With this issue, the Militant is adopting the same name and masthead for its Spanish-language section: El Militante. It is the name this socialist newsweekly has proudly held since its founding some 77 years ago. This is a cause for celebration. It’s a final step since we went bilingual in June in making the Militant a single paper with a few pages in Spanish and the same articles in both languages. With this shift all readers, including those who are more comfortable in Spanish, are drawn to the paper’s continuity and to how the Militant got its name.

The first issue of the Militant was dated Nov. 15, 1928. The paper has been published uninterruptedly ever since. The Militant’s continuity, however, goes back to October 1917, when workers and farmers in Russia stormed the heavens, took political power, and changed the world by carrying out the first successful socialist revolution. They were led by a revolutionary working- class party, the Bolsheviks, whose central leader was V.I. Lenin.

The Militant’s first editor, James P. Cannon, was a founding leader in 1919 of the Communist Party, which was forged by militant workers seeking to emulate the Russian Revolution. Cannon and other revolutionists were expelled from that party in 1928 for defending the course charted by Lenin in opposition to the policies implemented by a rising bureaucratic caste in Russia headed by Joseph Stalin. The Militant was central to the building of the Socialist Workers Party along this revolutionary course a decade later.

As Joseph Hansen, an SWP leader and editor of the Militant, put it in 1968, from the beginning the editors aimed to maintain the Militant as a “fighting paper integrated with the supreme task of our time—to build a combat party of the working class in the tradition of Leninism.” For this reason, throughout nearly eight decades of publication, the Militant has not only provided accurate news and Marxist analysis of the major battles in the class struggle around the world, but has served as a voice and organizer of the communist movement and the broader working-class vanguard.

The paper’s name fits its origin, continuity, and record. In a 1973 interview with James P. Cannon, Harry Ring explained how the Militant got its name. It was Cannon’s proposal and the idea stemmed from his relationship with Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Cannon had been the national secretary of the International Labor Defense (ILD), a nonpartisan committee initiated by the Communist Party in the mid-1920s to defend political prisoners. Defense of Nicola Sacco and Vanzetti, two anarchists framed-up by the government and executed in 1927, was a major activity of the ILD. Cannon visited them in prison several times. He described one memorable visit with Vanzetti.

“We had a long talk,” Cannon said. “Vanzetti was talking about a third member of their group who had jumped, or was pushed, out of a 10-story building when government agents had him prisoner and were examining him. I remember Vanzetti saying, ‘He wouldn’t have jumped. He was a good militant.’

“In the old radical movement,” Cannon explained, “that was an ordinary expression. That’s what you say about a person who’s active and giving all they’ve got to the movement. I proposed this name to designate what we were, and it was accepted.”

Adopting this name for the Spanish section of the paper builds on this revolutionary working-class tradition. “El militante” has a similar meaning as in English, a militant worker, in addition to its connotation in Spanish of a cadre of a political organization.

In a message to readers in the May 2 Militant we said that the monthly magazine Perspectiva Mundial—the Militant’s sister publication in Spanish since its founding in 1977—would cease publication in June. When we went bilingual, we maintained the designation Perspectiva Mundial for the Spanish-language section, even though the paper had one editor and one set of editorial volunteers for both languages. The three pages in the back contain translations in Spanish of the Militant’s featured articles and editorials each week—not summaries of several articles published in English the previous month, as was often the case in the PM monthly magazine, or sometimes features that appeared only in Spanish.

Readers have recently reported that Spanish speakers often refer to the paper as El Militante, not Perspectiva Mundial, when buying copies or subscribing.

After this brief period of transition, we are happy to announce the name of the Militant in Spanish is now more in line with its content and continuity and with how many of its readers see it.

In solidarity,
Argiris Malapanis, Editor  
 
 
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