WeeklyWorker

10.06.2009

Confident and optimistic

The traditional fundraising drive of the Communist Party - the Summer Offensive - started on June 6. Howard Roak looks at its politics and possibilities

Our annual Summer Offensive concentrates the minds of comrades in and around the party. Raising cash to support the struggle of this organisation and its paper for principled Marxist unity is a year-round task, of course. But during our SOs we try to vividly highlight the link between having strong financial sinews of war and our ability to raise a clear, independent voice for Marxism. Frankly, the profound disorientation evident on today’s left makes the case for a stronger CPGB far more eloquently than any article I will be writing over the coming eight weeks or so. Simply leaf through the pages of this edition of the Weekly Worker, dear reader, for prima facie evidence of the deep, dark hole that leaders of organisations such as the Socialist Party and Socialist Workers Party have led their comrades into.

However, the bare essentials of the Summer Offensive are worthwhile outlining once more before we comment further on that theme. Every year, CPGB members set the organisation a collective minimum target to raise in a particular period - normally the two months up to and including our annual school, the Communist University. This year we are aiming for £25,000 by August 15. Individual comrades then set themselves personal targets to raise - often very ambitious ones. But the SO is an inclusive affair. We receive donations of all sizes from comrades and readers of our paper and website. Every penny we get is gratefully received and put to good use. The campaign is also inclusive in the method used to calculate comrades’ totals. All the money they raise in the course of work for the party or for campaigns the party is centrally involved in counts towards their final tally.

So every book or sub sold, every donation solicited, every badge bought from party stalls, every new supporter for Communist Students or every affiliation won to Hands Off the People of Iran is factored in. The Summer Offensive is not designed to be a spell of penny-pinching purdah for our people, but an opportunity for them to turn outwards. The final total both for individuals and our collective thus becomes a measure of our success in engaging with our target audience - advanced militants in the workers’ movement and young people finding their way to communist politics.

Thought about in this way, it is clear that the 2009 campaign is a particularly important one for us.

The backdrop is politically sobering. There has been grim news for the left on the electoral front. The smouldering discontent of millions of working class people has for the moment found expression in an increased vote for the right and a dramatic collapse in support for Labour. In this country and across Europe, the masses are voting out of fear - fear for their jobs, for their living standards and conditions. Yes, they are being fooled by the rhetoric of the right, but we have to be clear why.

The abysmal and consistent failures of the revolutionary left have provided a more or less free run for the pseudo-solutions of rightwing populism. Since the mid-90s, the organisations in this country that dub themselves ‘Marxist’ have consistently refused to organise as Marxists and to start the long, patient work of winning sections of our class to the politics these sects purport to believe in. There are few guarantees in life - ‘death and taxes’ covers much of it. So even if the process of Marxist unity had been underway, the tide might nevertheless be flowing to the right in this period. One thing is guaranteed, however - politically unprincipled short cuts to mass influence for ‘Marxists’ do not work.

The key point is that - with imagination, daring and commitment to principle - we could have established a degree of clarity and optimism amongst strategically important layers of our class. We could have equipped advanced militants with politics that - at the very least - would have enabled them to hold their ground in the present difficult period and to lead wider swathes of the class forward in the future. Instead, the left has managed to make itself more or less invisible at a time of profound economic and political crisis of the system to which it is supposed to be proposing a viable social alternative.

The Tories now look set to win the next general election - the bulk of the protest votes that went to Ukip and the British National Party will flow back to this ‘natural’ party of government come a national poll. So where do we go from here?

First, the CPGB is confident and optimistic - as our ambitious target for this year’s Summer Offensive shows.

As is the case with all left organisations, more people have been applying to join us in the recent period - particularly youth. That’s encouraging, but our optimism has a more firmly anchored basis than that. Simply put, the state of the world demands Marxist solutions! Communists in this period should be coming forward confidently with genuinely radical - ie, Marxist - answers on the organisation of the world economy; on the crisis of bourgeois democracy and fears about the rise of the chauvinist right; on the ecological future of the planet and the misanthropic or individualistic claptrap spouted by some.

The last thing we need are any more doomed projects offering the working class warmed over Labourism, left national chauvinism or populism. This is the pivotal question for our class - the need for Marxism to become politically hegemonic in the movement and take organisational form in a mass, democratic, revolutionary communist party. That’s why we need your help to storm our target of £25k - not to stand still as an organisation, but to push the Marxist left as a whole forward.

As the Weekly Worker goes to press, the SO 2009 is looking this way:

Looking forward to a marked increase in pace during the next week, comrades!