Workers World reaches international audience
By John Catalinotto
From a talk at the Sept. 21-22 Workers World Party
conference.
As war threatened in South Asia last spring, Workers World
newspaper editors received the following email from a young
Pakistani communist:
"I have already read your editorial as well as the article
by Fred Goldstein. We also passed these on to our youth study
circle. Both your articles were absolutely spot-on. They really
hit the mark.
"Hope to read many more articles by you and the Workers
World on India-Pakistan and other issues.
"Taimur, Communist Workers and Peasants Party of
Pakistan."
To generate the contents of Workers World newspaper each
week takes dozens of organizer-writers plus photographers,
editors and proofreaders. Then Lal Rookh and the rest of the
tech staff use their art and political know-how to lay it out
in attractive, readable form.
Printed, it becomes a tool to collectively educate, agitate
and organize Workers World Party members, the progressive
movement in this country and the working class.
Now, in the 21st century, new technological developments
make a different form for this same content possible.
Most readers of WW probably don't know that:
A south Korean radical group--Base 21--posts Workers World
articles on its Web site.
A South African study group downloads and prints articles
from Workers World, then reads and discusses them. These can
include Monica Moorehead's analysis of the struggle to win
reparations for Africans and African Americans, or the question
of land takeovers in Zimbabwe, or anything else in the
paper.
An Arab leftist in Damascus frequently translates Workers
World articles, which then appear in daily newspapers in
Syria.
Cuban sites also post some of the WW articles, where people
can then read of developments in the U.S. independent of
CNN.
Portuguese Communist Party members, who maintain an
unofficial Web site in the Portuguese language at
resistir.info, recently translated and posted two of Deirdre
Griswold's articles. Activists with Internet access in
Portugal, Brazil and parts of Africa can read them.
The Workers Party of Belgium (PTB) recently translated into
French and Dutch and posted by Thursday afternoon Brian
Becker's report from Iraq-- which Janet Mayes sent out to WW's
email subscribers the night before.
Spanish communists last year passed around an article Teresa
Gutierrez wrote on why the U.S. progressive movement should
support the FARC-EP in Colombia.
A British communist newspaper, The New Worker, often
publishes WW articles for its U.S. news.
This sample demonstrates a growing international interest in
WW and in Workers World Party, much of it possible because the
articles are quickly available by email or at the
www.workers.org Web site. It's also because WW editor Gary
Wilson spends many hours each week maintaining an attractive,
useful and accessible site.
But behind the growing interest is also the decisive role
Workers World Party has played in the anti-war movement in the
U.S.
Because the U.S. is the home office of war, whatever the
movement here is able to do has worldwide impact. That an
organization with revolutionary socialist goals plays a leading
role in the anti-war movement in the center of imperialism
encourages and inspires communist revolutionaries
worldwide.
No single act was more important in building Workers World
Party's reputation than its firmness after Sept. 11, 2001. Then
WWP supplied the core of the movement that immediately
protested Bush's exploitation of the World Trade Center deaths
to open an endless war. This firmness provided all the many
other courageous groups and individuals in the U.S. with a
center to rally around.
This helped anti-imperialists around the world as they could
point to the clear resistance in the center of the Empire. It
also aroused growing interest worldwide in WWP's analysis of
U.S. and world events.
Reprinted from the Oct. 10, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe to WW by Email: wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Donate to
support pro-labor, anti-war news.
Email
this article
Printable
page