So my question is, do you conclude from this that communists also need to begin taking a different approach from that of the last decade--a more agitational approach? Not just explanation, but more agitation, in your press and in your other political work?

JACK BARNES: I don't think I would call it a new stage. I am cautious about "stages." And I am cautious about a global acceleration of a capitalist collapse. But what is unassailable is this: the long-term deflationary bias and instability of capitalism are increasing. The enemy is showing more vulnerable spots, even as they deliver blows to our class. Conditions are more volatile. They affect working people and broad layers of the middle classes all over the world in more unexpected ways, bringing greater insecurity and uncertainty into their lives.

Ten days ago, none of us in this room expected what was going to happen in Mexico. But at the same time, we also knew it was bound to happen, didn't we? That is a sign of the times we are living in.

Nobody can predict the "when"; that is unpredictable. Revolutionary workers do not hold ourselves accountable for that. But we can make one ultimately fatal mistake. We can wait until conditions "reach a new stage" before getting serious about building a disciplined proletarian party. By then it is too late. By then, it is no longer possible to redeem the time that has been lost.

The history of the twentieth century teaches us that during periods of rising class battles and revolutionary struggles, a small communist nucleus can grow into a large political force very rapidly. But that is only possible if an initial communist nucleus has been built beforehand. It has to be a nucleus that is proletarian not only in its political program and continuity, but also in the composition of the big majority of its membership and leadership.

It has to organize not only through rounded, self-confident, political branch units, but also through structured groups of communist workers in the major industrial workplaces--what we call union fractions in the communist movement.

The worker cadres of such a communist organization need to have gone through substantial experience in the working-class movement beforehand. They must have engaged in strikes and social protest activity with others and gained confidence in debating counterposed strategies and perspectives. They must have experience in talking socialism with co-workers and organizing around a weekly rhythm of political activity. They must be pros in getting revolutionary newspapers, books, and pamphlets into the hands of other fighters and winning workers and revolutionary-minded young people to the communist movement.

Once big class battles and revolutionary struggles break out, it is too late to start building from scratch. If the time beforehand has been redeemed, then the cadres of a communist organization will have had enough experience to have internalized revolutionary proletarian politics in their gut. They will provide self-confident leadership and fight alongside other workers with a bolshevik discipline that comes from within themselves: from years of experience, education, and preparation. They will have developed the habits of discipline, including the habits of study and the discipline to think systematically. They will not be dependent on the formulas of sects. They will not rely on or trust any bureaucratic apparatus ultimately beholden to the exploiting classes.

Revolutionary-minded workers must learn to read broadly, to take complicated questions seriously and work at them--and to study together with co-workers, youth, and newly won members of the communist movement. The capitalist rulers do everything they can to confuse workers, to make us believe we must rely on experts, wizards, and pollsters. They try to obfuscate--about economics, about stocks and bonds, about the monarchy in Britain, about the church in Poland, about class relations in the United States, about education and wage differentials, you name it.

The unexpected consequences of the peso's devaluation were not some "Mexican thing," however. We will see more such breakdowns and panics in today's deflationary conditions. The imperialist bourgeoisie in its decline has no plans, no overarching strategy. But at the same time, everything we see beginning to unravel is also the inevitable outcome of the lawful workings of the capitalist system.

What is important for communist workers is to begin preparing now--not to wait for it to happen. There is no way to prepare for it. Because neither we nor anybody else knows, or can know, what it is going to be.

Workers have to fight to get out of the framework the capitalists try to impose on every social and political question. It is not possible for workers to come to the necessary revolutionary conclusions alone, without exchanging experiences and ideas with other revolutionary workers and without reading and studying and discussing what the lessons of our class have been over more than a century of struggles in scores of countries all over the world.

We have to think, to discuss, to plan, to organize--to broaden our scope. It takes time and work--and it takes a revolutionary party.

This is the kind of organization the Socialist Workers Party set out to build from the beginning, as you can document for yourself in books such as The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon, and the four-volume Teamsters series by Farrell Dobbs. The best single guide to party-building in the world our class has been facing since the mid-1970s is The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. All these books are the heart of the revolutionary political arsenal kept in print by Pathfinder Press.

Yes, we also have to agitate when it's timely to do so. But we do not counterpose agitation to political explanation--which communist workers will continue to do, and to do more of, as the pace of the class struggle picks up. We should never forget that it was during the biggest revolutionary situation in this century, in the months just after the collapse of the tsarist regime in Russia in February 1917, that Lenin taught the ranks of the Bolsheviks that their task above all was "to patiently explain"; their task was to convince the working class of what it was capable of accomplishing by organizing for the conquest of power and breaking politically with all the misleaders who stood in the way of doing so.1

Today, we have to work to understand and to explain to other workers why capitalism is becoming more unstable, why this will not be reversed by reforms, why big class battles are inevitable, and why we must organize collectively--as an international class--to overturn this exploitative social system.

If the nucleus of the revolutionary working class does not prepare beforehand, if we do not effectively use the time we have right now, then the odds shift against our class being successful when revolutionary situations develop. If we understand this, then we can see the truth of what the communist movement has said ever since the rise of fascism in this century: that before reaction can conquer, the workers get the first chance.  
 
 
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