07.08.2014

Valuable and provoking

Another good week for our annual fundraising drive. Mark Fischer reports

An encouraging message arrived this week from comrade RT, who doubled his £30 resubscription payment, adding the same amount again for our Summer Offensive. He writes: “I’d like to extend my thanks and gratitude to all involved in the publication of the Weekly Worker. Each week you publish a valuable and provoking journal of Marxist thought and discussion. I’ve always found the Weekly Worker to be consistently good - a tribute to all of you, who I’m sure have busy jobs of your own!”

Good to know the efforts of the Weekly Worker team are appreciated so much. This week, we have sent out several thousand emails soliciting donations to this year’s SO, a nudge that put a great deal of emphasis on the importance of this paper and the need to enhance it, both as a physical product and in terms of its online presence. CC responded promptly with a £10 online donation, along with an explanatory note - “a small contribution to the Summer Offensive”. He was joined by NW and his £20 donation, plus £15 from JC in New York. These, plus other subs, standing orders and donations, added another £2,421 this week, bringing our running total to £14,941.

Our comrades who have been following up aforementioned emails with phone calls report a generally positive response, despite the pretty impecunious state of many of our people out there in reader land. If we can crack £20k by the start of this year’s Communist University, our annual school, we are more or less guaranteed to hit our overall target of £30,000 by Saturday August 23 - the last day of CU 2014.

So good intentions are not enough, comrades! If you appreciate the work of this paper; if you think its ideas and the political culture it champions need to take firmer root in the contemporary left, then you need to put some money on the table. There were 8,355 hits on the WW site last week last week, but still only a handful of comrades came away with even a small dent in their credit/debit cards.

Just 16 days to find over £15,000, comrades!