Workers World Party conference
Learning to use Marxism in the struggle
By
Deirdre Griswold
Tell your fellow workers or students that you're going to a
political gathering these days and they're likely to look at
you funny, thinking of $5,000-a-plate dinners,
red-white-and-blue balloons and vapid speeches that lack even
phony promises.
But there's plenty of life beyond the corrupting grip of the
Democratic and Republican parties.
On the weekend of Nov. 6-7 in New York City, Workers World
Party will be hosting a national conference around the theme of
"Learning Marxism for Today's Struggles."
Marxism is, of course, the comprehensive scientific doctrine
for social change that was first developed in the mid-19th
century and has been added to by many great revolutionary
struggles since. But what does it mean today? How can it be
helpful to all the movements now fighting capitalist
oppression?
This oppression takes many forms. In the United States, the
most glaring is racism, not only because of the cruel toll it
takes on tens of millions of people but also because it is so
obviously a poisonous weapon meant to divide the whole working
class.
Anyone fighting for an end to capitalist exploitation of the
workers, which is the goal of Marxism, has to see the
anti-racist struggle as of the greatest importance. The WWP
conference will devote much thought and energy to what is the
most urgent practical task confronting the multinational
workers' movement on this issue: the struggle to free Black
revolutionary journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Scheduled speakers include activists like Pam Africa of
International Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Workers
World's own Monica Moorehead.
There will be workshops and updates on the status of Mumia's
case and what form the struggle will take next. The discussion
will be geared to stimulating ideas on how the full weight of
the multinational working class and progressive movement can be
brought to bear in the struggle to exonerate and free
Mumia.
Time to assess the world struggle
A Workers World Party conference provides an opportunity to
assess where things are at in the global struggle between the
two basic class forces today: the working class versus the
capitalist class.
The development of world imperialism has added another huge
category to this equation: the billions of nationally oppressed
people. Their struggle for national liberation puts them on the
side of the working class in resisting the giant corporations
and banks that use up and discard whole countries in the
unending search for super profits.
And there are countries like Cuba, China and north Korea
where revolutionary struggles broke the control of the
exploiting classes and began the process of socialist
construction. They also belong on the workers' side in the
global divide.
The progressive camp, however, has suffered great setbacks
in the last two decades of imperialist expansion. The workers'
states in the Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe were
overturned, allowing a U.S.-promoted new bourgeoisie to
dismantle socialist property at a terrible cost to the workers
there.
But this has not ended the global struggle between the
socialist and capitalist systems. That struggle flows
ultimately out of the exploitation of the working class, and
can only be resolved when the workers and all the oppressed are
victorious over capitalism.
A task of the WWP conference will be to define the many hot
points in this world struggle. The discussion will not be
abstract. WWP members have been leaders in the movement against
imperialist war and aggression, and will bring intimate
knowledge of these subjects to the conference.
Pat Chin, who has seen first-hand the devastation caused by
U.S.-NATO bombs in Yugoslavia, will be speaking on U.S. war
crimes there. The continuing U.S. war against the people of
Iraq through bombs and sanctions, and the movement against it,
will be another important focus.
The rising movements against reaction and imperialist
intervention in Puerto Rico, Colombia, Indonesia and other
parts of the world will also be taken up.
The conference provides an opportunity for class-conscious
workers, youth and progressives to come together and contribute
to a wide-ranging discussion whose purpose is to build
solidarity among all those fighting capitalist oppression.
If you are against sexism and the oppression of lesbian,
gay, bi and trans people; if you have ideas on how to struggle
most effectively against the racists in and out of uniform; if
you want more information on the basic contributions of
Marxism--then come to the conference.
For information on registration and housing, call (212)
627-2994 or check out the Workers World web page: www.workers.org/marxism/.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
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