No buzz for Aldrin?

The Vanguard Newsletter Committee was a small Trotskyist group in the United States, led by Harry Turner. Turner's newsletter is filled with intra-mural polemics, articles delineating Trotsky's positions on various issues, and reports on various Turnerite attempts to broker unity with other equally small groups (some of them exotic). While less crackpot than the Spartacist League and the Workers League (their main competitors on the radical flank of U.S. Trotskyism), Turner's group nevertheless give a rather tiresome, dogmatic and sectarian impression. Ironically, the Turnerites were *smaller* than Spartacist and the Workers League! Eventually, Turner's little band declared themselves in sympathy with the Morenoite LIT-CI, the largest Trotskyist denomination in Latin America. But that was still in the future when “Vanguard Newsletter” was hot off the mimeograph.

This is apparently a set of all seven issues of “Vanguard Newsletter” published in 1969. A large portion of the newsletter is devoted to a defense of Trotsky's positive view of Black self-determination and self-organization. There are also polemical articles against the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist Labor Party and the Black Panther Party. An article on the moon landing declares: “Revolutionary socialists, on the contrary, aware of the explosive character of the increasingly powerful forces in the hands of the American imperialists, see the moon landing as an alarm, as a warning of impending disasters for mankind, unless an end is made to this most aggressive and predatory ruling class and its increasingly irrational capitalist system by a working class revolution.” No buzz for Aldrin, huh?