Several Pathfinder stores have taken goals above the 10 percent target, and many are restocking for the campaign. Pathfinder supporters around the world must average sales worth $21,000 a month the rest of the year to reach the target of $126,000 for the second half of 2003. The figures in July and August were just over $18,000 a month.

Pathfinder publishes the writings and speeches of outstanding communist and working-class leaders, such as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, founders of the modern communist movement, and V.I. Lenin and Leon Trotsky, leaders of the Bolshevik-led Russian Revolution.

The publisher’s titles span four decades and more of the writings and speeches of leaders of the Cuban Revolution, including Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara.

Books and pamphlets by other revolutionary leaders, from Malcolm X to Thomas Sankara, the leader of the 1983-87 revolutionary government in the West African country of Burkina Faso, are included in the publisher’s catalog. James P. Cannon and Farrell Dobbs are among the leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States published by Pathfinder.

Titles such as Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, and The Changing Face of U.S Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions by Socialist Workers Party national secretary Jack Barnes, along with the New International series distributed by Pathfinder, present a Marxist analysis of the world today and a revolutionary road forward for the working class.  
 
Confident in campaign’s success
Supporters of the international communist movement organized in the Pathfinder Printing Project are mapping out plans for the sales campaign. In a September 8 phone interview, Maceo Dixon and Jane Roland, who are members of the project’s sales coordinating committee, expressed confidence that the goal will be met.

“We know there is a market for these books because of what is happening in the world,” Roland said, pointing to Washington’s ongoing push to war and the deteriorating living and working conditions facing working people. “We just need to get out to the bookstores and convince book buyers and librarians that there are people who want these books,” she said—“people looking for the scientific explanation of the world they provide.”

Roland has noticed increased interest in non-English political books by librarians and bookstore buyers. An increasing number of bookstores that are oriented to the Black community have also shown interest in getting titles in Spanish and French, she said.

Dixon, who helps to ship orders from Pathfinder’s Atlanta distribution center, said that in the first half of this year many sales have come from classroom adoptions. These are titles that university professors have decided to add to their course reading lists. “We have received orders ranging from 30 to 150 copies of a wide variety of titles including the Communist Manifesto, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, and titles on Black studies and Marxist economics,” he said.

“Now is the time to go after these adoptions,” Dixon added, “as many professors are finalizing their reading lists for the winter and spring 2004 classes.” He noted that “we get a steady request each month from prisoners for Pathfinder catalogs.”  
 
Pathfinderpress.com sales increase
Sales through the pathfinderpress.com web site have steadily increased this year, Dixon said. He urged campaigners to promote the site at literature tables, on the job, in trade union activity, and through Pathfinder bookstores.

Pathfinder will be represented at a number of book fairs over the course of the six-month campaign, Dixon said. Volunteers from Atlanta, New York, and the United Kingdom will participate in the Fiesta Humanidad in Madrid, Spain, in mid-September. Other teams will take part in the Fête l’Humanité in Paris and in the Gothenburg, Sweden, book fair.

Teams will staff stalls at the New York is Book Country fair, the Los Angeles Latino and Family Book Fair, and the Baltimore Book Fair, all in September; the Northwest Bookfest in Seattle in October; and the Miami Book Fair in November. “We have also been invited to participate in the Third World Studies book fair that will take place in Shreveport, Louisiana, in early November,” he said.

Reaching the goal, said Norton Sandler, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, “will take the political imagination and combined work of supporters of the communist movement and socialist workers who are active in their unions, standing as candidates for elective office, and shouldering responsibility with others in various coalitions doing work in defense of the Cuban Revolution.”

Sales of Pathfinder titles will be a central part of work by Socialist Workers candidates and their supporters as they soapbox at street corners and sell the socialist press at factory gates, he added. Socialists in the trade unions will find sales of Pathfinder titles an indispensable component of their political work over the coming months, as they fight alongside other workers to build their unions as part of resisting the assaults by the capitalist rulers in country after country.

Sandler noted that young people like those who attended the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange in July are likely to continue adding to their Pathfinder libraries. Among those who will find these revolutionary books and pamphlets of interest, he said, will be the hundreds of workers, students, and youth joining the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride caravans across the country that will converge in a rally for immigrant rights in New York October 4.

The Militant encourages supporters of the effort to send in reports and photos of sales activities in their area.  
 
 
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