Vol. 71/No. 13      April 2, 2007

I urge you to join supporters of the Militant to increase the paper’s readership! Take part in the Militant’s subscription drive, which begins March 31 and lasts for eight weeks, ending May 27. Help in signing up 2,500 new readers. While introductory subscriptions are the focus of this circulation effort, sub renewals count too.

During the same period, the Militant is carrying out its semi-annual fund drive to raise $100,000 to meet operating expenses—from printing and shipping to sending reporters around the world. The Militant depends on your donations, and your efforts to solicit contributions from others, to keep coming out weekly and to improve its coverage and reach.

At the heart of these campaigns is the expansion of the paper’s readership and financial support among the working class and in the number of workers, youth, and others who actively take part in bringing these efforts to fruition.

Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialists in the United States and sister organizations in other countries have been among the Militant’s most consistent distributors and contributors.

A growing number of other workers and youth, however, have been joining efforts to sell Militant subscriptions and use the paper politically on the job, and beyond. Many more can do so. The success of this circulation campaign and fund drive will depend above all on substantially increasing the number of such consistent promoters of the paper.

Over the last year and a half, the Militant has increasingly become, in the eyes of thousands of workers, a tool they can use in resisting the bosses’ onslaught on wages, job safety, dignity, social security, and trade union rights. It has become for them a more reliable source of accurate information on world politics.

The paper’s socialist editorial policy also attracts working people and student youth to a revolutionary perspective as the only viable solution to capitalism’s spreading wars and economic disorder: the road of the working class toward taking state power out of the hands of the tiny minority of billionaires that rule the United States and other capitalist countries, and joining the struggle to build a society based on human solidarity and social equality—socialism.

The place of the Militant today is more striking as the labor movement continues to weaken, with the U.S. unionization rate dropping another half percentage point to 12 percent last year.

A recent sign of this trend is the union officialdom’s effort to hide its course of subordinating the interests of working people to electing “friendly” capitalist politicians—which is the reason for the unions’ decline—behind lobbying for bills such as the Employee Free Choice Act, or “card check” legislation the House of Representatives passed March 1.

The trade union tops and middle-class radicals like the Communist Party USA herald this bill as labor’s salvation, because it would allow for union recognition if a majority of workers in a company simply signed a card saying they want the union without requiring a vote.

This is masquerading by the labor officialdom as doing something to organize the unorganized. Contrary to claims by union officials, the problem workers face in trying to unionize is not existing labor laws that are “ineffective,” such as the National Labor Relations Act that requires elections to certify a union, but the labor tops’ course of class collaboration.

Class-conscious workers can use the Militant to explain that they are for secret-ballot union representation elections because it’s the most effective way for workers to demonstrate what they want. And they can point to experiences over the last decade, reported accurately in the Militant, showing that even in today’s adverse conditions workers have won such elections when they’ve taken ownership of their struggles from the beginning.

Given the current state of the labor movement, selling Militant subscriptions on the job and elsewhere, and soliciting donations for its fund drive, is central to the political work of revolutionary-minded workers.

The Militant’s bilingual character makes it accessible to the vast majority of toilers in the United States and many other countries, which aids the effort to increase the numbers of those distributing and using it. This has become evident recently in the attraction to the paper, in response to immigration raids, among meat packers and others in the midwestern United States and beyond.

Students and other youth can also be drawn in, even more than last year, in making these campaigns their own.

To aid these efforts, several books and pamphlets that contain a popular explanation of the program of the revolutionary working-class movement will be offered at special prices along with any Militant subscription: The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism at $1; Cuba and the Coming American Revolution and The First and Second Declarations of Havana at $5 each; and issues 12 and 13 of the magazine New International at $25 for both.

Join in! You can order a bundle if you don’t already get one at 70 cents per copy to show the Militant around and sell subs. And you can organize house meetings or other fundraisers to get donations for the fund drive. For more information, or to collaborate with other supporters of the paper in these efforts, please contact the Militant directly or distributors nearest you (see directory on p. 8).

Welcome on board!

Sincerely,
Argiris Malapanis, Editor  
 
 
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