The excerpt below is taken from "Capitalism's Deadly World Disorder," a talk given April 10, 1993, at a regional socialist educational conference held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the following day to a similar gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. The talk reported the decisions of a meeting the previous weekend in New York City of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, youth leaders of the SWP, and leaders of communist leagues in several other countries. The entire talk appears in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium.Copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. 
 
 
BY JACK BARNES 
Enormous changes are taking place that are improving the odds that the international working class can become a social force able to transform and salvage the future. The working class makes up a larger and weightier component of the population in countries the world over than ever before in history, and it continues to expand. In a growing number of countries, moreover, the working class is more international in its makeup than ever before too. And these trends will continue and deepen as the crises of world capitalism unfold in coming years.

Communists often explain that there is no "Europe"; there are only a number of capitalist states and their rival national ruling classes. That is true, but I have learned that leaving it at that is not the best way to help people understand the political point we are making. It is more accurate to say that Europe is disappearing — the capitalists' Europe. Their idea of a Europe of a single currency, of a single fiscal and monetary policy, of converging or at least compatible foreign military policies — all of this still widely talked about in ruling circles in Europe — is a bourgeois utopia.¹

Our Europe is slowly coming into being, however. Think about the expansion of intra-European travel. What comes along with expanded flows of capital and commodities worldwide is greater migration by workers to get jobs. In every single capitalist country in Europe today there is a higher percentage than ever before of workers from other countries and other nationalities who are part of the working class. The working class in every imperialist country — and this will even begin to include Japan — is more multinational than at any time in its modern history.

On a leadership level, the importance of the political fights under way in Cuba and in South Africa deserves our attention. Since you spent yesterday evening's session discussing Mary-Alice Waters's report on the Cuban revolution today, and will spend tomorrow morning discussing Sam Manuel's talk on South Africa, I will not say much about them tonight. But the increasing interest in genuine communist literature in these countries, and the degree of interest in discussions with revolutionary-minded workers and youth from other countries, indicates the possibilities of a way forward.

Not since the early days of the 1960s has there been the kind of political openness in Cuba that is developing there today. I am not talking about the new layer of hotel managers with gold chains and Rolex watches; I am not talking, of course, about those in Cuba who aspire to be like the pimps of the capitalist world. They may number in the hundreds of thousands. What I am talking about—and what I know was at the center of your discussions last night during the conference session on Cuba Today—are the millions of workers in Cuba, and their tested political leadership within the Communist Party, who are determined not to allow what they fought for, what they believe in, and what they have accomplished to be destroyed. They are determined to defend the socialist revolution. The working class and its communist vanguard are who ultimately count in Cuba, and they will have the final say in a real battle.

To understand the potential power of our class, we also must take account of the growing numbers of women workers the world over. Never in history has there been anything comparable to the position and political weight of women in the workforce and labor movement today. The place of the fight for women's rights as part of the political battle to transform the workers movement compares to nothing experienced by previous generations of revolutionists.

Another powerful advance for our class is registered by the fact that over the last several decades, for the first time in history, world-class communist leaders—looked to by thinking workers everywhere—have emerged from the most economically backward countries and parts of the world. Communists like Maurice Bishop in Grenada and Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso were genuine products of the class struggle in their own countries and became leaders of world stature.

And someday a small book will be written about the place of Nelson Mandela in the history of the class struggle in the imperialist epoch. Mandela has not only educated us all to better comprehend the dynamics of the class struggle in South Africa, but also helped transform the capacity of workers everywhere to recognize world-class revolutionary leadership when we see it in action.

Here is a man who, during his visit to South Africa's Natal province in March of this year, stood up before a big audience, mostly of Indian origin, and frankly explained the weaknesses and mistakes of the African National Congress in relation to that community. Those mistakes, he said, are reflected even in the ANC's very popular anthem, which, he said, is "purely based on the history and the aspirations of the African people" and contains "no reference to the culture, the history, the contribution of the Indian and the Coloured communities."²

Workers the world over can learn a lot about class solidarity, too, from reading the speeches of Nelson Mandela. Time and again, he hammers away at the importance of the battle against the grinding social conditions and divisive racist oppression facing the working class in South Africa — the battle for employment; the battle against violence, against the coarsening of how society values life itself; the battle against racism, race-baiting, and scapegoating of any kind.

The greatest obstacle in the working-class movement that has faced all workers and all revolutionists — the worldwide Stalinist murder machine that caused the bloody defeat of so many revolutions — is weaker than at any time since its consolidation in the first half of the 1930s. The combination of fear and horror, of corruption and confusion that Stalinism brought into our class; the substitution of the needs of a small, privileged national caste for the international needs of working people — all this has taken historic blows.

Crises like those of the Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are still ahead of us in China. They will take different forms there, because the huge pools of labor in the countryside create different openings for economic development that no longer exist anywhere in Eastern Europe or the former USSR. But pushing rural toilers from the land and rapid, brutal industrialization will produce big class struggles in China, in different combinations and at a different pace, just as they did in Europe and America over the past one hundred and fifty years. That is all coming further down the road. The world bourgeoisie's dreams of the great miracle — a billion Chinese consumers and value-producers — will bring such struggles! And communist leadership in China will come in exactly the same way it will come everywhere else, from fighters in the working class and among revolutionary-minded youth.

We take it for granted now that young communists from the United States, or Sweden, or New Zealand go to the Philippines, or go to a conference of Asian youth in India, and mix it up with other young fighters from the region and sell communist literature. But for decades this was almost unthinkable. Such exchanges were largely blocked off by the virulence of Stalinism in Asia, which marched under the banner of Maoism and produced the horrors of Pol Potism, among other things.³ In the so-called Western world, there was a lot of petty-bourgeois romanticizing of this Maoist variant of Stalinism, as if a worker in Asia could not be an equal, could not be expected to rise to the same level of political consciousness as a worker elsewhere in the world.

But there is not a single political organization or current anywhere in the world today that looks politically to the Beijing regime or draws tribute from its trough. And only a handful of organizations in Asia or elsewhere, splintered among themselves, still cling to one or another variant of Maoism. Given the disintegration of these Stalinist obstacles, new energies, capacities, and creativity among millions of workers and youth can be opened throughout Asia and beyond.

The primordial fact that communists have insisted on over the past few years is being confirmed: It is not new wellsprings of capitalist expansion and power that are being created as the twenty-first century draws near. To the contrary, the size of the hereditary proletariat worldwide is growing, as are new possibilities for workers to cross borders and work together to find ways to move forward. And as this process unfolds, young people and workers looking for dignity — who are inspired by militant resistance and a growing desire to give as well as to receive solidarity, and who aspire to true political equality —will find their place in the ranks and leadership of the communist movement.  
 
 
1. On January 1, 1999, eleven governments in Europe did begin using a common currency—the "euro"— to denominate stock, bond, and banking transactions. Actual "euro" notes are to replace German marks, French francs, and other national currencies in circulation in 2002. Compared to its eleven separate predecessors, the euro will put up stiffer competition to a relatively weakened U.S. dollar as a store of value in national treasuries around the world, and later perhaps even as a unit of account.

From birth, however, the euro's stability was undermined by the conflicting interests of the rival imperialist bourgeoisies it pretends to yoke together. As the onerous effects of capitalist overproduction bear down in differential ways on countries and regions across Europe — and working people press demands for jobs, against farm foreclosures, and for livable wages and government-funded social benefits —the fissures in the new currency union will widen.

2. See "Speech to Members of the Indian Community," in Nelson Mandela Speaks (New York: Pathfinder, 1993), pp. 222-25.

3. Pol Pot was the top leader of the former Khmer Rouge regime that inflicted a murderous reign of terror on the peasants and working people of Cambodia for nearly four years following the collapse of the U.S.-backed rightist government there in April 1975. The Khmer Rouge, which combined the Maoist variant of Stalinism with xenophobic Cambodian nationalism, was driven from power by the combined forces of the Vietnamese armed forces and Cambodian oppositionists in January 1979.

In June 1997, after years of virtually complete clandestinity, Pol Pot was put on public trial in the military redoubt of a faction of the Khmer Rouge and sentenced to "life imprisonment" for ordering the execution of a top aide. The Stalinist-trained butcher died under house arrest in April 1998. In December 1998, the last remaining Khmer Rouge forces surrendered to the Cambodian government. A few weeks later, two remaining senior Khmer Rouge offcials, Khieu Samphan and Nuon Chea, also turned themselves in, appealing at a press conference in Phnom Penh to "let bygones be bygones."  
 
 
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