04.08.2004

Learning lessons

Ian Mahoney reports on the summer offensive

This year’s Summer Offensive has been a hard, but extremely useful campaign. Every year, our two-month fundraising drive tells us about the general state of politics around us, as well as the fitness levels achieved by the CPGB as a communist collective.

As we go into its final stages, all comrades should be intensely proud of the achievements of the Party in this, our 20th SO. This week, our total moved up to a shade over £23,000, but still somewhat removed from our full target of £30k. With some big donations in the pipeline, we are confident of a very creditable total by the time of the campaign’s formal end on August 14. Fuller details of individual donations next week, comrades.

In the meantime, what can be said about this year’s SO? While we will clearly raise an impressive amount of money for a small organisation, there is no room for complacency. This year’s campaign has highlighted important problems. We always promote this annual drive as a high point of the political work of the Party. It is not a technical operation. With this is mind, two features stand out in 2004.

First, that the SO takes place in the context of a degree of organisational and political meltdown of the wider left. The rise of the Respect coalition has seen the largest Marxist organisation in this country - the Socialist Workers Party - embrace left populism in the electoral field. The rest of the revolutionary left has effectively been scattered by this development, with most in headlong retreat into sectarianism. Respect, in that sense, is effectively an anti-left unity project.

Second, it is clear that our organisation has not been immune to the negative features of this period. We have lost people - on a pathetically low political level, it must be said; we have lost some élan as a fighting communist collective and comrades - at all levels of the organisation - have too often evidenced passivity in relation to agreed Party campaigns and tasks.

Obviously, these problems have not just popped up in 2004. The good results for SOs since 2000 have concealed real flaws that have surfaced more obviously this year. These campaigns took place in relatively dynamic political circumstances that gave us enough momentum to hit our targets with something to spare. The Socialist Alliance meant we could interact with other important trends on the left and the breadth and imagination comrades brought to the fundraising campaign during SA’s heyday illustrated that it had a galvanising effect. Similarly, the 2003 anti-war movement gave us a politically incoherent, but genuinely mass audience to address - the success of last year’s campaign reflected this.

Of course, there were clear faults even in these successes. Speaking at the end of the 2002 SO, which had raised just over its £25k target, comrade Jack Conrad was critical of its “routinist” nature and suggested that “with more imagination and determination, we could be raising sums more of the order of £50,000 now” (Weekly Worker August 22 2002). Undoubtedly true. Both because we could critically address these subjective failings of imagination and determination and overcome them, but also because the situation we were working in gave us cohesion and real political opportunities.

Obviously, the 2004 campaign has been much harder. The demise of the SA and the ebbing of the anti-war movement have had negative effects on our comrades’ morale. Plus - crucially - it has meant us having a far smaller political sea to swim in. Consequently, it has starkly exposed the weakness of our national infrastructure - something present in previous years, but ameliorated by positive developments in wider politics. It is a big problem for us that the majority of our comrades are not organised into functioning collective units such as Party cells or branches. Given the negative developments in wider politics, this has thrown our comrades back onto their individual resources to make their 2004 targets. Most have performed bravely, but we have no millionaires in our ranks (contrary to the nonsense peddled by a few idiot provocateurs on the left).

There have been other, secondary, failings. We were unable to stage an SO launch meeting this year, an inspiring event that acts as a launch pad for the drive towards our target. Our Party centre was disrupted by a move. We have ongoing problems with the lack of effective forward planning in our paper, meaning that the SO as a campaign with a long history in our ranks has not been promoted in its pages in a particularly imaginative way. Yes, all true, but the key problems have been imposed on us by wider developments in left politics and the way these have exposed our weakness as a national organisation.

On the positive side, this year has seen significant support from outside the ranks of the Party. Our members remain the campaign’s backbone, of course, but donations from supporters and sympathisers have been encouraging. We have built a relatively huge periphery of readers via our website and - while many disagree with our critical support of Respect - we have had the largest ever number of these comrades contribute to this year’s SO.

By August 14, this organisation will have once again raised an impressive total in its Summer Offensive, one of the most important political campaigns we run. Effectively, this column will be the last that many readers see before the SO ends next week. If there are still people out there who are yet to contribute - pull your fingers out, comrades!