His response was typical among the seven people who purchased subscriptions to the Militant or to the Spanish-language magazine Perspectiva Mundial at a September 28 demonstration in Los Angeles to protest the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and Israeli assaults on the Palestinian people.

The day’s effort was a good start in Los Angeles for the international subscription drive for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial.

For the next eight weeks, until November 23, supporters of socialist press will be campaigning to win hundreds of subscribers among workers, young people, farmers, and others.

The international goal of the drive is to gain 950 Militant and 400 Perspectiva Mundial subscriptions. As an incentive for subscribers to buy and read Pathfinder books, they will receive a 25 percent discount on any one Pathfinder title when they take out or renew their subscription. All the titles they buy at that time will count toward the 500 international book goal. In this way, the drive will reinforce the communist movement’s campaign to increase Pathfinder sales by 10 percent by the end of the year.

In California the subscription drive gives a boost to the Socialist Workers campaign. A worker at the Farmer John meat packing plant in Los Angeles hosted a meeting in his home for Joel Britton, the Socialist Workers candidate for governor of California. Twenty people, including four other workers at that plant, attended the meeting. A warehouse worker at the meeting decided to sign up for a subscription to the Militant.

At a peace demonstration in San Francisco, protesters expressed a wide range of views about the October 7 recall election. Many supported Democratic Gov. Gray Davis and opposed his recall. Some, however, wanted to find out more about the Socialist Workers platform, including its perspective of working-class political action independent of the two bosses’ parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. One bought a subscription to the Militant to follow the socialist campaign.

Sendoff rallies for Immigrant Workers Freedom Riders in numerous cities, from Los Angeles to Chicago, proved fruitful places for Militant and Perspectiva Mundial supporters to build momentum going into the start of the September 27-November 23 subscription drive.

Reporting from Chicago, Maurice Williams said that at a Freedom Ride event they sold two subscriptions to the Militant and one to Perspectiva Mundial, along with a copy of Capitalism’s World Disorder and a number of other revolutionary books and pamphlets.

Reporting from the September 14 New York is Book Country bookfair, Naomi Craine said sales of Pathfinder titles at the official Pathfinder booth and a Socialist Workers election campaign table a block away totaled $1,300. Thirteen issues of New International, in both English and Spanish, were part of the tally, along with eight copies of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes.

Nine people, many of whom checked out the fair while taking part in the Mexican Independence Day celebration, bought subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial. Nearly all the new subscribers bought a book too, Craine said.

Luis Madrid, the Socialist Workers candidate for City Council in the 10th District, which is centered in the Manhattan neigh borhood of Washington Heights, led the team at the campaign table. Members of Madrid's entourage took turns soapboxing, Craine said, drawing small crowds around the table. The dozen or so Socialist Workers candidates around the country will have many such opportunities in the eight weeks of the subscription drive.

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