Sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party National Committee and the Young Socialists leadership, the meeting drew participants from across the country, as well as some from Canada and the United Kingdom. The majority were active in working-class and other social struggles, from the fight for job safety by coal miners, to protests against "antiterrorist" detentions and secret trials, to actions in defense of the Cuban Revolution.

Many participants had been campaigning for Socialist Workers candidates from California to Florida to Illinois. A number of students and young workers who came had only recently met the communist movement through their political activity. Three workers in attendance were involved in the recently successful fight by meat packers at Dakota Premium in South St. Paul, Minnesota, to win their first union contract.

The morning after the meeting, three dozen young people attended a meeting called by the Young Socialists leadership to continue the political discussion and outline the work of the revolutionary youth organization over the coming weeks.

Both before and after the meeting, participants joined political discussions around the Pathfinder literature tables or the photo displays depicting different aspects of the work of the communist movement. Many of the youth descended on a special sales table featuring used books on revolutionary politics, and some left the event with boxes full of books under their arms. Supporters of the SWP from New York and New Jersey organized a buffet spread and refreshment bar to create a comfortable atmosphere for the informal discussion.  
 
Havana meeting on October 1962 crisis
Meeting under a banner reading, "The struggle against imperialism today," participants heard presentations from several leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. The featured speaker was Jack Barnes, the party’s national secretary.

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International, chaired the program. She described a conference in Havana she had participated in three weeks earlier on "The October Crisis: a political perspective 40 years later." Many among the 200 Cubans, Russians, and Americans attending that meeting had been actors in the 1962 events, in which the U.S. government led by President John F. Kennedy had, as Waters said, "brought the world to the brink of nuclear war as it sought a ‘regime change’ in Cuba." They included former Kennedy administration officials such as Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and presidential adviser Arthur Schlesinger.

Waters pointed to the new Pathfinder title October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba, by Cuban author Tomás Diez Acosta. It tells the powerful story, covered up by the U.S. big-business media, of the Cuban people’s mobilization to defend their revolution during these events. The author presents a wealth of facts on the steps that Washington took to prepare an invasion of Cuba, a course Kennedy turned away from when Pentagon officials estimated there would be 18,500 U.S. casualties within the first 10 days of an invasion.

"It was an instructive experience to listen to Arthur Schlesinger lecture his hosts that Washington had no intention of invading revolutionary Cuba," said Waters. "He said nothing about the strength and readiness of the Cuban people and government, which stayed Washington’s hand."

McNamara claimed the "missile" crisis was the "best-handled crisis of the 20th century," contrasting Kennedy’s approach with the Bush administration’s moves today toward a "preemptive" war on Iraq. "As if imperialism has ever fought any other kind of war!" said Waters.

"The Cubans at the conference, and also the Russians, answered these lies," she said.  
 
Campaigning for communism
Today, in face of the accelerating economic and political crisis of the world capitalist system, communists "take our explanations about this crisis to the broadest possible layers of workers, farmers, and young people," Waters said. "We explain that the solution does not involve replacing one capitalist government with another, but charting a course of action to mobilize the class forces capable of overthrowing capitalist rule and establishing a workers and farmers government."

Socialist Workers candidates and their supporters in New York have set the pace for campaigning along these lines, Waters said in introducing Martín Koppel, the party’s candidate for governor of New York as well as editor of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

Koppel reported that a few days earlier he and campaign supporters had joined thousands of transit workers at a Manhattan rally to defend their health benefits and oppose an abusive disciplinary system. "Find the money!" the workers chanted in answer to the mayor’s pleas of a "budget deficit." Many of the unionists welcomed the socialist campaigners, he said, "and exchanged views on their fight as well as on the socialist perspective."

Partisans of the socialist campaigns have soapboxed not only on street corners but at plant gates and on college campuses. At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, "a cluster of people often gathers around the speaker and the table," said Koppel. "Others passing by sometimes stop and ask, ‘Is this a rally?’"

Campaigning politically in this bold and broad way "puts communists in a stronger position to contest in the long-term struggle for leadership with other currents that identify themselves as socialist," Koppel said.

With the election campaign drawing to a close, he noted, "socialist workers and young socialists will draw on this experience and continue their street campaigning. We will not put away our bullhorns."  
 
Building party in western coalfields
Jason Alessio, one of three Young Socialists members who spoke at the meeting, is a union coal miner in Colorado. He ran as a Congressional candidate on the Socialist Workers ticket.

Many working people in coal mining communities have been interested in discussing the revolutionary perspectives of his campaign, Alessio said. "At Oak Creek, a town of 1,000 where pro-union signs can be seen in people’s front yards, a retired miner encouraged us to take part in the local May Day parade. We set up a table at the local grocery store and in three hours sold Militant subscriptions to a working farmer, a grocery store worker, and a local teacher."

Miners have bought many copies of the Militant at mine portals and swapped political ideas with sellers, he reported. At the Kennecott mine in Utah workers bought 70 copies of the Militant before the papers ran out. At a recent portal sale in Colorado, a miner asked Alessio, "How can you say you support women’s rights and also oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan?" After some give-and-take about Washington’s hypocritical posturing as a defender of women’s rights as it pursued its imperialist objectives in that oppressed nation, he remarked, "Everything I’ve read is the opposite of what you’re saying, that the U.S. government is exploiting more than helping." He said he would visit the Pathfinder bookstore in Craig, Colorado.

Seventeen Pathfinder titles have now been translated into Farsi, the official language of Iran, said Waters in introducing Ma’mud Shirvani, Pathfinder’s Farsi-language editor. They range from Malcolm X Talks to Young People to Problems of Women’s Liberation by Evelyn Reed, to titles by Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky.

Explaining the conflicts between rival imperialist powers that lie behind the U.S.-led drive to war in the Middle East, Shirvani quoted Lord Browne, chief executive of British Petroleum, who recently asked Washington to establish a "level playing field" for British oil corporations in Iraq rather than "carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of any future war."

To V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik party and the October 1917 Russian Revolution, imperialist spokespeople such as Lord Browne were "’civilized’ hyenas...whetting their teeth" on the natural and human wealth of countries like China and the states of the Middle East, said Shirvani. Browne’s coveted "level playing field" will in fact be a "rough terrain of conflict and war," he said.

Through their intervention in the Middle East, said Shirvani, "the ‘civilized’ hyenas in Washington, London, and other imperialist capitals aim to regain what they lost in Iran’s revolution of 1979," where a mass insurrection toppled the U.S.-backed monarchy.

While revolutionary leaderships do not exist today in the countries of the Mideast, class-struggle-minded working people today do not confront the obstacle of Stalinism on the kind of scale that blocked many previous revolutions, Shirvani said. Furthermore, "the imperialist moves toward an assault on Iraq have not awed the masses but rather have accelerated the pace of politics, creating the conditions for more turmoil and resistance."

As the war proceeds and class conflicts sharpen, he said, "Pathfinder books, which bring working people their revolutionary continuity, will be weapons of life-and-death importance."

Arrin Hawkins, Socialist Workers candidate for lieutenant governor of New York and a worker in Pathfinder’s printshop, had recently helped build public meetings in Washington for Cuban revolutionary leader Víctor Dreke and Ana Morales, who has helped lead Cuba’s medical missions in Africa.

Dreke had already spoken before audiences in Washington, D.C., and Georgia, and was headed to Alabama, Florida, and Massachusetts. "This is the first time ever a commander of the Cuban Revolution has spoken in U.S. cities," Hawkins noted. In these broadly sponsored meetings, Dreke "explains the place of internationalism in the Cuban Revolution, and the ties of solidarity with Africa that have been forged over decades. He tells how working people in Cuba made a revolution in 1959, took down the ‘rope’ of racial discrimination, and set about the socialist transformation of Cuban society." Before the revolution, a rope was often used in Cuban town parks to separate whites from Blacks at social events.

The political interest generated by the meetings for Dreke and Morales has been reflected in the sales of revolutionary literature. More than 100 copies of Pathfinder’s From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution by Víctor Dreke and $3,000 worth of other Pathfinder titles had been sold so far, Waters said.  
 
Publishing program
Waters reported on Pathfinder’s publishing program and celebrated the contribution of supporters of the communist movement in helping keep the publisher’s backlist in print. The 200-plus supporters in the Pathfinder Reprint Project have also shouldered major tasks in the publication of more than a dozen new titles so far.

Pathfinder has transferred its "pick and pack" operation from New York to Atlanta, and supporters of the communist movement there have taken on the responsibility of warehousing the books and shipping out book orders.

Supporters of the Socialist Workers Party are also working with the party to increase and regularize sales of Pathfinder titles to bookstores and libraries, Waters said.

Pathfinder is now preparing a Spanish-language edition of Malcolm X Talks to Young People and a new expanded edition in English. Also scheduled for publication in the coming weeks are Marianas in Combat, based on an interview with Brig. Gen. Teté Puebla, who fought in the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon during Cuba’s revolutionary war; and issue no. 12 of New International. The latter will feature the report by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes adopted by the party’s national convention in July, and will include reports to the 1921 congress of the Communist International by Lenin and Trotsky.  
 
Work with anti-imperialist forces
Olympia Newton, a Young Socialists leader and the recent Socialist Workers candidate for secretary of state in California, described the interest in the Militant among West Coast dockworkers, who are engaged in a fight for a contract, in which the federal government, arguing that "national interests" are at risk, has intervened by imposing the antilabor Taft-Hartley law.

"By resisting appeals and pressure to subordinate their struggle to ‘national security’ and the war effort, the dockworkers are objectively carrying out action against the imperialist war drive," she said.

Newton described the work she and other Young Socialists are carrying out together with other youth to build participation in the congress of the Continental Organization of Latin American and Caribbean Students (OCLAE), to be held in Guadalajara, Mexico, November 29–December 2. Among the hundreds of students attending from across the Americas, many will be looking for ways to fight against imperialist domination.

"YS members will have already met some of the delegates at previous international gatherings, and the congress will be an opportunity to link up with them," Newton said. The youth congress will coincide with the Guadalajara International Book Fair, where Pathfinder will have a booth.

"Dozens of students who attended meetings addressed by Víctor Dreke in Washington and Atlanta said they were interested in attending the OCLAE congress," Newton pointed out. This response "shows the potential to organize a good number of youth from colleges and high schools in the United States to go to the event," she said. Newton is part of a group of about 30 in Los Angeles who are making plans to go.  
 
Invitations for Cuban youth leaders
The YS is also working with students and academics who are interested in inviting two Cuban youth leaders for a speaking tour next spring, as well as doing initial work to build a delegation to the U.S.-Cuba youth exchange in July of next year.

Newton invited young people at the public event to attend a meeting organized by the Young Socialists the following day. At that meeting, a lively discussion took place, including YS members and other youth interested in the revolutionary organization, on several political questions that had been raised during the program the day before. The meeting also discussed the Young Socialists’ main work over the next few months--from continuing the perspective of reaching out broadly through street campaigning for socialism, to building the OCLAE congress, to joining up with workers and farmers in struggle.

SWP national secretary Jack Barnes took up some of the broad developments in politics and elaborated on some of the themes addressed by other speakers.

Referring to an earlier point by Shirvani, Barnes explained that the statement by British Petroleum’s Lord Browne about a "level playing field" in the Mideast for British oil companies is a "sign of the times and the speed of events." The capitalist spokesperson was saying, with casual frankness, that British companies have the "right" to a share in Iraq’s oil wealth because they are furnishing cannon fodder to an imperialist assault.

Such a cold-blooded attitude, he said, "expresses the brutal logic of capital, which cannot be prevented. "It can only be ended by overthrowing its domination."

The socialist leader noted the accumulating signs of depression conditions in the United States and internationally, including the sharp drop in U.S. auto sales, the virtual bankruptcy of flagship firms such as Ford and United Airlines, and the shift by some middle-class and bourgeois layers away from the dollar and toward gold and other precious metals as an attempt to protect their savings.

In face of this growing crisis, Barnes said, the reaction among wide social layers, including many working people, is denial--like a frog in water that is slowly being heated and that doesn’t recognize the rising temperature as it’s being cooked.

Even revolutionaries, not having lived through such major events before, "don’t understand this in our stomachs at first," he said. But they act as part of the vanguard of the resistance by working people that is generated by the conditions of capitalist exploitation and brutality.

"What we do here and now as part of the working class is decisive," he said. And the communist movement has political leverage well beyond its size through the revolutionary books that Pathfinder is publishing today.

(Barnes’s remarks will be reported more fully in a subsequent issue.)

The meeting concluded with an appeal for contributions for the $105,000 Pathfinder Fund. Almost $5,000 was raised by those present, along with some $4,000 in additional pledges.  
 
 
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