09.08.2012

Summer Offensive -Above our weight

Mark Fischer thanks our supporters for stepping up and takes on anti-cpgb red baiting

 In last week’s column, I put out a “special call for support” to address a cash flow problem in this year’s Summer Offensive, our annual fundraising drive. I estimated that we needed £3k in hand by Monday August 6 to enable us to square up to some “rather large, ominously looming bills”. Well, we didn’t make the full target for this mini-campaign within our overall two-month period of financial work. Some £1,200 was hurried in to us by the deadline which, combined with some imaginative financial plate-spinning, was just enough to keep the wolf from the door before we finished with a total of £2,563 for the week. (In fact, if financial plate-spinning were an Olympic sport, ‘Team CPGB’ would by now be weighed down with tacky glitter …).

Special mentions go out to the comrades who were prompted by this call to come forward with their payments for attendance at this year’s Communist University, our annual school that runs for seven days from August 20 in south London (the full agenda for the event is on our website - just click the CU banner at the top of the home page and follow the link through to the timetable). In particular comrades LC, JC and PBS, who, as an act of solidarity, coughed up their fees promptly despite not actually being members of our organisation - many thanks to them. And particularly to PBS, who added a small donation onto his CU payment and resub to the paper - exactly the sort of approach we are looking for, comrade.

Also, comrade JPC who told us that her ‘guilt’ had spurred her to send us £30 via our website’s PayPal facility - she reads the paper online every week, but does not donate with anything like the same regularity. Well, absolvo te comrade - consider your donation the Marxist equivalent of 30 Hail Marys. If only more of those online readers who have sinned as you have (9,632 last week alone, our webs stats facility tells us) would repent with some cash, we could fight the good fight with a little more vigour. Seriously, many thanks, comrade.

Readers - whether of the print edition or online - will be amused by some idiotic red-baiting our organisation is attracting at the moment. Comrades will have read of the parallel splits that played themselves out in the Labour Representation Committee and the Labour Briefing magazine at the latter’s AGM on July 7 around a motion (successfully carried) that LB should “become the magazine of the LRC”. I won’t go into the details of this spat (comrades can follow the reportage of Stan Keable of Labour Party Marxists to get the back story - see Weekly Worker July 5, July 12 and also the LPM website). What is truly odd is the approach taken by comrade Christine Shawcroft - a member of the Labour Party’s national executive committee and an opponent of the ‘merger’.

If you follow the ‘Real Labour Briefing’ button on her personal site you will be presented with just one article. The bitter opening paragraph of this reads:

“On Saturday July 7, members of the LRC - aided by members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which produces the Weekly Worker - attended the AGM of Labour Briefing and forced through a vote to close down Labour Briefing after 32 years of publication. The LRC now intends to launch its own ‘house journal’, using the same name - Labour Briefing” (www.christineshawcroft.co.uk).

Actually, ‘CPGB’ and ‘Weekly Worker’ are simply scare words that today’s degenerate left - inside and outside the Labour Party - deploy to discredit arguments for openness, democracy and adherence to working class principle. Comrade Shawcroft is actually of the opinion that our brand of politics is truly bizarre and capable only of repelling working class people (ironically, an attitude she shares with the leaders of the left groups outside the Labour Party she is on record as professing utter contempt for).

And yet these ideas - though still championed in this country by our communist collective that I wrote candidly of last week as “extremely fragile in terms of core personnel and resources, especially its financial resources” - punch way, way above its weight by dint of the simple fact that they are true. They are vital prerequisites for the workers’ movement to begin the long process of reconstituting itself as a viable challenge to capitalism.

That’s the inspiring task that every penny donated to the SO 2012 will feed into. The £2,563 donated this week brings our total up to just shy of £15,000. Another £10k by August 26, comrades!