Socialist workers, members of the Young Socialists, and others who may want to join the circulation drive can do so as they participate in political events and protest actions, join strikers and others on picket lines, talk with co-workers on the job, and meet students on college campuses. Supporters will place a priority on getting out to working-class neighborhoods in the areas where they live and work, and showing the paper around on the job and to others in their unions.

Militant supporters will go into the drive with a big effort at the March 20–21 Rally for Rural America, reaching out to farmers, union activists, and others from across the United States who will travel in buses to Washington, D.C., to protest the crisis confronting farmers. A few days later on March 25 socialist workers will join with fellow unionists showing solidarity with locked-out members of the United Steelworkers of America at AK Steel in Mansfield, Ohio.

A central feature of politics in the United States today is that although strikes and labor battles are not necessarily winning more often, no matter what the immediate outcome, more workers decide to keep reaching out, joining in other actions, and building solidarity.

In a presentation at the Havana International Book Fair launching Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, Pathfinder president Mary-Alice Waters noted that the bosses' drive to lower wages, extend the working day, speed up production lines, and squeeze more out of workers in general has resulted in sharply worse conditions on the job in mines, mills, and factories across the United States.

"Under these conditions, a new mood of resistance and struggle is developing among working people in the United States, and a new vanguard is beginning to emerge out of the labor battles and struggles by working farmers to keep their land," Waters said.

"Working people, tested in struggle, are beginning to know and trust each other," Waters added. "They are beginning to take measure of their collective strength, to gain confidence, to extend the hand of solidarity from one struggle to the next. To come together and look for ways forward. And this is new.

"As this process unfolds, a new generation of young people, drawn toward these struggles, is awakening to political consciousness and action, and fighters of all ages are increasingly open to new ideas, looking for answers to explain the world in which we live. Just as important, they are looking for examples of how to fight back successfully against the most powerful ruling class the oppressed and exploited of the world have ever had to take on and defeat."

Waters's remarks highlight why there are increasing opportunities to reach out to working-class fighters and young rebels to win new readership to the socialist press, as well as new recruits to the communist movement.

Socialist workers organized in the industrial unions will be taking goals for all three publications for sales to fellow union members. Opportunities abound to win new subscribers among workers, including those who have been or are currently involved in labor battles. Among meatpackers on strike in New Zealand, Steelworkers locked out at Kaiser Aluminum, engineers and technicians striking for a contract at Boeing, hospital workers in France, dockworkers and truck drivers, coal miners protesting cuts in medical care and black lung benefits, and unionists marching to defend affirmative actions there are many who will want to regularly read the socialist press.

The subscription drive will be a concentrated effort by supporters in Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Sweden, the United States, and other countries around the world. It will build on the campaign to sell Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, which involved getting Pathfinder titles into the hands of workers, farmers, and youth, and getting libraries and bookstores to purchase copies of the book for resale. Some of the efforts around that campaign resulted in a few retail stores ordering weekly bundles of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.  
 

Building a revolutionary party

Many of the fighters who bought Capitalism's World Disorder will want to buy its companion volume: The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions. This Pathfinder title is a handbook on building a revolutionary party of industrial workers and its strategic course to fight for the transformation of the unions into revolutionary instruments of struggle. Both books and the Militant are tools for growing numbers who are attracted to a scientific analysis of the capitalist system and its inevitable social crises, which lead to economic devastation, fascist tyranny, and world war.

For these same reasons every issue of New International--in English, French, Icelandic, Spanish, and Swedish--is one that can help shed light on the historic lessons and conquests of working-class struggle, from the alliance of workers and farmers, to the place of the Cuban revolution in the world today, to why U.S. imperialism lost the Cold War. Each of these will help every vanguard militant become a better fighter, a more class-conscious proletarian, and more ready to consider the need to build a revolutionary party.  
 

Workers and farmers need 'Militant'

Workers, farmers, and young fighters need the Militant. It provides a proletarian internationalist outlook with coverage of struggles and political developments around the world. Like no other paper, it explains how the deepening crisis of capitalism spawns the seeds of reactionary and fascist movements from the Freedom Party in Austria to Patrick Buchanan's election campaign in the United States.

The paper helps arm workers with a more generalized view of the world and a scientific understanding of the world capitalist system as a whole. The Militant and Perspectiva Mundial help to link fighters together, including those involved in different struggles around the world. The Militant is the only newspaper where readers can absorb the true history and lessons of the international working-class movement or dissect the shifts in relations among all classes of society. The paper tells the truth about these political questions from a working-class viewpoint and presents communist answers and perspectives.

That's why this is a campaign for communism, which offers a revolutionary perspective and the fight for a new society.

The Militant encourages its supporters to send in notes and reports on sales activities and especially political discussions with workers and farmers about their views on world events. Many readers will be interested in the weekly progress of the circulation effort. Photos of literature tables, sales at protest actions, and at factory plant gates are welcome.  
 
 
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