Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 926	5 December 2008

2008 Subscription Drive

WV Welcomes New Readers

Congratulations to participants in the 2008 Workers Vanguard subscription drive! The Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs conducted an intensive campaign this fall to widen the readership of our biweekly Marxist press. We exceeded our quota, selling a total of 2,926 points, representing 1,302 subscriptions to WV, 85 to Espartaco (published by the International Communist League’s Mexican section), and 71 to the press of other ICL sections. Vancouver comrades of the Trotskyist League of Canada assisted SL/U.S. comrades on regional trips in the Pacific Northwest. Special congratulations go to comrade Laura in the Bay Area for selling the most subscriptions (136.5 points).

Our annual subscription drive is crucial to maintaining our readership and reaching out to regions where we do not have branches. Our press is our central weapon for raising consciousness of the need for a working-class vanguard party to lead the proletariat and the oppressed in the struggle for socialist revolution to overthrow the capitalist order and establish working-class rule. This year, discussions centered on our principled opposition to giving any electoral support to representatives of the capitalist class enemy—Democrat, Republican, Green or “independent”—and our struggle to forge a workers party.

In contrast, the reformist left, reflecting as always prevailing liberal bourgeois public opinion, worked hard to steer youth repelled by imperialist war, racism and exploitation to the doorstep of the Democratic Party. As a perfect example, at UC Berkeley the International Socialist Organization (ISO) had a sign inviting students to watch Obama’s acceptance speech with “socialists,” and that issue of their paper, Socialist Worker (7 November), had red, white and blue as its front-page colors. In combat against such opponents, the SYCs held “Meet the Marxists” events on campuses to introduce students to our revolutionary Marxist program, especially highlighting the fight against black oppression and the struggle to free class-war prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.

We also worked to maintain our readership among important concentrations of workers, including transit workers in New York and Chicago as well as port workers on both coasts, from the Port of Oakland to Charleston, South Carolina. Trips to Seattle and Portland included selling subs to ILWU longshoremen, and the teams also hit the picket lines of Boeing aircraft workers who had been on strike for nearly a month. Discussions with picketers at a Boeing site in Seattle centered mainly on our opposition to protectionism, anti-immigrant racism and China-bashing.

The widespread support for Obama was an obstacle, especially at the outset. “While this was more ‘lesser evilism’ than any kind of fevered Obamamania, the elections were nonetheless seen as the expression of political involvement and ‘change’ for many,” the Bay Area subscription drive report summarized. But the international capitalist financial meltdown also led to “heightened interest in a Marxist newspaper or at least an interest in some kind of alternative” or even just an explanation from Marxists for capitalist economic crises and the current financial chaos. A comrade commented about UC Santa Cruz students: “A number of students were interested in the food crisis article [“Behind the Hunger Crisis: Capitalist Profits—Imperialism Starves World’s Poor,” WV No. 919, 29 August and WV No. 920, 12 September], imperialism and the workings of production for profit.” One of the best one-liners came from comrade Reuben, who sold WV at a radical-liberal public meeting in Berkeley, declaring, “Capitalism is on its deathbed, why would you want to vote for a guy who wants to change the sheets?”

Comrades from the Bay Area and L.A. made a successful regional trip to Oregon (163 points) covering the University of Oregon in Eugene, Lewis & Clark, Portland State and Reed College. The report on the trip noted that the capitalist economic crisis sparked greater curiosity about Marxism: “We were selling WV No. 921 [headlined “Wall Street Nightmare Stalks Working People”] which allowed us to point out the inherent aspects of capitalism—driven by irrationality, the deep-seated oppression of black people, etc.” But another comrade underlined the huge gulf between our authentic Marxist program and popular consciousness: “A number of students expressed sympathy with Marxism.... However what they understood by ‘socialism’ was vague, ranging from some sort of social democracy to thinking Sweden was socialist to support for Obama. Our placard on Obama wanting to be Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism attracted a lot of attention, both positive and negative.”

Our placard proclaiming “Free Abortion on Demand!” drew a lot of attention on various campuses. Underlining that this supposedly available legal right is increasingly unavailable to women, especially working-class and poor women, young women approached our campus tables in several localities asking hopefully if we were providing the service!

A comrade reported on one Oregon campus where our Chinese-language slogans against the counterrevolutionary “Free Tibet” movement brought students from China to our literature table: “They agreed that the Dalai Lama was a reactionary figure and commented how many Americans didn’t understand that Tibet was part of China and used to be a slave society.” WV’s article on the Sichuan earthquake (WV No. 917, 4 July) was particularly useful in pointing out the contradictions of the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy, as well as helping to combat the idea that the Chinese bureaucratically deformed workers state is capitalist. All locals held forums on China in the lead-up to or during the subscription drive (see: “Democrats Spearhead Anti-China Crusade—Down With Imperialist and Dalai Lama Provocations! Defend the Gains of the 1949 Chinese Revolution! For Workers Political Revolution!” WV No. 923, 24 October).

The Chicago subscription drive report underscored that, of the 557 points sold, 167 were from renewals, reflecting a core of loyal readers. “Most people we sold subs to were voting for Obama, but most were not so much enthusiastic about Obama as they wanted ‘Anybody but Bush/McCain’.” Comrades also met students who argued that Obama couldn’t say what he “really” thought if he wanted to get elected: “There was a lot of pressure for the population to vote and ‘participate in the system’,” much of it coming from the union bureaucracy. The Minneapolis trip intersected the Labor Day protest of the Republican National Convention. Chicago comrades went to a Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) national conference at DePaul University. Barred from entering the event, our comrades took to the soapbox to scandalize the ISO, CAN’s leading lights, for the exclusion, exposing the ISO’s fear of defending their reformist politics in open debate. Amusingly, ISO supporters outside argued with us that “revolutionary politics is outside the context of what this conference is about.” Yes, indeed.

New York City comrades and supporters sold 953 points. On elite campuses such as Columbia and New York University, subscription sales were difficult, but the regional trip to Western Massachusetts sold 103 points. On a trip to Hartford, Connecticut, comrades met youth who had seen us intervene at a Toronto public conference sponsored by Socialist Action last May 22-25, as well as at an antiwar conference in Cleveland on June 28-29. To these activists we distributed our offprint, “ICL’s Trotskyism vs. Socialist Action’s Reformism” (see WV No. 917, 4 July). On many campuses we encountered students who had some experience with other left groups; often, such youth were already dissatisfied with the tepid reformist politics of these outfits.

New York’s regional trip to North Carolina yielded 118.5 points. A comrade noted that here, too, the Obama campaign proved “a litmus test for potential subscribers.” In addition to the campus work by the North Carolina team, we also sold to the Moncure strikers in the area (see “Victory to the Moncure Plywood Workers Strike!” WV No. 921, 26 September).

The Los Angeles Local sold a total of 426.5 points. In addition to participating in trips to Oregon/Washington and Colorado, the L.A. Local undertook regional trips to Arizona, Texas, UC Santa Barbara and San Diego. Comrades also sold at the Labor Day union gathering in Wilmington, an L.A. suburb, where three subscriptions were sold to longshoremen. A successful “Meet the Marxists” event at UCLA helped increase our subscription base there.

WV welcomes its new readers and those who renewed their subscriptions. We encourage you to let us know what you think of our press and to get involved in our activities. Study Marxist theory and class-struggle history at our public class series or through our literature. We are proud of our history and programmatic fidelity and offer for sale bound volumes of WV as well as other publications of our party. We strive to make our paper forthright, polemical and hard-hitting, basing ourselves on the work of our revolutionary Marxist forebears.