Minutes:
Communist Students
Executive meeting, 02/12/07, Central London
Exec members
present: Tina Becker, Dave Isaacson, Ben
Lewis, Laurie McCauley.
Apologies: James Turley, Jamie Tedford
Observers: Andrew
Crichton, Nick Jones, Ted North, Dan
Read, Chris Santos,
Sachin Sharma, Chris Strafford.
Chair and minutes: Dave
Isaacson
1)NUS
Democracy.
Comrades reported on the
results of the NUS
Extraordinary conference and discussed the prospects for the campaign.
-Nick and Tina agreed to keep up to speed with developments.
-Nick to report for the
CS blog.
-Dave to coordinate attempts to get comrades delegated
to go to NUS conference.
2)HOPI.
This was discussed
more fully at other points over
the weekend. Chris to re-write
model union motion to suit student unions.
3)CS
Conference.
To be held in Manchester
on 16/02/08.
-Chris to check out
venues.
-Chris, Sachin and Dave
to start to organise logistics
and prepare an agenda.
-Suggested topics for
discussion included: elections,
reports, Iran/HOPI, fascism, Hal Draper, and Palestine.
-Possibly have public
HOPI event in evening.
-Ask James to draft a
discussion document on debates in CS.
4)Building
CS.
-Membership cards now
available. All comrades must get
signed up/signing others up and send all monies and
membership details in to
Ben.
-Decided to establish a
'CS members' yahoo group
(who?).
-Laurie and Santos to
investigate possibilites of some
kind of discussion forum.
5)Finance
and Fundraising.
-Encourage comrades to
set up standing orders when bank
account is ready.
-Santos to investigate
production of t-shirts for sale.
6)Education.
Both London and Sheffield branches have
begun discussing Hal Draper at
meetings.
James has written an introduction to our study of Hal Draper which we must publish.
-To ask James to give a
short talk on our study of
Draper at CS conference.
-Dave
to draw up a reading list and study questions on the nature of higer education in
contemporary capitalst society
with a view to us developing our
understanding in this area and producing some intelligent writing on it.
7)CS4
and CS5.
Laurie gave a critical
assessment of CS4 arguing that
overall it was our best issue yet. There was a discussion on the front page headline
with some comrades thinking it
could have been better, others
felt it was just right.
We commissioned a number
of articles:
-NUS past, present and future
(Laurie)
-'Zizek!' film review (James)
-'Persepolis' film review (Dan)
-USSR (Dave);
-South Africa interview
(Ted)
-France (Chris)
-Iran (Tehran student)
-HOPI/STW day of action (Tina);
-'Comrades' book review
(Andrew)
-human nature (Ted).
Comrades argued that we
need to be disciplined in our
writing and try to keep articles for CS short.
*The
deadline for submissions for CS5 is January 15 2008*
We aim to produce
the papers for February 1 2008 in time to use to build for student protests
on Feb 15th.
8)ENS
proposals for joint left slate at NUS conference.
-Ask James to draft a
response on this.
9)SYN
conference.
We discussed Owen Jones'
recent assessment of SYN's
results and prospects.
-Laurie to write on our take of
it all for the CS blog.
-We agreed to attend the SYN conference again in the new year and to submit motions.