The Houston club has grown to 250 members today. Our club works mostly in two arenas, the civil rights movement and the trade union movement. We concentrate on recruiting working-class women and people of color. We ran several candidates in 2016 for the first time since the 1940s. One got 250,000 votes and another got well over 100,000. We are also running several candidates in 2020. We have had a Progressive Movie Night every month now for over three years. We get anywhere from 15 to 45 people at the movie nights.

We also have a Socialist Reading Group, which has been meeting every two weeks since 1988. Attendance has run from 6 to 34. Right now we are averaging around 15 at each study group. We have also put the study group under the control of our younger members. We have studied Lenin’s Imperialism, other classics and, currently, Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism.

We participate in picket lines and marches like the recent national Women’s March. We just had our Club Conference and elected a new seven-person executive board. It is the youngest exec I ever remember. It is also very diverse. At our yearly club conference a short time ago, two young African American guests joined the party. Our plan for work this year revolves around the struggle to defeat Trump and his allies. We hope to recruit 100 new members this year. I know it is a tall order, but we think the Bernie Sanders campaign and our criminal justice work will help us.

We work as Communists within the mass organizations, coordinating our work to add the “Communist plus” to wherever we are.  A lot of our new members are recruited from the groups we work in.

We are the only left group in Houston to have a headquarters. We can seat up to 100 people, and in the past for a Bernie Sanders event we had around 94. We have a bookstore and a lending library with many books both in English and Spanish. We have two computers, a 3D printer (we still have to figure out how it works), equipment for Zoom, CD and DVD players, and a very large screen with stereo speakers. Some of our members have small children, so we have a Young Pioneer childcare area equipped with toys and books. Unfortunately, small children like to run around and make noise, but it does give our meetings a family type environment. We try to keep our meetings to 1½ hours. We always have an educational and sometimes guest speakers. We often have candidates come to speak to us. Our last Progressive Movie Night had 26 people show up, including 5 candidates running for office.

Finally, the Houston Communist Party Club is a Marxist-Leninist club. While not all members understand what this means when they join, we do our best to help them grow ideologically through both education and mass work. I invite comrades, where ever you are, to come visit us.

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