13.07.2011

Halfway through and gathering pace

Mark Fischer reports on the CPGB's Summer Offensive

Two new standing order pledges have come in over the past seven days - £15 each from stalwart supporters JS and GS. These are significant donations, as they take us over halfway to our initial target of raising an extra £300 a month in regular income for the Weekly Worker.

And - neatly enough - we reach this milepost in the fourth week of the two-month Summer Offensive fundraising campaign (the Weekly Worker drive is at the core of our annual SO - a finance campaign that encompasses all the party’s work and which this year has as its target £25,000 to be raised by August 20, the last day of our annual school, the Communist University). So new standing orders are at £165 a month - but there is plenty more out there to be won.

Comrade JS also set an example to others with an additional donation of £30 via our normally rather neglected PayPal website button, as has TB. SK contributes a magnificent £230 and LA adds £30 to his score so far. Comrades have also been stumping up their fees for Communist University, which also goes into the pot - including a £50 donation from JR towards the travelling costs of a young comrade attending the event from Holland. An example that others could follow - and which helped take us to a pleasing £2,123 this week.

Halfway in, we now have a running total that has surpassed the psychologically important £10k barrier. With £10,008 in hand we are well placed as the second half of the campaign begins and, as the experience of our 26 previous SOs teaches us, the pace of the fundraising gathers as we head towards our Communist University.

Speaking of which, this coming week will see a more or less complete timetable for this school available on our (still lamentably makeshift) website. Comrades will see a richly diverse spread of speakers covering subjects from the unfolding Arab revolution (prominent Israeli socialist Moshé Machover and Mohammad Reza Shalgouni, leading member of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers Iran/Rahe Kargar, present this session); through the latest thinking on our Neanderthals cousins and the human revolution (Camilla Power, University of East London and the Radical Anthropology Group); to comrades from American group Platypus on ‘Capital in history’ and ‘Marx’s critique of political economy’. A session I am looking forward to in particular is the one we are putting together on the soiled culture of the revolutionary left.

Comrades who read this paper on a regular basis will be well aware of what this will address - the left’s propensity for expulsion and excommunication as a substitute for political dialogue and clarification; its snarling hostility to other trends in the movement based on little more than a fight for ‘market share’ in recruitment rather than deep political differences; its cavalier attitude to what are meant to be its core principles when this or that sect starts to sniff the big time, etc.

But we don’t want this to be a therapy session (one comrade has suggested we adapt Larkin for its advertising puff - “They fuck you up, the left sects. They don’t mean to, but they do …”). Comrades from a number of political backgrounds who have fallen foul of bureaucratic regimes of various stripes will discuss why the left is the way it is, what accounts for its self-defeating philistinism and how we can move beyond the sects and their paralysing culture.

Keep an eye on the website in the coming seven days for comprehensive listings. Last week, some 12,785 of you did just that, the vast majority logging on to read a paper that has become part of their weekly political routine. Your regular financial support for that vital political project - at whatever level you can give (and, I remind comrades, this includes embarrassingly large standing orders as well as the more modest) would be a tremendous contribution.