First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 6, No. 36, September 30-October 13, 1981.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The Workers Viewpoint is in grave financial trouble. To go on publishing on a weekly basis, we need $30,000 more a year.
Unless we receive an adequate response within three months, we will have to cut back our publication to once every two weeks. Even now, we are cutting back to three times a month and using the money saved for fundraising activity such as mailings.
In the 80s. a weekly Marxist press is a necessity, not a luxury. With the rise of Reaganism and the fightback against it, the challenges placed before all revolutionaries and progressive-minded people are momentous.
The Communist Workers Party and its newspaper, the Workers Viewpoint, is meeting the challenges head on. The 80s was kicked off by the government assassinations of five CWP members in Greensboro, North Carolina. Many honest people around the country could sense that the political climate was undergoing radical change, and the Workers Viewpoint covered and analyzed it. Moving up the schedule by six months, the WV immediately became a weekly newspaper, providing extensive coverage of the campaign to avenge the CWP 5, the presidential elections, the economic crisis, the Iranian revolution and other historic events.
Maintaining and publishing a weekly newspaper has been difficult. Our staff’s load was immediately doubled. Many of our writers who work full time to support their families come to work at the WV for several hours a night and often come in weekends. Full time staff writers – the bare minimum necessary to keep both the WV and the Spanish language Punto de Vista Obrero going – live on a combined sum of $600 a month. We have cut costs everywhere possible – on supplies, typewriter ribbons, even lightbulbs. Our writers often type on broken typewriters and have even lined up to type their articles because we lacked the money for repairs.
Still, we not only publish regularly, but also tremendously improved the paper. We provide the latest, most advanced thinking of the Communist Workers Party and its General Secretary, Jerry Tung, comprehensive analysis of the economy and international events and reports on the problems and achievements of socialist construction. We have also introduced to you talented people’s writers like David Armstrong and May Quan and columns like “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” “Culture and Class Struggle” and “Sports.”
When our financial straits could no longer be ignored and production costs keep going up, we still hesitated to cut back, choosing instead to raise our cover price to fifty cents. But this has not raised the additional revenue needed to publish a weekly newspaper, and our staff has cut and squeezed to its limit.
Mao Zedong once commented, “The next 50 years or so, beginning from now will be a great era of radical change in the social system throughout the world, an earth-shaking era without equal in any previous historical period. Living in such an era, we must be prepared to engage in great Struggles which will have many features different in form from those of the past.”
These are hard times for us all. Inflation, unemployment, political repres- [text missing in original – EROL] unprecedented resistance to Reagan, and he has been beat back on three most important fronts: El Salvador, the McCarthyite Subcommittee or Security and Terrorism and the anti-abortion rights Human Life Amendment. Half a million workers hit the streets against Reaganomics on Solidarity Day.
Events move so rapidly, it is hardly possible to keep pace. The political scenery can completely transform overnight, and social movements are just as quickly confronted with new and pressing questions demanding answers. To recognize the opportunities and answer the questions, revolutionaries and progressive people need a weekly Marxist newspaper. Revolutionaries and progressives need the Workers Viewpoint.
These are critical times which call for hard decisions. Decisions that can change lives and the whole course of events. This decision is no exception. We have done all we can. Now you must make a choice: how important is a weekly Workers Viewpoint to you and your struggles? Contribute to the WV,/em>, or better yet, become a regular, monthly sustainer. A weekly Workers Viewpoint – it is up to you.