https://themilitant.com/2018/06/30/2018-active-workers-conference-build-labor-movement-build-swp/
2018 Active Workers Conference: Build labor movement, build SWP
By Terry Evans
and John Studer
Vol. 82/No. 25
July 9, 2018
OBERLIN, Ohio — “Deeper into the Working Class, Act on the Rulers’
Deepening Political Crisis, Build the Labor Movement, Build the
Socialist Workers Party” read the large banner hanging over the stage at
the 2018 Active Workers Conference. The annual event, sponsored by the
Socialist Workers Party, was held here June 14-16.
Above, Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents
report "Deeper into the Working Class: Build the Labor Movement" to
Active Workers Conference June 14 in Oberlin, Ohio. Middle, conference
participants study displays illustrating the party's participation in
the class struggle and developments in world politics. Bottom, those
attending conference for first time pick up offers on books on party's
program to build their libraries.
Militant photos by Arthur Hughes
Above, Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes presents
report “Deeper into the Working Class: Build the Labor Movement” to
Active Workers Conference June 14 in Oberlin, Ohio. Middle, conference
participants study displays illustrating the party’s participation in
the class struggle and developments in world politics. Bottom, those
attending conference for first time pick up offers on books on party’s
program to build their libraries.
“This year our banner features an additional line: ‘Build the Labor
Movement,’” SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes told the nearly 400
participants in his political report to the opening conference session.
“This will be the axis of work of the party’s trade union fractions
going forward,” he said. SWP members will carry out this activity
alongside weekly door-to-door campaigning in workers’ neighborhoods with
the Militant and books on working-class politics, as well as
participation in social and political struggles in the interests of
working people
That additional line on the banner wouldn’t have rung true last year,
Barnes said, prior to the wave of teachers’ union battles since early
2018 that inspired workers across the country, won broad support and
scored some victories. After decades of attacks on the working class by
the employers, driven by the deepening crisis of their capitalist
system, teachers and other workers are beginning to fight back. In the
weeks before the conference, a number of participants across the U.S.
and Canada had gone with co-workers and fellow trade unionists to bring
solidarity to other labor actions and social protests. Through
participation in such activity, the party is recruiting new members.
Ringing the hall, dozens of colorful displays illustrated the teachers’
strike battles, as well as other key political developments and
questions in the U.S. and worldwide — from Korea to Europe to the Middle
East. The exhibits showed experiences by members of the SWP and sister
Communist Leagues in campaigning to advance a revolutionary
working-class program and course of action.
The displays also addressed themes discussed in two other conference
talks by SWP leaders — “Private Property, Women’s Oppression, and the
Working-Class Road to Emancipation” presented by Mary-Alice Waters, and
“The Proletarian Revolution and Culture” presented by Dave Prince — as
well as classes and informal discussions over meals and elsewhere.
In addition to discussion sessions on the main presentations, there were
classes on “Class Struggle, Communism, and the Jewish Question: from
Palestine and Israel to Iran”; “Black Liberation and the Labor
Movement”; and “The Political Legacy of the Grenada Revolution and
Communist Leadership.”
Barnes placed the new openings in the labor movement in the U.S. in the
context of important shifts in politics and the class struggle
worldwide. He focused on recent developments on the Korean Peninsula,
the ongoing wars and capitalist rivalries in the Middle East, the U.S.
rulers’ relations with Moscow, and the accelerated tearing at the seams
of the so-called G-7, European “Union,” and other imperialist pacts and
crumbling “global” institutions.
This article focuses on these events and their significance for
struggles by working people. Next week, in addition to continuing this
account of U.S. and world politics, the Militant will report on other
presentations, discussions and projections for party work at the SWP
conference and subsequent National Committee meeting.
U.S. out of Korea!
The prospects opened by the Singapore summit between President Donald
Trump and North Korean head of state Kim Jong Un, which concluded two
days before the SWP gathering, are good for the working class, Barnes
said — not just in the U.S. and Korea, but in Japan, China, and across
the Pacific and the world.
The Socialist Workers Party has campaigned for decades to demand that
the U.S. rulers get their troops, planes and bombs out of Korea and end
their brutal imperialist sanctions against the people and government of
North Korea. “Korea is one!” the SWP has explained, helping to educate
working people in the U.S. and throughout the world about Washington’s
bloody occupation and partition of Korea, with Moscow’s collusion, in
1945. With the victory of the Vietnamese Revolution in 1975 and
unification of Germany in the 1990s, Korea remains the last nation on
earth whose people were forcibly separated by the division of spoils at
the end of the imperialist Second World War.
The SWP has long called for a halt to Washington’s annual joint military
maneuvers with South Korea — accurately recognized by President Trump at
the June summit both as “war games” and as “provocative,” to howls of
protest by Democratic Party liberals and some Republican politicians.
The U.S. government indefinitely suspended those war games with Seoul
June 22.
Trump has also raised withdrawing some of the 28,500 U.S. troops
stationed in South Korea — a proposal he first mooted during the 2016
elections — in exchange for the North Korean government taking steps to
dismantle its nuclear missile program. The SWP calls, Barnes said, “For
a Korean Peninsula, Japan and surrounding skies and waters free of
nuclear weapons.”
Barnes drew attention to a chart given to all conference participants
showing the nuclear arsenals of Washington (some 6,450 nuclear warheads)
down to North Korea (an estimated 10 to 20). According to the chart, the
most recent warhead tested by North Korea is 10 to 15 times more
powerful than the U.S. bomb that annihilated some 100,000 or more people
in Hiroshima in 1945 (including at least 20,000 Koreans, most of them
forcibly transported as cheap labor for Korea’s Japanese colonial rulers).
The steps already taken by Washington since the Singapore summit “buy
space and time for the working class,” Barnes explained, as will further
steps in this direction. They have a welcome impact on working people in
Japan, who have living memory of the U.S. rulers’ nuclear attacks on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and oppose nuclear weapons in Asia, whether in
Korea or on Washington’s submarine fleet plying the Pacific.
War and class conflict in Mideast
The U.S. rulers, Barnes said, are also pressing to hammer out agreements
in the Middle East, both with rival bourgeois governments across the
region and with the rising capitalist rulers in Moscow, who have their
own economic, political, and military interests there, especially in Syria.
The current White House, Barnes said, has ceased acting on the false
premise, one that has guided the last several Democratic and Republican
administrations alike, that “the U.S. rulers can dominate the world
unopposed in the mistaken belief they won the Cold War.” While
Washington maintains massive military superiority over other world
powers, it can no longer simply impose U.S. capital’s will through
bloody wars — wars that have now gone on, from Syria to Afghanistan, for
more than 17 years. Instead, the current administration is seeking to
advance U.S. imperialist interests by moving to end some longstanding
conflicts and pull in its horns to a degree, at least for now.
This is Washington’s course, for example, in seeking a deal with the
Israeli and Russian governments to end the now eight-year-long Syrian
civil war and restore a semblance of stability to advance their separate
but mutual class interests. Increasingly over that long and bloody
conflict, the bourgeois clerical regime in Tehran has deployed its armed
forces and associated militias across Syria — including the
Lebanon-based organization and militia Hezbollah, which Iran’s rulers
created and politically dominate — seeking to defend the tyranny of
Bashar al-Assad and entrench the Iranian rulers’ position there. Their
goal is to use this position to control a wide arc of territory and
political/military influence to expand their counterrevolutionary sway
across Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon to the Mediterranean and the borders of
Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
Since 2015, both Moscow and Tehran-backed forces had succeeded in
propping up the Assad regime. Together with military efforts by
Kurdish-based military forces in northeast Syria, aided by Washington
both in the air and on the ground, armed opposition groups in Syria,
including Islamic State, have been pushed back. At the same time, those
military victories have weakened the glue holding together Moscow’s and
Tehran’s temporarily coinciding but conflicting class interests.
In recent months, Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and agreed that the Israeli rulers can
strike at Tehran-backed forces — including not only Hezbollah, but
Iranian troops themselves — when they get too close to Israel’s border
or start stockpiling and transporting large quantities of missiles and
other weapons. Washington, Tel Aviv and their Mideast allies are all
pressing — both separately and, to the degree they can, together — to
end Tehran’s military presence in Syria.
The Israeli government’s June 18 airstrikes killed and wounded dozens of
the Tehran-backed Shiite Kata’ib Hezbollah militia members in Syria,
with no response from Moscow. A similar airstrike in May, directly
destroying Iranian forces — again with no military response by Moscow —
was carried out by the Israeli government while Netanyahu was on a
return flight from a visit to Putin in Russia.
In return for its silence on the Israeli government’s airstrikes, Barnes
said, Moscow seeks talks with Washington to guarantee the expansion of
the Russian military base at the warm-water Syrian port of Tartus, key
to Russia’s navy, and its nearby air force facilities. Days after the
SWP conference U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton was dispatched
to Moscow to prepare the ground for a summit between Trump and Putin
(jointly announced for later this summer by the two governments as this
issue was going to press).
The Iranian ruling class acts against the toilers of Iran, and its
foreign policy is an extension of that counterrevolutionary course at
home, Barnes said. But the rulers in Tehran “are neither suicidal, nor
irrational. They, too, can be pushed to seek a new deal with Washington,
and, if that is successful, with Tel Aviv.”
Washington also sent President Trump’s son-in-law and White House
Adviser Jared Kushner to Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt in late June to
discuss the next stages in advancing its Mideast peace plan, Barnes said.
Despite the U.S. rulers’ intentions, these moves — from Korea to Moscow
to the Middle East — can have positive results for the working class and
toilers, helping to open much-needed political space to organize; to
gain class-struggle experience against their respective capitalist
ruling classes; to strengthen ties of workers solidarity across
imperialist-stoked national and religious divisions; and to take steps
toward the building of new working-class leadership.
Next week, the myth of the so-called G-7 and European “Union”; “trade
war”; U.S. liberals, the “Resistance,” and a working-class course in
face of assaults on the rights of working people, women, Blacks, and
immigrants; and much more from the SWP’s 2018 Active Workers Conference.
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Cop charged with murder in killing of Antwon Rose
•'Puerto Ricans will never give up struggle for independence'
•Amnesty for all immigrants in the US! No deportations!
•'Militant' fights new round of censorship in Florida prisons
•2018 Active Workers Conference: Build labor movement, build SWP
Feature Articles •Rising interest rates tighten debt squeeze on US farmers
Also In This Issue •Auckland protest demands protection of Maori land
•London march marks 1 year since Grenfell Tower fire
•Rail bosses press for longer freight trains, less workers
•Ivan Licho’s ‘Militant’ cartoons exposed capitalist rule
•Books by Thomas Sankara spark interest at Harlem festival
•Crisis in Puerto Rico caused by colonial control, capitalist rule
Editorials •Liberals' harassment crusade is threat to rights workers need!
On the Picket Line •UK hospital workers wage second strike, call further
action
•Ukraine rail workers fight for job safety
25, 50 and 75 years ago
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