28.08.1997

Sell this paper!

Party notes

An important part of the discussions around our perspectives for the coming 12 months will be the Party’s contact and supporter work. I will not blather on yet again about the problems I see in this area - suffice to say that comrades know that I consider it almost uniformly abysmal, one of the weakest areas of our political practice.

As in last week’s paper, this issue carries an advert calling on subscribers to sell the Weekly Worker (see below). This call is not a product of a throwaway whim on the part of the paper’s production staff. It is to be part of a coordinated attempt by the Party to involve supporters and sympathisers in the work of the organisation.

In many ways, our newspaper is the organisation. As we wrote about our paper The Leninist in 1989,

“The most important weapon in the hands of [the Party] is ... the central organ ... It is our collective propagandist and agitator. It is also our collective organiser. Organisation around the distribution of The Leninist and education on the basis of its articles constitutes the basis for the continuous joint action of our organisation” (my emphasis, Report of the fourth conference of the Leninists of the Communist Party of Great Britain, The Leninist December 23 1989).

Thus, attempts to draw new recruits to the sympathising periphery of the Party into selling and contributing to the paper is in effect an attempt to draw them into the Party itself. Our organisation is a working school of revolutionary Marxism, a collective in which organic links are forged between the various parts of the organisation and individual members by day-to-day collective work. The role of the paper in this is indispensable.

The circulation of our paper has increased quite dramatically over the past few years. Alongside this, the quality of the readership of our Party press has improved. Of course, this has been insufficiently monitored or actively promoted by Party Centre - another expression of our ‘under-organisation’. Nevertheless, circulation of the Weekly Worker compares very healthily with the press of much larger organisations.

Yet while thousands of our Party’s newspaper are sold and distributed every week, no one can claim that we have saturated our potential market. The systematic involvement of the Party periphery should help push circulation up considerably.

This campaign clearly cannot remain the ‘property’ of Centre. It must become an integrated part of the weekly work of Party cells and branches. Sympathisers and supporters must be encouraged and won politically to start taking extra copies of the paper for their contacts. The results and their implications - both for the organisation and individual contacts - must be monitored, discussed and reported regularly. General pushes for circulation boosts coordinated by individual fulltimers have yielded some quite pleasing results, but this cannot substitute for the organisation as a whole integrating this into its political practice.

A special issue of the Party’s supporters’ bulletin will soon be produced on this question. Comrades will be allocated contacts to follow up and Centre must be informed of your progress. Comrades, let’s fight to make every supporter into a seller - on the way to making them full members of the Party!

Mark Fischer
national organiser