BY NELL WHEELER AND TED LEONARD

NEWARK, New Jersey - With only one week to go and nearly $50,000 to collect, making the international fund drive in full and on time must be the top priority for all supporters of Pathfinder Press. The funds are urgently needed to maintain the publisher's ability to keep in print and continue to upgrade some 300 titles that are increasingly in demand by workers, farmers, students, and other young people.

Michael Pennock reports from St. Paul, Minnesota, that on November 2 supporters of the fund there raised $1,800 in payments and new pledges for the reprint fund at a rally that featured Mámud Shirvani.

Shirvani is coauthor of the introduction to the Pathfinder book, To See the Dawn: Baku, 1920 - First Congress of the Peoples of the East. His remarks were centered on the theme of an article by Russian Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin titled "Backward Europe and Advanced Asia."

"Although Europe, both in Lenin's time and today, is more advanced than Asia in terms of material wealth," Shirvani said, "it is terribly backward in the outlook and morality of the ruling bourgeoisies." He cited United Nations figures showing 4,500 deaths per month among Iraqi children due to the UN embargo of that country, enforced by U.S., British, and other naval and air forces in the region. "Recently, Washington blocked $2 billion of oil sales designed to buy food and medicine, then offered $7.5 million in humanitarian aid."

The previous night, Shirvani showed a video of the 1920 Baku Congress to a gathering of 10 young people organized by the Minneapolis/St.Paul Young Socialists. The day after the fund rally he gave a class on the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the opening of the struggle for national self- determination of the peoples of the East at the Pathfinder Bookstore. Twenty people attended.

Throughout the weekend, the Pathfinder bookstore in St. Paul sold 34 titles, including six copies of To See The Dawn, six copies of Lenin's Final Fight, Speeches and Writings, 1922-23, and nine copies of Leon Trotsky's The History of the Russian Revolution.

Monies collected in the international fund drive make it possible to keep in stock dozens of books and pamphlets such as these.

Currently, Pathfinder has slated two Marxist classics for reprinting. The founding document of the modern working-class movement, The Communist Manifesto, is one of them. The Manifesto was drafted by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels as the program of one of the first workers parties, the Communist League. Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, also by Engels, is the other title.

The Communist Manifesto, first published in 1848, explains why communists act on the basis not of preconceived notions but facts springing from the actual class struggle. It also explains why communism, to the degree it is a theory, is the generalization of the historical line of march of the working class. This pamphlet is one of the most popular Pathfinder titles and is often used by university professors as required reading in their classes. Because these "classroom adoptions" come along suddenly and may require hundreds of books, 5,000 copies of the booklet will be printed to have an adequate stock on hand.

Likewise, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, is often used as a classroom text, and 2,000 copies will be printed. In this pamphlet, Engels explains that modern socialism is not a doctrine, but a working-class movement growing out of the establishment of large scale capitalist industry and its social consequences.

With an all out effort to talk to every person who has made a pledge to the fund, the entire $131,000 pledged can be collected and sent in by the November 10 deadline. Pathfinder supporters in each city should make sure to express mail money collected. The final chart printed in next week's Militant will reflect payments received as of Tuesday, November 12, noon EST.  
 
 
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