Young Socialists launched in USA

BY A POLTICAL A NEW revolutionary youth movement was launched last month by the Workers League, American Trotskyist At a packed conference of over 300 young workers, unemployed youth, students and black and Puerto Rican youth decided to call the new movement the 'Young Socialists'.

The conference on December 18 was attended by youth from all over New York and Philadelphia, Boston, New Jersey, Baltimore and Connecticut.

It marked an important step forward for the Workers League, which, sympathy with the International Committee of the Fourth International, has struggled continuously against Stalinism and Pabloite revisionism, for Marxist principles.

The launching of. 'Young Socialists' opens up the road to development Marxism among young workers in the US.

fraternal greetings from the Socialist Labour League and the British Young Socialists, Dany Sylveire said it was symbolic that the first youth conference of the movement should coincide with the meeting of the capitalist powers in Washington.

'As you know, this meeting was called to discuss the greatest economic crisis in the history of world capitalism con- trary to the superficial liberal observer, no tangible. solution can be reached.' Timely Dany Sylveire continued: 'Capitalism in its death agony is economically beyond repair. No power on earth can save it. All that it has to offer mankind is trade war, slumps and a world nuclear war.

"We must not treat this situation as if it was something that exists outside of us. This is the most timely period in history to launch the revolutionary youth movement in the US.

'For what is happening poses a question to which we revolutionary socialist Trotskyists, have the only answer.

"This answer cannot be given in an abstract way. Each of us has to examine the crisis and decide what we are going to do about it' It was not enough, said Comrace to launch to Coll Socialist movement. Everything the movement did was vital to the future of youth and the working class in the US.

"This is a period of the sharpest class conflict the world has ever seen. It contains the greatest dangers for the future of all mankind, but dialectically it also contains the greatest opportunities for the learning of Marxism and development of our perspectives.' Tim Wolforth, National Secretary of Workers League spoke of the consequences of Nixon's August 15 measures in the United States and internationally, and of their effect on youth in particular.

'Youth seek a revolutionary solution. They have been through the experience of the poverty programmes, the student protests, the demonstrations Dany Sylveire gives greetings to the conference from British Young Socialists.

which produce nothing. Youth seek more power to fight with. George Jackson before he was murdered took up a study of Marxism and said that Engels' 'Anti-Duhring' was the most important book he had ever read.

•Marxist theory must also be brought into the working class. You must go into a struggle of opposites against the workers' capitalist thinking and bourgeois ideology.

'We are not just proposing this programme as an idea, but we must take it live in the life of the party. We must be able to mobilize and move masses in struggle.

"The missing ingredient is not the desire of workers and youth to fight. The problem is to construct the revolutionary party. Youth have the major responsibility for the development of theory' The discussion which followed these two interventions involved all the layers of youth at the conference. It centred on what kind of youth movement has to be built in the struggle to prepare the working class power.

Can it be a centrist youth movement bringing together all the movements on the 'left' or does it have to be a revolutionary youth movement fighting for Marxist principles among the youth of the United States?

Youth at the conference, coming out of the experience of massive unemployment, of the bitter lessons of nationalist movements, posed the question of how capitalism could be defeated and. socialism established, what happened after the Russian Revolution and how they could move the adult working class into struggle uniting all sections of workers to force Nixon out of office and build a Labour Party in the United States.

In this period, large sections of youth have passed through explosive experiences, the groping towards Marxism, as a weapon to enable them to struggle and win, now opens the possibility of developing a mass revolutionary. youth movement in the United States.

This will only take place out of a conflict, against the predominant ideas among youth.

The conference was prepared by the drafting of a 'Programme for youth to fight back' which was taken out into all the areas and discussed, winning broad support from all sections of The programme demands full employment, free higher education for all . and an end to racial discrimination in jobs and unions.

It calls for immediate withdrawal of all US troops from Indo-China and demands the labour movement call a General Strike against the war.

'Free all political prisoners. The unions must take up the fight for all those victimized by the government,' it says.

The Young Socialists call for nationalization of industry and the construction • of a Labour Party based on the trade unions and a socialist programme, to participlate in the 1972 elections.