[lbo-talk] Publishing on the Left

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Jon Johanning zenner41 at mac.com, Tue Dec 7 09:29:32 PST 2004:
>On Dec 7, 2004, at 12:19 AM, joanna bujes wrote:
>
>>  Yes, there is something almost scholastic about these publications.
>>  Many Marxists/communists/socialists will argue for the need to advance
>>  theory. I wonder. It seems much more important to reintegrate ideas
>>  about commons, sharing, pride in work, communal responsiblity, etc. in
>>  our shared sensibility than anything else. I would be much happier
>>  with a socialist "alternative" type paper -- that talked about all of
>  > life -- cooking, sports, jobs, relationships, books, music, ...than
>>  with another grave digging expedition in the socialist annals.
>
>Your idea of a socialist alternative paper sounds very attractive. 
>There have been attempts at it, but I don't know of any that are 
>currently active.

If American leftists had built a mass political party on the left, 
instead of supporting the Democratic Party, they could have developed 
and sustained a newspaper like the _Akahata_, a daily newspaper 
published by the Japanese Communist Party, which does talk about all 
of life, including but not at all limited to "cooking, sports, jobs, 
relationships, books, music"  -- you can see a cooking recipe in a 
photograph of the Sunday edition of the _Akahata_ at the bottom of 
<http://www.jcp.or.jp/akahata/week/index.html>.

No mass political party on the left -> no mass-circulation daily 
newspaper on the left.

Yoshie