Vol. 75/No. 23      June 13, 2011

Below are brief reports from volunteers organizing to expand the readership of the Militant. They help paint a picture of the political responsiveness by working people to the revolutionary working-class perspectives presented in the paper.

HOUSTON—We’re finding that a number of people we meet door to door want to talk with us again. We’re getting better results from callbacks to people who expressed an initial interest in the Militant’s revolutionary perspectives.

One woman, who works at a grocery chain, told us she “pretty much read the whole issue” before deciding to have us come back to pick up the subscription.

“I like that you are going out and talking with working people across the county,” she said. “Nobody is doing that, but you are.”

She said she saw a column by the editor saying the paper wants more new readers, and decided she could be one of them.

A new reader in Houston bought a subscription for her husband who is in jail and asked us to come back again with more books.

—Jacquie Henderson

SEATTLE—We stopped by the house of a couple who recently subscribed in the Georgetown neighborhood. One of these new readers remarked that when she subscribed she had not seen a paper like the Militant since the People’s Weekly World, the newspaper associated with the Communist Party, went out of print. (She called it the Daily Worker, the name the CP used for many years. The CP stopped publishing its paper in 2009 and told its readers to go online.) She said she might know other people in the neighborhood that would be interested in the Militant.

This time we talked to her husband, who has started reading the Militant. He said they had received a couple of issues and that it’s a great paper, and a great deal for $5. He, too, said they probably know some people who would like the Militant. He said he and his wife would “talk about this together and see what we can do.” Cecelia Moriarity and I left him three back copies of the paper and subscription blanks, and we will follow up with them.

A hairdresser who subscribed explained how she had sold her house and her business just before the economy nosedived in late 2007. “I work for someone else now, and I rent a place to live. It’s less pressure for me, but it doesn’t solve everything,” she said. “There are still all the other people losing homes and already homeless. I’ll give that paper a try.”

—Mary Martin

MINNEAPOLIS—Socialist workers from here traveled to Marshfield, Wisconsin, recently to talk to subscribers and to knock on doors to see if we could meet other workers interested in becoming readers of the Militant.

We sold a subscription to a young meat packer at a ConAgra plant in Abbotsford, a small town of 1,500 north of Marshfield. He’s had a job there three years and hates the way the bosses treat workers. When we explained what the Militant is about, he signed up. He said he wanted to learn about a revolutionary movement that will change conditions for working people.

—Frank Forrestal

SYDNEY, Australia—We had a successful trip to Cessnock, a town in a coal mining and farming district north of here. Six new readers signed up for subscriptions. Two of them are hospital workers who told us about the moves by the new conservative state government in new South Wales to restrict the bargaining rights of public sector workers, the same kinds of laws being passed in Wisconsin!

Three other subscriptions were sold during doorknock sales in working-class areas in western Sydney. A workmate at a Sydney meatpacking plant also bought a subscription.

—Ron Poulsen

MINNEAPOLIS—A recent subscriber in Keokuk, Iowa, told us she “was very happy to meet a revolutionary.” She is a laid-off Machinist union member who regularly joins the picket line for the locked-out Roquette workers in Keokuk.

When I showed her the paper, she said, “Oh yes, I’m familiar with the Militant. It is the only intelligent paper I know.” The bosses and the government “don’t want us to have this paper.”

She bought a subscription, a copy of Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes, and paid an extra $5 so a friend of hers who is locked out by Roquette could also start receiving the Militant every week.

“There are some big fights to come,” she said, discussing what capitalism is doing to working people and how solidarity can be won for workers in struggle. “This is just the beginning.”

—Natalie Morrison