Workers Vanguard Welcomes New Readers

Our annual Workers Vanguard subscription campaign ended on October 14, with comrades obtaining 2,030 points. This includes 904 subscriptions to WV, 113 subs to Espartaco (the newspaper of the Mexican section of the International Communist League) and 68 to other ICL press. We congratulate comrade Vance who sold 83 points and won the national sub drive.

This subscription drive allowed us to visit places where we don’t have locals and to meet new readers for our revolutionary Marxist biweekly newspaper. We had the opportunity to argue politics with youth, workers and others who are angry about the oppression and inequality in society, but who have illusions in reforming the capitalist system.

One of the highlights of our sub drive was a visit to the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico where people spoke bitterly of the debt crisis choking their economy. Capitalist austerity is particularly targeting the public university and the unions, while Wall Street bankers continue to amass wealth by squeezing profits out of the workers.

Students at some of the campuses we visited in the U.S. had illusions in Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. In America’s grim political landscape, Sanders’s comments about the rich being too rich and the poor being too poor allow him to at times pretend to be some kind of “socialist” alternative. In fact, Sanders’s role is to rope the disaffected back into the Democratic Party fold. We argued against support to Sanders or any other capitalist politician and explained the need for the working class to organize independently from the parties of the class enemy. For those most interested in a real fight for socialism, a subscription to WV provided an opportunity to learn about the necessity of building a Leninist vanguard party capable of leading the working class to power.

We also had discussions with workers across the country, including at ports and auto plants. Many appreciated our article on the death of New Jersey longshore worker Judy Jones and the need for unions to fight for safety and better working conditions (“New Jersey Docks: Death Trap,” WV No. 1073, 4 September). Our sub drive intersected the expiration of the United Auto Workers (UAW) contract with the Big Three and the initial rejection of the new contract by UAW workers at Fiat Chrysler. Our article “Blood, Sweat and Tiers: Auto Workers Oppose Sellout Contract” (WV No. 1075, 2 October) was warmly received by workers, particularly in the Midwest. Our new pamphlet Then and Now was popular among subscribers. That pamphlet, which describes three militant strikes in 1934 that were led by reds, explains key historical lessons for those looking for a revolutionary perspective.

All of our teams intersected anger over black oppression and racist cop terror—from the death of Sandra Bland to the barbarism of the prison system and the death penalty. Comrades sold a number of pamphlets from our Black History and the Class Struggle series as well as Marxist Bulletin No. 5 (Revised), “Trotskyism vs. Black Nationalism,” all of which lay out our program of black liberation through socialist revolution.

We welcome our new subscribers and encourage our readers to come to our public events and contact us with comments on our articles.