http://themilitant.com/2016/8021/802103.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 21 May 30, 2016
(front page)
Join Socialist Workers Party campaigning coast to coast
BY MAGGIE TROWE
The Socialist Workers Party’s experience in campaigning from
Philadelphia to New Jersey to Washington state is that when we go to
workers on their doorsteps, they want to discuss what is the way
forward," Mary Martin, SWP candidate for governor in Washington,
reported May 17. “They give a hearing to our party’s perspectives and
program. Many want to try out our newspaper, the Militant, pick up a
book on revolutionary politics from Pathfinder Press, and help us get
our party on the ballot."
Martin filed to be on the ballot in Olympia, the state capitol, the same
day.
Workers reject President Barack Obama’s claim that the U.S. “right now
has the strongest, most durable economy in the world." They are looking
for a way forward out of the grinding depression conditions they face in
today’s feeble economic recovery — including low pay, unsafe working
conditions and degrading treatment.
The government’s list of what they call NILF — people Not In the Labor
Force, workers 16 or older who are not employed or actively looking for
work — increased by over half a million last month to bring the total to
94 million, the highest number ever recorded.
It’s in this context that members and supporters of the SWP are taking
their revolutionary working-class perspective to workers at their
doorsteps and in struggles against the bosses’ attacks — from East Coast
Verizon strikers to locked-out aerospace workers in Indiana to warehouse
workers fighting firings in Los Angeles — and as they put the party’s
presidential ticket of Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart on the ballot.
The SWP is also running candidates for Senate and Congress in
California, Minnesota, Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Georgia,
Florida and the District of Columbia.
Communists find many people who want to join in discussing how the
working class can unite and build a powerful movement to organize
unions, fight police brutality, defend women’s rights and transform
ourselves to become capable of displacing the dictatorship of capital
and building a new society based on human solidarity.
SWP campaigners have put Kennedy and Hart on the ballot in Colorado, and
are prepared to file in Louisiana in July. Ballot drives to get the
party out to workers in small towns and big cities are underway in
Washington and New Jersey, and begin in Tennessee and Minnesota May 20.
Betsy Farley, a union steelworker and Socialist Workers Party candidate
for U.S. Congress in Chicago, joined pickets May 15 in South Bend,
Indiana, where aerospace workers, members of United Auto Workers Local
9, have been locked out by Honeywell because they refused to sign a
concessions contract. “They treat us like we’re a commodity, like corn
or soybeans," electrician John Billington told Farley. Four locked-out
workers subscribed to the Militant.
SWP branches are organizing meetings with workers and young people
interested in going to the June 16-18 SWP Active Workers Conference in
Oberlin, Ohio (see article this page).
“I’m looking forward to going to the SWP conference because I enjoyed
the party forums I went to in Omaha," Chris Steffen, who works in a
plastic fabrication plant in Lincoln, Nebraska, told the Militant May
18. “As some of us were organizing a demonstration in defense of a
woman’s right to choose abortion at the state capitol here in April, we
had a forum where Alexandria Smith, one of the organizers of the
protest, and I spoke, and a dozen people took part in the discussion."
Steffen and SWP member Joe Swanson went to a May Day meeting on the
fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. “We raised the need to
organize unions as part of winning $15," he said.
Workers fund the ‘Militant’
At a May 14-16 meeting to prepare the conference, the SWP National
Committee decided to extend the deadline for the party’s drive to win
readers and contributors to the Militant to May 24 to help branches of
the SWP and Communist League sister parties around the world go over the
top.
To date 1,435 subscriptions and $94,286 have come in toward the quota of
1,550 subscriptions and $110,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund. The
cost of the paper’s production is sustained by hundreds of contributions
every spring.
“Twelve readers of the Militant here contributed $621 to the Militant
Fighting Fund," Nat London writes from Paris. “Five workers on the SNCM
ferry boat line in Marseille and a group of ‘temporary’ workers joined
workers at the Peugeot auto plant in Poissy near here to put us over our
goal of $450." The workers read French translations of Militant articles
sent out each week by supporters in Paris.
Twenty-one prisoners have subscribed during the drive. “I feel
privileged that the Militant has opened my eyes and educated me to
social issues that affect all working classes and struggles that unite
us all," a prisoner in New Zealand writes. He said he appreciates books
he has gotten from Pathfinder, especially It’s the Poor Who Face the
Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System: The Cuban Five Talk About Their
Lives Within the US Working Class.
To join with the Socialist Workers Party in winning workers to a
revolutionary perspective, contact a party branch listed in the
directory on page 8.
Related articles:
Spring subscription drive April 2 - May 24 (week 6)
Militant Fighting Fund April 2- May 24 (week 6)
Socialist Workers Party campaign
Socialist Workers Party conference to discuss capitalist crisis, what to do
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