BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND NAOMI CRAINE
CHICAGO - The Socialist Workers Party National Committee met here October 3-5 to discuss and adopt a course of action to deepen the proletarianization of the party and to launch a campaign to rebuild fractions of the party in eight industrial unions. Participating in the meeting, in addition to members of the National Committee, were leaders of the party's trade union work, organizers of SWP branches across the country, a delegation from the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, and representatives from the leaderships of Communist Leagues in other countries.

The objective basis of this campaign is the upturn in defensive struggles by the working class that has become increasingly apparent for more than a year. Right now coal miners in Illinois, striking Titan Tire rubber workers in Iowa and Mississippi, farm workers in California, and farmers in growing numbers around the country are involved in important fights.

Women and workers who are Black are also assuming a more weighty leadership role in battles by industrial unions against the employers. And layers of militant workers and working farmers - from Caterpillar plants in Illinois to a Crown oil refinery in Texas to Black farmers in the South -are beginning to draw broader conclusions about capitalist society and form links of solidarity among themselves and with other fighters.

The increase in struggles such as these raises the standard of leadership responsiveness - of speed and consistency in political work - that vanguard workers and fighting youth have a right to expect of the communist movement.

This is the third campaign in the last two decades to meet political opportunities by organizing to get the big majority of party members into a range of industrial unions, and in industries representing a cross section of the working class as a whole - auto, garment, textile, mining, airlines, machine manufacturing, meatpacking, steel, rail, oil refining, and chemicals.

To accomplish this goal, participants in the meeting decided, every party branch needs to function in its entirety as a jobs committee to find the hiring openings and make collective decisions on where members of the party need to seek work to build all eight of the party's national industrial union fractions. Beginning now.

By carrying out this effort as a party campaign, in a politically centralized way, the best conditions are created for each individual member to participate, said SWP national secretary Jack Barnes in his summary report to the meeting. The party will come out of this campaign with more local fractions of two or more members working in the same plant, increasing the effectiveness of political work on the job; and with fewer members on permanent second-shift jobs, which makes it hard for them to participate in political activity as part of a branch.

Three months earlier, meeting immediately following a July 11-12 Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh, the SWP National Committee voted to qualitatively strengthen the party's concentration in garment and meatpacking, and begin serious work to rebuild a fraction of coal miners. This could only be done by many party members currently working on the railroad or in the airlines and steel mills changing jobs. But that's not what happened over the subsequent two months.

"Simple arithmetic tells us the scope of what must change if we are to reach our goal and relaunch the turn - substantial numbers of comrades in the largest fractions, with no fraction immune, getting on the jobs committees to carry out our decisions," Barnes said in a September 11 report to the party's Political Committee, a summary of which was published as part of a booklet for all party members just prior to the National Committee meeting. "Implementing the NC decisions on garment, packing, and coal goes hand-in-hand with reconquering proletarian norms in all the fractions."

Transform unions into tools of struggle
This course, the "third campaign for the turn to industry," is the only road to political fractions that can carry out working-class politics in the trade unions and more broadly today and begin recruiting workers to the communist movement.

The party launched its initial turn to industry as a politically centralized nationwide campaign in 1978, to get the overwhelming majority of the membership and leadership of the party members into industrial unions. This was possible and necessary because of shifts in the class struggle that put the working class at the center of politics in the United States for the first time in decades, as workers resisted the bosses' blows to the unions after the 1974-75 world recession.

The aim of the first campaign for the turn to industry is presented in the book, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes. "Our goal is quite simple: to do everything possible to transform the American unions, as [Bolshevik leader Leon] Trotsky explained, into `instruments of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat,'" Barnes explained in a 1979 convention document contained in that collection. "What we do is aimed at advancing toward revolutionary unions as combat organizations of the American working class. In the process of doing this, we'll build the irreplaceable political instrument of our class -a revolutionary party of industrial workers."

In the early 1980s, the party strengthened this turn to the industrial unions by broadening the range of its national union fractions, including getting into the garment and textile industries and later meatpacking. This put the party in contact with broader sectors of the working class, including those with lower pay levels. In 1985 the party launched the second campaign for the turn to industry, focusing on expanding the number of fractions built in each branch, and thereby extending the geographic spread of the national fractions.

"By having party members from more of our branches represented in each one of the nine national fractions, we draw on the experience of a broader layer of the union membership of our class, and of our own cadres. We find out how ignorant a small organization such as ours really is about the industrial union movement in this country. And we begin to expand our knowledge and spread it throughout the party," said Joel Britton in a report to an SWP national convention in 1985, summarizing some of the experiences of that effort. Britton is today a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers in Chicago and a member of the party's national Trade Union Committee. Britton's 1985 report was recently published as the lead article in an Education for Socialists booklet titled Background to `The Changing Face of U.S. Politics' and `U.S. Imperialism has Lost the Cold War.'

That 1985 report helped "prepare us for the battles that broke out in meatpacking later that year," noted Betsy Farley, a party leader in the Philadelphia branch. At the time she was working in a garment shop in Birmingham, Alabama. When the members of United Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9 struck at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, "we were able to help get strikers to come speak to garment workers and miners in Alabama," she recalled. "We couldn't have done it without getting our fractions in shape first."

Labor retreat is over
"U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," the 1990 SWP resolution featured in the just-published issue no. 11 of the Marxist magazine New International, opens with the words, "A more than 10-year offensive by the employers has failed to drive the labor movement from the center stage of politics in the United States." The resolution points to the Eastern Airlines strike, and the overlapping coal miners strike against Pittston in 1989-90, as fights that set the example for the labor movement, foreshadowing bigger class battles for all working people in the 1990s.

In light of those labor battles, the resolution explains, the end of the nearly decade-long retreat of the U.S. labor movement since the deep 1980-81 recession seemed to be in sight. But under the impact of Washington's brief and largely uncontested assault on Iraq in 1990-91, and the slow onset of deflationary conditions throughout the capitalist world, the working class resumed its retreat for another half dozen years.

These conditions reinforced pressures on the party to become more routine and inward turned. Party branches and union fractions tended to institutionalize these habits of retreat. The proportion of party members in relatively better-paid union jobs, such as rail, steel, and the airlines grew, while the numbers in garment and meatpacking dwindled to a handful in a few cities. Party members in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) were laid off, and a new generation was unable to get hired in the mines. The tendency to view one's job as a personal matter, instead of a political assignment, increased.

Since early 1997, the evidence has mounted that the long retreat of the working class is now behind us. There are signs of resistance, from contract battles by farm workers in California to the UPS strike last year, from the five-week walkout at General Motors earlier this year to new forms of leadership initiative by working people who are Black in factories and in the farm movement. There is a new push forward by women in the plants. The opening section of the 1990 resolution "can now be read, not with disclaimers that conditions are different, that much of what is written there may not be a useful guide to action today, but with confidence that the opposite is more and more true," explains the "In This Issue" article of New International no. 11, written by Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters.

That fact became especially clear as workers in the party who are organizing to rebuild a fraction in the UMWA began using the 1990 resolution as a daily guide in their work. These include some of the youngest generations in the communist movement, as well as party veterans who led the turn to the industrial unions in 1978 and are now joining the effort to get mining jobs. As one experienced miner who has been laid off for a number of years explained it, while she put in job applications with younger party members, "The first coal boss in the United States who hires me, gets me."

This third campaign for the turn to industry can be successful only through the combined efforts of several generations in the party, Barnes noted. The generations that led the previous two efforts, and who still make up the majority of the active party cadre today, cannot lead this campaign on their own. But these individuals, together with the youngest generations of leaders of the party and the Young Socialists, are capable of helping to meet the opportunities to transform the party again, Barnes said.

Launching this third turn to industry was prepared through several party trade union leadership meetings in July, August, and September, as well as the Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh. (An article on this conference appeared in a supplement to the August 10 Militant.) The Pittsburgh conference, while not a decision-making gathering, registered the course that a growing number of workers and youth were pressing - a course that was bringing to a head the contradiction between the expanded openings for communist work and resistance to responding to these openings in party branches and fractions as they had been shaped by the retreat of previous years. The conference focused on practical work and the opportunities that exist to carry out mass work in the labor movement, linking up with layers of militant workers and farmers.

Responding to proletarian initiatives
Above all, the Active Workers Conference was a call to workers in the party to take initiatives to lead the party along a proletarian course, assuring them that the central leadership of the party would respond to such political efforts. It encouraged workers in the party who had become reticent during the years of retreat to step forward and assume leadership responsibilities.

The National Committee adopted a letter along these lines that Barnes had written to a member of the Lost Angeles branch, in response to such an initiative by that party member. It also adopted a report by a commission appointed by the party's Political Committee to work with the membership in Los Angeles to reconquer proletarian norms and reverse adaptations to centrist political pressures.

Meg Novak from Birmingham said that the discussion at the National Committee meeting "makes it clear this is what we all face." She gave the example that in Birmingham, the local executive committee of the party for weeks did not bring a debate on whether to build a fraction in the area in the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees into the branch, even though this had been set as a national priority. Once the branch as a whole discussed it, they began to carry out this perspective.

The Active Workers Conference also encouraged members of the Young Socialists to push in a proletarian direction. One result was the "YS Manifesto," a set of working notes drafted by members of the Los Angeles YS chapter in April, through a series of chapter discussions that drew on the strategic documents of the party to clarify the character and activity of their organization and the necessity of its relationship with the communist vanguard party of the working class in the United States, the SWP.

The YS Manifesto was subsequently published in New International no. 11 and is one of the documents the Young Socialists are using to open discussion in preparation for their convention in December.

Bold moves by Young Socialists
Over the same period the Young Socialists took a series of steps that placed politics ahead of organizational forms in order to draw on the momentum of a spurt of recruitment on the West Coast. The YS National Executive Committee (NEC) decided to give a September 5-6 regional conference called by the YS chapters in California the power of the YS National Committee to call a national convention of the organization. Every YS-age participant was given an equal vote, regardless of whether they were a member. The NEC also decided to move the YS National Office from Chicago to Los Angeles.

The success of that conference showed it was possible to take the much needed step of releasing a layer of the most experienced leaders of the YS from the youth organization to focus their political attention on party building. The development of leaders of the party's branches and trade union fractions who are in their early 20s is key to the party being able to strengthen itself today.

Two weeks after the West Coast conference, the YS National Committee met in Los Angeles. Representatives of YS units across the country were invited to participate with equal vote. That meeting set the dates for the YS convention that had been called by the West Coast conference. It will take place December 4-6 in Los Angeles.

Participants in that YS national leadership meeting decided to lead the YS over the coming months to respond to struggles such as the miners strike in Illinois, the Steelworkers strikes at Titan Tire, farm protests, fights to defend immigrant rights and bilingual education, work in defense of the Cuban revolution, and the struggle for Puerto Rican independence. At the same time they will take advantage of the next month of the Socialist Workers election campaigns -seven YS members are candidates on the party's ticket - and the Militant subscription drive. Through such mass work and propaganda activities they will recruit to the Young Socialists and build the December convention as a by-product. (Reports on the West Coast YS conference and the YS national leadership meeting appeared in the September 21 and October 12 Militant.)

In the opening report to the expanded SWP National Committee meeting, "Deepening the proletarianization of the communist movement: prospects for the Young Socialists," Mary- Alice Waters stated that recruitment to the YS today sharpens the need to fight for a proletarian party and against the habits of the previous years of retreat. The majority of party branches today have been, in fact, acting in a way to block recruitment to the Young Socialists, she stated, by not responding promptly to struggles that break out, lecturing young people instead of working together with them as equals on political questions during common activity, pressing people to join without doing the work to convince them of the politics and disciplined character of the organization they are joining, or pressing YS members to get into industry immediately, instead of winning them to doing so through deepening their political understanding of the vanguard place of the working class first. That was what the YS members in Los Angeles were responding to when they drew up the Manifesto.

"There won't be any Young Socialists convention that's successful unless all three California chapters are strengthened over the next two months," noted party leader Norton Sandler from San Francisco. "And that won't happen without meaningful joint political work between the party and YS. Pursuing this course means the end of not giving a political explanation for everything we do together." It means being able to answer the question, "Well, what do you do in industry?" In other words, it means meeting the challenge of revitalizing the party's branches and union fractions by putting politics first, narrowing the gap between their form and content, which is at the heart of the third campaign for turn.

Carrying out this campaign is a precondition for opening up recruitment of young workers and students to the communist movement, Waters said. The nose for recruitment, the nose for mass work in the trade unions and elsewhere, and the nose for the working-class to take power are fundamentally the same thing, she noted.

Parallel to these developments in the Young Socialists and the proletarian initiatives by workers in the party was a series of decisions and actions by the party's trade union leadership, beginning with a meeting June 27-28 that made final preparations for the Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh. Immediately following the Pittsburgh gathering, the members of all of the elected steering committees of the SWP's work in the International Association of Machinists; Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers; United Auto Workers; United Food and Commercial Workers; Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees; United Steelworkers of America; and United Transportation Union, as well as the party's Coal Committee, met for about six hours. They discussed the need to focus on initiating timely policy guidelines that can be used to competently lead every local unit of the fraction to participate in the working-class resistance to the employers' offensive on wages, safety and other working conditions, and living standards. Meeting over the next two days, the party's National Committee called meetings of all of the national trade union fractions for the beginning of August.

Following those national fraction meetings, two expanded meetings of the SWP Trade Union Committee took place in Chicago and in Los Angeles that made more concrete what it means to respond to developments in the class struggle with timely policy guidelines.

Stirrings among women in industry
One example that came up in the International Association of Machinists (IAM) was how to respond to the call by the union officialdom in October 1997 for setting up women's committees in every local. Socialist workers in the IAM in Seattle helped to establish and participate in the women's committee at the Hexcel plant there. But a national meeting of socialist workers in the IAM in February did not draw any broader conclusion from this experience.

At the August meeting, the IAM fraction voted to "initiate work to find out about women's committees or other developments among women unionists in their area..." The trade union leadership conference at the end of August in Los Angeles reversed this course. Based on the facts that were already known, said Nan Bailey and Norton Sandler in a letter on behalf of the Trade Union Committee to the IAM fraction steering committee, "the party IAM fraction needed to immediately look for and try to become part of or help initiate such developments in other workplaces across the country." This is true across the board, for both men and women in the party.

In calling for the formation of women's committees, the IAM officialdom is responding to demands being raised by female workers, including layers of women who've gone through previous experiences in struggles, such as civil rights and affirmative action battles, and new generations who have come into plants and airports across the country in a recent spate of hiring. The union tops sense the stirrings and potential struggles among these workers, and attempt to channel them toward the officialdom. But this also means the potential is there to strengthen the fighting capacity of the unions. Socialist workers need to be part of this.

Participants in the trade union leadership meeting in Los Angeles considered whether this also reflects a broader development of resistance among women in industry. After going around the table describing their own experiences in the workplace in recent months, it was more than obvious that this is the case, said Barnes in summarizing that discussion.

There are also signs of an upturn in the fight for Black rights, concentrated again among industrial workers. In many of the labor battles that break out today, workers who are Black are in the leadership of the fight, such as in the recent transit workers strike against SEPTA in Philadelphia. Black farmers are also in the vanguard of rural toilers resisting the increasing price-credit squeeze that is forcing more and more farmers off the land.

One decision of the SWP trade union leadership meetings in Chicago and Los Angeles was to establish a party farm work committee as a step towards leading the party's work to bring militant workers and fighting farmers together and strengthen the worker-farmer alliance.

Special meeting of socialists in rail
The steering committee elected by socialist workers in the United Transportation Union took the initiative to call a special second fraction meeting, eight weeks after the August 1-2 gathering to place before the entire fraction the challenge of rebuilding a multifraction party, revitalizing the UTU fraction in the course of doing so.

In his report to that meeting, UTU fraction steering committee organizer Sam Manuel pointed to the "dangerous logic of the tendency for more and more of the party to end up in the UTU." Without a perspective of building fractions in all eight of the unions where the party has decided to concentrate its forces, "being in the UTU no longer becomes a political assignment but a job."

Speaking at the National Committee meeting, airline worker Norton Sandler noted that the same is true in the International Association of Machinists.

At the UTU meeting, Manuel pointed to another sign of slipping from functioning as a unit of worker-bolsheviks in the rail union. At the August meeting, only half of the UTU members who received bonuses from their employer turned them over to the party, "reversing a proud tradition of the fraction." Participants in the September UTU fraction meeting voted unanimously to reaffirm the norm that worker-bolsheviks who get job bonuses or similar windfalls -often given by the rail bosses and other employers in lieu of a pay raise - contribute them to the communist movement, and encourage their coworkers to give as well.

Discussing this tradition at the expanded National Committee meeting, Amanda Ulman, who organizes the steering committee of socialist workers in the United Auto Workers (UAW), said, "The bonuses are blood money that the bosses rob from us, that they give us to dull the fight for pay raises we need or as payoff for accepting conditions that damage life and limb. Socialist workers have an obligation not just to the party but to our class" to use this money to advance the fight for the emancipation of the working class.

The meeting of UTU members also decided to adopt guidelines for dressing appropriately for their national meetings, which are usually held in hotels. This policy, adopted earlier by the UAW fraction, is not a checklist of dos or don'ts, but rather a question of having an attitude of "pride in the party," noted Cecelia Moriarity, who organizes the party's Coal Committee. The SWP National Committee adopted a proposal by the Trade Union Committee that this appearance code adopted by the UAW steering committee be universally binding on all national fraction meetings and other similar meetings.

The socialist workers in the UTU also discussed the practice that had started to occur of party members taking a leave of absence from the railroad instead of quitting while moving to another city or taking full-time assignment for the party. The fraction was becoming more of a "job trust" than a unit of worker-bolsheviks, Manuel pointed out in his report to the meeting of rail workers. The UTU members decided that fraction members in the UTU who move onto another union job, transfer to another city, or accept full-time assignment for the party quit their jobs.

The National Committee decided that the Trade Union Committee will present these policies for discussion and adoption by the other six trade union fractions at their national meetings October 24-25.

Digital transformation of printshop
At the Pittsburgh Active Workers Conference, the new opportunities to strengthen the party's branches and union fractions through mass work had been linked to steps by the communist movement to transform the production of revolutionary books and pamphlets needed by fighting workers and youth. As SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters had explained at an international socialist conference in Toronto in April, the size of the printshop of the communist movement had to be substantially reduced "by drawing more heavily on volunteers, cutting the labor time necessary to produce Pathfinder books, increasing the productivity of that labor, lowering the skill levels needed to work in the printshop, and driving down the production costs while sacrificing nothing on Pathfinder's standards of quality." This report was recently published in the Education for Socialists booklet Pathfinder Was Born with the October Revolution.

The communist movement had six months to carry out this transformation, Jack Barnes told participants in the Pittsburgh conference. Otherwise the printshop would be unable to pay its bills. At the very moment when communist workers and youth are facing the biggest political openings since the 1990-91 Gulf War, the leadership of the party would face the task of dismantling the shop and qualitatively reducing the number of Pathfinder books and pamphlets in print.

At the Pittsburgh gathering, the SWP leadership had presented two interconnected fronts on which the communist movement could fight to maintain the printshop and keep the production pipeline of revolutionary literature flowing.

First, supporters of the communist movement in North America and around the world had volunteered to scan, proofread and format the text, and prepare the covers and internal photographs and other graphics for each one of the some 350 books, pamphlets, and magazines that Pathfinder publishes or distributes. This international volunteer effort was a response by these supporters to the rise in working-class resistance over the past couple years. They wanted to do whatever they could to help the party respond to the expanded political opportunities to attract workers and youth and recruit them to the Young Socialists and to the SWP.

By producing finished books in electronic form, this volunteer effort would make it possible for the printshop to use up-to-date computer-to-plate technology to get books and pamphlets on the presses with many fewer hours of labor. As a first step toward complete digital production, an image setter was being purchased by the printshop to eliminate labor- intensive camera work and strip up of film.

In line with these measures, SWP leaders announced at the Pittsburgh conference that nine people were being released from the shop immediately. Further savings of labor time with the installation of computer-to-plate technology would soon make possible to free up several more people to get jobs in union fractions. Some $235,000 was pledged to a capital fund launched at the conference, covering the costs of the digital image setter and repair of the exterior of the Pathfinder Building in New York City. And an appeal was made for an additional $400,000 to buy and install the computer-to-plate system, with any funds raised over and above that going to pay down the outstanding debt on the presses in the printshop, eliminating the lien held by the finance company.

In a report to the SWP National Committee meeting on "The Digital Transformation of the Printshop and Volunteer Reprint Campaign," Steve Clark reported that coming out of the Pittsburgh gathering the leadership of the printshop had not carried out these policies but had instead continued to organize production guided by the "dead hand of the past." The result, Clark said, is that "we are simply three months closer to losing the printshop." In July, August, and September, the bottom line of the printshop had dropped below sustainable levels, bringing the day of reckoning closer. Over the past few weeks, as the source of this ruinous course became apparent to the party's Political Committee, it had relaunched the campaign to maintain the printing and publishing apparatus of the communist movement.

As Mary-Alice Waters explained during the discussion, the resistance to carrying out the third campaign for the turn in the branches, in the fractions, and in the National Committee itself was taking on its most concentrated expression in the apparatus of the communist movement.

The need for a campaign to carry out the party decisions presented in Pittsburgh, Clark said, had been presented and discussed at two three-hour meetings of the workers who volunteer to run the printshop just prior to the opening of the National Committee meeting. The prepress department - which had not only been maintained but in fact expanded following that Active Workers Conference - had been eliminated. As decided months earlier, all work in the shop, including the use of the new digital equipment, will now be organized through two production departments: the press department - including press operators, the sales force, and customer service representatives - and the bindery.

This is how the books, pamphlets, and other communist literature needed by fighting workers and youth will now be produced. And this is how the sales force can work with customers to bring them over to this new digital process, as well as break into new markets to compete for printing jobs, in order to help sustain the publishing program of the communist movement.

Central to carrying out this course is the decision to move ahead over the next four to six weeks with the purchase and installation of the new computer-to-plate equipment. A report on the Capital Fund Campaign by Jack Willey at the National Committee meeting in Chicago relaunched the international effort to raise the $550,000 needed to finance this equipment and pay off earlier loans (see accompanying article).

On what basis can the National Committee, and the members and supporters of the communist movement as a whole, responsibly judge that this effort to save the printshop can succeed, when the very same decisions announced in Pittsburgh three months earlier were not carried out by the shop leadership? asked Jack Barnes during the discussion. The only basis, he answered, is the decision coming out of the National Committee meeting to lead the third campaign for the turn. As the revolution in the branches and trade union fractions of the party advances, the conditions to lead the cadres in the printshop to transform the production of revolutionary books and pamphlets will also be created.

The cadres in the shop on whom this transformation depends, Barnes said, are those who are most driven politically to read the communist literature they print and bind. Those who, for that reason, always subordinate individual or narrow shop considerations to the party's political needs and priorities.

Every member of the printshop staff, Clark said in his summary of the discussion on the report, must be fighting to lead the campaign to make it possible to keep the books and pamphlets of the communist movement in print. At the staff meetings on the eve of the National Committee meeting, he said, the shop leadership finally began to confront these questions and set a course that allows the members of the shop to take the next steps forward.

Those who volunteer to take assignments in the shop, Clark said, must be those who have been leading the branches and fractions, as well as chapters of the Young Socialists, along a proletarian course. This interconnection will be the case in a particularly concentrated way in the New York and Newark branches, the organizer of the Newark branch executive committee had pointed out earlier in the National Committee meeting. The cadres who volunteer in the printshop are members of those two branches, he said, and the fight to reorient the branches along a proletarian line of march will make a significant contribution to the transformation of the printshop as well.

Volunteer reprint campaign
Clark also reported on the steps taken by the leadership of the international volunteer effort to digitize Pathfinder books and pamphlets to reach the 10 books per month needed at the current pace of sales to prevent titles from going out of stock. Since the work got under way in May, the volunteers have produced five books, an average of one per month.

The previous weekend, the San Francisco-based steering committee that leads the volunteer reprint campaign had organized a policy-setting meeting in Detroit to confront this gap between what is needed and what has been done, with the aim of adopting a battle plan to rapidly close it. Participating were the members of the steering committee - Peggy Brundy, Ruth Cheney, Jerry Gardner, and Tom Tomasko; and the members of the SWP national leadership responsible for centralizing the party's work with the volunteers on this project - Norton Sandler of San Francisco, and Argiris Malapanis and Steve Clark of New York. Others taking part in the discussions there were Toni Gorton and Steve Marshall of Detroit; Janice Prescott and Mike Shur of New York; and Bobbi Sack of Cincinnati.

Participants in the Detroit meeting worked through a detailed schedule of deadlines to deliver 20 books to the Pathfinder printshop between now and the end of the year - five in October, seven in November, and eight in December - putting them on the road to the needed 10-plus books per month. They discussed and settled a number of policy matters to help break through the bottlenecks that had been holding up production. These included adoption of a workflow plan and quality control procedures drawn up by Toni Gorton for the reconstruction in digital form of book covers, photo signatures, and graphics, and the decision to organize volunteers' work on graphics out of Cincinnati. Gorton will be responsible for quality control on design.

In order to break through the logjam of some 18 books suspended for weeks on end at various stages of proofreading - many of them between 80 and 90 percent done - new procedures were instituted to organize the work of the more than 90 volunteers working on this aspect of the project. The meeting decided that volunteer proofreaders will be notified immediately if they fail to meet their deadlines, and the work will be reassigned within a couple of days if the job is not completed.

A plan submitted by Tom Tomasko to organize the completion of the scanning of all 350 Pathfinder titles by January 2000 was adopted, in order to create a bank of electronic files ready for proofreading and formatting, and to free up these volunteers to join in other aspects of the work as soon as possible.

The volunteers also drew a negative balance sheet on their initial decision to format the books using Microsoft Word. They decided to get the project off the Bill Gates treadmill of planned obsolescence and perpetual "upgrades" of Microsoft's computer software programs. The volunteer organizers voted to transfer formatting work to the PageMaker desktop publishing program instead.

Most important, the meeting made several proposals on the overall organization and leadership of this effort. These were subsequently discussed and decided at a meeting of the Bay Area steering committee two days prior to the National Committee meeting. Ruth Cheney, the project director, who had taken the initiative to launch this volunteer effort at the beginning of the year, took responsibility once again for organizing the proofreading, as she had done in the opening months of the project. Jerry Gardner and Tom Tomasko, respectively, will continue centralizing the formatting and the scanning. And Peggy Brundy will function as the overall production manager, monitoring the various deadlines for each of the books in order to meet the schedule to supply the final product to the printshop.

Prior to the Detroit meeting, none of the members of the steering committee had been responsible for this overall management task - one of the main factors contributing to the slow pace at which books were being completed. The steering committee agreed that Prescott would work closely with Brundy, pulling together the text and graphics for each book and burning it on a CD-ROM for delivery to Pathfinder. Sandler, a member of the SWP National Committee and leader of the San Francisco branch, will now serve as the organizer of the Bay Area steering committee of the international project.

In addition, the volunteers reviewed a detailed budget for the graphics work necessary to digitize the Pathfinder arsenal. They estimated that it will cost $70,000 to complete the entire project, and they launched a $35,000 fund to cover the costs for the coming year, with the goal of $5,000 by January 1 to complete the first 20 books and pamphlets.

From the start, the volunteers established the policy that the entire digitization effort would be self-financing by the individuals involved - that not a cent of the resources of the party would be spent on this work. Volunteers purchase their own computers and printers, software programs, scanners, and other needed equipment and materials. The proofing and other costs related to the work of the relatively small graphics team, however, are well beyond the expenses involved in other aspects of this project, requiring some centralized fund- raising.

The volunteers will organize to raise these funds through their own efforts, going after donations that do not cut into contributions by active supporters and other friends of the communist movement to the Capital Fund, to semiannual fund drives, or to regular monthly pledges. Ruth Cheney has volunteered to head up this special fund-raising effort, and Tom Tomasko will serve as the director of the fund.

Workers will join to fight fascists
In his closing remarks at the National Committee meeting, Barnes noted that workers and young people will be attracted to and join the communist movement to effectively combat the ultrarightist attacks on workers' struggles that will grow as the class struggle sharpens, not to cope with economic depression. He was summarizing a thread of discussion that began the first day of the meeting, when one participant said that a member of his branch had asked, "What will we do when the depression hits?"

There's nothing the working class and its vanguard can do to prevent the capitalist system from entering a depression, but what vanguard workers do to prepare for the coming battles will be decisive in whether fascist forces can triumph over the working-class fight for socialism in the coming years.

Barnes pointed to "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold," a resolution adopted by the SWP national convention in 1988. It listed the cumulative effects of the falling average rate of profits of the capitalist rulers worldwide under nine subheadings: intensified interimperialist competition; overproduction and excess capacity; declining capital investment in capacity-increasing plant and equipment; speculative binge and debt explosion; U.S. bank and business failures; devastation of semi colonial countries; farm crisis in imperialist countries; declining real wages and accelerating speedup; and rising unemployment and growing relative surplus population. In the last 10 years all of these trends have become more pronounced than they were at the time.

The point communists must keep explaining, Barnes said, is that as struggles heat up there will be two forces, the working class vanguard and the ultraright, who know that the question of power will be settled in the streets. Rightist forces are growing in every imperialist country today. They feed off the politics of resentment, off the scandalmongering and pornographication of politics, such as the current hearings in the U.S. Congress over President William Clinton's sexual affairs.

Commenting on this, Tom Alter, who works in a packinghouse in Iowa, pointed out that supporters of fascist politician Lyndon LaRouche were campaigning at a recent protest rally of farmers he attended. "I want to find people who will be with me when forces like that get stronger," he said, "not people who are worried about having enough money in a depression."

As working-class politics accelerates, there will be more workers who come to the party already leading vanguard struggles in industry, Barnes concluded. They will join the party for two reasons, he said, to broaden their political scope and because they're convinced joining will make them more effective in the fights they're involved in. The third campaign for the turn aims to make the SWP that kind of party.

 
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home