2011 Subscription Drive Success

WV Welcomes New Readers

To widen the readership of our press, the Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs embark on a national campaign each year from August to October. This year, we surpassed our quota by 26 percent with 2,512 points, which includes 1,186 new subscriptions and renewals to Workers Vanguard, 60 to Espartaco (published by our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México) and 102 to the press of other International Communist League sections. Congratulations to comrade Dylan of the Bay Area local, who won the subscription drive with 125 points.

The backdrop to the sub drive again was the prolonged economic crisis, which has thrown millions of working people out of their homes and jobs. As the chief executive of capitalist class rule, Barack Obama has overseen this ruin at home as well as the atrocities committed by U.S. imperialism abroad. Although enthusiasm for Obama has faded over time as he continues to stick the knife into workers, immigrants and black people, one comrade noted, “When pressed, most subscribers said they would probably vote for Obama again as a lesser evil compared to the insane types running on the Republican ticket.”

Support for the capitalist Democratic Party “lesser evil” peddled by the trade-union bureaucracy is a key prop for the maintenance of racist American capitalism and has served as a central political obstacle to mobilizing workers in defense of themselves and the oppressed. We hope our newspaper will help to win workers and students to a Marxist worldview and an understanding of the need to build revolutionary workers parties internationally to fight for the overthrow of world capitalism through socialist revolution.

Our campaign kicked off at the outset of the Verizon strike, the largest strike in the U.S. in the last few years. We sold dozens of introductory WV subscriptions to workers on the picket lines but were not able to extend these intros into full-year subscriptions. One factor that we encountered was the frustration that set in after the union bureaucracy called off the two-week strike without a settlement.

On the other hand, we sold large numbers of subscriptions to longshore workers on the West Coast and nationally, including in Longview, Washington, during our two trips to intersect and report on the struggle of International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 21. In early September, Local 21 and its supporters fought back against the union-busting EGT grain-exporting conglomerate by engaging in the kind of militant labor action that built the industrial unions in the U.S. in the 1930s. In response, the bosses and their state hit the union with brutal cop attacks, harassment and arrests as well as court-issued fines (see “ILWU Fights Deadly Threat,” WV No. 986, 16 September and “Defend Longview ILWU Against Bosses’ Cops and Courts!” WV No. 987, 30 September). Concrete acts of labor solidarity, especially internationally, are urgently needed to back up the union in its ongoing battle with EGT.

In addition to our material on the Longview struggle, longshoremen expressed interest in what we had to say about the economic downturn and, especially on the East Coast, there was outrage over the execution of Troy Davis. One comrade who sold to longshoremen in Oregon noted, “Workers expressed a lot of basic class anger: the rich get richer while working people are squeezed dry.” The most popular giveaway in the sub drive was our 2009 pamphlet on the economy, Karl Marx Was Right: Capitalist Anarchy and the Immiseration of the Working Class.

We attracted attention among students for our articles on Egypt—in which we emphasized the importance of the working class emerging as a contender for power in its own right as against the military and Islamists—and in defense of the Palestinians against Israeli state terror. One polarizing issue was our call on workers around the world to take a stand for military defense of Libya against the U.S./NATO imperialist butchers and their “opposition” lackeys on the ground, without offering any political support whatsoever to Qaddafi’s capitalist regime. Our position shocked the sensibilities of one student so much that, within a few weeks, she cancelled her subscription. Well, a revolutionary internationalist newspaper isn’t for everyone.

From September on, we intersected the growing Occupy protests in New York City and elsewhere. The Occupy movement has attracted broad support among wide layers of the population searching for some way to fight the wrenching effects of the recession. But the liberal-populist outlook of the protests is premised on the false notions that American capitalist “democracy” can be made to work for the little guy and that the working class is just another sector of the “people,” i.e., the amorphous “99 percent.” Although we have received a hearing for our views, selling a large amount of individual WV copies, we sold comparatively few subscriptions, underscoring the tremendous gulf between our Marxist worldview and the liberal politics of Occupy.

One standout of this year’s campaign was the fine work of our new SYC members in Lansing, Michigan. With the help of comrades in the Midwest, the Chicago/Lansing SYC sold dozens of subscriptions at Michigan State University and elsewhere. Comrades who intervened into Occupy Lansing had a polarizing impact on protesters on account of our forthright opposition to the Democrats as a party of capital and to the police as the enforcers of capitalist rule.

A key part of our annual sub drives involves traveling to regions of the country where we do not have a regular presence in order to meet with current subscribers, offer our paper to new readers and sample political consciousness and moods, from the campuses to the workplaces and union halls. This year, our subscriptions in North Carolina and Oregon increased significantly, and we also had success at the Detroit Labor Day rally as well as on campuses in Arizona and Texas, although it was slow going in Massachusetts.

On many regional campuses, the disastrous effects of the economic meltdown piqued student interest in reading a newspaper that opposes capitalism. Many students who subscribed also were motivated by opposition to racism and anti-immigrant bigotry as well as the ongoing assault on abortion rights. While we had success at many public universities that attract working-class students (a student in Durham, North Carolina, allocated the last of her laundry money for a subscription), sales were more difficult at elite campuses like the University of Chicago and Harvard as well as the University of California at Berkeley.

As usual, on some campuses we had to fight for our right to distribute our paper. At the University of New Orleans, armed police kicked us off campus following a sharp confrontation with a racist who hated our defense of the Pelican Bay, California, prisoners on hunger strike. Notably, the campus chapter of Amnesty International defended our right to be on campus, allowing us to set a sales table back up. At the University of Massachusetts Boston, cops who approached our table left us alone after we asserted our right to get out our views, much to the displeasure of a member of the anti-communist International Socialist Organization hovering nearby.

Making our paper available to black workers and students is especially important to our party. Subjected to racial oppression that is endemic to capitalist America, black workers—strategically placed in the economy—will play a key role in the vanguard of the fight to overthrow capitalism. Since 2008, we had run into some difficulty selling subscriptions to black people, for whom the election of the first black president was supposed to provide some relief from the raw racist reality of this society. Older black workers still tend to tell us that Obama is “limited in what he can do” and fear that any criticism might play into the hands of racist reaction. But with the bloom off the Obama administration—one student called Obama “the world’s biggest terrorist,” citing rapper Lupe Fiasco—our sales this year to black workers and students increased significantly.

Workers Vanguard welcomes our new and returning subscribers. A Marxist, working-class press is a crucial scaffolding for our small fighting propaganda group, the nucleus of a future Leninist vanguard party. It is the purpose of WV to propagate the revolutionary program in addressing the struggles of workers and the oppressed. We encourage all readers to carefully consider our arguments, attend our public events, write us and let us know what they think.