Vol. 71/No. 7 February 19, 2007
We urge you to sign up for a long-term subscription to the Militant. The best offer is $35 for a year. For just about 70 cents a week you will be getting the paper home delivered for the next 12 months. You can also convince your coworkers, fellow unionists, schoolmates, neighbors, friends, or relatives to do the same.
A number of readers, whose comments are published each week in the subscription ad on page 2, are explaining why they are pitching in to build the paper's long-term readership. You can add your voice by sending to the Militant such endorsements, along with photos, and organize others to do the same.
As these statements indicate, increasing the circulation of the socialist newsweekly—single issues, subscriptions, and renewals, in particular—is central to the work by militant workers to organize and strengthen the trade unions in a period when the labor movement continues to decline.
At the same time, it is clearer that over the last year the U.S. working class has been strengthened. This was registered in last spring's mass proletarian actions demanding legalization for all immigrants. It has been confirmed by recent events, such as the November 16-17 walkout by 1,000 meat packers at the Smithfield slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina, protesting the firing of coworkers for "false papers." This strengthening is permanent, short of an all-out war by the employers and their government that can inflict crushing defeats on the workers. Hints of such a war can be seen in recent factory raids and deportations.
In the eyes of working people beyond those who regularly read it, the Militant has become more of an instrument of the resistance to the bosses' attacks. Expanding the paper's long-term readership in the working class is essential in the struggle to advance the use of union power, as well as in building a revolutionary working-class movement.
By getting the paper week after week, month after month, you won't miss a beat on its accurate coverage and analysis of imperialism's spreading wars and financial disorder. Or its description of the place of the Cuban Revolution for the toilers of the Americas and the world.
We are making this appeal in the second week of a five-week sub renewal campaign, when we fell 15 subscriptions, or 3 percent, behind schedule. You can help turn this around and make sure all the quotas are met or surpassed in the next three weeks.
"Enclosed are three renewals," wrote Jacquie Henderson, a garment worker in Houston, in a February 6 note to the Militant. "Two of them are from a meeting with two oil workers. The other we got at an anti-deportation protest. One of the oil workers mostly wanted to talk about Cuba and what workers in power can and have done."
This kind of work can be emulated everywhere.
Help us make the sub renewal campaign a resounding success!
Sincerely,
Argiris Malapanis, Editor
Click here to see the 'Militant' subscription renewal drive chart