The Socialist Workers Party candidates in Kentucky — Amy Husk for governor and Samir Hazboun for lieutenant governor — and campaign supporters joined 150 demonstrators at the federal courthouse in Louisville May 21 to protest against growing attacks on women’s right to choose to have an abortion. The action was one of hundreds across the country.
Many young participants, energized by the protest, stayed after the rally, waving signs and eliciting support from people driving by. Six subscriptions to the Militant and four books on revolutionary politics were sold there.
A quick, and incomplete, tally shows 48 subscriptions to the paper and 33 books by party leaders and other revolutionaries were sold at actions across the country.
“We join those around the world who have been standing up for a woman’s right to choose abortion,” SWP member Deborah Liatos told 200 people at an abortion rights protest in Van Nuys, California. After she spoke two young people approached Liatos to get a subscription and Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.
The books sold at these actions are some of the hundreds of titles offered at a discount during the current drive by the SWP and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. to expand the readership of revolutionary literature and win new subscribers to the Militant. As they campaign, party members explain that working people are capable of building a movement to make a socialist revolution and recruit others to building a party today that can make that possible.
May 28 is the deadline for party members and other Militant readers to bring the spring drive to a successful conclusion.
Amnesty for all immigrants in US!
“The Socialist Workers Party demands amnesty for all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. — to help unify the working class and create better conditions to organize the unorganized and strengthen the trade unions,” Alyson Kennedy, SWP candidate for mayor of Dallas, told construction worker Everardo Guerrero when she knocked on his door in Venus, Texas, May 8.
She showed Guerrero a picture of a federal detention center in the book The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. The image shows the wretched conditions that immigrants without papers are thrown into.
Maintaining “second-class status for immigrants is one of the ways the employers promote competition and conflict among workers in order to press down wages and conditions of the entire working class and further divide and weaken the unions,” Barnes says.
Guerrero described the low wages bosses paid him when he worked on a ranch just after arriving in the U.S. from Mexico years ago. He decided to get the Spanish edition of the book and a subscription to the Militant. He also kicked in $9 to the Militant Fighting Fund.
Militant Fighting Fund
The contribution was one of hundreds received by distributors of the paper around the country as they campaign door to door. Such contributions — from those who appreciate the paper’s unique coverage of working-class struggles and the road forward it presents — are the bedrock of the paper’s finances.
The annual Militant Fighting Fund is organized to win contributions from the Militant’s readership and other working people so the paper can meet its rising costs. Last week some $16,000 in fund contributions came in, bringing the total to $87,409. This puts the paper in a good position to collect the $27,591 needed over the next week to make the $115,000 goal. You can contribute online at www.themilitant.com.
Back fight against cop brutality!
“That stuff effects everyone!” factory worker Joshua Sorel told Harry D’Agostino and Alex Huinil after the socialist campaigners described a recent meeting against cop brutality in Albany, New York. Sorel said that he had had his own experiences with cop harassment. He got a Militant subscription when the two SWP members knocked on his door May 5 in North Adams, Massachusetts. Sorel urged them to stay in touch.
The paper has a long record championing fights against cop killings and explains how police brutality, the plea bargain road to prison, onerous bail terms and the entire capitalist “justice” system operates against the working class.
“During the eight years of the [Bill] Clinton presidency, between 1993 and 2001, the number of people locked behind bars in US prisons jumped by nearly 60 percent,” Barnes explains in The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record. “While the United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, today it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.
“As throughout history, the overwhelming majority of those incarcerated are workers, with ‘the law’ coming down disproportionately on those who are Black, Latino, or Native American,” Barnes adds. “Today fully one of every three young males who are Black is either in prison, on parole, or on probation. Lockdowns and solitary confinement, with their dehumanizing effects — designed to make you feel helpless and worthless — are increasingly the norm.”
If you want to help successfully complete the Militant, book and fund drive, contact the party branch nearest you, listed here.