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   Vol. 69/No. 13           April 4, 2005  
 
 
Join campaign to sell ‘New International’
Effort to distribute new issues of Marxist magazine to last till August 15
(front page)
 
To those coming to the March 26 meeting in New York to celebrate the publication of two new issues of the New International, we say welcome! We also urge Militant readers—including those who didn’t make it to New York—to join the campaign to sell copies of these new issues of the magazine of Marxist politics and theory to thousands of workers, farmers, youth and others around the world.

This campaign is being launched at the March 26 meeting. It will be at the heart of the work of class-conscious workers in the next five months. It will last through August 15, the end of the 16th World Festival of Youth and Students taking place in Caracas, Venezuela. The widespread promotion of the new issues of the magazine—for which the Militant is proud to have taken the lead—will be combined not only with the efforts to distribute them in all the corners of the globe but with classes to study and absorb their contents.

The two new issues of New International have simultaneously been published in Spanish as numbers 6 and 7 of Nueva Internacional. This will facilitate their promotion, sales, and study worldwide. Efforts are already underway to translate and publish them in French and other languages. That’s a magnificent illustration of what’s summarized in the title of the lead article of New International no. 13: “Our Politics Start with the World.”

“Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” This statement, made by Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin in his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? a century ago, captures the importance of the publication of NI numbers 12 and 13. The articles and documents in the 13 issues of New International are an invaluable political tool for working-class militants today. This magazine and its distribution, along with other programmatic documents, by the cadre of proletarian parties, and the day-to-day political work of class-conscious workers in mines, mills, and factories, are what distinguishes above all the communist movement from all other tendencies that still pretend to be “socialist” or “Marxist.”

After leading the workers and peasants of Russia to take power in October 1917—the mightiest revolution of our epoch—the Bolsheviks proudly took the name communist, Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes explains in the “In This Issue” that introduces New International no. 12. “The Bolsheviks were taking a name synonymous with being in the front ranks of the proletariat—among ‘the most advanced and resolute section,’ in the words of the [Communist] Manifesto—in its march toward power, toward the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Barnes says. “They were proclaiming a new kind of movement, one ‘in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered by this or that would-be universal reformer,’ but on ‘clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’… ‘Insofar as it is a theory,’ Engels had explained a year earlier, ‘communism is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in [the class] struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat.”

This is the kind of movement partisans of the New International are working to build.

“As the social consequences of capitalist crises grow, as inevitable political conflicts sharpen between and within classes, and as probes to restrict political and democratic rights used by working people increase,” Barnes says, militant workers taking the lead to reach for, organize, and use union power will join others “to resist accelerated employing-class assaults in the plants and the political arena, at home and abroad.” In doing so they will change themselves as they fight to change the world. Using the new issues of New International—buying them, studying them, and selling them—is at the heart of carrying out this course.

Partisans of the Militant will find interest in the NIs among the thousands of young people traveling to Venezuela this summer for the world youth festival. We can expect similar interest on the job, at plant gates, on picket lines, during door-to-door visits in working-class communities, at social protest actions, or political activities on campuses.

These issues of the magazine demand our time and energy to work at and conquer, and this can best be accomplished by common study. Working people in capitalist society are taught to do the opposite. “We’re supposed to go to work, do our job, produce a profit for the boss, and not disturb the placidity of the homeland,” as Barnes says. “That’s the long and short of it.”

We invite you to join us in using the new issues of New International and in the process learning to think as the makers of history we can be. The larger type and increased space between the lines of these issues—along with their photographs, ads, and indexes—make them more inviting, more readable, more valuable political tools.

Join the campaign to sell the New International!
 
 
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