Vol. 71/No. 47      December 17, 2007

“The Cuban Revolution remains the only example of a living socialist revolution that is advancing in the world,” said Waters at the opening of her remarks. “The conquest of political power by the proletariat represented by that revolution is the dividing line” in political discussions today.

The power of Cuba’s example was reflected in the openness to Our History Is Still Being Written at the September 21-23 Sixth International Conference of Overseas Chinese, held at Peking University in China. At the conference, reported Waters, copies of the book were sold to 3 people returning to Indonesia, 1 to Japan, 1 to Hong Kong, 6 to Singapore, 1 to Peru, 1 to the Czech Republic, and 2 to the United States.

The book contains interviews with three Chinese-Cuban generals about how the Cuban Revolution transformed the lives of ordinary Chinese Cubans and all working people.

Our History Is Still Being Written is a weapon for Asians looking for a revolutionary perspective, Waters noted. She described recent meetings centered around the book in Houston, San Francisco, and Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland, that have opened the doors to further opportunities to discuss the example of the Cuban Revolution amongst Asians and Asian Americans.  
 
Political debate in Venezuela
The Cuban example and the revolutionary capacity of the working class were also at the heart of debates and discussions at the Third Venezuela International Book Fair in Caracas, November 9-18.

A five-day rolling panel took up the theme “United States: A possible revolution.” Waters was one of the speakers. Over the following days a debate ensued centered on four questions, she said: the revolutionary capacity of the U.S. working class; the nature of the first and second American revolutions; rejection of the Stalinist methods of Jew-baiting, agent-baiting, and thuggery; and the Cuban road of socialist revolution. (Readers can follow this debate on pages 6-8 and in the November 26, December 3, and December 10, 2007, issues of the Militant.)

Waters described how communists are effectively carrying out political work around the world by using such books. This is done not simply by publishing the books, but by the worker-Bolsheviks who are the human agents getting these titles into the hands of workers and youth across the globe, she said.

She announced that Pathfinder will publish its first books in Arabic in the near future, beginning with The First and Second Declarations of Havana and followed by The Communist Manifesto.  
 
Fighting for working-class unity
In his talk, Barnes described how the capitalist offensive against the working class compels many workers to band together to defend themselves, at the same time that others pin their hopes on capital.

In voting for recent contracts with Ford, Chrysler, and GM, he said, “thousands of auto workers hardened their hearts against fellow workers.” Unionists who voted for contracts ending the auto companies’ responsibilities for retirees’ health care and slashing wages of new hires by 50 percent “turned against solidarity. The act of doing that deepened the divisions in the working class.”

Barnes said the contracts registered once again that those workers who will be in the vanguard of struggles are those who literally have nothing to lose.

He explained that a massive seizure of the financial and credit system is under way, the beginning of the worst recession in a quarter century.

In response to the spiraling foreclosure rate on homes that were purchased at “subprime” rates, the Bush administration and major U.S. financial institutions have come up with a plan they call the Hope Now Alliance, Barnes said. The plan would temporarily freeze the mortgage rates of only a minority of homeowners with subprime rates, while all others will see their mortgage payments go up by several hundred dollars a month within the next two years. “There is no ‘housing crisis’ for the ruling class,” said Barnes. “The working class has a housing crisis. The ruling class has a mortgage crisis.”

Barnes pointed out that Frederick Engels, one of the founders of the modern communist movement, explains in The Housing Question that home ownership by workers is one of the ways capitalism tries to hitch labor’s fate to that of capital. This in turns inhibits the mobility and class consciousness of the worker as “free outlaw.”  
 
Building Socialist Workers Party
The consequences of the unfolding economic crisis and how workers can defend themselves will be at the center of the Socialist Workers Party’s 2008 election campaigns, Barnes said. The SWP candidates will explain the fight for a workers and farmers government and the need for labor to break with the twin capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans, and form a labor party. There is no way forward through militant trade union activity alone, or through the building of larger and larger social protest movements, the candidates will explain. The only road forward is political, through independent labor political action.

Barnes said that such a revolutionary approach will gain a hearing among workers and the young people attracted to their struggles. The disproportionate effect of the economic crisis on the working class is leading many workers to fight, Barnes noted. And many workers who want to fight are being attracted toward the SWP.

Barnes said that the challenge before the party is to win revolutionary-minded workers to the movement by fighting together with them on the job, in social protests, and wherever political opportunities arise. In doing so, party organizational forms that get in the way should be cast aside to focus on the political vanguard that is emerging.

A table of Marxist books available at a discount, set up by the Young Socialists, sold $578 worth of titles, mostly to young people. Youth and workers attracted to the communist movement came from New York; Washington, D.C.; Indianapolis; Atlanta; Doraville and Carrollton, Georgia; Los Angeles; Houston; Des Moines, Iowa; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Seattle; and the Twin Cities.

During the program, Dave Prince, a member of the SWP in Atlanta, announced that pledges to the party’s 2007 Capital Fund have now reached $800,000. Some $100,000 of that total was pledged at yesterday’s meeting. The Capital Fund accepts donations of $1,000 or more to help produce new books and keep the entire Pathfinder arsenal in print.

A separate “More-of-the-Same” fund appeal to enable the party to continue its work raised more than $15,000.
 
 
Related articles:
Young Socialists hold national meeting in N.Y.  
 
 
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