29.01.2004
Your financial support needed
Ian Mahoney appeals to our readers and supporters
This is a call to readers, supporters and sympathisers for increased financial support. Over recent months, our Party has come under considerable financial pressure, as political demands have increased, while other sources of income, such as our printshop, have remained static or even suffered a decline because of our inability to stump up the required capital needed to re-equip.
We are certainly not in crisis yet. But we are going through a very lean period. Our monthly income just covers our absolutely minimum outgoings, leaving us no flexibility to meet new demands or take advantage of opportunities as they develop. However, as with many things in and around our ranks, there is considerable under-utilised money-making potential out there amongst you, our comrades. Over the next month, we will be:
* Contacting those who regularly give money now - including comrades with standing orders for the Weekly Worker. You will be encouraged to give more.
* Reaching out to the hundreds of comrades who have sent us one-off donations over the in the recent period. These are always welcome, but really we need regular contributions - ideally through standing orders - which allow us to plan our finances with a degree of confidence.
* Encouraging supporters and sympathisers to take money-making initiatives. This will mean that many of these comrades will need to be drawn into a more organised relationship with us - not easy, given the numerical weakness of our cadre around the country, but something we must be constantly striving to achieve.
Now, as many know, the Communist Party has a reputation in the movement for being good at raising money. True, we are. But this is not simply some technical ability we have been fortunate to pick up. No, it is all a question of what type of politics we have and the levels of commitment and hard work we are able to win because of it.
Take the printshop we run. The story of its birth is instructive. I have had comrades from rival left groups confidently tell me that it is "impossible" for a political organisation the size of ours run a financially viable business like this. Indeed, getting the cash together for the equipment in the first place would be beyond us. There were only two realistic options, I was told.
First, that - conveniently - we would happen to recruit a printer, complete with an up and running business. Or second, more likely in some comrades' view, the mega-rich sugar daddy at the heart of our organisation would simply use his spare cash to buy a print business for the organisation to play with.
Not even close, comrades. In fact, the organisation decided that a printshop was a political necessity for our group in the aftermath of the liquidation congress of the opportunists of the 'official' CPGB in late 1991. To underline our message that the CPGB had not died with the hara-kiri of the opportunists - to help disassociate communism in Britain from these degenerate political trends - we decided to stand in the 1992 general election. However, we did not approach the campaign by first totting up 'spare' resources to determine if it was possible. We identified a political necessity - conducting a nationally focused, genuinely communist electoral intervention around our four candidates in England, Scotland and Wales - and then found the means to make it happen.
Quite apart from other items of propaganda, a serious campaign would require 250,000 individual election addresses. Commercial printing was prohibitively expensive. To meet the political challenge, we clearly needed an organisational leap. The money for the machine was raised through a financial appeal and some generous loans. But print machines don't just run themselves "¦
A comrade - then a lowly civil servant - was approached to take on the task. He gave up his job and burned the midnight oil to quickly learn the trade before he was plunged into the work. He didn't get further than the basics. He learned how to print through screamingly frustrating hours of trial and error. The comrade worked gargantuan shifts to hit the delivery deadlines for our election material. At the end of one shift, he would often sleep beside the machine - amid small mountains of paper stacked on pallets - in order to get a quick start on the next batch of work. And he did it. Only just, but he did it.
That is where our Party printshop actually comes from, that is why we had a viable printing business for over a decade and that is how we have been able to print our Party's newspaper, books and other propaganda. So politics come first, followed by a little bit of healthy Leninist fanaticism. Works wonders.
Politics today are very different, but no less challenging. We are not just asking comrades to put their hands in their pockets for our organisation to stand still; we must move ahead once again. We need to dramatically expand the readership of our press; to re-equip our office and our Party businesses; to consolidate the new contacts we have round the country in a more cohesive national structure; to publish more books and pamphlets in 2004; to improve our web presence, which despite a large number of hits remains extremely amateur and lacking in imagination - all these initiatives are immediate priorities and all need money.
The next meeting of our Provisional Central Committee will discuss the details of the campaign and soon after that we will be contacting comrades individually and in groups. We are confident that once again our comrades will rise to the challenge.