Youth focus on solidarity

Scan page 3

Black community on trial; isolate and defeat them.

This explains why the conference is likely to be very bureaucratic.

Conference is supposedly the sovereign body of CND, but in reality the CND leadership, in particular the clique around Bruce Kent and Joan Ruddock, function without any democratic mechanism to limit their power.

For instance, last year's conference passed a very clear resolution on the need for labour movement action to stop the bomb. The response of the leadership was simply to sit on this policy, using their control over CND Council and Executive to make sure that nothing was done to implement it.

By maintaining control of Goodwin Street, the leadership can control CND.

Conference, for them, is a public relations exercise (it starts off with a Bruce Kent rally). Their aim is to keep the lid on any opposition.

Activists in CND should organise against attempts by the CND leadership to carve up the conference.

We have to make sure that three basic issues are high up on the agenda, and open to full and democratic debate.

Freeze

First, the attempts of the CND leadership to close down Labour CND and Youth CND, the most radical sections of the campaign.

Secondly, the question of the nuclear freeze. We should s apport the Greater Manchester en lergenannual conference.

cy resolution, opposing the idea of ditching unilateralism.

Finally, conference must address itself to the vital need to continue the fight for and organise labour movement action against Cruise missiles.

This means backing the resolútion from Vauxhall Labour Party:

"Conference recognises that massive support for CND's policies inside the labour movement has been mobilised in action to only a tiny degree. We believe our efforts to stop the nuclear rearmament plans of the British government and its allies will involve mass action, on a scale not yet seen, involving millions in opposition to the government's plans.

'Millions of trade union members in particular do have the power to prevent nuclear rèarmament."

The resolution goes on to detail a whole series of concrete steps to realise this aim.

So CND conference is going to be a watershed. Either the CND leadership will be checked and forced to take account of the militant activists in the campaign, or the CND leaders will further tighten their grip on the campaign.

The first result would at least provide the basis for developing and extending the fight against Cruise and all nuclear weapons. The second result would make CND increasingly distant from the real struggles going on against the Bomb.the CLASS Fighter reaffirmed its sponsorship of Socialist Organiser at its conference last weekend. Nearly a hundred youth met in South London to decide on the course for Class Fighter in the next 12 months.

Judith Bonner, re-elected as National Secretary, opened the conference. She told us how Class Fighter was centrally involved in the fight to regain Youth CND's independence, and how Class Fighter was involved. in many other campaigns and struggles.

She emphasises the importance of our rejection of traditional left sectarianism towards the women's movement, peace movement, etc. As revolutionaries we cannot abstain from these struggles. We must build them, and in doing so win people over to revolutionary politics.

The plenaries and workshops attempted to come to grips with exactly how we can build these campaigns and fight for our polities within them.

In the women's workshop, Denise Fowler argued that we should reject once and for all the crude notion that women's oppression is simply economic, and that rape, heterosexism, and sexual harassment - 'ideological' questions - are secondary and will be solved automatically once economic structures are changed.

Apart from perpetuating the false division between economic and ideological oppression, this view ignores the fact that men benefit materially from the subjection of women. If we ignore this, we will make ourselves and our politics irrelevant to the mass of women.

In the Central America workshop, led off by Paul Muddle: wards liberation movements such as the FSLN in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador.

Our orientations towards the FSLN, a ruling party, and the FMIN, a mass organisation in struggle, cannot be identical. The consensus seemed to be that the struggle for Trotskyist Jane Ashworth and Lyn Ferguson report on the Class Fighter annual conference.

leadership must be carried out within the FMLN in El Salvador - to do otherwise would be dead-end sectarianism.

In Nicaragua, the mass organisations set up the Sandinistas would be the place for this fight to take place.

But in both cases socialists need to organise, with whatever tactical arrangements, to fight for a programme going way beyond the cross-class nationalism of the Sandinistas and FMLN. Workers' power, based on workers' councils and drive for international extension of the revolution, must be our goal.

We also discussed the problems of solidarity work in Britain. Too often Central America demonstrations and pickets are "paper-sellers' jamborees' with little or no mainstream labour movement participation. We must work for a clear labour movement orientation in these solidarity campaigns.

The Ireland workshop reaffirmed our commitment to the Labour Committee on Ireland, and stated our willingness to work for issues like the banning of plastic bullets, while always pointing out the role of the British state in the six counties and fighting for "Troops Out Now' Resolutions were discussed on the NGA dispute, the government's Youth Training Scheme, and other issues.

The women's resolution stressed the importance of Greenham Common, where women are daily facing the armed might of the state.

Tony Dale from Manchester Central YS spoke about the importance of the NGA dispute with Messenger Newspapers in directly challenging the Tories' anti-union legislation.

The combativity of the NGA rank and file, the willingess to addresses the conference. fight (so far!) of the NGA leadership, and the level of support the dispute has generated, make it possible to argue for the TUC tó call a one-day general strike and to prepare for an indefinite Members of Workers Power lan anti-Socialist Organiser group in Class Fighter, who have now left) argued that we should demand an indefinite general strike now, and that to do otherwise was unprincipled. Tony Dale, in reply, pointed out that, given the defeats that the working class has suffered over the past four years, and its consequent demoralisation, a one-day general strike would Essex Road, London N1 2SY. DEDE be an enormous step forward -as a preparation for all-out general strike action, and not as an end in itself.

To demand the TUC calls an indefinite general strike immediately would be to disregard the present state of consciousness in the working class, and to make our agitation a 'blank shot'. The conference supported Tony Dale's original resolution.

Closing the conference, Judith Bonner said that we had now to put our decisions into action - to enter into the struggles of young workers, women, black youth, and the unemployed, and to convince them to fight alongside us for a mass socialist youth movement.

12 pages INSIDE YCND diary Gay YS Yooth training scandal

----- pull-quotes -----

Socialist Squaddies? osasuer