06.05.1999

Washing our dirty linen

Party notes

Communist Party comrades in London have been having a good chuckle - in fact you could say we have been creased up - about the latest rumour to reach us purporting to explain the origins of the Communist Party’s funds. Some of our erstwhile partners in the Socialist Alliance are telling people that our money comes not from our comrades’ dues and donations. No, apparently one leading CPGB member is supposed to be the heir to a well-known dry-cleaning chain and he supplies the cash.

Presumably, he uses us to launder the money.

This shock revelation has left the rest of us in a quandary. Clearly it is time for us to come clean. Should we press full steam ahead on the Summer Offensive, or should we let it fold? Should I use this column to call on comrades to tighten their belts, or should I offer a cut-rate alteration service to do it for them? (“Pick it up next Wednesday, sir…”)

Of course, there is a serious political point behind this silly rumour. Those organisations and individuals whose politics are circumscribed by doing only what seems ‘possible’ look in blank incomprehension at our group, a communist collective defined by the fight for what is necessary. This approach requires courage, but it also instils it. Our individual comrades have thus been capable of levels of sacrifice that have confounded - and even angered - other elements on the dozy British left.

The simple answer to why we are able to raise comparatively much higher sums than the rest of the left is that our politics are on a commensurately higher level. Not that we should expect these comrades to embrace that explanation, of course. Instead, they all reach for - or rather, invent - other answers, the ‘dry cleaners’ version being just the latest and (so far) the most entertaining.

Thus, Arthur Scargill claims we get our money from ‘the Turks’ (an ethnic group he does not appear to differentiate politically - which Turks, Arthur? And why?). ‘Official communist’ opportunists in the 1980s would confidently claim that our lines of finance could be tracked back to the East German state, the Revolutionary Communist Group or - of course - MI5 (the variant would depend on which stripe of opportunist you were talking to and - crucially - how late you arrived in the pub).

We should treat the comrades who claim to believe these sorts of rumours with a degree of amused sympathy - they are tacitly admitting to us how impotent and puny their own politics actually are. Indeed, we should feel a certain pride in ourselves that we seem to be the subject of so much inaccurate speculation. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, there is only one thing worse than having your organisation talked about, and that is not having it talked about.

The pace of pledges coming into centre for this year’s Summer Offensive is beginning to pick up. Our ‘Politics of the Balkan war’ school on May 2 (see back page) gave the two-month campaign a good boost towards its £25,000 target, and other supporters and sympathisers are now beginning to step forward with pledges of cash.

We currently stand at just under £12k initially promised, with much more to come, as soon as readers of the paper and our broader periphery are tapped more systematically.

Of course, comrades will use a variety of different methods to raise the cash. However their pledges are raised, the common themes are self-sacrifice and hard political work. When we look back over the history of the previous 15 SOs, we see there has been a huge variety of schemes, political initiatives and levels of participation. We have had Stakhanovite heroics from comrades who have completed marathon sessions with hundreds of pounds raised making and selling badges, hundreds of papers sold, etc. On the other hand, we have had sympathisers - with childcare and domestic responsibilities - who have raised money through scrimping and saving house-keeping money, forgoing small ‘luxuries’. Indeed, these types of ‘micro-pledges’ have often meant far more politically to us, given what they have cost the donor.

Money has never come easy: we have always worked hard for it. We work for the finances correspondent to our political ambitions and tasks.

The CPGB is the only national organisation that has not collapsed before Scargillism in the June 10 Euro-election contest. We are determined to mount a principled challenge to bomber Blair. The rest are victims of their poverty - financial and political.

It is our stamina, ambition and programmatic method - not our current membership levels or societal weight - that makes this organisation the most ‘viable’ on the British revolutionary left. We take the rest to the cleaners, so to speak.

We urge readers to make a full contribution to the fight for the future - rush cheques and pledges for this year’s SO at our usual address.

Mark Fischer
national organiser