Vol. 76/No. 25      June 25, 2012

According to the chart at left, communist workers in several regions are poised to go over their local quotas—if they have not already done so as in Manchester, England. Denver raised its quota for the second time last week.

Two books by Jack Barnes, Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power as well as The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism, are offered to subscribers at a special price.

“It’s important to get a paper that has information about other struggles,” said Sydney Coe, a forklift operator on strike against Davis Wire in Kent, Wash. “I don’t feel alone knowing that other workers are going through the same thing, standing for their rights.”

Coe is a recent Militant subscriber. He was talking at 12:30 a.m. June 10 on the picket line with a group of Socialist Workers campaigners headed by Mary Martin, SWP candidate for governor of Washington state.

The 85 Teamster-organized workers at Davis Wire have been on strike since May 21 for safety, improved conditions and against increased health insurance costs, among other things.

Coe’s interest in a working-class newspaper that helps forge links between working-class fighters is not an exception.

“The Militant is more reliable than other news,” Romelito Charles told SWP members in Miami June 7. “It tells you the true story because its interests are pure. It’s not for profit.” They were on their way back from an action Charles helped organize at two Walmart stores demanding that a worker the company fired because he is a well-known proponent of a United Food and Commercial Workers union organizing campaign there be rehired with back pay.

Charles renewed his subscription for six months and gave $10 to the Militant Fighting Fund.

The final day of the campaign will coincide in New York with a major demonstration against the anti-working-class stop-and-frisk policy by local cops. Members of the Socialist Workers Party have built the event and are expecting to meet many workers and young people who will be interested in subscribing to the socialist newspaper.

Dan Fein, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in New York, campaigned with a bullhorn in Harlem June 10, urging workers to attend the June 17 protest.

“I don’t agree,” Simone Vines, a young Black woman, told Fein. “Stop and frisk could save my life.”

“The purpose of stop and frisk is to intimidate workers,” Fein said. “The bosses and their cops do it to emphasize who has the power and who is in charge on the streets.

“It is true that some workers prey on each other, it’s a reflection of the dog-eat-dog values of capitalism,” he added. “That can’t be solved through the brutality of capitalist justice or prison life.

“Working-class solidarity and our sense of worth can only be gained through struggles—for jobs, higher wages and other working-class issues,” Fein said

Vines told him she enjoyed hearing about the socialist campaign, bought a copy of the Militant and said she would think more about the issue. Another woman, who had listened to the exchange, got a subscription. Altogether six subscriptions were sold during the afternoon of campaigning.

The final scoreboard of the drive and a balance sheet on the effort will be printed in the next issue of the Militant, which will be mailed July 5 following a two-week break.
 
 
Related articles:
Spring ‘Militant’ subscription campaign April 14-June 17 (week 8) (chart)  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home