18.06.2015
Holding a line
Mark Fischer reports on the CPGB’s Summer Offensive
No one opts to become a revolutionary and join a communist group in order to get rich - unless they have been badly misinformed. For the most part, those committed to the revolutionary left are self-sacrificing, hugely generous with their time and money, when it comes to supporting their particular group - often despite the jarring inconsistencies between said group’s perspectives and the concrete reality that surrounds them.1
Certainly, the vast majority stand in bright contrast to the self-serving scum that drifted to the top of ‘official communism’, as Stalinism declined in this and other countries. I recall with a little jerk of nausea the calibre of the leadership of ‘official’ CPGB’s youth organisation, the Young Communist League, under the opportunists in the 1980s. In particular, I recollect the full-time nonentity (ie, a full-time apparatchik and a full-time nonentity) who explained to us that it had proved impossible to produce more than a single issue of the League’s dire journal, Challenge, during the miners’ Great Strike of 1984-85, as he and his cohorts in party centre had expended most of their energy over the year raising money … to pay their own wages.
Always and everywhere, the question of money for us is political, to put it more pithily.
The Summer Offensive - an annual, roughly two-months-long drive for funds organised by the CPGB - is on us again and has a 2015 target of £30,000. This campaign incorporates the Communist University as both one of the reasons why we raise the money, 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. The SO is an annual measure of the intensity of the political work of our organisation. Our school is an important peak for us and is an event of which we are justly proud.
For example, the agenda for this year’s CU is more or less complete (go to the CPGB’s interim site and sign up for regular updates via Notes for Action, our e-bulletin) and compares very favourably with any annual school staged by other left groups in terms of its breadth, depth and willingness to confront issues of real controversy amongst Marxists. For example, we kick off on the afternoon of Saturday August 15 with a debate between one of Left Unity’s principal speakers, Salman Shaheen, and the CPGB’s Jack Conrad on the ‘The right to bear arms’. Readers will recall that comrade Shaheen was confronted with some gusto on BBC 2’s Daily politics by presenter Andrew Neil who demanded to know what he thought of a Communist Platform motion to Left Unity’s third national conference calling for a workers’ militia: “I will be voting against,” he reassured the bumptious Neil.2
In truth, we have too few debates like this scheduled for this year’s event - comrade Shaheen is to be congratulated for his willingness to pick up the gauntlet. In contrast, too many requests sent out over the past few years inviting comrades from different traditions and organisations to discuss points of difference with us have been ignored or guiltily turned down. Another exception this year is Ian Birchall, a comrade whose 50 years-plus in the International Socialist/Socialist Workers Party tradition will no doubt inform his opening on ‘Lessons of the Third Comintern Congress’ - also on the opening day of this year’s CU.
Of course, given the quality and polemical vim of many speakers throughout the whole week of the school, there will plenty to get people’s backs up, for them to interrogate and clarify - and, as readers know, we allow generous time in the sessions to facilitate this. So not only will speakers such as Hillel Ticktin, Paul Demarty, Chris Knight, Bob Brenner, Mike Macnair, Michael Roberts, Kevin Bean, Suzi Weissman, Moshé Machover and James Heartfield have the space to fully expound an idea: the audience will also get ample opportunity to pull them up if they think it’s nonsense.
Communist University is when the Weekly Worker ‘goes live’, in other words.
We try to bring as much intensity as political circumstances will allow to the SO, so to keep it under comrades’ noses for the duration our hardy columnist Robbie Rix will make way from the next issue for a weekly campaign report and news and updates about CU. The formal SO launch will be at a party aggregate on June 21, so the details of the campaign are still to be definitely confirmed, as this report is written. (In our culture, an aggregate has - amongst other rights - the ability to overthrow proposals from the leadership … and the leadership along with them, if it feels so inclined.) I chance my arm, however, and say that comrades ought to get their cheque books ready …
Attentive readers may have spotted that we have the same £30K target this year as for the 2014 Summer Offensive. When, last year, we had scraped everything together at its conclusion (effectively this is on the last day of CU), we had come “eye-wateringly close”, as I put it afterwards.3 We were just £100 or so shy when every money box been looted, every comrade chased for their final pledge instalment and the nether regions of every metaphorical sofa invasively searched.
The fact we have the same target this year is not an expression of organisational conservatism or routinism on our part, it should be stressed. If nothing else, we are an ambitious organisation. The SO is a political event and thus takes place in the context of, and in relation to, a left that has over the past 12 months or so continued its organisational and theoretical decline. Symptomatic of this, its showing in the May general election was statistically irrelevant.
Obviously, since we began discussing the details of this year’s campaign, there have been important developments in the Labour Party, with Jeremy Corbyn winning a place on the ballot paper for leader. Perhaps the political scene will be very different by September 12, the date when the new Labour leader will be announced at a special conference. Perhaps not.
As always, don’t wait to be asked, comrades! If you value this paper and the work of the CPGB as its main source of support, send your cheques in now, phone us to make a pledge or bother that PayPal button on the Weekly Worker site!
mark.fischer@weeklyworker.co.uk
Notes
1. The comrades of the Socialist Party in England and Wales - and before that Militant - in general have an admirably serious approach to finances, raising impressive sums of money for their organisation ... large amounts of which its leadership then squanders in totally wrongheaded, opportunist initiatives such as the Trade Unionist and Socialist Alliance.
2. See ‘Arms and our moderate speaker’ Weekly Worker May 22 2014.