Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. have kicked off the eight-week campaign to sell 1,350 Militant subscriptions, the same number of books and pamphlets that offer a revolutionary road forward, and raise $140,000 for the SWP Party-Building Fund. They’re taking news about today’s labor battles and the working-class view on key political questions to workers’ doorsteps, union picket lines and other labor movement activities and protest actions.
At a truck stop in Weatherford, Texas, Sept. 27, Rafael Ramirez discussed the FBI raid on former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home with SWP campaigners Josefina Otero and Dennis Richter. “People take this stuff lightly,” Ramirez said, “but the way politics works if they start going after one thing, they’ll go after another.” He bought a subscription to the Militant and made a contribution to the SWP Party-Building Fund.
The annual fund is key to financing the party. All the party’s work is based on contributions from workers and farmers.
D’vhonte Jackson, an over-the-road trucker who got a Militant subscription last spring, described the steep increases in prices for diesel and insurance. He renewed his subscription, gave a contribution to the fund, and bought Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power, by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, and Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity. Jackson said he’s been following the Militant and is convinced “Russia should leave Ukraine alone.”
In Cincinnati, three party members took the Militant and its pro-union coverage of rail workers’ fight against treacherous schedules, crew sizes and working conditions to the CSX Queensgate rail yard Sept. 16, where 14 workers stopped and got copies of the paper on their way in or out of work. One bought a copy of In Defense of the US Working Class by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters.
One worker showed Samir Hazboun, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Ohio, the bed he’d built into his car. CSX closed the rail yard nearest his home making it harder for him to make it in time to a shift call. He said he often sleeps in his car halfway between home and work when he’s high on the call-in list.
Over 150 people gathered under a giant Ukrainian flag at Bowling Green Park in New York Sept. 24 to protest the Russian government’s recent troop conscription and stepped-up war moves against Ukraine. “The Socialist Workers Party hails the resistance of Ukrainian working people,” Sara Lobman, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate, told the crowd when invited to take the mic. “We stand with the Russian toilers protesting Moscow’s escalating war moves.”
Explaining that the party has an unbroken record of support for Ukraine’s battle for independence, Lobman said that fight is in the interests of working people in the U.S. and worldwide. One protester got a subscription and several others picked up copies of the paper.
When 81 dockworkers voted by over 98% to authorize a strike at the Port of Quebec, management retaliated by locking them out Sept. 15. Felix Vincent Ardea, the Communist League candidate for Quebec’s National Assembly from Marquette, joined their picket line. The strikers, members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, told him that the main issue was the bosses’ imposition of 12-hour shifts. “Shifts like these wreck family life and fatigue on the job increases the chance of injury on the job,” agreed Vincent Ardea, a Teamsters union member who faces similar schedule pressures as a conductor on the Canadian National Railway. “It’s one of the central issues in many of today’s labor battles.”
Eleven books, which are on special offer when purchased with a Militant subscription, are featured in this ad. All other Pathfinder titles are available at a 20% discount.
Join in! Contact the SWP or Communist League branch nearest you, listed in the directory.