“Dozens of workers bought copies of the special Perspectiva Mundial supplement, and were sitting reading it together and to each other before one organizing meeting,” Rivera said. The supplement contains the article, “Coal miners in Utah fight for a union,” which reports the facts about how the union fight began. “One miner bought an extra copy, framed it, and hung it on his wall.”
Four of the locked-out workers have bought subscriptions to the Spanish-language monthly in the past two weeks.
The firsthand accounts of the miners’ fight have attracted new readers across the country, helping to get the international drive off to a brisk start. As can be seen in the chart, campaigners are ahead of the pace right now, having sold 134 Militant subscriptions, 100 subscriptions to Perspectiva Mundial, and 54 books.
On October 4 a team of Militant campaigners in Utah selling door-to-door in a trailer park reported that all the workers they met there declared support for the miners. One invited the sellers in for a 45-minute discussion, in the course of which he took out a Perspectiva Mundial subscription and bought a copy of the Spanish-language edition of The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform under Capitalism, by Jack Barnes. He told the team that hearing of the Co-Op mine fight had encouraged him and his co-workers to discuss organizing a union.
Sales drive organizers in East Coast cities said rallies for the AFL-CIO-organized Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride provided a big opportunity to introduce workers to the socialist press and books on revolutionary politics.
Some 50 campaigners from Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, Houston, New Jersey, New York, Northeast Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., took part in the October 4 immigrant rights rally in New York. They sold 26 Perspectiva Mundial and 22 Militant subscriptions as well as $1,220 worth of Pathfinder books and pamphlets to people at the event and on buses providing transportation to and from it.
Afterward, the three Socialist Workers candidates for New York City Council—Luis Madrid, Paul Pederson, and Olga Rodríguez—met demonstrators at a socialist open house at a nearby restaurant. Several people who attended the event said it was their first encounter with the Socialist Workers campaign. One was a new Militant subscriber and medical student from Albany, New York, who told campaigners of the impact that a 1960 speech by Argentine-Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, entitled “To be a revolutionary doctor you must first make a revolution,” had on her. She had read the speech on an Internet site.
Three days earlier, on October 1, Militant supporters in New Jersey set up two morning campaign tables at Rutgers University in Newark to inform students about a meeting that afternoon featuring Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party.
Waters explained how workers and farmers in Cuba had successfully organized a fight for state power and carried out a socialist revolution just 90 miles from the mightiest imperialist power on earth. Some 50 people attended the meeting, titled “U.S.-Cuba Relations: Why Washington’s Cold War Doesn’t End.”
Two people subscribed to the Militant and one to Perspectiva Mundial after the meeting, reported Mike Taber from Newark. People crowded around the Pathfinder table, buying more than $110 worth of titles to add to the $85 taken in earlier.
Taber noted the high proportion of subscribers who have taken advantage of the 25 percent discount they are offered on any one Pathfinder book. Of the 23 subscribers signed up in the drive so far in Newark, he said, 13 have bought at least one Pathfinder title.