Subscription Drive Success!

ASp Welcomes New Readers

Congratulations to participants in the 2009 Australasian Spartacist subscription drive! The Spartacist League of Australia (SL) and Spartacus Youth Club (SYC) undertook an energetic campaign from late February until early April to widen the readership of our Trotskyist press. We exceeded our modest quota by almost 50 percent, achieving 254 points. The points represent subscriptions to Australasian Spartacist (ASp) and the press of other sections of the International Communist League, especially Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S. The success of our campaign is a tribute to the hard work of comrades and sympathisers.

Our annual sub drive is crucial to maintaining an ongoing readership and reaching new people with our revolutionary propaganda. The SL is a fighting Marxist propaganda group and 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. Throughout the sub drive, in Sydney and Melbourne and on regional trips to Brisbane, Wollongong and Canberra, ASp served our interventions into rallies and meetings, at university campuses and on street sales. Our struggle to break class-conscious militants from the nationalist, reformist politics of Laborism was a major question discussed with youth and workers. Now in the second year of the Rudd ALP federal government, we highlighted that from anti-immigrant and anti-union laws, to the police/military takeover of Aboriginal lands, to the military occupations in East Timor and Afghanistan, Rudd’s ALP rules for racist Australian imperialism.

We strive to make our paper forthright, polemical and hard-hitting, basing ourselves on the work of our revolutionary forebears. Once again, a number of long-time readers expressed their appreciation of our press, a vital Marxist compass in today’s reactionary climate where political consciousness has been thrown backwards. With the deepening impact of the global economic crisis, comrades found, more generally, an increased interest in our communist views, particularly among youth on campuses where a solid number of subscriptions were sold. We received numerous positive responses to our “On Marxism and Religion” article, a lively polemic against the anti-communist reformists of Socialist Alternative. And our back-page article highlighting “Defend the Tamil People!” was also welcomed by many at the large protests against the murderous anti-Tamil offensive by the Sri Lankan army.

ASp welcomes new readers and those who renewed their subscriptions. We also take this opportunity to thank those who have contributed financially towards the ongoing production of ASp. We encourage readers to contact us to discuss the content of our press and to introduce our newspapers to friends and workmates.