From Socialist Appeal, Vol. III No. 56, 4 August 1939, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
Those readers of the Appeal who have no contact with our party branches, but who get the Appeal in the mails, at newsstands or from a street salesman – this article is addressed to you.
We want you in our party. Many of you are thinking of joining. Many others want to read our press a while longer before considering joining. Still others of you feel that, for one reason or other, you must remain for a time on the sidelines.
We want you in our party. But if you don’t feel quite ready, that doesn’t mean that the only other alternative is for you to stay on the sidelines.
There are many ways that you could help us right now. Let me suggest one very important way.
To understand how important this way is, let me first say that our press is only one phase of our activity. It is a big and important phase, for the press is, in Lenin’s phrase, “the collective organizer” of the party, but it is only one phase.
Particularly in this stage of the growth of our party, field organizers constitute our most pressing need. Our party grows only in the proportion that we expand our staff of professional revolutionists in the center and in the field. Wherever we have established full-time organizers, there our branches flourish and grow strong.
We have in our ranks today hundreds of young comrades, trained and educated, ready and willing to devote their entire lives to building the revolutionary movement. Selfless, devoted, ready for all sacrifices, they stand ready to march to their designated posts. We want to send them into every vital industrial center, to every field of the class struggle, where we already have groups of members or sympathizers, and where within a few months they, with the aid of a field organizer, will build branches sufficiently strong to support full-time organizers. All we have to do is to prime the pump for a little while, and the growing branches will do the rest.
In the program of expansion adopted last month by our convention, we decided that we must “increase the staff by the assignment of twenty more full-time organizers for field work and in the center.”
Our trained comrades are ready for this work. They need but a mere pittance of a few dollars a week to keep going.
In our last issue, we launched a drive for $10,000 to make possible these organizers and the further expansion of our press. We published the quotas assigned to the branches for this fund.
Among those quotas was one entitled, “National office ... $3,400.”
That was the amount which, we felt, would be contributed toward this work by you Appeal readers.
Give to the anti-war party. Get off the sidelines today. Give and give as generously as you possibly can. Send your contribution TODAY to the Anti-War Campaign Committee, 116 University Place, New York City.
Last updated on 15 March 2016