01.06.1995

Theory and practice

The 12th Party Offensive

EVERY YEAR members of the Communist Party conduct an intensive fund-raising drive called the Party Offensive. During this two-month period members, supporters and sympathisers of our organisation make high individual pledges.

This year, the target for our Party has been set at £25,000 for June and July. Comrades will have to work long, hard and with a great deal of imagination for this ambitious figure to be reached and - we hope - surpassed.

To storm the target, comrades will be taking second jobs, working extra shifts and cutting back on personal expenditure. These drives are one of the high points of the Party’s public work during the course of a year, of us turning outwards and involving others. All finance raised during this period is counted in the Party’s total.

Money from paper sales, from Party petitioning, from selling books and literature, from winning new subscriptions to the Weekly Worker, through fighting for donations from the periphery of our organisation - all of this and more is counted as work for the Party Offensive.

In this way, the annual Offensive of the CPGB is not simply a tribute to the high levels of commitment which the idea of a Communist Party is able to win from our militants. It is also an effective barometer of the extent to which we are involving others in our work - and even of the political mood of wider society.

Thus, these drives are not simply technical operations - they are organically linked with all of the political work of the Party. This year’s £25,000 minimum is set with the next general election in mind. Our organisation is preparing to make the most effective intervention possible in these watershed elections and that will require money - lots of it.

Over the years, we have fallen out with the people who have talked a good revolution. For Leninists, a communist is not defined by adherence to some vacuous checklist of Talmudic ‘beliefs’. To be a communist in today’s Britain is to actively recognise the need for a working class alternative to Labour, for a mass revolutionary party. In other words, knowing the way forward and doing something to get there.

The challenge to Labourism is the best example. Practically the entire left is committed to building some sort of alternative to the Labour Party. Except when it comes to practice, however.

From the largest on the left - the Socialist Workers Party - through to some of the tiny remnants of ‘official communism’, we are told that ‘resources’ are a problem; that they are too small just yet to start in the field of elections - the only place Labour can be effectively challenged today.

This is why the majority of the left still justify their pathetic ‘Vote Labour, but ...’ excuses.

In fact, the real poverty of the left is ideological: it is organically linked to bourgeois society through its support for Labour. Communists in contrast fight for what is necessary. They do not simply express platitudes about what would be ‘nice’, what others - Tony Blair, the trade union leaders - ought to do.

It is precisely in the course of this type of work that our comrades become full communists. Being a communist requires that comrades consciously subordinate themselves to the collective that is going to bring about a new society, no matter how embryonic a form that collective takes. That collective is, of course, the Communist Party.

Work in our Party is genuine communist work, a sort of primitive anticipation of how people will regard their work under communism itself. It is, as Lenin said, “labour performed gratis for the benefit of society ... without expectation of reward ... labour performed because it has become a habit to work for the common good.” Such work contains the “shoots of communism,” he said.

Communists work together, form mutual ties of trust, loyalty and authority in the course of precisely this type of work. Communist discipline is the internalised morality of our revolutionary collective. There can be no communist discipline in organisations subservient to Labour, in abstract debating circles or semi-religious sects.

As readers see, the Party Offensive of the Communist Party is far, far more for us than simply an annual ‘fund squeeze’ to be endured. It is certainly hard, it tests comrades and it implies a great deal of self-sacrifice. Yet in the conditions of contemporary Britain, we believe that the Offensives demonstrate - like our practical opposition to Labourism and our principled work for revolutionary rapprochement - the green “shoots of communism”.

The Twelfth Party Offensive of the Communist Party is officially launched on Sunday, June 4 in central London with a speech on ‘Communist Unity and the process of rapprochement. Comrades are urged to attend, or at least rush your pledges in to us as soon as possible.

The Weekly Worker will feature plenty of articles on this year’s Offensive, looking at both its history and the various ways comrades will be raising their targets this year. But don’t stay a spectator! Send a donation to the drive; think about setting a pledge yourself - get involved! We look forward to hearing from you.

Victory to the Twelfth Party Offensive!

Forward to a reforged Communist Party!

Mark Fischer

National Organiser, CPGB