http://themilitant.com/2017/8131/813150.html
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Vol. 81/No. 31 August 21, 2017
(feature article)
Marxist books presented in Sulaimani, Kurdistan
CATHARINA TIRSÉN
SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region, Iraq — “If you read these two books, you’ll
have a better understanding of the deepening crisis in capitalist
politics in the U.S. today I’m sure you’re hearing about,” said Steve
Clark, editorial director of Pathfinder Press, at a meeting at the
Endese bookstore here July 20. “You’ll find out why the wealthy rulers
were taken by surprise by the outcome of the presidential election last
November.”
Clark was holding up The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why
Washington Fears Working People and Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?
Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism — two new books by Jack
Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the United
States. At the invitation of Endese owner and manager Hazhar Majeed, who
chaired the program, Clark was speaking at a book-signing event to
introduce some 100 of Pathfinder’s Marxist titles the store in downtown
Sulaimani has recently begun selling. The books are displayed on a large
bookshelf in the store.
Noting that this year is the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik
Revolution, Clark said that Pathfinder traces its origins to that
victory in October 1917. More specifically, he said, it began with the
founding two years later of the Communist Party in the U.S., part of a
world organization of parties — the Communist International — that were
forged by revolutionary-minded workers seeking to emulate what workers
and farmers had done in the former Russian empire.
“There are no recipes, no templates, to bring about revolutionary
change. But it’s necessary to understand experiences and lessons from
other struggles the world over. That’s why Pathfinder publishes writings
and speeches by communist and other revolutionary leaders in their own
words,” Clark said. He pointed to books by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels,
Vladimir Lenin, and Leon Trotsky; by Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters, James P.
Cannon, Farrell Dobbs, Evelyn Reed, and other communist leaders in the
U.S., current and past; by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, West
African revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara, and others.
Over the coming year, Clark said, Endese will also be translating 10
titles produced by Pathfinder into Kurdish and publishing them.
Both of the new books I’m focusing on, Clark said, help explain the
subtitle of The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record — that is, why the
U.S. capitalist rulers fear working people. Under mounting blows to the
living standards, job conditions, and human dignity of tens of millions,
more and more workers are open to discussing radical changes, including
explanations by communist workers of the roots of today’s world
capitalist crisis — and revolutionary solutions to it. Down the road,
the rulers know, working-class discontent will lead to rising battles in
the factories and on the streets.
That fear explains the contempt in the liberal media and among upper
middle class and professional layers in the U.S. toward working people,
millions of whom voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping he’d act on his
pledge “to drain the swamp” of capitalist politicians and government
bureaucrats. These workers want a change from past administrations,
Democratic and Republican, under whom workers’ conditions have grown
increasingly intolerable.
The working class, Clark said, is the real target of today’s crusade by
big sections of the U.S. rulers to invalidate the 2016 election and
indict, convict, or impeach President Trump or those close to him. This
includes looking to the political police, the FBI, to criminalize what
are really political disputes.
The closing chapter of Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? —
“Capitalism, the Working Class, and the Transformation of Learning” —
presents a course toward overcoming what’s faced by workers and the
oppressed today. It explains the communist approach to education — to
learning as a lifetime activity, Clark said. To get there, Barnes
explains, requires preparing working people “for the battle to throw off
the self-image the rulers teach us, and to recognize that we are capable
of taking power and organizing society.”
During the discussion, a young woman asked, “Are you saying, in face of
governments that have enormous wealth and big armies, that education is
the solution to the problems we face? How can that be?”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Clark responded. “There can only be
education worthy of working, creating humanity when working people have
made a revolution and taken power out of the hands of the capitalist
rulers.”
That’s what workers and farmers did in Cuba nearly 60 years ago, he
said, and that’s how education began being transformed there, too.
“After taking political power, the July 26 Movement began in 1961 by
mobilizing hundreds of thousands of young volunteers to take off the
better part of a year to go out to the countryside to teach farmers and
rural laborers, the majority women, how to read and write,” Clark said.
After the discussion, participants crowded around a table where
Pathfinder books were on sale. Top sellers were Are They Rich Because
They’re Smart? Che Guevara Talks to Young People and The Clintons’
Anti-Working-Class Record.
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