04.07.2013

Summer Offensive: Running costs

Events like CU and the regular (miraculous) publication of the Weekly Worker deserves the support of every reader, says Mark Fischer

No comrades, don’t take our headline the wrong way. We are not asking you to sponsor our runners in various marathons again.

It’s rather less traumatic than that. Raising money to fuel the work of our paper and its organisation is a constant task, month in, month out. Much of that takes places behind the scenes, despite the heroically steadfast public nagging of comrade Robbie Rix in his weekly column. Our annual Summer Offensive is an important opportunity for us to highlight not just the regular paper bill we incur - which Robbie does so assiduously - but to ‘dramatise’ what it costs needed to maintain our level of political intervention on the left throughout the year.

For example, take our web readers - the vast majority of whom, of course (just under 9k of them last week) will have seen that the (more or less) finalised version of the timetable of this year’s Communist University is now on our site’s carousel. (Perhaps uploaded a tad too quickly - we are grateful to the comrades from Platypus who contacted us to correct our feral spelling of ‘Lukács’ and ‘Korsch’ in Mike Macnair’s advertised session on the afternoon of August 16: ‘Lukács, Korsch: philosophers of Leninism or the ultra-left?’ Then in the same email, with no doubt a frisson of forgivable sect pleasure, the comrades booked a CU fringe meeting on the same day, on the same subject - we assume to have a stab at putting us right on the politics of Lukács and Korsch, not simply the spelling).

There’s nothing else like the Communist University on the revolutionary left in the UK, unfortunately. It is still the only annual Marxist school that actively welcomes controversy, debate and the clash of serious ideas. It is interesting to note in this context that Mike Macnair’s comprehensive and fair-minded 4,000-word-plus report of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty’s annual school in last week’s issue forms a perfect counterpoint to the sub-Socialist Worker style that the organisation adopts to report its own event - eg, the comrades can’t even bring themselves to mention that any other political trend had turned up or had an argument with them. This sort of child-like denial discredits the left: the AWL has requested a stall at CU and, rest assured, we will report their comrades’ contributions to our debates - good, bad and indifferent.

The brutal practicalities of capitalism intrude on said CU, however. We need to pay the last advance instalment for the venue within the next two weeks - that’s just over £4k. A good deal of that money can be made at the event itself, but that does set in context the £2,750 of new money this week (including a tremendous £500 from comrade PM and cheques of £120 from GT and £100 each from RG and MM) - an impressive boost that brings our running total to £5,717. All good stuff and impressive work by our people. However, it is immediately earmarked and spent, comrades. There’s no room for complacency.

We will be reporting in some detail next week on the practical work that comrades are doing in this year’s SO, the actual commitments that have been made. But before then comrades reading this column should reflect on what the Summer Offensive is actually for - take a look at the agenda for this year’s Communist University. See the way it contrasts favourably with anything else on the left that passes itself off as a Marxist school. This deserves the active support of every reader of this paper.