http://themilitant.com/2015/7931/793103.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 79/No. 31 September 7, 2015
(front page, Socialist Workers Party statement)
Socialist Workers Party leads drive for new readers
Statement by the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party,
issued Aug. 27 by Norton Sandler, the party’s trade union director.
For the next eight weeks, starting Sept. 5, the Socialist Workers Party
is organizing our members and other working people to win 2,300 new
readers and renewals to the Militant newspaper, which presents the
positions of the party and helps organize its political activity. SWP
members are urging fellow workers to subscribe to, discuss and join in
expanding the readership of the party press.
The subscription drive kicks off over Labor Day weekend, when unions are
organizing marches, picnics and other events. Socialist Workers Party
members and workers and youth who look to the SWP politically are
building these activities along with others.
Naomi Craine, a member of the SWP National Committee, is the
subscription drive director. Craine, currently a staff writer for the
Militant, is a longtime union member, including of the United Food and
Commercial Workers and UNITE HERE.
Concurrent with the subscription effort, the Socialist Workers Party is
organizing a fall fund drive to raise $100,000 to carry out the party’s
political work.
Join Labor Day kickoff
The 2015 Labor Day actions are part of the increased resistance this
year to the employers’ relentless offensive against the working class,
as well as to the brutal capitalist “justice” against Blacks and other
working people meted out by the cops and courts. Workers across the U.S.
have taken steps forward in the fight for a $15 minimum wage and a
union. Steelworkers are battling the bosses’ steep concession demands,
with national demonstrations to be held in Gary, Indiana, and in the
Pittsburgh area on Sept. 1.
Labor Day activities in Charleston, South Carolina, will build on the
Black-led victory for the working class this summer of having the
Confederate battle flag removed from the state Capitol grounds, as well
as ongoing fights against police brutality and for unionization and
better wages and job safety. Joining Labor Day events in parts of the
U.S. will be autoworkers whose contracts expire in September and workers
organized by the Communications Workers of America and International
Brotherhood of Electrical Workers fighting to hold off Verizon’s
takeback contract demands.
Working people are responding to the consequences on our lives and those
around us of today’s capitalist depression in production, employment and
trade, as well as crushing debts on homes, credit cards, automobiles and
college loans. Tens of thousands of workers and farmers have been
killed, wounded, or left with lifetime disabilities from Washington’s
wars just since 2001, as the U.S. imperialist-dominated global order
imposed at the end of World War II unravels. The U.S. ruling class, with
no solutions to the crisis, seeks to make working people bear the brunt.
Out of the resistance to the rulers’ grinding offensive, there are new
opportunities to expand a Marxist current that follows the lead of the
Socialist Workers Party in political and union struggles and joins in
getting the Militant, Pathfinder books and the magazine New
International into the hands of working people.
During the subscription drive, Socialist Workers Party members and
others who support the party’s work — including SWP candidates for mayor
and City Council in Philadelphia and port commissioner in Seattle — will
take the Militant and books broadly to porches and apartments in
working-class neighborhoods in cities across the U.S., as well as to
workers, farm laborers and farmers in small towns and rural areas. We’ll
distribute the paper at political meetings, social protests and labor
actions. We’re intervening with the Militant and book tables to reach
workers and youth in the big crowds at campaign events for Bernie
Sanders and for Donald Trump.
Members and supporters of Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada, New
Zealand and the United Kingdom are joining in this international campaign.
We’re talking with workers about the need to put an end to the
dictatorship of capital, whose social and political consequences all of
us live under today. We discuss the need for the revolutionary
organization and mobilization of the working class to take political
power out of the hands of the ruling class. The transformation of
working people, as we fight alongside each other to transform our
conditions of life and work, opens the road to socialism here and the
world over. Regular readers of the Militant will find articles most
weeks pointing to the example workers and farmers in Cuba have set since
they took power and made a socialist revolution some 55 years ago.
A half-dozen titles presenting the party’s program are on special for
new and renewing Militant readers. These include Teamster Politics by
Farrell Dobbs; issues of the Marxist magazine New International
featuring the articles “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War,”
“Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” and “Our Politics Start with
the World”; and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers
Power and The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack
Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. (See ad on
page 3.)
Socialist Workers Party fund drive
Contributions to the Socialist Workers Party’s $100,000 fall fund drive
are an essential part of the yearly budget for the party’s political
activity, which is reported week in and week out in the pages of the
Militant. Like the subscription campaign, the fund drive continues
through Nov. 3.
SWP members set an example, contributing generously to the fund and
urging workers we are fighting alongside and new and long-term readers
of the party press to contribute.
Related articles:
SWP campaign finds interest, support at Sanders rally in S.C.
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