09.01.1997

Party finance

Party notes

Comrades will be pleased to hear that the restructuring of Party finances - identified in Perspectives 97 as a key task - is now well in hand.

This restructuring will entail the removal of various crippling debts and the freeing of new sources of future credit and finance for the Party. Although not all comrades will be aware of details of our financial problems, the Party membership as a whole certainly knows that the last few years in particular have been financially very difficult for us. Essentially, far too much of ongoing Party fundraising has been swallowed up servicing menacing debts.

Of course, none of these debts were ever entered into casually. The Party has incurred relatively heavy financial liabilities as a result of taking our organisation forward politically. Thus the election campaigns we have conducted, the creation of our printshop and the appearance of the Daily then Weekly Worker, the dynamic campaigns we have conducted around upsurges such as Timex or the miners in 1992 - these and a myriad other initiatives have stretched our organisation to its limits logistically and financially.

In this sense, any revolutionary organisation worth its salt should constantly be in debt, continually fighting to extend itself as far as objective conditions will allow.

So there are very good reasons for our debts. Nevertheless, over the past period they have started to appear rather intractable to comrades. This has been exacerbated by poor financial management technically by Centre. Politically, our approach to money- raising has always been the correct one - that is, we decide what we want to do politically, then we address ourselves to how we are going to finance our tasks. We have thankfully never started arse-backwards and looked at what we can afford to do. If we had, we would never have published The Leninist number 1, let alone achieved all we have in the intervening 15 years.

Technically however, we have been slack. As a result of a certain lack of consciousness about our financial work, comrades’ recent image of it has been akin to standing on the edge of a vast, dark abyss, tipping buckets of money in and never even hearing it hit the bottom, let alone filling it up.

The financial restructuring of the Party will end this demoralising grind. Thus, this year’s Summer Offensive - our annual intensive period of fundraising, likely this year to be for £25,000 during the months of June and July - can be used for real growth, not for debt servicing. Recent SOs have been technically proficient rather than inspired - the fact that this year’s will be used for real tangible results for our organisation should provide a real boost of energy to the whole campaign, particularly for the Party periphery.

In the meantime, as part of our financial re-organisation the Party must pay serious attention to the situation with quota paid to Centre from branches and cells. This regular duty on Party organisations over and above the members’ dues has tended to fall by the wayside recently. This is due to prevalence of Centre cells in the Party organisation as opposed to the geographically-based cells and branches which have tended to be marginally better quota payers. The tendency, given the tight period we have been working in, has been for these to ‘raise and spend’ on their centrally allocated tasks.

Of course, the motivation behind this has been perfectly laudable - the desire to ensure that lack of finance does not impede important delegated tasks. That said, this lack of communist centralisation must now be overcome as part of our campaign to bring order to Party finances.

Cell secretaries and branch officials will soon be receiving targets for their organisations. It is their responsibility to ensure that these are devolved to regular individual targets where appropriate, checked systematically and - crucially - vigorously fought for as part of our ongoing political work.

Mark Fischer
national organiser