1. (a) The primary political task is to increase the scope, intensity and numbers of people in mass struggles, struggles which objectively help to undermine the barriers that currently divide the working class, barriers such as sex, race, union bureaucracy. We are guided in this work by class struggle, anti-imperialist politics and these guidelines will help us expose the practice of left and right opportunist groups, groups such as the NDP, CP, and Trotskyists.
(b) The primary political task is not to consolidate the left around a systematic political program as a precondition for leadership of mass movements.
(c) The difference is between an orientation which stresses learning from" the working class and an orientation which stresses self-cultivation of the petite-bourgeoisie.
2. (a) Our first task on the newspaper is to investigate spontaneous, popular resistance and to identify the most progressive movements and most progressive tendencies within movements. Through regular discussions of our investigations we will contribute to the clarification of theoretical differences and/or ambiguities which will require study. But it must be stressed that knowledge of the subjective conditions is essential to the introduction of any meaningful political and class ideas, solutions, suggestions, interpretations. Failure to include the subjective side of things results in left opportunist practice, which is still the most dangerous error we are prone to make:
(b) Our first task is not research to sharpen our understanding of the theory of scientific socialism and the objective contradictions in Canada. There is a need for a national, theoretical communist journal, but at this time debate among communists has no place in the pages of the WV.
(c) The difference is between an orientation which stresses subjective consciousness of workers and an orientation which stresses objective forces and contradictions.
3. (a) Investigation of popular struggles requires contact, and over a fairly lengthy period of time, working relations with militant and politically advanced workers, agitators in other words. Agitators are the nucleus of higher forms of organizational unity and the real success of the WV depends on our ability to identify and work with a widening network of agitators. There is no need to argue the importance of leadership, but it must be leadership that is rooted in struggle, not imposed from the outside according to a pre-determined program.
The WV is an agitational paper: summarizing the experience of mass actions, drawing political lessons which are recognizable to the people involved in these actions, even though they may not have drawn those systematic conclusions themselves. Agitation is getting a few, simple ideas across in new and convincing ways. More discussion should take place as to what are the relevant, simple ideas. But there is an obvious difference in perspective between a paper which uses peoples’ struggles to “prove” that revolution is the only answer and a paper that participates in peoples’ struggles and helps identify new friends and enemies (e.g. the support for the Canadian union movement flushes out the NDP as a supporter of foreign domination, pro-imperialist despite its rhetoric.
4. (a) Our main current political task is to convince agitators of the need and usefulness of the WV to advance their own specific struggles and to keep informed through honest, systematic, popularly written reports with the work of other agitators^ The development of higher levels of unity between movements primarily depends on the growth of those movements themselves.
5. The form of the paper must be consistent with the political objectives. If the priority is building networks between militant and/or politically conscious workers, the present form of the WV has several glaring weaknesses.
(a) The amount and nature of the content makes the WV more like a magazine/journal than a newspaper. It is more appealing to people who have become trained to and enjoy reading as an activity and give this activity some priority in their life. At the same time it is not a theoretical magazine that debates current political priorities. At our best we provide relevant research necessary to the development of such debates.
But to continue in this way is to help preserve an existing “political“ culture, not to advance or broaden the movement.
(b) Partly because of the magazine tendency, the parts of the paper that do implement the network priority are buried, certainly to the reader and often to ourselves. This last aspect is evident in the almost total collapse of efforts to return the paper (which is the summary of our investigative work) to the network. An obvious priority in the last issue was collective distribution of the WV to postal workers, outside post offices, during shift changes.
(c) Network stories are not only a minority of the quantity of material printed, but there is little political discussion on the investigations except on cover stories which are written by more than one person.
(d) We constructued another paper, 8 pages, out of the last issue which tries to bring the form more into line with the network priorities. It is possible – with the exception of a lack of sufficient network news – to make two issues (weekly) out of the one issue (bi-weekly). This is not based, however, on a comparison of the financial costs of the two methods.
June, 1974