Vol. 79/No. 41      November 16, 2015

“Our party has a program to defend the working class,” Fein responded. “You can’t be for the bosses and the workers at the same time. We’re participants in the fights taking place today, like the Nov. 10 national day of actions for a $15 minimum wage and a union. Workers need to organize politically independent of the capitalists and their parties on the road to take power and reorganize society along the lines of the Cuban Revolution.”

Malchow, who works as a nanny, subscribed to the party’s paper, the Militant. She also got three of the books on special for new readers: Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning; and New International no 11 with the lead article “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War” to learn more about the SWP.

Over the last two months members have been leading a broad effort to expand the circulation of the party’s press and books in the working class. The final results of the subscription drive, and of the $100,000 Party-Building Fund, are still coming in and will be published in next week’s issue.

“Four workers subscribed to the Militant outside the CVG auto parts plant in Piedmont, Alabama, where workers recently voted in the United Auto Workers,” Dave Ferguson from the SWP in Atlanta reported Oct. 30. “One worker said the company had taken away paid sick time and increased the number of temporary workers.”

The same day teams from Atlanta went to the towns of Seneca and Red Bank in South Carolina. Many workers in Seneca were outraged at the state prosecutor’s decision not to indict the cop who killed Zachary Hammond there (see article on front page). Four people subscribed to the Militant.

White supremacist Dylann Storm Roof lived in Red Bank before he carried out the political assassination of nine African-Americans in a church in Charleston in June. “John Benson and I knocked on doors in a small trailer park,” wrote Susan LaMont. “David Thompson, 46, and his wife, Jennifer, both thought what Roof did was ‘outrageous.’ She manages the trailer park and he installs wood floors.

“We also talked about the Confederate battle flag, which the state government was forced to remove from the Capitol in the wake of the massacre. David said he thought the flag ‘wasn’t a racist symbol, it’s part of history.’

“John explained that state governments raised the battle flag in the South in the 1950s and ’60s, not during the Civil War, as a symbol of opposition to the civil rights movement and maintaining Jim Crow segregation,’” said LaMont. “David said he hadn’t known that and they decided to subscribe. So did a neighbor of theirs, a young Black woman who works at the Amazon fulfillment center. She was interested in the Fight for $15 movement.”

“We’re over our goal,” wrote Patrick Brown from the Communist League in New Zealand. “Stewart Shanks, a stonemason, renewed and bought several books. He has followed the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster (see article on page 6). At first, he said, he was inclined to think the workers were to blame, but the Militant’s coverage convinced him that a frame-up is underway.”

“I invited the Militant to spend the day talking to locked-out ATI workers at three gates” in western Pennsylvania, said Regina Stinson, an organizer of Wives of Steel, which coordinates solidarity activities for the fight against takeback demands at Allegheny Technologies Inc. “The Militant does a great job of getting the workers story out.”

“At picket shacks in Bagdad, Vandergrift and at the gate in Brackenridge six workers subscribed to the paper and one got Teamster Politics,” reported Arlene Rubinstein from the SWP in Washington, D.C., who took Stinson up on her invitation. “A retired steelworker got a sub and two books for her daughter. She picked up Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power for herself and contributed $15 to the fund.”

Five areas have gone over the top and a number more report that they now have pledges and contributions to the Party-Building Fund that go over their goals. As the final checks are put in the mail, we’ll keep closing in on the $100,000 goal. Everything that comes in for the fund by next Tuesday will count.

John Studer, SWP Party-Building Fund director, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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