Political principles

• The Young Socialists recognizes the need to overthrow capitalism and fight for socialism. Since this is an international struggle, we build our organization internationally.
• The YS opposes all forms of exploitation and oppression, including racism, national chauvinism, and sexism. We support all struggles for national liberation and women's emancipation.
• The YS seeks to lead youth in the battles against imperialism's march toward fascism and war.
• The YS looks to the working class and the program and the communist continuity of the Socialist Workers Party as the proletarian party that can lead it to take state power, overthrow capitalism, and join the international struggle for socialism.
• The YS defends Cuba's socialist revolution and sees it as a living example of the way forward for all of humanity, as the Bolshevik-led October 1917 Russian revolution was earlier this century. Our goal is to emulate the Cuban revolution in the U.S. and internationally.

Campaigns

The YS opposes the imperialist drive toward war against Yugoslavia and will use any opportunity to explain the truth about Yugoslavia and the crisis that imperialism faces today.

The YS understands that Patrick Buchanan's movement represents the true face of American fascism. We will join with other fighters in protests and counter-demonstrations to oppose Buchananism.

In defending Cuba, the YS will work with others to:

• build the tour of Cuban youth who have been invited to speak at U.S. universities in April;
• build and help lead the U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange sponsored by the National Network on Cuba and scheduled for July 24-August 5;
• and actively work with the Union of Young Communists (UJC) in Cuba and other youth organizations around the world to build the world festival of students and youth to be held in Havana in 1997.

The YS rejects any support to the parties of big business and will campaign for the Socialist Workers Party candidates in 1996.

We join with all resistance to the horrors of capitalism, including joining picket lines of striking workers, abortion rights actions and clinic defense, protests against police brutality and the death penalty, mobilizations to defend affirmative action and equal rights for immigrants, protests against the destruction of the environment, protests against education cuts and others. We go to this resistance and these protests armed with our political weapons, the Militant, Perspectiva Mundial, New International, and Pathfinder books and pamphlets.

YS members strive to study the lessons of past working- class struggles and trace our political continuity to the founding document of scientific socialism - the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Election of delegates

A convention is a delegated meeting with powers to set policy for the organization, elect a National Committee, and decide tasks. A delegated convention allows for more democratic discussion, airing of different views, and authoritative decision-making than is possible with a national membership meeting.

Delegates to the YS convention will be elected on the basis of the political principles, rules of membership and discipline,security policy, YS-SWP relations, and campaigns.

Delegates will have voice and decisive vote at the convention. Members of the outgoing National Committee, if not elected as delegates, will be delegates with voice and consultative vote.

Members voting and nominated for delegate must be in good standing (owing less than three months in dues).

 
 
 
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