The Socialist Workers Party begins an eight-week drive, March 24-May 22, to take its political program and activities deeper into the working class — winning 1,400 subscribers to the party’s paper, the Militant, and selling the same number of books on revolutionary politics by party leaders. Join us in expanding the party’s reach! As part of the campaign we’ll raise $112,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund.
Members of the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and others who look to the party around the world, will join in the party-building effort.
The party’s campaign takes place following the successful nine-day strike battle by teachers and school workers across West Virginia. Workers picked up by that struggle are preparing for battles of their own in Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona and other places. Party members are joining with co-workers, others in the labor movement and those inspired by these fights to go to the picket lines and extend solidarity. They take the Militant and Pathfinder books with them, to help strengthen the working-class movement and carve out a revolutionary vanguard.
An important part of the drive will be knocking on doors in working-class neighborhoods, talking about what needs to be done to advance our struggles. Millions are looking for answers to capitalism’s deepening social and moral crisis, and the devastating impact of the rulers’ wars. They are open to discussing how to replace the rule of the capitalist class with a workers and farmers government and reorganize society to meet the needs of the toiling majority.
The stirrings in the labor movement and discussion about the road forward today occur during an uptick in the capitalist economy. As jobs increase so does workers’ mobility, self-confidence and readiness to fight bosses’ attacks. At the same time we continue to face the competition-fueled assaults of the propertied rulers on our wages and conditions, and the divisions they impose between employed and unemployed, immigrant and native-born, women and men, Black and Caucasian, to weaken our struggles.
Decades of capitalist assaults have worsened the conditions we work and live in — from teachers and other workers forced to work two or three jobs to get by, to the spreading drug epidemic.
The fight for women’s rights, developments in Korea and the Middle East, and the fight to defend and emulate the example of Cuba’s living socialist revolution are addressed in the pages of the Militant and in the books on special offer during the campaign.
It is the big political questions — war and attacks on political rights, women’s rights and the need to advance culture — that workers worldwide want to discuss and debate.
The books on special offer are Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power; Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?; and The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record, all by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes; Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters; and “It’s the Poor Who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System.”
And we’ll distribute widely the SWP National Committee statement “For Recognition of a Palestinian State and of Israel,” which is available on the Militant’s website.
Hospitality worker Alberto Victorino picked up a subscription to the paper when Nancy Boyasko and Terry Evans knocked on his door in Union City, New Jersey, March 4. He told the SWP members he had worked at one of President Donald Trump’s businesses, but left after Trump’s opponents protested outside the workplace, targeting the workers. “I want the book with the joke title,” Victorino said, pointing to Are They Rich Because They’re Smart?
“The rulers say they’re the smart ones because they want workers to believe we aren’t capable of taking power and organizing society,” Evans said, handing the book over.
The Militant depends on financial contributions from supporters of the paper to meet its costs, and is not beholden to any other financing that places conditions on its politics. Party members will ask all those who respond favorably to kick in a donation and work to expand the number of new contributors to the Militant Fighting Fund.
If you would like to be part of the drive, or make a contribution to the fund, contact the nearest SWP or CL branch listed in the directory of local distributors.
Dan Fein is the circulation drive director.