Vol. 77/No. 25      July 1, 2013

BY LOUIS MARTIN

The Militant has extended the international campaign to win 2,800 subscribers by one week, through July 2. The Militant Fighting Fund, which is an integral part of the effort to expand the socialist paper’s readership, has also been extended. During week six, 331 subscriptions were sold — bringing us to 2,249.

This adjustment is needed given the number of Militant campaigners who will be participating in a meeting of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee in New York June 22-23, what was the final weekend of the subscription effort.

The extension makes it possible for Militant supporters to make their local goals with a big collective effort and to organize celebrations of the drive’s successful completion with all those who took part.

“I support the Militant and anyone who supports the UMWA,” said Lorraine Cook from Oceana, W.Va., at a June 17 rally in St. Louis organized by the United Mine Workers of America against union-busting efforts by Patriot Coal. “People need to join this fight. They need to say what they think.” (See article on front page.)

Cook, who bought a Militant subscription at a June 4 UMWA-organized rally in Henderson, Ky., is the wife of a retired coal miner and had three cousins killed in the April 2010 explosion at the Upper Big Branch Mine in West Virginia that took the lives of 29 miners.

On her way back to Chicago from the St. Louis rally, Alyson Kennedy reported that 21 subscriptions, 25 single copies and three books were sold at the action, as well as going door to door the day before in Coulterville and Pinckneyville, two mining towns in southern Illinois. Militant supporters from Chicago; Houston; Montreal; Des Moines, Iowa; and Lincoln, Neb. took part in the effort.

“Through fellow inmates, I’ve heard and was fortunate enough to read one issue and, by that, I’ve become interested in a subscription,” one prisoner from Florida wrote us last week. We also received a renewal from an inmate in the same jail, bringing the total to eight on a goal of 15 to workers behind bars.

The Militant Prisoners’ Fund makes it possible for inmates, often with help from friends or family, to subscribe at a reduced rate of $6 for six months. Subscriptions are also offered free of charge to those with no means to pay.

Eric Simpson wrote that Militant readers from San Francisco drove to Salinas, Calif., June 10 where they joined with subscriber Oswaldo Cisneros, a field worker and member of the United Farm Workers union, in selling door to door. Salinas is a center for agricultural production and for the UFW. New subscribers that day included several farmworkers, meat packers, a house cleaner and a plumber.

“This system is about breaking spirits for a profit. It’s about everyman for himself, where you step on each other and then all fall down,” Carson Danneman, 22, a community college student who works washing dishes in a restaurant, told Militant supporters when they knocked on his door in Seattle June 15.

“I want to be a knowledgeable leader and a follower of socialism,” Danneman said as he bought a subscription.

“Supporters of the Militant and communist books published by Pathfinder Press sold 26 Militant subscriptions and 62 books during the annual Printers Row Lit Festival in downtown Chicago, June 8-9,” Ilona Gersh wrote.

There is still time to join the international effort to expand the Militant’s readership among working people. Call distributors in your region (see directory on page 8) or contact us at (212) 244-4899 or themilitant@mac.com.
 
 
Related articles:
Spring ‘Militant’ subscription campaign May 4 – July 2 (week 6) (chart)
 
 
 
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