From the Crossroads to the Entry Points—The YCL Builds on its Convention

Report to the CPUSA NC Meeting June 24, 2006

Good afternoon! I’m glad to be addressing our National Committee today in order to report back on the success our National Convention and our drive to continue moving forward.

Our generation is at a crossroads.

We are indeed living through a historical moment of global shifts, bringing young people an almost inherent awareness of the world and how it affects us locally. Despite our obsessions with American Idol, P Diddy’s latest discovery, or (my personal favorite) the new Namibian “Brangelina”, today’s youth are connecting the dots faster than ever.

Maybe it’s easier to connect the dots because there are more dots to connect! All of a sudden, we don’t have enough math books in our classrooms for each student to have one. Our community sports and rec leagues get canceled due to lack of funding. We can’t find a job outside of the military because the Bush Administration wants to spend over $283 billion in Iraq. And we need not acquire a car for our “sweet sixteens,” gas prices being what they are.

Naturally, this new consciousness provides the youth movement and the broader democratic movement much potential for growth, development, and concrete gains in the struggle to defeat the ultra-right. And it is within this period of swelling upsurge, that the YCL convened our 8th National Convention.

The convention program included plenary and panel discussions on hot issues affecting youth today, skills building and issue workshops, and ideological workshops where YCL and Party leaders teamed up to dive deeper into our vision and beliefs. We participated in a cultural exhibit and show entitled “War and Peace” sponsored and organized largely in part by our own Dynamic Magazine, featuring visual and performance artist impressions on war at home and abroad—including an Iraqi hip hop artist. To get people moving, the convention featured a demonstration outside of Brooklyn’s primary military recruitment center demanding money for books, not for war.

Our National Convention was a huge success, and to highlight this success, I will share a couple of numbers:

• 200 delegates and guests participated in the convention throughout the weekend, with approximately 42% women and over one half people of color. We also had a significant number of youth present between the ages of 15 and 18 years old, representing a new generation of YCLers.

• $113,847.40 was raised through delegate fees, ad book sales, tabling, grants, and your generous contributions. For the first time in a long time, we raised the cost of the convention with change to spare! Your contributions were a huge part of this, raking in over $59,000, and we are grateful for the YCL members that were able to attend because of it. Over 125 Party members and allies donated $250, matching the amount an individual YCLer had to pay to attend the convention. …What is more, there are still fees and pledges to collect! This effort has given us more incentive to be strategic, consistent, and deliberate in the planning of our actions and fundraising requests. It has also strengthened the relationship between many YCL clubs and Party districts, especially where the district aided not only in fundraising but also in helping our national leadership identify and mobilize potential club leaders and members to attend the convention. On behalf of all of us at the YCL, thank you again for your generous contributions and support.

• The last number is 4. This is the number of years between now and our next convention, the number of years we have to carry out key components of our political work. …And we will need the help of Party clubs and Districts to be successful in building new and strengthening existing YCL clubs and efforts because in addition to electing our new leadership, we adopted an Action Plan.

We know that youth have an important role to play in joining with labor, people of color, women, and other broad democratic struggles in challenging the current power structures. The Young Communist League is an active participant in building unity both within the youth movement and between the youth movement and broader struggles. But as much as we talk about this, we cannot move forward unless we begin to concretely outline exactly how we will fulfill this role. That is why we drafted and adopted our Action Plan.

Our Action Plan serves as a framework to guide us in strategic action between now and our next convention. It will help us determine worthwhile demands, campaign priorities, and other on-going programs and activities that will help to build our organization while strengthening the broader youth movement given the current political and economic climate.

The Action Plan of the Young Communist League is not meant to mimic the National Program of the Communist Party USA. It is not our strategy to win socialism. However, it will help us plan the next four of these many years of struggle we have ahead of us, guide us in how to better engage our allies and potential allies and coordinate with the Party.

Our Action Plan is separated into two distinct parts, the Youth Bill of Rights and our Areas of Struggle.

The Youth Bill of Rights gives us a means through which to clearly and concretely state our vision and demands as young people. It provides us with a forum to promote the demands of our generation and to better define specific policies and changes we seek on all levels while helping us to broaden unity within the youth movement. Inherent in all of these demands is equality and democracy, as we believe these rights to be inalienable to all youth regardless of race, nationality, citizenship status, disability, religion, sexuality, and/or gender expression.

We strongly believe that revamping the simple idea of a Youth Bill of Rights will aid YCL clubs in building relationships with youth struggling around a wide variety of issues, allow young people who can and cannot vote to participate in the elections by highlighting a platform for ALL youth, and serve as a tool to get more youth and students invested in a longer term vision. The Youth Bill of Rights is a powerful tool that can be localized and used to legitimize community, school and workplace demands, and we hope that in addition to providing some glue for the youth movement it will also bring more youth to a place where they are interested in exploring our vision—a vision for socialism.

The second component of our Action plan consists of our 3 Areas of Struggle—Peace, Education, and Jobs. These Areas of Struggle indicate the fields of work we believe most immediately and drastically affect the lives of youth. In passing our Action Plan, we re-confirmed our commitment to building local peace coalitions, representative of the broadest sections of youth possible, as well as continuing to bring more youth organizations to the table of the National Youth and Student Peace Coalition.

We re-invested in the drive to fund and improve public education from nursery to university through focused legislative action, school centered coalition building, and a focus on local principals and administrators. We identified a need to strengthen the identity and organization of young workers in the United States, and outlined a strategy to better engage and re-vitalize young people with union and non-union jobs through focused club building, tailored programs, and facilitating new connections between local labor organizations and young workers.

These areas also demonstrate where we as an organization have the most capacity to build unity within and strengthen the youth movement. In choosing these three areas, we have not abandoned other demands and guiding principles, many of which are noted in the Youth Bill of Rights. Rather, we maintain that the attainment of these goals will allow us to contribute great advances in the struggle to defeat the ultra right.

Our Action Plan closes with some brief suggestions of how we will use the document and the next four years to build the Young Communist League organizationally. As I noted at the end of the convention, it is time for a lot less margin, and a little more mass. It’s time for the YCL to grow, to increase our relevance locally and nationally, to be more effective in building unity and pushing youth demands. We cannot successfully fulfill our role in the struggle to defeat the ultra-right unless we are consistent in our growth in this next period.

In adopting our Action Plan, our membership lived up to their constitutionally outlined role, providing a guide for us to carry out the work of the YCL and truly acting as the highest decision-making body of our organization.

You will note that our Action Plan is still in draft form, awaiting final approval of late amendments by the National Council in early October. Afterwards, it will continue to be a working document—adapting to changing situations in the political arena.

The drafting and adoption of our Action Plan has been an incredible achievement for the Young Communist League, representing the first time in a long time that we as an entire organization have outlined clear goals and strategy for the period in between conventions. Members from around the country participated in pre-convention discussion through conference calls, web-based dialogue and club discussions. Debate on the plenary floor was lively, with many perspectives and viewpoints represented, demonstrating a heightened political awareness and investment in our organization. We hope to continue building on this to strengthen our organizational cadre, and better participate in a wider variety of movement discussions.

With that said, I’d like now to touch on some of the significant political discussions and outcomes from the plenary floor. During floor discussion, some delegates suggested we add the environment as a fourth major Area of Struggle of our Action Plan. Ultimately, the convention voted this down, preferring instead to establish a workgroup to better determine how we as an organization can improve our capacity and understanding of the struggle to maintain our planet’s environment as well as our ability to survive in it, both on a global level and in our own communities. However, this was not a move to table and/or bury the suggestion. The call rang out loud and clear and the convention answered, duly noting the issues raised concerning the environment are indeed of legitimate and immediate concern to our generation both now and in our futures.

The increased urgency of addressing environmental issues became evident to us before our convention when reading Sam Webb’s “Reflections on Socialism” where he notes, “Our planet cannot indefinitely absorb the impact of profit-driven, growth-without-limits capitalism.” Our task as communists struggling within the youth movement is to expand the conversation to the communities of historically underrepresented young people. This shift that shows environmentalism can no longer be the issue of well-to-do white environmentalists was also apparent at the recent Take Back America Conference where progressive democrats highlighted the Apollo Alliance, a collection of environmental and labor groups focused on establishing energy independence, new technology, alternative fuels, and the “green collar” jobs required to create and maintain them.

We have to draw the connections of environmental devastation and capitalism—highlighting which communities experience the most environmental devastation be it a toxic waste dump or a hurricane. And we have to strengthen the issue from one of charitably protecting our sensitive planet, to one of human health and survival. The People’s Weekly World reported on Idaho residents suffering from health problems due to nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. Last weekend in New York, workers responsible for cleaning up the wrecked aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center re-visited Ground Zero in demand of healthcare subsidies for diseases and symptoms suffered from the unsafe environment there. The connections between environmental stability and our struggles for healthcare, fair working conditions, and livable communities are becoming more and more obvious, and we must develop a plan to unite more people around them.

On the convention floor, our comrades reminded us that ultimately, another world is possible, but will it be environmentally friendly enough for us to live in it? As David Shariatmadari points out in “The Hard Green Revolution”, “We tend to take it for granted that we are more powerful than nature.” We can continue to devastate the planet under capitalism, but in the end Mother Earth will be just fine. It’s the human race that we have to be worried about! This realization brings even more power to our slogan “Socialism is necessary.”

But again, we did not add the environment to our Action Plan at this convention. We chose instead to consciously and strategically build our capacity around the issue, determining the best ways to relate and build the youth environmental and environmental justice struggles in relation to our restless push towards socialism. Being slow and steady in our approach, we hope to be in a better place to tackle environmental issues by our next convention, and better incorporate it as an integral component of our current goals and demands for peace, education and jobs.

The convention also considered three proposed resolutions. The floor vibrantly passed a Resolution on the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, calling on all YCL members to fight to defeat the ultra-right in Congress during the 2006 Elections and forcing candidates to work towards a real Gulf Coast reconstruction plan. It passed a Resolution on Peace, renewing our commitment to end the unjust occupation of Iraq, and bring all the troops home—ensuring that soldiers are cared for when they return—and re-igniting the call for Books not Bombs!

The convention referred a proposal supporting immigrant rights to the incoming National Council, applauding its intentions while wanting to strengthen its substance. The struggle for immigrant rights is integral to all components of our work and, more specifically, of the three Areas of Struggle we outline in our Action Plan.

Until immigrant communities no longer live in constant fear of deportation and/or detainment for simply existing in the United States, there can be no peace.

Until immigrant youth can afford and attend schools and universities without jumping through impossible loops and crannies, there can be no quality education.

And until immigrant workers can earn a fair wage, benefits to healthcare and social programs, and work under safe conditions, no one will be able to fairly benefit from the fruits of his or her own labor.

The words of Gus Hall’s “Fighting Racism” still ring true in our globalized economy. Of institutionalized racist hiring, firing, and compensation practices he noted “It is the corporations that have made profits from these discriminatory practices. The corporations must be made to pay for correcting the situation.” Equality is still today a class issue!

As young communists struggling with and within the “anti-globalization” movements, we have to remind our allies and potential allies of the implications of global trade agreements on immigration.

Legislatively, we must not allow Congress to support corporations in their super-exploitation of immigrant workers by allowing them to live and work at standards far below other American residents while constantly being criminalized and threatened as “illegal”. During the 2006 Elections, YCLers will aid immigrant youth in forcing the issue—reminding candidates that all workers, immigrant and non-immigrant, young and old deserve dignity, respect, and the right to fair and livable wages. Our ancestors overturned the “three-fifths clause” long ago, and despite the ultra-right’s attempts to take away the gains of all of those that came before us we won’t go back!

In referring this resolution to the National Council, the convention demonstrated a level of political sophistication not always apparent in a youth organization. YCL members recognized that it is not enough to simply pass a weak resolution just to say we support immigrant rights. In order to be helpful and effective in furthering the struggle for immigrant communities in the US, and in particular immigrant youth, we must take our time and be explicitly clear about how we intend to do that. By the end of the year, I hope to present you with a thorough and substantive resolution on the YCL’s support for the struggles of immigrant workers and immigrant youth in the United States.

The first meeting of the incoming National Council, the meeting that elected the new Coordinating Committee and National Coordinator, was also surprisingly sophisticated in tone. The new leadership was already consciously looking ahead while seeking to evaluate our past in hopes of repeating positive progression and avoiding mistakes. The Council voted to establish a small working group to study the political and logistical occurrences and outcomes of our participation in the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students this past August in Venezuela. Indeed, there were many significant and valuable discussions that occurred around such issues as how we identified with the American flag to how we represented our country and our socialist values—indicative of the conflicted position American youth experience of representing and claiming this country as our own while recognizing how we simultaneously benefit and suffer from its imperialist aggression. This workgroup will be convened shortly in hopes of submitting a final reportback to the National Council by the fall so we might build on our experiences in the future.

Much else was debated on the convention floor, in workshops, and during non-programmed time between YCLers from around the country. As if seeing family we haven’t seen in years, our young comrades jovially discussed our approach to socialism in the United States in a true character of good will and optimism. But I’ve highlighted here what we have determined to be some of the more significant political outcomes of that weekend.

This leads us to our next steps. After hearing about such a successful and energetic convention, you must be wondering what’s next for the Young Communist League, for indeed it is not just our generation that is at a crossroads, but our organization that has come to a fork. This is the first challenge for our new leadership. Our new coordinating committee and our staff will meet in less than a month to flush out goals for growth, and to begin brainstorming the implementation of our Action Plan for our National Council to review and discuss. We have much to do in building for 2007.

And yet 2006 is hardly over! Just around the corner from August 5-13, the YCL Education and Literature Committee has joined with the Communist Party Education Commission to host a National School here in New York. YCL club leaders, National Council members and other developing cadre will come to town to study and learn how to better practice our Marxist science. This school further indicates our desire to not only recruit youth experienced in mass struggle and/or who are interested in Marxism, but to train and consolidate our membership and our leaders in our ideology, values and vision. Indeed, this is what makes us unique and absolutely necessary within the broader youth movement.

I must take a moment to note that the most popular series of workshops at our convention were in fact the ideological workshops. Although YCL delegates and guests were interested in hearing about various issues occurring in the mass struggle such as the fight for education or against military recruiters in schools, they knew they could hear many of those presenters again somewhere else. And even though our members were invested in gaining the skills required to successfully carry out our goals and demands, there was a sense that many of these lessons and models could be acquired elsewhere also. This is not to diminish the importance of these workshops, as we will continue doing them in conventions to come. But it highlights the niche we fill within youth struggling through the problems of global capitalism on a local level.

I joined the Young Communist League seven years ago in 1999. I had not studied Marx or participated in what one might consider “left” politics. But I’d struggled with other youth and students about issues I cared about, issues that affected me directly like tuition, police harassment, and debt. I was a good North Carolina democrat—an enemy of Jesse Helms and a leader in our local club.

But something was missing.

I was yearning for something I couldn’t find within the Young Democrats despite my persistent attempts to try. I was missing something I couldn’t figure out alone through local issue organizing. Despite the warm support received from my Presbyterian upbringing, my church did not provide the answers to why all these problems I faced and others faced persisted, at least not scientifically!

I felt myself stray.

Without even knowing it, I was searching for an ideology to back up my anger, my fear, my disappointment… and yet an ideology that supported my optimism, my idealism, my hope for a better world… and not only supported it but an ideology that proved it! In March of 1999, at a legislative conference of the United States Student Association, I met Seth, Treston, Megan and others… who identified that not only was I justified in my efforts, but that there was an ideology that scientifically proved why I was doing the work I did, and why it was important. Needless to say, it took less than a year more and 2 Black Radical Congress meetings with Jarvis, Joe and Debbie for me to take the next step in joining the Communist Party.

Young people are looking for a long-term vision. We want to know why things are happening, how they are happening, why many remain blind to it, and what can really be done to make things better. On a base level, that is what youth are looking for… proof that they aren’t fighting in vein. And that is why every ideological workshop at our convention required extra chairs with youth standing in from the hallway to better understand our approach to fighting racism and sexism, to discuss why class isn’t just another “ism”, to better articulate our world view, and to get the tools needed to defend our position on voting and participating in elections. This is the void many came in search of filling, and this is why youth will continue to join the Young Communist League.

…This, and of course because we’re young, hip, and have found new ways to make socialism really sexy again!

But in continuing, the Young Communist League will work to build on this niche, doing more to open our ideology up to more youth and students through consistent local and national schools, timely statements and brochures, and shorter yet substantive study guides that can be implemented at the beginning of a club meeting. We must create more entry points to our organization, and we must create them based on our strengths. In building on our education and ideological work, the Young Communist League is privileged to have a talented Education Coordinator in Adam Tenney.

Unable to wait until after the school is our plan for the 2006 Elections. Although we are taking a different approach from 2004, focusing on local elections instead of sending our members to participate in hot races, we feel that our participation in the process will be just as powerful. We have outlined a plan that allows YCLers to use the Action Plan as a tool to force candidates to address key issues in the Youth Bill of Rights, not the least of which are peace, jobs and education. We are working with our members, allies and of course with the Party’s Political Action Commission to identify and focus on specific locations for elections participation.

Whether it’s as large as a district or ward with thousands of residents in St Louis or a 20-tenant apartment complex in Tucson, we are encouraging all of our members to build a concrete list of youth, and turn them out on Election Day. These are youth we can outreach to in broadening local peace coalitions, in building workplace clubs, in fighting for funding for our schools. These are youth that can eventually join the YCL. The 2006 Elections are not just another forum for us to do our part in beating back the ultra-right. We must see them as another entry point, a series of wide-open doors for more youth to join our organization. Only through increasing our visibility on the ground will we command legitimacy at the national level. To prepare our members for this important and tedious drive, we are honored to have an incredibly able organizer in Sheltreese McCoy.

We are sorry to lose Docia Buffington from our national staff at the end of the summer, where she plays the role of membership coordinator. But we are more than excited to have elected her to our coordinating committee where she will continue to assist and guide the organization in her new role as a student in Chicago.

In gearing up to implement our Action Plan, I would be doing the organization a great dishonor not to highlight the work we are doing to enhance and circulate our public face, our magazine, Dynamic. Not only has Santi Suthinithet, our magazine’s editor, streamlined the process for producing and distributing it, but together with the Dynamic Committee and the staff he is working to develop a concrete strategy for incorporating Dynamic as an integral tool-kit in the day-to-day work of our clubs. Again, we are working to increase the number of entry points to the Young Communist League, widening the doors for new membership and leadership development.

For us, the word of the day is ‘planning’. Our immediate past leadership and national coordinator, Jessie Marshall, did a great deal to develop systems of accountability to help us better plan and implement YCL campaigns and programs. Indicative of this is the success of our 2004 elections project, the success of our US delegation to the World Festival of Youth and Students—the fifth largest and absolute youngest delegation in Venezuela, and the success of our 8th National Convention. Our convention paid for itself because of planning, and we intend to build on this and do more of it for our future efforts.

Our organization is at a crossroads.

If we do nothing else in this next period, we must build our base of members. One thing we could have emphasized more at the convention was the centrality of clubs and building club structures within the Young Communist League. Don’t get me wrong. We did not completely overlook membership growth and development, evident by our club-builder workshops and trainings on recruitment. But we could have done more to emphasize the political significance of the club and of building our organization from the ground up, focusing locally and on specific areas of growth.

Instead of building broad citywide clubs as a starting point, we hope to focus more on schools, neighborhoods and apartment buildings, and small workplaces. If the best way to bring together a group of Marxist youth in high school is through fighting for a publicly funded neighborhood baseball team, so be it! If the best way to bring together invested young artists is through a monthly open mic group, so be it! If young people have to build study groups in order to build a critical mass before engaging in broader struggles, so be it! This is not to say we will neglect our existing citywide clubs in any way. Rather, we will work with them and potential clubs to engage in focused growth and focused actions of all sorts in order to open up more entry points to the Young Communist League. We will provide our members with the tools they need to be confident and invested in building the organization.

All of us, Party districts included, must take it up as a political priority to unapologetically build the Young Communist League with the same drive we use to raise money and the same determination required to preserve and maintain the struggle for socialism! The way I see it, there are two types of youth in the United States today; those that are members of the Young Communist League, and those that will get asked to join in the next four years.

This presents us with a lot of one-on-one conversations, comrades, and we are going to need your help. I would not be here if it were not for the nurturing mentorship and patience from many of you here in this room in the labor commission, the women’s equality commission, through my local CP club, and others. And yet there are so many YCL members and potential members in need of your guidance and experience, not just in organizing, but also in simple conversation. We are so hard on ourselves, often being our toughest critics, and what many of our young comrades need is someone to allow them to mess up, to say the wrong things and not be ostracized for it. We need you to be this ear for YCLers in your hometown. Building our organization numerically, as well as strengthening our confidence in Marxist ideology is the only way we can remain relevant and visible enough to build unity within the movements we engage in. Imagine had the YCL not been visible within the United States Student Association in March of 1999, or imagine if the Communist Party had not been vocal within the Black Radical Congress. Youth must see us to know we exist, and to know they have a political home here. And YCL growth can only serve to strengthen the Communist Party.

Both of our organizations are at a crossroads.

The Young Communist League recognizes our position in the broad struggle to defeat the ultra right and to eventually win socialism. We know our elder comrades, though always vibrant and ever present, must be exhausted. And you have right to be. After living through the gains of the 1960s, you were then forced to live through the backlash of Reagan, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its aftermath, the war of Bush Senior, and now the current Bush Administration and the ultra right that controls it. There must have been times when you felt the great burden of holding the united front together was going to break you, like a sweater that’s been stretched real thin.

We within the YCL are grateful for you, and we aggressively step up to the challenge—bringing new fabric, a sewing machine, and some vibrantly designed patches to stand beside you in our on-going fight!

And note I said beside you. Don’t go anywhere! Forget passing the torch. Youth as a whole must reignite the fire in the belly of the broad people’s struggle, and our convention provided the mandate for the YCL to be the match!

Young Communist League