Vol. 79/No. 31      September 7, 2015

For the next eight weeks, starting Sept. 5, the Socialist Workers Party is organizing our members and other working people to win 2,300 new readers and renewals to the Militant newspaper, which presents the positions of the party and helps organize its political activity. SWP members are urging fellow workers to subscribe to, discuss and join in expanding the readership of the party press.

The subscription drive kicks off over Labor Day weekend, when unions are organizing marches, picnics and other events. Socialist Workers Party members and workers and youth who look to the SWP politically are building these activities along with others.

Naomi Craine, a member of the SWP National Committee, is the subscription drive director. Craine, currently a staff writer for the Militant, is a longtime union member, including of the United Food and Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE.

Concurrent with the subscription effort, the Socialist Workers Party is organizing a fall fund drive to raise $100,000 to carry out the party’s political work.

Join Labor Day kickoff

Labor Day activities in Charleston, South Carolina, will build on the Black-led victory for the working class this summer of having the Confederate battle flag removed from the state Capitol grounds, as well as ongoing fights against police brutality and for unionization and better wages and job safety. Joining Labor Day events in parts of the U.S. will be autoworkers whose contracts expire in September and workers organized by the Communications Workers of America and International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers fighting to hold off Verizon’s takeback contract demands.

Working people are responding to the consequences on our lives and those around us of today’s capitalist depression in production, employment and trade, as well as crushing debts on homes, credit cards, automobiles and college loans. Tens of thousands of workers and farmers have been killed, wounded, or left with lifetime disabilities from Washington’s wars just since 2001, as the U.S. imperialist-dominated global order imposed at the end of World War II unravels. The U.S. ruling class, with no solutions to the crisis, seeks to make working people bear the brunt.

Out of the resistance to the rulers’ grinding offensive, there are new opportunities to expand a Marxist current that follows the lead of the Socialist Workers Party in political and union struggles and joins in getting the Militant, Pathfinder books and the magazine New International into the hands of working people.

During the subscription drive, Socialist Workers Party members and others who support the party’s work — including SWP candidates for mayor and City Council in Philadelphia and port commissioner in Seattle — will take the Militant and books broadly to porches and apartments in working-class neighborhoods in cities across the U.S., as well as to workers, farm laborers and farmers in small towns and rural areas. We’ll distribute the paper at political meetings, social protests and labor actions. We’re intervening with the Militant and book tables to reach workers and youth in the big crowds at campaign events for Bernie Sanders and for Donald Trump.

Members and supporters of Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are joining in this international campaign.

We’re talking with workers about the need to put an end to the dictatorship of capital, whose social and political consequences all of us live under today. We discuss the need for the revolutionary organization and mobilization of the working class to take political power out of the hands of the ruling class. The transformation of working people, as we fight alongside each other to transform our conditions of life and work, opens the road to socialism here and the world over. Regular readers of the Militant will find articles most weeks pointing to the example workers and farmers in Cuba have set since they took power and made a socialist revolution some 55 years ago.

A half-dozen titles presenting the party’s program are on special for new and renewing Militant readers. These include Teamster Politics by Farrell Dobbs; issues of the Marxist magazine New International featuring the articles “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,” “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” and “Our Politics Start with the World”; and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power and The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. (See ad on page 3.)

Socialist Workers Party fund drive

SWP members set an example, contributing generously to the fund and urging workers we are fighting alongside and new and long-term readers of the party press to contribute.