The role of a revolutionary newspaper

Excerpts from a plenary talk given by Kris Hamel from Detroit at the Nov. 14-15, 2009, Workers World Party national conference in New York.

A revolutionary Party utilizes all methods to try and win the hearts and minds of the working class and the oppressed, so that our class sisters and brothers become partisan fighters alongside us in the global class struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialism.

There is one consistent weapon in our arsenal that wields the kind of power necessary to successfully wage a class war against the enemies of the workers and oppressed. It is a razor-sharp sword that has been with us for over 50 years now; it is Workers World newspaper.

At this time of great crisis and record unemployment, when so much makes so little sense to our class, Workers World newspaper is a powerful tool that we must get into the hands of the workers with ever-greater consistency and regularity. The pro-worker bias of Workers World paper is sorely needed by our class as an antidote to the lies and poison that the corporate-owned media bombard us with constantly.

V.I. Lenin, the great revolutionary leader of the Bolshevik Party, once wrote, “The newspaper can and should be the ideological leader of the Party, evolving theoretical truths, tactical principles, general organizational ideas, and the general tasks of the whole Party at any given moment.”

Isn’t this what our newspaper is all about? It lays out working class, socialist ideology. That means we explain everything using the parameters of the global class struggle, with the working class and oppressed peoples on the one side and the capitalists, the imperialists and exploiters on the other. When you read Workers World there’s no doubt which side we’re on.

Our paper lays bare the contradictions and impossibilities of capitalism to solve the problems of the working class and oppressed and its inability to provide a decent quality life for all. It highlights the struggles of the working class here in the U.S. and internationally. It projects the struggles that the Party is involved in and unifies us coast-to-coast in those struggles.

Workers World has been published since the Party’s founding in 1959 and became a weekly newspaper in the fall of 1974. It’s an amazing feat that our newspaper continues to be published on a weekly basis; 51 issues a year, at a time when other parties have only biweekly or monthly papers or have ceased publication altogether.

While Workers World’s readership has expanded exponentially because of the worldwide Web, we recognize that fewer and fewer working people are able to afford a computer these days or to purchase Internet service.

Every single comrade needs to distribute our paper; to sell subscriptions; to be there at every picket line or progressive event with a bundle of Workers Worlds; to make it a priority to get out.

The paper needs more comrades and friends to submit articles. We need younger comrades and new comrades to write, to become editors, to come up with new ideas and new ways of doing things. We’re excited that FIST comrades have started a quarterly newspaper called Left Hook.