BY SARA LOBMAN
NEW YORK - Pathfinder Press has a new French-language title, La lutte pour un parti prolétarien (The Struggle for a Proletarian Party) by James P. Cannon. The first of a new series Cahiers de formation communiste (Communist education notebooks), it contains major excerpts from the English- language book of the same name. Cannon was a founder of the communist movement in the United States and a central leader of the Socialist Workers Party until his death in 1974.

The Struggle for a Proletarian Party was written at the end of the 1930s, as Washington was preparing to drag millions of U.S. working people into the carnage of World War II. Cannon defends in it the political and organizational principles of Marxism against a petty- bourgeois current in the SWP that was retreating under the pressure of the imperialist war drive.

"The new Cahiers de formation communiste seek to make available to today's fighters important unedited translations of texts by communist leaders that Pathfinder already publishes in English," explained Michel Prairie in Montreal. Prairie is Pathfinder's French-language editor.

"Instead of these translations gathering dust until they can be edited and published in book form, Pathfinder has decided to quickly make them available to the new generation of French-speaking workers and youth who in growing numbers reject the horrors of capitalism," he said.

"This new series is particularly important given the growing resistance by the labor movement today, from the Teamsters strike against UPS in the United States to two province-wide demonstrations of some 10,000 each on September 27 by municipal workers in Quebec City and teachers in North Bay, Ontario," Prairie added.

The Cahiers have a format similar to that of the English- language Education for Socialists, also published by Pathfinder. The next titles in the French-language series include Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, For a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States by Jack Barnes, and Socialist Revolution and the Struggle for Women's Liberation, an international resolution that the SWP leadership drafted in the late 1970s.

The publication of the Cahiers is made possible by the work of many volunteers. A team in Toronto is reviewing the unedited translations to make sure that they don't contain major inaccuracies.

Another team in Vancouver has started to scan translations into digital form, in preparation for later work. And in Paris, where a group of Young Socialists and others have been studying what fascism is and how to fight it, a team organized volunteers there, as well as in Montreal and Toronto to translate Counter-Mobilization: A Strategy to Fight Racist and Fascist Attacks by Farrell Dobbs. They completed the translation in record time and have already sold 57 copies of a draft edition.

An event celebrating the publication of La lutte pour un parti prolétarien was held at the Pathfinder bookstore in Montreal on October 4. The program was part of the international Pathfinder Fund, which aims to raise money to publish and reprint Pathfinder books - including the production of new titles in French like the upcoming Le visage changeant de la politique aux États-Unis - la politique ouvriere et les syndicats, the translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics - Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by SWP leader Jack Barnes.  
 
 
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