Vol. 68/No. 11
March 22, 2004
Socialist Workers Party inaugurates new
international headquarters in NY Garment District
BY MICHAEL ITALIE
AND SAM MANUEL
NEW YORK—Some 360 people gathered here February 29 for a meeting to celebrate
the Grand Opening of the new headquarters that houses the New York Pathfinder
Books and Militant Labor Forum, the newsroom of the Militant and Perspectiva
Mundial, and the national office of the Socialist Workers Party. The newly
completed facilities are located in the heart of Manhattan’s Garment District.
The meeting featured presentations on key political questions facing workers
and farmers today.
The new headquarters is the culmination of a several-year effort. For more
than three decades the six-story Pathfinder Building on Manhattan’s Lower West
Side housed the Socialist Workers Party national office, the Militant and
Perspectiva Mundial, the Pathfinder editorial offices, and a printshop
that produced Pathfinder’s books and pamphlets. In 2000 the New York
Pathfinder bookstore and Militant Labor Forum were established in the Garment
District. In May of last year, the Militant and the Socialist Workers
Party national offices moved to a temporary location near the local Pathfinder
bookstore. The new headquarters integrates these facilities and is better suited
to the political needs and the size of the communist movement, enabling it to
respond effectively to the opportunities in the class struggle today.
The headquarters is located in the heart of New York’s main industry, where
tens of thousands of clothing workers are concentrated and where the garment
workers union UNITE has its international headquarters. Garment shops occupy
several floors of the building, and workers in neighboring buildings can be seen
through the windows, often working well into the evenings or on weekends.
“We anticipate that fellow workers in this area will be among the best
customers looking to buy Pathfinder books and seeking political discussions,”
said Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, who chaired
the February 29 event.
To respond to that opportunity, Barnes reported, the staff of the Militant
and Perspectiva Mundial has decided to schedule their lunch breaks in
order to staff the bookstore from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Chris Hoeppner, who headed up the organization of the work to build the new
international headquarters, told the audience that 123 volunteers from 22 cities
in the United States and four other countries came in to help over the 58-day
construction effort. He explained that the volunteers, who included workers with
skills in carpentry, plumbing, electrical wiring, and painting, saved the
project half a million dollars in construction costs. Shelves, counter tops, and
cabinets throughout the offices were custom-built by the volunteers.
“Many of these workers put in double stints,” Hoeppner said, “finding a
way to get time off from their jobs, and ensuring at critical points that we
kept on schedule.” A core of a dozen volunteers worked through the entire
project.
Two or three times, Hoeppner said, crew organizers got much needed help from
electricians, plumbers, and carpenters, working for stints of a week or more.
They also helped train many other less skilled volunteers who had come in for
longer periods. Together they transformed an empty shell into an attractive
workers political center, Hoeppner said.
The last week of the effort, he noted, the crew were boosted by volunteers
from New Zealand, Sweden, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and others just back
from the Havana book fair.
Finishing the project on schedule took detailed planning and organization,
from the floor plan to the budget. Barnes reported that the work was completed
on time and that the $225,000 Headquarters Appeal surpassed its goal, raising
more than $231,000 to cover the project’s costs. By the time of the meeting,
the committee that oversaw the budget and expenditures had audited and closed
its books.
Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the Marxist magazine New International
and president of Pathfinder Press, reported from an international team of
communist workers and youth who staffed the Pathfinder booth at the 13th Havana
International Book Fair. The main political highlight of their work, she said,
was the response they met to the successful fight last year to prevent the U.S.
government from deporting Militant staff writer and Perspectiva
Mundial editor Róger Calero.
In December 2002 the U.S. immigration cops had arrested Calero on his return
from a reporting assignment in Cuba and Mexico. An international campaign was
immediately launched to protest the attempt to deport him. Calero won a wide
hearing within the U.S. labor movement, among supporters of the rights of
immigrants, and among others fighting for justice. In the face of this growing
campaign, the case became a political liability for U.S. authorities. The
federal government dropped its deportation effort in May 2003.
Calero, who was in Havana to report on a January conference opposing the Free
Trade Area of the Americas and on the Havana book fair, was interviewed by the
Cuban newspapers Juventud Rebelde and Granma International. (See Juventud
Rebelde interview in this issue.) He also appeared on the popular evening
television news program Lente Mundial (World Lens), and spoke at meetings
organized by the Federation of University Students and the Association of
Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.
“The interest in Róger’s fight showed the desire in Cuba to learn about
the class struggle in the United States,” Waters said. Students at some of the
meetings said, “This is information about the United States we don’t often
hear.”
Battle of ideas
Waters also spoke about the place of what is known in Cuba as the Battle of
Ideas. This is a political offensive aimed at deepening the involvement of
working people and youth in the revolution, central to which is broadening the
educational and cultural opportunities available to the Cuban people. The goal
is to counter the imperialist ideological drive promoting capitalism as the
future, and in addition, to address the social inequalities that have widened as
Cuba has become more directly exposed to the capitalist world market since the
collapse of preferential trade relations with the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe in the early 1990s.
The social differentiation between Cubans with and without access to hard
currency was evident at the Havana book fair, Waters said. The increased numbers
of Cubans who came to the fair with dollars to purchase books, compared to
previous years, stood in contrast with those who were limited to buying books in
pesos.
One component of the Battle of Ideas, Waters said, is the campaign to repair
and expand primary schools throughout the country to help reduce the
teacher-pupil ratio. Militant reporters visited an elementary school in
western Havana, she reported. Employees at the nearby offices of the State
Strategic Reserves Institute (INRE) had taken responsibility two years before to
help not only in repairing the school but in expanding the number of classrooms
and facilities through volunteer work brigades.
“They got volunteers from all over the country, sending out the word to
INRE employees to find out who had skills in plumbing, electrical work, and
carpentry,” Waters said. “Workers would come in after work and on weekends
to pitch in on the project.” Some of the best-known artists in Cuba
contributed murals. “They asked for four murals but 10 artists volunteered, so
they had to do 10 murals,” she added.
Waters pointed to the flashpoint in Venezuela, where the U.S. rulers,
concerned about the growing struggles of working people in that country, are
determined to overthrow the elected government and deal a blow to workers and
farmers.
She noted that the number of Cubans involved in the medical and literacy
mission in Venezuela make it Cuba’s most extensive internationalist mission
since the aid given to Angola to defeat the South African apartheid army’s
invasions in the 1970s and ‘80s. In addition, she said, there are now 10,000
Venezuelan students attending classes in Cuba. The campaign to make classic
works of literature available to working people, which started as part of the
Battle of Ideas effort in Cuba, has now been extended to Venezuela. Some 1.2
million copies of world literary classics have been printed for distribution in
Venezuela.
Aldabonazo book launchings
The main Pathfinder title featured at the Havana book fair was Aldabonazo:
Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground 1952-1958 by Armando Hart, one of
the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution. The title was launched at the book
fair and at two other meetings in Havana. At the meetings Hart described how he
and others of his generation became socialists during the rising revolutionary
struggle in the 1950s. The revolutionary leader explained that he and others had
never been anticommunist but rather revolutionaries who were anti-Stalinist, and
that it was legitimate to recognize that Leon Trotsky was one of the central
leaders of the Russian Revolution of October 1917.
Many of those who came to the Pathfinder booth, Waters said, wanted to know,
“Who are you? Where do you come from? How are you able to write these kind of
books?” She said, “We told them we publish books like Rebelión Teamster
because workers in the United States need them.” Such questions provided
opportunities to describe the work that communists carry out in the United
States and other imperialist countries.
Róger Calero introduced Olivia Nelson, who together with Militant
editor Argiris Malapanis will be part of a reporting team to Venezuela and will
attend the convention of the youth organization of the Fifth Republic Movement,
the ruling party in Venezuela. Calero also reported that two other Young
Socialists, Paul Pederson from the United States and Ogmundur Jónsson from
Iceland, would attend a solidarity mission in Palestine organized by the World
Federation of Democratic Youth, and that YS members Jacob Perasso and Romina
Green would be part of a U.S. group at a youth seminar in Cuba in March.
Nelson said that Washington had been stepping up its offensive against
Venezuela, with White House officials charging Caracas with acting together with
Havana to “destabilize democratic countries” in South America. Washington
has backed a recall referendum drive by pro-imperialist opponents of the
government aimed at removing President Hugo Chávez from office. “But in
Venezuela working people have become more tested through their struggles, and
there will be resistance to imperialist-organized intervention there,” Nelson
said. She encouraged efforts to begin now to build participation in the 2005
World Youth Festival, which will be held in Caracas.
Barnes next introduced Bill Estrada, a striking coal miner from Utah. Estrada
had been fired from his job because he supported the effort by workers at the
mine to join the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). His co-workers walked
out in response to his firing and have been on strike since September.
Before Estrada spoke, Barnes noted that competence in strike leadership is
one of the most difficult qualities to gain. It involves learning that your
actions have real consequences for those involved in the struggle.
Barnes said that the series of books written by Farrell Dobbs on the 1930s
fight to build the Teamsters union in the Midwest is not about building a social
movement, but about the possibilities that are opened up along that road when a
strike is competently led. “When a number of strikes are won,” Barnes said,
“a broader layer of working-class leaders can develop and gain confidence to
reach out to and speak out on broader social issues.”
In Minnesota in 1934, the workers started the struggle and then drew in the
union, Barnes said. That’s the case at the Co-Op mine in Utah, he explained,
and the miners have maintained that relationship.
This is different from the approach of building an “alternative
leadership,” the SWP leader said, or of looking for a social movement where
none exists. “It is a course of action that draws in those workers who want to
fight to win the strike.” That course enabled strike leaders and revolutionary
socialists Farrell Dobbs and Ray Dunne to win workers along this line, including
those like union official Pat Corcoran, who had been sent in by the Teamsters
International leadership to bust up the Minneapolis local’s militant
leadership. Because Corcoran wanted to see the workers win the strike, and saw
that the way it was being led made that possible, he became a loyal member of
the organizing campaign, and a union martyr when he was killed under mysterious
circumstances in 1937.
Today the strike by miners in Utah to be represented by the UMWA is the most
important labor action in the country, said Barnes. It is the most important
because it is possible to win it and, through a victory, open up more
possibilities for labor.
Estrada gave a concrete feel for how the strikers are taking steps to
strengthen their picket line and reach out for support from UMWA locals and the
labor movement. He talked about lessons miners had learned through their
experiences about how to strengthen their union.
Bush avoiding course of ultraright
Barnes also reviewed the historic trends that undermine capitalist profit rates.
He said the recent proposals floated by Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan
Greenspan “are a softening up of the beaches” by the U.S. rulers for an
offensive on Social Security to be able to take back significant parts of the
social wage of working people and widen the divisions in the working class.
Barnes said that despite the claims of liberals and
middle-class radicals, the Bush White House is a centrist, not rightist,
administration. It is doing everything possible to avoid the course of the
ultrarightist backers of the “culture war.” To do otherwise would mean they
could not hold together the Republican base to win in November.
With its grandstanding call for a constitutional
amendment on marriage, Barnes said by way of example, “the administration is
taking a token position on gay marriage that can’t win.” There is virtually
no chance that such a constitutional amendment would be adopted, he pointed out.
The administration’s course has two objectives, Barnes said. One is to
transform the U.S. military along the lines of the Special Forces to be able to
respond more rapidly to threats to imperialist domination around the world. The
second is to advance the “war on terrorism” against the rights of working
people in the United States.
Barnes noted that it is the struggles of working people like the
union-organizing drives of meat packers in the Midwest and coal miners in Utah
that are the greatest obstacle in this country to Washington’s campaigns.
Because of the potential of the coal miners’ fight, he added, the meetings of
socialist workers in the unions to be held in the weeks ahead will orient toward
winning further support in the labor movement for the strikers in Utah.
Barnes invited friends and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party to the
national convention of the party in June in Oberlin, Ohio, to discuss the
political themes of the Grand Opening weekend and meet others involved in
working-class struggles.
Barnes concluded by announcing the decision of the Militant editors to
launch an ambitious campaign to expand the circulation of the socialist press,
and to halve the price of the introductory Militant subscription to $5,
to maximize taking advantage of the increased interest among working people in
these publications.
He also asked for initial pledges toward the $85,000 Militant and Perspectiva
Mundial fund drive. Participants pledged $25,000 at the meeting.
SOURCE: http://www.themilitant.com/2004/6811/681152.html
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