06.07.2011

Get dialling!

Mark Fischer looks forward to some pleasant surprises

Comrades who attended the Social Workers Party’s annual Marxism event report a pretty brisk trade on our stall and for our individual paper sellers (well over £250 in sales over the weekend). Of course, there was also the usual irrational hostility from some of the established members of the SWP when they were approached - many readers will be familiar with the two main forms this takes. Either there is a look of surly distaste or a stony-faced, Easter-Island-statue refusal to even grant you the courtesy of acknowledging that you might exist, let alone may have just said something or offered a leaflet.

However, a good number of others - including many younger SWP members - were prepared to engage. Indeed, our comrades’ anecdotal evidence from the intervention underlines how correct it was for us to place support for the Weekly Worker at the core of this year’s Summer Offensive, the annual fundraising drive of the Communist Party.

In common with other sellers, I was approached by comrades who told me that they were weekly online readers and consequently felt obliged to buy this week’s issue as a small act of solidarity and gratitude. Hardly a surprise that a high percentage of our online readers - 11,912 of them last week - would be at an event like Marxism. Our paper is read overwhelming by militant activists, comrades eager for ideas, political clarity and honesty about the state of our movement that they unfortunately do not find in the other left publications. This has always been the case - however, we have noticed a distinct shift over the past 10 years or so.

Our reading periphery has grown more sympathetic to us. We are not yet talking about an active identification with the core project that the Weekly Worker embodies, but many have certainly moved beyond the snarling resentment we sometimes used to encounter from comrades who felt they had to read the paper, despite the fact that it was clearly compiled by evil little trolls who did the dark bidding of Satan or, perhaps a tad more likely, MI5.

The online readers who took the rare opportunity at Marxism of having a living, breathing WW vendor in front of them to give a little token solidarity represent an important shift. They are also the tip of an iceberg of untapped potential support. An important task over the two months of the Summer Offensive 2011 (it ends on August 20, the last day of our annual school, the Communist University) is to start to convert an appreciable number of those comrades into regular financial contributors to the paper - a prelude to making them engaged political partisans of the project of the organisation that sustains it, of course.

On the coalface in this are the comrades who have been telephoning contacts of the party. The general reports that are filtering back about this are very good - this week, for example, we have added another £61 towards our target of £300 extra in standing orders to the paper, bringing the total of new regular money to a pleasing £135. Moreover, comrades tell me it is pleasant work, with those approached often praising highly both our publication and the political project of principled Marxist unity.

The trouble is not enough of it is being done! It seems that the “culture of low expectations” that I wrote of last week is not simply leading some comrades to expect lukewarm responses when we ring our contacts: it is leading some of us to be reticent about starting at all. Get dialling, comrades! You’ll be pleasantly surprised! (And if you have any ideas about people who might be persuaded to back the paper, recommend them to us and we’ll contact them.)

The state of play more generally in the Summer Offensive is equally positive. In the past seven days, we have taken a sturdy £2,847 off our £25k target, bringing our running total to £7,885 - very respectable indeed at this still early stage in the campaign. Special mentions go to comrade JT for both a £300 one-off and increasing his regular standing order by £25 to a fantastic monthly £75. To CG for modestly increasing his by £10 to a regular £30, but not actually telling us! And to PS for a new commitment of £30 a month.

This SO looks set to be one of our best for years, comrades. Let’s keep up the momentum and bust through our target.