The campaign to date shows the potential for winning new readers and consolidating a strong subscription base of workers, farmers, youth, and others who follow and are influenced by the revolutionary socialist press. Workers on picket lines and at plant gates, students on campuses, and participants in protests against the U.S.-British occupation of Iraq have all subscribed.

In spite of these encouraging results, however, the international totals for the two socialist periodicals and for sales of Pathfinder books to subscribers have lagged over the past couple of weeks. Militant totals stand at 54 percent—9 percent behind schedule, with three weeks to go. Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions are at 60 percent of the goal, or 3 percent short of pace. In addition, 208 books have been sold along with subscriptions—107 behind where we should be.

Betsey Stone described how campaigners in Los Angeles had presented the two publications in door-to-door sales. “We found that showing people a combination of the front covers of the current Perspectiva Mundial with the photo of the locked-out workers at the Co-op mine in Utah and the Militant with the headline on the immigration raids at Wal-Mart got across a key part of what these publications are,” she said.

This helped illustrate the potential that immigrant workers have to strengthen the labor movement and the way that the bosses and their government try to break up working-class unity by victimizing those classed as “illegal,” Stone said.

The Co-op miners’ fight is having an impact in coalfield communities out West, reported Ilona Gersh. Back in Detroit on November 2, she spoke about the sales team in the western coal region that she had participated in over the previous week.

“We volunteers divided up into two teams,” she said. “One headed out for portal and door-to-door sales in Gallup, New Mexico, and the other was focused in Kayenta, Arizona, where there are two coal mines—the Kayenta mine and the Black Mesa mine.

“That team did several portal sales and set up a literature table at a grocery store, selling three subscriptions to the Militant,” Gersh said. “One was to a Kayenta coal miner who remarked how impressed he was that most of the Co-op miners struggling to build a new UMWA local are immigrant workers. ‘That wouldn’t have happened a few years ago,’ he said. ‘The mine bosses try to keep us isolated and scared.’”

The miner had met the locked-out Co-op workers, Gersh reported, and commented, “They are real fighters. We’re discussing how to support them.” He bought a copy of Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes. A worker at the Black Mesa Mine and a teacher at the grammar school on the Navajo Nation also subscribed.

Capitalism’s World Disorder was also the choice of a former worker at Hollander Home Fashions in Frackville, Pennsylvania, after she subscribed to the Militant, said Betsy Farley in a November 3 interview. Reinforced by two campaigners from Newark, New Jersey, and New York, Militant teams sold at two coal mines in the area—the first such sales “in a long time,” Farley said.

See subscription campaign chart.  
 
 
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