matter of solidarity - they are portents of things to come here, too, and are integrally tied to building a proletarian party and an international communist movement."

That's why when communists went to Argentina to provide firsthand coverage of the social explosion they took with them a suitcase full of copies of the newly released El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos, the Spanish-language edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, and other revolutionary literature. This book, Koppel said, "is an irreplaceable political weapon for building a revolutionary party in the United States. But it is also what working-class fighters need in Argentina and other countries to chart a course that can lead workers and farmers to power."

David Corona, a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, talked about workers' resistance to speedup and union busting in Co'rdoba, the main auto and aerospace manufacturing center in Argentina. Ford, Chrysler, Fiat, Volkswagen, and Renault all have factories there.

Corona described marches and a recent highway blockade in front of the Fiat plant by unionists resisting company attempts to impose wage cuts and firings of union militants. Workers at this Fiat plant were at the heart of the Cordobazo, a 1969 uprising centered among industrial workers that coincided with a similar revolt in the Argentine city of Rosario. "This uprising is now a permanent part of the living history of the working-class movement in Argentina - many workers in Co'rdoba told us about it with pride," Corona said.

Fiat owners have recently hired about 1,800 workers - many in their late teens and early twenties - as part of a work force of 3,500, Corona said. The employers hope these younger workers will not only hold up better under brutally intensified production lines but will be less combative and union conscious. "From what we saw, that is not what the bosses are going to get."

Many Fiat workers wanted to know the conditions industrial workers face in the United States, Corona noted. He described how a number of them grabbed copies of El rostro cambiante.

"Most of the unionists did not know our party," Corona said. "But one of them asked, `Are you members of the SWP?' When we said yes, he explained how he had met SWP leaders like Joseph Hansen during the working-class upsurge in Argentina 25 years ago. I realized then that our party has a real history and continuity in the struggles in Argentina and other parts of the world."

The new developments in Argentina are as important for revolutionists in Cuba as they are for us in the United States, Mary-Alice Waters said in her remarks. They are a concrete example of how the conditions capitalism generates can propel millions toward emulating the Cuban road - the road of socialist revolution.

Waters spoke about the publication by Pathfinder of Pombo: A Man of Che's `guerrillá by Cuban brigadier general Harry Villegas (see ad on page 10). The book tells the story of the 1966-68 guerrilla campaign in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara, which Villegas took part in as a member of the general staff. Conference participants bought more than 700 copies of this newly released title, edited by Waters, along with more than 100 copies of El rostro cambiante.

Both of these books are fundamentally about the same thing, Waters noted. They are about ordinary working men and women building revolutionary parties and in the process transforming themselves through struggle. Pathfinder Press also published a pamphlet in English and Spanish, titled At the Side of Che Guevara: Interviews with Harry Villegas, that was also a big sales hit at the conference (see article on page 5).

An intensified economic war by Washington is taking its daily toll on the lives of the Cuban people, Waters said. In the midst of this, the communist leadership in Cuba is taking political initiatives to bolster the revolutionary consciousness and confidence of working people, especially the youth. She pointed to the recent publication in Cuba of Secrets of Generals, a book comprised of interviews with 41 top officers of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces (the Militant published a review of this books in its May 26 issue). Many of these generals are sons or daughters of carpenters, sugar workers, or peasants. Some did not learn to read and write until after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. They tell stories about their experiences on internationalist missions, as they battled alongside national liberation fighters in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Waters pointed to what she described as the most important sentence in the publisher's preface to Pombo: A Man of Che's `guerrilla,' which says, "if conditions allow, the revolutionary leadership in Cuba, from Fidel Castro on down, will not hesitate to act again with the same internationalist selflessness."

A special guest at the convention was Rafael Noriega, a third secretary at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. Lena-Margarita Sardá Noriega, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and a leader of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers in Havana province, had also been planning to attend, but the U.S. State Department denied her a visa.

In his greetings to the convention, Noriega said that imperialism "suffered a severe heart attack" with the Russian revolution of 1917 and subsequent socialist and democratic revolutions by working people in many countries. Today "imperialism suffers a deep wound, which is Cuba," he said, "and I guarantee that between you and us, we're going to give them another heart attack." In a message sent to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, the SWP convention delegates stated, "The rejection by Cuban working people - including the men and women of the Revolutionary Armed Forces - of the Yankee empire's latest attempts to divide their ranks and revolutionary leadership through bribes and threats stands as an example to all those around the world who want to stand up against oppression and exploitation."

The convention also heard greetings sent by the Workers Party of Korea. In a reply, the delegates condemned "Washington and Seoul's systematic effort to block much- needed international food assistance" to north Korea as part of the U.S. war drive against the workers states. The message concluded, "Together working people the world over will get the imperialist occupiers out of Korea and every other corner of the world."

Struggle for a proletarian party today
Leading up to the convention, party branches discussed a draft political resolution titled, "The struggle for a proletarian party today." It pointed to the opportunities to take another step in "building a communist party rooted in the industrial unions, one with the proletarian norms, methods of functioning, and habits of discipline capable of winning a new generation to Bolshevism."

The resolution cites the words of founding SWP leader James P. Cannon in 1940, during the buildup toward U.S. entry into World War II. "Preparation for war means, for us, not some esoteric special task," Cannon wrote. "It means turning the face of the party to the workers, penetrating deeper into the trade unions [and proletarianizing] the composition of the party membership."

A convention report by Jack Willey introduced the discussion on the resolution. Willey is a member of the SWP National Committee, the party's National Trade Union Committee, and the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists. He reviewed some of the openings to strengthen the party's trade union fractions and increase the sales of revolutionary literature in a way that advances the construction of a disciplined, proletarian party.

An example of how these elements can come together has been the experience of the strike at Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. Socialist steelworkers in several cities have been part of strike solidarity work together with their co- workers. They also regularly visit the picket lines, where they've been able to sell books and the Militant to strikers. Willey described how on one occasion socialists helped lead in discussions among strike activists and supporters about why anti-Semitism is damaging to the union.

Protests by Chicanos, Blacks, women
Willey and several delegates pointed to growing protests by Chicanos and Latinos over the last two years around immigrant rights and other issues. This is intersecting with struggles by strawberry pickers fighting for a union in the Watsonville, California, area and apple packers in Washington State. There are growing possibilities to participate in these fights along with fellow unionists.

Jim Gotesky, a delegate from San Francisco who is a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers, described several recent strikes by mostly immigrant workers in the Bay Area. Another delegate from Houston described how Mexicans have been in the forefront of protesting the surge in executions by the state of Texas. The celebrations on both sides of the border in response to the freeing of Ricardo Aldape Guerra, a Mexican worker who spent 11 years on death row for a murder he did not commit, showed what a deep nerve this issue touches.

Willey also pointed to examples of resistance by the Black nationality in the United States to racist discrimination and police brutality. Delegates had joined in protest actions around these questions in recent weeks, from New Jersey to Atlanta. Convention participants painted a banner celebrating the release of Geronimo Pratt, a Black Panther leader who spent more than a quarter-century in prison because of an FBI frame-up. And delegates sent a message of congratulations to Pratt, drafted by Mark Curtis, a party leader in Chicago. Curtis, who faces parole restrictions stemming from his own frame-up conviction nearly 10 years ago at the hands of the cops in Des Moines, Iowa, did not attend the convention.

Willey also described opportunities to link up with young people fighting for women's rights. Several of those attending their first socialist convention came in contact with the SWP and Young Socialists around the national Young Feminist Summit that took place in April. A couple of these activists from Morgantown, West Virginia, initiated the painting of a banner advocating women's equality and gay rights, which they plan to use at a protest outside an all- male rally of the right-wing Promise Keepers group in Pittsburgh in July.

Discussion on anarchism
"Other currents in the workers movement also see what's happening, and are actively recruiting," Willey said. This includes Stalinist, social democratic, and anarchist political forces.

He described how members of the party and YS in Minneapolis-St. Paul had to go back to the books to learn and relearn the history and politics of anarchism, after building protests against the anti-abortion group Human Life International (HLI) in which anarchists played a central role. In discussing that experience, one of the delegates challenged Willey's reference to the "anticapitalist rhetoric" of these groups, saying the anarchists "aren't really anticapitalist."

In his summary, Willey pointed to this as an example of why it's crucial to be accurate in politics. "Anarchists are anticapitalist," he said. "They're also antistate and anticommunist. As the class struggle heats up, their leaders will use their radical demagogy to divert the working class from fighting to take state power," thus betraying workers, as they did in the Spanish revolution in the 1930s.

Willey responded to a couple of delegates who referred to right-wing organizations such as HLI as "Catholic" or "religious," saying, "The shift to the right comes out of the trajectory of bourgeois politics, not religion. It's important to explain this clearly. We will unnecessarily isolate ourselves from a lot of working-class fighters if we mush together rightist groups with religion."

Willey also answered a delegate who said that in building for the upcoming World Festival of Youth and Students in Havana, members and supporters of the Communist Party had "come out of a slumber, a slumber they would prefer to inactivity."

"Whenever we fall into the self-defeating notion that our political opponents prefer inactivity to activity," Willey said, "you can be sure these currents are influencing and recruiting young fighters who revolutionists could have won had we been on our toes politically."

Following the discussion on Willey's report, the delegates adopted the resolution.

In the final convention session, the delegates elected the National Committee that will be responsible to implement the convention decisions and guide the work of the organization until the next convention (see page 9).

Conference activities
In addition to the convention sessions, all those in attendance had the opportunity to participate in classes on a wide range of Marxist topics, as well as workshops on practical day-to-day political campaigns and activity, and a huge book sale.

Members of the party and YS who are active in the International Association of Machinists; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers; Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; and United Food and Commercial Workers met during the gathering to discuss recent experiences in these unions and elect national steering committees to guide their work over the coming period.

The delegates and guests took note of five veteran communist fighters who had died since the last party convention in 1995 - Robert DesVerney, Lois Remple, Ed Shaw, May Stark, and Sam Stark.

Participants left the convention on a better footing to carry out ongoing political activity, including building successful delegations to the upcoming World Festival of Youth and Students and the International Workers Conference Confronting Neoliberalism and the Global Economy. Delegates voted to join others in fighting to oppose Washington's undemocratic and unconstitutional efforts to prevent young people from the United States from attending the international gathering (see page 6).

The resolution adopted by the delegates pointed to other examples of assaults on democratic rights, including the surge in the use of the death penalty and the tightened policing of airports across the United States on the pretext of fighting terrorism. In order to advance their assault on the wages and social gains of working people, the resolution says, the capitalist rulers are "compelled to make strides in curtailing democratic rights - rights that must be severely restricted if the ruling class is to have any hope of defeating the workers and their allies in the coming decisive battles."

At the same time, as pointed out in the reports by both Jack Barnes and Jack Willey, increased political polarization is leading to a growth in ultrarightist groupings -in the United States and other imperialist countries - that will be used in the future to attack workers' meetings. "We are living in a political period that requires us to view security in a much more serious and disciplined way," the SWP resolution states. In accordance with this judgment, confirmed by experience over the past year, the delegates discussed a report on convention security at their first session and organized the defense of the gathering in a more systematic way than had been the case in recent years.

Frame-up in Brazil
Delegates also pledged to work in defense of José Rainha, a leader of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) in Brazil. MST leader José Brito Ribeiro, who was a guest at the convention, began a two-week U.S. speaking tour the day after the gathering ended. Brito gave greetings on behalf of the MST, and also gave a class to conference participants on the struggle for land in Brazil. Being among hundreds of revolutionaries who are committed to the fight for socialism in the United States and around the world, Brito told the convention, "makes me think that imperialism is not as strong as it seems."

The greetings sent to the MST from the convention delegates noted that the organization's staunch support for Mark Curtis's fight for justice, and pledged that the fight against Rainha's frame-up "will further transcend the borders of Brazil, as we join with others here and around the world in getting out the truth."

The final evening of the convention, participants launched a fund drive, to run September 1 to November 1, to raise $125,000 for publishing Pathfinder books. More than $83,000 in initial pledges was raised at the meeting.  
 
 
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