First Published: The Call, Vol. 7, No. 48, December 11, 1978.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
One of the key goals of the current campaign to build The Call is the expansion of newspaper sales in the factories and communities.
In the article below, a team of Call sellers at Detroit’s Chevy Forge auto plant describe their two-and-a-half-year battle to root the newspaper among the plant’s 1,800-member workforce.
We can see the progress that we’ve made in bringing The Call to the workers since sales first started in the spring of 1976. Today, we sell 100 Calls a week on a regular basis, sometimes even twice that. And just as important, a group of Chevy Forge workers have begun to distribute the paper themselves inside the plant.
How did we build this relatively strong base of support and readership?
It wasn’t easy. We found that two-line struggle was the heart of our Call selling team, the motor that drove us on to achieve successes.
We found that we had to wage political struggle to understand why we should be out there selling the paper, why we also needed to start up a sales network on the inside, and how to link up the newspaper to the workers’ own concerns.
We came up against problems almost as soon as we started our sales work. After some initial enthusiasm, some of us began to lose interest.
“Why go out?” was the question on our minds. And instead of answering this question, some team members at first tried to solve this problem of a lack of enthusiasm bureaucratically. “Just go and sell at the gate!”
“It was a battle to get myself to go each week,” one team member recalled. “I kept having doubts about whether the workers were really interested, about whether this really helped build the communist party and advance the revolution or not.”
Then we experienced our first real turning point in the team’s work. Instead of avoiding these political questions, we went back and studied up on the role of a revolutionary newspaper like The Call.
We read and discussed What is to be Done?, the classic Marxist work by the Russian communist leader V.I. Lenin. In this book, Lenin shows how a revolutionary newspaper is the best tool for educating and organizing workers around common work and a common plan of struggle, as well as for bringing communist ideas to the people. Lenin described the newspaper as a “scaffolding” around which a communist party can be built.
The distribution of such a newspaper shouldn’t be haphazard. As Lenin pointed out in another of his works, Letter to a Comrade, the seemingly “mundane” job of distribution is vital to the revolutionary movement.
“Arranging for and organizing the speedy and proper delivery of literature,” Lenin explains here, “... training a network of agents for this purpose, means performing the greater part of the work for preparing for future demonstrations or an uprising.
“It is too late to start organizing the distribution of literature at a time of unrest, a strike, or turmoil...”
Once we understood this, we began viewing our sales work differently. We did more than just stand at the gates and sell the paper.
For one thing, we studied each issue more closely ourselves.
We tried to pick out articles we thought would especially interest Forge workers.
When workers showed interest in The Call or in the struggle inside the shop, we got their names and then paid them a home visit. Sometimes an active worker inside the plant would go along with us to encourage them to get involved.
We tried to learn as much as possible about the plant itself and the issues on the minds of the workers. Although none of us worked inside Chevy Forge, we learned a lot about the speedup, overtime, unsafe conditions, discrimination and other problems workers were fighting against.
We got some of the regular readers involved in discussion groups where they could share their ideas and experiences, not only about the articles in The Call but also about the fight against the bosses.
Even with all this, though, we could only go so far in building support for The Call. In order to root the paper deeper, we had to get directly involved in the actual struggles at Chevy Forge. The day we did this–that was the second turning point in our work as a Call selling team.
On October, 9, 1977, a Black worker at the Forge shot his foreman after months of racist harassment and abuse from him and from the company. His name is Robert “Smitty” Smith, and his case became a focus for the struggle in the whole shop.
When Smitty shot his foreman, our team members were immediately notified by workers. We talked with people during the lunch hour and tried to find out what had happened.
By the end of the shift that same day, The Call selling team was back at the plant gates distributing a leaflet in defense of Smitty.
The Call soon became the most visible voice in Smitty’s defense. Articles on the growing plant-wide effort to free Smitty appeared regularly in the paper, and many Forge workers came to rely on The Call for news and analysis of the struggle.
Call sales doubled. The paper could now be found all over the plant and inside the union hall. Neither the GM bosses nor the union bureaucrats, who tried to squash the “Free Smitty” movement in the union, could stop The Call or lessen its new influence. The Call, in fact, exposed the UAW misleaders and showed how their attitude towards Smitty fit in with their refusal to fight GM on other issues.
It became easier for Forge workers to tell the difference between The Call and the various opportunist and phony “communist” papers which were also sold at the gates.
“That’s the paper that freed Smitty!” was how one reader described The Call after Smitty’s April 1978 trial ended in victory. Many could see how The Call had been a powerful force in building the struggle against the railroad of Smitty and the exploitation and oppression that stood behind it.
Many of the more active workers at Chevy Forge now regard The Call as their own newspaper. When something happens in the plant, they expect The Call to write about it.
Also, when GM tried to drive the sales team away, workers got together and wrote up a leaflet defending their right to buy the paper. “Don’t mess with The Call!” was the title.
Despite the fairly good state of our gate sales, we know that the day will come when the ruling class tries to stop the CPML from getting its voice out to the people. In a period of increased repression, or even fascism and war, public Call sales at factory gates may be banned.
But even if such open selling isn’t possible, Forge workers will still get The Call. That’s because we have laid the basis for a strong distribution system inside the plant among the workers, a network that can survive the attacks of the bosses and the government.
We still have a long way to go in building The Call at Chevy Forge. Aside from increasing sales to a bigger share of the workforce, we want to involve and train more correspondents for the paper. We also want to establish more study and discussion groups around the paper.
If we continue with this approach, we think The Call will be an important force in the struggle and debate at Chevy Forge around the upcoming 1979 contract.