The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 75/No. 41      November 14, 2011

 
New reader: ‘So important
for us to have our own voice’
(front page)
 
BY MICHEL POITRAS  
At the end of the fourth week of a seven-week international campaign to win 2,200 new and renewed subscribers to the Militant, we have reached a total of 1,338, or 61 percent of our goal. The drive finishes November 20. The best results last week came from a combination of going door to door in working-class districts and reaching out to workers resistance.

In Longview, Wash., site of a months-long battle by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union against a union-busting effort by the EGT grain terminal, nursing instructor Sue Yarbrough decided to subscribe to the Militant when supporters from Seattle and San Francisco knocked on her door, wrote Mary Martin.

“It’s so important for workers to have a voice,” Yarbrough said. “So often we don’t. People used to say you could always get a job nursing. This isn’t so now. We graduate hundreds who have to travel far to even hope to find a job.”

The Longview team sold 12 subscriptions to ILWU members at picket lines or to other workers while going door to door, along with five copies of Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, one of five books offered at a reduced price during the drive. (See ad below.)

Socialist Workers Party members have begun contacting locked-out sugar workers in the Red River Valley whose subscriptions are beginning to expire. Since the fight began at the end of July, some 150 subscriptions to the socialist newsweekly have been sold to embattled workers and their supporters.

“During the weekend,” Frank Forrestal said, “five renewals were sold in Drayton, N.D., and East Grand Forks, Minn.” Forrestal met with Clayton Bronson in Drayton, who had already mailed his renewal directly to the Militant office in New York. “I like reading the paper because it doesn’t give you a false sense of hope,” said Bronson. “You learn that others are in a similar situation and you are not alone in the world.” Bronson volunteers a lot of his time in the union trailer organizing picket duty.

Of the five renewals, Forrestal said, one was for one year and two for six months. In addition, he found that several subscribers have been urging other sugar workers to subscribe or buy revolutionary books from Pathfinder Press.

In Miami, a longshoreman renewed his subscription at the regular weekly sale SWP members do outside the International Longshoremen’s Association union hall. “That worker,” wrote Tom Baumann, “is working with us to set up a meeting with his union to discuss the battle waged by locked-out sugar workers in the Midwest.”

The bulk of subscriptions in Miami have been from door-to-door sales, said Baumann. “We met a nonunion Verizon worker on Saturday in Ft. Lauderdale who got a subscription, Teamster Rebellion, and made a $5 contribution toward the Socialist Workers Party Party-Building fund.”

Campaigners for the SWP candidates around the country sold dozens of subscriptions to the Militant, speaking with workers about the deepening crisis of capitalism and the party’s revolutionary fighting perspective. (See list of candidates below.)

John Steele wrote from Montreal that last weekend he and another member of the Communist League went to Sudbury, a nickel mining town in northern Ontario. The team sold 11 single copies of the Militant and one subscription to nickel miners at two mine entrances. “In the two-and-a-half days we were there,” Steele said, “we also picked up one renewal from a retired rail worker and four subscriptions going door to door.”

“In addition,” he wrote, “four subscriptions came in from supporters of the Militant in Vancouver, British Columbia, including two to longshoremen sold at the Vancouver hiring hall, along with copies of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes and Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay by Leon Trotsky,” a central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution.

From Auckland, New Zealand, George Fyson reported that members of the Communist League have sold four subscriptions going door to door in the suburb of Glen Innes, a large area of public housing.

“A government agency,” reported Fyson, “has recently told some 150 of the tenants that they have to move elsewhere because it wants to sell the land for high value development.” One of them is Moana Okotai, who bought a Militant subscription. She said that the new houses “will sell for half a million dollars or more—beyond what we can afford. They want to move us like cattle.”
 
 
Related articles:
Fall 'Militant' subscription campaign Oct. 1-Nov. 20 (week 4) (chart).  
 
 
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