04.09.2014

Summer Offensive: Proud

This year's fundraising drive came exceedingly close to reaching the collective target, reports Mark Fischer

It is a tremendous pleasure to inform readers that this year’s two-month Summer Offensive - our annual fundraising campaign - has been an excellent one, only just missing its overall target of £30,000. We were eye-wateringly close though, with comrades raising £29,901 over this period of intense work for the organisation - a drive which incorporates the Communist University as both one of the main reasons why we raise the money (see report, p9), and as a means to generate cash at the event itself in the form book sales, subs to the paper, donations from inspired participants, in addition to the surpluses we generate from the communally organised food and drink.

This is an excellent achievement, comrades. It again underlines the fact that - in contrast to the left that surrounds us - this organisation continues to hold its own in this rough period of historical reaction, organisationally as well as ideologically (the two go hand in hand, of course). We have even, modestly, been able to nudge our project forward a little in some respects. Remember, readers, that we dubbed last year’s campaign - which scored a little under £27k - as “one of our best for a number of years”. We have been able to build on the 2013 achievement, despite the decline not simply of the wider left milieu we make strenuous efforts to relate to, but also a political implosion of those small sections of this left we were politically engaged with to some extent at the time of last year’s Offensive.

In 2013, our final SO round-up noted that, as evidenced by the debates at that year’s Communist University, relations with comrades from the International Socialist Tendency and Nick Wrack of the (then existing!) Socialist Platform of Left Unity were “generally moving in the right direction” - limited though the progress was. (Weekly Worker August 29 2013). Twelve months on, even that cautious appraisal looks wildly over-optimistic in hindsight.

However, our own organisation remains in fairly robust shape. But the SO is also about the human material that comprises our collective and so every year - despite some criticism even in our own ranks for ‘individualising’ the campaign - we mark out and celebrate the successes of a few comrades who have excelled in it in some way. This year, comrade TB was honoured by her comrades for the highest target achieved in 2014 - particularly gratifying, as this comrade is veteran stalwart of many SOs, whose hard, backroom work on the campaign has helped many others to generate money for their own pledges. Modesty and other financial considerations of the comrade preclude us mentioning the precise figure, but it is a four-figure sum!

In the same vein, comrade MC - who put many hours’ hard slog into making and distributing (as well as actually physically selling!) thousands of badges for us - got the ‘outstanding effort’ reward and a bottle of something fizzy to take back with him up north. And that’s not Alka-Seltzer, comrades, despite the fact that I can attest from personal experience that long hours hunched over our manual badge-making machine/cum-instrument of medieval torture might leave you in need of relief from some of the maladies that said bubbly pain-reliever is designed to cure, according to Wikipedia - eg, “minor aches, pains, inflammation”. Also flagged up in the same entry are “hangovers” - much more appropriate following our comrade’s celebrations, we hope.

The Provisional Central Committee congratulates our two prizewinners, all members and supporters who set themselves targets and collectively raised thousands of pounds, as well as all supporters and sympathisers, who contributed smaller, but nonetheless vital, donations to this year’s Summer Offensive.

We should all be very proud, comrades.