SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, the main speaker, took up key questions in U.S. and world politics, none of which had been addressed by any of the candidates of the capitalist parties. At the heart of U.S. politics today, he said, is the fact that the unions remain at center stage, and that for increasing numbers of working people today, mobilizing union power or organizing unions in face of the employers’ assaults has become an immediate, practical necessity.

Barnes also described how the U.S. rulers, to meet the challenges to their declining international order, are transforming their global military posture and political world strategy. This includes a shift in the U.S. armed forces to smaller, more mobile units poised for rapid deployment around the world.

These developments, he explained, pose the kind of steps needed today to meet the opportunities to build a revolutionary workers party whose goal is to lead millions of working people to confront the ruling billionaire families and take political power.

The meeting celebrated the culmination of the Socialist Workers campaign. Over the past months, many in the audience had been energetically campaigning for the Socialist Workers ticket of Róger Calero for president and Arrin Hawkins for vice president as well as local candidates in 22 states and the District of Columbia.

At the public event, Betsy Farley, organizer of the SWP organizing committee in Hazleton, eastern Pennsylvania, reported on the successful reopening of the socialist campaign hall there. The campaign hall, now reconstructed, had been firebombed on September 11. The arson attack badly damaged the front of the hall and damaged books and campaign literature. Supporters of political rights across the United States and other countries sent letters of protest to the city administration calling on them to prosecute those responsible.

Farley said this broad public backing and generous contributions made it possible to reopen the campaign center within a few weeks. “This victory belongs to everyone who supported us in this fight,” she said, thanking all who were part of the effort.

One of the featured speakers, Roberto Villanueva, described the new stage in the battle by workers at the Co-Op coal mine in Huntington, Utah, to win representation by the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). On Sept. 22, 2003, the bosses at C.W. Mining, known as the Co-Op mine, fired 75 miners after learning that they were talking to the UMWA about organizing. The mine workers were angry about unsafe job conditions, said Villanueva, and being paid between $5.25 and $7 an hour when wages for underground miners nationwide average at least $17 per hour. The unionists there turned the company lockout into a strike.

During a strike that lasted nearly 10 months, the miners won support from unions and others in the West, across the country, and around the world. The miners’ stick-to-itiveness and the solidarity they won, said Villanueva, brought pressure to bear on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which in June ruled that the company had illegally fired the miners, that it must give them back pay, and that a union representation election must be held with the UMWA as an option. The company was forced to allow all the miners who wanted to, to return to their jobs, where they have continued their fight for a union.

Villanueva said more solidarity is needed—and the miners are anxious to reach out to others to explain what they are fighting for—in order to press the NLRB to set a date for the union election, and to exclude members of the Kingston family, which owns the mine, from voting in the election.

In addition to the company’s war of harassment against the unionists, he said, “pro-UMWA miners at Co-Op face the pressure to leave the job and the fight by seeking employment in nearby mines that are hiring workers at much higher wages.” The foremen at Co-Op bait the miners, saying that if they were smart they’d go for a better-paying job. “They think that by waving dollars in our face we can be bought,” said one miner, according to Villanueva.

The miners are also facing a lawsuit the company filed against the UMWA September 24. “This is a harassment and nuisance suit,” Norton Sandler, national director of the Socialist Workers 2004 Campaign, told the audience. “It is designed to take the focus off the fight for a union.” The lawsuit charges the UMWA with violation of labor law, and places charges of libel and defamation against a number of unions and other organizations that support the union fight, as well as numerous media outlets that have covered the struggle at Co-Op.

Sandler said the Militant is one target of the company lawsuit. “Twenty-four of the 80 pages of the suit are block quotes from the Militant’s coverage of the fight,” he said.

Of the 56 issues of the socialist paper that have come out since the start of the fight, 54 have had articles on the struggle at Co-Op, Sandler noted. “And the Militant is going to continue to cover this fight in the same way,” he said, “with the same accuracy, making no bones about its support for the miners in their fight for a union.”

Supporters of the Militant are taking this attack seriously. “It’s one thing to not be thrown off course by a suit like this,” Sandler said, “but it’s something else to take frivolously what you may face.” He announced the launching of the Militant Fighting Fund and asked for contributions to help cover the legal and other expenses that the Militant may face against the Kingston suit. The goal, he said, is to raise $30,000 by December 15. Those present pledged or contributed more than $23,000.  
 
Hidden centrality of ‘union question’
“Before the results are in after the polls close on Tuesday evening the feverish diversions of this election campaign will rapidly fade away from human memory,” said Jack Barnes in opening his talk. The reason is that the elections didn’t address the most important questions facing humanity, he stated. Whoever wins the elections will face a very different kind of economic and financial crisis before the end of his term than his predecessor did, the SWP leader said. Competition between U.S. imperialism and its European and Japanese rivals, deflationary pressures, and the danger of default on the foreign debt held by governments in semicolonial countries will drive the U.S. rulers and their government to try to squeeze even more out of workers and farmers.

In addressing what to do today in face of these conditions, the single most important question for working people is the need to organize unions and mobilize union power, and to build a labor party based on the unions that fights in the interests of workers and farmers.

This course, which was placed at the center of the Socialist Workers election campaign this fall, stands in sharp contrast to all the abstract promises, pleas, and plans that capitalist politicians offer, and that in the end reduce us to the dismal prospect of voting for “Anyone But…,” Barnes said.

The unions remain at center stage of politics in this country, said Barnes. “The battle to build these defense organizations of the working class has not been and will not be driven away” as working people resist the assaults by the employers and the effects of the economic devastation that are a consequence of capitalism.

Barnes said workers are confronted with a contradiction. On the one hand, the trade union movement continues to decline in size and strength. The course of the class-collaborationist labor officialdom more and more resembles that of corporations that carry out merger after merger to ensure their continued existence and the pensions of the executives.

On the other hand, trade unions will continue to be the potential instruments workers turn to as they seek to fight the employers’ offensive against their wages and conditions of life and work.  
 
‘Their transformation’
Barnes noted that the most important change the U.S. capitalists are carrying out today is the transformation of their military in face of the challenges they face in defending their class interests around the globe. The reason this was not debated at all in the bourgeois election campaign is that there is no basic disagreement on this course among the U.S. rulers and their twin parties.

The U.S. rulers are reorganizing their armed forces into smaller, more lethal units that can be rapidly deployed around the world to defend Washington’s interests. They are eliminating the overseas military bases of the Cold War years, which were virtual cities with facilities for soldiers’ families. The “logistical support” on such bases is being “outsourced.” Instead, Washington is moving to set up stripped-down “lily pads” in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe—particularly near the Middle East and Central Asia, where the imperialist offensive, waged under the banner of the “war on terrorism,” is currently focused.

Uzbekistan, Romania, and São Tomé and Principe (in the oil-rich Gulf of Guinea) are among the locations being considered for these new deployment points. Meanwhile, U.S. forces stationed at giant bases in Germany, south Korea, and Okinawa, Japan, will be sharply cut back as part of this restructuring. Bases that are unpopular locally, like the one in Seoul, Korea, are in the process of being moved to more remote areas.

This transformation of the U.S. military’s posture is being driven and accelerated by wars like those in Afghanistan and Iraq. The purpose of these wars is not to recolonize these countries and occupy them for the long haul with American troops but to work with sections of the local ruling classes to advance the strategic interests of U.S. imperialism.

At home, the SWP leader said, the U.S. rulers have established the Northern Command, the first time the U.S. military has command of security on U.S. soil since the end of the Civil War in 1865. Northcom is a war-fighting command that is responsible for “homeland defense,” which includes dealing with “civil disorders,” drug trafficking, and “terrorist” attacks on U.S. territory.

Working in coordination with Northcom, and also located at the Peterson Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, Colorado, is the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad), which can put the Canadian Air Force under its command. Norad has flown more than 38,000 sorties by fighter-bombers “in protection of the homeland” since Sept. 11, 2001, Barnes said.

“Homeland defense” also changes Washington’s approach to its own southern and northern frontiers. The model for the U.S. rulers is the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region, where the border is defined by military necessity rather than the needs of sovereign nations in command of their territory, allowing Washington to move its forces quickly against its enemies in the region. This is the standard the U.S. government wants to set for its borders with Canada and Mexico.

The purpose of the wars the U.S. rulers launch is not only to safeguard their interests abroad, Barnes noted. Equally important, it is aimed at mobilizing patriotic sentiment at home—that is, getting working people to accept “sacrifice” in the name of “saving America” and “defeating terrorism.”

The SWP leader explained that it is important to assess U.S. imperialism’s accomplishments in the world over the recent period—“to know our enemy.” One such achievement is the transformation of the Pakistani government from a protector of the Taliban in Afghanistan into one of Washington’s strongest allies in the region.
 
‘Islamism’ has peaked
Barnes pointed to the preparations for a new U.S. military offensive in Iraq’s “Sunni Triangle,” an area where Saddam Hussein’s Baathist forces have had a base of support. Just as Washington and London were easily able to invade Iraq last year because of the Hussein regime’s incapacity to fight imperialism and the stranglehold it had imposed through its party-police state on working people of Iraq, the U.S. rulers have made advances in that country today because of the political nature of the forces involved in the opposition to the U.S.-led occupation.

“There is no revolutionary resistance in Iraq,” said Barnes, “although there are many brave young people in Iraq who are outraged by the occupation and the false promises” of the occupiers and their collaborators. Unlike the bourgeois-led militias, which have relied on methods such as beheading foreign hostages and bombing U.S. targets, a revolutionary movement against imperialist domination must offer a clear presentation of what it’s fighting for.

By way of contrast, he pointed to the wealth of political debates on program and strategy conducted by genuine national liberation movements over the decades. These range from the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, which led the popular movement that defeated U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia, to the revolutionary liberation movement in Algeria against French colonialism, to the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army in Cuba. Nor is there a bourgeois regime in the Mideast willing to risk organizing a nationalist resistance to the imperialist occupation, said Barnes. This marks the political exhaustion of the bourgeois nationalist and Stalinist forces that for decades substituted for revolutionary leadership in the region.

This includes the exhaustion of “Islamist” groups like Hamas or al-Qaeda. In fact, Barnes said, the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by 500 insurgents, which the Saudi regime crushed after two weeks, “was the high point of ‘Islamism,’ while September 11 was its flare-out.”

Because the imperialists can’t solve the crisis bred by their own system and generate permanent instability, however, working people in the region will be able to make use of the political space opened up to seek ways to advance their struggles, Barnes said.  
 
‘Our transformation’
Pointing to the resistance by working people in the United States, Barnes said the experiences that militant workers and farmers are going through today are part of “our transformation.” What class-conscious workers do now is critical for the big class battles of the future. We go through common experiences with other workers, who show a willingness to learn and change their views on all kinds of questions as they fight.

Workers will learn, for example, that they are limited not primarily by the government’s antiunion legislation, but by “what they themselves are big enough to take,” Barnes said. That means relying on their own strength and capacities and reaching out to fellow working people.

A strong point of the SWP campaign, Barnes said, was when the party’s presidential candidate, Róger Calero, began responding to workers complaining about how badly the bosses treat them by pointing out that when companies lay off workers or shut down plants and move production elsewhere, workers must follow the bosses wherever they go—even to Mexico or other countries. Past labor upsurges in the United States have shown that workers can defeat the bosses’ tactics when union-organizing and other struggles become so generalized that bosses “can run but they can’t hide.”

It is to be part of this resistance that over the past few years socialist workers have organized to get jobs in coal mines, garment and textile factories, and meatpacking plants. These are industries where the bosses’ brutal productivity drives have begun to generate resistance.

Class-conscious workers need to be mobile in order to have the flexibility to leave one job and get another one quickly as struggles develop. Key to this is acquiring the necessary job skills. Barnes pointed to the example of the New York SWP branch, where both the oldest and youngest members of the branch, 62 and 25 years of age, are in jobs learning butcher skills.

This example points to the need for communist workers of different generations to work together to make real progress.

Barnes said he wholeheartedly agreed with a comment by a Cuban revolutionary leader who was asked by a participant at a recent meeting in Washington, D.C., whether the leadership of the revolution was passing the torch to the younger generation. He replied that it’s impossible to “pass the torch.” Instead, the leadership transition is being carried out in Cuba through several different generations of cadres working together to carry out all the campaigns of the revolution, he emphasized.

Likewise, the SWP leader said, integrating youth into the communist movement requires more than reading about and discussing what the movement stands for, however important that is. It has to be combined with systematic work to take revolutionary-minded young people to picket lines and other class-struggle actions, as well as involving them in regular sales of the Militant at factory gates or mine portals. This is crucial to get a sense of the potential power of working people and gain a better understanding that communism is not a set of ideas—which will seem hard to understand—but the generalization of the line of march of the working class.

Barnes ended by quoting from one of his favorite articles on the Socialist Workers campaign. It was a recent interview with vice-presidential candidate Arrin Hawkins in the Louisiana Weekly, a Black community paper published in New Orleans, during the socialist’s visit to Tulane University.

Noting that Hawkins was “the only African-American woman running in the 2004 race,” the interviewer wrote, “Poised and trim in a blue pinstriped suit and short cropped hair, she flashed an easy smile, behind which were some not-so-easy ideas.”
 
 
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