The new issues are New International no. 12 in English and Nueva Internacional no. 6 in Spanish, featuring the articles “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” and “Their Transformation and Ours” by Jack Barnes, and New International no. 13 and Nueva Internacional no. 7, which include “Our Politics Start with the World,” also by Barnes. The latter two had a first printing.

“The initial printing of these books was sold out at the Havana Book Fair, but we will soon have all four back from the printers, and we invite everyone to come to the international meeting to launch the new publications in New York in April,” Clark said.

“This is an historic turning point for imperialism,” Clark added. “We will see economic devastation that none of us has seen before—conditions that much of the world has been living under for a long time. And we will have an opportunity to participate in big class battles for decades to come.”

“As Barnes explains in ‘Our Politics Start With the World,’ the activity of vanguard workers must be guided by a strategy to close the economic and cultural inequalities between imperialist and semicolonial countries and among classes within almost every country,” he said.

“We are part of an international class, the working class. The key to our transformation is the use, the strengthening, and the extension of union power,” Clark said.

The 58 participants in the program came from Houston; Atlanta; Birmingham, Alabama; and Daytona, Orlando, Gainesville, Tampa, and Miami, Florida. They were welcomed by Karl Butts on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party in Tampa. Sonja Swanson, a member of the Young Socialists in Miami, co-chaired the meeting. This public event was part of a two-day regional educational weekend sponsored by the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists. The educational conference, titled “Imperialism and the Fight for Socialism Today,” included three classes on Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin.  
 
Build the world youth festival
It also provided an opportunity for activists to share experiences in building for the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students taking place in Caracas, Venezuela, in August. Swanson pointed to a display on the festival, described the upcoming activities of the newly organized festival organizing committee in Miami, and then introduced Ilona Gersh, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Detroit.

Gersh asked all those in the audience who are building the festival in their cities to stand. She explained that the broadest possible festival would help defend both Venezuela and Cuba from U.S. imperialist aggression. She pointed to the importance of young people in Venezuela meeting others like themselves from around the world who are looking to fight imperialism, and the possibility of winning youth from the United States who go to the festival to the perspective of making a revolution in the United States itself.

She said that the workers and peasants of Venezuela have three times defeated attempts by the capitalist class, backed by Washington, to overturn the elected president, Hugo Chávez. And she described the inspiring example of the tens of thousands of Cuban volunteer doctors and teachers in Venezuela today. “We have an opportunity to involve workers and farmers of all ages in helping to build the festival in each local area,” Gersh stated.

The public meeting provided an essential political framework to the two days of intensive study of Imperialism. The discussion addressed questions such as: why the free competition of the early years of capitalism inevitably led to monopolies; why the rise of monopolies leads to more violent competition and deeper economic crisis; how the capitalists of the different imperialist nations are forced—not as a matter of policy, but by the workings of their own system—to divide and redivide the world among themselves through military and economic means; the connection between the rise of imperialism and the rise of opportunism as a current within the workers movement; and why imperialism leads not only to increased national oppression, but also increased resistance among the toilers of the world.

“This is the first thing I have studied by Lenin,” said Milovan Tucakovic, 27, a middle school teacher from Miami. “For the first time, ‘imperialism’ is not just a word. I learned a lot about how they dominate the world.”

“Lenin wrote this pamphlet 90 years ago,” said Muhammed Kareem, a young worker from Atlanta. “He explained what the system is and what it would lead to, and that’s exactly what has happened, what’s going on right now. When I first started to read the Militant, it put all together what I was seeing in the world. It explains that the problems facing humanity are the result of the system of capitalism, not of individual leaders like George Bush. There’s no going around it. The system can’t be reformed.”

Conference participants purchased close to $150 worth of books, pamphlets, and periodicals on revolutionary struggles, including eight copies of Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V. I. Lenin.

Rosa Huerta from Atlanta left the conference with Somos herederos de las revoluciones del mundo (We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions), by Thomas Sankara. “I think it’s true that capitalism doesn’t worry about the hunger of people in the world,” she said. “My experience is from Latin America. The imperialists take the maximum resources they can such as minerals and oil. When there is no more oil, it is not worth anything to them anymore.”

Nine hundred dollars was collected for the Militant Fighting Fund to help the paper defend itself in the libel lawsuit brought by the Kingston family, the owners of the Co-Op mine in Huntington, Utah. One reader of the Militant renewed her subscription as part of the international campaign to increase the number of long-term readers of the paper.  
 
 
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