BY MARTÍN KOPPEL
In the first week of the $90,000 Militant fund drive, supporters of the paper sent in $3,757. The priority now is to organize regular collections, totaling $12,500 a week for the remaining seven weeks of the campaign. This is needed to reach the goal by November 7, and to do it in such a way that allows the Militant to keep paying its bills—printing, shipping, utilities, and reporting costs.
The Militant’s character as a revolutionary workers’ paper financed by its readers draws on a proud tradition. V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the Bolshevik Party and the October 1917 Russian Revolution, wrote about how a proletarian party campaigns for subscriptions and contributions to the socialist press.
“The working-class press needs to be developed and strengthened,” Lenin wrote in a 1912 article. “And this requires money. Workers’ newspapers in Russia can be satisfactorily organised through persevering effort only on conditions that the workers constantly arrange massive collections.”
Lenin celebrated the success of a six-month fund drive to launch Pravda as a daily paper. “By founding a workers’ daily newspaper, the workers of St. Petersburg have accomplished a major feat, one that without exaggeration can be called historic,” he wrote. They could be proud of “founding a press of their own.”
During that fund drive, he noted, workers in St. Petersburg and elsewhere had made 504 group contributions. In building the revolutionary movement, Lenin said, the key was not the amount of each donation but the number of workers who became the backbone of Pravda’s circulation and its financial bedrock.
“A newspaper founded on the basis of five-kopek pieces collected by small factory circles of workers is a far more dependable, solid and serious undertaking,” Lenin wrote, “than a newspaper founded with tens and hundreds of rubles contributed by sympathising intellectuals.”
He added, “The significance of such collections will depend above all on their being regularly held every pay-day, without interruption, and on an ever greater number of workers taking part in these regular collections.” Lenin gave importance to regular reports in Pravda on the progress of these fund-raising efforts and promoted the campaigning slogan, “A workers’ kopek for the workers’ newspaper!”
Supporters of Pravda campaigned vigorously to expand “its circulation among fellow workers, acquaintances, countrymen, etc. The politically conscious friends of Pravda do not limit themselves to subscribing to the paper but pass it on or send it to others as a sample, to make it known at other factories, in neighboring flats or houses, in the countryside and so on,” Lenin wrote.
It’s in this spirit that Militant supporters are campaigning to increase its subscription base and raise the needed funds. To make a donation, write checks or money orders to the Militant, earmarked “Militant Fund,” and send them to 306 W. 37th St., 10th floor, New York, NY 10018.
Click here to see the fund chart