BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
Seven politically active youth attended a recent discussion on "Youth and the communist movement" in Chicago, YS member Jay Paradiso told the Militant, reporting on the summer school program sponsored by the Young Socialists and the Socialists Workers Party in that city. The next day, six of them marched together with several hundred other people to protest police brutalization of working people.

This combination of studying basic works of Marxism and joining in political struggles with other youth, working-class fighters, and others, is part of a plan of action by socialists in Chicago and around the country that will culminate in an August 5-7 Active Workers Conference in Oberlin, Ohio. Through this activity they are seeking to convince many of these workers, farmers, and youth to join the Young Socialists or the Socialist Workers Party.

The Chicago summer school participants include three Young Socialists members and four college students interested in the socialist movement who helped organize a protest at DePaul University against the U.S.-NATO assault on Yugoslavia. They and others in Chicago are now beginning to work out the nitty- gritty details of how to get to the Active Workers Conference, such as travel and fund-raising. Car caravans will depart from several locations around the country, drawing workers and young fighters from around each of these regions, and head to the Ohio conference.

In Seattle, socialists have hosted summer school classes on Capitalism's World Disorder and other books in which several newly interested people are taking part. Some summer school students also participated in a rally by Teamster-organized packinghouse workers on strike against Iowa Beef Processing in Wallula, Washington.

On August 1, after a final fund-raising party, people from across the Northwest will depart from Seattle on a cross- country caravan to the Active Workers Conference.

Talk on need for revolutionary party
The keynote presentation at the Active Workers Conference will be on the revolutionary party - on why such a party is necessary to lead a mass vanguard of toilers to overthrow the capitalist rulers and establish a workers and farmers government. It will explain why this working-class party must be of the kind built by the Bolsheviks, under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, which led millions of working people to power in Russia in October 1917.

Two pillars of the Ohio conference will be the Young Socialists and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party. The gathering will give YS members an opportunity to describe the work they have been involved in. The Young Socialists have been strengthened as an organization through their recent political activities, such as their involvement in the successful tour of two Cuban youth leaders. For the summer, the Young Socialists has transferred several of its members to designated summer school centers - in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta, and other cities - to help strengthen and build chapters.

Many of the more than 120 SWP supporters currently involved in the project to convert all Pathfinder Press titles to digital format will be attending the conference, where workshops on this project will be held.

The party supporters also play a critical role in financing the revolutionary party. At its May 30-June 1 meeting, the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party decided to launch a campaign to raise the monthly contributions by supporters from an annual average of $139,000 to $175,000 by the closing rally at the Active Workers Conference on August 7. This campaign, which will require systematic work by party branch leaderships in every city over the coming weeks, will be organized out of Seattle.

The National Committee also decided on other steps to reconquer a proletarian approach to financing the communist movement. One decision is to return to the party's tradition of branch units being debt-free in their monthly obligations to the party's national office. A related step is to set three- month budgets serving as effective tools for branches to meet their basic operating expenses and make it possible to respond to the labor and farm resistance that is now a permanent feature of U.S. politics.

This profound change in working-class politics means that, to be a competent party that is able to judge politics accurately, socialists must systematically reach out and link up with working-class struggles beyond the cities where party branches exist. This makes it necessary to make aggressive use of the party's state, regional, and district structures along those lines. For example, socialists from the two local units making up the party's Minnesota State organization and from Des Moines, Iowa, got some positive results from a two-day team they organized to meet up with packinghouse workers Worthington, Minnesota.

Socialists in Southern branches are carrying out a number of joint activities in the region. Unionists from Houston and Birmingham, including socialists, are traveling to Gramercy, Louisiana, to join a June 27 rally by locked-out Kaiser Aluminum workers. Some Kaiser workers have participated in the socialist summer school in Houston.

Socialists in Birmingham have sent a couple of teams to Auburn University in eastern Alabama to meet with several students who have bought Capitalism's World Disorder and try to involve them in the regional summer school program. A special joint Atlanta-Birmingham July 4 summer school weekend is planned in Birmingham.

And socialist workers from a number of cities are taking part in a Virginia team to reach out to the nearly 9,000 striking Steelworkers in Newport News, Virginia, with solidarity and a communist perspective. They are also participating in a march and rally by the strikers in Richmond and selling at several industrial plant gates, a campus, and working-class communities in the area. Socialists from Washington, D.C., are seeking to work more closely with a couple of youth in Virginia Beach, Virginia, who are interested in the Young Socialists.  
 
 
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