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Vol. 72/No. 49      December 15, 2008

 
Book helps ‘clarify and understand the world’
Latest issue of ‘New International’ magazine
presented at Venezuela Book Fair
(feature article)
 
BY MICHAEL BAUMANN  
CARACAS, Venezuela—A Pathfinder best seller at the Fourth Venezuela International Book Fair here was also the topic of a panel discussion involving revolutionaries from Venezuela, Cuba, and the United States.

The latest issue of New International, in English and Spanish, was launched at a meeting November 15 as part of the fair. Many of the 45 book fair participants who attended the event had bought the magazine earlier at the Pathfinder booth; three bought the remaining unsold copies immediately after.

Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International, chaired. She called attention to a sizable display of previous issues of the Marxist magazine. The new volume in Spanish, she explained, was part of a series of publications that, for 25 years, had taken up some of the most important questions facing working-class fighters in the United States and around the world.

Over the course of the discussion the panel, and the audience afterwards in questions and comments, took up articles in the current issue on the roots of the financial crisis, the revolutionary legacy of Malcolm X, and the working-class defense of land and labor.

Oscar Fuentes, a leader of the youth in the United Socialist Party of Venezuela, recommended the article “The Clintons’ Antilabor Legacy: Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis” for its help “to clarify, to understand the world we are living in today.”

The article is correct, he said, in stating we have to go beyond the way the financial crisis has been “presented in the media and by the Democrats in their campaign for president.”

“They try to portray Bush as solely responsible for it. The truth is, Bush does have responsibility, but he’s not the only one.”

The financial crisis, Fuentes said, is the product of imperialism, of “big capital and all those who serve its narrow interests of profit.”

Fuentes also spoke about the article tracing Malcolm X’s political evolution from Black nationalism to his convergence with revolutionary communists. Fuentes said there was one thing about the article that he would never forget: “The part about Malcolm’s conversation with a leader from Algeria, who said to him: I am not a Negro. Where does that leave me in your system?”

Malcolm X came to understand, said Fuentes, that “the fight against racism, the fight against capitalist repression, is not a fight of just one sector of society—whether it be Blacks, farmers, native peoples, or whatever. It is a fight that requires the unity of working people inside and outside the United States, against the entire capitalist system.”

Manuel Andérez, a Cuban volunteer in Venezuela, spoke on the article “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor.”

“Before I start,” he said, “I’d like to explain that the person addressing you is a genuine product of the Cuban Revolution. Before the revolution I was shining shoes in a brothel in a tiny little town in Cuba. The triumph of the revolution gave me the chance to study. I grabbed it, I took advantage of it.”

“Since then,” he said, “I have worked for the government in many different ways, ranging from research to serving as vice president of Cuba’s Ministry of Environmental Science and Technology. I’ve been in Venezuela for the last two years, with primary responsibility for overseeing the training of the Cuban agricultural specialists working here.”

After Hurricane Flora hit in 1963, destroying tens of thousands of acres of crops, the Cuban leadership “saw the importance of making sure this never happened again,” Andérez said. Construction began on what was to become a nationwide system of mini-dams, capable of controlling the flow of water from sudden massive rains.

Despite the severity of the storms that hit Cuba, very few lives have been lost—a stark contrast to what happens in the rest of the world, including some of the richest countries.

“When it becomes clear a part of the country is likely to be hit by a big storm,” said Andérez, “every person in the area, no matter what age, is evacuated 72 hours in advance. They are housed, fed, and cared for—free of charge—until they are able to return to their homes.”

Omari Musa, a garment worker and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Miami, zeroed in on the question of who is responsible for the economic crisis.

“Nothing could be more false,” he said, “than to claim it’s the result of Bush’s ‘failed policies.’”

The Clinton administration laid the legal basis for the financial crisis by getting rid of laws banks found “inconvenient,” Musa said.

One law Clinton signed—the Financial Services Modernization Act—did away with the wall erected in 1933 between commercial banks and other financial institutions, like insurance companies, brokerage houses, and hedge funds. This law, passed in 1999, opened the gates to a massive expansion in now famous “derivatives.”

Turning to the article “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X,” Musa pointed to its central theme: the role of workers who are Black in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalist rule in the United States and bring to power a government of workers and farmers.

He explained how, in the communist movement, discussion of this question began with Marx and Engels and continued in the Bolshevik Party under the leadership of Lenin.

Regarding Malcolm X’s political trajectory, Musa explained that in the final year of his life Malcolm was moving toward becoming a communist.

In the interview he gave the Young Socialist shortly before he was murdered, Malcolm said he no longer used the term “Black nationalism” to describe his point of view. It didn’t cover what he had experienced or the totality of what he defended, including the revolution in Cuba and the anti-imperialist struggle in the Congo and Vietnam.

It’s important that this article is available in Nueva Internacional, Musa said. “Now anyone for whom Spanish is his or her first language can read about, study, and absorb the revolutionary vanguard position of workers in the United States who are Black.”

“This issue of New International, Musa concluded, “is a weapon in the hands of revolutionary-minded workers and youth in the struggle to overthrow capitalist rule and replace it with a government of workers and farmers. Such a government can be used to do away with the roots of discrimination and exploitation.”

Reflecting the wide range of views raised during the fair, at the Pathfinder booth and elsewhere, a lively debate opened in the discussion period.

It’s fine you’ve done an analysis of the legacy of the Clinton administration, said one speaker. “But wouldn’t an article on the legacy of the Bush administration be longer and more useful?”

The point, responded Musa, is not whether Bush or Clinton were “worse.” It’s that they both “served the interests of the ruling class” of the United States, in different periods, under different circumstances.

Another, after thanking Pathfinder for making Malcolm X available in Spanish, questioned whether Malcolm had broken from Black nationalism. Wasn’t he really trying to build an “African American socialism”?

There is no such thing as Afro-American socialism, Musa answered. “You fight for socialism, or you fight for something different.”
 
 
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Pathfinder books attractive feature at Caracas book fair  
 
 
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