WV Goes to Eight Pages

Beginning with this issue, the biweekly Workers Vanguard will be reduced from 12 to eight pages. This is a necessary retrenchment to bring the work of the Spartacist League/U.S. into line with our current capacities. We may produce 12-page issues when warranted.

We do not take this step lightly, as WV has appeared in a 12- or 16-page format for several decades. But our current situation is that a thin layer of cadres in the central party leadership is responsible in an overlapping way for WV and the English-language edition of the ICL’s theoretical journal Spartacist as well as for giving administrative leadership to the SL/U.S. and heavily to the International Secretariat.

To allocate even more of our limited resources in an attempt to preserve a 12-page paper would limit our ability to intervene in protests and labor struggles where they do break out in the U.S. and to take advantage of international opportunities. Readers of WV know that in the recent period countries like South Africa and Greece have been volatile, while in Britain there has been an increase in political ferment with the emergence of a large movement behind left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. In Quebec a few years ago, there was a high level of student struggle where timely intervention enabled the ICL’s Canadian section to establish a branch in Montreal.

The core of our cadre was won to Trotskyism in the period of radicalization spurred by the civil rights movement and then by the U.S.’s losing war in Vietnam as well as the 1968 French general strike. In subsequent decades, new recruits came more slowly. With the destruction of the Soviet Union through capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92, communism is viewed in most countries as utopian, at best. The workers movement has been in a deep historic trough, with little social and class struggle in the U.S., reducing our opportunities for intervention and recruitment. We do have a layer of younger comrades who carry out the day-to-day central leadership functions. At the same time, the SL/U.S.’s historic leadership often plays a decisive role in sorting out knotty political questions here and internationally.

Following our last national conference, the incoming Central Committee took note of our paucity of resources and authorized the production in cases of emergency of eight-page issues of WV (“Fighting for Revolutionary Continuity,” WV No. 1088, 22 April). Since that time it has become evident that what was conceived of as an emergency measure is actually a necessity. We tried increasing the number of archival pieces, reprints from our Marxist forebears, but to select these pieces and motivate their relevance to today’s readership requires significant work and places demands on the time of the same cadres involved in leading the party. We have reprinted more articles from other sections of the ICL, but these sections also have limited resources and much less frequent press. We will continue to have such archival and international pieces but without relying on them to simply fill 12 pages.

Cutting back to eight pages is the most minimal step we can take to maintain a quality biweekly Workers Vanguard without grinding up our cadre. As we have noted before, WV is essential to our existence as a fighting propaganda group. Its frequency allows us to intervene and be a factor as events unfold, serving as a collective organizer for our international tendency while influencing the consciousness of the several thousand people who read or peruse our press every two weeks.