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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 15 April 18, 2016
(front page)
Join spring activities to build Socialist Workers Party
BY SETH GALINSKY
Join us from now through June — and beyond — as the Socialist Workers
Party steps up its activities to get the party known more broadly in the
working class and to win new members and friends to the revolutionary
movement. Communist Leagues around the world are doing the same.
Among key aspects of this concentrated effort:
Getting Socialist Workers Party candidates for U.S. president and vice
president — Alyson Kennedy and Osborne Hart — on the ballot in six
states: Louisiana, New Jersey, Tennessee, Colorado, Minnesota and
Washington (see details on page 3).
Joining and promoting the fight for unionization. Organize the
unorganized! We will be right in the middle of the April 14 nationwide
protests for $15 and a union, and winning solidarity for other union
actions by workers standing up to attempts by the bosses to make working
people pay for the capitalist crisis.
Going door to door in small towns and big cities talking to workers,
small farmers and young people to put forward a communist perspective
and win new readers to the party’s press — the Militant and books that
are part of advancing a Marxist program that points the way forward to
putting an end to the dictatorship of capital.
An important beginning piece of this are teams in Wisconsin, where the
big discussions and debates over the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders
campaigns are an opportunity to talk to workers — no matter what
bourgeois candidate they support or don’t — who are fed up with politics
as usual and looking for a way to fight back against the bosses.
We will build other social protests, from the fight against police
brutality to opposing the firings and deportation of immigrant workers
to defense of women’s right to choose abortion, such as the April 9
demonstration in Indianapolis.
As part of all these activities, party branches are setting goals for
selling subscriptions to the Militant from April 2 to May 17. Along with
the paper, we will be getting Pathfinder books, with the continuity of
more than 100 years of Marxist experience, into the hands of working
people and youth looking for a way forward. The $110,000 Militant
Fighting Fund drive will run concurrently to raise the money needed to
keep the Militant in print. Weekly charts starting in the next issue
will track our progress on subscriptions and the fund.
The newest of Pathfinder’s arsenal of books — The Cuban Five Talk About
Their Lives Within the US Working class: “It’s the Poor Who Face the
Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System” — is worth noting. This is not
primarily a book about prison conditions or how to stand up to solitary
confinement. It’s about the dog-eat-dog morality fostered inside that
“microcosm” of capitalism that is prison in the United States. And about
the lessons and example from five Cuban revolutionaries who conducted
themselves with, and won others to, the morality and values of
working-class solidarity and internationalism. Seven Pathfinder books,
including this one, are on special during this drive.
All the capitalist candidates from Trump and Sanders to Ted Cruz and
Hillary Clinton want you to believe that who is elected can change
something fundamental. Or that whoever they appoint to the Supreme Court
can do so.
The Socialist Workers Party has a diametrically opposed view. The
problem working people face is worldwide. It is the dictatorship of
capital. The worldwide economic crisis can’t be voted or legislated away.
As working people stand up and fight for better work conditions and
wages and join other social struggles, we gain self-confidence and
combat experience. But these struggles by themselves cannot put an end
to the exploitation that is part and parcel of capitalism.
That’s why the Socialist Workers Party and its candidates combat
illusions in electoral politics and point a road forward to workers
taking power out of the hands of the capitalist class, as the workers
and farmers of Cuba did in 1959. The example of what Cuba’s working
people have accomplished since then, standing up to every attempt by the
U.S. rulers to overthrow that revolution, shows what workers can
accomplish.
After these weeks of intense work, many of those we meet will want to
attend the June 16-18 Socialist Workers Party conference in Oberlin,
Ohio. This international gathering will be an unequaled opportunity to
bring together the experiences of the last several months, continue
political discussion, gain a better understanding of the communist
movement and map out the work ahead.
Our work building the communist movement won’t stop after this spring
campaign, but continues 365 days a year.
Join us!
Related articles:
‘Workers need to fight to take political power’
Socialist Workers Party campaigns across Wisconsin against capitalism
and its crisis
SWP candidate backs fight to prosecute California cop
SWP Campaign
For $15 an hour and a union!
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