OAKLAND, Calif. — Members of the Socialist Workers Party, and of the Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the U.K., are organizing to complete the spring campaign to win 1,300 Militant subscribers, sell a similar number of books by revolutionary working-class leaders, and to raise $165,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund by May 20.
With a week to go, party members have already taken the goal for books over the top, selling 1,419, and are closing in on the Militant and fund goals.
At the center of the campaign is explaining why workers in our tens of millions can overturn the dictatorship of capital and put an end to imperialism’s march toward depression, fascism and war. And why recruiting to and building revolutionary working-class parties is necessary to make that possible.
“As we meet people at union picket lines, immigrant rights marches and campaigning in working-class neighborhoods, we’re also getting back to workers we met earlier,” Betsey Stone, organizer of the SWP branch here, told the Militant.
“Last week party members visited two construction workers in San Leandro. Both signed up to renew their Militant subscriptions and said the paper’s coverage of the campaign to return wrongly deported Maryland unionist Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the U.S. is important to get into the hands of working people today.
“We’re organizing more get-togethers of this kind this week,” she said.
Kevin Dwire, SWP candidate for Minneapolis mayor, campaigned in Faribault, Minnesota, May 3, where he spoke with school worker Yessica Velasquez on her doorstep.
“Being in this country is so much better for workers and especially women,” Velasquez told Dwire, “because there are rights written into the Constitution.”
“Those rights were fought for by working people in two revolutions, by the labor movement and in the course of social struggles like the fight to overthrow Jim Crow segregation,” Dwire said. “We must defend these rights. It’s important that labor unions protested at the state Capitol on May Day against deportations and violations of due process.”
Velasquez signed up for a Militant subscription and bought The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us: The Socialist Workers Party Looks Forward and Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes.
‘We need this kind of literature!’
Laura Anderson, SWP candidate for mayor of Miami, campaigned at the Little Haiti Book Festival, an annual cultural event in the Haitian community May 4, and spoke at the open mic there. Supporters of the campaign sold 22 books and six subscriptions to the Militant.
Jim St. Louis, who works in a corner store, stopped to talk with Anderson and browse the books. Anderson showed him the article in the Militant on the interest in books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries at the recent Erbil International Book Fair in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. “Amazing!” he said, “I didn’t know this kind of literature existed. We need this.” He decided to buy The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class, and a copy of the Militant.
More on May Day protests
More reports are coming in on the response to the SWP on International Workers Day actions, May 1.
“Among the many people who were interested in the Socialist Workers Party at the march in Los Angeles, one worker sported a ‘MAGA’ T-shirt that spelled out ‘Mexicans Aren’t Going Anywhere!’” SWP member Barbara Bowman reports.
At the march in Milwaukee, Fidel García talked with SWP member Lisa Rottach about the stepped-up attacks on immigrant workers. “The government should be thankful for our work, not attack us,” García said. “They need us. Why is this happening?”
“The bosses are in bare-knuckle competition with their capitalist rivals around the world. They are driven to extract more profit out of our labor,” Rottach replied. “The ruling class keeps millions of workers living under the threat of deportation to divide us and to drive down the wages for all workers, putting more profits in their pockets.
“The SWP demands an amnesty for workers without papers to unify our class and strengthen our capacity to fight back,” Rottach said. García bought a copy of the Spanish edition of The Low Point of Labor Resistance Is Behind Us.
The paper is funded entirely by workers. The annual spring Militant Fighting Fund is on the way to go over its $165,000 target, with fund organizers in Chicago, Minneapolis and Oakland reporting that they will exceed their quotas.
If you want to join the Socialist Workers Party and help distribute and fund the Militant, contact the party branch nearest you listed in the directory.