Burnham Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 54, 17 December 1938, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
If we were a publishing house, we would discuss the question of a twice-weekly paper merely as a business venture. We would argue about whether it would make more or less money, whether there is a sufficient market, whether advertising would increase, and the like.
We are not a publishing house, but a political party. This means that we approach every publishing venture, and every other enterprise as well, in terms of political aims and needs.
This is a fact of primary importance, one sometimes overlooked even by ourselves. We must take care never to regard our publications as simply commercial or literary or cultural institutions.
Our publications are above all political weapons: and -in the final analysis they are perhaps our strongest and most decisive weapons. They bind us together as a united army; they strike our hardest blows; they are our daily and never-tiring organizers.
That is why the project for a twice-weekly APPEAL, is for us, modest as the action may seem in the light of the world crisis, an event of the first political magnitude. To carry it out successfully means to take a, major political step forward, to enter an altogether new stage in political development.
This step we must all understand, in turn, as only the prologue to the crucial test that we must place resolutely in the close future: the advance to a fighting daily.
Forward, then, to the twice-weekly APPEAL, on the road to the daily!
Burnham Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Last updated: 12 September 2015