Supporters in a number of local areas have stayed at or ahead of their subscription targets through campaigning for the Socialist Workers Party ticket in the November elections. This includes selling dozens of Pathfinder books and pamphlets on revolutionary working-class politics, like those in the Pathfinder Supersaver Sale (see ad).
In Iceland, partisans of the Militant are well ahead of their target, selling 14 subscriptions to the socialist weekly in the first three weeks—56 percent of their goal. Ólöf Andra Proppé from Reykjavík sent the following note September 21:
“Last Saturday, supporters of the Militant set up a campaign table outside a supermarket in downtown Reykjavík. We were campaigning in support of teachers who had called a strike starting the next Monday, and advertising a Militant Labor Forum titled ‘Support the teachers’ right to strike!’ The response was polarized. Many welcomed our support for the teachers and some decided to get a copy of the Militant. We got shouts of ‘Good work!’ and clenched fists showing solidarity with the teachers. Others were hostile towards the strike and said, ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves!’ We sold 10 copies of the Militant, three copies of the Icelandic edition of the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism and one Communist Manifesto.
“Socialists have sold three subscriptions to the Militant to workers at a fishnet factory. A worker in his 30s who bought a subscription said: ‘I’m so glad to meet you and get this paper. I’ve been looking for something like this since I came to Iceland.’ He also took advantage of the Pathfinder Supersaver Sale and got a copy of Capitalism’s World Disorder. He later participated in a class on the first chapter of this book, ‘A Sea Change in Working-Class Politics.’
“We have sold five of the subscriptions at a mall on the outskirts of the largest working-class district in Reykjavík. People wanted to discuss the upcoming elections in the United States and appreciated learning about the working-class alternative presented by the candidates of the Socialist Workers Party.
“This was also the case at a pre-university school, Menntaskólinn vi Hamrahlí, where socialists set up a table in the lunchroom and spoke on a microphone advertising an upcoming forum on the U.S. elections. We sold one subscription and several pamphlets.”
In Des Moines, Iowa, socialists organized a special target week September 4-11 to get a running start on the campaign. Edwin Fruit, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in that state, took time off from his job at a Tyson slaughterhouse in Perry, Iowa, to campaign. Teams of campaigners set up a table at a September 4-5 conference in Des Moines on the political conflict in Sudan. The event featured John Garang, a Sudanese political figure who is calling for intervention by U.S. and other troops in the conflict in that country. The socialists, who are opposed to such imperialist military intervention, got a hearing from those attending the conference. They sold 27 Pathfinder books and three Militant subscriptions.
On September 19, Fruit and a campaign supporter made house visits to a number of Fruit’s co-workers in Perry, Iowa. At the home of a fellow worker from Liberia they sold one subscription and a copy of Thomas Sankara Speaks, a Pathfinder book containing the speeches of the central leader of the 1983-87 revolution in the West African country of Burkina Faso. As a result of these efforts, socialists in Iowa are on target in their subscription sales goal and have surpassed their September goal for book sales.
Emulating examples like these can help everyone carry out the kind of work that can boost the sub sales pace, which is much needed now.
Pathfinder Supersaver Sale
Fall Militant/Perspectiva Mundial Fall Subscription Drive chart (week 3)