Vol. 76/No. 35      October 1, 2012

Join us in this campaign—a big campaign. Between now and mid-December, help us get the Militant, as well as books and pamphlets on revolutionary politics, into the hands of people you know, people you work with, people who live in your neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Workers need a paper published in the interests of our class. We need a working-class paper, one that charts a political course of struggle in face of the world capitalist crisis, for which the propertied rulers and their governments have no solution.

Over the last two years, Militant salespeople have found broad interest among working people in the paper’s coverage of how both the capitalist Democratic and Republican parties, whatever the squabbles among them, are making workers pay for capitalism’s global contraction of production and trade. There is interest in our reports on resistance to the bosses’ attacks by workers, opponents of cop brutality, and supporters of the rights of women and immigrants.

We’ve found this receptivity in working-class neighborhoods; among workers who are Black, Latino, and Caucasian; in large cities and small, as well as rural areas. We’ve found it on union picket lines and at street-corner tables, plant gates and political events.

Working people are interested in what’s behind the mounting crisis in Europe, China and elsewhere; Washington’s murderous wars and drone assaults, from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Africa and the Middle East; the cop massacre of union mineworkers in South Africa; the joblessness, devastation of living standards, land dispossession and other assaults on workers and peasants across the semicolonial world… and much more.

Workers are hungry for an explanation of the truth about where the crisis comes from and what our class can do about it. There is openness to the communist course presented by the Socialist Workers Party 2012 campaign, the working class, labor, socialist alternative to the Obama and Romney tickets and other candidates of the bosses’ parties.

Through door-to-door sales, not only can we increase the number of new subscribers and long-term renewals to the Militant. We’ll also expand the numbers of us who are working alongside each other to get the paper around, as we take part together in labor solidarity actions, social protests and other political activity.

Working people face sustained high unemployment—no job growth in the U.S. more than three years into a so-called “economic recovery”—rising prices of food, gas, and other basics, and employer attacks on wages, conditions and safety on the job.

The buildup of these pressures for half a decade—what might be called “the long discouragement”—intensifies competition among workers for jobs, takes a toll on confidence, and stacks the deck in favor of the employing class. Strikes and lockouts—those that stretch over months like the lockout of sugar workers at American Crystal Sugar in North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as those that last just a day or a week—often end in concessions.

Employers see such outcomes simply as progress in beefing up their bottom line. What they don’t see is not only that workers come out of these fights more united, but that alongside such experiences a longer-term discussion in preparation for coming battles is taking place in the working class.

Through these experiences, more workers are helping get the Militant around—on the job, and with others in their areas who feel the same way. They recognize the paper as a way to get to know other working people and learn about the conditions and struggles of workers and farmers the world over.

Many become interested in books that explain the political lessons and traditions of working people engaged in the fight for political power over the past 150 years and more. Four such titles are on special offer with a subscription: The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning: The Fraud of Education Reform Under Capitalism by Jack Barnes; The Cuban Five: Who They Are, Why They Were Framed, Why They Should Be Free by Martín Koppel and Mary-Alice Waters; Women in Cuba: The Making of a Revolution Within the Revolution by Vilma Espín, Asela de los Santos, and Yolanda Ferrer; and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by Jack Barnes. (See ad on this page).

Teams going door to door in working-class neighborhoods introducing the Militant and books can get under way right now.

Contact distributors of the paper in your area, listed on page 8. Ask them to come and work with you to meet friends, coworkers, or fellow students at a neighbor’s house or apartment, at a coffee shop or in a picket shack. Order a bundle. Get subscription blanks.

In a note on page 3, two readers from Yakima, Wash., explain they’ve recently been drawn politically to the activity of workers they’ve come to know who are “knocking on doors, distributing literature like the Militant newspaper and books such as The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, and standing in solidarity with fights against workplace repression worldwide.”

The combined efforts of readers like these will make the Militant’s big subscription effort a success. A report on quotas taken by the paper’s supporters in local areas, along with the overall international goal, will be reported in a coming issue.  
 
 
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