24.07.1997

Work, commitment and guts

Party notes

This is the last ‘Party Notes’ column before the end of this year’s Summer Offensive, so we should make some general points about this year’s campaign and what it illustrates about our organisation at the moment.

I will concentrate primarily on the negative here, but it is worthwhile starting with some positive feedback to comrades. When the final amounts are clawed in, this year’s campaign looks set to be one of our best, with - I estimate - something like £21,000 raised towards our ambitious target of £25,000.

This is a very impressive achievement and all comrades are to be congratulated on their work, commitment and guts. In a period still characterised by retreat and excuse-making, the core cadre of this Party continue to show their fighting mettle in our annual SO. I am intensely proud of what we have collectively achieved this year and all comrades should feel the same.

Our weaknesses must be addressed, however. Essentially, we are hampered by what could be characterised as a low level of Party mobilisation. Comrades influenced by this paper are of course busy people. They work in a variety of different arenas, including the Socialist Labour Party and the Scottish Socialist Alliance. Too frequently however, we find that the sleepy work tempo of these types of social democratic formations tend to start to set the pace for our own people.

Of course, this is only a tendency, not an absolute law. Yet it certainly has a noticeable effect in terms of the amount of energy comrades put into events that are expressly ‘Party’ - over the past few months, this column has noted a certain fraying in our discipline, an organisational softness creeping in at all levels.

Frequently, this expresses itself in the low-key approach we take to our events and campaigns: we consistently under-mobilise, and this year’s SO is no exception despite the relatively high levels of participation by our periphery. This problem manifests itself organisationally, but must have deeper roots. Organisation is simply “the form of mediation between theory and practice” (Lukacs, ‘Towards a methodology of the problem of organisation’ in History and class consciousness London 1971, p299). Thus - while we must beware of over-dramatising them - these weaknesses do at root express political problems of some sort.

Growth is an important part of the answer to this, but how? This organisation quite correctly rejects the sects’ approach of building their organisations first and foremost, as if the movement of the working class actually existed only as a recruitment pool for these groups. Our method is to grow organically with the actual movement of the class - a notion that is deeply instilled in all our comrades.

The negative side of this correct approach is that sometimes we can be criminally negligent about building our organisation in the here and now. The SO is a good example of this.

I am currently involved in induction courses with new comrades. Other comrades are about to start. In one of the courses I am involved in there is a section on the Communist Party, with a subheading on communist morality and culture. The readings for this section include a number of articles on the Summer Offensive, describing its key place in our organisational and political development.

Yet little effort has been made to make inductees’ such as this - good comrades with real potential - actively learn our politics through personal participation in one of its high points of practical application, the annual Summer Offensive. Instead, they have been reduced to passive spectators. Thus the campaign - despite its success - has lacked the collectivity of previous years. It has been overly technical and individualised.

As an opportunity to recruit to the Party therefore, this year’s campaign has not been a success. This is a real pity, as clearly the periphery is of much better quality than perhaps ever before.

Despite their generalised nature, many of the problems we currently face can be traced to ineffective central organisation, I believe. In my opinion, there is room for a reorganisation and new divisions of labour at Centre, but this is something for the Party as a whole to discuss and agree in the appropriate forum.

Let me close by congratulating my comrades once again on their achievement. We are building an organisation to be proud of, an organisation the working class will know it can trust and rely on. We are building a Communist Party worthy of the name again.

Mark Fischer
national organiser