05.09.1996

Impressive Achievement

Party notes

Party members from around the country met this month. They took the opportunity to review a number of Party campaigns like the Summer Offensive ’96, as well as to discuss the ongoing intervention around initiatives such as the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliances.

Firstly, the final monies for the SO ’96 have now been clawed in and totted up. This year, Party organisations raised in excess of £22,000 - an impressive achievement. The breakdown of this total is politically instructive for our organisation at this stage of our development. The vast bulk of it was raised by Party members and closer supporters - a telling indication of the nature of our periphery and our ongoing failure to involve them more fully in the work of the Party. Symptomatic in this context also is the fact that over three quarters of the SO total was raised in London, where the majority of Party members are concentrated.

This year’s fundraising campaign was criticised for its routinism - a weakness that is currently affecting other areas of Party work. The SO ’96 was competent rather than inspired.

The aggregate also discussed ongoing Party finance and emphasised the need to inculcate a far more conscious attitude to the need to raise money. This is especially true given the prospect of the forthcoming general election and the financial commitments this will entail.

The other main item on the meeting’s agenda was the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Alliances.

In the SLP, the leadership’s policy of ‘velvet’ expulsions must be challenged by all principled elements in the workers’ movement. The creation of a workers’ party is not the exclusive property of any one trend or point of view. The leaders of the SLP seem to believe that they can simply ‘airbrush’ those they accuse of being communists or communist sympathisers out of existence without a word of protest. We will encourage SLPers and others to fight this modern McCarthyism. If national executive committee members of the SLP plan to conduct a purge, then they must conduct it in the open, before all militants in the class and explain themselves and their actions. These people claim to be against private property - they should stop treating what they purport to be the party of the working class as their private possession, to be manipulated and misused as they wish with no comment sought or expected from any other section of the movement.

The forthcoming national meeting of Socialist Alliances in early October offers activists from around the country an important opportunity to coordinate their work and perspectives. We will encourage this meeting to adopt bold perspectives for the future of the SAs, which encompass building a united left bloc in the forthcoming general election and a nationally elected leadership to develop and extend their work.

The current stage of rapprochement between the Communist Party and other revolutionary organisations was reviewed and a number of the Provisional Central Committee’s recent initiatives approved. These were intended to ensure that the process does not lose momentum and to encourage those elements in all organisations who are pushing for revolutionary unity at the highest possible level.

Mark Fischer
national organiser