Subscription Drive Success!

Comrades and sympathizers of the Trotskyist League/Ligue trotskyste and Spartacus Youth Clubs recently concluded our annual subscription drive, exceeding our national quota by 18 percent. This represents 248 subscriptions to Spartacist Canada, 98 to Workers Vanguard, biweekly newspaper of the Spartacist League/U.S., and another 56 to other publications of the International Communist League, chiefly the Ligue trotskyste de France’s newspaper, Le Bolchévik.

Our newspaper takes on the lie, aggressively pushed by the ruling class and the pro-capitalist NDP and bought into by our allegedly Marxist opponents, that “Communism is dead.” While the results of this year’s subscription drive were the best we have achieved in 15 years, selling subs was far from easy. Comrades reported that many students buy into the bourgeoisie’s hype that the economic crisis is over or at least in “recovery mode,” even as the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs has devastated the working class. In our sales to the labour movement, we confronted a sharp rise in protectionism, which in effect blames workers abroad for the attacks of the Canadian capitalists here at home.

Placards at our campus literature tables prominently featured our Trotskyist program for the unconditional military defense of the remaining workers states—China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam—against imperialist attack and capitalist counterrevolution, and for workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracies. We often had to combat anti-communist prejudices, particularly aimed at China. But there were exceptions. A number of young women from East Europe subscribed to our press for the first time; some related to our salesmen their experiences growing up amid the horrors wrought by the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet bloc.

Another issue that proved controversial almost everywhere we went was our position advocating independence for Quebec. Our line on the Quebec national question makes us stand out prominently on the English Canadian left, which is dominated for the most part by open capitulation to the Anglo chauvinism of the Canadian ruling class. As we explained in our article last issue, “‘Fightback’ and the Quebec National Question” (SC No. 162, Fall 2009): “We Trotskyists call for Quebec independence in order to remove the roadblock of national antagonisms that divides the workers of English Canada and Quebec, poisoning prospects for united class struggle against capitalism.”

Comrades undertook regional trips to Victoria, Hamilton, Peterborough and Ottawa, and also assisted the SL/U.S. in work in Washington state. A joint trip to Montreal by comrades from the TL/LT and SL/U.S. focused on selling subs to students at francophone campuses. There, the newly published French-language edition of our international theoretical journal, Spartacist, was the biggest selling point by far for subscriptions. Comrades reported generally that Spartacist was very useful in motivating interest in our Marxist worldview.

In B.C., we also went for the first time to Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, where our placard “Labour Must Defend Native Rights!” drew a lot of attention from students at the heavily Native campus. We exceeded the quotas at the main campuses we work, the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and also sold briskly from our literature table at the BlackFest celebration at Toronto’s York University. Several subs to Espartaco, newspaper of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, were sold at a Toronto march commemorating the victims of the bloody CIA-backed 1973 military coup in Chile.

Our aim is to build a revolutionary vanguard party on the model of Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which led the working class to power in Russia in October 1917. Today, our focus is on producing and circulating a Marxist newspaper that is forthright, polemical and hard-hitting. Congratulations to all comrades for their hard work in making this subscription drive a success, and special congratulations to comrade Alex in Vancouver who sold the most subscriptions (59 points). Welcome to all of our new readers, and welcome back to those who renewed their subscriptions!