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From Labor Action, Vol. 5 No. 45, 10 November 1941, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The second national convention of the Workers Party, recently concluded in New York, voted unanimously to launch a drive for a $5,000 Party Building Fund.
The money is to be raised by the members and sympathizers of the party in an all-out, high-speed drive to last no more than six weeks from the day it is officially launched. The fund is to be used for financing the program for party expansion decided on by the convention.
Special organizers are to be sent into the main industrial and political centers of the country to speed up the agitational and recruiting activities of the branches. The first group of these special organizers, four in number, are leaving this month to take up their assignments in the field. Others will follow suit early in 1942.
Special concentration points, indicated by the convention, are to be placed on the Workers Party map by the shifting of whole groups of Party members from their present place of activity. These concentration points include the centers of the steel and coal, the automobile and machine industries, as well as a vital agricultural center. The last-named was represented at the Party convention by two specially-invited delegates representing the agricultural workers of their territory. In addition, in several key industrial centers in the East, the Middle West and the West Coast party branches which are too weak to cope with the problems confronting them are to be reinforced by the assignment of more party militants to work with them.
Plans are to be announced in a week or two for increasing the circulation of Labor Action. The immediate increase will be not less than 100 per cent! Before three months are up, according to the schedule adopted by the convention, the circulation is to be increased by more than 100 per cent above its present figure!
Our party is alertly aware of the tremendous job it has before it with direct American participation in the war impending. We mean to do this job with all the strength and courage and determination we can muster, in a manner befitting a revolutionary working class socialist organization.
A new registration of all party members is now being taken, with the aim of tightening the ranks of the party and eliminating all hampering deadwood. The fusion of the youth and party organizations, decided upon by the. convention and endorsed by the Young Peoples Socialist League (Fourth International), is already virtually completed, an act which will further contribute to the centralization and concentration of all our forces. A new, more rigid financial structure is being set up in the party. We are girding for the fight in the next period.
For this fight we must have a war chest. The war chest is our Party Building Fund. Quotas are being assigned to every branch, large and small, and every member; they will be published in detail in the next issue of Labor Action. We expect to subscribe these quotas, and then to over-subscribe them!
Party comrades! Sympathizers! Readers of Labor Action! Help us put over the $5,000 Party Building Fund in ship-shape style! Send in your contributions – promptly and generously! Let everyone do more than his share!
All contributions to the $5,000 Party Building Fund should be sent to the Workers Party, 114 West 14th Street, New York, N.Y.
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