International Marxist Group Archive

Magazines, bulletins and booklets of the IMG and its forerunners, 1961–1984

American Socialist Party suspends youth organisation

· The Week Vol. 2, No. 10, 21 September 1964 · p. 13 of the scan · 262 words

The scan: The Week v2 no10.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive, opens at this page)

Uncorrected machine reading. This text was read by machine (Tesseract OCR) from a scan of a stencilled typescript and has not been corrected. Expect misread words; titles in particular are often garbled where the issue printed no contents list. Quote from the scan, not from this page.
How this article was cut and titled: capitals heading; heuristic; title from the issue's contents list (match 1.00).

The Sociajist Party on Sept. 8 suspended indefinitely its affiliated youth organisation, the Young Peoples Socialist League (YPSL), because the youth group at its Labour Day convention came out against both Johnson and Goldwater. The YPSL is demanding the same right to present its viewpoint publicly as the right wing of the SP has to present its pro-Democratic Party views. At its convention, the YPSL passed a resolution declaring that it would not consider itself under the discipline of the Socialist Party as long as that party did not discipline its own members who are publicly supporting Johnson, “For example, Norman Thomas, honorary national chagzman of the SP, has been speaking around the country, advocating support of Johnson and the Democrats, end so have other SP spokesmen.

The Socialist Party claims to be "all-inclusive" and tolerant of many different tendencies having the right to present their views publicly. But its consistent practice has ‘been to bend over backwards in allowing the right wing to do and say anythinz at all but to come down hard on the left wing and to stifle and silence it, Even though the openly pro-Johnson group in the SP failed to gain a majority at the last party convention, the SP has no trouble in living with the public activities of these campaigners for the Democratic ticket. But when the YPSL merely. passes a resolution stating its opposition to the two capitalist parties (an elementary duty of socialists) the SP leadership within the week suspends them for taking a position "outside the basic framework of democratic socialism."

← U.S. notes: Rank & File conference to aid HoffaYoung Socialist announces change of format →

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