BY MAURICE WILLIAMS

As the international campaign to win new subscribers to the Militant enters its final days, supporters are going all out to build the regional socialist educational conferences at the end of November and wrap up a successful subscription drive.

"A two-week blitz of central Illinois has been organized" to build the conference in Peoria, reports Militant supporter Helen Meyers. "We sold two Militant subs at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and two more at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri."

Two members of the steelworkers union at the Bridgestone/Firestone plant in Bloomington, Illinois, bought Militant subscriptions from supporters who work there. Several workers in the plant have expressed interest in the educational conference.

Meyers said socialists in Peoria will join with activists in Des Moines to visit strikers on the picket line at the IBP packinghouse in Joslin, Illinois. The team will go door-to-door in the Quad City area of Davenport and Bettendorf, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois, where many striking meatpackers live.

This past week there were several actions in Pittsburgh including one on November 16, where more than 2,000 people protested the acquittal of one of the cops who killed Jonny Gammage. "We sold 20 single issues and two subscriptions to the Militant, plus a couple of Pathfinder titles at that demonstration," said airline worker Edwin Fruit. He said supporters in Pittsburgh sold eight subscriptions to the Militant during the past week to put the campaign there back on schedule. Fruit said students at Indiana University of Pennsylvania bought two copies of the Marxist magazine New International, one subscription to Perspectiva Mundial, and three Militant subscriptions at a literature table set up on the campus there.

Supporters in Los Angeles have led the international subscription effort throughout the campaign. They have already gone over their goal of 85 subscriptions to the Militant, and plan to keep selling. Distributors of the socialist press there launched their target week by selling 10 subscriptions to the Militant over the November 16-17 weekend.

Martin Hill, a socialist worker in London, wrote, "Militant sellers sold 18 copies of the Militant at a table in Aldershot, the site of a major Army base near London." Hill said several soldiers who stopped by the table bought copies of the socialist newspaper and some said they expected to be sent to Zaire. "African countries owe big debts, that's why they're in such a mess," one soldier told Hill. "The debt should be canceled."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home