The document published here, the preface by Mary-Alice Waters to the second, revised edition of the Spanish-language translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working- Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, will be part of the discussions Socialist Workers Party members and Young Socialists are having with interested working people and youth, as well as in party branches, in preparation for the 40th constitutional convention of the SWP, to be held April 1-4 in San Francisco.
What's dealt with in the preface goes to the heart of the political questions of working-class strategy and party building that every class-struggle-minded worker and young person needs to discuss. The political line of this article has been discussed in leadership meetings of the Socialist Workers Party and communist leagues in other countries. Many of the questions addressed here were discussed at the 1998 convention and Central Committee meetings of the Communist League in Canada. In January of this year, following a meeting of the SWP National Committee, the party's Political Committee and leadership delegations from the communist movement in Australia, Canada, France, Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom met and discussed the political and translation questions described in the preface by Waters.
Out of that meeting, further editing work was done on El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos, as well as on the upcoming editions of New International in French, Spanish, Swedish, and Icelandic, which contain the 1990 SWP resolution "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War."
As part of these discussions, Michel Prairie, editor of Le visage changeant de la politique aux Etats-Unis, the French translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, prepared a chart detailing the main political and translation questions taken up, which will be used as a guide by editors and volunteer translators preparing the upcoming editions of New International in different languages. This chart will be submitted for publication in the SWP's preconvention Discussion Bulletin.
In the last two weeks the Militant published special International Socialist Review supplements containing "A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics" and "Youth and the Communist Movement." These two talks by Jack Barnes are part of the preconvention discussions that SWP and YS members are holding with fellow workers and youth as well as the discussion in party branches.
Readers can purchase copies of these two ISR issues (for $1.00 and $1.50, respectively) at the nearest Pathfinder bookstore (see page 12) or by ordering them from the Militant at 410 West Street, New York, NY 10014.
The convention and socialist conference will be held at the downtown San Francisco Hilton. For information, contact the SWP branch nearest you or the communist league in your country (see addresses on page 12).
This second edition of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos: la política obrera y los sindicatos is the product of many hundreds of hours of work by numerous collaborators around the world. Their efforts have revised and improved the translation into Spanish of the second, expanded edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes, published in 1994 in English, the original language in which this book was written.
The political changes that have marked the class struggle in the United States in the short time since the first printing of the Spanish translation appeared in 1997 make the publication of this new, corrected translation even more important than before. The evidence continues to mount that the working class in the United States and most other imperialist countries has emerged from the political retreat that followed the short, brutal imperial assault on the people of Iraq in 1990-91. The outcome of that war was politically demoralizing to toilers the world over, and even more so to the soldiers and people in Iraq itself, since the bombardment and invasion went largely uncontested by the Iraqi regime, allowing the U.S. imperialist rulers to pay little price for their slaughter.
Today signs of renewed defensive action are everywhere - more numerous strike actions and counteroffensives against employer threats and lockouts, reflecting the tenacity and resistance of the embattled ranks; a noticeable growth in the confidence and determination of women in industry; the increased weight of Black leadership in labor battles and struggles of working farmers; an upswing in the Puerto Rican independence movement; more actions in defense of immigrants' rights; a revival of aspects of the Chicano movement; larger and more insistent responses to rampant police brutality and racist discrimination; more youth being attracted to the example of workers' and farmers' struggles, linking their energy and social protest initiatives to the class forces that can construct a livable future for all humanity.
Vanguard currents and individuals, as well as new layers of workers and farmers, are coming together in the course of this resistance, hungry for solidarity and unity in struggle, hungry to march shoulder to shoulder, as together we strengthen and learn from each other's fights against the effects of wage and debt slavery. Along this road, we learn to know and trust each other. We discuss explanations for and alternatives to the devastating future working people increasingly anticipate the capitalist system has in store for us all. More and more we are confident that as sizable sections of the massive working class in the United States go into action - as growing numbers of workers become conscious of themselves as a social class that can be an independent political force - this class will have the capacity to unite the toilers in the struggle to establish a workers and farmers government capable of leading humanity out of the profound social crisis that is the product of the lawful, inevitable workings of capitalism in its decline.
The greatest obstacle we face to the realization of this liberating and revolutionary perspective is that working people who are fighting underestimate what we are actually accomplishing and what we are capable of. We don't yet recognize ourselves as the true bearers of culture into the new millennium. But these are things we will learn, together, in the course of battles that are coming.
The work embodied in this corrected edition of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos - a collective translation effort of many committed militants - is the fruit of the economic, social, and political changes that have marked the closing years of the twentieth century. Obstacles have been eliminated that earlier would have made much more difficult, if not impossible, the kind of international collaboration that went into catching imprecise or misleading translations that marred the first printing.
The intensifying imperialist exploitation of Central and South America and the Caribbean has forced millions of workers and peasants whose first language is Spanish to leave their homes and head for the United States in search of jobs and income to sustain their families, and often to escape brutal repression. Hundreds of copies of the first edition of the book have been sold to Spanish-speaking workers in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere. The mix of workers from a more than a dozen countries of the Americas reading, studying, and discussing the book and calling attention to different words or phrases that were confusing to them, that didn't seem to capture clearly enough the concepts presented originally in English, or that oversimplified the nuances present in the original, helped the editors of the Spanish edition revise a number of key translations.
One such term is worker-bolshevik, a political designation that originated among the communist forces of the October 1917 Revolution and was used not infrequently by Lenin. In the first Spanish translation of this book, worker-bolshevik was not translated as a hyphenated compound noun -designating a communist cadre whose integrity and discipline, organizational functioning, class political habits and training, and milieu are proletarian to the core. Instead, it was translated with a noun and an adjective, a bolshevik worker (a worker who belongs to a bolshevik party). The complexity and class nuances of the Russian and English original, its essential political content, was lost.
A reader in Cuba helped correct the translation of another of the terms central to the politics of the book, the turn to industry and the building of a turn party. As is amply explained in the pages that follow, the expression turn party describes both a party that has made the turn to industry like the one the Socialist Workers Party carried out in the late 1970s as well as one whose rhythm of work, norms of behavior, and political milieu are determined by the fact that the majority of its membership and leadership are industrial workers and members of industrial trade unions. The expression is largely synonymous with proletarian party, as used historically by leaders of the Socialist Workers Party. The best presentation of what a turn party is, what it does, and its continuity through generations back to the 1919 founding of communism in the United States, is found in Section IV of the present book, "The revolutionary perspective and communist continuity in the United States."
In the previous edition, turn was translated by the Spanish word giro; here it is translated by the word viraje, which more clearly indicates a change of direction, as opposed to revolving.
This new edition also corrects the translation of the word worker. Unlike in English, in Spanish there are two terms for worker: trabajador, which includes industrial workers as well as others whose livelihood depends on selling their labor power in return for a wage; and obrero, which generally means factory or industrial worker. In this corrected edition trabajador is generally used to translate the English worker, except where the context is clearly referring specifically to industrial workers. The first Spanish edition had generally used obrero, a translation that inadvertently narrowed and distorted the class forces referred to in the reports and resolutions adopted by SWP conventions and leadership bodies that make up the contents of this book.
This correction breaks from a tendency, in fact a petty- bourgeois prejudice prevalent in much of the left in Latin America and elsewhere, to view the working class narrowly as those already organized in trade unions, especially better- paid, "skilled" workers, rather than, as in the Bolshevik tradition, the working class as a whole - industrial and nonindustrial, employed and unemployed, in the city and the countryside.
In a similar manner, numerous other terms and phrases have been reviewed and the translation rendered more politically accurate.
Considerable time and political resources have gone into preparing this corrected translation. This effort is an important contribution to forging a homogeneous political cadre in which workers whose first language is Spanish can be confident that what they are reading is the same thing fellow workers whose first language is English have read - and, above all, that it furnishes the same guide to action, as they work together to apply it in practice in the mass movement.
As anyone who has ever had experience interpreting from one language to another knows, translating clearly and precisely is a genuine challenge. The obstacle, however, is not simply, or even primarily, linguistic. It is a question of political culture, history, and habits of political thought - in other words, class traditions.
Spanish grammar (or that of French, to take another example of a language into which revolutionary socialists have translated The Changing Face of U.S. Politics) does not have an ahistorical, antimaterialist, antidialectical, nonproletarian bent greater or lesser than English. But the political history and traditions of the working-class movement in the United States have created a different legacy that does have a very real bearing on political vocabulary and unclouded, even if rough-hewn, class terminology.
The English-language political vocabulary of the communist movement in the United States has been established in the struggle of the Socialist Workers Party to speak in clear class terms to working people and to peel away the counterrevolutionary obfuscations of the Stalinist and Social Democratic forces, as well as various centrist pretensions and adaptations. The United States is the only country where, due to historical factors beyond any party's control (such as the fact that the United States escaped the physical destruction World War II wreaked upon the working class in Europe), communist continuity has been organizationally unbroken and relatively strong for the last eighty years, numbers notwithstanding. The relative weakness of the organized communist movement throughout Latin America and Europe over that same time period means that the Spanish political terminology of our movement, like the French, has also tended to adapt to the political culture of the "left," as mediated through the "far left" fashions in those countries.
Another historical factor - which may at first seem contradictory - is important. The powerful ups and downs in the class struggle in Europe and Latin America, as compared to the United States, mean the political traditions of the workers movement are in fact stronger there, even if the proletarian vanguard has never been able to carve out a stable nucleus, with decades-long communist continuity. So the language that "sounds right" to workers, even those newly recruited to the communist movement, is much more heavily weighed down with Stalinist, Social Democratic, and centrist political content and shadings. It means that workers won to the communist movement often have much more to unlearn than newly radicalized workers elsewhere - just to be able to express dialectical contradictions, materialist concepts, and class-struggle content. The accentuated unevenness and contradictory social combinations that mark the final historical days of the imperialist epoch are felt in many ways.
Given the growing social weight of Spanish-speaking workers, including within the imperialist countries of North America, and the fact that they compose a significant proportion of cadre and leadership of communist parties in those countries, clarity and accuracy in translation between English and Spanish especially become a crucial part of the fight for the political homogeneity necessary to forge a powerful enough and broad enough leadership of a proletarian party to lead the toilers to storm and victory.
It is in that spirit that this second edition of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos is published. While the translation changes affect only a small percentage of the words and phrases in these pages, students of the first edition will find that this second edition reads like a new book. And we hope they will purchase it as readily as the new readers together with whom they will be discussing and using it as a common guide to work in the mass movement.
For the work that made possible this new translation, we express special appreciation and thanks to editors Martín Koppel and Luis Madrid, as well as to Michel Prairie, whose parallel effort on the French-language Le visage changeant de la politique aux Etats-Unis helped to spotlight not only translation problems but many of the political challenges that needed to be addressed and corrected.
February 1999