It's hard to fight alone...
LET'S GET ORGANIZED!

That was the motto of the first national conference of REVOLUTION Germany. Around 20 activists from Berlin, near Berlin (Bernau, Falkensee) and not near Berlin (Stuttgart, Osnabrück, Münster) met over two days. With four branches nationwide, our communist youth organization is bigger than ever. The goal of the conference was to bring all the activists together to reflect on the work of the last year and develop perspectives for the coming one.

REVOLUTION is built up democratically: the activists decide on the politics of the organization by a simple majority. A small but growing youth organization faces great tasks: europe-wide mobilizations against social cuts, building up united fronts against the nazis, campaigns against sexism, organizing youth camps, and lots more. To deal with these tasks in one way or another, we need input from all our activists.

For this reason we formed working groups on the topics war, school, nazis, social cuts and sexism. Each discussed and decided on political resolutions. These form a "how-to.manual" for our work in the next year.

In order to relax during the 11-hour session, we played "revolutionary pictionary": one comrade drew terms like "strike", "may day" or "lenin" on the wall, while all the others guessed what that was supposed to be. (The curious can find the highlights on our web site.) At the end of the first evening we watched "The Life of Brian" - a reminder not to lose onesself in discussions with tiny left groups like the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea, instead orienting to the broad masses.

the Central Command

On the second day organizational questions were discussed. The current size of the group makes it impossible to organize through an e-group and informal discussions. We needed an efficient structure!

After long discussions - beginning a month before the conference - an eight-member executive committee (Exkom) was elected, composed of comrades from all branches, a mixture of men and women of all ages (from 16 to 26). This committee has the job of carrying out the decisions of conference, i.e. organizing the publication of the paper, working out statements for the group, maintaining contact with REVO groups in other countries, and more.

Additionally, our self-description was changed from "socialist youth organization" to "communist youth organization". Even though both terms are correct - we fight for socialism as a step from capitalism to a classless, communist society - the question was how we could best present our ideas. A large majority of activists felt that the term "communist" more clearly expresses our goals and differentiates us from the many reformist "socialists"

four times bigger?!?

At the end of the conference there were workshops on revolutionary practice. A comrade from REVO UK, who had come all the way from North England to Berlin to participate in the conference, taught everyone about tactics on demos: how to de-arrest a comrade, how to prevent the cops from carrying you off during a sit-down protest and other useful tricks. Also, we painted a new banner for upcoming anti-nazi actions: "Against nazis - resistance! Class struggle instead of fatherland!"

At this first national conference there were four times more participants than at our first national meeting nine months ago. As a comrade explained in the opening speech: "With lots of different activities we've managed to make our organisation grow so fast. We can't stop now. If we keep working, it's realistic to quadruple the size of REVO again by next year."

In this spirit we call on all radical youth in the FRG to build up a revolutionary youth movement together with us. Long live the REVOLUTION!

//by Wladek from Berlin-Kreuzberg //German original in REVOLUTION #10
//more stuff in English from REVOLUTION Germany