The Low Point of Labor Resistance is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward

A decades-long retreat by the working class and unions has come to an end, as owners of capital and their parties shift the burden of their crisis onto working people's backs. More and more workers—of all ages, skin colors, and both sexes—are saying, "Enough is enough!" They've begun to wield the collective power of the exploited producers in response.

This book, drawing from the trade union and broad political work of members and followers of the Socialist Workers Party, highlights opportunities ahead for class-conscious workers. It sets the course of action needed to forge a labor party built on fighting unions. And a mass proletarian vanguard able to lead the struggle to end capitalist rule, opening a future for humanity.

Also available in Spanish (ISBN: 9781604881462), French. (ISBN: 9781604881479), Greek (ISBN: 9786185130244)

“Informatively analytical, thoughtful, thought-provoking, and politically inspiring.” —Midwest Book Review

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)

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, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women (2024, coauthor)
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970, editor)

Steve Clark (1948– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1977, is editorial director of Pathfinder Press and managing editor of New International magazine.

Active from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s in the fight to halt the US war in Vietnam, Clark joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1970 and Socialist Workers Party in 1971. He is a leader of the party’s work in solidarity with the socialist revolution in Cuba. He was editor of the Young Socialist magazine (1974–75) and YSA national secretary (1975). He edited the Militant newsweekly (1977–80, 2011–12) and the socialist news magazine Intercontinental Press (1981–84).

Clark is the editor of Malcolm X Talks to Young People and other collections of speeches and writings by Malcolm X, and author of the introductions to Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? and The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, both by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. In July 1980 Clark interviewed Maurice Bishop, central leader of the workers and farmers government in the Caribbean island of Grenada, for the Militant and is editor of Maurice Bishop Speaks: The Grenada Revolution and Its Overthrow, 1979–83 and author of “The Second Assassination of Maurice Bishop” in New International No.6.

Among Clark’s other articles in New International are “Farming, Science, and the Working Classes” and “The Politics of Economics: Che Guevara and Marxist Continuity,” co-authored with Jack Barnes.