What's this? The convention is always held in the summer in Oberlin,
Ohio. It does kind of make sense to hold it in New York because that is
where the national office is located, but this is the first time I know
of it being done.
http://themilitant.com/2017/8105/810550.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 5 February 6, 2017
(feature article)
Socialist Workers Party convention sets course to build revolutionary
party workers need today
BY NAOMI CRAINE
AND JOHN STUDER
NEW YORK — The Socialist Workers Party held its 48th Constitutional
Convention here Jan. 14-16, setting a course to advance carrying out
propaganda activity in the working class at workers’ doorsteps, on
strike picket lines and in other labor fights and social protests.
Through this work, the party seeks to broaden its geographical reach,
the number of workers and youth the party is working with and to win new
members.
In addition to delegations from party branches, convention delegates
included members who have moved to Denver, northern New Jersey and the
area around Albany, New York, to extend party-building work in those
areas. Along with branches of the SWP across the U.S. and of the
Communist League in Canada, they will be joining other workers to run
candidates backed by the party for mayor and other offices this year.
(See list here.)
For years workers have faced slow-burning depression conditions as the
capitalists’ profit rates have continued their decadeslong decline, Jack
Barnes, SWP national secretary, said in the opening political report. As
prospects have shrunk for profitable investment in the expansion of
factory buildings, mines, equipment, and jobs, the employers have sat on
growing hoards of cash or plowed it into stocks, bonds and other forms
of speculative financial paper. At an accelerated pace, this has
increased the relative weight of money capital at the expense of
manufacturing capital.
In 2008 a deep global financial crisis and contraction of production and
trade shook capitalism on a world scale. The employers and their
government continue to load the devastating consequences of that crisis
— the “carnage” referred to by the newly elected U.S. president at his
inauguration a few days after the SWP convention — onto the backs of
working people.
This crisis for the working class became the central factor in the 2016
presidential campaign. The SWP said there were two classes and three
parties — the capitalists had their Democrats and Republicans, Barnes
said, and working people had the Socialist Workers Party.
And the capitalist rulers increasingly displayed fear of the working
class, seeing a future of deeper class struggle to come as the carnage
continues and spreads.
Hillary Clinton revealed her anti-working-class contempt when she called
millions of workers “deplorables” because many of them backed Donald
Trump in hopes he would address the worsening economic and social
conditions they face — a decline in the size of the working class as
jobs disappear, falling real wages, cop brutality, attacks on women’s
right to choose abortion, multiple deployments for workers in uniform
sent to fight and die in Washington’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and
more. While Trump claimed he spoke for working people, he demagogically
targeted Mexicans, Muslims, women, unionists and others, aiming to
divide and weaken the working class and our unions.
The only way forward for workers and working farmers, Barnes said, is to
recognize ourselves as the political vanguard of the “deplorables” — to
see the need and capacity of the working class and our allies to put an
end to the rule of capital, of the small handful of superrich families
that hold state power in the U.S. and control both the Democratic and
Republican parties.
That’s the reason to join the Socialist Workers Party. The SWP is the
only party armed with a communist course of carrying out regular
propaganda activity in the working class and joining in fights by
workers and the oppressed, as the party politically prepares for the
bigger class battles and revolutionary struggles we know are coming.
For years SWP members have found growing interest as they knock on doors
in working-class neighborhoods to discuss the party and its activities.
Although there are no sustained labor battles or social movements like
the civil rights battle that overthrew Jim Crow segregation, many
workers respond when party members explain the need for the working
class to chart a course to build our own political party to take power.
Convention delegates discussed and adopted the next decisive steps to
sustain, as the axis of party activity, turning that interest among
working people into expanded influence and recruitment.
The party leadership has worked with a number of members to move to new
areas where the SWP has made contacts, Barnes explained. Together with
adjustments in organization and priorities in party branches to enable
members to step up political campaigning and use of the Militant and
books and magazines on communist politics among workers, these moves can
lead to a convergence of political activity in the branches, in new
areas — and by new party members.
In addition, Barnes told convention participants, there are new openings
today for party members to conduct political activity in the unions.
This is particularly true among rail freight workers, where dangerous
conditions — from the one-person operating crew on a growing number of
freight trains, to long and erratic work schedules, to moving trains in
crowded rail yards with remote-control units — have led to widespread
discussion and protests. This is part of the fight against the bosses’
speedup, job combinations, and assaults on safety among all workers.
Running candidates for public office is important to party-building
today, Barnes said. Most workers continue to see politics through the
framework of the elections. Communist campaigns have already been
launched across the U.S. and Canada, running for mayor in Calgary,
Alberta; Los Angeles; Miami; Minneapolis; Montreal; New York; and Seattle.
To be effective in this work, Barnes said, requires increasing attention
to political education. Class conscious workers need to dig into lessons
from the founding of the modern revolutionary workers movement in the
mid-1800s; to the Bolshevik revolution under the leadership of V.I.
Lenin (this year is its 100th anniversary); of the Cuban Revolution, the
living socialist revolution to our south; to experiences of the SWP in
trying to build that kind of party here in the U.S. together with
communist workers the world over.
Crisis of U.S. two-party system
The victory of Trump in the U.S. presidential election reflects the
deepening economic and political crisis of U.S. imperialism — and a
resulting historic shake-up in its two long-standing bourgeois political
parties.
The Republicans are being remade by Donald Trump, a multibillionaire
pretending to speak in the interests of working people while seeking to
find policies that further enrich the capitalist class, in a futile
attempt to end the inevitable crisis of their system. This has nothing
to do with hysteria about “fascism” among liberal and middle-class
radicals, Barnes said. In fact, the Trump electoral victory is weakening
already marginal ultrarightist currents, who are unable to gain any
traction in U.S. politics.
The Democrats are in disarray. Bernie Sanders and bourgeois and
petty-bourgeois leftists of every stripe on one side, and machine
politicians like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the other, are already
maneuvering to take over the party in hopes of making a comeback in the
2018 and 2020 elections.
Similar capitalist-crisis-fueled political breakups are unfolding in the
United Kingdom, France and other imperialist countries in Europe and
beyond.
Since 1990 the Socialist Workers Party has explained the global
reverberations of the fact that U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War.
As a byproduct of the implosion of the Soviet Union and other Stalinist
regimes in Eastern and Central Europe by the opening of the 1990s, there
was a rapid disintegration of the counterrevolutionary obstacle of
governments and parties that falsely called themselves Communist and for
decades had politically misled and undercut working-class and popular
struggles around the globe. As a result, while the working class
worldwide today has no mass independent class leadership, it faces
coming class battles unbroken and free of Stalinist disorientation,
something that wasn’t true for decades. Washington hadn’t “won” the Cold
War.
The U.S. rulers acted on an opposite assumption. They were convinced
they had triumphed and had a free hand worldwide. They intervened in
Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere — with disastrous
results for toilers in those regions and seemingly endless military
involvement for Washington.
Another side of these developments is now becoming clearer, Barnes said.
The U.S.-dominated NATO military alliance has been weakened. The
illusion is coming apart that an “ever closer” economic and political
European Union could transcend the nation states within it — most of
them imperialist powers, but at very different levels of economic might
and social conditions — and become a united capitalist Europe.
Sharpening competition among rival ruling classes under the pressure of
the international slowdown in capitalist production and trade is undoing
what many bourgeois politicians refer to as “globalization,” including
so-called trade pacts in Europe, North America, and the Pacific and
Asia. These classless terms are cover for the profit-driven efforts of
finance capital to compete to exploit workers and farmers and suck the
wealth they produce with their labor from every corner of the globe.
Delegates at the SWP convention seated international fraternal
delegations, including from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, France and
the U.K. They shared experiences that underscored that the
party-building openings discussed at the convention are worldwide.
Books to prepare us to fight and win
The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record is one of three books published
by Pathfinder Press in 2016 “to help working people address the
far-reaching political questions that we and others in the working class
need answers to in order to fight more effectively and win,” Steve Clark
said in the introduction to the Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record. The
other titles are: Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege,
and Learning Under Capitalism, also by Jack Barnes, and Is Socialist
Revolution in the US Possible? A Necessary Debate Among Working People
by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.
In addition to English, Spanish and French, these books, and others from
Pathfinder Press’ arsenal, “are right now being translated in Iran into
the Farsi language,” Clark wrote. “They will be distributed widely in
bookshops and libraries there and well beyond Iran’s borders. Their
broad circulation demonstrates how the scope and explosiveness of the
capitalist crisis, and the response of working people to its
consequences, are truly worldwide.”
In a report to the convention, Clark expanded on these points. These
books and more than 40 other Farsi-language Pathfinder titles are
finding a growing readership across Iran and beyond, including in
Afghanistan and the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Workers and farmers in the Middle East face the effects of the world
capitalist economic crisis, compounded by the impact of a devastating
civil war in Syria, more than a decade of bloody wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and the advancing Kurdish struggle for national rights, Clark
said. This has sparked interest in books that present the program and
history of the Socialist Workers Party, as well as the Russian and Cuban
revolutions.
Convention delegates also discussed the importance of the fight against
Jew-hatred. History shows that assaults on Jews increase in times of
capitalist crisis, as the rulers seek scapegoats to divert the middle
classes and layers of toilers from recognizing the true source of their
worsening conditions, the profit system. Clark reviewed the decadeslong
continuity of the SWP on this question, and that of Fidel Castro and the
leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution, from the impact of the rise
of Nazism, the horror of the Holocaust during the second imperialist
world war, to growing attacks on Jews and Muslims today as capitalism’s
devastation extends to more and more of the world.
Revolutionaries must push for recognition of the right of Israel to
exist, Clark said, including the right of return for Jews looking for
refuge from persecution, as well as for recognition of a state for the
dispossessed Palestinian people. This is the only way to open the space
for working people who are Arab and Jewish to build solidarity and fight
together against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression
throughout the region.
‘Two great socialist revolutions’
Convention delegates also discussed a Nov. 27 letter from SWP National
Secretary Jack Barnes to Raúl Castro, first secretary of the Communist
Party of Cuba, marking the political legacy of Fidel Castro, on the
occasion of his death Nov. 25 (see Dec. 12, 2016, Militant). The message
highlighted the two great socialist revolutions of the 20th century, in
Russia and Cuba, and the indispensable leadership of them by V.I. Lenin
and Fidel Castro.
Barnes wrote that the SWP will continue to “publish and spread the truth
about the Cuban Revolution and Fidel’s leadership, to make it known to
working people in the United States and throughout the world. With
unshakable confidence in the working class and its allies, we will
continue to organize and act on the course Fidel uncompromisingly
presented to the world in 1961, a month before the victorious battle of
Playa Girón: ‘There will be a victorious revolution in the United States
before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.’”
Mary-Alice Waters spoke to this in her convention report on
“Party-Building and the Cuban Revolution.” The working-class
mobilizations in tribute to Fidel Castro across Cuba following his
death, and Raúl Castro’s speeches in Havana and Santiago, demonstrates
once again that the socialist revolution in Cuba lives and fights to
this day. The Socialist Workers Party defends that revolution and
champions the fight to end the U.S. embargo, to get Washington out of
Guantánamo and return it to Cuban sovereignty, and to end Washington’s
“regime-change” policies.
One of the party’s priorities in the coming months, Waters said, will be
working to build a brigade of workers to visit Cuba for the May Day
celebration in Havana, to learn firsthand about the gains working people
made through their socialist revolution. This includes a chance for some
to also participate in a May 4-6 conference and related activities in
Guantánamo, near the base occupied by Washington for over a century.
The party and the Young Socialists are also building the World Festival
of Youth and Students taking place in Sochi, Russia, Oct. 14-22. This
presents another opportunity to work with youth around the world looking
for ways to fight against imperialist domination and capitalist
exploitation.
Waters noted increasing interest in books published by Pathfinder. There
are new openings to get these books into workers hands internationally.
She pointed to growing interest across Africa, including in South
Africa, in Namibia — a former colony of South Africa whose independence
was won as a result of revolutionary Cuba’s internationalist mission in
Angola aiding those fighting the apartheid army — in Tanzania, and in
West Africa. Bookstore orders for Pathfinder’s books containing speeches
of Thomas Sankara, leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina
Faso, are growing there.
This is deeply connected to the work of the SWP and Communist Leagues,
she said, as growing numbers of toilers from Africa who have come to the
imperialist centers in North America and Europe to work and study look
to learn more about politics.
Among those invited to attend the convention, in addition to members of
the SWP and Communist Leagues, were a number of people from across North
America who are members of committees that lead work by party supporters
to keep Pathfinder books in print for use in the party’s political
activity, and raise funds for the SWP’s work.
Convention delegates adopted the three reports and summaries, the
introduction to the Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, Jack Barnes’
letter to Raúl Castro, and other motions on the party’s political
course. They elected a National Committee to lead the implementation of
convention decisions.
The Socialist Workers Party is organizing an Active Workers Conference
in Ohio June 15-17, to bring together workers campaigning for the SWP,
helping circulate the party’s books and the Militant, joining in labor
struggles and social protests, and other common activity to discuss
world political developments and to register progress in building the
party.
Related articles:
Campaign for the Socialist Workers Party and Communist League candidates
for mayor across N. America
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