[Marxism] US SWP reports gains from industrial orientation from Latino immigration-rights protests

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

1. Huge working-class actions affect recruitment
 
BY ARRIN HAWKINS  
OBERLIN, Ohio?Among the nearly 40 workers, students, and others who
attended a Socialist Workers Party convention for the first time here
June 15-17, a quarter joined the party or the Young Socialists. A number
said the mass working-class actions for immigrant rights and the party?s
response to them had an impact on making this decision.

Jabari Ashe, 23, is an auto technician at a car dealership in the San
Francisco Bay Area. He said he joined the Young Socialists here because
?I want to learn how to be a better organizer and Marxist and join
others who think the way I do.?

Ashe said he first met the SWP and Young Socialists at a Martin Luther
King Day event in Houston in 2004. More recently he ran into socialists
again at the May 1 immigrant rights march in San Francisco. Ashe said he
went to the rally with some trepidation on how the largely foreign-born
workers would treat an African-American. But he was elated by the
enthusiasm with which the protesters embraced him. After the action,
some of his co-workers asked why he attended the march since he is
Black, he said, giving him a chance to explain why the fight to legalize
all immigrants is in the interests of all working people. Ashe said he
wants to get the Militant around more at work and sell subscriptions to
his fellow members of the International Association of Machinists.

David Arguello, a 29-year-old worker at a guitar factory in San Diego,
also joined the YS here. ?I was in the YS eight years ago when I was a
college student at the University of California in Santa Cruz,? he said.
?Then I went to Mexico and dropped out of activity. I decided to rejoin
because of the impact of the immigrant rights protests. It?s not enough
to go to marches, I had to be part of a movement. Now I will attend
classes in Los Angeles as part of a summer school on Marxism and
collaborate with the party and Young Socialists there.?

?I had been thinking of joining the Socialist Workers Party for a
while,? said Christian Castro, a 27-year-old technician and YS member in
Chicago who joined the SWP here. ?This was a good opportunity. I was
attracted to the Cuban Revolution and didn?t see any other party
organizing to emulate its example in the U.S. That was the starting
point for me. Attending Militant Labor Forums helped.? Along with other
YS and party members from around the country, Castro joined the May 20
march in Washington demanding ?Hands Off Venezuela and Cuba.?

Sam Cole, attending his first convention, also joined the party. ?I had
been looking for a socialist organization for a while when I found the
SWP,? he said. A 31-year-old nursing student at Lawson State Community
College in Birmingham, Alabama, Cole said he had read the Communist
Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and other socialist
literature since high school. In March he began looking for communist
organizations. ?Once I went to the Militant Labor Forum, it all came
together,? he said.

Gabriela Moreano, 26, organizer of the Young Socialists in St. Paul,
Minnesota, joined the party too. ?I first met the SWP at a Cinco de Mayo
event in St. Paul and subscribed to the Militant,? she said. ?I came to
the party convention last year and joined the YS last fall after the
World Youth Festival in Venezuela.?

Others did not become members of the party but strengthened their
commitment to help build the communist movement.

Howard Allen, a retired seaman and member of the Seafarers International
Union, was among them. Allen found out about the party last September
when Militant supporters came to New Orleans to learn the truth about
how working people responded to the social catastrophe they faced
following Hurricane Katrina. He bought a subscription to the socialist
newsweekly at the time and later helped distribute the paper among
neighbors.

?I had a great time,? Allen said of the convention. Its deliberations
?answered a lot of my questions about socialism, and straightened out
all the lies they tell in the press.? He said he especially enjoyed a
class he attended on ?The Jewish Question: The Danger for the Workers
Movement of the ?Israel Lobby? Conspiracy Theory.? Allen said he plans
to go to New York in July to help campaign for the SWP ticket (see
front-page article).

He?ll be campaigning along with Matilda Hernández-Miyares, a 17-year-old
high school student in New York, who was attending her first convention
and joined the Young Socialists here. ?I had thought socialism was a
good idea but it couldn?t work,? she said. ?So when I found out more
about the Cuban Revolution, especially through reading Our History Is
Still Being Written by three Chinese-Cuban generals, it changed my mind.
It?s the biggest example of where things have changed.?

Michael Italie contributed to this article.

2.Socialist Workers Party 44th convention
marked by ?irreversible strengthening
of working-class movement?
Scope and speed of mass working-class actions
for immigrant rights caught U.S. rulers by surprise
(front page)
 
BY PAUL PEDERSON
AND SAM MANUEL  

OBERLIN, Ohio?The massive proletarian actions for the legalization of
immigrants in the last three months ?represent an irreversible
strengthening of the working-class movement,? Jack Barnes, national
secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, told delegates and guests June
17 in his summary at the close of the party?s 44th Constitutional
Convention.

The speed and power of these protests caught the U.S. rulers by
surprise. It was the most important of a number of defining moments in a
year in which developments in the working class changed broader
politics, Barnes said.

The social disaster in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was
among them. In face of the utter indifference by the wealthy rulers and
their government, it was the initiatives and organization of working
people in New Orleans that became decisive in preventing more deaths
from occurring.

Then with the New Year, the wave of deaths in the coal mines began
posing sharply the life-and-death question that unionization is for the
working class.

The convention was stamped by the involvement of members of the SWP and
the Young Socialists, together with their co-workers, in these
working-class actions and other mass work. In the process, socialists
made advances in discipline and programmatic clarity needed to build a
revolutionary workers party.

Over the past year socialist workers took steps that strengthened their
political work in factories, mines, and mills where the bosses?
offensive on wages and conditions, and workers? resistance to it, has
been the sharpest. They transformed the Militant even more into a paper
seen by a growing number of militants as the voice of the working-class
vanguard. And they made progress in winning young people to the
communist movement and training them politically.

The three-day event drew 425 people?about 30 more than last year?s
convention. Nearly 40 were attending their first national SWP convention
or conference?up from 25 last year.

Trade union work

In a report titled ?Defeating the Bosses? Counterassault at C.W.
Mining,? Alyson Kennedy, who was a leader of the union-organizing fight
at the Co-Op coal mine near Huntington, Utah, summarized the
accomplishments of coal miners in a three-year battle to organize a
local of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) at the mine and then
against a retaliatory lawsuit filed by the company (see coverage in last
three issues).

Jacob Perasso, organizer of the party?s Trade Union Committee, presented
a report to the convention on the socialists? work in the labor
movement. Perasso noted the close relationship between the successful
efforts to expand the readership of the Militant among workers and the
strengthening of the party?s trade union work. He pointed out that 432
people signed up for subscriptions to the Militant in the spring
circulation campaign in the region of Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska?many
of them packinghouse workers.

?The party has a qualitatively different relationship to the union and
this region of meat packers because of this subscription base,? Perasso
said. ?It?s not uncommon for us to go with the Militant to, say,
Worthington, Minnesota, or Storm Lake, Iowa, and find out from workers
about a job action that has taken place in one of the large
slaughterhouses there.?

The Socialist Workers Party will continue to concentrate its trade union
work ?in the industries where the employers? offensive is the sharpest,?
Perasso said, explaining why the party organizes units of its
members?industrial union fractions?to carry out trade union work in coal
mines, meatpacking plants, and garment and textile factories.

Today, he noted, the big majority of socialists in these industries are
working together in fractions of two or more members in a given
workplace. A year ago, most were working alone in different plants and
mines.

The party?s fractions in the United Food and Commercial Workers
(UFCW) and UNITE unions held meetings here on June 14, the day before
the convention began, where socialists drew a balance sheet of their
work and elected steering committees to guide the implementation of
their decisions.

?Workers took ownership of struggle?

Perasso pointed to a statement made by Bernie Hesse, the legislative
director of UFCW Local 789 at a May 27 public meeting in St. Paul,
Minnesota, to celebrate the Co-Op miners? victory against the bosses?
retaliatory suit. Hesse said that in the battle at Co-Op and an earlier
one at Dakota Premium Foods, a beef slaughterhouse in St. Paul where
workers led a successful union-organizing campaign, the struggles were
defined by the fact that from the beginning ?the workers took ownership
of their struggle.?

That?s a useful political observation, Perasso said. In both of these
fights workers launched the organizing battle first and then went to
local union officials for help. ?Taking ownership of their struggle? is
what gave these organizing fights their strength and made them stand out
from many other strikes or unionization efforts in recent years. That?s
why communists have their eyes on the ranks of the working class,
organized or unorganized.

In his political report and summary to the convention, Jack Barnes said
that there are no signs of a coming stabilization of capitalist
politics, which is marked both by the employers? offensive at home to
shore up declining profits and by imperialist wars like those in Iraq
and Afghanistan. This capitalist world disorder will continue to
underlie fights like the two Hesse singled out, he said.

The course workers at Dakota and Co-Op followed stands in sharp contrast
to that of the top labor officialdom, who in face of the bosses?
offensive have focused on collaboration with the employers, not on
organizing workers to resist these attacks, said Barnes. He pointed to
the capitulation to demands by the auto barons for wage and benefit cuts
by the leadership of the United Auto Workers reflected at the UAW
convention and recent statements by UNITE president Bruce Raynor that
the union is not targeting manufacturing for organizing, where jobs are
supposedly ?outsourced? abroad, but service workers. ?Our goal is to
move service-sector workers into the middle class,? Raynor said.

This weakening of the labor movement, while motion toward rank-and-file
action continues, is one of labor?s central contradictions today, Barnes
said, and will only be resolved through a course like that Hesse put his
finger on.

The huge protests demanding legalization of all immigrants strengthen
mightily the prospects for the workers movement to move in that
direction, Barnes said. These were working-class political actions to
make demands on the government, actions in which all who took part, not
just immigrants, were welcome.

A number of delegates pointed to large numbers of workers being involved
in meetings to organize the protests for immigrant rights. Frank
Forrestal, a meat packer and delegate from Des Moines, Iowa, said some
200 people, largely workers, took part in such a coalition meeting in
that Midwestern city leading up to an April 9 action. More than 50
workers participated in another such meeting prior to the May Day
events.

Character of ?Militant? changes

The character of the Militant has changed more in the past 12 months
than in any 12 months of its history, Barnes said in his opening
remarks. The socialist weekly has become ?more and more the voice of
militant workers.?

Barnes, as well as a number of delegates who spoke during the
discussion, pointed to the special issue the Militant published in
February with the banner headline ?Unionize the mines! Build the UMWA!
No miner has to die.?

The campaign to sell that issue greatly increased the paper?s base of
subscribers in the West Virginia and Kentucky coalfields, said Ryan
Scott, a coal miner and a delegate from Pittsburgh. More workers say
they need the Militant because they identify it with a certain course of
action for labor, he said.

?When you begin to concentrate readers in an industry, a region, a
plant, you?re also putting enormous responsibility in your hands,?
Barnes said. ?It is a pledge to those workers that you will cover their
struggles in the paper.?

Last year the party had projected a modest fall subscription campaign.
By the midpoint of that effort, the response to the paper among working
people was such that the subscription goal was doubled and more than
3,000 new readers signed up for introductory subscriptions. A similar
demand for the paper was seen in the winter subscription renewal effort
and spring circulation campaign.

Political work in the labor movement is an integral part of the
irreplaceable work of building the communist movement, Barnes said. He
noted the significance of the modest increase in recruitment of workers
to the party in the past year and the development of leadership among
the youngest recruits to the movement.

At the opening of the convention, Barnes introduced the members of the
Welcome and Recruitment Committee. In addition to working with those
attending their first convention, the committee was charged with ?going
out and winning as many Young Socialists and candidates for membership
in the party as possible,? he said. By the end of the convention, as
participants were laying out plans to launch socialist election campaign
efforts and teams to introduce the Militant to workers, 10 people had
joined the Young Socialists or the Socialist Workers Party.

Leverage of propaganda work

?I know of no other book we have published that has gotten such a broad
response, and has led us to so many new forces as has this book,? said
Mary-Alice Waters about Our History Is Still Being
Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban
Revolution, published by Pathfinder Press this year. Waters, a member of
the party?s National Committee, gave a report titled ?Africa, Cuba,
China, the U.S.: The Leverage of Communist Propaganda Work.?

She said a public launching of the book will be held at the Chinese
Historical Society in San Francisco September 9. Speakers at it will
include Waters and Ling Chi-Wang, a prominent professor of
Asian-American studies at the University of California in Berkeley.

Waters stressed the importance of this type of mass work for building a
proletarian party. The response to the new book has provided
opportunities to broaden knowledge about the Cuban Revolution among
Asian-Americans and others, and to extend the reach and attraction to
the communist movement in such circles, opening doors previously closed
to it.

Waters also reviewed three other experiences that register the
increasingly effective use of books and other revolutionary literature
in building the communist movement.

Young Socialists participated along with 15,000 other youth from 144
countries in the World Festival of Youth and Students last August in
Caracas, Venezuela. The political activity and conduct of the Young
Socialists leading up to and at that gathering, which drew many
different political forces, was a ?master class? in mass work, Waters
said. A majority of the Young Socialists today were not members of the
YS then, and many were recruited through this campaign.

Another such experience was registered last October, when an
international team of volunteers staffed Pathfinder?s booth and
participated in the first book fair ever held in Equatorial Guinea. The
former Spanish-ruled colony in Central Africa, on the Gulf of Guinea, is
in U.S. imperialism?s sights today largely because of its oil reserves,
Waters said.

As a result of cumulative work over decades and the changes in politics
worldwide, a noticeable change was registered in the response to titles
promoted by Pathfinder at the last book fair in Havana, Waters said.
?This was especially registered in the response to the presentation
around issues 6 and 7 of Nueva Internacional,? Waters said, referring to
the Spanish version of the most recently published editions of that
magazine of Marxist politics and theory.

Waters pointed to the place of the work of some 200 party supporters in
formatting, printing, and helping to promote the books published by the
communist movement and to a reorientation of that effort. Steps have
been taken, Waters reported, to train all who volunteer and expand the
number of supporters active in the work of the Printing Project, as it
is called.

Convention delegates, elected by party branches in 16 cities, voted to
approve the reports by Barnes, Perasso, and Waters along with two
documents that had been discussed by party members before the
convention, ?The World Crisis of Imperialism: The Contradictory Dynamics
of the Labor Vanguard? and ?Consolidating Our Political Progress and
Recruiting to the Communist Movement.?

Convention delegates elected a new National Committee, the body charged
with carrying out convention decisions and leading the work of the party
between conventions.

Educational conference

Alongside the convention sessions, an educational conference was
organized for all participants. Eight classes were offered on themes
often taken up by delegates and in the documents before them. The
classes included, ?The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and the
Organizational Character of the SWP,? by Olympia Newton; ?The Case of
Leon Trotsky: The Answer to the 1936-37 Moscow Frame-up Trials and the
Fight to Continue Lenin?s Communist Course Against Stalin?s
Counterrevolution,? by Bernie Senter and Dave Prince; and ?The Black
Struggle and the March to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in the
Americas,? by Steve Clark, James Harris, and Gabriela Moreano.

Other classes were presented on ?The Jewish Question: The Danger for the
Workers Movement of the ?Israel Lobby? Conspiracy Theory,? by Sam
Manuel; ?Communism and the Internationalization of the Working Class,
from Marx, Engels, and Lenin to Today,? by Martín Koppel and Ross Hogan;
?Women?s Liberation and the Line of March of the Working Class to
Power,? by Betsy Farley and Chauncey Robinson; ?Trade Unions: Their
Past, Present, and Future,? by Paul Mailhot and Julian Santana; and
?Cuba?s Internationalist Foreign Policy,? by Sara Donaldson and Ben
O?Shaughnessy.

Party supporters participating in the Printing Project held workshops
the day after the conference concluded. A meeting of Young Socialists
and other youth was also held the same day.

Closing rally

The international gathering concluded with an evening rally on June 17.
A panel of speakers outlined plans to build on the successes registered
at the gathering.

?Campaigners for the SWP ticket in New York State are going out of this
convention to offer a working-class alternative to the Democrats,
Republicans, and other capitalist parties,? Róger Calero, SWP candidate
for U.S. Senate from New York, told the enthusiastic audience.

Ross Hogan, a member of the Young Socialists in New York, described the
successful launching of the Socialist Summer School in that city as well
as in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and St. Paul, Minnesota. He noted the
advances the Young Socialists have made in recruiting to the
organization and consolidating a cadre.

Greetings were read to the convention from Dagoberto Rodríguez, chief of
the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., who sent the message on
behalf of the Communist Party of Cuba; the Pro-Independence University
Students Federation (FUPI) in Puerto Rico; and the Workers Party of
Korea.

Panelists presented plans for a summer subscription renewal effort to
increase the Militant?s long-term readership, strengthening the work of
the Printing Project, and deepening the party?s trade union work.
Delegates and guests signed up to join a team to introduce the Militant
to miners and others in Harlan County, Kentucky, where the socialist
paper has received a good response because of its truthful reporting on
the killing of five coal miners on the job in May and the response by
working people to the disaster. A team of four volunteers sold 16
subscriptions and 150 copies of the Militant in Harlan Country June
22-24, bringing the total there to 31 subscriptions and 500 copies over
the last month.

Dave Prince, organizer of the party?s capital fund committee, announced
that $163,500 was raised in capital contributions from nearly 30
contributors during the three-day gathering. Those present responded to
an appeal to help build the SWP, contributing nearly $29,000.

 


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