I’m friends with an ex-member of another Trotskyist group. He is still a socialist, and active in left-wing politics as well as union activity, but no longer organised by a revolutionary tendency. One thing he’s often said to me is that he doesn’t see the point of public paper sales, except if they’re linked to activity for a campaign or anti-cuts committee.
There are many reasons why the AWL does public sales of Solidarity, and one of them is to talk to people about the campaigns we’re involved in. But I want to challenge the idea that such activity is pointless for winning people to revolutionary politics. Definitely not true!
The AWL has a new member in Sheffield, a 16 year old school student who has been central to the massive school students’ struggles that have taken place there recently. If we hadn’t recruited him, our ability to be involved in this movement would have been radically less. How did we meet him?
When we were selling Solidarity on the streets. (And from what I’m told, there’s another lesson: the comrade who sold him a paper made an active effort to speak to him as he passed by and looked at the headline.)
Or another case: one of our new National Committee members was recruited in 2006 when he met comrades selling the paper outside York station. (Yet another lesson: the comrade he bought it from, now an RMT activist and also a National Committee member, was recruited after an AWLer saw her reading Socialist Worker on the train and talked to her.)
Last anecdote. At the end of a paper sale in Peckham, in South London, on 15 January, cold, hungover and having only sold two papers, I was approached by a young woman angry about the government making cuts while the bankers clean up. She said she had been thinking about socialism and would be interested to know more, and left her details.
With the economic crisis and the growing fight against the cuts, there are many more people thinking about socialism, and potentially interested in the AWL. Getting out on the streets, and doing it regularly and consistently, is one of the ways to let them know we exist!
Fund drive
We are asking all our readers for financial help. This will help us sustain the weekly Solidarity and get our new premises up and running at the end of this month. A donation, however small, will help keep us on track.
Send a cheque payable to “AWL” to PO Box 823, London, SE15 4NA.
Or see www.workersliberty.org/donate.
Thanks this week to Dave and Debbie for new standing orders and J for other fundraising . Our fundraising total (our target is £25,000) stands at £19,953.