Socialist newspaper sees sales soaring

A weekly voice of workers’ solidarity

BY MICHEL POITRAS
“The Militant is seen by a growing number of workers as a voice of solidarity with the fight against the lockout,” writes Frank Forrestal from Minneapolis. Since American Crystal Sugar locked out its employees August 1, the working-class newsweekly has expanded its readership among sugar workers and others in the Red River Valley of Minnesota and North Dakota—and is still doing so.

Over the Labor Day weekend, 19 Socialist Workers Party members and supporters from eight cities and towns in the Midwest and across the U.S. sold 36 subscriptions to the Militant—visiting picket lines, union halls, and solidarity rallies, mixing it up with working people in restaurants and bars, and knocking on doors in working-class neighborhoods.

Since the fight began in the Red River Valley August 1, some 90 subscriptions have been sold there, about 80 to sugar workers. Some new subscribers also took advantage of the Militant’s special offer to buy books on revolutionary politics such as The Changing Face of U.S. Politics by Jack Barnes, Is Socialist Revolution in the U.S. Possible? by Mary-Alice-Waters, Teamster Rebellion by Farrell Dobbs, and others (see ad on page 4).

What’s happening in the Red River Valley reflects a growing interest in working-class politics, as workers and farmers face the mounting consequences of the world capitalist crisis on their living and job conditions. More and more are open to discussing the need for a fighting course against the propertied ruling families and to build a revolutionary movement to replace today’s dictatorship of capital with rule by the working-class majority and its allies.

Just since mid-June, socialist workers have won nearly 900 new subscribers, some 720 in the U.S. and about 170 in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. This includes close to 200 new readers in coalfield communities and other mining areas in those countries.

Dozens of subscriptions have been bought by embattled workers at a uranium conversion plant in Metropolis, Illinois; corn-processing workers in Keokuk, Iowa; Verizon strikers along the Atlantic Coast; and others. Socialist workers have sold the paper door to door in working-class areas of big cities and small towns. They signed up subscribers among backers of a woman’s right to choose during a week of protests in defense of an abortion clinic in Germantown, Maryland.

Altogether, since the beginning of 2011, some 4,150 subscriptions to the paper have been sold internationally, a marked increase over the same period in recent years.

As workers and farmers resist assaults by the capitalist rulers worldwide, as well as their bloody military adventures and wars, more and more fighters will see the need for “a socialist newsweekly published in the interests of working people”—one not afraid to speak the truth and say what it means for us and our struggles.

The Militant will soon be launching our fall subscription campaign. Get ready!