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A.J. Muste & Louis F. Budenz

“We Must Build Our Paper”

Statement of the National Executive Committee
of the CPLA on the task of building Labor Action

(15 September 1933)


From Labor Action, Vol. 1 No. 10, 15 September 1933, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).


The National Executive Committee of the CPLA has decided that a major effort must be made at once to build up Labor Action. We call upon all militant workers to help us to do the job.

Labor Action has met with the utmost enthusiasm from its readers. “Here’s the paper,” workers have said, “which talks in our own language about the things in which we are really interested.” But Labor Action has too few readers, too few subscribers, too few who take bundle orders and sell them.

Never have the workers in this country faced a greater crisis. The next few months will probably decide. literally, whether Fascism will be fastened upon them or whether they will march on to achieve “the third American revolution” and build here a genuine republic of the workers, for the workers, by the workers.

A fighting paper is indispensable to the workers in this crisis.

The N.E.C. has signified its appreciation of the seriousness and urgency of the job by appointing Cara Cook as circulation and promotion manager of Labor Action.

Cara Cook was recently in charge of the office of the Ohio Unemployed League in Columbus and played an important part in making the arrangements for the great national convention held in Columbus on July 4.

She will do a good Job but in spite of that will fail unless she has at least a few hundred circulation managers around the country to support her. Whoever you are, reading this announcement, you are hereby appointed circulation manager.

Get busy immediately. There are all kinds of things you can do. Write Cara Cook that you will back her up and get suggestions as to how you may most effectively help. Subscribe yourself if you have not already done so. A year’s subscription is $1.00; 3 month’s subscription is 25c. Get your fellow workers and friends to subscribe. Get your union, unemployed league, club to take subscriptions with a bundle order for its members. Perhaps you or some relative or friend can become an agent working steadily at getting subscriptions and selling individual copies in your shop, mine or neighborhood. Send in a contribution if you have already subscribed and can’t get additional subscriptions at once. Every penny counts. CPLA members and branches must at once place the problem of the distribution and sale of Labor Action in the forefront of their agenda.

There is no time to lose, not one minute. By direct and brutal or indirect and subtle means the effort is being made to crush every expression of radicalism, to deprive the working class of really effective weapons of resistance. The forces making this attack will put Labor Action out of business if they can. They know that there is nothing more dangerous today than a paper which tells the truth about NRA “in the American language.” Our answer to their attempt to do so will be to put out a better paper, sell It by the thousands and tens of thousand, make it the great means of educating the workers for revolutionary action out of the present crisis.

 

National Executive Committee
A.J. Muste, Chairman
Louis F. Budenz, Executive Secretary


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Last updated: 12 January 2022