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Workers Vanguard Subscription Drive New Readers for Revolutionary Press The Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs concluded our annual subscription drive on October 9. This year’s campaign was modestly successful, exceeding our quota with 2,325.5 points. The total represented 1,035 subscriptions to Workers Vanguard, 81 to Espartaco (newspaper of the International Communist League’s Mexican section) and 95 to the press of ICL sections in other countries. Unlike past years, the quota did not include an “at large” category, which had mainly consisted of WV subs sold by our comrades in Canada during their sub drive. Comrades reported that widening social inequality, the NSA spying revelations and recent racist atrocities were prominent factors in motivating new subscribers to our revolutionary Marxist press. Comrades from the four SL/U.S. locals visited campuses and worksites far beyond their home turf, with some working alongside the Trotskyist League of Canada in Montreal. Helping kick off the sub drive, a sizable team of comrades traveled to Washington, D.C., for the August rally marking the 50th anniversary of the “March on Washington.” Anger over George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the racist killing of Trayvon Martin was still running hot, swelling the attendance. But the rally was expressly designed by Al Sharpton and other Democratic Party liberals to appeal to the Obama administration and its top cop Eric Holder for redress. Our banner calling, “Break with the Democrats! For a Workers Party!” had a polarizing effect, outraging some but attracting others to our literature offering a program for black liberation through socialist revolution. As we have done for many years, we visited Mid-Atlantic, Southern, Gulf and West Coast ports, where the ILA and ILWU longshore unions are increasingly under siege from the shipping companies and terminal operators. Our Chicago local was encouraged by its results in Michigan. In addition to sales at the large state universities in Lansing and Ann Arbor, comrades did well in Detroit, a city that the auto barons and bankers have turned into a monument to capitalist decay. At Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, where pensions, union protections and wages have all been on the chopping block, one worker held up our newspaper and announced: “I’m not a communist, but there’s a lot of truth in this! Communists are pro-union all the way, and that’s good enough for me!” Locals reported that the SYC’s “Meet the Marxists” presentations, a regular feature of our sub drives, sparked lively debate on everything from the shell game of capitalist electoral politics to petty-bourgeois environmentalism. Many student subscribers, overburdened with debt and facing scarce job prospects, said that socialism was attractive because to them it meant affordable education and health care. In New York City, the SYC joined protests against the return of the U.S. military’s ROTC program to City College after 40 years, as well as against the City University’s appointment of war criminal David Petraeus as a visiting professor. In Durham, North Carolina, a Spartacist speaker addressing a protest against the threatened U.S. imperialist bombing of Syria pointed out that the reformist Workers World Party and other self-described socialists had hailed Obama’s 2008 election and that the Democrats are the capitalists’ preferred party of war. As Workers World supporters lamely insisted that Obama’s ascension to Commander-in-Chief was a victory against racism and imperialism, several protesters were intrigued by our polemics and subscribed to WV. WV is known for tackling the hard issues, such as defending China and North Korea’s nuclear weapons capacity as a deterrent to imperialist attack. One particularly controversial article featured in the sub drive was “State-Branded ‘Sex Offenders’: Pariahs for Life” (WV No. 1030, 20 September). Our Marxist press promotes an international perspective grounded in the history of the workers movement. The current issue of our theoretical journal Spartacist, which is included with all WV subscriptions, focuses on upholding the lessons of the Bolshevik-led October Revolution of 1917 against the attacks of social-democratic renegades from Marxism. While class and social struggle continue to be at a low ebb in the U.S., the very workings of the capitalist profit system generate enormous discontent. Swimming against the stream of bourgeois ideology is necessary to win those who want to fight against the depravities of capitalist imperialism to a revolutionary program. We welcome our new and returning readers. And we congratulate comrade Alan in the Bay Area for winning the national sub drive.
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