This shift in working-class politics, Barnes noted, was registered at the conference itself. The gathering, sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists, was held July 27-30 on the Oberlin College campus.

The degree to which socialist workers and youth are an integral part of the upturn in strikes and struggles by working people in city and countryside was a palpable part of every conference session, class, and informal event.

In the course of these struggles, commu nist workers and fellow fighters are discussing the program and strategy of the revolutionary workers movement--the lessons of worker and farmer resistance to exploitation and oppression earned in struggle over the past 150 years. Fighting workers and farmers are feeling a greater need to read and discuss the Militant, its Spanish-language monthly sister publication Perspectiva Mundial, the Marxist magazine New International, and books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press.

The effect of this work could be seen in the spirit, energy, political voice--and financial contributions--of those participating in the conference.

In attendance were some 450 people--members of the Socialist Workers Party and its sister communist organizations in other countries; Young Socialists members; organized supporters of the communist movement; and other workers, farmers, and youth interested in learning more about the struggles unfolding within the proletarian movement, as well as learning more about the YS and SWP. Seventy five were under the age of 30, and some 60 were 25 or younger. Workers and youth came from Australia, Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as from France, Greece, Italy, Korea, and Puerto Rico.

In response to the increased resistance by working people, participants in the Active Workers Conference came out of the gathering better prepared to increase the political striking power of the communist movement, and on a sounder footing to carry out campaigns over the rest of the summer and fall:

• an international effort to expand the sales of Pathfinder literature to workers and youth, focusing on the new pamphlet, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: the Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism and the book Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, both by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes;
• a drive to win new subscribers to the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial among fighting workers and farmers, as well as other working people and youth attracted to these struggles and repelled by the brutality of capitalist society;
• support for the Socialist Workers 2000 ticket of James Harris for president of the United States and Margaret Trowe for vice president; and
• a fund drive to raise $125,000 by November 13 to finance the production and distribution of the Militant and PM.

Supporters of the communist movement who are organizing the Pathfinder Reprint Project--through which volunteers around the world are working to turn every Pathfinder title into digital files ready to be produced on the modern computer-to-plate equipment in the publisher's printshop--announced their plans for the coming year at the conference, as well. They aim to have fully half of Pathfinder's booklist in digital form by May Day 2001.

The party's supporters also announced an effort to raise the level of their monthly financial contributions to the party to a total of $250,000 annually by December 31.

In a Friday afternoon presentation on the second day of the conference, SWP leader Jack Barnes outlined the central political ideas and strategic perspectives being reflected in the panels of active workers at the gathering. Barnes drew on concrete experiences of socialist workers over the last several months, and raised a number of issues that were discussed over the next day and half at a second panel, from the floor, at classes, and informally.

"Some day, if people hold tough," Barnes said, "an example emerges that not only inspires but shocks--shocks--the thinking working-class world into a change, seemingly slight at first, in the focus of their creative work and even the very pattern of their daily lives.  
 
Packinghouse workers struggle
"The sit-down strike and rapid union victory at the Dakota Premium packinghouse is such an event. It shocked the officers of the local union. It shocked many working people throughout the Midwest. And it shocked our party and the Young Socialists," he said.

Workers at Dakota Premium Foods in South St. Paul, Minnesota, staged a seven-hour sit-down strike June 1, demanding the bosses address immediate concerns such as the brutal line speed, the company's practice of putting injured workers back on the job, and schemes to cut pay. By the end of that day, management agreed to meet with a delegation elected by the workers and granted concessions on line speed and other issues. On July 21 workers at Dakota Premium, organized by United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, won a union representation election by a decisive 112-71 margin.

"Fifty-one days between a sit-down strike and union victory in a major factory is, to put it mildly, unusual today," Barnes said.

"The decisive moment was that morning when workers sat down in the cafeteria; when they would not work; when they would not be cowed, bought off, or divided," he added. "That's when the bosses broke and said, 'We will meet with you,'--and 'you' had become plural not singular; not just as an individual 'Dakota employee,' but with a delegation chosen by the workers themselves.

"A great moment in the American class struggle occurred that day, and the first steps across a bridge were taken," Barnes said.

"Once the workers came into the plant, punched the time clock, and then sat down in the cafeteria and refused to work, they were challenging the sanctity of private property. 'We refuse any longer to be treated like cattle, not human beings,' they said. 'We refuse any longer to be brutalized on the line.'

"Once the company agreed to meet with the committee elected by those engaged in that sit-down strike, the workers had the union if they didn't stop fighting."

What is happening in South St. Paul can change the real perspectives in packinghouses throughout the Upper Midwest and beyond, Barnes said. In Omaha, Nebraska, where the UFCW has initiated an organizing drive, "all it takes is for workers inside one of the big packinghouses to decide, 'Let's do it like they did at Dakota!'" When something like that happens, then--after months of collecting signatures on union cards, and efforts by young people volunteering their services--the prospects for actually winning a union can begin to be transformed overnight."  
 
Capacity of workers
The evening before Barnes's talk, the conference had been opened by Roberta Niles, a member of the Young Socialists who works at another St. Paul meatpacking plant, and Norton Sandler from San Francisco, who is the organizer of the party's Trade Union Committee.

"The struggle at Dakota showed me what workers are capable of," Niles said, "and gave me a sense that this is the future of the working class."

"I also want my co-workers to be awakened to the possibilities of a socialist future" through reading publications like the Militant and PM and getting involved in labor and other social struggles going on today, Niles remarked.

Sandler called attention to the words--the guidelines--on the large banners that had been painted by volunteers and hung behind the podium in the hall where the main conference sessions were held. The central banner read "¡Sí se puede!" the affirmation of confidence and strength--Yes, we can!--that has been taken as the battle cry by the Dakota workers and many other working people.

That banner was flanked by two others that read: "Following natural lines of resistance in the working class" and "Structure the revolutionary party through mass work." Those watchwords, Sandler said, described the course the SWP and YS had set out on at an Active Workers Conference held in July 1998 in Pittsburgh, where the socialists assessed their initial experiences in responding to the new resistance of working people to the offensive by the employers and their government.

The Pittsburgh gathering had been followed by a joint party-YS conference in Los Angeles in December 1998, held concurrent with a YS national convention. Participants there had discussed the perspectives summarized in a talk by Barnes on "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics," which was subsequently edited for publication as the opening chapter of the book Capitalism's World Disorder.

Since those two gatherings, and an Active Workers Conference in Ohio a year earlier, Sandler said, the party has established branch organizing committees in six--usually small--towns and cities in the centers of the coal mining, textile and garment, auto, and meatpacking industries, and closer to farmers struggles.

Sandler reported that socialists will be establishing a new branch organizing committee in Tampa, Florida, in late August. It is an outgrowth of the Miami branch reaching out to farmers and industrial workers in central Florida and--together with party and YS units in Atlanta and Birmingham--reaching up to the triangle of northern Florida, southern Georgia, and western Alabama.

In addition, Sandler said, substantial progress has been made in revitalizing the activity of socialist workers in the industrial unions in the United States, who work collectively together in plants, mines, and mills across the country. There has been growth and renewal of the party's work in the garment and textile industries organized by the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE); the meatpacking industry, organized by the UFCW; and coal mines organized by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

In addition, the conference marked a turning point in how socialists in the auto, rail, airport and aerospace, and steel industries are working to build local union fractions in their areas. Above all, this will accelerate the convergence of the course of these fractions with that of the party in UNITE, the UMWA, and the UFCW.

Coming out of the conference, socialists in the United Transportation Union (UTU), United Steelworkers of America (USWA), and International Association of Machinists (IAM) planned national meetings in August with the primary aim of reorganizing so they can work together in local units in the same plants or worksites. In many cases, this involves changing jobs or moving to new parts of the country where fights are taking place or are brewing.

At the conference session Saturday night, Ellen Berkeley, a worker in a UAW-organized auto parts plant in Detroit, explained how party members in the UAW had decided this spring to get out of situations where they were working in plants by themselves, and to get into workplaces with other party members. Working alone "made it impossible to have a feel for what was going on in the union and industry," she said.

At a national fraction meeting at the end of April, socialists in the UAW had voted to end all one-person job situations by June 15, a deadline that was met. Since then, Berkeley said, "we have a new fraction of three in an auto parts plant in Detroit, which is a first step to put us on the road to rebuilding a national UAW fraction."  
 
Linking up with fellow fighters
As the Active Workers Conference was taking place, UMWA coal miners in New Mexico and Wyoming were on strike against the Pittsburg and Midway Coal Co. (P&M), owned by Chevron. By holding firm and reaching out for labor solidarity, the workers at both mines beat back the energy giant's demand for 12-hour workdays and other concessions, winning contracts in early August.

As part of the first conference panel, Danny Wilson, a coal miner who works at a surface mine in the West, reported on solidarity work socialists had been organizing together with fellow miners for the P&M strikes. Wilson described how he joined with another coal miner who has been reading the Militant, as well as a union pipeline worker, to bring solidarity to striking miners in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Although he had initially planned the trip with two other socialist workers, Wilson said that at the last minute neither could join the team. "But we had an obligation not only to the workers in Kemmerer but to two fellow fighters to go ahead with the trip," he said.

When the three members of the new team met, they discussed their common goals. Wilson said his fellow miner--who considers the Militant "to be the only newspaper that told the truth" about an earlier UMWA strike by his own local--decided to help introduce the Militant to strikers they met. The team was a real success in what they learned about the strike, the coverage written for the Militant and PM, and contacts made for the ongoing struggle of miners in the West and throughout the country. In the process, five strikers bought Militant subscriptions, and numerous single issues were sold.  
 
Working together with fighters
"Working together like this with fighters engaged in various battles is something we should start to expect," Wilson said. "It comes out of consistent, steady work with militants with whom we increasingly converge. The Militant becomes a natural part of what we and other workers are doing."

Also speaking on a conference panel was Samuel Farley, a worker who took part in the June 1 sit-down at Dakota Premium Foods and a leader of the organizing drive there. Farley said the struggle for the union and a contract at Dakota gave him "a real feel for the battalions of working people that will lead and be a part of the transformation of the unions. When you consider the composition of the workers--overwhelmingly immigrants--and the conditions they face on the job, you realize that what we did can and will be repeated elsewhere."

The Workers' Voice, produced by pro-union meat packers in the plant, has been an essential tool in answering each of the antiunion moves by the company, Farley said. The paper helped cut across divisions imposed by management between workers in different departments and from different backgrounds, and "explained what the union is and the need for our own organization.

"We have worked from the start to have a leadership from the various key production areas, such as the kill floor, the cut, and packaging," he said. Getting jobs at the center of production is crucial not only in meatpacking but in other industries, Farley said, since that is where the bosses are imposing speedup and conditions that propel workers to resist and in the process forge a leadership.

"We are also learning that solidarity is not just something you receive, but something you have to give in order to advance your struggle. We are now preparing for the eventuality of a strike to get a contract," he said.

Amy Roberts, another leader in the organizing drive at Dakota Premium, spoke on the second conference panel during the day Saturday. She explained that "women have been stepping forward, distributing The Workers' Voice, and going to union meetings." In one case they forced the company to ask a supervisor, known for screaming at women workers, to resign after he tried to fire a worker.

Being part of the union battle, Roberts explained, helped her and others "to learn real discipline and gain experience doing mass work as part of a broader vanguard. If you vote to do something," she said, "your co-workers expect you to carry it out and want to know why if you didn't."

In working-class struggles such as these, said Barnes during his Friday afternoon presentation, the gauge of victory or defeat, of setbacks or advances, continues to be that used by Karl Marx some 150 years ago. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote: "Now and again 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."

The great product of working-class struggles "is the ever-greater union of working people and example of workers' struggles," Barnes said. "This includes developing a vanguard of our class that gains greater class confidence and a broader world view."

Within these struggles, "fighting workers will always respond to those who help show the way in which the unions can be transformed into revolutionary instruments of class struggle," Barnes said. "If we have not fought for this, there is no possibility of finding a way to overthrow capitalism, a road toward the socialist revolution," Barnes said.

"The goal is not to turn the unions into a revolutionary party, not to turn the unions into a revolutionary army, or into some kind of 'pure' union in the imagination of some social reformer--no matter how "red" or whatever. The goal is to turn the unions into effective, fighting, instruments of the working class that take the moral high ground, think socially, and act politically. Instruments that over time can organize the working class to be politically independent," he said.

"There are no limits beforehand on how far this process can go. It opens the opportunity to organize tens of millions of workers in the unions."  
 
Speed, leverage, timeliness
Three words, Barnes said, summarize the challenge facing communist workers in face of this new situation in the labor movement: speed, leverage, and timeliness.

During a retreat in the labor movement such as the one that marked much of the 1990s, he said, "a small organization like ours learns that what we don't do or prepare on Tuesday can often be done on Wednesday or Thursday or even later without big negative consequences."

But this changes when working people begin depending more and more on what each other do in a common fight. Then the speed of response time becomes decisive. "The truth is," Barnes said, "that Danny had no choice but to make a quick decision to go ahead with the team to the Kemmerer mine, since he had a commitment to a fellow miner, another fighting unionist, and other workers.

"Workers assumed we would be there. At that moment, there was no decision to make.

"What they did was a model. Because with the size and geographic spread of party units today, we cannot respond rapidly as fights break out and deepen unless we find other workers to join in and do it with us. And we will be better politically as we do so."

Communist workers also have to concentrate our striking power where our forces and our propaganda weapons have the greatest leverage in the class struggle, Barnes said, "where the fights and prospects for fights are the greatest. Where we are part of larger forces--a yeast, one of the levers within these forces."

When the developments in South St. Paul happened in June, for example, the Young Socialists set an example by putting aside a prior plan for summer activity and getting a substantial number of YS members into the Twin Cities and elsewhere in the Midwest to strengthen the energy of workers inside packing plants.

Party branches more than ever must carry out rounded political campaigns, Barnes said, reaching out as broadly as possible to working people and youth in their localities and regions. They must reach out to working people and youth deeply involved in the intense, minute-to-minute, and eventually--if left solely to their own logic--narrowing union and factory struggles.

At the same time, he said, the branches and branch organizing committees, union fractions, and cadres of the party now must also focus one-sided attention on particular plants, mines, and mills and often on particular workers districts in cities where they are located.

The importance of timeliness, Barnes said, is underlined by the way workers at Dakota Premium are using The Workers' Voice to respond point by point to the probes, attacks, and lies of management.

"Under these conditions, it's not only how quickly you counterpunch, but precisely when and how," Barnes said. "That's a question of political habits, and a concrete feel for the laws of the class struggle. That's where timeliness comes in."  
 
Developing Young Socialists cadres
Following up on the comments by Sandler on the steps being taken to build functioning union fractions, Barnes pointed to the participation of a substantial number of Young Socialists in these efforts. This common fraction-building experience by party veterans and YS members occupies a uniquely important place in prospects for strengthening the Young Socialists, he said.

"A communist youth organization never grows rapidly except during a period of massive action," Barnes said, "usually social protest demonstrations of one kind or another--like the Black rights marches, anti–Vietnam War demonstrations, and rise of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. This is when the energies of broad layers of young people in the streets--high school and college students, as well as young workers and farmers--place their stamp on the class struggle, and an organization such as the Young Socialists can take off."

A precondition to building a truly communist youth organization, however, Barnes said, is that the Young Socialists develop a self-confident political cadre, educated in Marxism and experienced in proletarian politics. The progress of the YS today has to be gauged by its success in doing this, not in terms of immediate quantitative results in recruitment, he said.

"That's why the flexibility shown by young socialists in going to where working-class struggles are sharpest right now is indispensable not only to building stronger party-YS fractions in the industrial unions," Barnes emphasized. "These YS members, many of them at the same time young party members, are also building the kind of cadre that can take advantage of what will open when a wave of social protests begin in response to the brutality and inhumanity of the imperialist system and the prerogatives of the capitalist rulers."

What's more, Barnes added, it will be those YS cadres who have shouldered leadership responsibility in party branches and in union fractions--demonstrating the capacity to lead, in an undifferentiated way, comrades from generations older than themselves--who will be the political leaders of an expanding communist youth organization as well.

"That's been the record with every youth organization in the history of the communist movement," Barnes said. He pointed to the growing weight of YS members in organizing the leadership of production and training in the Pathfinder printshop as one of the places where this process is already most advanced in the communist movement today.  
 
Working-class space
Barnes noted that among workers and within working-class organizations and communities, communist workers have virtually unlimited space to discuss political ideas, distribute socialist books and newspapers, and join together in common struggles. "For a Marxist," he said, "this is one of the most decisive tests that the resistance we're describing in the working class is real, not just what we want to see happen."

This reality can't be confused, however, with the notion that working people have expanding space on the rulers' own turf or that revolutionary-minded workers and farmers can act as if they have guaranteed rights in bourgeois society. "Working people have fought for rights over more than two centuries," Barnes said. "And millions of workers believe the bosses and government should honor what's contained in the Bill of Rights and press to make the rulers do so."

But if anything, the exploiters and their various repressive apparatuses are even more on the prod during a period of rising worker and farmer resistance. Class political polarization increases.

Especially in small towns, on college campuses, or in front of factories or mines (when sharp union issues are posed, above all), working people can open themselves up to unnecessary victimization as a result of insufficient political preparation to sell papers, set up book tables, or carry out political activity. Willful ignorance of what we're walking into, smart-aleck mouthing off, or other traits of petty-bourgeois rather than proletarian functioning can rapidly result in a citation or summons by the police--and sometimes much worse consequences at the hands of cops, private company goons, or right-wingers in league with the bosses.

"Even though the cops may not win in court, or the citation may be dropped," Barnes said, "they've still diverted us from carrying out political activity. They succeed for a while in tying us up in red tape, draining our energy and resources," Barnes said.

"They have diverted us from using to the fullest what the rulers cannot touch--working-class space," Barnes said. Recognizing and acting on the expanding opportunities among working people to discuss a socialist perspective, while avoiding ultraleft adventures that invite victimization by the state, is a crucial part of advancing the party's work, he said.  
 
Cuba and the U.S. class struggle
At the opening session of the Active Workers Conference on Thursday evening, Mary-Alice Waters, SWP leader and editor of the Marxist magazine New International, gave a feature talk on Cuba and the U.S. class struggle. She began by highlighting two important working-class actions that had taken place the day before, on July 26.

In Colorado, 100 striking coal miners from New Mexico and Wyoming and their supporters had rallied outside the P&M headquarters near Denver.

That same day, more than 1 million people marched through the streets of Havana, Cuba, celebrating the anniversary of the 1953 assault on the Moncada army barracks in Santiago--the action that launched the revolutionary armed struggle that brought down the hated U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in January 1959.

The big-business press noted with concern that Havana that morning was awash in red-and-black flags--the flag of the July 26 Movement, which under the leadership of Fidel Castro led the workers and farmers to victory in Cuba. What worries the imperialist powers, Waters remarked, is what these colors show about the living revolutionary continuity still deeply rooted among Cuban working people, and the ongoing efforts by the leadership to win the new generations to a proletarian course.

The UMWA rally in Denver and the "March of the Fighting People" in Havana may seem vastly disproportionate given their respective sizes, Waters said, but they have something much more significant in common. They underscore the growing interconnections of the fight to strengthen the working-class resistance in the United States and the workers state in Cuba.

"They register the most important developments in the world class struggle today--the growing confidence of working people, both in Cuba and the United States," she said.

Waters noted that in recent weeks there have been maneuvers in Congress around several bills or amendments to bills that would modify the terms of the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba. The framework of the current debate around these proposals, she pointed out, remains how best to intensify the economic, political, and diplomatic war against Cuba and overturn the socialist revolution.

"The problem for the capitalist politicians on all sides of this debate," Waters said, "is that all of them insist that anything they consider real trade concessions must be accompanied by real political concessions by Cuba on its proletarian and internationalist revolutionary course. And that's exactly what Cuban revolutionists refuse to do."

The irreplaceability of communists in the United States within the interconnected class-struggle developments here and in Cuba was registered in their response to the April 22 raid in Miami by federal immigration cops during which Cuban six-year-old Elián González was seized.

Focusing on the basic class questions involved, communist workers explained both why defense of Cuban sovereignty was at stake in demanding that Washington return the child to his homeland, and why the commando-style raid was a blow to the working class--a blow dealt by the U.S. rulers to reinforce the arbitrary and semimilitary powers of the hated migra and strengthen the prerogatives of the executive branch.

Waters also drew attention to several indications of the growing confidence among working people in Cuba as they emerge from the worst years of the retreat of the 1990s and begin to deepen their revolutionary course, as part of an international vanguard that converges with what is changing in the United States as well.  
 
Garment and textile workers
Socialist workers and youth described a range of other experiences during the Friday and Saturday panels, and from the floor of the conference during the discussion period.

Alyson Kennedy, organizer of the steering committee of the UNITE national fraction, pointed to some of the shop floor and strike struggles going on among garment and textile workers today. These include the recent strike at Tartan Textiles near Miami and organizing efforts by industrial laundry workers in Chicago.

Some socialist garment and textile workers are in unorganized plants, Kennedy explained. "The union question comes to the fore more and more in these plants," she said. "As battles pick up, more and more workers will turn to the established unions. How we conduct ourselves will have an impact on whether there is a victory or defeat."

A big majority of the UNITE fraction members are now sewing machine operators, Kennedy noted, a key component of the industry at the center of production. The fraction and its leadership have been able to function on a nationwide basis and take up questions at the center of communist work in the union because there are several local fractions of two or more socialists working together in the same plant.

"This gives us the opportunity to collectively work together, respond to what is happening on the job, and carry out party campaigns among co-workers," she said. Building this kind of fraction in production jobs is "crucial before the bigger struggles break out. Co-workers will get to know us as trustworthy and serious people they can depend on."

Kennedy explained several experiences fraction members had learned from of how ultraleft functioning cuts across this approach. In one plant, the local fraction exaggerated how far a contract fight had deepened and began acting as though the union officials were more of a problem than the boss. In another case, a fraction member became unnecessarily vulnerable by starting to distribute widely the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial in a plant before getting to know other workers and the situation there.

"An ultraleft course can weaken our class in relation to the boss and damage a fight," Kennedy said. "When workers take their fire off the boss and put it on the union officials, it diverts the struggle and the longer-range possibilities to transform the union itself."

During the Saturday panel, Frank Forrestal, a member of the UMWA in western Pennsylvania, described the conditions both union and nonunion miners face, and struggles in the mining regions against cutbacks in health care, pensions, safety in the mines, and control over the length of the workweek. Over the past year there has been a noticeable increase in the number of protests, meetings, rallies, and strike actions in the coalfields, signaling the emergence of a social movement resisting the consequences of the offensive by the coal operators and the government.

Forrestal said the mine where he works has been cited for 343 violations in the past year. Two workers have been permanently disabled and there have been four rock falls. The ventilation went down recently and workers were not notified for more than 30 minutes, creating a dangerous potential for buildup of explosive methane gas. These are the conditions miners are resisting.

The socialist coal miner explained that the party branch in Pittsburgh is stepping up its efforts to build both fractions of coal miners and of garment workers. Doing so will mean the socialist movement is much more in touch with political developments and actions by working people in the area. They are organizing regular portal sales at coal mines, including where Forrestal and another socialist work. There is plenty of political space open to communist workers to act together with fellow fighters in struggle and to advance the knowledge and understanding of Marxism through distributing the Militant, Pathfinder, and New International, he noted.

Willie Evans, a leader of the USWA members on strike against Titan Tire in Natchez, Mississippi, explained the current stage of their nearly two-year fight against union-busting. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recently ruled in favor of the union on its claims that the company has engaged in unfair labor practices, a ruling the company is appealing.

The unionists at Titan Tire are planning a rally September 13 to mark the second anniversary of the struggle and encouraged broad union participation in it. Panelists and other conference participants responded by pledging to be there and bring others with them.

John Stivers, a packinghouse worker and UFCW member from Toronto, explained a successful effort by co-workers to build solidarity with the struggle at Dakota Premium. Some 85 workers signed a message of support and turned it over to the union officials to send off to their brothers and sisters in Minnesota. Meat packers' struggles are occurring in many parts of Canada, other participants reported. Several were familiar with union-organizing efforts and workers' resistance to company assaults in Alberta; others are involved in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Lisa Potash, a sewing machine operator in a large plant in Chicago, described a union-organizing drive and strike for recognition by laundry workers there, reporting that 95 percent of the workers signed cards.

Siggi Herald, a Young Socialist in Iceland, described a recent strike by bus drivers that he said "helped the YS become a more proletarian organization. We saw a disciplined strike of workers and made contact with them. One strike leader spoke at a forum we organized."

Jack Ward, who has been a miner in southern Illinois, reported on a visit he made to the strikers in Wyoming against P&M. "There is a new organization there called Miners' Backbone," he said. "It is more than what we often think of as a women's auxiliary. They have organized picketing and other actions that have had an impact on the effectiveness and morale of the strike."

Olympia Newton, a member of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee and a worker at Pathfinder's printshop in New York, participated in the second conference panel.  
 
Young Socialists provide leadership
"Five Young Socialists are taking on major responsibilities in the shop and are leading across the several generations of socialist workers there to produce what the party needs and to maintain the kind of printing operation that makes it possible to continue these publishing efforts," she said.

As lead operator on the folder, Newton has trained three other workers to run the machine. Other YS members head up the web press crew, the probation committee responsible for the initial orientation and training of new workers, and the maintenance of the computer and phone systems in the Pathfinder Building.

"We are making progress both in building the shop as a factory and the YS as a proletarian youth organization," she said. "In the process we have taken more leadership responsibility in the YS and the party. We learn in the shop to take responsibility for what we do. We learn we need discipline without compulsion, which is the basis for proletarian functioning in the Young Socialists and the party as well."

The Young Socialists organized a meeting for all YS-age youth at the conclusion of the conference to discuss these perspectives and map out plans for the summer and fall (see article in last issue).

Sherman Martin, from Los Angeles, spoke the final evening on how "members of the Young Socialists in high school and college have strengthened the YS. "In Los Angeles we had four members who were students last year. We participated in events around the janitors' strike and actions to defend immigrant rights," he said.

Martin, who had just received his high school diploma, also addressed from his own experience one of the political challenges facing a good number of young socialists as they get deeply involved in political activity. He explained why he had decided to complete high school, "because graduating was a political task. We need a diploma to get jobs in order to be in the middle of struggles such as we have been discussing at the conference."

The petitioning drive to get Socialist Workers Party candidates in the 2000 elections on the ballot in New York, reported Paul Pederson, is part of defending political space within the working class and the legality of the party in the eyes of working people. Pederson, the organizer of the Brooklyn branch of the party and one of the party's candidates for U.S. Congress in New York, said the drive to collect 30,000 signatures was being carried out in record time.

This is partly due to reconquering the importance of winning ballot status, he said.

"The exploiters use the electoral arena to justify their rule, which makes it harder for them to simply deny a workers' party a place on the ballot, even if they erect all kinds of legal obstacles to make doing so difficult." Workers and farmers have no immutable rights under capitalism, he explained, and getting on the ballot undercuts the ability of the employers and their government to portray the party and its activities as illegal.

"The kind of response we are getting to the campaign is a good indication of the number of workers and youth we can meet over the coming months through the socialist campaign," Pederson said.  
 
Danger of ultraleftism in unions
Seven classes at the conference were the scene of lively discussions. They were titled, "The working class and the transformation of learning," "Organizational principles of the SWP," "The danger of ultraleftism in the labor movement," "Death penalty: weapon of capitalist class rule," "Class struggle road to women's liberation," "Lessons from the battle at Crown Oil," and "The 1979 Iranian revolution and the class struggle in Iran today."

Joel Williams, a meat packer and leader of the SWP in Chicago, presented a class and spoke on a panel on the destructive logic of ultraleft currents in the labor movement.

"If you start going after the union officials and not the bosses you're going to set back the struggle," Williams said. "Class-conscious workers are the enemy of any anti-bureaucracy effort. We lead other workers and unionists to take care of our own house as a byproduct of the struggle against the bosses."

Williams pointed to several examples in the UAW and mine workers unions where some veterans of struggles, in the name of fighting bureaucracy, have sought to turn workers away from the unions. This often comes after protracted struggles against an employer where the fight gets dissipated and frequently wrapped up in the red tape of the courts and National Labor Relations Board.

Communist workers must discuss these questions with fighters, Williams said. "We function on a pro-union, pro-workers-unity axis. We start with the fact that the members are the union. The union is ours, including the union hall and all its members, including the officers. That will be the road everywhere to transforming the unions into fighting instruments."  
 
Cuban union leaders participate
The interrelationship of the class struggle in the United States and Cuba was a political thread that ran throughout the conference. This was reinforced by the participation of two special guests to the conference, leaders of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), Olga Rosa Gómez and Manuel Montero, on a speaking tour of the United States through mid-August.

Gómez is the general secretary of the Cultural Workers Union and a deputy in Cuba's National Assembly. Montero is the head of the CTC's international relations for North America. The unionists joined the conference during its first full day.

After listening to presentations at the Friday morning panel and having a chance to speak over breakfast with a number of conference participants, Gómez opened her remarks to the gathering by saying how much the CTC leaders appreciated the opportunity to meet and hear from rank-and-file U.S. workers involved in struggles. She said she was struck by the number of young faces she had seen, as well.

"After hearing about how you develop your work and how many obstacles you face," Gómez said, she was "amazed at what workers in the United States have to do to get a union and then go on to get a contract." Washington and its supporters claim that workers in Cuba have no trade union freedom, Gómez said, a proposition she rejects from her own experience and that of other Cuban workers. But after hearing from conference participants, she remarked, "I don't know what kind of trade union freedom they are talking about right here."

The Cuban union leader described some of the steps working people have taken since the early 1990s to reverse the dramatic shortfall in production precipitated by the collapse of aid and favorable trade relations with the former Soviet Union. "We have been making extraordinary efforts to seek ways and alternatives to reverse the impact of this crisis on the daily lives of Cubans," she said, pointing to the progress made so far.

Gómez said the U.S. embargo against Cuba is "aimed at destroying the revolution, which is why it has been maintained and reinforced over the past decade." Montero pointed to the "workers parliaments" and other ways that working people in Cuba have brought their weight to bear in the "social, political, and economic life of the country."  
 
'We need to make a revolution'
Karl Butts, a vegetable farmer from central Florida, was one of the speakers from the floor during the Friday morning panel. He described a trip to Cuba he took earlier this year with other fighting farmers at the invitation of the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP).

"All farmers in the United States are at risk of being foreclosed," he said. "In Cuba we saw how the revolution makes it possible for farmers to have use of the land, rather than losing it to the bankers who hold the title over our heads.

"Many of us came back and started to discuss how can we make this revolution in our own country," Butts said. "We need it."

"With the revolution in Cuba," Montero responded, "farmers were not only able to use the land and earn a living, they eliminated the oppressive system and the army and rural police who would burn crops, burn homes, and murder peasants. With the revolution all these abuses were ended."

In his presentation later that afternoon, SWP leader Jack Barnes welcomed the CTC leaders, as well as Fernando García Bielsa, first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section to the United States in Washington, D.C., who spoke to conference participants at the evening session on Saturday.

"The most decisive convergence between revolutionary-minded workers and farmers in Cuba and the United States," Barnes said, "is their shared conviction about what makes such a life worth living. It is the conviction among those fighting for a new world in each country that when we ask for solidarity, we will get it without conditions and with no strings attached, as each of us has in the past. We will collaborate as equals, as fellow fighters.

"That's the ultimate convergence between the 100 in Denver, the workers in South St. Paul, and the million in Havana waving the red and black."

"¡Unidos venceremos!" said Barnes in concluding his talk. Together we will win. "¡Cuba sí, yanqui no!"

The displays at the back of the meeting hall prepared by the Pathfinder Reprint Project volunteers and by the Young Socialists attracted great interest from participants, as did the Pathfinder book tables.

Since February 1998 the reprint project volunteers have been instrumental in getting 95 books converted to digital files and back in print, often in dramatically improved editions. "This conference has been all about why," said Ruth Cheney, a member of the project's steering committee based in San Francisco, to the session Saturday night.

Those 95 titles were on special display and sale, so fighters attending the conference could either expand their libraries or stock up on new printings with more readable type, and sometimes with new prefaces or other material.

Outlining the supporters' goal of making 50 percent of Pathfinder's titles digital by May 1, 2001, Cheney noted that in June of this year 125 individuals participated in the project, the highest of any month yet. The volunteers, she said, also plan to increase their monthly contributions, advancing the self-financing character of the project.

A special report was also given by Sara Gates, a party supporter from Seattle who organizes the monthly contributions of supporters across the country. They surpassed the goal set last year of $200,000 in annual contributions, and launched a drive to increase the total to $250,000 a year.

Participants bought $7,648 worth of books, with many carrying bags and boxes full back home with them. The new Pathfinder pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes was purchased by 109 participants.

A total of 566 of the newly digitized books and pamphlets were purchased, with the highest sellers being The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon, founding leader of the SWP; Teamster Politics and Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, leader of the Teamster organizing drives in the 1930s who became the SWP's national secretary; and The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution and In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky, a leader of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution. A total of 226 slightly damaged books were bought at bargain prices, grabbed up especially by young socialists at the gathering.  
 
Final day of conference
Three concurrent activities were organized on Sunday, the final day of the Active Workers Conference.

Socialists who are members of the steering committees of the party's national trade union fractions met to discuss further implementation of the course discussed at the conference.

The Young Socialists organized a meeting of all YS-age young people who attended the gathering to discuss their political perspectives and activity for the rest of the summer and fall.

And the steering committee of the Pathfinder Reprint Project held a series of workshops on each stage of the digital production line. Some 60 people attended, many of whom are new volunteers.

A few days after the conference, Joanne Murphy, a party supporter from Iowa, wrote a letter to Jack Barnes saying how much she had appreciated the gathering politically, including the proofreading workshop she had participated in.

In his reply to Murphy, Barnes pointed to a decisive aspect of the political contribution party supporters are making that is often not thought about. "In addition to meeting the goals of putting in digital form every book, pamphlet, and education bulletin produced by our movement," he said, "a much bigger accomplishment is being prepared.

"Together with the shop, they are helping put in place, for the first time in history," Barnes said, "an irreplaceable, web-based infrastructure of digital propaganda production, decentralized so that no matter what financial, security, or other conditions may confront the communist party in the decades ahead, the program and legacy of the modern revolutionary workers movement can be prepared outside any physical 'brick-and-mortar' apparatus and then printed on presses wherever they can be found and whenever they can be paid for.

"What the Bolsheviks would have given for that!"

"A hundred fighting people in the United States means a lot to the people of Cuba," said Fernando García Bielsa in his remarks to the Saturday evening session, referring to the Denver UMWA solidarity action mentioned by Mary-Alice Waters in her opening conference report. "It means a lot because they are doing it here--as José Martí said--inside the belly of the beast."  
 
Construction of socialism in Cuba
The first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section to the United States in Washington, D.C., brought greetings from the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Referring to the large celebrations in Cuba earlier in the week marking the 47th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada garrison, García said that those involved in the 1953 action "were mostly working-class people, humble people, trained through their own efforts."

The revolutionary government "created a new system of values and social justice," he said, "including that of internationalism." The Cuban people have faced unrelenting threats and aggression by Washington in a "spirit of combat and struggle. We are going into a new stage of the revolution now, which is part of a tremendous struggle of ideas worldwide," he said. "The revolution is not going to change, and the people are not going to give up.

"Maybe they expect us to cry 'Uncle!'" García said. "But we are now ready not only to defend our independence, our homeland, and the accomplishments of the revolution, but to reinitiate, on more solid foundations, the construction of socialism in Cuba."

Written greetings were received from Puerto Rican independence leader Rafael Cancel Miranda, who spent a quarter century in U.S. prisons for his actions opposing Washington's colonial rule. "What is happening in the meatpacking industry in the Midwest, in the miners' strikes in the West, in the protests against the criminal death penalty and against police violence--the developments in each of our countries affect us all," he wrote. "If we are able to liberate Puerto Rico from the bloody claws of Anglo imperialism--then we will all be stronger! Because a defeat for the enemy of all is a victory for each one of us."

The Movement of Landless Rural Workers in Brazil (MST) sent a message of solidarity "with the struggle of workers and farmers in the United States and the world against the neoliberal policies imposed on our peoples." The greetings described the ongoing mobilizations for land and union rights in Brazil and against recent murders of peasant activists and police attacks on protests.

In his presentation summarizing the conference, Barnes pointed out that "the 'productivity miracle,' the 'new economy,' the U.S. rulers boast of is not built on computer technology, as they claim. It's not something magic."

Their so-called productivity boom, Barnes explained, is built on what Washington's top banker, Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, euphemistically refers to as "labor force flexibility."

In other words, Barnes said, "It is built on you and millions of others like you--on the life and limb of workers and farmers. It's built on speedup, on a longer and longer workweek, on more temporary workers, on differential treatment, on driving down our wages and basic social protections."

At the same time, Barnes added, there has been an increase in cop brutality and state terror at every level. "The death penalty--whether the slow death on a plant floor or a quick one at the hands of the hated la migra along the U.S. border, whether inflicted by a cop on the streets or in a prison death chamber--goes hand in hand with the bosses' 'productivity miracle.'"

Just read the copies of The Workers' Voice on the web site of UFCW Local 789, Barnes said. "You'll find out that Dakota Premium management before the June 1 sit-down went from moving 450 head of cattle through the plant in 10 hours to 700 head in less than eight hours. That's the source of their great boom," Barnes said.

"And this is true not just in meatpacking, but throughout other industries and across North America.

"As workers start resisting--as they push the line speed back from 700 head to 450--then we'll begin seeing a 'reverse productivity miracle,'" said the SWP leader. "Because 'the miracle' is built on the blows the employers have dealt to the working class and unions for more than a decade. And that's what's beginning to change.

"Their miracle needs you as silent martyrs. When the silence ends, the miracle evaporates."  
 
Produce their own gravediggers
It is this reality, Barnes said, that underlines the recognition by class-conscious workers that what produces "class battles and revolutionary struggles in this country and worldwide is what the bourgeoisie and other propertied classes do in relation to the toilers. It's the consequences of what Fidel Castro aptly calls the 'dog-eat-dog' heart of capitalism.

"It's not how capitalism doesn't work," Barnes said, "but how capitalism does work--its 'miracles,' not its failures--that produce the horrors, the conditions of life and labor that lead working people to resist and rebel."

The capitalist rulers truly "produce the gravediggers of their system," he said. "They, not we, are creating a new U.S. working class by bringing into the factories and the fields millions of workers from beyond the U.S. borders, with their experiences and traditions of struggle from throughout the Americas and the world."

This is what the capitalists are compelled to do by the laws of their own system, by intensifying interimperialist competition for markets and profits. And they always believe that in doing so they are solving their problems.

"But they miss the point, as the employing class has done throughout its history," Barnes said. "What they do to working people breeds rebellion. The intensification of work, of line speed, the brutality, the unfairness; being treated as objects, as 'factors of production,' instead of thinking, fighting human beings--that's what brings the resistance.

"It begins around moral questions," Barnes said. "The fight at Dakota Premium, the strikes in the Western mines, the developing social movement in coal communities across the country are around moral questions. Read what person after person says in The Workers' Voice and in the Militant coverage. 'I cannot accept this any longer, not only for myself but for my co-workers. I now make my stand.' That's what the fights we're seeing are over.

"The capitalists bring on the socialist revolution," Barnes said. "It is the political organization of workers in massive numbers when the revolutionary situation arises that decides whether or not it will be victorious."  
 
Bipartisan assault
Class-conscious workers must not be taken in by the election-year bombast of the Republican Party presidential candidates and members of Congress, Barnes said, who point to what he called "the almost comical limitations" of the Alaska-based antimissile defense system being proposed by the Democratic White House. Because behind the campaign rhetoric is the deadly serious reality that the Clinton administration has taken the first steps in two of the main strategic but unrealized goals of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

Clinton is making the initial move to put in place a missile defense system--another step toward a nuclear first-strike capacity for U.S. imperialism--aimed at the Chinese workers state in the first instance. In the 1980s, Reagan ultimately had to back away from anything more than ongoing research expenditures on such a "Star Wars-type" system.

Similarly, Clinton's legislation to "end welfare as we know it" opened the assault on Social Security that Reagan himself considered too explosive politically to touch during his own eight years in office.

These and other moves by the Democratic administration--the aptly-named Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act is a prime example--have opened the door for deeper assaults on working people at home and abroad, no matter which of the two major capitalist parties occupies the White House or holds the majority in Congress.

Political polarization is growing as well, Barnes noted, pointing to the capture of the Reform Party by Patrick Buchanan.

Buchanan is leading a regroupment of rightist and ultrarightist forces around the Reform Party, Barnes said. This will aid Buchanan's forces in keeping one foot in capitalist electoral politics--with ballot access and substantial government funding--while regrouping the cadres of an incipient fascist movement that will eventually take its ultrarightist politics and antilabor thuggery to the streets and strike pickets.  
 
Convergence of party, YS, supporters
In concluding his remarks, Barnes called attention to the photograph of workers from the cut floor at Dakota Premium Foods, wearing ¡Sí se puede! T-shirts, at the UFCW Local 789 union hall the night before their victory in the union representation vote.

"We should remember the origins of that photograph," Barnes said. "It was organized by the workers, as an act of pride and to put fear into the bosses. They posted it on their union web site the day of the vote.

"Then the Militant ran the photo on its front page. And the Young Socialists decided to make it the centerpiece of their display at this conference, along with a picture from the UMWA strike against P&M out West."

The party supporters organizing the Pathfinder Reprint Project also used the photograph of the Dakota Premium workers as a central opening feature of their conference display, Barnes pointed out. The text explained that the struggles depicted in that and other photos on the display "are the reason we do this work." (Reprint project steering committee member Peggy Brundy later said the volunteers "had the display all ready to go before the vote and union victory at Dakota. We just added the picture in with the rest. It fit like a glove!")

That photograph, Barnes said, "is sort of a 'gut check.' If you like that picture--if you see in it the kind of revolutionary party and youth organization we're determined to build--then we're on the same road, were together on the historic line of march of the working class."

Barnes said that the communist movement had "never before had a gathering at which the purpose of the Young Socialists, the purpose of the party's organized supporters, and the purpose of the party have converged in the powerful ways we've seen over the past few days.

"We are building the nucleus of a party that will be capable of leading the working class in a mighty revolution against the most violent ruling class that has ever existed on the face of this earth. Out of the vanguard of fighting workers and farmers we will forge the cadres, the women and men, who will make up the most advanced political organization in the history of humanity, a communist party, capable of emulating what our comrades in Cuba did--make a socialist revolution--so that together with working people the world over we can end the degradation of capitalism once and for all."

Martín Koppel, Norton Sandler, and Brian Williams contributed to this article.  
 
 
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