The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is introduced by Wikipedia this way:
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) is a communist party in the United States. Originally a group in the Communist Party USA that supported Leon Trotsky against Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it places a priority on "solidarity work" to aid strikes and is strongly supportive of Cuba. The SWP publishes The Militant, a weekly newspaper that dates back to 1928. It also maintains Pathfinder Press.
Among its earliest founders and also its most prominent leader was James P. Cannon, who wrote two books that are likely still required reading for any wannabe Trotskyist: The History of American Trotskyism, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party. The former is still well worth reading; the latter is forgettable.
Mr. Cannon spent sixteen months (1944-1945) in jail for violating the Smith Act, later ruled unconstitutional. He wrote many Letters from Prison, now collected in a volume by that name. Among those letters (dated Dec, 1944) is a disquisition on the role of the Party's newspaper, The Militant. Excerpts from that letter are republished in this week's Militant under the headline From prison, Cannon proposed SWP expand reach of ‘Militant’. (I don't have access to the full letter; my comments here are based only on the excerpt.)
I'm not clear why The Militant republishes this. It is so out of date that it provides no guide as to what role the paper should play today. Rather than flattering the The Militant, it makes it look ridiculous. Mr. Cannon's lede paragraphs (ellipses and italics in original):
What kind of a paper will best serve the needs of the new party in the next period which lies immediately before us? We used to think, or rather take for granted, that as we broke out of the narrow propaganda circle and began to get a hearing from the workers, we should aim at changing the weekly into a daily. …
It was also assumed that, as the paper became a “mass” paper, it would be obliged to adapt itself to the political understanding of the average, if not to the lowest common denominator, among its new readers; leaving the more complicated political and theoretical explanations to the monthly magazine. …
By "next period" Mr. Cannon means the immediate future, i.e., the next few years after the war. He predicts that the paper will break out of the "narrow propaganda circle," and become widely read. Of course this turned out to be wrong. Apart from a sharp recession immediately following the war, the American economy entered into a long period of rapid growth that extended for twenty years through the 1960s. Living standards during that time more than tripled.
The reasons for this growth are detailed in Robert Gordon's marvelous book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth--and contrary to what my Trotskyist friends will claim, it has little to do with the wartime destruction of Europe. The fact is that the economy was growing at 6% annually, there was a decades-long labor shortage and so the unions were fat and sassy, and nobody wanted to turn the economy over to know-nothings like Jim Cannon and Farrell Dobbs. The political effect of all of this was an allergic reaction to all things "communist", culminating in the McCarthy senate hearings.
To reach this promised next period, Mr. Cannon details what the Party needed to do next.
But what we have to do next is to reach more and more new people, catch their attention at the moment when they are just awakening from political indifference, and try to reach them with our message regularly. A big national weekly is ideally suited to this task.
He then answers two questions about the role The Militant is supposed to play.
The first question is about the price--it definitely should not be free. (Italics in original; ellipses mine.)
The principle that readers must pay for the paper is a sound one; people are inclined to put a higher value on things they pay for, even if it is a very small amount, than on throwaway sheets which they get for nothing. ... [E]xperience has also shown that it is the principle of paying, not the amount paid, that is most important. The two should not be confused and lumped together.
Mr. Cannon asserts a very capitalist principle, namely that prices mean something. The price is a representation of value, and when people pay for something it means they value it more. How different this is from, say, Cuba, where the ration card is more important than money. Things like housing and medical care--which should have a high value--are given away for free. People don't take care of things they get for free, which is why the housing stock in Cuba is so miserable.
The second question is about the intended audience The Militant is supposed to reach. The paper should serve two audiences simultaneously. The majority of readers, in Mr. Cannon's imagination, will be the unwashed masses, who coming to Trotskyism for the first time will need a simple introduction to the dogma. At the other extreme are folks who have been around the movement for longer and are interested in more substantive and complex articles. Of course there is the spectrum in between--and The Militant will have to accommodate them as well.
As Mr. Cannon points out, the Party did not have the resources for two weekly newspapers--one will have to accomplish both tasks.
Of course it never happened. The Militant never became a mass market weekly and Mr. Cannon's market segmenting problem never arose.
What I found surprising is Mr. Cannon never discusses The Militant as an organizing tool. The model for this was Lenin's paper Iskra, which was used to share information among class conscious workers throughout Russia. Of course Lenin's organization was at that time illegal, which made such information transfer essential. The Militant was not illegal.
In any case, it's all gone awry. Every October the paper has to publish a Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation to comply with postal regulations. This includes circulation figures. From the issue dated October 25th, 2021 (pdf, p. 8), under the "Average Number of Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months" category, the "Total Paid Distribution" was 2,553 copies. This is a very far cry from being a mass market weekly.
I think 1972 might represent the high water mark for The Militant's circulation. Thus choosing the postal statement printed in the October 13, 1972 (pdf, p. 26) issue, we learn that "Total Paid Distribution" was 24,605 copies. This is ten-fold better than what they're doing today, but still a far cry from a mass market weekly.
Mr. Cannon served as National Secretary of the SWP from 1938 until his retirement in 1953. That latter year--when the political prospects for communist revolutionaries was at its nadir--must have been when Mr. Cannon recognized the futility of his efforts. The Militant was never going to achieve mass market status in his lifetime.
His successor, Farrell Dobbs, served as National Secretary until 1972, when he retired. And his successor, Jack Barnes--today an octogenarian--still holds the office! This, I think, is a scandal. The Party needs to pass term limits or a mandatory retirement age.
Further Reading:
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