29.04.1999
Long live May Day! Victory to the 16th Summer Offensive!
Party notes
May 1 sees the official launch of the Communist Party’s 16th Summer Offensive, our annual fundraising drive. We will mark the event during our ‘Politics of the Balkan war’ school on May 2 and take individual pledges from our comrades present towards our £25,000 target.
For readers unfamiliar with our SO, it is an intense two-month period of collective income generation undertaken by members and supporters of the Party. Comrades set themselves personal targets and then go about clawing the money in. All the cash that a comrade raises through his/her work during the course of this eight weeks is counted towards their total - so comrades have a chance to get off to a good start on the various May Day demonstrations around the country this weekend. Thus, the SO is more than a much needed fund drive: it is also a measure of the intensity of political work and intervention of our organisation and the individuals who comprise it.
A justified criticism of previous years’ campaigns has been what might be called the ‘big black hole’ syndrome. The Party’s financial targets were set without being clearly referenced to what the money was going towards, what had already been achieved and what was still needed to be done. Thus, comrades sometimes compared raising money to standing on the edge of a pit, pouring money in without ever knowing if the abyss was filling, how much more was needed.
There are no such worries this year. It is clear what our immediate tasks are and the type of funds we will need.
The crisis of the Socialist Alliances in London and the North West means that it falls to our organisation to shoulder the burden of mounting a principled challenge to Blair. This will cost £10,000 in deposits alone, before we even start to think about running any sort of campaign.
Long ago, we outgrew our current national centre. During the SO campaign, we plan to move to more spacious and better equipped office space. This will greatly facilitate the work of the organisation, but it will cost us in the short term.
The challenge to the outrageous decision of the registrar of political parties to debar us from standing under our own name in forthcoming elections will be an ongoing fight. Apart from any direct campaigning demands, the vital legal advice we have taken is incredibly expensive.
We have the perennial task of activating the layer of Party supporters we have around the country. We must get these comrades selling the paper regularly, contributing more substantially to Party coffers and attending national events more regularly. In other words, we have to reverse the current situation where servicing Party supporters is a small net drain on resources. Our periphery of sympathisers and supporters has remained relatively stable over the last year or so. However, most are still very inexperienced and will find the rigours of the Offensive difficult, particularly without close attention from experienced veterans.
Certainly, the amounts that individual members are able to raise have been quite daunting for outsiders. This is our 16th SO. They originated in the struggle of Leninists against the old 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’.
This approach flows from how we regard our tasks as revolutionaries. To believe in communism in practice means to take the necessary steps in the here and 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 future, shimmering 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”.
History shows that masses of workers have been more disposed to building serious organisations in a serious way than the sects of the revolutionary left. “Ordinary” people have flocked into organisations from the Catholic Church to the Communist International on the basis of their deeply held beliefs, not which was cheaper to join.
The project for world communism demands commitment on a qualitatively higher level than that of the most militant workers. Certainly those who do not even aspire to such levels should not insult militants by blaming their failings on the supposed whimsical and shallow nature of the working class itself.
The crisis-wracked British left is utterly incapable of linking its theory to its practice. It is an irony that the one organisation - the CPGB - that recognises this as a period of intense ideological reaction has been left alone on the electoral stage as groups like the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Party and Alliance for Workers’ Liberty have collapsed.
The gutless failure of these other groups is an expression of a programmatic crisis ripping through their ranks, of a profound disjuncture between their upbeat perspectives and the harsh reality of the class struggle in contemporary Britain.
An energetic and successful 16th Summer Offensive will have an excellent exemplary effect on a revolutionary left in such a state of flux. Comrades must approach this year’s SO with attention to detail, guts and imagination.
Mark Fischer
national organiser