The effort to increase the Militant’s readership is now off to a running start. This bodes well for the simultaneous campaign to raise $90,000 to help the paper continue publishing week after week.

Most of the new readers signed up at the April 9-10 mobilizations for immigrant rights in the United States and other related activities. Militant reporters went to Detroit April 13 to meet with workers at Wolverine Packing who were fired for missing work to participate in an immigrant rights action there. Nine people signed up to subscribe during the visit, five of them workers at the plant. The majority subscribed for either six months or a year, said Don Mackle.

Supporters of the Militant in Des Moines signed up 65 new readers last week, reported Mary Martin. On a Saturday visit to Marshalltown, Iowa, 10 people subscribed at a street table, five of them workers at the large Swift meatpacking plant there, she said.

In Houston, socialists have sold 39 subscriptions so far, many at the immigrant rights march of nearly half a million in Dallas April 9 and the mobilization of 50,000 in Houston the next day. One subscriber stopped by a display Militant supporters had set up at the Houston rally with a letter he had received in the mail telling him his subscription was about to expire. “I knew you guys would be here,” he said, as he renewed his subscription and picked up a copy of Our History Is Still Being Written (see ad on home page).

Throughout this campaign that book is discounted to $15 for those who subscribe to the Militant. Likewise, new readers can buy a copy of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution for only $5 and a copy of the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism for only $1. The two newest issues of the Marxist magazine New International can be purchased for $25 for both with a subscription.

Together with the circulation drive, the Militant has launched an effort to raise $90,000. The funds are needed to help cover the paper’s operating expenses. These include costs for reporting trips, rent, utilities, printing, shipping, and equipment maintenance

Militant supporters in New York started the fund-raising with a bang, reported Amy Husk who organizes the effort there. They sent out a mailing inviting supporters of the paper to donate. They followed up with phone banking. And they held a fund-raiser at the April 14 Militant Labor Forum.

“The Militant doesn’t have advertisements for Nike or Victoria’s Secret,” said Ben O’Shaughnessy, the organizer of the Young Socialists in Albany, New York, in giving the fund pitch at that meeting. “The paper depends solely on contributions from working people and youth like yourselves to cover the high costs of publishing and getting the coverage you see every week.”

The collection at the New York forum netted more than $1,700. New York Militant supporters have taken a quota of $12,000 for the fund. Of that they have already turned in $2,239, funds sorely needed now.

You can join these efforts. Contact the Militant directly (see information on home page) or distributors of the paper nearest you (see directory).

Paul Pederson contributed to this article.  
 
 
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