The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.62/No.29           August 10, 1998 
 
 
Active Workers Conference Registers Gains In Socialists' Union And Branch Work  

BY NAOMI CRAINE AND NORTON SANDLER
PITTSBURGH - Some 450 people participated in an Active Workers Conference here July 11-12, including trade unionists, activists in the fight for Puerto Rican independence, Young Socialists, and supporters of the communist movement involved in helping Pathfinder Press keep its books and pamphlets in print by putting them in digital form.

The purpose of the conference was to "draw together our experiences of the last few weeks - participating in the fight by auto workers against General Motors, the general strike in Puerto Rico and fight for Puerto Rican independence, as well as other struggles of working people - and use these to strengthen and deepen the party's work," said Mike Fitzsimmons, organizer of the Socialist Workers Party branch in Cleveland, in welcoming participants to the conference. Joining him in the welcome was Diana Newberry, the SWP branch organizer from Pittsburgh.

The conference was hosted by the Pittsburgh and Cleveland SWP branches, the Pittsburgh Young Socialists, the YS National Committee, and the steering committees elected to lead the work of socialists in seven industrial unions. In addition to workers and youth from across the United States, participants came from Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

Final preparations for the conference, and for the conference panel of active workers, were discussed and organized at a two-day meeting in Pittsburgh June 27-28. SWP national secretary Jack Barnes and members of the SWP's Trade Union Committee (TUC) participated in the first day of that meeting. The second day the TUC members met jointly for several hours of discussion with the steering committee organizing the conference.

The program of the July 11-12 gathering itself featured an opening talk by Verónica Poses, organizer of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, on the fight for Puerto Rican independence; two panels with presentations by workers involved in the class struggle; and a talk and conference summary by Barnes.

Puerto Rican independence struggle
Poses, who spoke on "Puerto Rico: New rise of independence struggle as world imperialism weakens," had just returned from a Militant reporting trip to Puerto Rico along with Perspectiva Mundial editor Martín Koppel. She described the convergence of nationalist struggle and working-class resistance evident in the telephone workers' strike against the sale of the state-owned phone company to a consortium headed by the U.S.-based company GTE.

"The Socialist Workers Party has always put the struggle for Puerto Rican independence at the center of the fight for the socialist revolution in the United States," Poses said. "We try to politically educate our class that the working class in this country will never be free so long as Puerto Rico is enslaved." This was codified in the declaration of principles adopted by the SWP at its 1938 founding convention. The party drew on the continuity of the communist movement's support for struggles against colonial oppression, going back to the work by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in the last century in support of the Irish freedom struggle and of rising national liberation struggles by the Communist International in the time of Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin.

As one example of the impact of the Puerto Rican struggle on workers in the United States, Poses described the experiences of Ed Shaw, who was a longtime leader of the Socialist Workers Party. As a young maritime worker during World War II, Shaw missed his ship and spent two months in Puerto Rico, where he participated in support work for a longshore strike in the port of Ponce. It was one of the experiences that led to him joining the SWP a short time later.

Olga Rodríguez, an airline worker from New York, noted in the discussion how the increase in labor resistance opens the door to discussions with more U.S.-born workers on the fight for Puerto Rican independence. "On the first day of the general strike [in Puerto Rico July 7], a co-worker who I didn't think of as progressive told me, `We have to do something like that here!' "

The presentation and discussion highlighted some of the concrete activities socialists are participating in with others today, including building the July 25 demonstrations calling for Puerto Rican independence and the release of Puerto Rican political prisoners, and preparing for the hearings on Puerto Rico before the UN decolonization committee August 10-12.

Among the participants in the discussion was Nivea Carballo of the Orlando, Florida, chapter of the National Committee to Free Puerto Rican Prisoners of War and Political Prisoners. Two young Puerto Rican activists who participated in the gathering decided to join the Young Socialists.

The party and mass work
At the heart of the conference were two panels of worker- bolsheviks addressing the theme, "Structuring party branches and union fractions through mass work." Panelists on the first day included Peggy Brundy, a member of the steering committee of the project to put Pathfinder books in digital form; Mike Fitzsimmons, a member of the SWP Trade Union Committee; Doug Jenness, a member of the United Steelworkers of America (USWA) in Minnesota and organizer of the party's Trade Union Committee; Cecelia Moriarity, organizer of the Coal Committee recently established to organize the SWP's work among miners; Diana Newberry, a member of the Young Socialists and the Coal Committee; Bernie Senter, who organizes the leadership committee of Pathfinder's print shop; and Gaetan Whiston, organizer of the steering committee of party members in the USWA.

The panelists pointed to concrete examples of how participating in working-class struggles with other vanguard fighters can restore political content to party structures that had sometimes become simply forms during the retreat of the labor movement. In his talk Saturday evening, Barnes traced this retreat to the opening of the 1990s. Participating in the Eastern Airlines strike and other labor battles around that time, and campaigning against Washington's war in Iraq, had strengthened the party's structures, particularly the trade union fractions. But during the seven-year upturn in the U.S. business cycle that followed the slaughter in Iraq, the retreat of the labor movement resumed, taking a toll on the habits of discipline and timely political response by the party's branches, union fractions, and leadership bodies.

That retreat has now ended, Barnes said. For the first time in the United States since the period from the middle of World War II through the postwar labor upsurge, workers are coming into action ahead of student youth. The shift is also reflected in the increasing numbers of supporters of the communist movement who are coming toward the party and offering to take on more responsibility. And a few veterans are rejoining the party.

Fitzsimmons described the impact on the Cleveland SWP branch of several months of consistent efforts by workers in the branch to reach out to other workers in that area. The branch regularized its weekly sales at factory gates in the area, as well as in working-class neighborhoods, and turned to a small strike by Steelworkers at MSI in Marietta, Ohio. The strikers, now in their 17th month of battle, have adopted the slogan "One day longer" than the boss, and their fight has become a rallying point for workers throughout the region who want to resist the employers' attacks.

"At first we were buzzing with excitement that we were selling lots of papers at the plant gates," Fitzsimmons said. "It's still exciting to sell 10, 20, or 30 papers," he continued, "but now we're discussing more what it means and how to adjust our priorities each week to deepen our collaboration with other fighters."

Gaetan Whiston described similar experiences in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Since May workers at Northwest and other airlines have bought nearly 200 copies of the Militant as a result of work done by the fraction of socialist workers at the airport and regular sales teams there. "Now we're posed with the challenge of developing relations with these fighting workers that go beyond a one-hour sale," Whiston said.

Union and political activity
Several panelists stressed that the point is not simply to do sales and propaganda work, but to participate as fellow workers in struggles and in union and political activity with other unionists and working people. In the course of such work, fighters will become interested in buying and reading socialist literature.

Cecelia Moriarity, a former coal miner who is currently a member of the USWA in Pittsburgh, reported on the 20th conference of the Coal Employment Project (CEP), which took place June 26-28. The CEP began as support teams to help women get jobs in the mines and stay there.

Moriarity described how she joined in building and working on preparations for the conference, including helping make the banner and selling raffle tickets on the job. During the CEP conference itself she discussed a broad range of questions with miners and others present, from the fight to get women into the mines to issues of health and safety to the GM strike and the Cuban revolution. In the course of these discussions, several people subscribed to the Militant.

Newberry described the results in the Pittsburgh branch of renewing the consistent weekly selling of the Militant at mine portals in western Pennsylvania. Socialist workers are learning about activities where mine workers are fighting to get black lung benefits reinstated, as well as other resistance to the unrelenting offensive by the coal bosses. The teams are also learning about potential hiring in the mines.

Also on the panel were those involved in transforming the production of Pathfinder books to cut costs, increase labor productivity, and reduce the size of the print shop. "Two days ago the reprint of Sexism and Science was completed by comrades in the print shop," reported Bernie Senter. This was the second book totally prepared in digital form by an international team of volunteers, eliminating the need for traditional prepress work. The book is now stored on CD-ROM "and can be put back on press within hours as needed," Senter explained.

The night before Sexism and Science was finished "we announced that nine comrades are being released from the print shop to get jobs in industry," most of them in their current branches in New York and Newark. In addition, three worker-bolsheviks who had been in the print shop are on their way to cities where there are big opportunities in the class struggle today - two of them to San Francisco, one to Detroit.

These gains were made before any new equipment had been brought into the print shop. A digital image setter, which can produce one piece of film per printing plate, was delivered July 21. This is the first piece of equipment on the road to an entire computer-to-plate system that will eliminate more labor time and allow an even smaller shop staff.

This transformation is only possible through the efforts of some 140 supporters (and growing) of the communist movement who have volunteered to put in digital form every piece of every Pathfinder book and pamphlet - from the text to covers, graphics, and photos. "Everything that supporters have done is possible because of the class struggle and how the party is responding to it," said Peggy Brundy, a member of the steering committee organizing this project in the San Francisco Bay Area. "We want to keep the books in print and free up party members to talk to workers."

More than $235,000 was pledged to a capital fund launched at the conference. This covered the cost of the new digital image setter, as well as long-needed work now under way to repair the exterior of the Pathfinder building. The response to the appeal shows the potential to raise the $400,000 cost to buy and install the computer-to-plate system. Anything above that will make it possible to pay down the outstanding debt on the shop's presses, eliminating the lien held by the finance company. Contributions to the fund come from contract bonuses, bequests, trusts, and other special windfalls

`Assets revert to rightful owners'
The Saturday evening presentation by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes on "Sea change in working-class politics" pointed to the underlying causes of the acceleration in struggles by workers and opportunities for communists that the panelists described earlier that day.

Barnes referred to a statement by Pittsburgh business baron Andrew Mellon during the worldwide crisis of capitalism in the 1930s: "In a depression, assets revert to their rightful owners." This accurately portrays the process unfolding on a world scale today. The biggest capitalists in the biggest imperialist nations are reclaiming the assets they proclaim themselves to be the rightful owners of.

A front-page headline in the June 22 Wall Street Journal summed it up, "Picking the Bones: As Asian Assets Dive, the Bargain Hunters Move In for the Killings." The article described how since the collapse of the Thai currency a year ago, followed by a wave of devaluations and debt and banking crises throughout the region, U.S. companies are pouncing on the economic collapse to buy out their "troubled partners" in southeast Asia for a fraction of the former price of factories, land, and financial institutions.

Only a few months ago, U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan declared the financial catastrophe in Asia to be an "important milestone" in the "seemingly inexorable trend toward market capitalism." But then the currencies plunged again.

This economic catastrophe is a milestone - in the inexorable trend of world capitalism toward social devastation, fascism, and war. And the crisis is spreading not just in the semicolonial countries of Asia, Barnes pointed out, but also in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. It is especially acute in Japan, world capitalism's second-largest economy.

Much of the debt owed by governments and businesses in the semicolonial countries in Asia is held by Japanese capitalists, who expected these assets to return to them as the "rightful owners." Instead, Tokyo remains in the grip of a deep banking crisis, and highly leveraged assets throughout the region - including in Japan itself - have begun to revert to U.S. capital. It's a sharp reminder that Washington was the big winner in World War II, and the imperialist pecking order won't be reversed short of another war.

The laws of motion of capitalism operate through the competition of capitals, Barnes said, and the central conflicts today are between capitalist rivals. The exploitation of the working class is a permanent fact, but the source of the deepening attacks on the working class today is the employers' drive to cut costs and increase productivity in order to compete. When the bosses at GM say they need to cut 50,000 jobs to keep up with Ford, they're telling the truth. Workers get hit harder and harder as a byproduct of these sharpening capitalist rivalries.

For much of the past two decades, for instance, the bourgeoisie in Indonesia operated under the illusion it could outtrade, outbuild, and outsmart not only other capitalists in the region, but also its backers in Washington and Tokyo.

But no "emerging" semicolonial country ever has or ever can "emerge" as a rival to the handful of imperialist powers in North America, Europe, and Asia and the Pacific; that hasn't changed since Lenin wrote his pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism more than 80 years ago, on the eve of the Russian revolution. And now, as Indonesia's rulers are awakening to that reality, they are not only attempting to force starvation conditions on millions of peasants and workers, but also bumping into the obstacle of the working class in that country as they do so.

The employing class in the United States and other imperialist countries is also bumping into such resistance by workers more and more often. As the conference was going on, the UAW strike in Flint against General Motors was still under way and most GM production throughout North America was shut down. Barnes and others described the competition-driven logic of the auto giant's course toward a showdown with the union, whether in this strike or the next. It was clear that workers in the UAW are willing to fight and, far from being beaten, are prepared for another round with GM.

Working class is not demoralized
Since the closing years of the 1980s, Barnes said, the Socialist Workers Party has pointed to world capitalism's course toward depression conditions signaled by the stock market crash of 1987. The party has also explained that with the crumbling of the Stalinist regimes in Europe, Washington had lost the cold war. It's one thing to discuss these elements, but another to increasingly live through their effects and see the changes in the working class in the countries where you live and work.

Most of the "left" is bemoaning what they see as a defeat with the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But workers do not view these events as defeats and have not been demoralized by them, the SWP leader noted. Instead, it's clearer than ever that as capitalist rivalry and conflicts intensify, the imperialist rulers still face the challenge of confronting the toilers in Russia, eastern Germany, China, and other workers states where capitalist rule was overturned earlier in this century. This is a draining, destabilizing factor for world capitalism, not a situation that opens possibilities for capitalist expansion and stability - as they dreamed of at the opening of the 1990s.

The bourgeoisie in Germany - and the project for a strong, German-dominated European currency it intended to lead - are being dragged down by the attempt to absorb the east Germany workers state and by the massive outstanding loans Bonn has issued to Russia.

The miners in Russia, who have been striking for months now, are the terror of the International Monetary Fund, and all they are demanding is their paycheck.

The last remaining element of this picture that socialist workers have to get comfortable with today is the disappearance of "the left," Barnes said. Most of the time since 1936, the glue that held the left together - including social democrats, liberals, and petty-bourgeois radicals of many stripes - was the class collaborationist "popular front" policies of the Stalinists, dominated by the Communist Party with its ties to the state power in Moscow. With the disintegration of the Stalinist movement, that glue is now gone.

This makes politics more fluid in the workers movement and the broader milieu attracted to it. It's harder for opponents of a proletarian course to throw up factional obstacles to prevent revolutionists from working with each other, or to block off revolutionary-minded workers and youth from the communist movement.

Barnes noted that incipient fascist forces aim more of their fire at the conservatives today, and pointed to several recent commentaries by Patrick Buchanan, who remains a useful benchmark for these currents in the United States. Buchanan's July 4 column embraced Pauline Hanson, the Australian ultrarightist whose One Nation party got nearly a quarter of the vote in the Queensland state elections in June. "U.S. conservatives should take note," Buchanan wrote. "[Prime Minister John] Howard's conservative coalition could be swept from power because of a failure to accommodate a surging populism of the right."

Buchanan's two previous columns sang his frequent refrain of virulent nationalism and protection of "American workers" against "global corporations" - denouncing General Motors for "making its new Motown in Mexico," and hailing an initiative by liberal "consumer advocate" Ralph Nader demanding that companies open their stockholders meetings with the pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag.

Second day of panel
The speakers for the panel on the second day of the active workers conference met following the discussion on Barnes's talk to adjust their presentations to advance the work done so far by participants in the gathering. Among those on the panel the second day was Danny Booher, a member of the SWP Coal Committee who recently moved to the Pittsburgh area from Chicago. Booher described the class-struggle lessons a layer of workers gained in their fight against Caterpillar Corp. They are among a layer of vanguard workers together with socialists who are trying to impart what they have learned to other unionists involved in struggles today in the Midwest.

Samantha Kern from the Young Socialists explained how the SWP and YS in San Francisco are sponsoring a summer school to study the lessons of Marxism as they participate in actions, from the coalition to build the July 25 demonstration in solidarity with the Puerto Rican freedom struggle to support for battles in the fields by members of the United Farm Workers union.

Tom Alter from the Des Moines SWP and organizer of the steering committee of party members in the United Food and Commercial Workers detailed the importance of working with fighting unionists to become knowledgeable about and to join in the struggles of working farmers. He related an experience during a trip to Australia recently where workers told him how the ruling class of that country tried to get the big farmers to be a leading wedge in their failed attempt to break the dock workers union. Alter said that socialists have to lead in practice on advancing a workers and farmers alliance against their common exploiters, the wealthy capitalist ruling class.

Socialists in Sweden have been participating in the major class battles in Europe, explained Anna Olson from the Communist League in Stockholm, Sweden. Their trips to meet with workers during the Danish general strike in April and May and to workers' mobilizations in Germany helped prepare communists in Sweden for an upturn in the class struggle there. CL members and supporters were better prepared to reach out in a timely way and win public support when rightists broke the window of the Pathfinder bookstore in Stockholm in June. This was the fourth attack on the bookstore in a year, and took place in the context of other rightist attacks on freedom of speech, including the destruction of a controversial photo exhibit.

Picking up on a theme from Barnes's talk, Olson also noted that a former member had recently rejoined the Communist League in Sweden, attracted to the political openings and the communist movement's response.

Paul Pederson, a Young Socialists member who works in the bindery of Pathfinder's print shop, and Bill Estrada, one of the press operators, described some of the steps taken to improve training, habits of collective discipline, control over paper inventories, and machine maintenance. "This has been my most political experience ever," Pederson noted. Working through the challenges of political organization in the shop "convinces me it's possible for working people to organize society."

Over the two days of discussion, many conference participants took the floor to amplify points made by the panelists and in the talks by Barnes and Poses. This was particularly true the second day.

Laura Garza, a member of the IAM in Houston, spoke about the discussions on the "practice" picket lines by workers at the Anheuser-Busch plant there, who are in the midst of a contract fight. "There is a rumor that after last year's strike at UPS, one of the bosses at Anheuser-Busch said, `UPS are wimps - we'll show them how to deal with the Teamsters,' " she said. "By going pretty regularly to the plant, we've gotten a feel for some of this discussion."

Need for discipline grows
As working-class struggles unfold today, "We're learning about the discipline needed to participate in the mass movement," said Norton Sandler, a member of the IAM in San Francisco who organized and chaired the panel discussions. He noted that over the previous 10 days, substantial groups of goons had gone into strawberry fields and attacked union supporters in the Watsonville, California, area.

Both Jacob Perasso and Manuel González described the lesson they learned in organizing protests at the University of California in Santa Cruz against Proposition 227, the California ballot measure banning bilingual education. "The second demonstration took place after Prop. 227 passed," said Perasso "and we ran into right-wing slurs. One driver swerved violently at us, nearly hitting a demonstrator. We organized that protest quickly and without marshals. I'll never organize something like that again without being prepared to defend it."

Alejandra Rincón from Houston spoke from the audience about a protest she had just participated in against a Ku Klux Klan rally in Jasper, Texas, where a Black man, James Byrd Jr., was recently murdered. "This was the first time Íd seen a demonstration of the KKK," she said. About two dozen racists took part in the rally, with about 200 people protesting them. But some people who clearly supported the Klan also gathered to watch. "A Black woman started shouting at them `Take your hoods off you cowards,' " Rincón said, "and then we started the chant `Hey hey, ho ho, the KKK has got to go!' It struck me how confident that woman was."

When events like the Jasper lynching happen, being known by your co-workers as a political person pays off. Shelton McCrainey, a member of the USWA in Chicago, described how a fellow worker who is Chicano came up to him in the break area to point out a news report about James Byrd's funeral. "He was angry and wanted to talk about this, and he asked what I thought. It touched me, because he wasn't even Black." The Chicano worker hadn't bought the Militant before, but did after that discussion, and so did a couple of others in the plant.

In his summary to the conference, Barnes described why it was important that the Pittsburgh meeting was called as an active workers conference. He noted that since last October SWP branches and Young Socialists have hosted a number of educational conferences around the country where, among other things, communists came to grips with obstacles they were confronting in responding in a timely and disciplined way to political openings through their branches and union fractions. The Pittsburgh meeting was not a continuation of that series of conferences. We decided we needed an active workers conference now, Barnes explained, to show what we're doing in the mass movement and adjust to more effective ways of doing mass work.

There will be more Militant headlines written in kitchens as this continues, he said, recalling the lead article in the paper after a December 1984 fire in the Wilberg coal mine in Utah killed 19 members of the United Mine Workers of America and eight company executives and foremen. Cecelia Moriarity, who worked in the mine, wrote the article together with others. The headline, "Company greed killed coal miners in Utah: Emery Mining Corp. conceals the facts," was the result of discussion among these union fighters in the home of one of them.

Trade union fraction leaderships meet
For several hours following the completion of the conference, members of the elected steering committees of the SWP's trade union fractions in the United Steelworkers of America; United Auto Workers; Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; International Association of Machinists; Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union; United Transportation Union; and United Food and Commercial Workers union met. Also participating were members of the SWP Coal Committee.

They heard a report by Jack Barnes and discussed their priorities and responsibilities in leading the SWP's fractions in the industrial unions. Summarizing the discussion, Barnes said that the leaderships of steering committees need to focus on initiating timely policy guidelines that can be used to competently lead every local unit of the fraction to find and participate in the real lines of resistance to the employers that are developing in that particular union. Barnes noted that this is not how fraction steering committees have been functioning. They had instead focused on analyzing developments in the union and intervening from afar in the work of local fractions. Hands- on help to local fractions, where appropriate, is best handled by local branch leaderships of the SWP, he said.

Barnes pointed to the importance of timing, which is everything in politics. Coming out of the SWP convention a year ago, the party's branches, fractions, and leadership bodies initially found it difficult to respond rapidly to the openings socialist workers had talked about in the convention sessions. The experiences discussed at the active workers conference showed that we're becoming a movement that can regain the timing that was lost in the retreat, he said. Party members can begin to act and then meet in order to keep doing so more effectively. The starting point for the industrial fractions should never be "are you meeting regularly," but "what are you doing." If you are doing something, you'll feel the need to meet, but you will also know what you are meeting about, he emphasized.

Barnes said the structures of the SWP should be coming together politically now. Branch executive committees need to work more closely with local trade union fractions on day-to- day work - they are the most competent to do so. The national trade union fraction steering committees can focus on policy questions and political opportunities in the unions today. Letters to trade union fractions on political openings, such as the GM strike or the telephone workers fight in Puerto Rico, will simultaneously be useful to the political work of party branches, he said.

The Socialist Workers Party National Committee met for two days following the conclusion of the Pittsburgh active workers conference. The NC meeting had been prepared by the conference discussion and by the meeting of the trade union steering committees. Participants continued discussion on the main political points that had come up over the weekend. In his report to the NC meeting, Barnes proposed that all the national trade union fractions call rapid meetings that can draw on the Active Workers Conference to discuss the accelerating labor resistance and elect new fraction leaderships.

All seven industrial union fractions will meet on the August 1-2 weekend. The meetings are being held in Newark, Cleveland, and Chicago.

Norton Sandler is a member of the International Association of Machinists.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home