30.05.1996
Overcoming amateurish work
Party notes
As we come to the halfway mark in this year’s Summer Offensive, it is worthwhile all comrades critically reviewing their progress so far. In general, this SO looks set to be a successful one.
Pledges currently stand at over £20,000 - just £5,000 short of our initial target for the two-month campaign. Yet it must be said that this pledge total has been achieved without a major push to draw in the periphery of our organisation, most of whom remain far too passive in relation to ongoing Party work.
This is a recurring problem, of course. Given the demanding standards of Party activity, comrades at all levels of our organisation tend to focus on simply organising themselves rather than drawing in others. The tasks that confront our still embryonic organisation tend to overwhelm our neat division of labour and turn it upside down, inside out.
This is a problem that finds expression in our Party from ‘top’ to ‘bottom’. Yet - as Comintern puts it - the art of communist organisation is to make “use of everything and everyone in the proletarian class struggle, distributing Party work suitably among all Party members and using the membership to continually draw ever wider masses of the proletariat into the revolutionary movement”.
Thus, while this weakness reflects itself throughout the Party, it is the responsibility of leading comrades in particular to provide solutions.
The Summer Offensive provides us with an opportunity to do just that. This annual campaign is a purge of our methods of work and organisation. This year’s must be used particularly to overcome the amateurish, artisan working methods that continue to plague us. For example, comrades in our organisation - and I am one of the biggest ‘sinners’ in this - frequently constitute themselves as fire hazards with the amount of pieces of paper they heave around.
Yet look at the desk of a director of a monopoly. A huge desk, but no little bits of paper clogging it up, no notes to himself written on the back of envelopes. Is this because no work is being done? To suggest this is simply SWP-style philistinism. To dominate the world as a tiny minority, the bourgeoisie needs truly talented leaders. Very slowly, the common characteristics of centuries of the supervision of production have been brought together in a branch of knowledge that emerges as the science of administration. A clean desk, but the work of others - millions of others - is being organised.
Obviously, we should not dream that we can work in this way. But we should certainly strive to streamline and make efficient our entire organisation. Away with the heroic amateur, comrades! Let’s fight to become professional revolutionaries. In the spirit of purging our organisation of these flaws, all comrades should approach their own and others’ work in the spirit of comradely criticism and self-criticism. We should all become far more pro-active in rooting out shoddy or slipshod methods of work.
The Party has an aggregate very soon with the Summer Offensive on the agenda. Rather than reports of individual endeavour, comrades must give thought to how we widen the campaign. The second half of the SO ’96 must be used to draw in far broader layers of our periphery. If we are successful in this, then we can go well beyond our £25,000 aim, a minimum target, I remind comrades.
Mark Fischer
national organiser