27.06.2013

Summer Offensive: The solidarity quid

Mark Fischer senses a gradual change in attitudes to the Weekly Worker at the People's Assembly

CPGB comrades at the People’s Assembly report a brisk trade in papers. We had decided beforehand that our main intervention at an event that was, effectively, a series of bigger or smaller rallies would be our subsequent coverage in this issue. However, the reaction to the Weekly Worker was encouraging and confirmed a previously noted trend. A good percentage of the people we sold to on June 22 were regular web readers. They took the opportunity to approach our sellers on the day, some with small, guilty half-smiles, hand over the cash for a paper they had already read and then melt back into the throng.

It is at large left events like the PA or the Socialist Workers Party’s Marxism festival that we can sense how relatively substantial this sympathising periphery appears to be getting. Of course, this online progress is very pleasing. The political influence of our paper and website continues to show modest expansion - which is obviously the reason it is produced in the first place, not to generate revenue. Given this, we are even quite happy when we encounter antagonistic comrades at events like Marxism (especially at Marxism in previous years, actually) who will aggressively inform our comrades that they won’t buy a paper because (a) “it’s shit” and (b) they “read it for free every week on the web”.

Quite how that is one in the eye for us I’ve never been quite sure. Effectively, the comrades are boasting: ‘OK, every seven days I allow a new set of strong, principled, politically subversive ideas from the Weekly Worker to crawl around on the inside of my head and thus - whether I’m aware of it not - potentially undermine my whole sectarian world view.’ Out of exchanges like this, we are the ones supposed to come away peeved because we’ve been diddled out of a quid … Hmm.

To be fair, I didn’t encounter any of these types at the PA - hell, even leading SWP comrades were relatively friendly. But the central lesson is that while the paper has always had a relatively impressive readership (this currently hovers at roughly 9,000-11,000 online each week - 8,955 over the last seven days, for example), there has been a change in attitudes to the publication. Time was that people read it grudgingly because they had to … often to find out what was going on in their own organisations, which must have narked them even more. We shouldn’t exaggerate, but it is clear we have gained some appreciable political ground and a good percentage, although obviously still a minority, of the 10k or so who now read us do so with a degree of sympathy.

It is this layer that we really need to start mobilising for this year’s Summer Offensive campaign. If the readers that occasionally see our people on a march and pass over a ‘solidarity quid’ resolved to take out a standing order that just met the unit cost of the paper in physical form - say, £5 monthly - the effect on our finances would be quite startling. There are, after all, quite a few of you out there, comrades …

This week, special mentions to SK for his magnificent £230, DO for his £20, £35 from DS and a £50 MM donation. YM adds an impressive £400 and comrades at our weekly London Communist Forums have stumped up just under £100 over the last few meetings. Lastly, well done to EO, who made £300 this week by chasing down some old invoices that had been overlooked for months!

In total then, £1,135 of new money this week and a running total to £2,967, as we go into our fourth week on the campaign. Good work by comrades, but the pace does need stepping up if we are to reach our £30,000 target by August 18.