In the first two weeks of the five-month campaign, 852 copies have been sold of the magazine’s new issues in English and Spanish (see front-page ad). These issues feature “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter has Begun” and “Our Politics Start with the World,” which present a strategic understanding of the class struggle to help chart a course for working people to organize and change the world in the interests of the vast majority.

In coal country in western Pennsylvania, socialist workers from Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Hazleton, Pennsylvania, visited mine portals and mining communities to spread the use of these political weapons.

Tony Lancaster from Pittsburgh writes that a laid-off coal miner there “bought the two New Internationals. He pointed to a peace flag in his yard he had erected when Washington launched the war on Iraq. When he looked at the charts and graphs in New International no. 12, showing facts and figures about U.S. military spending and deployment, he said, ‘I’ve got to have this.’”

Similarly, in Atlanta, Arlene Rubinstein reports that a co-worker in the garment shop where she works has already started reading “Their Transformation and Ours” and discussing it with her. Originally from Eritrea, he commented on the charts “on the number of bases and installations under consideration on African soil”—where Washington is preparing for future wars of plunder.

Near Miami, at the Point Blank Body Armor plant, fellow garment workers were pleased to see their successful union-organizing fight mentioned in Nueva Internacional no. 6, says Eric Simpson. This drew their interest in the magazine’s explanation of the bosses’ antilabor offensive, the weakened state of the unions today, and the need to use and extend union power. One of the workers there “picked up her copy as soon as it became available,” Simpson said.

Supporters of the magazine from the Midwest spent a weekend campaigning in several towns in Iowa after mass firings of foreign-born meat packers by the bosses at Tyson Foods in Perry and Waterloo. In a transparent attempt at intimidating the workforce, the bosses fired dozens of workers they alleged did not have valid Social Security documents, regardless of previous employment screening or years of service.

A construction worker in West Liberty bought Nueva Internacional no. 7 after studying its graphic depicting the swath of darkness that covers much of the semicolonial world because of the lack of electricity. He was interested because it not only showed the brutal gulf in conditions in the world, but that there is a way for working people to “unify to fight these conditions and ultimately to take power,” said Mike Ellis from Chicago.

Local areas have adopted quotas that add up to 2,427, but initial results show this is well below what can be achieved for a five-month campaign running through August 15. In the first two weeks, a number of areas have already sold a third or more of their quotas, and many are planning to rediscuss and increase them. The Militant will wait a couple of weeks to report the overall goal, taking into account the revised quotas.

Click here to see the New International sales campaign scoreboard
See link for New International sales offer.