Members of the Socialist Workers Party and of the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K. have gone over the top on their quotas in the fall party-building campaign!
In the weeks after the U.S. election, party members continued joining in strike picket lines and visiting workers on their doorsteps to discuss what workers can do to defend ourselves from boss and government attacks. They’ve introduced the party’s revolutionary program and class-struggle road forward, selling 1,316 subscriptions to the Militant, 1,436 books by SWP and other revolutionaries and raising $141,637 for the SWP’s annual Party-Building Fund. The eight-week campaign to extend the party’s reach concluded Nov. 19.
SWP campaigners found widespread interest in building solidarity with union strike struggles, disgust at what Democratic and Republican administrations alike do on behalf of the capitalist class they serve, and interest in learning more about the root cause of the growing conflicts shaking the crisis-ridden world order. More workers today sense the imperialist rulers in Washington and elsewhere are dragging humanity toward the unthinkable prospect of a third world war.
Days after a deadly explosion at the Givaudan Sense Colour factory in Louisville, Kentucky, SWP members Amy Husk and Jacquie Henderson talked with workers who live near the plant Nov. 17.
The horrific blast “should never have happened,” Hope Harp told the two SWP members. “Two workers are dead, others injured. You can see glass that went flying from homes and the twisted metal from the plant.”
Harp is a member of Millwrights Local 1076 and a recruiter for the union. The consequences of the blast are “everyone’s concern,” she said. “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Harp got a Militant subscription and four Pathfinder books, including a prepublication order for the new edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women by SWP leaders Mary-Alice Waters, Evelyn Reed and Joseph Hansen. The book offers a Marxist explanation of the origins of women’s oppression and a class-struggle road toward ending it.
Stronger unions show way forward
In McKeesport, in the Pittsburgh metro area, SWP member Tony Lane spoke with Stephanie Cook on her doorstep. She works at a nearby candy factory. They discussed the outcome of the election and Barack Obama’s remarks that Black men who don’t vote for Vice President Kamala Harris are prejudiced against women.
“That’s not why I didn’t vote for Harris!” Cook said. “We need a better country.”
“What workers do together through our unions today is a start on the way to improve the conditions we face,” Lane said. Cook agreed. The SWP calls for a class break with the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties and building a party of labor. Cook got a subscription to the Militant.
In the same area, SWP member Sergio Zambrana spoke to a worker who told him about a nearby battery plant where workers in September organized a local of the United Steelworkers. She got a Militant subscription and a copy of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward by SWP leaders Jack Barnes, Mary-Alice Waters and Steve Clark. She wants to get together again and get a copy of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class.
In Montreal, office worker and longtime Militant reader Nancy Crawford renewed her subscription after attending a Nov. 16 Militant Labor Forum. Communist League member Beverly Bernardo asked Crawford what she likes about the paper that she began reading after CL members knocked on her door some years ago.
Crawford said she’s “long recognized the imbalances and injustices in the world, and it only seems to be getting worse.
“My goal is to learn more about what can be done to combat inequality,” she said. “The solution can’t come from the government. It has to come from the people.”
In the weeks ahead, members of the SWP and CLs, along with some new supporters won to the party’s 2024 presidential campaign, will continue taking an internationalist, working-class program to working people in cities, towns and rural areas.
To join in advancing this course and the effort to build the party that workers need, contact the branch of the SWP or the CL nearest you.