17.06.2011
Aiming for target of £25k in two months
The Weekly Worker is at the very centre of our annual fundraising drive, writes CPGB national organiser Mark Fischer
From Saturday June 18 the CPGB embarks on its annual fundraising campaign, the Summer Offensive. This is the two-month stretch in every year when our members, supporters and sympathisers collectively attempt to raise thousands of pounds and - flowing from this - set themselves some ambitious targets for their individual contributions. Again this year, we are pushing for £25,000 and I am pleased to report that already party members and some of our closer supporters have pledged to raise £13,390. An encouraging start, given how much the economic travails of global capitalism have impacted our comrades’ lifestyles - and bank balances - over the past 12 months.
This year’s campaign was preceded by two extensive discussions by our leadership - the Provisional Central Committee - on the relevance of its format and its place in the culture of the organisation. Some unease was expressed on the committee that the SO had grown a little stale and that the rhetoric that went with it jarred with the content of what most comrades actually did during the two months. While the Offensive was touted as a chance for the organisation to turn outwards, to engage with the party’s sympathising periphery more, often there was too little of this. Comrades will recall that writers on the campaign in previous years have pointed to the problem of older comrades treating it more like an annual personal tax. Younger ones found the going tougher and often came to be a little flummoxed by the whole thing.
These problems notwithstanding, the PCC was unanimous that the Summer Offensive remains an essential part of the organisation’s work. What will be new is that we will put fundraising for the Weekly Worker at its very core this year. This means that the paper’s campaign to win more standing orders, as explained by Robbie Rix in last week’s paper, will play a big part in the SO.
The urgent reasons for our paper’s finances to be upped were clearly spelled out by Robbie. As he wrote, “While Socialist Worker, The Socialist and the rest may claim to be unique, that description actually does apply to the Weekly Worker” (‘Extra needed’, June 9). We wish it didn’t, of course. We wish that whole swathes of the ostensibly Marxist left had the culture of our paper - open, democratic, and characterised by an unshakable fealty to communism and the struggle to unite all communists and revolutionaries around a genuinely Marxist programme. Clearly, the world in 2011 - and what we can see coming over the horizon for our class - quite simply demands this.
We are entering an intense period of conflict between the workers’ movement and the coalition government. We have seen the huge TUC demonstration of March 26 and now with the June 15 vote by the PCS to join hundreds of thousands of teachers and lecturers in a coordinated walkout on June 30, the temperature has risen noticeably. With a coming ‘autumn of discontent’ being spoken of almost as an established fact by media pundits, various bourgeois politicians have floated the possibility of another raft of repressive anti-trade unions laws - Boris Johnson, Vince Cable, and Francis Maude have talked about placing yet more restrictions on trade union action.
What lies in front of us is nothing less than a strategic battle. So the key thing for us is the readiness of our class - most starkly revealed by the state of its advanced part: the comrades organised in the left of Labour, the left militants in the trade union movement and in and around the revolutionary sects.
That left has taken a pounding over the past period. The Labour left has been dramatically reduced in size and influence. Trade union membership is around seven million, compared to over 13 million in 1979, the basic structures are emaciated and the bureaucrats continue to exercise a profoundly deadening influence, despite the recent increase in protests.
The revolutionary groups have criminally squandered chances to establish a beachhead for Marxism in wider society, particularly in the field of electoral contests. Instead, narrow sect interests continue to prevail and hopelessly opportunist ‘get rich quick’ schemes have been foisted on the movement. Now, these forces have retreated into the activity that largely defines them - wasting a huge amount of effort constructing Potemkin villages, attempting to fool the working class that they alone are ‘the socialists’, that anything else that might exist is irrelevant at best, that the party our class needs will arrive only through the accumulation of new recruits.
On one level, this sort of behaviour is just farcical of course. On another, it speaks of a criminal irresponsibility and totally cavalier attitude to the needs of the movement for principled unity. This degenerate culture is, unfortunately, the dominant one and has been strengthened, not weakened. Clearly this awful state of affairs has had a material affect on the work of the CPGB and - as an important part of that work - our annual SO.
Our ability to turn outwards has been constricted, as the left has declined and retreated into itself. In this sense, the Weekly Worker is our most effective weapon. It is read by thousands of advanced workers in this country and across the world. It hammers home its message of unity, of programmatic clarification and death to sectarianism every week and, despite its weaknesses, is the embodiment of an approach to politics that can take the left out if its current sad impasse. Sustaining its finances and providing the wherewithal for us to actually plan expansion - more pages, adding colour, actually running fighting campaigns to expand its circulation, dedicated office space instead of the rather makeshift arrangements we currently have - all of this will be at the very centre of this year’s Summer Offensive.
Of course, the place where most readers encounter our paper is on the organisation’s website and that has obviously been a real weakness. The current site is totally inadequate to present our politics to the relatively huge numbers who visit it, compared to those who take a hard copy of the paper. Obviously, the Weekly Worker is what really drives the site’s content forward and this will continue for the foreseeable future. However, on June 18 - the first day the Summer Offensive - a revamped site will finally be launched that is designed to have a great deal more interactivity.
In order to develop our online presence further - indeed, to get this redesigned site off the slipway - we have had to buy in commercial web expertise. Not something we do casually, as a cash-strapped organisation overwhelmingly composed of working class people - despite the lurid tales about our limitless funds and establishment connections that do the rounds in some of the more stupid quarters of the left - but, given the growing importance of the web for our work and the circulation of the Worker, we have had no option.
We will be systematically contacting the readers and sympathisers of the paper over the next couple of weeks to ask them a simple question - whether a physical version plops onto their mat weekly or they read the paper online, do they value the contribution it makes in the search for a positive resolution of the palpable crisis of the left? Does it deserve not simply to survive, but flourish and expand? If so, can they make a regular contribution to support that process?
Two months to make £25k, comrades, and to put the Weekly Worker on a footing to consolidate and then expand! Let’s hear from you!