14.08.2014

Final heave

Communist University is close at hand and the CPGB's annual fundraising drive is looking healthy, reports Mark Fischer. But don't let that stop you!

Our annual week-long school, Communist University, looms large on the horizon, with the opening sessions of this year’s event scheduled for the afternoon of Saturday August 16 (see here for details).

CU is an event that takes a large amount of organising for a small group. Everything from the procurement of ‘refreshments’ to lubricate the evening discussions after the formal sessions; keeping the CU ‘masses’ fed and watered during the day itself; haggling with the venue’s management for that extra bit of space in the garden to pitch our lunchtime gazebo; to the worries over disabled access and how to keep children and toddlers happy and quiet, while their parents put the world to rights - the party comrades directly responsible for this event have a lot of boxes to tick before we even reach the starting line.

One perennial problem, of course, is money. And that is really how the Summer Offensive fits together with Communist University. Like any serious political organisation, the Communist Party lives well beyond its means for most of the year. So when it comes along, the SO provides a massive boost to our shoe-string annual budget and just about moves us back into the black - or at least a shade of grey, so to speak. That’s a fact of life for our organisation and very important for us - but it’s not really that uplifting a vision for the comrades who take part in this financial campaign.

However, CU itself is a far more inspiring product of our comrades’ hard work and sacrifice. As SO money comes in, it goes out again to fund the venue (which we normally have to pay for well in advance), speakers’ expenses, publicity, subsidies to low/unwaged participants, the accommodation for residential participants (which again is normally demanded in full, in advance) and the million and one incidentals that derail our plans and drain our coffers.

That said, if you take a look at the timetable - not to mention the range and quality of the speakers - you will see the central importance to the movement of the subjects addressed. The sessions are approached in a very serious way, with ample time to explore subjects and chairs briefed to actually prioritise audience contributions from comrades with serious differences/minority viewpoints. We are sure you’ll agree it’s money well spent.

But, returning to the SO, a big boost to the campaign came this week from the work of comrades who attended the big August 9 Gaza demonstration in London. On a warm day, with a receptive and lively audience, our comrades raised over £1,300 in book, paper and badge sales - “hard work, but inspiring”, as one comrade characterised the action.

Notable donations this week include a tremendous £600 from MM, plus £44 for the comrade’s Weekly Worker sales over the past period. Then there was EW, who sent a cheque for £100 to the Weekly Worker, which, he says, offers a “consistently high standard of Marxist analysis”. There was another £100 from PG, an ex-party member who remains sympathetic to our work, while DC also sent us the proverbial ton. Many thanks to these and other comrades, who have added a hefty £2,652 to our running total this week, taking us to a chipper £17,593. That leaves us pretty well placed, with a final heave, to achieve our £30k target by August 26, the last day of Communist University.

And, in particular, how about more of the comrades out there who read us online (7,249 hits last week) taking a leaf out of the book of the comrades mentioned above and adding some of their financial weight to that last shove?

Mark Fischer