NAM Conferees Back Socialism for America

DAVENPORT, Iowa--The New American Movement (NAM) finished its conference in this industrial city yesterday, and the 450 delegates and observers returned to their home communities to "put socialism on the American agenda for the seventies."

NAM--a growing organization that began on the West coast earlier this year--is committed to balancing national coordination with local community organizing. Its goal is to become "an organization that represents all sections of the American working people" in a fight for "a completely democratic form of socialism."

The conference elected 13 delegates (seven of whom the conference voted must be women), to a National Interim Committee (NIC) to conduct national business until the NAM founding convention in June.

NAM also selected three issues as national priorities--economics, anti-corporate activity, and imperialism. The conference urged the more than 25 NAM chapters to work on at least one of the three priorities in addition to whatever other work the chapters are engaged in.

Supports Strikes

The NAM economic priority--probably the most important issue of the conference--was concerned with the response to President Nixon's new economic plan. It called for support for "all strikes which attempt to break the wage guidelines."

The majority of the persons attending the conference were ex-student radicals who are now organizing in various working class communities. Traditional radical centers such as New York. Cambridge and Berkeley, Calif., were represented at the conference along with less likely centers such as Pittsburgh, Baltimore. Md. Minneapolis, Minn., and Davenport, Iowa, itself.

Debate at the conference--although heated at times--never approached the discordant name-calling and chanting that has often characterized New Left gatherings in recent years.