30.08.2006

Conscious planning

Howard Roak reflects on this year's Summer Offensive - our annual two-month-long fundraising campaign - and offers a suggestion or two for next year

Our comrades will be discussing these questions when they gather for the next Party aggregate on September 9. I want to use this final SO column of mine to flag up some of the issues I think need to be chewed over by that meeting. Also, I will suggest ways in which the obvious weaknesses the campaign has revealed can be addressed and, I am confident, overcome.

So what are the key lessons of this year's fund drive?

There is no question that it showed a level of inertia or complacency in our own ranks and in our broader periphery. Some 130 people contributed to the campaign, with the lion's share of the cash being raised by party 'veterans' - comrades with four or more SOs under their belts. Clearly, this is a small number compared to the number of people who actually read our paper every week and those who have a degree of sympathy with its project.

Also, with a few honourable exceptions, this year's campaign saw little in the way of real initiative from either our veterans or from newer recruits. Indeed, longer-term cadre now tend to budget for the SO simply as an annual party 'tax' on them as individual members.

In turn, this produces a tendency - nothing more than a tendency at this stage, I underline - to fragment the party during the two-month drive, as comrades fall back on their private resources to achieve their target. They cut back on items of personal expenditure, they take extra shifts at work or they take out loans. Again this year, there was little in the way of our comrades turning outwards, using the politics of the organisation to win donations from sympathetic readers in the movement.

There are good and bad reasons for this. Certainly bad ones include the general level of our education and party culture. However, the main explanation must be found in what surrounds us, in the generalised political decay and organisational decline of the ostensibly revolutionary left internationally.

Our comrades do not operate in a positively challenging political environment, where people who call themselves Marxists are honestly engaging with ideas, are willing to think and thus offer practical support to a paper such as the Weekly Worker. Of course, this is not new - it has been like this for some time in the workers' movement. However, as we have pointed out, in previous years we have occasionally been lucky with the timing of our SOs - or rather, we used our gumption as an organisation to make our own luck. Our work in the Socialist Alliance is one example that springs to mind; the mass anti-war mobilisations are another. In the absence of 'lucky' moments such as these, the 2006 campaign - like the previous year's - has emphasised to us the scale of the task that faces genuine Marxists.

In this politically impoverished environment, we must guard against our Summer Offensives becoming technical exercises. For instance, while it was positive that this year's campaign saw various party 'businesses' revamped, we have to emphasise politics as the motor that drives the SO, not the law of value. Thus, there is a need to recast the SO in the light of the agreed perspectives of the organisation and the tasks that flow from them.

These tasks are not - as suggested by some refugees from the Socialist Workers Party who have recently glanced off our periphery - to 'get out there' and 'get our hands dirty'. We are facing a left in political meltdown. The answer to this drawn out programmatic crisis is not to hand out more leaflets, to flog more papers or shout really loudly into more megaphones. We are not snotty about any of this campaigning work; however, to present it in and of itself as the answer to the degenerate state of our movement is idiotic.

Thinking about it in this way, it is perhaps quite odd that our Summer Offensive effectively ends before the Communist University. In terms of our organisation actually turning outwards, showcasing our open approach to politics, engaging with our sympathetic periphery and exemplifying the need for serious thought and theoretical clarification, the CU is the high point of our political calendar as things currently stand. Indeed, in the week of this year's school some £8,500 came in from fees, literature stalls, the sale of food and drink plus individual donations. While most of this cash appeared after we could justify including it in the SO total, it meant that the event easily beat any seven-day period during the SO itself for money raised. (The next best week was the ninth, which saw a comparatively small £3,342 stumped up).

So it is odd that we do not make the CU the centrepiece of our annual fundraising drive rather than something comrades think about as a separate event to be organised, built and paid for distinct from the SO itself. The Communist University is when the Weekly Worker - possibly the most successful publishing project the left can currently boast of - goes 'live'. Actively seeking sponsorship and financial support for it, campaigning to build it instead of simply announcing it is on, using more imagination in its preparation and promotion can give our annual SO the campaigning cutting edge that it currently lacks.

At least, that is my opinion. I look forward to a lively debate on this and related questions at our aggregate.

Finally, let me thank all comrades who have contributed - at whatever level - to this year's Summer Offensive and, on behalf of the organisation as a whole, congratulate those who raised particularly impressive amounts or showed some real imagination in going about the task of hitting their personal targets - comrades Mike Macnair, Peter Manson and our marathon translation man, Ben Lewis.