30.04.1998

Long live May Day!

Party notes

This May Day issue of the Weekly Worker sends its revolutionary greetings to all partisans of the working class, of genuine democracy and human progress the world over. May 1 this year also coincides with the launch of our 15th Summer Offensive. This is not simply an annual financial push for us; it is one of the high points of Party political campaigning during the course of the year.

Every Summer Offensive stretches our organisation. It is a painful process of struggling not for what is ‘possible’, but for what is necessary, what must be. Inevitably, our material resources constantly lag behind the practice we are fighting for, as our Party treasurer will tell you.

This year’s Offensive will be a particularly difficult one, however. A fact explicitly recognised by our organisation when it lowered the target from £25,000 to £20,000 for the two-month duration of the campaign. Over the recent period, we have lost some experienced comrades. Our periphery of sympathisers has grown slightly, but these are mostly very inexperienced and will certainly find the rigours of the Offensive difficult, particularly without close attention from experienced veterans of the campaign.

Our more general periphery of occasional correspondents and readers has expanded massively over the last two years or so. Relative to the size of the organisation that produces it, the Weekly Worker must be the most successful paper on the revolutionary left. Indeed our circulation is now starting to rival organisations the size of the Socialist Party - with the qualification that, while ours is going up, its is declining. But it is hard to describe this element of our periphery as ‘sympathetic’: they read our paper because they simply have to.

At the moment, most are - irrationally - resistant to actually supporting the organisation that produces the paper they rely on for accurate news and analysis of the left.

Every year, our members and closer supporters are the backbone of our fundraising. This year, comrades must pay particularly close attention to their targets, must look to really maximise them.

The Summer Offensive always has an important exemplary aspect. Indeed, a degree of mystique surrounds it. Opponents of our organisation tend to regard it as generally admirable but slightly unhinged.

The amounts that individual comrades are able to raise have been quite prodigious. Our SOs originated in the struggle of the Leninists against the opportunist leadership of the Communist Party in the 1980s. We were thus able to directly contrast the levels of commitment and sacrifice of our comrades with members of contemporary factions in the Party. One comparative statistic that sticks in my mind from the time was our discovery that some of our lower totals being raised by individuals were more than those managed by several whole districts of opportunists during their limp annual ‘appeal’.

Thus, a serious approach to money has always characterised this organisation. Given the nature of the tasks we set ourselves, how could it be otherwise? The SO is the high point of our fundraising, yet day to day the Party receives serious money in the form of dues from its comrades. Members give 10% of their income as a required minimum. Of course, comrades in dire financial straits are not driven to the workhouse, but in general we regard this as perfectly reasonable. Moderate, even.

This approach flows from how we regard our tasks as revolutionaries. To believe in communism in practice means taking the necessary steps now that will get us from here to there. The left in Britain flounders in day-to-day ‘practical’ activity, with a platonic commitment to a communist chimera, gleaming off there in the remote distance. Some of these comrades have even called our level of dues and financial demands “immoral” in that they alienate “ordinary workers”.

First, history shows that masses of workers have been more disposed to building serious organisations in a serious way, rather that the flighty sects of the revolutionary left. ‘Ordinary’ people have flocked to organisations - from the Communist International to the Catholic Church - on the basis of their deeply held beliefs, not which provided the better bargain. Did the miners of the Great Strike of 1984-85 not make huge financial sacrifices? What about the heroic stand of the Liverpool dockers - what did that do to their bank balances?

The project for world communism demands commitment on a qualitatively higher level than that of the most militant workers. Certainly those who fail to even aspire to such levels should not insult militants by blaming their failings on the supposed whimsical and shallow nature of the working class.

Second, these comrades show just how far they are away from any understanding of genuine communist morality. Our morality is

“what serves to destroy the old exploiting society and to unite all the working people around the proletariat, which is building a new, communist society … to a communist all morality lies in this united discipline and conscious mass struggle against the exploiters” (VI Lenin CW Vol 31, Moscow 1977, pp290-5).

An energetic and successful 15th Summer Offensive will provide an excellent example for a revolutionary left in a state of flux and decline. Comrades must approach this year’s SO with attention to detail, guts and imagination.

Mark Fischer
national organiser