12.07.2006

Heads down

Howard Roak reports on some promising developments during our annual fundraising drive

We have broken the £10,000 barrier in this, the sixth week of our annual fundraising drive. I now have in hand £10,156 after an extra £2,069 came in from comrades. Particular thanks go to EB for her £250, CR for knocking £400 off his target, £250 from our comrade MM, JB's £130 and £100 from TG. Also, well done to comrades who staffed stalls at Marxism, raising over £250.

At roughly this point in last year's campaign we actually had over £10,120 in and I was then making slightly squeaky noises to the effect that the campaign needed "urgent attention" over the following seven days. Again this year, I recommend that comrades get their heads down sharpish to make sure that the coming week sees the pace of the SO increase dramatically. Hopefully, I will come across a tad less 'squeaky' this year, however.

Not only have we a relatively large number of reliable comrades with significant amounts still outstanding - people we are confident will stump up the cash - but there are also a number of projects that we are confident will yield results. We try to use the two months of the Summer Offensive to review the party's work in the various business enterprises it runs and - if we can - to up their profile and make them more bountiful 'cash cows'. Not always with runaway success in previous years, it must be said, but 2006 look like being a good one. Well done to all comrades involved in this important area of Party work.

As in previous campaigns, we are at our weakest in the area where we need to be strongest: support from our relatively huge periphery of readers and sympathisers - we had 22,139 web readers last week, for instance. But such comrades should perhaps reflect on some of the responses our paper-sellers encountered from SWPers at Marxism.

As usual, there were plenty of the surly, 'don't talk to me, you don't exist' types who, when you approach them, would happily break your arm rather than their stride. There were the snarly, barely contained fury merchants, brawlers with sectarian murder in their steely eyes (some of our comrades did appear to be going out of their way to engage with such people, although thankfully there were no 'Zinedine Zidane moments' this year). There were the 'What? Moi? Be seen with that gossip rag?' SWPers - although, as usual, all of these became decidedly vague when asked to identify a single line of gossip in the current issue. (Even when we offered them money to find it. Amusingly, this group included several members of the semi-demented Spartacist League, an organisation whose members contrived to generally come over as mad as monkeys at this year's event).

Interestingly, a good number of SWP comrades - when they thought they were unobserved - stopped at our stall and lost themselves in the paper for a time. They would give a start and head off double-time if you actually challenged them to buy one, of course. (One SWPer, after I timed him reading our paper for nearly 20 minutes, barked at me: "I don't want to read that shit". You could have fooled me, comrade "¦).

Most tellingly, there was a young Scottish SWPer who was dividing his efforts between arguing with the CPGB's Mark Fischer and two members of the Socialist Party. Perhaps because he was thus a little off balance, he actually admitted that he had been told by organisers in the SWP not to read that foul paper, the Weekly Worker (so, like hundreds of other SWPers, he reads it on the web, of course).

We had a comrade until recently who ping-ponged between us and the SWP for some time. Eventually she was granted an audience with SWP national organiser Martin Smith with a view to rejoining. During the course of this, she was told that she could be re-admitted to the group, but only on condition that she cancel her sub to our paper, undertook not to speak to any CPGBers ever again and not even to look at us on the web.

All comrades should take enormous encouragement from the defensive and cowardly attempts by such petty bureaucrats to politically lobotomise their members. It means that - despite our obvious organisational weaknesses - they sense the political strength of our message.

Now isn't that worth supporting, comrades?