BY SARA LOBMAN
Participants at the upcoming Young Socialists national convention will be the first to be able to acquire the complete Collected New International, which includes every article published over the last 60 years in the New International, a Marxist magazine of politics and theory. It is available on a three-volume CD-ROM set. Draft versions of the first two volumes, covering the years 1934-1971, were completed in mid-1996. After a test period, the entire collection will be available for sale to the general public.

New International was founded in July 1934 "by pioneers of the communist movement in the United States and Canada," the introduction to the 3-volume set explains. "It has been published for more than six decades since then, presenting political, theoretical, and historical material that clarifies the most important questions of program, strategy, and organization confronting the working-class movement internationally.

"While the name and format of the magazine have changed several times over the span of sixty years, the continuity of political outlook and editorial policy has remained unbroken," the introduction says. "That political continuity begins with the Communist Manifesto, drafted in 1847 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels; adopted by the December 1847 congress of the Communist League, it became the founding programmatic document of the modern workers movement.

"The initial editors of the magazine were leaders of the communist parties in North America," the introduction adds. "Those parties were forged in the crucible of the first interimperialist world slaughter, which precipitated the collapse of the social-democratic Second International and ended in the victory of the October 1917 Russian revolution, led by the Bolshevik Party. Trained in the proletarian internationalism of the Communist International under the leadership of V.I. Lenin, the founding editors launched New International as part of the effort to maintain that communist continuity in face of the political counterrevolution consolidated by the rising bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union in the latter 1920s.

"The majority of the magazine's editors and many of its contributors have been leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States," the introduction says. "From its first issue, the magazine has been produced in collaboration with leaders of communist organizations around the world, all of whom shared the goal of linking up and advancing the prospects for a new revolutionary international. Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky was among the most frequent early contributors to the magazine until his assassination in 1940 at the hands of the Stalinist murder machine."

James P. Cannon, a founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party, explained the political and editorial policy of New International more than half a century ago when he stated that the international movement the SWP was part of had no new revelations to make.

It is "not a new movement, a new doctrine," Cannon wrote, "but the restoration, the revival, of genuine Marxism as it was expounded and practiced in the Russian revolution and in the early days of the Communist International."

This collection of three CD-ROMs contains every issue of the magazine from 1934 through 1994. Beginning as New International, from 1934 to March 1940, the magazine later appeared as Fourth International, from May 1940 to spring 1956. It then changed its name to International Socialist Review and was published in magazine format until 1975. Since then the ISR has been published as a supplement to the socialist newsweekly, the Militant; these issues of the ISR are not included in the collection. In 1983 New International resumed publication as a magazine of Marxist politics and theory; its 10 current issues are included on Volume 3 of the CD-ROM set.

By the late 1980s, issues of the magazine from earlier decades had become increasingly scarce. Individual copies and bound volumes from the early 1950s and before were yellowed and crumbling. Later issues were long out of print; many were available only on microfilm in a limited number of libraries.

Reproducing `New International'
"As the magazine became less and less accessible, the valuable political legacy it contained was in growing demand by a new generation of communist youth," the editors explain in the introduction. "To meet this need, supporters of New International decided to take up the challenge of making the magazine broadly available once again."

Since 1989, some two dozen volunteers have worked to prepare a subject and author index of all 3,800 articles and to scan the magazines to turn them into digital files.

Chris Remple, who was part of the team that just completed work on the third volume, explained in a recent phone interview how the Collected New International is organized to make it as easy as possible for youth and working-class fighters to have access to the rich political legacy contained in the magazines.

"You can look up a topic, author, or title, and get a list of articles on the CD and where else these articles have been published," Remple noted.

"From the Main Menu you can click on the subject index. There you can page through the index or go directly to a subject you are interested in," Remple added.

Among the topics written about are: "Fascism and the Anti- Fascist Struggle," "Cuba: Land Reform," "Black Struggle: Nationalism and Self-Determination," and "Imperialism and Interimperialist Rivalry." Clicking on any subject will produce a list of all relevant articles published on the three-volume CD-ROM set. Then you can click on the title and the article will come up on your screen.

Or you can go to the author index and look up a particular author, James P. Cannon, for instance. The index will list all the articles published under his name from 1934 to 1994. You can also check the Pen Name index to see whether he published articles under any other name. If the article was published in book form, the Published Elsewhere index will tell you where you can find it.

The articles on CD-ROM can also be printed. They include the photographs and drawings that were used in the magazine. The covers have been reproduced in their original colors. Ads, cartoons, letters, and book reviews that were part of the theoretical magazines are all included as well.  
 
 
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