Manager's Column (June 1945) (original) (raw)
Fourth International, June 1945
From Fourth International, vol.6 No.6, June 1945, p.162.
Transcribed, marked up & formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for ETOL.
Because of the great increase in the cost of printing and mailing Fourth International, we are compelled to raise the price of single copies to 25c, also to raise the price in bundle orders to branches to 20c a copy. This price increase will become effective with the July issue. Subscription rates will remain the same – 1forsixmonths,1 for six months,1forsixmonths,2 for one year.
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Bound volumes of Fourth International for 1944 are now ready for delivery to our readers. This volume, bound in red cloth and lettered in gold, includes an index listing material by subject as well as author. The price is $4.50 a volume.
A limited number of bound volumes for previous years are still available – 1938 through 1943 – and we will be glad to furnish prices upon request.
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Our agent in Milwaukee sent the following carefully thought-out suggestions which he feels will improve Fourth International:
“The FI has no parallel. But, of course, we aim to perfection. To achieve a good balance (especially when the aim is to broaden the circulation), to have ‘popular’ material and to maintain the theoretical quality is not too easy. The article by Lily Roy was good and was in the direction of attracting less theoretical readers to the FI. Another suggestion I would like to make is that we have a few popularizations (the popularizations that do exist, chiefly Kerr, are either out of print or are inadequate) of Marxist economics, historical materialism etc. These also would help in educating and in increasing the circulation.
“Please do not think me presumptious for throwing out all these suggestions. They have been gestating for sometime.”
We not only welcome these suggestions from our Milwaukee agent, but urge that all agents and readers of Fourth International send in any suggestions which they feel will improve the magazine.
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Subscribers sorely miss those issues of Fourth International they don’t receive for one reason or another.
- M.V. of St. Louis writes: “I haven’t been receiving my copies of Fourth International. Will you please look into this matter and I would like to have all the numbers I didn’t receive ... I checked now and my last number was the January issue. Please excuse me too for not informing you of this sooner, as I have been working in defense work 10½ hours a day (52.5 hour week). I hardly had any time to read, but I will have more time from now on. The plant is going on a 44-hour week and I won’t be so tired.”
- M.P. of Chicago: “To punish myself for not paying for my subscription when it was due, I am paying you 3bycheck.Theextra3 by check. The extra 3bycheck.Theextra1 you may apply to an extension of this subscription or as you may see fit.”
The following successful method for building sales is reported by Sidney Crabbe, our Boston agent:
“Our FI sales have been very bad for the past period and I was considering recommending to the branch a cut in our bundle order. I decided first to recommend hawking the FI along with our pamphlets at suitable community meetings and forums. In our first attempt our star salesman, H. Powers, sold 11 copies of the magazine. If these sales continue we shall be able to maintain our present bundle order.”
Boston has not cut its bundle order. We assume, therefore, that this method of selling Fourth International continues to be successful.
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We quote at length from a letter sent us from Coventry, England:
“We are not going to disguise the fact that we could do with some of your material at the present time, especially the Fourth International. If it is possible to supply us with any bound or collated issues of the FI we should be pleased to get hold of them. In our opinion there is no other journal that can compare with the FI from an educational point of view. Its profound analysis of the various problems of Marxism and the tactics and strategy of the American and world working class movements gives the world Trotskyist movement a weapon of which there is no equal. In addition to the above request, if you would supply us with Trotsky’s In Defense of Marxism; and Cannon’s Struggle for a Proletarian Party, we should be really grateful.
“We cannot let this opportunity go by without mentioning that the struggle your party has put up on behalf of the imprisoned18 comrades is magnificent. We recognize in this struggle a well-thought out tactic to reach through these means to the broader masses of the American proletariat. On the basis of such tactical struggles, successfully carried through, are mass parties built. We have no doubt from reading your material that Trotskyism will achieve a mass base in the not too distant future.
“We regularly get The Militant and Fourth International and they have always been valuable to us in our own personal theoretical training and also to impress workers, especially Stalinist workers who are approaching our movement, with the development of our American party and the international scope of our tendency.”
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Last updated on 9.9.2008