First Published: The Call, Vol. 5, No. 24, October 18, 1976.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Anniversary programs in cities across the country will celebrate The Call’s fourth birthday this month. These celebrations are especially significant because they also provide an opportunity to celebrate and sum up our first six months of successful publication as a weekly.
One year ago, to prepare for the launching of the weekly, a series of Call articles presented a Marxist-Leninist view of the press, stressing the role it must play at this time in building a new communist party in the U.S. The articles pointed out that the newspaper must stand at the center of the work to build this party among the workers in the factories as a collective organizer, agitator and propagandist.
What have we learned after six months, of carrying out these tasks with a weekly newspaper? Has the weekly brought more workers into the movement against imperialism, for socialism and for a new party?
Without a doubt the answer is “Yes!” One sign of this is that The Call is reaching thousands more workers with many more articles than before. More working people are being brought directly into the life of The Call as correspondents. The change to weekly publication raised the monthly circulation to almost three times the former number sold. In addition, in spite of the fewer number of pages per issue, the overall number of pages being published is almost twice as many in English and four times as many in Spanish.
Both the larger circulation and the greater number of articles reflect the strengthening and widening of Call networks in the factories and communities. Work around the weekly Call has provided many new examples of how networks of workers who read, study, write for and sell The Call on a regular basis can become, as Lenin said, the “scaffolding” for the new communist party.
A good example of such a network is being built at a plastics plant in New England. In addition to selling and studying The Call, workers from this plant have contributed many articles and letters in the past months – exposing the sellout of labor bureaucrats in their union and the economism of the RCP in their plant, describing the role of The Calland the OL in their struggle and, most recently, contributing their thoughts on the death of Chairman Mao. In many cases, the study and struggle which contributed the writing of these articles and letters have been important steps in winning the most advanced workers to communism and to the party-building movement itself.
The weekly Call has been able to effectively combine agitation and propaganda. For example, a number of articles during the four-month long rubber strike were used on the picket lines to put forward a fighting program for revolutionary struggle in the URW. Other agitational articles gave direction to several important strikes and mass movements.
Complementing these was the series of propaganda articles, “A Communist View of the Trade Unions.” These were enthusiastically welcomed and studied by Marxist-Leninists and advanced workers anxious to deepen their understanding of how to fight for revolution in the unions. In this way, The Call’s propaganda played the decisive role of training communist fighters and contributing to the development of the line and program of the new party on this question of crucial importance to the whole working class.
Another example has been the use of The Call in the Gary Tyler campaign. Over the course of several months, The Call was used to mobilize thousands of workers to condemn the Tyler frame-up and demand his freedom. Even more importantly, many, advanced workers who have come forward in this struggle have joined Call discussion groups to study propaganda articles which linked Tyler’s case to the whole system of national oppression under capitalism and to the struggle for Afro-American self-determination and socialism.
In much the same way, The Callwas able to express the profound grief of the masses over the death of Chairman Mao and, with timely articles, sum up many of his most important contributions. These were used across the country to bring hundreds of workers to memorial meetings where they learned not only about the life of this great Marxist-Leninist, but also about many of his important teachings and how they must be applied to the revolutionary struggle here.
The task now remains to consolidate and broaden even further these gains in organizing revolutionary activity around The Call. In many factories, the work to build stable networks has only just begun. In a number of cities, the work of getting The Call Committees set upon a correct and sound basis is still going on.
But our weaknesses and mistakes only serve to remind us that the struggle to build communist leadership of the working-class movement is a protracted one. What has been shown in four years of publishing a Marxist-Leninist newspaper is that, where the press has been placed at the center of communist work, the work has moved steadily forward, bringing ever greater numbers of workers into the revolutionary struggle.
With the increased influence of The Call, the ruling class has, of course, responded viciously with widespread acts of suppression and harassment. The attacks on The Callat the recent United Mine Workers convention by the reactionary union bureaucrats show not only that the bureaucrats are serving the interests of capitalism, but that their fear of The Callgetting into the hands of miners is growing.
This gives us even greater encouragement. Communist influence is also apparent in the testimony of the workers themselves, like the report from a correspondent at Somers, Conn., who recently wrote that a strike there of over 100 prisoners “would not have been possible if many had not first studied revolutionary theory.” In fact, this study was made possible because the prisoners organized and won a fight to bring The Call and other revolutionary literature into the prison where now over 90 are subscribers. Since the recent rebellion, the authorities are again trying to suppress our newspaper.
These are the kinds of advances that this year’s anniversary programs must celebrate and sum up. They must aim at teaching even greater numbers of workers about the key role of the communist press in their movement. They must help raise the $10,000 needed this month to expand The Call to 16 pages. And they must win new subscribers, distributors and writers for the communist press and recruit new fighters to struggle for socialism.