Vol. 73/No. 28      July 27, 2009

Barnes chaired the evening rally. During the day many in the audience had petitioned in working-class neighborhoods all over the city to get the SWP ticket on the ballot. The party is running Dan Fein for mayor, Maura DeLuca for public advocate, and Tom Baumann for Manhattan borough president. Fein and DeLuca are union sewing-machine operators. Baumann is a student at Hunter College.

The current depression is unique, Barnes said, in that it draws all the semicolonial countries, as well as the more advanced capitalist countries, into its financial and economic turbulence. In order to raise its falling rate of profit the capitalist class on a world scale has only one solution: to radically restructure the working class’s standard of living.

The socialist candidates explain there will be more wars along with the rise of radical organizations that are anti-working-class.

Barnes took up the “normalization” of the Obama administration—that is, the rapidity with which the White House is becoming indistinguishable from most of the policies of the previous presidential administrations. This is particularly evident in the speed with which Obama is accelerating the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while more than 100,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

A July 10 Gallup poll found that a big majority—82 percent of those surveyed—express confidence in the U.S. military. Obama is working to increase that support, Barnes said. For a few years now the U.S. rulers have used affirmative action to bring many more Blacks and Latinos into the officer corps, a step the capitalist rulers know will be necessary to create the type of army that can meet the working-class resistance that is coming.

Barnes pointed to the example of the Navy, which has traditionally been among the most segregated branches of the military. The class of 2013 just entered the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Thirty-five percent of the class is Black, Latino, or Asian, almost twice the percentage 10 years ago. Most of the change has come in the last two years.  
 
Affirmative action debate intensifies
The debate over affirmative action is intensifying, Barnes said. Rightist forces are up in arms. Patrick Buchanan wrote a column July 7 called “Dumbing-down the U.S. Navy.” He blasted the Navy affirmative action program, calling it “a national disgrace” and “systematic race discrimination … against hundreds of white kids.”

As the imperialist war drive deepens, Stalinist, social democratic, and anarchist forces are rudderless, Barnes said. He pointed to an editorial in the June 25 People’s Weekly World, which reflects the views of the U.S. Communist Party. The piece praised Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal for saying he would reduce the number of drone missile attacks in Afghanistan. Less than a week later, the World’s editor announced that the print edition of the paper will cease publishing Jan. 1, 2010, another step toward the liquidation of the Stalinist party (see article on page 4).

More clashes like those between the oppressed Uighurs and the dominant Han Chinese in western China will be another feature of world politics in the coming period, said Barnes. He noted that the Soviet Union ultimately broke up along ethnic fault lines. Such explosions over national oppression frequently occur when class differentiation is on the rise and unemployment sharply increases.

The sharp economic contraction is also leading to a decrease in immigration to the United States, after a giant increase, Barnes went on to say. This has been a feature of previous depressions. The Obama administration, with Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat, taking the lead, is now preparing an “immigration reform” that will further stiffen attacks on immigrant rights.

The socialist candidates call for immediate, unconditional legalization of all undocumented workers and an end to raids and deportations, Barnes said. They also speak out against the antiwoman barrage in the liberal media against former Republican Party vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Barnes likened the unrelenting campaign to portray Palin as psychologically unstable and ignorant to the drive by rightists during the 1990s to vilify Hillary Clinton.

The alternating of ups and downs in the world capitalist economy and the accompanying insecurity in the coming years will lead to radicalization, Barnes concluded. The absence of stability will help convince the most class-conscious workers that they must take power out of the hands of the propertied minority.

Martín Koppel, chairperson of the New York 2009 Socialist Workers Campaign, spoke next, explaining that the SWP candidates are the only ones in the race saying that workers and farmers need to organize a proletarian revolution to take political power from the capitalist class and reorganize the economy and all social relations in the interests of the toiling majority.  
 
Tribute to party leader Tom Leonard
The meeting also paid tribute to SWP leader Tom Leonard, who died in June. Leonard grew up during the 1930s depression and witnessed the devastation it brought but also the working-class solidarity that arose in response. (An article reviewing Leonard’s 58 years in the party and his contributions to the communist movement will appear next week.)

Longtime SWP National Committee member Norton Sandler, the executive committee organizer of the New York Headquarters branch of the SWP, described Leonard’s role in big class battles in Houston during the nearly three decades he was active there. This included defense against Ku Klux Klan attacks in 1971, the fight to win the right to vote on contracts in the United Steelworkers union in the mid-1970s, and collaboration with locked-out unionists at the Crown Central Petroleum refinery in the mid-1990s.

Mary-Alice Waters, also a longtime member of the SWP National Committee, spoke on the Maritime Project, a party effort to bring together the political experiences of cadres who worked together as an SWP fraction in the maritime industry in the 1940s and 1950s, carrying out systematic communist political work.

Leonard took substantial responsibility for this project and spoke widely in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia on the lessons of this chapter in party history. Waters explained that his talks made the maritime fraction “come alive” for younger members of the communist movement, but he always presented his experiences in the framework of the leadership challenges in the labor movement today.

Militant volunteer Ben Joyce spoke about Leonard on behalf of the Young Socialists. He said Leonard was a “footloose rebel” and “a soldier dedicated to the victory of the proletariat.”

Some $6,195 was raised to further the party’s work.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers in N.Y. sign to put socialists on ballot
Over 15,000 signatures collected in 9 days  
 
 
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