First Published: The Call, Vol. 8, No. 37, October 1, 1979.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Seven years ago this Oct. 1, The Call was born in Los Angeles. Though it had a small circulation and was put out by a small group of people. The Call had big aspirations–to be a voice of the working people, to articulate their demands and promote their struggles.
This was not to be just another publication criticizing the system and calling for reforms. From the start, The Call was seen as an organizing tool to help build a broad movement and a communist party that could overthrow this system for good.
The birth of our newspaper took place amid a fierce debate in the communist movement on how best to carry out that struggle. As a result The Call had to take on more than just the capitalist-owned press, which acknowledges problems in the system only to defend the system itself. This young paper had also to take on various opportunist forces within the people’s movement, which would direct the struggle into the clutches of one or another misleader.
Since that first issue, The Call has taken many steps forward. Its pages have provided the forum for debates on important theoretical questions, debates which welded together a number of Marxist-Leninist groups and helped establish the CPML in June 1977. Today this unity process continues, and once again The Call is trying to contribute to bringing all genuine communists in the U.S. into a single party.
Over the years the paper has promoted factual analysis that goes beyond exposing the system’s anti-people policies to explain why it operates this way and how to fight it. As it has become more involved in different fronts of struggle, The Call has become a sharper critic of the ploys used by the ruling class and by opportunist forces to lull the oppressed people into false solutions.
Of course, the fact that The Call comes out only once a week severely limits it in a number of respects, including the amount of space given to culture and sports, wide-ranging news reports and commentaries. Some day we can build a press that is daily and able to fulfill all these tasks.
But right now our main job is to use our paper to broaden the influence of revolutionary ideas in the U.S. We need to reach out to many new forces, both to build the Party and the numerous mass organizations that are opposed to imperialism and all the exploitation, discrimination and brutality it stands for.
This past year has seen a number of advances for the newspaper. We started the year with a new look. In this format we made room for more columns such as the cultural reviews of Paul Reid, and better investigative reporting, such as The Call’s scoops on the Chicago DC-10 crash. We carried more eyewitness reports, including the current series from Puerto Rico, David Kline from Iran, and accounts from Mississippi of the woodcutters’ strike and the Bubba Mae jailing.
But we still have many shortcomings. There are too few articles that explain the program we’re fighting for. Some important areas, such as the Chicano people’s struggle, have received far too little attention from us. In addition, we haven’t reached nearly enough new readers.
Now we are faced with a severe financial crisis that has required us to cut back the staff and even reduce the number of pages, making it harder to correct our weaknesses. So far our readers have contributed generously to our fundraising appeal. This week readers in Los Angeles sent in the biggest single contribution yet–$15,000. Nevertheless, with the fund drive now half over, we have raised only $81,926, far short of the $100,000 halfway mark.
In honor of The Call’s seventh anniversary, we are calling on all our readers to contribute to the paper’s financial base by bringing in new subscribers. Take the paper to your friends, show them a place they can read about their problems and their struggles, interest them in finding out about a revolutionary alternative. To make sure they become regular readers, have them get a 12-month subscription.
As The Call enters its eighth year, we are confident that we can overcome our financial difficulties and be able to make the paper an even stronger voice of the people’s struggle. Every time we receive a week’s paycheck from a worker or a $5 donation from a prisoner making 15c an hour, we are reminded of the importance of getting out The Call and the potential power we have on our side.