Vol. 76/No. 48      December 31, 2012

Each of the last four weeks has been better than the one before—in the last two weeks alone, nearly 900 subscriptions were sold, overwhelmingly by going door to door in working-class neighborhoods.

With the several-day extension to send in subscriptions announced last week, a number of areas are fighting for their quotas. Others are pushing to go over to help fight for the international goal.

“We made it,” Jacquie Henderson wrote from Houston. “And our 150th subscriber, who we met going door to door tonight, is going to sell the paper with us tomorrow. The most fun in decades!”

“Militant distributors in London have now sold 209 subscriptions of our goal of 200. Of these, we have sold 124 going door to door three to four times a week,” Paul Davies reported.

“We are at 146 subscriptions for Canada, over our increased goal of 145,” Bev Bernardo wrote from Montreal.

“We have now sold 94 subscriptions—over our goal of 90. We have sales planned for the week leading up to the Christmas weekend. We will let you know what else we sell,” wrote Joanne Kuniansky from Sydney.

With 10 subscriptions to go toward their goal of 450, distributors in New York decided to raise their quota to 460.

“The politicians are making laws that hurt working people while they get their support from wealthy corporations. I want to read about what is really going on with this,” said Melvin Roberts, an Amtrak chef for 30 years, as he bought a subscription and a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power from readers going door to door in his neighborhood in Seattle. The book is one of four on special with a subscription (see ad below).

One of the 17 subscriptions sold in Seattle last week was to a striker on a Teamsters Local 117 picket line. The union struck United Natural Foods Inc. after the company fired 72 union members during a contract dispute, John Naubert reported.

Also from Seattle, Edwin Fruit wrote that Militant reader Stalin Harrison turned in two more subscriptions he sold in his barber shop, for a total of four since the beginning of the campaign. He is working on more this week.

The response to the socialist newsweekly and other revolutionary literature is a further registration of what the communist movement has observed in recent years about the level of political thinking and discussions going on in the working class, generated by the cumulative effects of the deepest economic crisis of capitalism in living memory.

Persistently high unemployment exerts a pressure on millions of workers, fostering competition among us and making it easier for bosses to go after our wages, working conditions, unions and dignity. When we fight back, we confront the weak state of organized labor today as a result of decades of seeking “common ground” with the bosses and support for their political parties by bureaucratic misleaderships—a problem that will be solved in the course of class battles to come.

But despite these challenges and limitations of resistance today, more and more working people are interested in reading a paper that tells the truth about and explains the root causes of the crisis; addresses a wide range of political questions from a working-class perspective to arm and unify our class; covers strikes and social struggles of workers around the world; and charts a fighting course to confront the mounting assaults by the bosses and their government that seek to foist the burden of the crisis on our backs.

While all focus and attention this week are on making the international quota, the effort to expand the readership of the socialist newsweekly will continue long after the end of the drive.

The final scoreboard will be printed in the next issue, two weeks from this one.

If you want to join, you can order a bundle or subscription blanks at themilitant@mac.com or (212) 244-4899.
 
 
Related articles:
Fall ‘Militant’ subscription campaign Week 9 (chart)  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home