25.08.2010

Looming tasks

Howard Roak looks back at this year's Summer Offensive

At our Summer Offensive celebration meal on Friday August 13 - organised on the penultimate day of the Communist University - comrade John Bridge was able to announce that we has raised £24,011 as of that evening, but comrades were assured that there was more in the pipeline. In fact, after we had collated all the new donations that had come in while we were embroiled in CU, the final tally had crept up to just over £24,500. This is a solid achievement for the organisation in a year when many individual comrades started to feel capitalist austerity bite.

Out of the late flurry, special thanks go out to a few comrades. There was DT for his £30 e-cheque, SG for that out-of-the-blue £100 and JD for his £30 - which arrived with the comrade’s usual modest and misplaced apologies for not being able to contribute more, given his pensioner status.

Misplaced because all donations to this important annual party campaign - whatever their size - are greatly appreciated. To our knowledge, there are no eccentric millionaires out there in Weekly Worker readerland, dropping us the odd £50 note just to free up space in their wallets. The vast majority of our readers and supporters are working class people: comrades who don’t have spare cash to chuck around. This makes the contributions they send in all the more precious to us.

They all add to our organisation’s great collective endeavour, the annual SO. We should guard against becoming complacent, of course. In hindsight, this year’s campaign could probably have been used to challenge ourselves more. For that section of the workers’ movement that presumes to dub itself ‘Marxist’, huge tasks loom, as the attacks of the Con-Dem government start to impact on our class. Unfortunately, much of the rest of the left continues in its complacency and stupidly self-satisfied sect insularity. If it does not change, it will fail those challenges - just as it has failed to establish an electoral foothold for Marxism over the last 15 years or so, despite a number of abortive attempts.

So, while comrades are justly proud of what we achieve in our Summer Offensives, we should be wary of taking as a measure what surrounds us on the British left. We should ask ourselves what is necessary for a Marxist organisation in a period such as this; not simply how what we do contrasts with what other groups are managing. Frankly, viewed in this way, the contemporary left in Britain - all of us, it should be admitted - is mired in amateurism and achieves the incredible feat of adding up to less than the sum of its individual parts. The difference is that our organisation is aware of these crippling weaknesses and fights to overcome them; the others appear intensely, almost pugnaciously, proud of them.

The Marxist left - as the advanced part of the movement - has to do better. This year’s successful SO again provides this paper and the organisation that sustains it with a replenished war chest to continue the fight for a transformed Marxist movement, ready and able to properly serve the class as a whole. For that, many thanks comrades.

The Provisional Central Committee of the CPGB sends its congratulations to all comrades who contributed to this year’s campaign. Forward to our 26th Summer Offensive in 2011!

And, in the meantime, back to Robbie Rix! See you next year, comrades.