Communist newspaper leaves small mark on campus

The booth publicizing Workers Vanguard — a communist newspaper published by International Communist League — was set up in the Pit last week.

Nick Cebollero, a Student Union staff member, said there was no reservation about setting up the booth that publicizes a communist newspaper.

“I don’t feel anything against it,” said Shannon Wu, a UNC student. “I saw them multiple times last week. I wasn’t really looking at what they tried to publicize, but it should be free to express ideas on campus.”

Workers Vanguard’s latest issue published on Sep. 18 urged for a socialist movement to achieve women’s right to abortion.

“They (people in the booth) are exercising freedom of speech like a pit preacher,” said Joyce Cho, a UNC student. “I saw them in front of the Undergraduate Library during lunch time and found nothing wrong with it.”

UNC professors believed the booth publicizing Workers Vanguard is not likely to influence students.

Gary Marks, a UNC political science professor and co-author of the book, “It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States,” said communism is a tiny faction in American politics.

“There are very few ties to the Communist Party amongst the American people,” Marks said.

“Historically, several hundred political parties have campaigned on the names of socialist, community or farmer-labor, but there are few today,” he said. “They have almost no electoral support — with the partial exception of Bernie Sanders, who had described himself as a Socialist.”

Konrad Jarausch, a history professor at UNC, said he believed the International Communist League — the publisher of Workers Vanguard — is not very influential in world politics.

“A few Asian countries such as China, Vietnam and North Korea are still nominally clinging to communism, but most are changing toward a market economy,” he said.

Jarausch said there is not going to be a mass movement reviving socialism.

“That looked more likely 100 years ago,” he said. “More recently protest movements have been populist affairs invoking disparate intellectual traditions.”

It has been more than 50 years since the Speaker Ban controversy — the conflict over the N.C. bill that forbade any speech from a known Communist Party member on UNC campus — sowed the seeds of student activism for freedom of speech.

The ban was lifted in 1968 after high profile protests of the ban on UNC's campus.

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