Raya Dunayevskaya 1955
Source: News & Letters, Vol 1, No. 1, June 24, 1955. This piece appeared as Dunayevskaya’s column, “Two Worlds: Notes From a Diary”; The Readers' Views were published in the subsequent issue of News & Letters, Vol. 1, No. 2, July, 8, 1955.
Transcribed: by Chris Gilligan, December 2024.
Source: News & Letters, Vol. 1, No. 1, 24th June 1955.
As we were preparing to go to press with this, out first issue, I was asked why I had placed so much emphasis on letters to and from news committees as well as to and from workers outside these news committees. The daily press is so well-known for its being the voice, not of the people, but of big business, that we have all but forgotten the part the press played in the making of this nation.
The worker who put the question to me, said: "All I read the papers for are the sports and the comics." Were this indifference to all other sections of the paper a mere question of forgetting history, nothing much would be lost. But it is not a question of history. It is a matter of new passions as they are expressed in the daily lives of ordinary people. It is these that need to be heard. When fundamental changes are shaking society to its depths,' the need for communication forces its way up, finds all sorts of unique ways of realization. One of these is letter writing.
The world over, each stage of freedom first announced its coming in the intimate expression of the common people to each other. But it is especially characteristic of this country's development at every great turn in history. Here it was largely in the form of letters that the passions of the struggle for independence of this country from Great Britain was first formulated.
Or take the question of slavery which divided the nation into two. On January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison almost single-handedly published the weekly LIBERATOR. This paper, which seemed so small, was an active force which brought about the final abolition of slavery.
I o not mean to put the press above the actual activity of the people. Quite the contrary. That same year a much more world-shaking event occurred than the publication of this organ of emancipation. A slave revolt, led by Nat Turner, shook the very foundations of the solid South which were being undermined daily by the runaway slaves. What I do mean to say is that the LIBERATOR was the expression of these new passions and forces for freedom which brought on the Civil War.
The American working people, with their great capacity for free association in industry and in politics, have in the press created an almost unique form of communication and inter-communication. Where an intellectual would at best, consider letter writing a matter of "raw material,' a sort of "unspoken conversation," the worker considers letters the oft-spoken conversation that has finally been written down to be heard.
It seldom is nowadays. At this critical stage in American democracy, which seems to be in such contrast to the Communist totalitarian regime of Russia, the simple truth is that the working people have no press of their own. The daily press is in such disrepute because it reflects the views of the very people — the political leaders, the big industrialists, the labor bureaucrats —who have brought the world into the state of total, never-ending crisis in which it now finds itself, while the rank and file people are not heard at all. Yet it is only in their workaday world that you will find the elements of a new society, a new human being to whom his relations with his fellow workers, his acts against the labor bureaucrats as well as against the boss, his relations with his family and his neighbors mean more to him than the fact that he can buy a car and a television.
What is needed above all is a workers paper, one written, edited and circulated by workers themselves.
It is not that we reject the middle class—intellectuals, housewives, technicians. They are welcome, as is any and every part of the population that has nothing whatever to do with the two gigantic bureaucracies struggling for world domination, American as well as Russian. But the first necesesity is that the rank and file have the paper in their hands to say what they want to, how they want to.
It is in the expression of the working people, on whose backs the total weight of state capitalism rests, that we will find the new passions and forces for a new society. All the others may desire as total a change but they are not so strategically placed in production that they cast stop its wheels or change its course.
Old radicals, in starting a paper, used to say that. But their fear of being captured by the "outside" was so strong that they felt the need for all sorts of controls and hence special privileges for those on the "inside".
We feel no such need. Hence the emphasis on letters from those outside the news Committees that are issuing this paper now. In truth, the only way this paper can be established is if the readers take matters into their onw hand - themselves write and edit and circulate this paper. Today's readers and tomorrow's.
___________________________________________ ___________________________________________
Source: News & Letters, Vol. 1, No. 2, 8th July 1955.
Today I received the first issue of NEWS' & LETTERS. I'm very excited -about it. The typos (typographical errors) didn't bother me as much as I expected they would. They made me conscious, however, of the tremendous job that the Detroit editing committee has be fore it. And I would like to ask the Detroit readers to make themselves available for proof-reading.
Mrs. B. Leslie - Los Angeles
* * *
The paper is the best I have seen. Nowhere else in the United States can people speak as freely about the things that matter most to them. Nowhere else is there a paper expressing the hidden voice of the American people. I don't care too much for the appearance of the first page or for the many printing errors, but these, no doubt, will be corrected . . .
The only serious criticism I have is that nowhere in the first issue can be found an article dealing with the origins and circumstances surrounding the publication of this new paper.
Skilled Worker - Los Angeles
* * *
It seems that NEWS & LETTERS is going to bring things out more. It will give more encouragement to working people.
Aircraft Worker - Los Angeles
* * *
It's super enough for big congratulations. We were a bit unhappy about the typos, especially those on the front page, though.
Two Readers - West Virginia
* * *
We shall be glad to see the new paper, and if there is anything of interest we can send from our side, we shall do so.
You ask: "What kind of paper do you want?" I know the question is addressed to your American friends, but I may as well say that I should like to see articles and letters that give a personal message, where one has the feeling that they come from real people, and not shadows called by the magical word, "worker." We take it for granted that the writers are workers, and it is extremely tiresome to see the word repeated fifty-thousand times — it makes one feel the contributors are very self-conscious and apologetic about it, although they pretend it to be otherwise. Why the hell shouldn't workers write, read, discuss, create things, have feelings? The majority of mankind consists of workers, and these things belong to mankind.
A. C. - Whittington, ENGLAND