BY JEFF ARTHUR
ATLANTA - "This conference has been earned by the progress the party is making in advancing the third campaign for the turn," said Norton Sandler. Speaking for the Socialist Workers Party's Trade Union Committee, a body charged with leading the party's work in the industrial unions, Sandler opened a national conference of socialist trade unionists here August 28-29.

Some 150 members of the SWP and Young Socialists - workers in the garment, textile, meatpacking, rail, steel, oil, airline, aerospace, and automobile industries - met to discuss how they are advancing their ability to function as competent fighters alongside a growing layer of workers and farmers today resisting the devastating conditions created by the workings of the world capitalist system. At the center of this effort by the party and YS is the third campaign for the turn - a concerted drive to get jobs in packinghouses, garment shops, textile mills, and coal mines; to deepen relations with toilers in the countryside; and to transform the day- to-day functioning of the party in order to respond to the rising proletarian movement in a timely and revolutionary centralist manner.

A four-month campaign to sell the Pathfinder Press title Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium to bookstores, libraries, and other outlets where workers and farmers buy books is helping to advance this effort.

In her report to the conference, SWP Trade Union Committee organizer Nan Bailey from Seattle explained that there are the beginnings of a proletarian movement in U.S. cities and rural areas. This includes groups of workers and farmers who increasingly sense they share a common future and face a common exploiter - the wealthy handful of ruling-class families. Acting on this fact, the SWP and the Young Socialists have launched the campaign to sell Capitalism's World Disorder to bookstores and libraries.

The book is a collection of five speeches by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes that presents a working- class explanation of the evolution of world politics over the last decade. It serves to clarify that the mounting chaos and devastation is a product of the inevitable workings of the capitalist system, which is increasingly being resisted by workers and farmers who reach out to each other for solidarity.

Selling `Capitalism's World Disorder'
The campaign to sell the book is centered in the areas where the resistance of workers and farmers is taking place, as well as near the plants where socialist workers and Young Socialists are organized into factory and union- based units known as fractions, Bailey explained. Socialist workers are seeking the assistance of fellow fighters and co-workers in getting Capitalism's World Disorder placed in the bookstores, libraries, and the other outlets where workers and farmers get their books.

"Don't just go down the old list" of bookstores that have carried Pathfinder books in the past, stressed Joel Britton, in his report to the conference. A Trade Union Committee member from Chicago, Britton reported on discussions with coal miners in southern Illinois about the book campaign. Such discussions need to be at the center of the effort to distribute Capitalism's World Disorder.

Following the conference of socialist workers in the unions, Bailey headed up a two-day team to North Carolina that included a Young Socialist and a couple of rail workers who had attended the meeting. They sold two copies of Capitalism's World Disorder to a bookstore in Charlotte, where strikers at Continental General Tire will be leading the first Labor Day parade in many years September 6.

They then traveled to the eastern part of the state to sell the book and the Militant at a textile mill, a poultry plant, and park-and-ride areas where workers meet for the two-hour commute to the Newport News shipyard in Virginia. They visited several bookstores and libraries, laying the groundwork for possible sales in the future, and met several workers at the Center for Women's Economic Alternatives in Ahoskie, North Carolina.

Another team through North Carolina is planned following the Charlotte Labor Day parade.

Chicago packinghouse worker Harvey MacArthur described an experience he had the previous week with a co-worker who joined him in a visit to a local library near the plant to meet with the librarian there about the book.

The book campaign is also another step toward transforming the Socialist Workers Party. Its aim is to advance the functioning of the SWP as a party whose members and local units carry out centralized and directed initiatives to reach fighting workers and farmers. Properly led, the campaign will integrate every member of the party into the new proletarian movement and involve all members in the placement of the book in stores and libraries, along with participation in mass work, picket lines, and farm actions.

Struggles by coal miners - both union and nonunion - will converge as they are forced to take on the mine owners, stated Jack Willey in a report by the Trade Union Committee that detailed the effort to get socialist workers hired in coal mines. The industry has changed a great deal since the late 1970s, noted Willey. The percentage of coal mined by members of the United Mine Workers of America continues to shrink, a legacy of the union tops' class collaboration and the companies' schemes to get around union contracts. More coal is being mined than ever, and with fewer miners. The coal bosses are hiring today in the most productive mines, many of which are nonunion. He cited the experience of a socialist worker in Appalachia who just got hired in a nonunion underground mine but is working side-by-side with miners who previously worked in UMWA-organized mines. These miners, said Willey, bring with them the tradition of the UMWA in working safely underground.

Jeff Powers, a member of the United Transportation Union in Seattle, spoke in the discussion about a team that recently visited Colorado coal fields where a significant number of young workers are being hired in the mines, including women. Powers met a miner on the picket line at the Deserado mine in Colorado who had been on strike recently. This worker bought a copy of Capitalism's World Disorder and a subscription to the Militant, Powers explained, because "he liked our coverage of Kosova. His father was a socialist, and stood up for years to red- baiting. He had been stationed in Japan in the Navy, and had been to Hiroshima [where Washington dropped the atomic bomb], which deeply affected him." This miner liked talking with the young socialists he met when teams came out to the picket line over the past couple of months.

Willey noted that the changes in the working class are not limited to those presently organized in unions. Struggles over safety and conditions in the mines will inevitably break out, and the young miners will find their way to rebuilding the union. Conference participants voted to concur with the Trade Union Committee's proposal that where a factory committee has been established in a nonunion coal mine, or in a nonunion garment shop, textile mill, or meatpacking plant, those socialist workers will be part of the party's national fractions that are based on the unions.

Competence as struggles break out
Carrying out communist work under these conditions and learning to how to be competent in nonunion situations requires advancing to a higher level of centralization and discipline, Willey emphasized.

The importance of competence in the trade union struggles and skirmishes breaking out on the job already was taken up in a report on "Structuring Branches and Fractions through Mass Work: Experience of a Detroit Factory Fraction," by Jean-Luc Duval. A UAW member, Duval detailed a fight by workers at the large auto parts plant where he works in Detroit against moves by the bosses there to drastically speed up production and gut hard-won rights, to the point of refusing to allow workers to use the bathroom while the assembly line is running. Several workers, including Duval, were suspended when they demanded union representation to protest moves to implement the new conditions. Workers organized themselves on the shop floor and successfully pushed the company back, including on the suspensions.

Socialist workers' participation in other struggles on the job were also taken up during the conference at meetings of each of the SWP's national trade union fractions: in the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW); Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); United Auto Workers (UAW); United Transportation Union (UTU); International Association of Machinists (IAM); and United Steelworkers of America (USWA). Members of the Paperworkers, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Union in Houston also met. The fractions elected new steering committees to direct their work over the next several months.

A few days prior to the conference, more than 50 airline workers were arrested at the airport in Miami and charged with being part of a drug and gun smuggling scheme. Ernie Mailhot, a member of the IAM in Miami, explained that the government and American Airlines had worked for two years to set up an elaborate entrapment operation, targeting workers at American and Lufthansa Sky Chefs. A massive news media campaign has been whipped up against airport workers. Mailhot pointed out that similar moves were carried out at Eastern Airlines in 1986, when workers and some Eastern bosses were arrested. None were ever convicted. This has nothing to do with preventing drug smuggling. The aim is to chip away at airport workers' democratic rights.

Forging links with farmers, rural poor
Holly Wilson, organizer of the Minnesota State Committee of the SWP, described the deep crisis facing farmers today in a report on "Following the Natural Lines of Resistance by Workers and Farmers in the Upper Midwest." The price of commodities is lower than the price of production, and farmers are losing land they have had in their families for generations. It has become difficult in the Midwest for farmers to even rent land. Many farmers, Wilson said, "are losing the illusion that politicians and bankers promote that they can make it and get rich, and that they have no connection to the working class." No revolutionary workers party can be built in the United States, Wilson emphasized, "that is not deeply part of this broad proletarian movement. Among all the toilers, revolutionaries campaign for a fighting alliance of workers and farmers. Ongoing work among farmers and those toilers associated with them is the fourth aspect of the party's third campaign for the turn." Books such as Capitalism's World Disorder, Wilson said, help fighters in the countryside and the city draw far-reaching conclusions.

Wilson emphasized that the orientation toward impoverished toilers in the countryside is not limited to one part of the country. It is as important for the party in Minnesota as it is in Georgia.

Ultrarightist outfits operate in the farm movement promoting "radical" schemes. But there is big interest from among farmers about the working-class struggles. "Farmers have more confidence that they can figure out what is going on," said Tom Fiske, an airline worker in the Twin Cities. At a recent rally of 1,200 farmers in Waconia, Minnesota, Fiske noted that, "you could have serious political discussions" even as a parade of politicians spoke from the stage. Wilson added that farmers at the Waconia rally were particularly interested in the Militant's coverage of strikes in the labor movement like the one recently concluded in Newport News, Virginia.

Arlene Rubinstein spoke of two Georgia farmers who have been using Capitalism's World Disorder and other Pathfinder books to help understand demagogues such as Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura. They have become supporters of the campaign to place the book where other farmers can obtain it.

Kathie Fitzgerald, a member of the UTU in Newark, New Jersey, said farmers she met at a fair in Warren County, New Jersey, rejected government plans to give them more loans in the face of the drought that hit much of the eastern region of the country this summer. They are demanding cash relief. Fitzgerald also met farmers at a livestock auction in Hackettstown, New Jersey, where farmers have been forced to sell their animals because they cannot afford to feed them.

Socialists from Philadelphia recently visited Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to meet with dairy farmers hit hard by falling milk prices and the drought.

Although socialists in the upper Midwest have long participated in farm protests, forums, and rallies, Wilson said that the party there was only at the beginning of doing the work among farmers that was necessary. This means getting to know the younger, fresh forces today leading farm actions. "We have to have our eyes on the ranks in the countryside, just like we do in the labor movement," Wilson emphasized.

The Young Socialists will also place promotion of Capitalism's World Disorder at the center of their work this fall, said YS National Executive Committee member Samantha Kern in a report on "Advancing the Proletarianization of the Young Socialists." This summer was a real success for the YS, Kern said. YS members "got a chance to work together": in a summer class series, in factories alongside SWP members, on regional teams to mining and meatpacking towns, plantgate sales, strike picket lines, and working-class communities.

The summer program was capped with the Active Workers Conference in early August and a "Red Week," where dozens of young socialists and others worked together on maintenance projects in the Pathfinder Building in New York. Young Socialists plan to join in regional teams, at Labor Day weekend regional socialist education conferences, and the upcoming book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, Kern reported.

Jason Alessio, a Young Socialist and student at the University of California-Santa Cruz, worked as a meatpacker this summer. He also joined strikers on their picket lines at the Deserado mine in Colorado, and more recently among Teamsters vegetable packers in King City, California. For a young person to visit these struggles had a big impact on the strikers, he said, and on himself. Looking back on the summer perspectives the YS carried out, Alessio said, "It really politically sharpened us."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home