The meeting centered on the summer campaigns of the YS. These include working with others to build broad delegations of young people to the July 22–30 Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange in Havana and to the World Festival of Youth and Students, scheduled for August 8–16 in Algiers, Algeria. The other major effort is the socialist summer schools, which will be centered in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, and Minneapolis.

Jacob Perasso, the organizer of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, opened the meeting with a report on YS summer perspectives. "We need to work with every individual and group interested in building the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange and the World Festival of Youth and Students this summer," he said.

"We need to continue building these events on the job in factories, on campuses, and in the workers districts we are reaching into along with the Socialist Workers Party. We need to be working with others to raise the money for these events; this will help us to reach out even more broadly to find new people who want to join the delegations with us."

Perasso pointed to several examples from around the country where opportunities have opened up for the Young Socialists in this work. During the discussion on the report, Arrin Hawkins, a YS member and meat packer in Chicago, described a recent meeting at her union hall that heard a local union member speak about a recent visit he and a dairy farmer made to Cuba and meetings organized by the Cuban farmers organization. The union meeting raised interest among her co-workers in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange.

As part of regular weekly sales of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, members of the YS and the Socialist Workers Party in New York met a group of young people associated with a church in Washington Heights who are building a delegation to both events this summer.  
 
Socialist summer schools
"The summer schools we are launching coming out of the Active Workers Conference are central to the work we are doing to build the YS this summer," Perasso said. "Our summer schools are an opportunity to study the history of the communist movement and current Marxist analysis together with several generations of the communist movement, many of whom have a living link to the continuity we will be studying. The summer school classes will complement the weekly Militant Labor Forums series in every single city."

Perasso stressed that the success of all these campaigns depends on the YS carrying them out alongside units of the Socialist Workers Party. "Every young person in this room will make decisions about their relationship to the communist movement in the immediate future," Perasso noted. "Under capitalism, we are taught to think only of ourselves. In order to be revolutionaries, we have to challenge ourselves and each other to transform ourselves. As Che Guevara explained, we have to be selfless and make decisions based on what advances the interests of the communist movement."  
 
Winning youth to communist movement
The discussion that followed was a real exchange of experiences and ideas on recruiting to the YS, launching the socialist summer schools, and building delegations to the Youth Exchange and Youth Festival.

Marcie Pedraza, a member of the Chicago chapter of the YS, explained how her chapter took advantage of the interest in the Cuban Revolution and in revolutionary politics in the United States that they ran into as part of the recent campus-based speaking tour of Cuban youth leaders Yanelis Martínez and Javier Dueñas to build the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange. "There are weekly meetings of a dozen people in Chicago," Pedraza explained. "We watch videos and study books on Cuba and organize fund-raising activities for the Youth Exchange. We've also attracted some of the young people involved in a struggle for a public high school in their Chicano neighborhood to the idea of going to the Exchange."

In New York, YS members who marched in the "U.S. Navy out of Vieques" contingent in the Puerto Rican Day Parade met several young people who are active in Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, explained Romina Green. "We will meet fighters who want to study Marxism and join the YS as we are building delegations to the meetings in Havana and Algiers, and we will meet fighters from all around the world at these two events."

Jason Alessio, a member of the YS on his way to build the communist movement in Grand Junction, Colorado, explained his experiences in previous YS summer schools. "You study the history of the communist movement, and then you take what you've learned to the streets, to the plant gates, on the job, and on campuses. The summer schools are one of the best opportunities for YS members to work closely with a broader layer of our movement and learn from them."

Shem Morton from the Los Angeles chapter explained the impact the strike by members of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees at Hollander Home Fashions in Vernon, California, had on the YS chapter there, whose members joined the picket lines and met several strikers. He also explained how the chapter was using the YS national fund drive to organize events geared toward recruiting some of the young people around them.

"We organized a video showing of a movie on Cuba and a class on the book Playa Girón," Morton said. "Members of the Socialist Workers Party in Los Angeles sold five copies of Playa Girón at an organizing meeting for the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange," he noted, referring to the Pathfinder book on the 1961 Cuban victory over the U.S.-backed mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs.

"There are about 15 people in the Twin Cities planning on going to the Youth Exchange," reported Lawrence Mikesh, the organizer of the YS there. "We have a broad coalition of students and professors, and are working to involve others we have met around anti-police brutality actions in this work. We are using the opportunity of the Youth Exchange to recruit to the YS in the Twin Cities. A few of the individuals active in building the Exchange are very interested in joining the YS. By working with others around the Exchange and the Festival, we are getting to know them politically and drawing them closer to the YS."

Perasso explained how all work done to build the Youth Exchange is work toward building the World Festival of Youth and Students. "The two events go hand in hand politically. Young people attracted to the Cuban Revolution can also be won to the idea of attending an international anti-imperialist youth festival in Algeria, a country where there was a successful revolution more than 30 years ago."

Janice Smith, a brand-new YS member in Vancouver, British Columbia, explained that she had been attracted to the communist politics of the YS since she met members of the organization at an International Women's Day event several months ago. She urged those in the room who were not yet YS members to "think seriously about why you want to be a member. I joined because it is a way to improve people's lives by struggling for what you believe in," which means making a socialist revolution.  
 
 
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