Subscription Drive Success

WV Welcomes New Readers!

Comrades and sympathizers of the Spartacist League, Spartacus Youth Clubs and Labor Black Leagues spent six weeks from late August through early October engaged in the annual Workers Vanguard subscription drive campaign, exceeding our national quota of 2,650 with a total of 2,955.5 points. Every local surpassed its own quota. These points represent 1,345 subscriptions to WV and 119 subscriptions to Espartaco, newspaper of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, with 85 subscriptions to other International Communist League sectional newspapers and placements of WV in bookstores.

WV welcomes its new readers and greets those who renewed their subscriptions. A Marxist, working-class biweekly, WV seeks to propagate our full revolutionary program and to make this program concrete by addressing the struggles of workers and the oppressed and our interventions into these struggles. The SL is a fighting propaganda group whose aim is to build a revolutionary vanguard party of the kind that V.I. Lenin and the Bolsheviks forged in order to lead the working class to power in the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. In arguing for the founding of a regular party press in his 1899 article “Our Immediate Task,” Lenin wrote:

“In speaking of the necessity to concentrate all Party forces—all literary forces, all organisational abilities, all material resources, etc.—on the foundation and correct conduct of the organ of the whole Party, we do not for a moment think of pushing other forms of activity into the background—e.g., local agitation, demonstrations,...etc., etc. On the contrary, we are convinced that all these forms of activity constitute the basis of the Party’s activity, but, without their unification through an organ of the whole Party, these forms of revolutionary struggle lose nine-tenths of their significance; they do not lead to the creation of common Party experience, to the creation of Party traditions and continuity. The Party organ, far from competing with such activity, will exercise tremendous influence on its extension, consolidation and systematisation.”

We make a special effort to sell subscriptions to our press because it is our main tool for seeking to influence and lead struggles and for winning workers and youth to our ranks. Our annual subscription drive is crucial to maintaining an ongoing readership and reaching out to new layers and to regions where we do not have branches. The campaign also serves to give us a picture of current political consciousness and moods, from the campuses to the workplaces and union halls.

Racial Oppression and the Fight to Free Mumia

A central part of this year’s subscription drive was building the urgent campaign undertaken by the Partisan Defense Committee to free death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and later an award-winning journalist and supporter of the MOVE organization. Our efforts included building rallies demanding freedom for Mumia that were called by the PDC and LBLs and took place in four cities during October (see page 12). Around the country, SYCs held showings of the PDC video “From Death Row, This Is Mumia Abu-Jamal,” often at the invitation of other student groups and professors on regional trips. Comrades on subscription drive trips to the South were able to bring the case to trade unionists there, garnering a number of signatures on the PDC’s statement of support for Mumia (see page 8). A PDC spokesman addressed hundreds of trade unionists on the fight to free Mumia at the Labor Day picnic in Charleston, South Carolina.

Just as the capitalist state’s attempt to execute Mumia, who represents the spectre of black revolution to the ruling class, is emblematic of the special oppression of black people in the U.S., the atrocity around Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans just over a year ago stands as a searing indictment of the racist capitalist system. Our pamphlet Black History and the Class Struggle No. 19, which features key WV articles on New Orleans, was a big draw in the sales of subscriptions across the country. SL comrades undertook two trips to New Orleans during the subscription drive, and despite the overwhelming difficulties for people trying to pick up their lives in a still largely devastated city, we were able to engage politically with workers at the ports and shipyards as well as with students, selling 73.5 points in subscriptions.

Comrades on our trip to North Carolina intersected sanitation workers in Raleigh battling for union recognition in the face of anti-labor “right to work” laws that exist throughout the South (see “Sanitation Workers Battle for Union Rights,” WV No. 878, 13 October). A student organization at historically black North Carolina Central University in Durham organized a forum for us to speak on New Orleans, at which there was a lively discussion. A common theme in discussions with students in the region, as in other parts of the country, was the search for a “third road” between the horrors of capitalism and the fight for socialist revolution. Often cited as an example of such a “third road” was the bourgeois-populist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, which is administering the exploitative, class-divided capitalist system but is hailed as supposedly “socialist” because high oil prices have enabled it to throw some crumbs to the poor.

In this context, it was particularly useful to have our series of articles under the Young Spartacus masthead on the history of the Russian Revolution of 1917, as well as the article “The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women” from the current issue of the ICL’s international theoretical journal, Spartacist. These articles helped comrades explain what a true social revolution looks like and to concretize the revolutionary program that working people need to fight to end capitalist exploitation and oppression. WV articles that ran during the subscription drive motivating the Trotskyist program in defense of the deformed workers states of China and North Korea—a program that the ICL uniquely upholds—also helped to illustrate the gains of social revolutions for new readers.

U.S. Imperialism and the Elections

Our articles opposing both the U.S.-backed Zionist onslaught against Lebanon—and the ongoing murderous oppression of the Palestinians—as well as the subsequent imperialist intervention into Lebanon by UN “peacekeepers” were of much interest in the early part of our subscription drive. Likewise, our coverage of struggles in Mexico, from the mass protests around the presidential election results to the teachers strike in Oaxaca, drew a lot of interest not only in WV but also in Espartaco. We sold a number of Espartaco subscriptions at immigrant rights protests held around the country in early September, as well as a number of WV subs to young activists who had been involved in the massive immigrant rights protests last spring.

WV’s staunch opposition to the capitalist Democratic Party of racism and war was a major question discussed with youth and workers in relation to everything from immigrant rights and the racist atrocity around Hurricane Katrina to the U.S imperialist occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and Washington’s threats against Iran and the North Korean deformed workers state. In the lead-up to the midterm elections, “Anybody but Bush” sentiment is running high, given the prospect of an improvement in the Democrats’ electoral fortunes, such as they are. In this situation, a number of organizations claiming to be revolutionary Marxist have continued their sordid practice of seeking to channel discontent with racist U.S. imperialism into the dead end of pressuring the capitalists through the bourgeois elections.

Perhaps most energetic in this regard is the reformist International Socialist Organization (ISO), which is running its member Todd Chretien as a candidate for U.S. Senate in California on the ticket of the capitalist Green Party. Drawing a crude working-class line against the capitalist candidacies of Todd Chretien and Democrat Dianne Feinstein in the Senate race is Jeff Mackler of Socialist Action, to whom the SL has extended critical support. We call for a vote to Mackler while pointing out that the reformist politics of Socialist Action are an obstacle to the necessary task of forging a workers party that fights for socialist revolution. We had many debates with youth in and around the ISO in the course of our subscription drive over this issue and continued to campaign for a vote to Mackler despite his farcical “rejection” of our critical support at several events we attended and in a letter from Socialist Action (see “Critical Support Is Not a Marriage Proposal,” WV No. 878, 13 October).

Local and Regional Highlights

Congratulations to comrade Martin of the Bay Area, who with 112 points sold the most subscriptions! Comrades from the Bay Area undertook a number of regional trips, including Colorado (102 points), a Northern Tour covering Washington and Oregon (189 points), Texas (48 points) and UC Santa Cruz (156 points). Comrades sold 49 points between the two major Bay Area campuses, San Francisco State University and UC Berkeley.

In addition to assisting with the Northern Tour and the Texas trip, L.A. comrades undertook regional trips to Arizona (33 points), San Diego (38.5 points) and UC Santa Barbara (21.5 points). Comrades sold 24 points at UCLA and SYCers sold 144.5 points, representing over a third of the local’s points. Comrades intersected an Engineers and Architects strike and participated in the repulsion of a Minuteman provocation at the annual Labor Day union gathering in Wilmington.

The Chicago Local made trips to the University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, where we also held two successful video showings on Mumia’s case. Chicago comrades traveled to Minneapolis, the University of Wisconsin-Madison (62 points) and to Ann Arbor and Detroit (57 points), where comrades intersected a teachers strike. Chicago comrades also assisted with trips to North Carolina, New Orleans and Colorado.

The New York Local covered a large swath of the East and Gulf Coasts, from Boston to New Orleans. Comrades made trips to North Carolina (111 points), Charleston, South Carolina (54 points), Norfolk, Virginia (31.5 points), Western Massachusetts (72 points), Washington, D.C. and Baltimore (28 points). Comrades from New York were greatly assisted by our many sympathizers in Boston in covering a number of campuses there. New York comrades traveled to a number of State University of New York campuses, selling some 81 points, on top of 47 points at various campuses in New York City, including 28 points at Columbia University.

The “at large” points included subscriptions to WV sold by our Canadian comrades of the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste as part of their annual WV/Spartacist Canada subscription drive. Subscriptions mailed in from locations not serviced by a local make up the remainder of that category. Congratulations to all comrades for their very hard work in making this subscription drive a success! We encourage our readers to let us know what they think of our press and to contact us to discuss its contents and get involved in the activities of the SL, SYCs and LBLs.