Introducing Suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard Over the past year, the Spartacist League has formalized the publication of semi-regular issues of suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard and the inclusion of bilingual pages in the press.

Workers Vanguard No. 1151	22 March 2019

Introducing

Suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard

Over the past year, the Spartacist League has formalized the publication of semi-regular issues of suplementos en español de Workers Vanguard and the inclusion of bilingual pages in the press. These Spanish translations of WV articles help bring our revolutionary Marxist program to Spanish-speaking working people in the U.S. Our articles in Spanish are also aimed at reaching the Puerto Rican people, who are oppressed as U.S. colonial subjects and who have suffered massive repression in their struggles for independence.

The suplementos and bilingual pages are an expression of our commitment to addressing in Spanish Latino oppression, as well as the black question, the key to the American socialist revolution. This propaganda is an extension of lessons codified at the Seventh International Conference of the International Communist League in 2017, which reaffirmed the need to communicate in the languages of the workers and the oppressed as a counterweight to the “English only” chauvinism of the U.S. capitalist ruling class. (See “The Struggle Against the Chauvinist Hydra,” Spartacist [English-language edition] No. 65, Summer 2017.)

For decades, we have distributed Espartaco, the publication of the Grupo Espartaquista de México, the ICL’s Mexican section. Espartaco is key for our work in the U.S., home to the world’s second-largest Spanish-speaking population, and in Latin America, the Caribbean and Spain. The suplementos, produced in collaboration with our comrades of the GEM, expand our capacity to intervene in the struggles of the multiracial American working class, as shown by our recent bilingual leaflet, “L.A. Teachers: Strike to Win!” (printed in WV No. 1147, 18 January). The leaflet was issued and handed out on picket lines from the first day of this important strike in defense of public education and of a union with many Spanish-speaking teachers.

Our goal is to build a party dedicated to leading the proletariat in sweeping away this capitalist system and establishing workers rule. For that purpose, we want to arm the working class, including its white majority, with a program to fight on behalf of itself as well as the black and Latino masses. It is necessary for the labor movement to mobilize in opposition to anti-immigrant repression, raising the demands for full citizenship rights for everyone in the country and no deportations.

Another crucial demand to address the oppression of Latinos is the right to bilingual education, to learn English and also to preserve Spanish capacity. In the Southwest of the U.S. near the border with Mexico, many people speak Spanish fluently but cannot read or write it because there is no real access to quality bilingual education. As part of our opposition to privileges for English, we are for the elevation of Spanish to a recognized standard language in the Southwest.

The struggle for bilingual education is not limited to Spanish speakers but is vital for all immigrant communities and beneficial for those born here regardless of their ethnic origin. When workers speak more than one language, it helps to counter the divisions within the working class. Bilingual education is an essential component of the fight for free, quality, integrated public education. We also seek to break down the walls of the ghettos and barrios—that is, we fight for quality, low-cost, integrated housing, where black people and Latinos can live among whites as equals.

Today, Spanish-speaking workers make up a strategic component of the American proletariat, with many representing a living bridge to the struggles of its class brothers and sisters in their countries of origin. The Spartacist League seeks to build a party whose membership and leadership is 70 percent black, Latino and other minorities. Our work toward publishing propaganda in Spanish here in the belly of the imperialist beast better enables us to win over the most advanced Latino workers, who will fight under the banner of the Fourth International to construct the multiracial and multilingual vanguard party that will lead the working class to power.

Our readers in the U.S. and Puerto Rico who subscribe to Espartaco will also receive suplementos en español de WV. The archive of the suplementos can be found on the ICL website: www.icl-fi.org.