Workers World newspaper read by more at home and abroad

If a sign of the prestige of a Marxist newspaper is the amount of articles that are reprinted, quoted and translated by other progressive and Marxist websites and newspapers, then Workers World is in good standing. If you scan the progressive and Marxist press on websites from this country and abroad, you will often find Workers World articles. Below is a representative collection of Workers World articles published this year on websites and in newspapers in the U.S. and around the world.

Issues related to African Americans and Africa have been reprinted frequently on progressive websites. Abayomi Azikiwe’s article “African-American farmers struggle” on the Black farmers’ fight for compensation from the U.S. Department of Agriculture because of past racism was featured on marxistleninist.wordpress.com. A Somali-related website, www.banadir.com, carried Azikiwe’s article on possible aggression against the people of Somalia, “Pentagon threatens to bomb Somalia.”

A recent article by Jen Waller on the climate conference in Bolivia was republished in nordis.net, a website based in the northern Philippines, and on williambowles.info.

A Workers World article on the March 4 student movement also garnered interest in the international leftist press. The article, “Countrywide struggle unites students, workers, community” by John Catalinotto, featured an interview with Larry Hales, a leader of the youth group FIST (Fight Imperialism, Stand Together). Hales describes the variety of militant actions that students took in defense of public education and against education cuts around the country on March 4, a struggle in which he played an important role.

This interview was translated and published in its entirety by the Italian Marxist website resitenze.org. It was also the basis for articles in the Portuguese Communist Party weekly Avante (avante.pt) and on the website Terra e Tempo (terraetempo.com) in Galician, the popular language spoken in the Northwest region of Spain. (Nearly 100,000 people demonstrated in the main square of Santiago de Compostela on May 17 in defense of the Galician language as part of the struggle for self-determination. WW managing editor Catalinotto is a regular contributor to the above two websites.)

The upsurge in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist struggle in Latin America over the past decade has greatly increased discussion in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language press concerning progressive politics in Latin America and abroad. There has been a concomitant interest in Workers World articles in the Spanish- and Portuguese-language press.

WW owes much of its success in that arena to the determined work of the Mundo Obrero editorial staff, who translate major WW articles each week to fill one page of text.

For example, the Spanish language website kaosenlared.net reprinted Fred Goldstein’s article “The health care bill: What it means for workers” from the MO version. This article was also translated into Portuguese for Avante and posted on odiarinfo.info, an important Portuguese Marxist website, and on the website vermehlo.org of the Communist Party of Brazil. It was also reprinted at rebelion.org, a widely read Spanish-language leftist website, with articles covering all the Spanish-speaking and other countries. This website also recently reprinted Fred Goldstein’s article “Jobless recovery: The only solution is class struggle.”

Pope and politics

The article that set this year’s record for translations was Sara Flounders’ analysis entitled “The Pope, pedophilia and the class struggle.” It garnered special attention from those who had themselves been subjected to religious education and discipline in their childhood, who became the driving force to translate this article into Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese and to publish it widely in many countries where Catholicism is the major religion. It can be found in all the languages at tlaxcala.es, the home of the Tlaxcala network of volunteer progressive translators, and at iacenter.org.

Workers World articles on the Middle East and Afghanistan are also widely distributed. Sara Flounders’ article “US-NATO offensive unravels in Afghanistan: The longest war in U.S. history” was reprinted on the Canadian anti-imperialist website globalresearch.ca. The Italian-based site resistenze.org has regularly translated and published WW articles, including “U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hit women the hardest” by Joyce Chediac.

Beside some of the sites mentioned above, the British Marxist weekly the New Worker (newworker.org) regularly published articles from WW in their print and web editions.

It’s important to note that this is only a summary of a small selection of WW articles republished by the movement around the world. This global distribution and reading of articles by serious political thinkers and actors worldwide highlights the importance of submitting articles to WW and contributing financially to keep Workers World newspaper strong for the entire movement.