SWP: Help us win ‘Militant’ readers, raise contributions!

BY MARY MARTIN

Socialist Workers Party members and supporters are launching a seven-week campaign to take the party to workers on their doorsteps, at strikes and other labor fights, and to protest actions demanding amnesty for undocumented workers, against cop brutality, in defense of women’s right to choose abortion and other issues of concern for working people.

A key part of this effort will be to expand the readership of the Militant, winning 1,100 new subscribers, coupled with getting out the same number of three Pathfinder books. At the same time, the party is organizing a Militant Fighting Fund to raise $112,000 to support the paper. The campaigns will run from April 1 to May 23.

The three books that are part of the drive are: Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?; The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People; and Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? — all available at reduced prices.

Join SWP members and readers of the Militant worldwide to help make the spring drive a success. Our aim is to meet and involve workers who are looking for a political perspective and way forward in the economic and social carnage caused by the crisis of capitalism. The SWP and the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom are the only parties to explain that to defend our interests the working class must build a movement capable of taking power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers.

SWP branches are planning to kick off the spring campaign in a big way.

In Los Angeles, Oakland and Seattle the branches are planning to visit United Steelworkers members on strike at the Lucky Friday silver mine in Idaho. Reports from these trips in the Militant are a tool for all workers to use to get out the word about these miners’ stand against union busting and for safety at the Hecla mine.

SWP members will also go door to door in the Idaho panhandle to discuss the strike and the road forward for working people with workers there.

The United Farmworkers Foundation has called protest marches around the West Coast and in Texas. SWP members in Washington and California will join these actions, discussing the government’s attacks on immigrant workers and the need to expand the fight for amnesty — a life and death question for the trade union movement.

Dan Fein from Chicago reports that SWP members there are organizing a campaign target week starting April 2 to put themselves in a strong position to reach out to the working class with the Militant and the party’s program. Over the course of the drive they are planning regional teams to the coalfields in southern Illinois and to Milwaukee where 20,000 workers marched on the “Day Without Immigrants” in February.

They are looking to get back to Milwaukee on May 1, when local immigrants’ rights groups are planning another large protest. Party members are building and organizing to join similar May Day actions being called across the country (see list on page 8).

Chris Hoeppner from Philadelphia said party members are organizing to respond to a new anti-Semitic attack on a synagogue there. They plan a solidarity visit to the synagogue and will go door to door in the area this weekend with the Militant.

“Charles Murray, the author of The Bell Curve will be speaking at Villanova University March 30,” Hoeppner said. “We’ll be there to debate and discuss the importance of political space for the working class with those protesting his talk. We will also show people Pathfinder’s Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? which explains what his Bell Curve is all about — a warning to the ruling class about the threat of the working class.”

Three other books are also on special — “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk About Their Lives Within the US Working Class; Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; and Cuba and Angola: The War for Freedom.

As we take the party and its propaganda out broadly, we will also ask workers we meet to contribute to the Militant Fighting Fund. This annual fund is decisive for meeting the regular operating budget of the paper, to pay for special reporting trips when working-class fights break out around the world and to subsidize cheaper and free subscriptions to workers behind bars.

Join this campaign! Contact the office of the communist movement nearest you, listed on page 10, to volunteer or to order books and papers to distribute in your area.

All out April 1!

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