The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.9           March 8, 1999 
 
 
A Handbook For Workers And Farmers Who Reach For Solidarity, Offer To Fight With Others: Preface to `Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium'  

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
We are at the beginning of struggles that will bring profound changes. And because this is only the beginning, we can make the mistake of not seeing it soon enough, of not responding by radically changing the understanding and - above all - the timeliness with which we act today from our starting point within, and as part of, a militant vanguard of working people.

A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics

Jack Barnes, December 1998

"A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," the opening chapter of Capitalism's World Disorder, is the real introduction to the pages that follow.

In that talk, given to the closing session of the Young Socialists convention and conference in Los Angeles, California, in December 1998, Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes emphasized a central feature of today's reality.

"A new pattern is being woven in struggle today," he noted, "as working people emerge from a period of retreat, resisting the consequences of the rulers' final blow-off boom, of `globalization' - their grandiloquent term that displays imperial arrogance while it masks brutal assaults on human dignity the world over. The emerging pattern is taking shape, defined by the actions of a vanguard resisting indignity and isolation, whose ranks increase with every single worker or farmer who reaches out to others with the hand of solidarity and offers to fight together."

There is a new mood and growing confidence among clusters of vanguard workers and farmers from one end of the country to the other. We are surprising ourselves and each other as we look around and discover we are not alone. Everywhere we begin to see others like ourselves, working people who are thinking and acting in a similar way, resisting, refusing to be beaten, using the political space that the rulers' instability has opened up, taking what the relationship of forces allows in any skirmish, strengthening ourselves for the next opportunity, broadening our field of vision as we fight, reading and studying and discussing with each other as we look for answers to explain how the wretched world in which we live came to be, how it was imposed on us, and how we can overturn it and build something new.

Capitalism's World Disorder is a handbook for workers and farmers everywhere who increasingly recognize themselves as part of this new vanguard of working people. It is a handbook for young people who are attracted to these proletarian struggles and find their lives transformed as they become part of them. The publication of this book now is more timely than at any moment since the talks included here were first given - precisely because there are increasing opportunities to apply in practice, to use as a guide to action, the facts and ideas encountered in these pages. There are increasing opportunities to measure these analyses against our own daily conditions of life and struggle, correcting and adjusting them as necessary.

The earliest presentation contained in this volume, "Youth and the Communist Movement," is a 1992 report adopted by a fusion convention of the Communist League in the United Kingdom and three groups of young socialists in London, Manchester, and Sheffield. The most recent, which brings the rest of the book into focus for vanguard forces at the millennium, is the summary talk at the Young Socialists Los Angeles conference in December 1998. Reading these two presentations side by side, one is struck by the clarity with which the central challenges and opportunities of working- class politics we face today were already addressed and prepared for by the communist vanguard more than six years earlier.

Comprising the bulk of Capitalism's World Disorder are four talks by Jack Barnes that were given between June 1992 and New Year's weekend 1995. Together they dissect the economic, social, and political underpinnings of the vast mold- shattering changes that swept world politics between the October 1987 near-meltdown of the world's stock markets, and the so-called Mexican peso crisis that hit in December 1994, coinciding with the first government default in the United States since the Great Depression, the Orange County, California, bankruptcy filing.

During those seven years from 1987 to 1995, the world the twenty-first century inherits was born. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the disintegration of the Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union; from the defeat of the white-minority apartheid regime in South Africa to the strengthening of socialist Cuba's world vanguard role; from the brutal and destabilizing imperialist assault on Iraq to the opening of the twenty-first century Balkan Wars; from the bursting of the Japanese economy's miracle "bubble," to the sharpening economic and social indigestion suffered by the German capitalist rulers as they tried to swallow whole the east German workers state - the post-World War II pattern of the twentieth century came to a convulsive end. The outlines of the major forces whose contradictory interrelation already marks the course of the world class struggle had emerged. A historical watershed is now behind us. Today what matters is our ability to use the space that has been opened, to apply what we have come to understand, and to respond with a working- class course of action. We and all others will be judged, daily and uncompromisingly, by the needs of the struggles of the workers and farmers vanguard forming itself across the United States.

If the new millennium was born prematurely, its first wail was heard as the New York stock exchange plunged 500 points on October 19, 1987, losing 23 percent of its value in one day. The tremors rocked financial markets and capitalist confidence around the world. But when all was said and done, the October 1987 crash remained a market event that most capitalists soon recovered from. It was not yet the opening of an accelerated worldwide economic and social crisis, devastating the lives of millions, with repercussions on every level of financial, banking, trade, and production relations, as well as on the unfolding of political and military conflicts.

The 1987 crash did announce the inevitable that was coming. The opening of the "Asian crisis" ten years later - from Jakarta to Moscow - confirmed that the future had arrived and was now irreversible.

Most importantly, along with that reality has come the growing resistance of the toilers worldwide, including in the imperialist centers. A shift in mass psychology has occurred. It marks every new struggle, every anticipation of the spread and polarizing results of rightist initiatives, every gesture of solidarity, every use of political space to advance discussion and unity among workers and farmers who have gone into action.

Among proletarian militants who are engaged in scattered actions now a communist party is being prepared. Currents and individuals, from different pasts, are finding out about each other and reaching in practice today toward a unified future, a political future. They are being led toward each other by the need for mutual solidarity and broader understanding of the forces behind a seemingly chaotic, conspiratorial world. Through broadening and accelerating this process, any current claiming to be communist must stand, act, fight, and be counted. Within this multifaceted effort, for a revolutionary- minded toiler nothing is impossible; outside of it, all one can do is hide for a while - more and more denying even the knowledge that such change is occurring. In one direction lies the line of march along which a communist party will be forged. In the other is the drift of the League of the Just into self-induced oblivion.

*****

Each of the presentations collected in this volume was discussed and adopted by conventions and other leadership bodies of the Socialist Workers Party, and its co-thinkers in communist leagues around the world. The usefulness of the talks, as well as their liveliness and interest, however, stems from the fact that these are not analytical essays composed in retrospect. Each chapter is based on a report given in the midst of fast-breaking events, to groups of thinking and acting vanguard workers and youth who came together, often from different parts of the globe, to discuss and deepen their understanding of the unfolding class struggle as they were in the very process of responding to its demands. In editing them for publication the sequence of points has sometimes been rearranged, and questions and discussion that took place during meetings on the same subject in different cities have been combined, but there is nothing in these pages that a reader who attended the events at which these talks and reports were given would not have heard and even joined the issue from the floor or raised their hand to vote on. As a result, this book in fact reflects the experiences of a party, not just the views of a speaker.

Capitalism's World Disorder should be read as a companion volume not only to the second expanded edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, published in 1994, but also together with issue no. 11 of New International. The centerpiece of that issue of the magazine of Marxist politics and theory is a resolution adopted by the Socialist Workers Party in August 1990. Entitled "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," it lays out in thesis form the main lines of change in world politics and the working-class response to them - the same themes developed throughout the talks in the present volume.

A great deal of discussion went into selecting the title for Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. At least one young worker who saw the proposed subtitle raised with the author that he thought it was a mistake for the communist vanguard to publish a book this year with the word millennium in its title. It would be taken on the street for one more crank, conspiracy theory volume, he pointed out, one more recipe for evasion of reality by the toilers. Young people especially are being pounded by reactionary hype poured out by the tons as the clock ticks toward a moment of no more significance than the turning of a calendar page. It is all designed to divert the oppressed and exploited from understanding, uniting, and - above all -doing something to confront the real world of social misery and economic devastation in which we live. After considering all the arguments, it seemed that far from being a drawback, however, these were good reasons to take the "millennium" diversion head on.

Yes, the working class does have an answer to the crisis felt by hundreds of millions at the millennium; it is a course of action that is based not on mysticism and superstition but science. A course that depends not on gurus but the unification of fighters.

Capitalism's World Disorder may be the only millennium title on bookstore shelves today whose purpose is not to obscure but to clarify. The social devastation, financial panics, political turmoil, police brutality, and military assaults accelerating all around us are not chaos. They are the inevitable products of lawful - and understandable -forces unleashed by capitalism.

But the arrival of the future capitalism has in store for us is not inevitable. It can be averted by the timely solidarity, courageous action, and united struggle of workers and farmers conscious of their power to transform the world. The urgency with which we act on this understanding today to guide the forging of a communist leadership will be decisive. This book has been written to help bring that future closer.

February 1999  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home