BY VERÓNICA POSES AND JACOB PERASSO
SAN FRANCISCO - Some 30 young people participated in a lively West Coast educational conference here September 5-6 sponsored by Young Socialist chapters in California. Youth came from California, Washington state, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

The Young Socialist members and other participants shared their experiences and discussed how to advance in building disciplined YS units that meet on a regular basis, have a serious approach to finances, and can effectively participate in the increasing resistance by working people and youth. At the end of the conference, participants voted enthusiastically to call a national convention of the Young Socialists for late November in Los Angeles.

The National Executive Committee of the YS had asked the young people participating in the conference who were of Young Socialists age (between 14 and 26 years old) to vote on whether or not the weekend's deliberations indicated that the call for a YS convention was warranted.

Young Socialists in California decided to call the Labor Day weekend regional conference after a spurt of recruitment to the organization in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, and San Francisco. The influx of new members has helped YS members in California begin transforming their chapters into increasingly active and effective organizations that participate in struggles with others and can win many of those fighters to its ranks. These experiences have been uneven, so the YS chapters called a conference to help generalize their lessons.

The conference was held at Fort Mason, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. The onetime military fort has been converted into retail stores and a conference center, among other things. The fort was used 100 years ago to supply weapons and ammunition for the U.S. invasion Guam and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War at the dawn of U.S. imperialism, and was a major troop deployment center for decades. More than 1.5 million U.S. soldiers and naval personnel passed through the fort on the way to fight in World War II and Korea.

Young Socialists Manifesto
In the opening report to the conference, Samantha Kern, the state organizer of the Young Socialists in California, talked about the accelerating pace of the world capitalist crisis and possibilities that exist in the West Coast to build a youth organization today.

Mary-Alice Waters, editor of the magazine New International, joined Kern on the platform for the opening session, which some 65 participants of all ages took part in. Waters explained why the coming issue of New International will publish the "Young Socialists Manifesto" as its opening article.

This document was discussed and drafted by the Los Angeles YS chapter as part of responding to the growing opportunities that exist today to do political work with radicalizing workers and youth. The new issue of New International is scheduled for publication at the end of September. "The YS Manifesto is the keystone to issue no. 11 of New International," Waters said. "It's about acting as proletarian revolutionists today."

"The Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists both work within the history and continuity of the modern working- class movement," she added. "The YS is a proletarian organization in program and perspective. This is the common foundation of the party and the YS."

The opening session of the conference was followed by two days of classes, panels, socials, and other sessions open only to YS-age youth and a few invited guests. A class on the book The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes, led by a YS member from Seattle, was followed the first night by a panel discussion that reflected some of the experiences of Young Socialists on the West Coast. Nefta Pereda, a YS member currently living in Los Angeles, drew lessons from his experiences in the fight against Proposition 229, a ballot measure attacking bilingual education in California that passed last year.

Responding to strikes, antiracist action
J.P. Crysdale, a student at City College in San Francisco, reported how he and other YS members responded to striking members of the Service Employees International Union at that campus. Thousands of City College students refused to cross picket lines set up by the workers. "The school administration claimed that the workers were depriving us of educational opportunities," he said, "but the truth is that we got some real education by seeing these workers fight." The YS was able to respond quickly to the strike. Young Socialists staffed Pathfinder book tables on campus, discussed issues in the Militant with strikers and students, and offered solidarity on picket lines at every opportunity. Crysdale observed that the YS led the communist movement and the SWP into solidarity with the striking workers. Several young people from City College participated in the conference.

The panel also featured a YS member from Vancouver, who talked about lessons from Vancouver actions protesting racist attacks and the role that the YS played in bringing other young people to them.

Jason Alessio, a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz who worked as a meatpacker over the summer, talked about his experiences in going to picket lines set up by farm workers fighting to organize a union. Alessio was also active in building a demonstration in the Bay Area on July 25 demanding independence for Puerto Rican political prisoners and independence for Puerto Rico. "What attracted me to the YS is that it connects all these different struggles," he said.

The importance of learning about the history of the working class and the communist movement was also a feature of the conference. In her report to the conference, Kern talked about the example set by the Los Angeles chapter of the YS on the day of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan and Sudan, August 20. After a scheduled class on Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx, they turned the discussion toward the question of how to respond to Washington's act of imperial aggression and called a protest for the next day.

Two organized discussions held on the second day of the conference focused on Socialism on Trial by SWP leader and founder James P. Cannon and the article "Imperialism's March Toward Fascism and War" by Jack Barnes featured in issue no. 10 of New International magazine.

Building units of an organization
A central question in the weekend's discussion was how to build chapters of the organization that can effectively participate in politics and carry out the national campaigns of the Young Socialists. Participants at the conference read the Young Socialists Organizer, a document adopted at the March 1997 YS convention that serves as a guide to organize local units.

"We need to be a cohesive and disciplined organization in order to be effective in politics" said Kern in her summary report to the conference. "We need to meet every week to assess the work we've done and discuss in a collective way what we'll do the following week" she explained.

Amanda Hillard, a YS member in Los Angeles, commented on the importance of functioning collectively as the only way "to build an organization that develops all its members as leaders."

Kern also explained the importance of YS members learning Spanish. "More and more, we need to be a bilingual organization. We should be able to communicate with fighters in their own language," she said, noting that the entire conference was conducted with simultaneous translation into Spanish.

Youth who were not members of the Young Socialists also participated in the discussion. Lauro Clavijo, a high school student from Los Angeles, described the harassment that students at his school face, going through a metal detector every time they enter the building. "We need to work more with high school students," he said.

Conference participants ended the weekend with several hours of discussion on whether calling a national convention of the Young Socialists would help to generalize some of the advances that were expressed in the conference discussion. They concluded that it would be the most important initiative they could take.

"Building the Young Socialists convention will be at the center of our movement's activity for the coming months. We will build the Young Socialists as we build the convention," said Samantha Kern in her summary.

"This will be the anniversary convention of our movement," she noted.

The year 1998 marks several anniversaries: the 80th anniversary of the founding of the communist movement in the United States, the 70th anniversary of the Militant newspaper and Pathfinder Press, and the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Socialist Workers Party on the eve of World War II.  
 
 
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