Special Reports

Resolutions were presented to the Convention prior to our arrival at Milwaukee.

On the 225th Anniversary of the declaration of Independence, we affirm our commitment to the revolutionary ideals which ring in so much of the original.

The Internet is just a tool among many we have, like the printing press, the telephone, or the television. But because the Internet is new, it is transforming the way we work internally and with our allies and the general public. We all need to quicken the pace and make using the Internet a completely everyday experience in the Party's political life.

The struggle against the corporate domination of the media is a cornerstone of the fight to defend democracy.

After a year of price gouging and record profits by the energy monopolies, for the first time a few weeks back the wholesale rates of natural gas and electricity magically went down sharply in California.

They attribute this to everything under the sun, including milder weather.

But, this sudden change was brought about by a powerful broad people's movement, with street heat at its core, and the shift in the political balance in Washington and the nation since Senator Jeffords left the Republican Party.

Education is a basic democratic and human right. It is as basic to human life as clean air and water, food and shelter, freedom and equality.

The idea that education is a right has deep roots. The right to formal learning, once considered only for the privileged and property-owners, was expanded to the majority of people through struggle, through struggle and through still more struggle.

I begin with a warning: A specter is haunting the world - the specter of environmental destruction! And as communists, we have the responsibility to help bring together a global alliance of working class and people's organizations to exorcise this specter!

Coalitions burst forth in a new way at the end of the century, and in many ways coalition building is defining the strides of progress in the 21st century. In Seattle, when Teamsters walked with turtles against the WTO, a whole new level of coalition appeared with global potential.

Building our Party, in size, connectedness and influence; helping transform our clubs so that they are related to the mass movements and, in particular, connecting with the new labor movement must be our collective project, and we should tackle the problem of growing the Party in the course of that.

The fight against the capitalist class enemy, against the ultra-right danger which threatens even limited bourgeois democracy, requires the highest levels of all people's unity. Without higher levels of multi-racial and multi-national working class, Black, Brown, white unity, the fight to build all people's unity, will be stymied.

Our desire to elevate this work is not born out of a moral obligation alone; it is born out of necessity. For there is no struggle for bread and butter issues at home, for decent housing, for better education for better wages that will be won if we do not also struggle for peace and disarmament.

Our Party is committed to and actively working for greater political independence of the working class and all the progressive forces. We are working for the establishment of a united multiracial labor-based independent people's electoral party that could ultimately challenge and win against the dominant capitalist parties, in every state in the union. We consider it a necessary goal, on the road to Socialism.

Our goal in this brief report is to lay
bare the relationship between the fight for women's equality and the struggle
of the working class, to highlight why the ultra right targets women, and, lastly, to challenge the Party to recast its understanding of the new reality of the importance of the Woman Question in light of the significant emergence of women as members of the paid work force as well as unpaid caregivers to and caretakers of working-class families.

The Program Committee sees its work as a major contribution toward building political and ideological unity and mass fightback against the all-out assault of the extreme right wing. We project developing a Program for our times, which builds on our Programs of past periods, and projects into future periods including socialism.

The transition of leadership over the last year and a half launched a process of improving our organization and structure, adopting innovations to improve the work.

Our goal was to make proposals that would help us to be better organized, more streamlined to allow for more connection to the upsurge of the labor and people's movement, more action based, more responsive in a timely way, more results oriented, more based on our Party reality, more transparent, more democratic, but at the same time collective and responsible.