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   Vol.65/No.11            March 19, 2001 
 
 
'Militant' subscription drive to start in late March
 
BY MAURICE WILLIAMS  
Socialist workers, members of the Young Socialists, and other supporters of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial are preparing to launch an international circulation drive to sell subscriptions to the two publications. The subscription effort will begin in late March and will coincide with the campaign to sell the Pathfinder titles Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas and Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces. Both are published in English and Spanish.

Warm-up plans for the circulation campaign include sales at political events, contacting subscribers and others about purchasing the new books, and attending the celebration meetings over the next two weeks in New York and Seattle.

A team to the coalfields in Wyoming and Colorado will begin a five-day sales effort March 11. "The team will visit coal portals at union and nonunion mines, meet with miners who became recent subscribers to the Militant, introduce Pathfinder titles to bookstores in the region, and set up literature tables on college campuses," said Frank Forrestal a coal miner in Pennsylvania.

Socialist unionists who work in the packinghouse industry are also making plans to visit meatpacking plants, like the one owned by Excel Corp. in Fort Morgan, Colorado, where workers recently staged a wildcat strike after rejecting a proposed six-year contract.

Campaigning with Pathfinder titles is a complement to winning new subscribers to the two periodicals. These books, along with the Militant and PM, are among the best tools for helping workers and revolutionary-minded youth to see the capacities of working people to forge a revolutionary leadership, fight to take power, and begin transforming themselves and all of society. What workers and peasants in Cuba did in making their revolution and defending it from attacks by U.S. imperialism help show that the employers and their government are not invincible, and that working people can take power and begin reconstructing all of society in the interests of the vast majority.

Through the campaign to sell Pathfinder books and subscriptions to the Militant and PM, socialist workers can make advances in rooting their headquarters in workers districts. This includes setting up weekly sales tables and going door-to-door in the neighborhood. Organizing sales to co-workers and at factory plant gates is another way to broaden the readership of the Militant. Making this a regular part of the drive will take planning and weekly coordination.

The drive takes place at a time of continued strikes and other resistance by working people. These include the growing ferment among airline workers; the strike by 8,000 rail workers at Union Pacific in late January; and coordinated one-hour walkouts in Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio by workers at the UNITE-organized Kmart warehouses to protest contract violations and the bosses' assault on union rights.  
 
 
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