Today’s post comes from “Workers World,” the official publication of the Workers World Party. The WWP founded by Sam Marcy, in New York in 1959 from a faction of the Socialist Workers Party. The WWP is a Marxist-Leninist group that ideologically supported China, until the early 1970s, the USSR and North Korea. Additionally   “the Workers World Party has been controversial for its support of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-il, and the Chinese crackdown on the “counter-revolutionary rebellion” in Tiananmen Square.”[1]

Box 608

Workers World June 9, 1972

The WWP was started by fewer than 100 people and never had a very high membership. According to Laird Wilcox, by the late 1980s, thirty years after the organization started, there were only a few hundred members of the WWP. [2]

In the issue highlighted today from 1978 there is a feature on American military action in Africa and Joanne Little. I believe that there is a type-o for the name Joanne Little and they are actually writing about Joan Little who killed a prison guard defending herself against a sexual assault in 1974. There was somewhat of a media frenzy around the Joan Little case which became a cause of the civil rights, feminist and anti-death penalty movements.

There are over 350 publications from the WWP in the Hall Hoag Collection.

Learn more:

The Workers World Party is still in existence today: http://www.workers.org/

WWP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_World_Party

Sam Marcy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Marcy

Joan Little: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Little

 

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_World_Party#CITEREFAlexander1991

[2] George, John and Laird Wilcox “Nazis, Communists, Klansmen, and Others on the Fringe” Prometheus Books (1992) pp.171-172