Members of Socialist Workers Party branches and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. are off and rolling in a seven-week international campaign that began Sept. 26. The goal is to win 1,150 new readers to the Militant and sell an equal number of books by Socialist Workers Party and other revolutionary leaders, and to build support for the 2026 election campaigns of the SWP and CLs. And the SWP Party-Building Fund aims to raise over $140,000 for the work of the party.
When Tony Lane, SWP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania, knocked on Eric Bryant’s door in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania, Oct. 4, they got into a discussion about the power of Cuba’s socialist revolution and why successive U.S. administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, have been determined to overturn it. Lane showed him the new Pathfinder book, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by veteran Cuban revolutionary Víctor Dreke. Lane quoted Fidel Castro, who said that the Cuban Revolution owed a debt to humanity. “That’s why Cuban volunteers played such a central role in helping to defeat the colonial powers in Africa and the South African apartheid regime’s invasions of Angola.”
Bryant wanted to learn more and got a subscription to the Militant and bought the book.
“There are real challenges trying to raise a family today. The cost of groceries, housing, all the basics,” Sage Arnold, a worker at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told Dennis Richter, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas, on her doorstep in Arlington Oct. 4.
“I have a daughter and we would like to expand our family, but even thinking of daycare costs running over $400 a week makes us put it off,” she said.
Richter said the SWP calls for fighting for cost-of-living clauses in all union contracts and government programs like Social Security that guarantee when prices rise, wages rise to meet them 100%.
“We also need a massive government-funded public works program to provide jobs to build what working people need, including more daycare centers,” he said. “And the fundamental right to a job that pays enough to sustain a working person and their family. I’m a union member and we need to use union power to fight for what all working people need.”
Arnold said she hadn’t voted before but wanted “to know how to vote for you,” as she bought an introductory subscription to the Militant.
‘A different way of looking at things’
“You have given me a different way of looking at things,” Dave Gibson, a 53-year-old concrete worker originally from the Bahamas, told SWP member David Rosenfeld, who met him campaigning in Miami Oct. 2.
Rosenfeld explained the SWP advances the demand for amnesty for all immigrant workers in the U.S., a demand that was raised by tens of thousands of workers in widespread demonstrations in 2006. This is in the interests of the entire working class. “The capitalist class and their parties, the Democrats and Republicans, reap superprofits by maintaining millions of workers without papers who have fewer rights. They also look to scapegoat these fellow workers for the deepening crisis of capitalism that bears down on all of us.
“We fight stronger and more effectively when our co-workers don’t face the threat of deportation and are organized into the unions,” Rosenfeld said. “This strengthens and unifies the entire working class.” Gibson said his dad was a meatpacker and he understood the stakes involved in forging working-class unity.
“I want to educate myself,” Gibson said as he bought Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes; The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark; and a Militant subscription. As Gibson treated campaigners to some Gatorade, Rosenfeld said, “We’ll stay in touch.”
Melvin Robinson and Victoria Robinson from Atlanta stopped by the Pathfinder Books booth at the Decatur Book Fair Oct. 3. They too bought a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. Melvin Robinson, who is studying to be a therapist for children with autism, picked up the book with interest. “I was raised in South Carolina,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in what happened in the Civil War and what led up to the Civil Rights Movement.”
“Despite the victory against the slavocracy in the Civil War, we ended up with 80 years of Jim Crow segregation in the South afterwards. Why?” responded SWP campaigner Susan LaMont. “Because of the overthrow of Radical Reconstruction, the biggest defeat for the U.S. working class in our history, dividing our class along race lines.”
“It took the mighty Black-led Civil Rights Movement to tear down Jim Crow segregation and begin to overcome that decades-long division in our class. This has strengthened the whole working class, including our unions,” she said.
Melvin Robinson was also interested in the ongoing series on the history of the fight to overthrow Jim Crow segregation now appearing in the Militant. So were many others among those who bought 15 subscriptions, along with 106 books.
Out of such discussions, SWP candidates and their campaign supporters find many working people are willing to make a contribution to the SWP Party-Building Fund.
To join in campaigning in your area, contact the nearest Militant distributors.