So far, 2,225 people have signed up to receive the Militant each week and 505 readers have been won to its Spanish-language sister publication. That leaves 75 subscriptions to meet the international target on the Militant and 45 for PM.
Because this issue goes to press one day early due to the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, the final results of the effort will be printed next week. Here are a few of the highlights of the final stretch.
Socialists working in the coal mines in the United States have gone over their Militant subscription goal, selling 32 subs on the job, at union meetings, and in the course of union-building activity.
“The victory scored by the Co-Op miners was an important impetus for us in the last week of the campaign,” said Tony Lane, a miner in southwestern Pennsylvania (see front-page article). “About nine of my co-workers subscribe to the paper, and they’ve been following this fight closely. One miner, who signed up for a subscription at the start of the drive, decided to renew when he learned about the victory at a union meeting last week. At the same meeting, another miner signed up for the first time.”
Lane pointed to the fact that nationally the bulk of the new readers among miners is in Price, Utah, where 14 subscriptions were sold. “This shows the impact of the Co-Op struggle as well as the new openings for unionization in the western coalfields, which the Militant has followed closely,” he said.
Opportunities to sell books on revolutionary working-class politics, like those advertised on page 7, net new subscribers, too. In South Florida, the Pathfinder booth at the November 12-14 Miami bookfair was a pole of attraction, with 216 Pathfinder books and pamphlets sold.
“When I was in school I wasn’t aware of the world,” Rosario Matos-Vila, a young woman from Kansas City, told a campaigner at the booth. “Now I have a lot of questions and I want to understand what is going on.” Matos-Vila was one of 15 people who walked away from that book stand with a Militant subscription.
In many U.S. cities, Militant supporters plan to use the Thanksgiving weekend—the busiest holiday shopping weekend of the year—to get some literature tables out and collect the final round of subscriptions to make the international goal.
“We’ve gone over our goal in Newark,” said Amy Husk, from Newark, New Jersey. “But we’ve been doing regular sales in downtown Newark, so we want to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people will be out shopping this weekend to set up a table downtown. Every time we go out, we meet people run across during the election campaign. Many are happy to see us still out on the streets after the elections.”
Fall Militant/Perspectiva Mundial Fall Subscription Drive chart (week 12)