Vol. 72/No. 25      June 23, 2008

Sponsored by the Young Socialists and Socialist Workers Party, workers, youth, and others interested in the working-class movement will collectively discuss these readings, some being introduced to revolutionary perspectives for the first time.

“The back and forth is useful,” said Jessica Zannikos, a student at Hunter College who is participating in the New York summer school. “Everyone has a different level of knowledge and experience and it helps you learn things from a different perspective.”

The first class in New York began a discussion on the forthcoming issue number 14 of New International, a magazine of Marxist politics and theory. The reading came from the introductory “In This Issue” piece that explains the significance of each article in the magazine and the political conjuncture in which the issue appears.

Over the course of the summer, New York participants will study all four articles in the magazine—“The Clintons’ Antilabor Legacy: Roots of the 2008 World Financial Crisis,” by Jack Barnes; “Revolution, Internationalism, and Socialism: The Last Year of Malcolm X,” also by Barnes; “The Stewardship of Nature Also Falls to the Working Class: In Defense of Land and Labor,” a statement of the SWP; and “Setting the Record Straight on Fascism and World War II: Building a World Federation of Democratic Youth That Fights Imperialism and War,” by the Young Socialists and Steve Clark.

“Marxist study, combined with action, will better arm us for the struggles we’ll be a part of in the future,¨ said Emily Paul, a leader of the Young Socialists in New York who is involved in organizing the summer school.

Other works to be studied in the summer program in New York include Marxist classics such as the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels; and The History of American Trotskyism by James P. Canon. A special educational weekend at the end of the summer will feature presentations and extended discussion of readings on the 1917 Russian Revolution.

The summer school is part of a package of activities young socialists will be engaged in this summer and beyond. In several states, they will help carry out extensive petitioning efforts to collect signatures needed to get socialist candidates on the ballot. The petitioning efforts will supplement campaigning for SWP presidential candidate Róger Calero and his running mate, Alyson Kennedy, among youth and working people across the country.

From July 10 to 12, young socialists will take part in a socialist educational conference in Oberlin, Ohio, sponsored by the YS and the SWP. The conference will focus on the political themes presented in New International No. 14 and from that starting point take up the key political questions in world politics today, charting a course of action for the communist movement.  
 
 
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