BY NAOMI CRAINE
Nine different books and pamphlets were printed, bound, and
shipped from Pathfinder's printshop in the month of March.
The titles include the pamphlet Coal Miners on Strike on the 1977-78 miners strike, back in print after many years; the new issue of Nouvelle International, the French translation of the Marxist magazine New International, featuring "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War"; and the new edition of El rostro cambiante de la política en Estados Unidos, the revised and improved Spanish translation of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Jack Barnes.
The others are reprints of Women and the Cuban Revolution, Leon Trotsky Speaks, The Last Year of Malcolm X, Feminism and the Marxist Movement, New International no. 11, and Che Guevara et la lutte pour le socialisme aujourd'hui (Che Guevara and the fight for socialism today). A pipeline of books is now flowing.
The Pathfinder Capital Fund is essential to building on this progress. Since last July, supporters of Pathfinder have contributed more than $710,000 in capital contributions that have made it possible to begin transforming the printshop, including installing a computer-to-plate system that greatly reduces the labor time needed to produce each book.
This tremendous response to the fund makes possible the next phase - raising another $250,000 that is needed to carry out long-postponed reconstruction of the room that houses Pathfinder's three presses. The project includes adding climate control, an air-filtering system that reduces dust and chemicals, new windows, a new floor, and double doors to keep out the drafts.
These steps are essential for productive, high-quality printing and will help advance the collective work of the press crew, by improving working conditions and removing what had been intended as a temporary partition - put up in 1993 - between the sheet-fed presses used to print Pathfinder books and the web press on which the Militant is printed. This is key to sustain a smaller shop that is one-third smaller than a year ago, freeing more socialist workers to carry out political work in the unions.
Of the nine titles delivered by the shop in March, six were reprints that had been prepared by an international team of more than 100 volunteers who are putting all 350 Pathfinder books and pamphlets in digital form.
The response to the capital fund so far has come both in contributions of up to a few thousand dollars and in larger donations from those in a position to give tens of thousands from capital sources. Both will be needed to raise the additional $250,000 needed in this stage of the fund. A substantial part of the fund so far - $77,000 since last July - has come from workers in the industrial unions contributing "profit-sharing" and other so-called bonuses.
To find out how to make a capital contribution, write to the Capital Fund Committee, 410 West St., New York, NY 10014.