The Militant extends a warm welcome to new readers who subscribed during the recent campaign to increase its readership. The paper is true to its masthead — a socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people.
Its reports on today’s union and working-class struggles are indispensable. They show what workers and farmers are doing to meet the attacks by the bosses and their government. From the strike by the Writers Guild across the U.S. and the intertwined struggle of rail workers and the working people of East Palestine, Ohio, to fights by working people for political rights in Iran and Ukrainian toilers battling to defend their independence, the Militant is a voice for mobilizing working-class solidarity here and worldwide.
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Union struggles for better wages and conditions are the foundation for everything workers do to defend ourselves. But as Karl Marx, one of the founders of the modern communist movement, said in 1866, “If the trade unions are required for the guerrilla fights between capital and labour, they are still more important as organized agents for superceding the very system of wages labour and capital rule.”
So-called friends of labor in the Democratic and Republican parties subordinate workers’ class interests to the bosses’ class interests and profits. The Militant explains why workers need a party of our own, a labor party based on the unions.
And it lays bare the reality that the interests of the toiling majority on any question cannot be reconciled with those of the ruling capitalist class. Big shifts unfolding in world politics are explained in its pages from the viewpoint of the common interests workers share internationally against the imperialist rulers in Washington and capitalist governments worldwide.
A special welcome goes out to new readers behind bars. The Militant defends the rights of incarcerated workers to be treated as human beings, including the right to get the reading material of your choice. The paper always fights any attempt by prison authorities to ban it — consistent with the Militant’ s unconditional opposition to attacks on free speech, due process and other constitutional freedoms.
Over the coming weeks you’ll read about the Socialist Workers Party candidates explaining how all political questions today are class questions and laying out a concrete working-class program and road forward.
You’ll read selections in the weekly “Books of the Month” column about lessons from past union, social and revolutionary struggles, from the fight to forge a proletarian party in the U.S. to the two great socialist revolutions in Russia in 1917 and Cuba in 1959.
The paper is a tool for building a party that can assemble, educate and organize a vanguard to help lead the fight to replace capitalist rule with a workers and farmers government. The Militant’ s working-class continuity means it can proudly run a column that reprints articles from 25, 50 and 75 years ago. In five more years, we’ll have to add in 100 years back.
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Editor, Militant