contronting the character, and keep Socialist Challenge afloat. front of socialism their THE future of Socialist Challenge is in danger. Sustaining a 16-page weekly paper requires at least 5,000 sales each week through local groups, as well as a quarterly £2,500 for the fund drive. We do not have the rich backers, the advertising or the mass which shore up the bourgeois Presently we face a stark choice — unless we can increase both the sales and the fund drive to the required figures we will have to reduce the size of the paper to 12 pages. Local group sales are up to 4,000 per week, but we have to go beyond this to The election of the Tory government presents the paper with new tasks and new opportunities. The Tories are on the attack, while the politics of the Labour leaders are inadequate to fight them. The need 1o hammer home alternative socialist policies has never been greater. The hostility of the working class to the Tories attacks has already erupted in big struggles — abortion, cuts, steel. There is a massive audience waiting for our politics if we are prepared to reach out to it.
to be stuck at 4,000 local sales.
press.
sell more papers.
In the present situation there should be no major problem in selling the paper; we don't have However, to take the paper outwards to its new potential audience there has to be an end to the conservatism that exists among IMG members and Socialist Challenge supporters who do not believe they can Every IMG branch has been set a target for the number of papers it should sell. Half the branches outside London have already met these targets; # small number have already gone over them. There is absolutely no reason why the London branches and those in the rest of the country which have fallen behind should not meet their targets - if they did we would see an end to many of the financial problems that heset us, let alone the boost it would give to the political influence of the paper. against the Tories.
But all this carry forward the aiternative.
We need a 16-page paper. Every week we are forced to make harsh choices about what not to print, such is the scope of the anti-Tory struggle. If anything we need more than 16 pages to take in all the developments in the class struggle. At present we are installing a new computerised typesetting machine to ease our production problems and improve the design and content of the paper; to win more people to socialism and to build the fightback depends on our readers and supporters, and time is not on our side. Either we go forward very rapidly or we will be forced to cut back. This is why we are making this urgent appeal to every IMG branch, eyery Socialist Challenge group and every individual supporter of the paper. We are asking you to expand your sales and raise money for the paper as quickly as possible. We are not asking for anything impossible or unrealistic.
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