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    Vol.62/No.39           November 2, 1998 
 
 
`A Recruiter To Proletarian Politics'  
Below are excerpts from a few of the messages read to the October 18 meeting celebrating the political contributions of Paul Montauk.

Paul was someone who was a recruiter, in my case to proletarian politics and the proletarian party. This was the main thing. It was a case of patiently explaining over time as the occasions arose in our activity. I must say I don't think of Paul has ever having lectured me.

It was he who broke me from bourgeois norms about money. That is, putting the party first in terms of money, too. You decide pledges based first on considering the party's needs, not your budget first and then pledging what's left over....

The YSA had to have a proletarian standard [of dress]. I can still hear him saying this - we dress conservatively because the workers demand respectability. He explained workers get dirty at work and clean up afterward and dress as well as possible when not engaged in alienated labor.

Andrea Morrell

Paul Montauk was the first adult I met who supported the Cuban Revolution. It was late 1962 or early 1963, and the Civil Rights movement and Cuba were beginning to have an impact on my generation. Student radical groups were tiny, isolated and fractured by internal factionalism, including the Young Socialist Alliance.... But two things stood out about the YSA. One was its enthusiastic support of the Cuban Revolution and the second was its association with the Socialist Workers Party. It was impressive to me that there was an organization that had a life outside the student milieu, where people, even some gray-haired people, had devoted their lives to socialist ideas.

Syd Stapleton

The H-Block Three's recent release from federal prison in Camp Parks, CA, after 14 months is proof of the power of the peace process we have all struggled so hard to create and maintain.

Paul was indeed one of us. I am especially grateful to Paul's wife Mary Lou Montauk, who, with so many others stood with the H-block prisoners, both here in America and in Northern Ireland. This solidarity sustained us.

Additionally, I am grateful to the Militant newspaper for telling our side and for promoting our case worldwide in the face of British government lies.

Please excuse my absence, I hope to meet and thank you all in the very near future.

Terrence Kirby  
 
 
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