31.08.2011
Best in years
Mark Fischer welcomes an excellent Sumer Offensive
The first task of the final column in this year's Summer Offensive, our annual fundraising drive (which ended on August 21), is to congratulate all comrades who took part, at whatever level. At the SO celebration meal in our Communist University on the eve of the conclusion of the campaign, comrade Jack Conrad was able to report that we had raked in just over £29,000 - and subsequent to that provisional figure, after we had totted up cash that had been sitting uncounted in various accounts, collection tins and the CPGB box number, we discovered that our final total was actually a magnificent £29,684.
Apart from the amount raised through payments, sales and donations received at Communist University, we also received last-minute cheques in the post from comrades DL and MEM (£100 each), TG (£75), RI (£50) and MM (£30). Comrade MEM was at pains to specify the worth of the Weekly Worker, of which he is an online reader (one of 35,977 visitors to our website since the last edition of the paper, by the way).
In fact we have had a double success in this year's campaign. Remember, our original target was £25k, which we have caned by an additional £4k plus. However, the SO also had a mini-campaign running inside it to raise an additional £300 a month in regular standing orders to the Weekly Worker. And that won out too. Towards the end of CU comrade MZ stepped in to take us over the finishing line with a monthly £10, and there was a further £8 (actually £25 a quarter) from comrade DT waiting for us in the post. Those two additions allowed us to end the campaign with a total of £313 - again, a great achievement and well done to all comrades.
We used to be in the habit of referring to this annual financial campaign as a "purge", despite the fact that the word "has become a discredited one in our world communist movement" (The Leninist September 3 1988). Looking back, we were making our point in such provocative terms partly for the outrage it caused in some quarters - the factions we were grappling with in the 'official' Communist Party of those days either looked on the 1930s purges in the USSR as a reason to distance themselves from communism altogether, or, grotesquely, actually approved of them.
We explained what we meant by the term with a quote from Lenin that emphasised that a successful purge meant "a victory over our own conservatism, indiscipline, petty bourgeois egotism" rather than a mass physical annihilation of the party comrades (CW vol 29, p432). The SO shows us what is strong in the organisation, and so needs nurturing, and what is weak, and so needs attention. Quite apart from its financial success, this year's campaign has been a good one in this context. At the risk of being a little schematic, we can pick out three features.
- What might be dubbed as the sympathising readership periphery of the Weekly Worker continues to expand and has become more actively partisan towards the paper. This confirms the correctness of our original decision to put the paper, and the development of its format and reach, right at the heart of this year's fund drive. Now this has been a slow process. Of course, it has relied on the consistent quality of the analysis and commentary that appears in these pages, a regular high standard of output that has impressed and started to subtly influence even people who start out as what they imagine to be implacable opponents. This is a huge achievement - the small and frequently embattled team who produce our paper deserve the thanks of the whole organisation.
- Unevenness is inevitable in any political organisation. In ours, however, this have become far more pronounced and problematic over the past years. It was reflected in our members and closer supporters both in the debates and contributions at Communist University, as well as participation in the SO. There were a number of members - including very new comrades - who excelled; there are a number who barely took part at all. This is something that we must politically address over the coming year - we need to "work harder on ourselves", as one comrade put it in the feedback session at the end of CU.
- I have mentioned the encouraging involvement of younger comrades in this year's campaign, with a number showing a great deal of grit and inventiveness to make a dent in their individual targets. At the celebratory meal we gave prizes to individual comrades to mark their personal achievement and two of the three all-female winners were comrades SM and EO, both of whom fit into this demographic category rather than our more grizzled layers (comrade YM won the award for the highest sum raised - a fantastic £3,180). We need a programme of systematic development, but - given the degraded levels of thought in today's revolutionary left in general - younger members and supporters need particular attention. This not only applies to the comrades' theoretical development, but also our culture of work and party tasks. Nevertheless, this is one of the best Summer Offensives for years, a campaign we can be all be proud of. It provides a great springboard for the party's work for the coming 12 months - both financially and politically.