Good evening comrades!
We had an extremely productive meeting this weekend due in part to the use of our new general meeting rules of order. David and I made a pamphlet that details how the general meetings might work from here on out, and I have included that pamphlet as a PDF attachment to the email version of this message in case you want to print yourself a copy.
Mutual Aid met up before the general meeting to begin the cleanup of the riverwalk. It went off without much incident apart from a truck crashing into the walkway at one point, running over some of our trash bags. A few of the folks who hang out there and inquired about our work there seemed to be excited about it. It should be noted that if anyone has any grabbers, they would be very helpful. We made good progress and are looking to send staggered groups down there to continue to maintain it. Mutual Aid’s next meeting time will be hashed out on the Discord, and will occur in our Meeting Room channel.
Theory and Education examined passages from the Communist Manifesto. We will be reading the Manifesto more closely in the future as well so that we can know it as well as possible before we try to teach it. For this week’s meeting, we will be reading Wage Labour and Capital. The reading is available on both our Discord server and our website. Please have it read by this Thursday(tomorrow) at 8PM so that we may discuss it at the Theory and Ed meeting on the Discord Meeting Room channel. Don’t worry, it’s short! We will also have to decide what our next reading will be and will be making more pamphlets to summarize our readings and make them accessible for mass consumption.
Due to the recent Patriot Front sightings, and the increasing presence of armed right-wing paramilitary groups, we passed a proposal to gather intelligence on potential ideological adversaries on a new Discord channel, #intelligence. It’s up now, so please post anything you see that is unsettling. We can use what info we gather here to aid ourselves and other similar groups.
We also passed proposals to work with Philly Socialists and Bergen County Socialists. We all agreed that we could learn a lot from the former group about organizing workplaces and tenants, strategies for mutual aid, and resources for printing materials for actions. Our outreach officer Arly has a paid version of Zoom so we could do it over that. We can then open the floor to questions from other members.
We agreed that working with Bergen County Socialists would be more of a mutual collaboration sort of thing. This is a much newer organization that claims lineage from the Silk City Socialists. David and I will schedule a call with them.
Next meeting we are going to be taking a look at other resistance movements happening globally right now – this was an idea suggested by Kate and David then suggested that these presentations take the format of our proposal time. The six presentations are as follows:
- David will present on Belarus
- Nick will present on the Yellow Vests
- Pat will present on the Zapatistas
- Arly will present on Hong Kong
- I(Nishad) will present on Bolivia.
- Lance will present on Rojava at a later meeting – he has to be elsewhere this coming Sunday but will be able to present at the general meeting after our BBQ.
Additionally we will be discussing alternative meeting places, how we will continue to meet as it gets colder out and meeting outside is not always possible, etc, as well as vote on formally adopting the rules of order, and finalizing the details for our BBQ(which will fittingly be the Sunday before Labor Day)! Arly has already assembled this handy little spreadsheet for it!
In solidarity,
Nishad
General Secretary
Central Jersey Socialists 