Vol. 79/No. 32 September 14, 2015
Members of the party across the U.S. and of the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom will be leading the effort to sign up at least 2,300 new and renewing readers.
The Militant presents the positions of the SWP and helps organize its political activity. Party members and others use it year-round to strengthen the immediate struggles of working people, such as labor fights and protests against police brutality, and to discuss working-class politics more broadly — from understanding the roots of the growing world capitalist economic crisis, to campaigning against imperialism and its wars, to pointing to the example of the Cuban Revolution in the world today.
The drive is a focused eight-week effort, with stepped-up campaigning in working-class neighborhoods as well as among those joining labor resistance, social protests and political meetings.
Simultaneous with the subscription campaign, the SWP is organizing a fund to raise $100,000 to help cover the party’s expenses guiding its work and participating in workers’ struggles, social protests and trips to collaborate with co-thinkers abroad. The Socialist Workers Party has assigned John Studer to organize the annual fund drive.
Studer is a member of the party’s National Committee, with experience in steel, rail and packinghouse unions. He currently serves as the editor of the Militant.
The party seeks to draw all those who work with SWP members in the fight against police brutality, in union struggles, defense of abortion rights and other battles, and who join in expanding the readership of the Militant, into contributing and helping to broaden the party’s financial base.
‘I like the name of the paper’
“When they distributed this at the plant gate 30 years ago, I’d say, ‘Go to hell,’” said Joe Piru, a retiree from Local 1010, who worked for 42 years at the ArcelorMittal mill in East Chicago. “That’s before I understood the union. The union taught me to look out for everyone.” Piru signed up at the Steelworkers rally and bought a copy of Coal Miners on Strike. “I like the name of the paper,” he said.Tom Herendeen also decided to subscribe. He’s the president of USW Local 903 at Dana Corp. in Fort Wayne, Indiana, which makes axles. “In 2006 the company filed for bankruptcy and demanded concessions,” he told party member Alyson Kennedy. “The union agreed to a second tier to bridge the companies’ gap when the economy declined. Now they have record sales, profits and CEO salaries.”
United Auto Workers members at Ford’s assembly plant in Chicago are taking a strike authorization vote this week, Kennedy told him. “The UAW is fighting to get rid of the second wage tier, while the auto companies want to add a third lower tier.”
“Sounds like we’ll get together again to join pickets there,” Herendeen said.
SWP members from Chicago plan to visit Moline, Illinois, during the first week of the drive. The farm equipment manufacturer John Deere has three plants in the area, and the UAW contract expires at the end of September. “We’ll go door to door where UAW members live, and perhaps sell at the plant shift changes,” Kennedy reported.
On Sept. 7, they plan to join in Labor Day activities in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Lowell, Indiana, a small town south of Gary where Steelworkers Local 1010 will have a contingent.
Glenroy Alexander, a member of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 888, has been reading the Militant since he met SWP members at New York’s annual West Indian Day Parade a year ago.
He invited party members to join the UFCW contingent at this year’s parade Sept. 7. “My grandparents were in the labor movement in Trinidad, we’re all union people,” he said, “so the Militant fits right in. It helps connect me with the struggles of working people globally.”
“We’ll be reaching out to the working class in an undifferentiated way,” Bill Arth wrote from Los Angeles, by taking the paper to many different workers’ neighborhoods in the metro area and in the region. “We also want to get teams to Boron, Victorville, Bakersfield and Oxnard,” rural areas and towns in southern California.
As part of the subscription drive, several books presenting the communist program are on special for new and renewing Militant readers (see ad below).
The Militant will be covering the Socialist Workers Party subscription and fund drives weekly. Please send in reports that can be included in this column. To join in the effort, contact a party branch near you.
Related articles:
‘Workers need their own party, a labor party, based on the unions’
Communist League candidate backs Quebec taxi drivers
Socialist Workers Party 2005 statement on Hurricane Katrina
Gulf social disaster: ‘Twin capitalist parties at fault, workers need a labor party’
US gov’t snubs Cuban offer to send doctors
Excerpt from the ‘Militant,’ Sept. 26, 2005
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