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Vol. 71/No. 35      September 24, 2007

 
Join the Young Socialists!
Letter to youth seeking revolutionary change
(Young Socialists in Action column)
 
This column is written and edited by members of the Young Socialists, a revolutionary socialist youth organization. For more information contact the YS at 306 W. 37th St., 10th floor, New York, NY 10018; tel.: (212) 629-6649; e-mail: youngsocialists@mac.com.

To young Militant readers:

Join the Young Socialists! There is no better way for young people to be a part of today’s struggles than to join the only revolutionary communist youth organization in the United States—the YS.

As the rulers in Washington “stay the course” in their “long war on terrorism” from Iraq to the Philippines, and in their assaults against working people here in the United States, we urge others to join street actions and demand, “Not one penny, not one person for Washington’s wars! Bring the troops home now!”

The YS, together with members of the Socialist Workers Party, will be in Washington, D.C., on September 15 and 29 to explain that no wing of the U.S. capitalist class can present a road forward out of the spreading wars and financial disorder.

The period we are living in today did not begin with the Bush administration or the September 11, 2001, attacks. The growing capitalist crisis is rooted in the decades-long downward trend in the employers’ profit rates, and the breakdown of the imperialist world order marked by sharpening competition between rival powers. No wing of the ruling class—not the Democratic or any other capitalist party—offers an alternative to this course.

At the same time the bosses continue their assault on workers, farmers, and youth on the home front. They are speeding up production, driving down wages, and cutting corners on safety in an attempt to turn around their declining profits. They are driving industry by industry, factory by factory, to break the unions and gut the social wage.

Even as standoffs and stalemates continue to be the norm for struggles in the labor movement, we see today the emergence of a mass political vanguard within the working class resisting these attacks—a vanguard emerging from the fight for legalization for all immigrants. The YS and SWP fight as part of this vanguard.

In response to the recent disaster at the Crandall Canyon mine in Huntington, Utah, young socialists, along with socialist workers, reached out to coal miners and other working people in Utah and across the country. “Safety is a union question! No miner has to die!” read the headline of the Militant that YS members sold at mine portals and in working class communities in Utah, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. We joined discussions with miners about the need to organize and use union power to defend life and limb on the job.

This fall the YS is reaching out broadly on campuses to bring our revolutionary working-class perspective to students and other youth. We will collaborate with other young fighters to organize meetings in defense of five framed-up Cuban revolutionaries. We will build protests against imperialist war. And we will organize events to discuss the ideas and communist course of Thomas Sankara, the leader of a revolution in Burkina Faso during the 1980s, in conjunction with the release of new editions in French and English of Thomas Sankara Speaks by Pathfinder Press.

Capitalism offers no future for working people and youth, as it continues to dive deeper into financial and political turmoil. The only way forward is to join the fight for a society based on human solidarity, not the dog-eat-dog morality of capitalism. To achieve this, we need to build a revolutionary party capable of leading the working class and its allies to take power out of the hands of the exploiters. The Young Socialists is connected with such a party—the Socialist Workers Party.

For more information on how to join the YS, contact us at the address listed above, or contact the Militant distributor nearest you in the list on page 8.

Join the YS today!

Sincerely,
Ben O’Shaughnessy
for the Young Socialists  
 
 
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