>
> Yes, I think it's a mistake to romanticize this plucky guy hawking the
> Daily Worker on a street corner no matter what the weather. Maybe New
> York City is just nastier than Minneapolis, but anyone who has been here
> any length of time gets used to seeing an assortment of cranks at their
> habitual postings around town flogging their idées fixes. No one to my
> knowledge has ever said, "Gee, look at those guys with nothing better to
> do than annoy passersby -- they must really have something to say!"
While I agree that one should not romanticize paper selling (sometimes declining sales means there is a problem with *you*, not the state of the working class), I still would argue that, if you accept the need for a fighting organisation, it makes sense to argue that such an organisation needs media, and that media needs to be distributed.
And since you're not going to get very far distributing media through established channels (at least not at first), you're going to need paper sales (which have the useful side effect of lots of interesting discussions, imo). Right?
Producing a selling a paper is not, in my mind, grounds for a judgement of insanity.
Peter
-- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk 'The demand to give up illusions about the existing state of affairs is the demand to give up a state of affairs which needs illusions.' - Karl Marx