BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS AND NAOMI CRAINE
NEW YORK - A new mass vanguard of the working class and its allies on the land is in formation in the United States. This is evident in groupings of workers and farmers who come forward in labor battles and fights over the crisis conditions in the rural areas, who have worked with each other over time, continue campaigning in the interests of the toilers after a particular battle is over, form links of solidarity among themselves and with other fighters, and begin to draw broader conclusions about capitalism.

What a proletarian party does today, through each of its branches and trade union fractions, and what each member of its leading committees does, makes a difference in the outcome.

The urgency of acting on this reality in a timely and concrete way was at the center of the Socialist Workers Party expanded leadership meeting that took place here January 1-3. In addition to members of the SWP's National Committee, participants included members of the party's Trade Union Committee, a delegation chosen by the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, organizers of party branches, and leaders of Communist Leagues in other countries.

Meeting three months earlier, the National Committee had decided to launch a campaign to deepen the proletarianization of the party and rebuild concentrations of socialist workers in eight industrial unions, where socialists' functioning had become routinized during the previous years of retreat of the labor movement.

The numbers of socialist workers in the garment, meatpacking, and coal mining industries had particularly dwindled, while fractions in rail, steel, and the Machinists union grew to be more like job trusts of relatively privileged workers than combat units of a revolutionary party.

The campaign to reverse the cumulative and depoliticizing effects of this retreat, particularly by getting many more party members into garment, meatpacking, and mining, was the third such effort since the SWP's initial turn to industry was launched as a nationwide campaign in 1978. (A report on the October 3-5 National Committee meeting appeared in the Oct. 19, 1998, Militant.)

The January 1-3 meeting opened with a report by Joel Britton, a member of the SWP's Trade Union Committee, on steps leaders of several party branches and trade union fractions had begun carrying out to advance and extend this third campaign for the turn to industry.

Radical organizational moves
This includes what may seem like radical organizational moves in response to the specific character of the resistance by vanguard layers of workers - taking jobs beyond the immediate areas of the cities where party branches are located today, and moving geographically in some cases to be able to collaborate more closely with workers who are in struggle.

A few days before the National Committee meeting, the Chicago branch decided that four of its members will move to central Illinois. This is an area where vanguard groups of workers have emerged from various labor battles in recent years, including the 98-day strike by 350 miners at the Freeman United Coal Co. that ended in December. A number of miners who went through that fight are discussing the lessons of that strike battle and how to continue building solidarity with others.

A layer of United Auto Workers (UAW) members at Caterpillar Corp., organized as the Tactical Response Team or Blue Shirts, who came together through a seven-year contract fight, are also building solidarity with other labor struggles. For instance, they have been part of mobilizing support for a strike by 82 UAW members at Tazewell Machine Works in Pekin, Illinois, determined not to let these workers go down to defeat.

A letter by Rodney Garman, one of the Blue Shirts in East Peoria, Illinois, was published in the Peoria Journal Star last June under the title "Caterpillar wants to crush working people's aspirations" (see box below). A number of militant workers in the area look at this letter as their manifesto too, Britton pointed out.

The Chicago branch of the SWP as a whole, not just the four members who are moving, will be orienting more to mining in central and southern Illinois, to working with these groups of class-struggle campaigners, and to getting jobs in garment and meatpacking, both in the city and in the broader region.

Members of the Minneapolis-St. Paul branch are looking for work in the big packinghouses a couple hours' drive from the Twin Cities. Given the weight of these plants in the industry nationally, this is important in being able to build a national fraction of socialist workers in the meatpacking section of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) union. The 1985-86 strike by members of UFCW Local P-9 at the Hormel plant in Austin, Minnesota, marked a break in a several-year rout of the labor movement in the United States. It helped inspire a wave of strikes in other packinghouses, and encouraged paperworkers and others to begin to fight against concession demands from their bosses.

Responsibility toward fellow fighters
In the discussion at the meeting Joe Swanson, a UAW member in Des Moines, Iowa, pointed to the responsibility of communists toward fellow fighters. He recalled the editorial the Militant published following the defeat of the 1985-86 Hormel strike. It frankly took up the challenge before the 850 meatpackers who were then locked out of the Austin plant of joining in support of other packinghouse battles and advancing the use of union power, as the road to winning the jobs back in Austin.

Swanson also pointed to the role the party can play in advancing the alliance of workers and farmers, saying three of his co-workers who are Black have said they would like to bring one of the Black farmers involved in the fight against the decades-long racist discrimination by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to speak in Iowa.

It was in the course of the battles in the mid-1980s that the Socialist Workers Party decided to get some of its members into the UFCW. This fraction has been concentrated in the beef and pork sectors of the UFCW; the union also includes retail clerks, poultry workers, and many others. Socialist workers are also relating to and organizing solidarity with other struggles by UFCW members. These include the fight for justice by catfish workers at Freshwater Farms in Belzoni, Mississippi (see article in last week's Militant) and the strike by more than 300 poultry workers in Indiana (see article on front page).

One Young Socialists member is currently working in a poultry plant organized by the UFCW in Alabama. After a couple of months of arguing that "we're not focusing on poultry," the party branch in Birmingham, at the urging of the national trade union leadership, decided party members need to join her there.

While there are more party members in meatpacking and garment today than three months ago, the shifts until the eve of the SWP National Committee meeting had been mostly reforms of the existing fraction structures, not the revolutionary changes that are needed to end the old habits of retreat and rebuild trade union fractions as political units of a revolutionary party. The concentration of party members in rail and the airlines especially had been largely unaffected by the initial months of the third campaign for the turn to industry.

Rail workers in the Pittsburgh SWP are taking some initiatives to change this. They decided in late December that all of them will be part of the search for jobs in meatpacking, garment, and coal mining - a decision the party's National Committee concurred with.

It was a meeting of socialist workers in the United Transportation Union (UTU) in late September that first began to face the fact that the party's fraction in rail had become more like a job trust than a unit of a proletarian party. Without a perspective of building fractions in all eight of the unions where the party had decided to concentrate its forces, "being in the UTU no longer becomes a political assignment but a job," Sam Manuel, who organizes the steering committee of socialist workers in that union, said at that meeting.

After essentially ignoring a strike by 59 anthracite miners at a mine in eastern Pennsylvania for several months, the Philadelphia branch decided that the only way they can build a proletarian branch of the party is to get involved in that fight, including building solidarity in their unions, and to relate to fights in other anthracite mines in the area.

Every branch of the party can and must be part of work in the coal fields as part of rebuilding a miners fraction, Britton said in his report.

As socialist workers and Young Socialists field more teams in coal mining areas - in the East, South, and West - their goal is not simply to reach out to miners and other working people and youth with the Militant and other political weapons. They are above all looking for hiring in the mines in order to help rebuild a fraction in the UMWA to go through experiences shoulder-to-shoulder with the miners. This work is carried out in a centralized and careful manner under the direction of the party's Coal Committee and the Trade Union Committee.

These are examples of the kind of steps needed by every branch and trade union fraction, Britton said, between now and the 40th SWP constitutional convention, which the National Committee called for April 1-4 in San Francisco.

It's by acting along these lines that the party can realize the goal of bringing five to 10 times the number of vanguard workers and farmers to the party convention as came to the December 4-6 Young Socialists convention. This goal was laid out by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes in his closing summary to the socialist conference that took place in Los Angeles together with the YS convention. (A report on the YS convention and party/youth conference appeared in the Dec. 28, 1998, Militant.)

Leading the Young Socialists
Carrying out the course described by Britton is the only way to help the Young Socialists recruit and take the next steps in becoming a nationwide communist organization, said Mary-Alice Waters in a report to the National Committee meeting titled, "The Party and Vanguard Workers: Leading the Young Socialists."

The YS convention, she noted, marked a political turning point in the third campaign for the turn. It brought together nearly 100 revolutionary-minded youth - dozens of them not yet members of the Young Socialists - and a number of workers and farmers involved in struggles such as the Freeman miners strike in Illinois, the fight by Black farmers for their land and against government discrimination, and the lockout at Crown Central Petroleum in Texas.

It showed concretely what is already happening in the class struggle, and convinced a much bigger layer of party members that the branches and trade union fractions needed to make the necessary shifts in response to this sea change in working- class politics.

In a report to the YS convention on the "Young Socialists Manifesto," published in New International no. 11, Samantha Kern stressed that the YS is a youth organization with a proletarian orientation above all because of its relationship through the Socialist Workers Party to the broader working- class vanguard. That's what makes the YS different from other youth groups. The participation of Young Socialists in social protest activity has more weight than that of other youth because of this connection to the fighting vanguard of the working class.

Revolutionary-minded youth are drawn to the SWP today through their attraction to the working class. Likewise, workers who are joining in struggle are attracted to the revolutionary youth. And both need the party to come together, Waters said.

The YS convention had an impact both on youth and on the workers and farmers who came. Waters related that one young person who came from the San Francisco area commented that in listening to greetings and classes by workers and farmers involved in struggles, "I saw forces concretely that can change the world."

Workers there were also attracted by what they saw in the Young Socialists, such as the description by Ryan Lewis, a YS member who works in the party's printshop. Lewis, 23, described heading up crews on the web press that prints the Militant. In the craft structure of capitalist factories, this kind of position takes years or decades to qualify for. Another worker in the shop, Ryan Kelly, was elected to the new YS National Executive Committee, the first shop "graduate" to be released for that kind of assignment in recent years.

It took the party leadership working politically with the Young Socialists to get to that convention and conference. At the heart of the third campaign for the turn is for the party to do this in every area - not intervene in the YS organizationally, but work politically with every YS unit and young person coming around.

It means not ignoring the Young Socialists - like the example of party members who rationalized leaving a YS member to work alone in a poultry plant, because it's easier than working with them politically. It means the party's units and its individual leaders going out of their way to make sure that Young Socialists are always included and worked with as equals in teams to the coal fields, farming areas, and all mass work.

Anticipate and act with urgency
The Young Socialists convention and socialist conference gave a glimpse of the cells of class struggle cadre that are forming in the working class, in union struggles and other fights today, and of the initial fruits of the work of the communist movement with them.

During one of the discussion periods Eddie Slaughter, one of the leaders of the Black farmers' struggle, addressed David Yard, who was then on strike at Freeman United Coal. Slaughter suggested that some of the farmers fighting government discrimination should join the Freeman miners' picket lines in solidarity, and urged the miners to come to the next court hearing in their lawsuit.

Other workers such as Ron Martin, a member of the Boilermakers union in Birmingham, also joined in discussing how to strengthen solidarity with the miners.

It's impossible today for the rulers to close the political space and prevent groups of workers from getting to know each other, broadening their scope, and fighting for others. Farmers and workers find each other, especially where there's broader social and political issues involved. It raises the political level of the discussion when these workers and farmers come in contact with communist workers who are also part of their fights.

Small groupings of workers that are potential parties start to develop before any particular strike breaks out, and don't disappear afterward, Britton noted in his report to the National Committee meeting. He quoted a passage from the Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It explained that in battles with the employers, "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers."

At the YS convention and socialist conference, Jack Barnes had noted that the SWP must have the perspective not only of recruiting individual workers to the party but fusing the party with groups of vanguard workers that are being forged today. This can only happen over time, through working together.

In a period like this, a communist party has an obligation to do what vanguard fighters assume it is committed to do. Party branches and trade union fractions could have been working to build the kind of solidarity Eddie Slaughter described between Black farmers and the Freeman strikers from early in the strike, Barnes noted in the political report to the National Committee meeting. Helping to bring some Black farmers to the miners' picket lines could have had a weighty role in the outcome of that confrontation, particularly since the company had hired Vance "security" thugs during the strike, many of them Black.

If the party had acted during the entire 98 days of the Illinois miners strike as it did in the last three to four weeks of that battle, it could have helped the miners to come out of the fight even stronger than they did. Unless the party makes the changes necessary to turn this mode of functioning into a habit, it will become an organization that rationalizes a course leading to defeats of the working class and its allies.

The order of the day for the party's individual leaders, and for its branches and fractions, is to anticipate developments in politics and act with urgency to help organize solidarity with toilers confronting the enemy class, Barnes said in his report. Otherwise the party will increasingly drop behind the expanding proletarian vanguard in formation.

It was a couple of militant Black farmers and workers who led SWP members in Alabama and Georgia to reach out to striking catfish workers in the South. When the party catches up to workers like these, Barnes said, it will then be in a position to recruit such vanguard fighters. It will then be transformed into a party whose cadres have the self-confidence to lead in battle - which other militant workers will be able to see, appreciate, and act on.

Tom Leonard from Houston, a longtime leader of the party's trade union work, also spoke to the urgency of transforming the work of the party's branches and union fractions. "Hundreds of workers are acting as if what we've been saying about the world is true. We're recognizing now that these vanguard workers had broken out of the retreat before we had," he noted. "We have a political responsibility to join them."

Reforms: product of revolution
Marching along this proletarian course necessitates strengthening the party's fractions in the Union of Needletrades Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) and the UFCW in every branch, and expanding the number of branches into the active effort to rebuild a fraction in the UMWA, Barnes said.

That is the road the party, together with the Young Socialists, must travel to successfully advance the third campaign for the turn to industry. Turning to building these three fractions today will strengthen the SWP as a party structured around eight industrial fractions with a proletarian - not a job-trust - character.

Shifting personnel among the party's other five union fractions - in the rail, steel, oil and chemical, auto, and machinists unions - can slightly strengthen the party's organization in one or another area, but by itself is simply a reform that goes nowhere. Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin continually stressed that all reforms are byproducts of revolutionary action, Barnes noted.

Attempts at reform alone stifle and stop revolutionary activity. "In order to consolidate the achievements of the bourgeois-democratic revolution for the peoples of Russia, we were obliged to go farther; and we did go farther," Lenin said in 1921, speaking on the fourth anniversary of the October revolution. "We solved the problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution in passing, as a `by-product' of our main and genuinely proletarian-revolutionary, socialist activities."

There is no correct number for a national UFCW fraction, or fraction in UNITE. The task is to shift enough members into these fractions in every branch, so that revolutionary work in these unions becomes an integral part of the political life of the branches. The UNITE fraction should be among the largest of the party's eight fractions, given that there are garment shops spread throughout the country and textile plants in many areas.

In the revolutionary change needed in the party today, the best example so far is in Chicago, where the entire branch is becoming involved in carrying out this course, Barnes said. Four members of the branch are moving to central Illinois, where they will get jobs and carry out rounded political work, including being able to have regular collaboration with coal miners, Caterpillar workers, and others who are beginning to think and act to advance the interests of the proletariat.

The key thing in Chicago is generalizing the collective method of work and rounded political activity that the entire branch will be carrying out. The biggest effect is not on the four branch members who are moving, but on the Chicago branch as a whole, as work to build the garment, meatpacking, and coal fractions and to revolutionize the political work on the job in all unions come to dominate politics in the branch.

Bonapartism, liberalism, imperialist war
Underlying the party's efforts is the political assessment that the spreading crisis of capitalist overproduction - and the instability and struggles it breeds - will continue to unfold. And that the space for vanguard workers and farmers to meet and forge links of solidarity is not a temporary phenomenon.

The SWP's 1988 convention resolution, "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold," pointed to the effects of this crisis in a section headed, "Cumulative consequences of falling average rate of profits." The following list of subheadings from this section gives an accurate picture of the world today: 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 semicolonial countries; Farm crisis in imperialist countries; Declining real wages and accelerating speedup; and Rising unemployment and growing relative surplus population. (This document is published in New International no. 10.)

The employing classes cannot reverse this crisis without first dealing much deeper blows to the working class at home and abroad, and without going to war with each other.

Greater rivalry among the imperialist powers marks the day. This was highlighted by the start of the euro - the attempt at a common currency of most of the European Union member countries - on January 1. After decades in which the dollar served as the unquestioned reserve currency of world capitalism, there is now the prospect of real competition between the dollar, the euro, and the Japanese yen.

The resulting instability of the world capitalist order is behind the decline in confidence in the leading personnel of the imperialist democracies among the rulers and among millions of working people.

The current crisis facing the administration of William Clinton is qualitatively deeper than the Watergate crisis that led to impeachment proceedings and the resignation of then-president Richard Nixon, Barnes said. Forcing Nixon's resignation in 1974 was a bipartisan attempt to cap the damage that Washington suffered as a result of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam and the rise of the Black struggle in the United States at that time. It prepared the later period marked by a retreat of the working class in the 1980s.

No one can predict now where the attempt to remove Clinton from office will lead to.

The impeachment campaign has been led largely by the ultraright, using as its major weapon the "cultural war." This is a term ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan popularized in the early 1990s. It describes an ideological offensive aimed at reversing affirmative action, the right of a woman to choose abortion, and other gains working people have won in struggle. The politics of resentment - targeting scapegoats in a time of economic and social crisis - is aimed at those whom middle- class layers and sections of working people can be convinced are the source of the problems they face, rather than capitalism.

The rise of Buchananism and of Bonapartist figures like the newly elected governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, is not new in bourgeois politics. Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the late 1940s and early 1950s was the first example in the post-World War II period of a leader of an incipient fascist movement. But none of those previous figures arose in conditions of an economic and social crisis that was bound to get worse.

Figures like Buchanan and Ventura flourish in world depression-like conditions under which the radical social demagogy and aggressive economic nationalism are necessary to inspire a cadre that can enable a mass fascist movement to get organized and grow in the future.

The current impeachment assault by the ultraright comes in response to a shift to the left in bourgeois politics in most imperialist countries that has been unfolding for more than two years. It is an attempt to take back through the cultural war what the rulers have not succeeded in reconquering on the field of direct class conflict. It is an offensive from weakness, not strength. One indication of this is the overwhelming opposition among working people to the impeachment of Clinton, shown in most opinion polls, and the refusal of a large majority to be suckered into the trap of the politics of resentment.

The response by the liberals in the White House and Congress to the impeachment campaign has been to shift their proposals on social programs slightly to the right -floating once again proposals to cut Social Security - and accelerating Washington's march towards imperialist war. That's what the now casual and frequent bombings of Iraq by Washington, and the Clinton administration's proposal for the largest increase in the U.S. military budget in 15 years, show.

It is imperative for class-conscious workers not only to join other workers in opposing the rightist impeachment campaign, Barnes said. At the same time they must explain to other fighters why giving even an inch of political credence to liberalism simply means supporting the system that breeds racism, class exploitation, and war. The way to fight rightist forces is not by supporting Democrats.

Under the current objective conditions, political space remains open in the working class for workers and farmers who sense the rottenness of the system, who react to the bankruptcy and corruption of the capitalist world order by seeking the moral high ground, fighting for human solidarity, to struggle and forge alliances.

The capitalist rulers cannot close down this space today. A day will come when a substantial layer in the ruling class will be ready to use more violent methods, turning to fascist forces to try to smash the working class. Between now and then there is time for vanguard workers to find each other, begin to work together, and gain in experience and confidence - time that must be redeemed.

Transforming Pathfinder production
Britton gave a couple of examples of the impact communist workers, and the lessons of earlier class-struggle experiences that they keep in print, can have.

Two of the miners who were on strike at Freeman read the article "The 50-year Domestic Contra Operation," by Larry Seigle, in the New International magazine that explains the origins of the Washington's political police apparatus, and the Pathfinder Press pamphlet Workers Rights Versus the Secret Police, also by Seigle. These were particularly helpful in deciding how to publicly protest the FBI harassment of one of the strikers and his family.

One of the miners also read a photocopy of The 110-Day Coal Strike: Its Meaning for All Working People, and then made a couple dozen copies for other members of the union local. That Pathfinder pamphlet, which is currently out of print, contains the Militant's analysis of the 1977-78 national miners strike (see excerpt on pages 6-7). There's a thirst among many of the miners to learn more about their history and the broader impact of their struggles in society. Pathfinder is now organizing to reprint this pamphlet.

These examples alone justify the efforts by more than 100 supporters of the communist movement around the world to put the entire arsenal of Pathfinder's 350 titles into electronic form. The digitization campaign, and the successful efforts by hundreds of workers around the world to raise the necessary capital to purchase modern computer-to-plate equipment for Pathfinder's printshop, have made possible a revolution in the shop.

The printshop has been able to reduce the size of its staff from 47 to 36 since last summer, while at the same time lowering the cost or production and the skill level necessary to run the shop and maintaining or improving the standards of quality Pathfinder is known for. The goal is to further reduce the size of the printshop to 32 by the party convention.

The challenges of the communist movement on this front, were discussed at the SWP leadership meeting under a report by Mary-Alice Waters, titled, "Transforming Pathfinder production and ourselves as we respond to growing workers' resistance: Toronto II." Waters had given a similar report to an international socialist conference in Toronto last spring.

The report by Waters drew substantially on the experience that participants in the SWP leadership gathering got through a tour of Pathfinder's printshop during the Saturday evening, January 2, session of the party's National Committee meeting. The most striking aspect of the tour was not the new technology, but the increasing confidence of the socialist cadre who work in the shop. (An article on this was published in last week's Militant.)

These socialist workers are also deeply affected by the shifts in the class struggle. The main thing the party leadership can do to continue to advance the transformation of production of revolutionary literature is to extend the party's third campaign for the turn, Waters said.

Preconvention discussion
Over the next three months, while joining other workers and farmers in struggles, SWP branches will organize preconvention discussion based on written documents. The resolutions and strategic reports discussed and adopted by Socialist Workers Party conventions over nearly a decade analyze the deepening crisis of world capitalism that underlies the change in the mass psychology of the working class that the party began fighting to turn toward at its last convention in June 1997.

Four of these documents, based on talks presented by Jack Barnes between June 1992 and January 1995, are collected in the book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, which Pathfinder is in the final stages of preparing for publication in mid-February.

The earliest of the reports to be included in this new book is "Youth and the Communist Movement." It was presented in June 1992 on behalf of the Central Committee of the Communist League in the United Kingdom and leaders of three groups of young socialists in London, Manchester, and Sheffield, and was discussed and adopted by the special congress called to decide on the proposed fusion of the CL and these YS groups. That talk is scheduled for publication as a special feature in an upcoming issue of the Militant.

The introduction to this new collection will draw on the themes at the center of the summary presented to the recent Los Angeles party/youth conference and reports adopted at the January 1-3 National Committee meeting. It will explain why the documents collected in Capitalism's World Disorder are of greater value today as practical political tools to guide the work of vanguard workers and farmers than when they were discussed and adopted by earlier SWP conventions, and why they can now be seen and understood in a clearer light. That introduction will be printed in the Militant in early February.

Party branches will use these two items from Capitalism's World Disorder as the basis for their opening rounds of discussion leading up to the April 1-4 party convention in San Francisco. The other chapters of that book will be incorporated in the preconvention discussion when it is published, along with the 1990 SWP resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" and article "Ours is the Epoch of World Revolution," both published in New International no. 11. Along with these documents, party branches will review the section of "What the 1987 Stock Market Crash Foretold," cited earlier.

Many preconvention documents will therefore be available to members of the Young Socialists and workers and farmers who party members will be working with and encouraging to come to the convention. Party units can organize discussions with these people that parallel the preconvention discussion in the branches over the next three months.

 
 
 
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