Good afternoon comrades,
We had another productive meeting this past Sunday! We were able to establish a few soft requirements for the early stages of the membership process in our constitution. Through popular vote, we were able to establish the following as our requirements for membership:
- An active member is a member of CJS who is granted voting privileges. Votes can be given for yes/no/abstain. Abstention does not count toward final vote counts in establishing either simple or qualified majority.
- Active membership is voted upon at meetings after an observing member meets the following criteria:
- 50% meeting attendance, or at least once a month(whichever is less).
- is a member of at least one committee or commission.
Additionally, it is important for prospective active members to strive to be ideologically consistent and be vouched for by an existing active member. The ideological consistency bit is something that will ultimately become the work of our Committee of Theory and Education, one of the five Committees that we voted upon.
The five core committees that we voted upon as part of the body that makes up our organization are as follows:
- Central Committee(does the administrative work of handling emails, social media and group paperwork)
- Labor Relations(the primary contact for unionizing workplaces)
- Theory and Education(does the work of contextualizing Marxist ideology for popular consumption – both to spread awareness of radical leftist politics and to guide our work as a group)
- Mutual Aid(does the work of collectivizing our talents and resources to make change in the society we live in so that it may one day look like the society we want to live in)
- Outreach(pushes initiatives to recruit new members)
We established that there will be a few commissions that are established temporarily to accomplish a goal that is time sensitive and will not act as a permanent structure within the body of the group. An example of this would be to set up a commission to aid in the fight for the Lincoln Annex School.
Finally, we decided to have weekly meetings until we are able to finish the drafting process of our constitution. Therefore, our next meeting is this upcoming Sunday, July 19th. We will be discussing the roles of each committee with a primary focus on the Central Committee, and we will be voting on leadership and other roles for the committees as well.
Please write down any ideas you might have and bring them to the meeting! It’s important that one writes everything down ahead of time in order to organize one’s thoughts before presenting them. We are trying to accomplish something monumental and we only have so much time to do it, so it’s important that we make the best possible use of that time.
Once again, the meeting is Sunday, July 19th at 8PM. Same place as last time. Also remember to bring items for the Food Pantry!
Red salute,Nishad.
Central Jersey Socialists 