Editorial

On the Importance of the Communist Press

On August 26, 1970 the first issue of People’s Canada Daily News, the daily newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), came off the presses. Since then CPC(M-L) has marked the last week of August as Party Press week.

People’s Canada Daily News began a tradition of communist journalism in Canada which was based both on proletarian partisanship and on the needs of the Canadian revolution. Its proletarian internationalism did not base itself on abstract “solidarity” with peoples fighting in other parts of the world. Rather, it took up the task of providing concrete assistance to all of those struggles through organizing the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism on Canadian soil.

There are many who dismiss the importance of the communist and revolutionary press because of its small circulation and limited influence. Others seek to denigrate the communist press by reducing it to the role of a clearing house for the views of others, including many who are sworn enemies of the working class and proletarian revolution. Of course, there is a necessity for a mass communist media, a mass media which fights for the interests of the working class and people. However, such a media will never be created by either bemoaning its weaknesses nor by eliminating its proletarian partisanship or burying that proletarian partisanship under a mountain of bourgeois propaganda.

The significance of the communist media is two-fold. First, it provides the working class with a voice to express its aspirations and to defend its historic mission as the gravedigger of capitalism, a voice which is denied it in the bourgeois media. The fact that this voice has a limited audience at this time is a reflection of the current marginalization and isolation of the entire working class movement, including the communist movement. Second, if the communists create their own journalism, rather than just promote the views of others, they are forced to actually look at the real world, analyze current developments and trends and predict where various social forces are headed. In other words, it forces the communists to think for themselves and hone their grasp of political science, to become actual leaders of society and not mere spectators and cheerleaders or critics of the activities of others. This is what it means to be a tribune of the working class and it is this tradition of revolutionary communist journalism that Modern Communism has strived to uphold for the past six and a half years.

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