Delegates to the festival would often pull up a chair by the Young Socialists booth, with its display of revolutionary literature, and start reading before deciding what to buy. The stand was part of the festival’s Friendship Fair, held at the Teresa Carreño theater, where more than 300 exhibitors had booths.
An Angolan sat at the booth for four hours reading parts of How Far We Slaves Have Come by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro and The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky. At the end, he walked away with those two titles, issues 12 and 13 of New International, and a stack of other books and pamphlets.
Sales of New International got a boost when YS members spoke at workshops. Annalucia Vermunt of the Young Socialists in New Zealand was on a panel on “Gender Equality and the Struggle for Women’s Rights Around the World,” which some 2,000 delegates attended. In her presentation, Vermunt quoted from a section of the Socialist Workers Party resolution “Their Transformation and Ours” published in New International no. 12. Titled “Historical Trends and Proletarian Strength,” it describes how, as women become integrated into the workforce, barriers to women and men working together as equals are breached around the world. That was one of our best days in NI sales, with nearly 40 copies purchased.
Young Socialists from seven countries also set up literature displays—often on towels on the ground—outside many seminars. Stopping by one such display, Amal Fareed of the Democratic Youth Union of Bahrain described recent protests in her country demanding the closure of a U.S. military base. She became interested in the maps and graphs in NI no. 12 that depict the changing global posture of Washington’s imperialist armed forces. After reading the section “Exhaustion of Alternatives to Revolutionary Leadership,” Fareed bought both NI issues.
Many of those who bought the Marxist magazine asked YS members to stay in touch. Limam Boicha and Taoufik Salama, youths from Western Sahara who live in Spain, bought the two NIs in Spanish, along with We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara, a leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso, and said they would like YSers to visit them.
Some, like a student from Colombia, joined Young Socialists in selling revolutionary literature. Others, like Patricio Parra and Julian Sánchez, students at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, invited YS members to join political meetings at their school.
Besides New International, we sold 650 books and pamphlets on revolutionary politics. The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes was number one, with 53 copies sold. It was followed by titles on the Cuban Revolution and on the fight for women’s liberation, and by Malcolm X and Sankara. Books by Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin, and Trotsky were also popular. More than 150 delegates purchased subscriptions to the Militant.
As the festival was closing, we ran out of both new issues of the Spanish-language Nueva Internacional. Diego García, a student in Caracas, came by the YS booth several times hoping that at least one copy of the magazine would turn up. As it became clear none were left, he said he will plan to be among the first to visit the Pathfinder Press booth at the Caracas book fair in November.
Click here to see the New International sales campaign scoreboard
See link for New International sales offer.