English

Louis Girard

Why I read the WSWS

During the late 90s, I began to interest myself more seriously in political and historical issues. The context of my developing politicization was the anti-globalization movement as well as an increase in poverty and social inequality, which I was beginning to be aware of. I would also say that the Littleton Colorado high school massacre in 1999 awakened in me the need to understand the reasons why.

In my last year of high school I enrolled in a course on 20th century history. One day, the history professor spoke about Marxism and made us read an excerpt from the Communist Manifesto. This had a huge impact on me. I saw in it the key to understanding the source of many problems and the means of solving them.

When I returned home, we had just gotten access to the internet, and so I typed the word “socialism” into a search engine. I came across several sites, including the wsws.org, and added it to my Favorites. At the time I was 16 years old. Over time, as I perused all these sites, I was not satisfied with the intellectual level of many of them, which contained a lot of quotes and pictures of socialist (or pseudo-socialist) leaders, but little content. One thing that I did not agree with was that Stalin was often misrepresented as the natural successor of Lenin.

One day I read the article by Nick Beams “Marxist internationalism vs. the perspective of radical protest - A reply to Professor Chossudovsky's critique of globalization ” which someone had the good idea to translate into French. I was very attracted by the overall idea, which was very well articulated in the text, and particularly by: “…Chossudovsky never addresses the question of why the post-war economic order, based on Keynesian-style demand management, collapsed in the first place.” … The WSWS was trying to understand the reasons for the rightward turn of all governments and of all the bourgeois parties.

From that time on, there have been few days when I have not read the WSWS. It answered many of my questions about our society. Barely one year later, the events of September 11, 2001 took place. I read everything that the WSWS wrote and I compared it with other ideas that were being circulated. The historical, objective and detailed analysis by the WSWS was by far the best I could find…

The WSWS plays a crucial role not only in bringing the ICFI to remote regions, but also in telling the truth and showing workers the political issues behind their everyday difficulties. It explains to workers what the program of the bourgeoisie consists of and how it has evolved historically, the devastating impact of this program on the living conditions of the population. It continuously denounces the pseudo-left which supports and adapts to this program.

In the course of all this analysis, the WSWS is the essential tool of the ICFI and its sections to demonstrate to the working class its historic role: the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and its replacement by a rational system of production, democratically run by the workers, that is to say, socialism.

I welcome the fact that the WSWS is gaining in influence. I will continue to contribute as best I can to its development and I encourage all those who read the site and agree with its analysis to do the same. We need you!

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