15.05.1997

Cohesion, discipline and the Summer Offensive

Party notes

Comrades will be pleased to hear that the launches of Summer Offensive ‘97 went well in Scotland and the North West. The fact that this year’s SO was also successfully launched outside of London is a positive development for us. In our Perspectives ’96 document - initially drafted in late 1995 of course - we set the aim of bringing far more cohesion and uniformity to the public actions of the Party. This would mean that the start of important campaigns like the SO and key anniversaries such as the Russian Revolution or the formation of the Party are also staged by the branches around the country.

Of course our Socialist Labour Party intervention knocked these plans a little off course and - as I have written before - contributed to a certain loss of cohesion and edge in the Party.

This intervention is at a new stage and the Party can now move to implement this important aim set out in last year’s Perspectives. This year’s SO launches were thus instructive for us. They have again shown us something about the state of our organisation nationally and the problems we must address.

The core participants in this year’s Offensive are veterans of numerous campaigns and tend to view the two-month push for extra funds very confidently. Thus, pledges have been have been good in general and all members should have little or no difficulty in hitting their personal aims.

In fact, the whole campaign is probably a little too comfortable. It actually borders on complacency.

While I am confident that comrades will be pushing their personal amounts up during the course of the campaign, we can see some of the difficulties of cohesion and discipline I have referred to in previous columns illustrated in this year’s SO.

First, too many of our comrades continue to be slack about important Party meetings. While all members work hard in their various spheres of responsibility and intervention, there is a pronounced tendency to regard central Party events as important, but optional extras. This finds reflection in too many eminently avoidable absences at these actions. This is a political problem. These events attract others apart from ourselves and are important forums for recruitment. This is not a job for a small core of the Party, but for every single member without exception.

Second, there is pernicious general indifference in the Party - unfortunately shared by some leading comrades - to new contacts around us. The wellspring of this attitude is understandable. We are interested in building organically in the class, in intersecting programmatically with a whole layer of the class as it breaks from social democracy to the left. Our understanding of ‘party’ is of a part of the class itself, united into a combat organisation. Certainly our conception is counterposed to the narrow sect perspectives of the rest of the British revolutionary left who regard the movement of the working class itself as merely a factor affecting their various narrowly defined recruitment drives.

However, our own comrades sometimes exemplify precisely the opposite problem. They tend to regard it as sufficient to have mobilised just themselves to Party events. We certainly are not animated by a real thirst to make new members, to involve our relatively large periphery and draw the better elements towards membership.

Of course the approach to new contacts is very uneven across the different organisations and regions of the Party. In general however it is very poor and finds reflection in poor activation of our supporters and sympathisers for the work of the Party.

The Summer Offensive offers a tremendous opportunity to start to overcome this reticence. We need new forces not simply around our organisation - and we have certainly massively improved the quantity and the quality of the Party’s periphery - but actually in it, as full members. All Party organisations should be looking to turn the SO not simply into a drive for funds, but a push to make new communists.

Lastly, we must fight against complacency. When we measure ourselves against the commitment and energy of much of the rest of the left, it is easy for us to think we have ‘arrived’ (see fund box). I remind comrades that our £25,000 collective target is the minimum our organisation needs over these two months and we should all address ourselves to the task of going way beyond this.

Mark Fischer
National organiser