By Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark
Contents include a top-notch introduction by the President of Pathfinder Press, Mary-Alice Waters, the (edited) resolution approved by the delegates to the recently concluded convention of the Socialist Workers Party (December, 2022), and select offerings from the pages of the Militant on Cuba, Ukraine and the national gathering of the worker’s vanguard that took place last summer in Ohio.
By David Rowlands (01-26-2023)
You may order this publication by clicking the link provided below.
Above – If a picture paints a thousand words: JEFF SCHUHRKE: Rail workers rally July 2022 in Galesburg, Illinois, against carrier bosses’ refusal to address inhumane work schedules, working conditions, and crew sizes. President Joseph Biden and bipartisan Congress barred right to strike.
Please find below the link to the recent Militant article that contains the introduction by Mary-Alice Waters. For purposes of this review, quotes from the introduction penned by Mary-Alice will be italicized with a yellow background.
“Asserting that “the low point of labor resistance is behind us” is not a prediction about coming struggles. Nor is it a promise about when or where new and more powerful class battles will break out. Instead, that assessment is based on the increased confidence and combativity, as well as the anger demonstrated by working people confronting very different conditions around the world.”
Please find below the links to the three articles from the Militant, a newsweekly published in the interests of the working people, that comprise a section of the book.
Above: Yours truly posing with my newest mailbox find. Photograph by Julie, spousal unit extraordinaire.
The operative core of the booklet, the first such publication since 2019, is the convention resolution, which will provide a valuable tool for the outreach, education and recruitment needs of party members, supporters and pro-party agitators of all kinds. It is divided into four sections and further organized with twenty-seven bullet points, with a brief but poignant explanation of each point made. It presents a sober and well argued synopsis of where we stand today, made possible through collective work among equals, as we struggle together to build organizations that will stand tall for our class, sans divided loyalties of any kind.
The content is quite readable with squint-resistant font, well placed photographs and a useful index. And the politics contained within are explained in a way that everyone, from those new to the ideas being discussed to those more experienced can readily digest what’s being said. It will be of great use for all working-class militants from all ages and backgrounds involved in trade union and party building activity, from those offering solidarity, to those on the line, to those distributing the Militant, and to those who are in the process of doing the arduous work necessary to form new units at the workplaces.
“The resolution is written in the form of twenty-seven numbered sections, yet none of the questions engaged here stand alone. They can be understood only as part of the line of march of the working class to state power, the political line of the resolution as a whole.”
Part One
Opposing US rulers assaults on freedoms protected by the Constitution and their use of the political police.
“Why the fight to prevent erosion by the capitalist government — both in Washington, as well as in the fifty states — of freedoms protected by the US Constitution is central to the US class struggle today. Freedom from government intervention and constraints on worship, on speech, on the press, on due process, on a trial by a jury of one’s peers (not forced confessions in the form of “plea bargains”), and more. This includes opposing the US rulers’ expanding use of Washington’s political police, the FBI above all.”
Cannon and his comrades, including members of Teamsters Local 544, on their way to prison in 1941. The prosecution of these worker militants, like the incarceration of those of Japanese descent at the onset of the second imperialist war, came at the behest of the liberal president, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Today the Democratic Party, along with the liberal meritocracy, the practioneers of Identity Politics and much of the middle-class left are likewise in the forefront when it comes to attacks on democratic rights and freedom of expression.
Part Two
Capitalism’s erosion of the family and the working-class road to women’s emancipation.
“Why the fight for women’s emancipation is inextricably intertwined with addressing the capitalist-caused crises of joblessness and inflation; the lack of affordable medical care, childcare, and housing; as well as drug addiction and domestic violence — all of which bear down on the families of working people, and on women especially. Why there should be no federal, state, or municipal laws restricting the safe medical availability of abortions.”
Above: female workers, such as these NYC nurses, will play an important role in the now unfolding line of march of the working-class towards power. In addition, the convention resolution discussed the multi-faceted questions surrounding Roe v Wade, what it was, what it wasn’t and where we stand today, using the Marxist method of dialectical and historical materialism.
Part Three
The Cuban socialist revolution and our communist continuity.
“Why the positions reaffirmed by SWP convention delegates trace their continuity from the founders in 1847 of the modern revolutionary workers movement, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and the world’s first communist party they led. To the opening years of the first victorious socialist revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 under the leadership of V.I. Lenin. To the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution under the leadership of Fidel Castro and the leading cadres of the Rebel Army. And to the SWP’s class-struggle experience from the founding of the first communist party in the US in 1919 down to today.”
Above: Cuban workers and farmers: Black, white and Asian, male and female, young and old, storm the heavens during the opening days of the Cuban Revolution.
Part Four
Forging a proletarian party and educating it’s cadre
“Why the Transitional Program, the 1938 founding resolution of the Socialist Workers Party and of our world movement, remains at the center of our program to this day.”
The programmatic bedrock:
The Draft Program of the Communist International: A Criticism of Fundamentals (Leon Trotsky)
The Transitional Program (Leon Trotsky with extensive collaboration)
In Defense of Marxism and the Struggle for a Proletarian Party (Leon Trotsky and James P. Cannon, respectively)
Their Trotsky And Ours (Jack Barnes)
Above: Volunteers from Pathfinder Press participate in the Kurdistan book fair held in Erbil. It should be obvious by now to anyone paying attention that only the Socialist Workers Party, along with the Communist Leagues of Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, have the wherewithal — politically as well as organizationally — to carry out the kinds of interventions that are indispensable to piecing together a revitalized world movement at a time when it’s again possible to do so. The notion that any organization from within today’s middle-class left, most of whom have lost track of what a woman is, could accomplish this is laughable. But now we leave them behind, as we look forward to the future.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this newest edition to the arsenal of the revolutionary class, with the hope that young women and men from nowhere, whose rising is as certain as the morning sun, will make their way to the vanguard party, put their stamp upon it and make it a welcoming place for all who have a desire to contribute their time, money, intellect and energy.
Above: campaigning with the Militant in Oakland, California.
The Union Of Workers 