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A.J. Muste

“The Collective Propagandist”

(6 April 1935)


From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 16, 6 April 1935, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


“A paper is not merely a collective propagandist and collective agitator.” It is “a part of an enormous pair of bellows, blowing every spark of the class struggle and of popular discontent into a general conflagration.”

Thus spoke Lenin himself, master of theory and master also in the field of practical achievement.

If the symbol of the bellows applied to the organ of a revolutionary party was ever or anywhere appropriate, it is at this moment in the United States.

To take the popular discontent stirring everywhere in this country today, still manifest largely in the hearing given to utopians, false prophets and mountebanks and transform it into a revolutionary conflagration! To enable the fighting elements in the unions to take the leadership in steel, automobiles, textiles, rubber, away from the bureaucrats who want to put down the fire of discontent so that the discontent of the Workers with rising prices and felling incomes, with sham company unions, with labor hating bosses, may be fanned into a conflagration sweeping the nation like a prairie fire during this spring and summer! That is the task of the Workers Party.

To achieve that task the New Militant must be distributed in increasing thousands. It must become the paper of the American workers. Our field workers, our comrades in the front line trenches in the strike areas, our comrades who have to meet the arguments or the slanders of other parties and groups, the party organizers and members who meet the militant workers In the unions and unemployed leagues and win them for the party, – all must be armed with the New Militant – their work must be supplemented by the New Militant going in thousands into the factories, mines, stores, offices and workers’ homes.

Blow “every spark of the class struggle into a general conflagration”.

That means, today, support the New Militant subscription campaign.

 

National Committee of W.P.
A.J. Muste, Secretary


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