First Published: The Worker, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 15-May 15, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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The Worker is the newspaper of the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters. It is published to serve as a weapon in the hands of the working class. From its first issue, the Worker has stood with the working people in the battle against the rulers of this country. From its first issue it has set the task of bringing into the battles of the working class an understanding of the nature of the enemy, how to fight them and wht the final good of that struggle is. The Worker stands with the working class and strives to build today’s movement into an all-out offensive against the rule of capital.
The Worker tells the truth. It tells the truth because it is partisan to the interests of the working class, the only class in society that has no interest in exploiting others. We have no interest in covering up. We couldn’t dream up anything worse than what the exploiters have done.
The Worker stands with the people. Our articles, our opinions, our paper all exist to promote the struggle of the working class and all the people oppressed by the capitalist system–here in the U.S. and around the world. In struggles like the miners’ strike or the fight against Rizzo in Philly we work to rally support for the cause, expose the actions and nature of the enemy and spread the lessons learned in the fight.
The Worker learns from the people because the people are the motive force for changing the world. Would be saviours have come and gone. Leaders have risen and fallen. The real test of their contributions to the struggle is whether or not their actions represent and advance the interests and aspirations of the people–the interests of fighting all the conditions of slavery and the aspirations not to be slaves at all.
In fighting the enemy we all come to learn their nature more deeply. In this process The Worker stands for socialist revolution as the goal of our present day struggle and the only final answer to the abuses and attacks we all face. We are for revolution not as a nice idea or as our private cause, but based on the needs of the struggle of our class. The need for a revolutionary movement of the working class lies at the base of every struggle we wage and the Worker strives to turn this need increasingly into the reality of a working class consciously fighting not to be slaves.
These are the principles, the foundation on which The Worker is based. Staying true to these principles is the test as to whether The Worker will be a weapon in the hands of more and more workers or just one more publication that professes in word to stand with the people, but in fact stands over the people.
In the past the Worker followed the political position of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In the recent period problems arose in the RCP because of the difficulty of combining the present workers movement with the movement for revolution. This has caused a major split. The RCP, in the face of the tasks of organizing in this period, has consolidated a position that amounts to sounding a retreat from standing with the struggle of the working people and on that basis working to lead it. To continue on in this task (which means, among other things, keeping true to the principles of The Worker) 40% of the members of the RCP have refused to retreat and instead formed the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters.
For 5 years the Worker newspapers for different areas of the country (and the papers that existed before them) took on the task of producing a paper that was a weapon in the struggle. In the beginning of this period, the Workers existed outside of the workers’ movement, but they took up the battles that were going on: the war in Vietnam, the struggle against discrimination and the growing resistance to the attacks that were coming down on the job. As the crisis developed and more and more people were thrown into struggle, the Workers continued to stand with these battles, expose the nature of the bloodsuckers who were running this system and increasingly played a role in organizing the working class to fight in its own interests.
While the motion was forward, the speed was not rapid enough for some of the leaders of the RCP. They increasingly saw only one side of the motion. To them the working class was not fighting enough for revolution, its struggle was at a low level, and not much could be done until the times changed to like they were back in the late ’60’s.
Instead of wishing for the old days and making comparisons to justify retreat from the tasks that present themselves, the role of revolutionaries is to stand at all times with the struggle and fight to push it forward. But this is not so according to the present leaders of the RCP, who see as their historic mission standing back from the fight and correcting people’s “backward” ideas. This has come out clearly in the recent history of the RCP where it has given up on figuring out how to fight the capitalists, the class enemy, by uniting people behind a political line. Now they take the struggle for granted and devote their main efforts to criticizing people, in and out of the RCP, for their “non-RCP” ideas. For example, in the recent miners’ strike, this line of thinking led the RCP members away from the main question at hand: mobilizing the masses inside and outside the union structure to beat back sellouts and government attacks. Instead they focused on running around trying to get people to join a small rank and file committee they were backing.
The task of The Worker is to stand with the people and build the battles that they are in. The RCP is bringing out papers they claim are “the Workers” but don’t do this at all. These “new Workers” preach at the people from the sidelines. In doing this they now join a whole host of other preachers who enter the struggle only to try and suckerbait people to their ideas.
The RCP has not confined their sermons to the people of the US. They also are hell-bent on preaching to the Chinese people as well.
In the RCP the present leadership made the key battle of their retreat over the question of the situation in China. To them the present leadership in China and the whole direction of the country is no good because a small gang of people (named the Gang of 4 by the great leader of the Chinese people and the international working class, Mao Tsetung) got locked up when they tried to take over the country. This Gang of 4 was nothing but a bunch of self-righteous, do-nothing preachers whose every action was based on advancing their own position and the position of their small band of followers.
In harmony with their position in the US, the RCP supports these people in China, who professed to see only difficulties and the danger of setbacks in taking up the necessary tasks of building a socialist society.
The masses of people in China put the Gang down because the people were not afraid of becoming counterrevolutionaries by getting their hands dirty in the job at hand. In the same way the people in the US will not be turned around, will not stop fighting, because there is less of a mass movement now than there was in, say, 1968.
Today the struggle still outstrips the level of organization. Today the main thing is not that the people are not fighting, but that the fight that exists needs to be better organized and more consciously led. This will not happen from the sidelines, this will not happen by just being around, ready to chip in with a thought here and a thought there. Progress will be made by being true to the principles that this paper was based on for years–by rejecting the preaching of the RCP, by learning from its negative example, but most of all by standing with the working class and fighting to promote its interests.