Expanding the reach of the Socialist Workers Party campaign — Rachele Fruit for president, Dennis Richter for vice president and local candidates across the country — and winning endorsers for the ticket is at the center of an eight-week international party-building campaign organized by the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia and the U.K.
The goal is to win 1,300 Militant readers, get out the same number of books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries on key questions in the class struggle and in the U.S. raise $140,000 for the SWP Party-Building Fund.
SWP members Gerardo Sánchez and Hilda Cuzco report that six of their co-workers at the Bimbo bakery in Grand Prairie, Texas, have signed up for subscriptions, and five have renewed. Several of them are endorsers of the Fruit campaign.
Machine operator Maria Cuadros told Sánchez, “It’s a good paper. You can see what workers here and around the world are doing to defend themselves and get better working conditions and wages. It explains what is going on in the world, like in Ukraine and the Middle East.”
With Oct. 7 marking the one-year anniversary of the Hamas pogrom against Israel, campaigners have gotten a good response in working-class neighborhoods, at strike picket lines and at events commemorating the massacre.
A construction worker on his doorstep in Fort Worth told SWP campaigner George Chalmers that some of his co-workers had been killed on the job. Chalmers explained that the Militant reports every week about strikes and other labor struggles, including against conditions like those that the construction worker faces. He got a subscription.
Lynda Little and Katy LeRougetel, members of the Communist League in Montreal, met Jai-Mansouri Abdelhamid, originally from Morocco, over coffee in Gatineau, Quebec, Oct. 3. He told them he bred sheep for five years on his 106-acre farm northeast of Ottawa, “but I had no vacation, the winters were hard — the water would sometimes freeze. It’s difficult to birth lambs in those conditions, so I changed to driving a taxi.
“In Morocco we lived side by side with Jews,” he said. “My school principal was a Jew, and so were many of my teachers. There was a Jewish butcher who would encourage my son to come to his home. The government of Iran is against all that.” He got a Militant subscription and the French edition of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class and two other titles.
CL members report a good response from calls to subscribers. Ed Baker, a retired factory worker in Halifax, Nova Scotia, renewed his subscription for six months. “The government should not have stepped in on the rail workers strike,” he said, pointing to the decision of Canada’s Industrial Relations Board to order 10,000 freight rail workers back to work in August.
Baker said, “The Militant explains exactly what’s going on. I give it to a buddy of mine and we talk about it.”
“After the Holocaust, the Jews have been through more than enough,” retired factory worker Margaret McIlmunn told Communist League members Andrés Mendoza and Pete Clifford when they knocked on her door in Manchester, England, Oct. 5. “You only have four cheeks to turn before you have to stand up for yourself and fight back. But you will never get peace,” she said.
“You can establish peace and end Jew-hatred, but only through a socialist revolution,” Clifford replied. “That requires building a party with unshakable confidence in the capacities of the working class.”
McIlmunn told the CL campaigners she’d lost her job at a bakery when she refused to cross a picket line. Clifford pointed to the coverage of labor resistance in the Militant. “There are more openings today with renewed labor resistance,” he said. She got a subscription.
At the picket line of striking Bakkavor workers in Spalding, Lincolnshire, in the U.K., three workers, members of the Unite union, got subscriptions to the paper when CL members Jonathan Silberman and Pamela Holmes brought solidarity to their picket line.
Members of the CL in London found serious interest in The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch at two events over the weekend of Oct. 5-6 commemorating Hamas’ massacre. They sold 32 copies of the book, five other titles and eight subscriptions to the Militant.
Seventeen people picked up the French edition of the same book from a literature table set up by supporters of the communist movement in Paris at a similar event held there Oct. 7.
To help get word out about the SWP campaign, and get out the Militant and books by revolutionary working-class leaders, or to contribute to the SWP fund, contact the party branch nearest you.