BY SARA LOBMAN
The first copies of El rostro cambiante de la política de Estados Unidos, the Spanish-language edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, were sold to students involved in the protests sweeping Argentina. Perspectiva Mundial editor Martín Koppel reports that one copy was sold to a young person who was part of a group of high school students who were interviewing teachers holding a fast to press their demands.

Students at the University of La Plata also bought a copy for the student center library, along with the issue of Nueva Internacional featuring the article "Imperialism's March toward Fascism and War." They had participated in battling the cops who charged onto their campus May 20 in an assault on protesting street vendors and their student supporters.

Big increase in sales on the job
Sales to workers in the industrial unions soared in May, as socialists organized to take advantage of a "super sale" by Pathfinder of many of its titles. Socialists in the United States sold 451 books to their co-workers, exceeding their monthly goal for the first time.

In Boston, 22 books were sold on the job, Mary Nell Bockman reports, including What Is to be Done? by V.I. Lenin, The Struggle against Fascism in Germany by Leon Trotsky, Cointelpro: The FBI's Secret War on Political Freedom, and On the Irish Freedom Struggle by Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. "Workers at a rally of 2,000 unionists from the GE plant in Lynn, Massachusetts, bought five copies of The Eastern Airlines Strike: Accomplishments of the Rank- and-File Machinists and a copy of Labor's Giant Step: The First Twenty Years of the CIO: 1936-55. Workers there are preparing for a contract fight. Boston socialists also sold 19 titles at political events, including a Gay Youth Pride march, a commemoration of the Irish hunger strike, and a debate on Puerto Rican independence." Another 19 books were sold at the Harvard Square Book Festival.

Rachel Fruit in Miami reports that members of the International Association of Machinists, the United Steelworkers of America, and the United Transportation Union came by the Pathfinder bookstore in May to take advantage of the special offers.

In Pittsburgh, 17 books and pamphlets were sold to members of the IAM. Doug Jenness reports from Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, that socialist workers there sold 34 books and pamphlets on the job in May, "the highest on record."

Dick McBride, a meatpacker and member of the United Food and Commercial Workers in Perry, Iowa, went around the plant after work, showing his co-workers the supersaver order form. One worker, who engaged him in an extended discussion, ordered 15 titles. Several other workers, from Vietnam and Latin America, joined in the conversation. Another worker, from the Sudan, purchased Capital and On Colonialism by Karl Marx.

13,800 books en route to workers, youth
The successful sales of the revolutionary literature to unionists on the job is one of the most important results of the Pathfinder sale. In the course of the special effort some 35,300 books were packaged and shipped to Pathfinder bookstores around the world, their first stop on their way into the hands of workers and youth. This includes 115 sets of the 14-volume Writings of Leon Trotsky, 231 sets of the Communist International in Lenin's Time, 121 sets of the Collected Works of Lenin, and dozens of sets of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. The total sales, including sales of the Collected Works during a special offer in the early months of the year, came to $152,000!

On May 24 and 25, several dozen volunteers converged on New York from across the United States and Canada to help pack up the final orders and ship them out from a warehouse the publisher had temporarily rented in Brooklyn to cities around the world. As the final orders were packed up, other teams immediately began a careful inventory of the remaining stock.

As part of the effort to set up the efficient production and distribution of revolutionary literature, several thousand books, mainly volumes of the Collected Works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, were shipped to a half dozen cities where supporters had volunteered to keep these hard-to- replace books until they are needed. Volunteers also destroyed thousands of overstock titles; both steps were necessary to ensure open shelves, space to fill orders in a timely way, and an organized reprint program that regularly produces the socialist books and pamphlets.

Following a final inventory review, volunteers will pull several thousand additional titles from the shelves. Many of these will be available at supersale prices to participants at the June 10-14 socialist conference in Oberlin, Ohio.

Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla
These steps come not a moment too soon. In addition to the Spanish-language edition of The Changing Face of U.S. Politics, several other new books are rolling off the presses. Pombo: A Man of Che's `Guerrilla', is a never- before-published story of the 1966-68 revolutionary campaign in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara told by Harry Villegas, a member of Guevara's general staff. Villegas, known by his nom de guerre, Pombo, is today a brigadier general in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.

At the same time, Pathfinder is publishing - in English and Spanish - recent interviews with Villegas, where he talks about the struggles he has taken part in over the past four decades and the importance of Guevara's political legacy for a new generation of fighters the world over.  
 
 
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