Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire, addressing the "African-Americans Speak Out for Palestine" forum on January 31, 2009 in Detroit. (Photo: Alan Pollock)
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Published Dec 23, 2009 1:08 PM
A message from Workers World editors
With 2009 coming to an end, we thought it would be a good time to bring our readers up to date on the success Workers World is having in spreading a Marxist outlook from “inside the belly of the beast” around the world and in many languages.
It’s a few days early to really take a measure of how much WW’s latest coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit has been sent around and picked up by different periodicals and their Web sites. But the article Sara Flounders wrote on the Pentagon’s pollution has already been republished on globalresearch.ca and translated into Spanish for rebelion.org.
Abayomi Azikiwe, who also edits panafricannews.blogspot.com for his longtime readers, wrote on the African bloc leading a walkout in Copenhagen. This article too has already been picked up by two or three friendly blogs and Web sites. Azikiwe’s articles on Africa in WW have broadened their reach, along with deepening our coverage. In November, one on “The imperialist grab for Africa’s resources” made it across the Atlantic to the New Worker newspaper in Britain.
Azikiwe, besides giving Workers World strong coverage regarding the African continent, writes about news in Detroit, a city that has gone from being the center of the automobile industry to the center of the capitalist depression. His coverage included the FBI killing of Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, with these articles picked up by Uhuru News, the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and Axis of Logic.
One of Azikiwe’s articles, on “Municipal bonds and the crisis of the cities,” drew a response from someone trying to maximize the response of the Black community to the 2010 census in the hope of getting more aid to depressed inner-city areas like Detroit.
Flounders’ article on the Pentagon budget was probably the most translated of any WW article this past year — at least that we know of. Many of Flounders’ articles are also published by globalresearch.ca, but this one was also translated to Spanish by the Mundo Obrero crew and showed up in kaosenlared.net; was translated into Portuguese by resistir.info and used on odiario.info and also published in the print edition of Avante, the weekly newspaper of the Portuguese Communist Party; was translated to French for the michelcollon.info Web site; and was translated into Japanese and distributed to anti-war activists there.
Solidarity with Honduras
Solidarity actions often generate coverage. This happened with John Parker’s reports of the Viva Palestina trip to Gaza, which were published in addictedtowar.blogsome.com and the San Francisco Bay View in the summer; and with the articles by LeiLani Dowell on the solidarity trip to Honduras in October, which were republished on trinicenter.com and by the Singapore Democrat News, among others.
Larry Hales’s insightful essay, “Tale of two cities in Pittsburgh,” which was written while organizing against the G-20 summit in September, was republished by exchangemagazine.com, by islamonline.net and by michigancitizen.com, among others.
Considering the political ferment in Latin America following the upsurge of the Bolivarian movement, it is extremely important for a Marxist newspaper to interact with the large and active Marxist movement — made up of different tendencies — throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. Through most of the region, this means a discussion in Spanish. Thus it is invaluable that the Mundo Obrero team of editors are each week selecting suitable WW articles, translating them into Spanish, and disseminating them to newspapers, webzines, blogs and political parties.
The MO editors have translated WW articles on the war in Afghanistan, on developments in U.S.-China relations, on the labor movement in the U.S., on the economic crisis, on the struggle in Iran and more, and these have been republished on influential sites based in Spain and in Latin America. Berta Joubert-Ceci, one of the MO editors, has had her own analytical articles on Honduras and on a big struggle in Puerto Rico republished on these sites after MO has translated them.
Articles on the economic crisis by Fred Goldstein, author of “Low Wage Capitalism,” have been republished. These tend to reach an audience of communist and labor organizers as well as economists. When MO translates them to Spanish, as it did for a recent “Outline” of the crisis, it brought a positive reaction from a South American communist leader looking for educational material on developments in the U.S.
These are the examples brought to our attention or published on Web sites and other media we follow. We invite the use of our articles, and hope editors will inform us of their use. If readers know of other sites that are reproducing WW articles or have ideas of how we can reach out even further, please write to jcat@workers.org.
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