The lively July 14 public forum, which drew some 30 participants, was held in conjunction with a two-day convention of the Communist League. Following the convention, socialist workers and Young Socialists members in Christchurch, located on the southern island of the country, organized a launching of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution hosted by the Militant Labour Forum. Twenty-four people came to the Pathfinder bookshop for the meeting, which was addressed by Pathfinder president and Socialist Workers Party leader Mary-Alice Waters, who wrote the introduction to the new book, and YS leader Olympia Newton from the United States, as well as Annalucia Vermunt of the Communist League in New Zealand.

In Christchurch, Newton also spoke to a meeting organized by students at Canterbury University. Waters and Newton also visited the picket lines of striking Bluebird Foods workers in Auckland and Sanford fish workers in Timaru. By the end of the week the Young Socialists in New Zealand had recruited a couple of new members, doubling their size, and had set up a new YS chapter in Christchurch.

The convention, forums, and other events provided a unique opportunity for the communist movement here--members of the Communist League, the Young Socialists, and organized supporters of the movement--to step back and assess how they can more effectively build a communist component integrated into the proletarian vanguard that is emerging from the resistance of workers and farmers in the country. Building branches of the league in workers districts, carrying out effective communist work in the unions and on the job in industrial worksites, and meeting the opportunities to recruit to the Young Socialists and the Communist League were at the center of the discussions.

At the forum in Auckland Communist League leader Michael Tucker described the strikes and protests that had broken out the previous week, actions by working people that helped shape the deliberations at the convention.

Tucker pointed to workers who walked out at factories and Bluebird Foods distribution centers in Auckland, Timaru, and Christchurch as part of a fight for a new contract. Fisheries, newspaper, and waterside workers are also involved in ongoing strike action, he said. And hundreds of apple growers marched in Hastings to protest the decision of the major fruit exporting company Enza to levy growers $4.50 a carton to cover its foreign exchange losses due to the decline in the New Zealand dollar. Prisoners also occupied a prison yard in Auckland to win a demand that pay phones be reinstalled for their use.

Tim Williams from the Young Socialists described the resistance of working people to the employers' offensive evident at a lively picket line set up by the striking Bluebird Foods workers. Williams highlighted the support the pickets are receiving from other workers, pointing to the din of "toots" from passing motorists, in particular from truck drivers, on the busy industrial road.  
 
Larger number of strikes
Recent statistics indicate that there were an increased number of days lost through industrial stoppages in the first three months of this year, the highest in 18 months. In addition, union membership in New Zealand increased last year for the first time in 15 years.

Tucker noted New Zealand is in an economic upturn, but with the major capitalist economies internationally slowing down, the expansion is unlikely to be deep or prolonged. "This upturn benefits the capitalists above all," he noted. "It grows out of the attacks the employers have carried out over the last 15 years on our wages, working conditions, and unions. It grows out of the success of the government's drive to dismantle the social wage, which has led to the crises working people face today in health, housing, and education."

Joanne Kuniansky from the Communist League in Australia spoke on the panel and added to the picture of actions being taken by working people in their own interests as they confront the effects of the capitalist offensive. Strikes by unionists to defend workers compensation, protests in support of Aboriginal rights, and rallies to defend immigrants have all occurred recently in Australia. She explained the increasingly open response communist workers who are part of this resistance are receiving, giving as an example a Militant subscriber who works on the docks and helped members of the Communist League sell Militant subscriptions to co-workers.

Kuniansky and other speakers said that communist workers have not yet found any limits other than their own size, time, and energy to the political response they get among a vanguard of fighting workers and farmers as they put forward a working-class perspective on politics and communist books and literature published by Pathfinder, and become involved together with them in political actions, strikes, and other events.  
 
Delegation to World Youth Festival
The openings for communist youth were addressed by Annalucia Vermunt and Olympia Newton. Both are helping to build delegations to the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students in Algeria in August.

Vermunt, a member of the Meat Workers union in Christchurch, said Young Socialists in New Zealand are working with political organizations in Fiji, New Caledonia, and Papua New Guinea, as well as Australia and New Zealand, to send representatives to the Youth Festival. This is an avenue for anti-imperialist-minded youth in the Pacific region to collaborate together and meet allies around the globe.

The festival in Algeria is only the second that is open to all anti-imperialist forces internationally to participate in on an equal basis. This in particular provides a new opening in Asia, where access by workers and young people to communist ideas has been previously blocked in some countries by repressive regimes, such as that of Suharto in Indonesia. The Maoist variant of Stalinism is also a declining obstacle.

Newton talked about the opportunities for the Young Socialists participating in the festival to introduce and sell books and pamphlets by Pathfinder Press to participants, many of whom have never had the opportunity to read the works of communist and revolutionary leaders. Participants in the World Youth Festival "will be hungry for revolutionary analysis and a guide to action provided in the Pathfinder books," she said.  
 
Work of supporters
The range and political breadth of books published by Pathfinder would not be possible without the work of supporters of the communist movement around the world who are organized into the Pathfinder Reprint Project. Volunteers are converting Pathfinder's 350-plus titles into electronic format so they can be printed anywhere in the world more quickly, more economically, and with more readable type. Lars Ericson, who recently signed on to the project, spoke at the forum on the latest successes of the volunteers who have been able to step up the pace of production at the same time they take on responsibilities for formatting new books and expanding the number of titles listed with on-line book distributors.

A display of the project, showing each stage of the work the volunteers carry out in order to produce a book in electronic form that is ready for printing, attracted quite a bit of interest at the forum. Reprint volunteers were kept busy during the social afterwards answering questions and encouraging others to join in the project.

Another display was of the Maritime Fund, a project established to document the activity of communist seafarers in North America in the 1940s and '50s. Baskaran Appu, a leader of the Communist League from Christchurch, explained the fund to forum participants. A number of those present had the opportunity to meet and discuss politics with Tom Leonard, one of these seafarers, during a visit he made to Australia and New Zealand last year. Six people signed up as new contributors to the fund.  
 
'A response we've not seen in decades'
Mary-Alice Waters, the featured speaker at the forum, related concrete examples of openings SWP members are finding among miners, garment workers, meat packers, and others in the United States. Waters explained the party was seeing among industrial workers "the kind of response we've not seen in decades--when we carry out competent political work within the working class and the unions."

Waters noted that it is possible for a communist party to act in such a way as to miss these openings, although it would not remain communist for long if it did. The most important thing is to position ourselves in the working-class communities and among layers of workers and farmers where the resistance keeps cropping up and won't go away. There is nothing unique about the resistance and openings in United States, she said. The class struggle in each country has its own forms and rhythms, but the basic features of working-class and farmer resistance is the same, as are the openings for communists--in New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the imperialist countries.

Waters said it is important for vanguard militants not to confuse this resistance with the fact that the unions as basic defense organizations of the working class continue to get weaker. A stiffening of the resistance of workers does not immediately translate into a strengthening of the trade union structures, she said.

The SWP leader said the center of inter-imperialist conflict today is between the various European powers and America. This was captured by U.S. president George Bush's recent trip to Europe, during which he pressed the imperialist powers there to bear the costs of the attempt to "digest" the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and arrogantly announced the U.S. rulers' intention to proceed with the militarization of space no matter what the objections of its European allies and rivals.

The heightened inter-imperialist conflicts in the world, growing differentiation between rich and poor countries, and rising class conflicts within the imperialist powers themselves are not an outgrowth of an abstract process of "globalization," said Waters, but arise from the continuing intensification of the contradictions inherent in capitalism between the social organization of production and private ownership of the means of production.

In his talk Tucker described the steps the Communist League is taking in order to become a component of the vanguard of the working-class resistance and to meet opportunities arising from the increased interest in communist ideas. These center on establishing branches of the league that through their activities are building a base in a workers district--getting to know workers and young people in the area and begin to attract them around the party. This means organizing weekly Militant Labour Forums, regular book tables and door-to-door sales, developing an expanded subscription base to the communist press, and keeping regular hours at the local Pathfinder bookstore that workers can depend on. With such a base of work, the branches of the Communist League can reach out to other developments in politics and in the unions.

Combined with this, Tucker said, is the work to build national industrial union fractions of communist workers carrying out regular and ongoing political work on the job and in their unions. The League is currently building fraction units among clothing and meat workers. Doing both of these, as part of how a communist workers party organizes today, is the road along which revolutionary-minded workers, farmers, and youth will be attracted and recruited to the communist movement, he said.

A party-building fund appeal launched at the meeting raised $NZ3,720 in pledges and donations.
 
 
Related article:
Forum celebrates new Pathfinder book  
 
 
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