BY STEFANIE TRICE
This column is written and edited by the Young Socialists (YS), an international organization of young workers, students, and other youth fighting for socialism. For more information about the YS write to: Young Socialists, P.O. Box 14392, St. Paul, MN 55104. Tel: (612) 644-0015. Compuserve: 105162,605

NEWARK, New Jersey - Young Socialists in New York and New Jersey finished off the New Year with a joint raffle held at a party celebrating the successful set-up of Pathfinder's new pick and pack fulfillment operation. Young activists, including one from Algeria, were among those who came. We raised $105 dollars for the YS national office.

Coming out of the successful recruitment drive in the final months of 1996, the New Jersey Young Socialists chapter started the new year with a meeting to chart out our tasks and perspectives for the coming year.

Weekly meetings, classes
Central to the tasks of the newly doubled chapter was concretely setting into action the perspectives we've been discussing since the national leadership meeting this December: building a proletarian youth organization. Our starting point was the essential need to organize ourselves through weekly membership meetings, without which our chapter will cease to exist. We decided to affirm Sundays as the day for our chapter meeting, the only day it's been consistently possible to have full membership meetings. With this, we concluded, other priorities such as classes will have to be scheduled so that they don't push this essential institution aside.

We voted to start on a new leg of our class series, public classes Saturday nights, which will take up Marxist classics, as well as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions and "The Opening Guns of World War III" from New International no.7, in preparation for the upcoming convention in Atlanta. We're presently working with the local branch of the Socialist Workers Party, who have co-sponsored our most recent classes, to develop and co-sponsor a detailed syllabus.

In looking at our success in recruitment over the past period, we addressed the question of "What are we recruiting to?" We concurred with the conclusions of the national leadership meeting in December 1996: that to recruit to a communist youth organization we must be on an axis of propaganda. With that conclusion, we voted to take the following steps:

Engage jointly in Sunday mobilizations with the SWP to further propaganda and recruitment work; selling the Militant and Pathfinder books; to actively build Friday evening Militant Labor Forums; to establish "Recruitment Wednesdays": organizing to do collective work each Wednesday to follow up with contacts and set up book tables in communities and at political events. We also voted to pay regular attention to advancing our work in New Brunswick, where one member of our chapter attends Rutgers University and where we have the potential for a new chapter; to have a recruitment point at each chapter meeting, using it to organize our work on Wednesdays; to propose to the SWP that a YS member chosen by the chapter be added to their committee, which organizes weekly sales work such as the Sunday mobilizations;

These decisions are how we intend to make recruitment part of everything we do. We consider writing for the YS column in the Militant as part of recruitment work as well, letting people who read the paper know that there's an organization they can join.

Finances
The chapter also assigned a financial director to bring in a financial point at the first meeting of each month, organize collection of dues, oversee fundraising activities, and present budgets to the chapter for approval.

We see finances as one of the points we've been weakest at, so we're looking forward to launching some aggressive fundraising in the upcoming months, beginning with a party in late January. We will continue to organize frequent raffles, dinners, and socials while pursuing campus speaking engagements that often pay honorarium.

Fundraising, if organized politically, often intersects with recruitment. One example of this is the opportunity we have to work with a student from northeast Pennsylvania who expressed interest in joining the Young Socialists and wants us to speak at her high school. We are going to visit her, and we want to raise money to send a team to the Wheeling-Pitt strike in Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, bringing people like her with us.

Finally, we voted to send 50 percent of all funds we raise at upcoming events to the Young Socialists National Office and to launch a local "Countdown to Atlanta Fund" to facilitate the participation of all youth who want to attend the 2nd Convention of the Young Socialists this March.

Putting it into practice
As soon as we adjourned our January 4, Sunday meeting, we dispatched a sales team to attend a local symposium in downtown Newark called: The State of Black and Latino Youth, sponsored by a local Maoist group, Black NIA F.O.R.C.E. The main speakers were Sista Souljah, an activist and writer, and Kathleen Cleaver, a former Black Panther member and presently a lawyer. Approximately 400 people, many of whom were young, attended the event. While references were frequently made to the chronic violence of capitalism, the solutions presented mainly focused on individual morality, education and the strengthening of the family. There were no revolutionary or communist perspectives presented. People flocked to the table set up by the Young Socialists outside the building where the event was held. Six books were sold in less than an hour with titles ranging from What is to be Done? by V.I. Lenin; Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, by Che Guevara; and FBI on Trial. Others bought catalogs; copies of the socialist newspaper, the Militant; took leaflets on upcoming classes and forums; and signed up for more information on the Young Socialists.

On Wednesday, January 8, we worked through the backlog of contact names which for too long have been unattended. We began to pare them down enough to be able to focus on those who are truly potential recruits and institute more timely follow up on those we meet weekly.

On Friday, January 10, we met a young worker named André interested in the YS at the Militant Labor Forum on "Sexual Harassment in the Military." The next day, the chapter held a successful class on the Communist Manifesto, led by Ric, the newest member of our chapter, and Luis Madrid, a member of the National Committee of the SWP. The weekend progressed on Sunday, January 12, with more than half of the chapter participating in voluntary labor to complete some final work on the pick-and-pack operation and collate volumes of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels and V.I. Lenin. We held discussions on the potential for SWP and YS members to work together in the trade unions in New Jersey, and finished with a successful chapter meeting.

Stefanie Trice is a member of the United Transportation Union. YS member Brock Satter contributed to this article.  
 
 
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