Building the kind of party working people need to prepare for coming class battles through which they will revolutionize themselves, their unions, and all society. A handbook for those seeking the road toward effective action to overturn the exploitative system of capitalism and join in reconstructing the world on new, socialist foundations.
Also available in Spanish (ISBN: 9780873489058), French (ISBN: 9780873489812), Farsi (ISBN: 9789645783233), Greek (ISBN: 9789608550582)
“A significant focus of the work is on the necessity of leading the party into the ranks of industrial workers and their unions, which the party began refocusing on in 1978.” —Research Book News
Jack Barnes (1940– ) is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He joined the SWP in May 1961 and has been a member of the party’s National Committee since 1963 and a national officer since 1968.
Since the mid-1970s Barnes has led the political course of the SWP and its sister parties worldwide to build communist parties whose members and leaders in their large majority are workers and unionists organizing workers to forge and strengthen trade unions and lead the working class and its allies toward a successful socialist revolution.
Barnes is a contributing editor of New International magazine and author of numerous books and articles on revolutionary working-class politics and the communist movement.
His writings include:
Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? (2016)
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019)
Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power (2009)
The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People (2016)
“The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” in
New International no. 14 (2008, coauthor)
Cuba and the Coming American Revolution (2007)
Their Trotsky and Ours (2002)
“US Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War” in
New International no. 11 (1998)
Other Contributor:
Mary-Alice Waters (1942– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1967, is president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International magazine. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1962 and Socialist Workers Party in 1964. She has helped lead the SWP’s work nationally and internationally, especially in defense of the Cuban Revolution as well as the fight for women’s liberation.
Waters was YSA national secretary, then chairperson (1967–68). She covered the 1968 student-labor uprising in France for the Militant and edited that working-class newsweekly from 1969 through the early 1970s.
She has edited more than thirty-five books on the Cuban Revolution as well as more than a dozen other titles. Waters has spoken in the United States and around the world on the Cuban Revolution and its lessons for working people and youth everywhere.
Her works include:
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019, coeditor)
In Defense of the US Working Class (2019)
Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? (2016)
“It’s the Poor who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk about Their Lives within the US Working Class (2015)
Cosmetics, Fashions, and the Exploitation of Women (1986, coauthor)
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970, editor)
