The Leninist Press and Revolutionary Continuity

Workers Vanguard No. 1000	13 April 2012

(Quote of the Week)

For the 1,000th issue of Workers Vanguard, we print below excerpts from a 1958 speech by James P. Cannon, historic leader of American Trotskyism, on the role of the Leninist press in propagating revolutionary Marxism and cohering the cadres of the proletarian vanguard. Delivered on the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Militant, newspaper of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), Cannon’s talk also marked the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. In the early 1960s, the Revolutionary Tendency, forerunner of the Spartacist League/U.S., was formed inside the SWP to fight against the party majority’s increasing abandonment of the Trotskyist program. The SL, founded in 1966, began publishing WV five years later. We salute the dedication of comrades who have helped produce and distribute our press over the decades and go forward in the fight for new October Revolutions.

We did not pretend, when we started The Militant, that we were producing a great mass paper, simplifying everything to the lowest common denominator. On the contrary, our paper was devoted to the education and reeducation of the vanguard militants of the Communist movement. It was primarily a cadre paper, the educator and guide of the cadres. The people who hold the party together and keep it going in all kinds of weather. The people who never quit, who never float down the stream like dead fish, but swim against the current no matter how rough it may be. That is the meaning of “militant,” and that was the meaning of the paper we started to represent such people.

We had learned a good deal by then, although we have learned a great deal more since, and were applying something from Lenin’s program for Iskra. Many of you have read in his great pamphlet, What Is To Be Done?, what he considered to be the role of a national paper. As Lenin conceived it, the role of a revolutionary paper is to function not merely as an agitator dealing with protest issues, not merely as a propagandist concerned with educating people and dealing with questions of theory and politics, but as the best organizer of the party....

Old Frederick Engels, in the hard and bitter time of the movement of his day, wrote to an old comrade, an old guard of the Communist League, referring to the difficulties and troubles they were in and to the good comrades who had fallen by the wayside. And the old comrade asked, “What shall we do?” And Engels answered, “What can we do? We stand in the breach. That’s what we are here for.”

—James P. Cannon, “Revolutionary Journalism,” November 1958, reprinted in Speeches for Socialism (Pathfinder, 1971)