Vol. 71/No. 34      September 17, 2007

BY BEN O’SHAUGHNESSY  
CARACAS, Venezuela—Members of Young Socialists organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, and New Zealand exchanged experiences with hundreds of other youth at an August 23-25 conference here marking the 60th anniversary of the World Festivals of Youth and Students (see front-page article).

The conference included workshops on three topics: youth employment and labor rights, the fight against imperialist aggression and military bases, and education and imperialism’s ideological offensive. Nearly 100 delegates attended each. YS members joined the discussions in these workshops, speaking from the floor about struggles by working people and youth in the imperialist countries in which they live.

During the seminar on education, Annalucia Vermunt from the YS in New Zealand explained the class character of education under capitalism and why communists fight for lifetime education for all. She spoke about the Australian government’s attacks against Aborigines, tying welfare payments to school enrollment. After the seminar, several delegates asked Vermunt for more information on the situation facing working people and youth in the Pacific.

“We are engaged in the struggle for socialist education, education for all, a lifetime education,” said a representative of the Union of Young Communists of Cuba (UJC), from the floor at the workshop. “The only debt Cuban students have is to become better students.”

In each of the three seminars, delegates from Cuba spoke from their experience living in a country where working people made socialist a revolution. They explained that, as young people there, they now have the task to defend and deepen gains already won.

“Iraq and Afghanistan are just two theaters of a multi-front war that Washington is waging today,” said Olympia Newton, representing the Young Socialists in the United States, during the discussion period. “This is a decades-long perspective for U.S. imperialism, and no wing of the U.S. ruling class has an alternative course.” She explained that the top contenders for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, call for reducing troop levels in Iraq in order to send more troops to Afghanistan and other fronts.

“The YS will join antiwar marches in September demanding the immediate withdrawal of all troops from Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else they are stationed, and ‘Not one penny, not one person for Washington’s wars,’” she said.

While in Venezuela, Newton and Ben O’Shaughnessy, the organizer of the National Steering Committee of the YS in the United States, were also invited to speak at a western Caracas leadership meeting of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) on the U.S. class struggle.

When asked about the response by the YS and Socialist Workers Party to the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, O’Shaughnessy responded that young socialists and socialist workers have campaigned to tell the truth about Katrina and its aftermath.

“Hurricane Katrina was not a ‘natural disaster’ but a social catastrophe rooted in capitalism, a system that puts profits before human needs,” said O’Shaughnessy. “We point to the internationalist example set by the Cuban Revolution, which offered to send hundreds of doctors to New Orleans, an act of solidarity to working people in the United States. This was ignored by the U.S. rulers.”

PSUV leaders at the meeting also asked about the YS’s activities to free five Cuban revolutionaries locked up in U.S. jails on frame-up charges. O’Shaughnessy described campus meetings, picket lines, and other educational efforts the YS has been involved in to win their release.

Cuban organizations have called for a period of increased activity to win the release of the five from September 12 to October 8. Newton and O’Shaughnessy said the SWP and YS will continue to join with others to organize events across the U.S. to help win their freedom.  
 
 
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