Weekly Worker 482 Thursday May 29 2003
Not one millimetre
The Communist
Party’s 19th Summer Offensive fundraising drive is launched on June 1
and runs until the end of July. The SO acts as an annual boost to the
health of our organisation
I
knew a decidedly flaky left communist/anarchist back in the 1980s who
could always be relied to get things hilariously wrong about the CPGB.
During our brief acquaintance, he confidently told me, amongst other mad
things, that:
- Jack Conrad was related to Joseph Conrad, the famous author. Our
money apparently came from the latter’s literary estate.
- On demonstrations, we insisted that the comrades on our contingents
swing their arms and march like squaddies.
- People were not allowed to join the Party unless they had achieved
a degree of competence in shotogan karate.
Now most readers have probably concluded that the man
was simply a loon with some politics and it is certainly true that my
friend did exhibit the disorientating effects of absorbing anarchism on
an empty head. However, when it came the annual fundraising drive - the
Summer Offensive - the comrade’s ravings sounded like nothing more than
a slightly dafter versions of the rumours that more ‘respectable’ sections
of the left circulated.
Of course, the SO really sent his star ship into hyperspace.
He would breathlessly seek me out on demos and - pop-eyed - ask me to
confirm that Party members were selling livers for the fund drive, that
all student comrades had been instructed to give up their digs and live
together in industrial squats in Brixton or that we had a T-shirt sweatshop
in Turkey that supplied the cash.
But, as Jack Conrad outlined last week, while others
on the left have had slightly less wacky explanations for the source of
our funds, there is a commonality here. And as comrade Conrad commented:
“Clearly they have no conception whatsoever of raising substantial finances
and maintaining a well produced weekly paper without first selling oneself”
- or even parts of oneself (‘Party
notes’, May 22).
In truth, the Summer Offensive - an essential part of
our annual funding - is a much less gruesome affair. Yes, it is a two-month
period of special effort, during which our comrades will cut back on items
of personal expenditure to hit ambitious individual targets they have
set themselves. But the campaign is a political event, not simply
a financial one in the narrow sense of the word. During the SO, we want
our members to turn outwards. Yes, comrades will tighten belts,
but the drive is one of the high points of our political calendar. Every
paper, book or pamphlet comrades sell, every donation or sub they win
goes towards their personal target.
Thus the SO is an annual gauge of the breadth and intensity
of the Party’s work - individually and, crucially, collectively.
The Offensive acts as a purge on our organisation. In
some years, this has meant nothing more than our comrades - all
our comrades - pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, sloughing off
some of the lazy and amateur habits of work that we had fallen into during
a sluggish period. In other years, as Jack Conrad reminded us, we have
lost people who had become inactive, who talked a good revolution
and nothing more - “clearing out dead wood”, as the comrade put it.
The debate at the third conference of the Leninists of
the CPGB in 1984 on ‘The Party crisis’ is a particular useful example
of this. As a result of sharp differences on our style of work brought
out by this debate, we lost two leading members of what was still a very
small group. As a raw 22-year-old and relatively new recruit to the organisation,
I vividly remember the drama of the event.
The suggestion that we significantly up our pace of work
- concretised by launching a full Summer Offensive that year - was vigorously
opposed by the two members of the leadership who subsequently parted company
with us. Conference was told by one of these comrades, “We are in Britain,
not Turkey”. We had to bear in mind that there “was not a revolutionary
situation in Britain” and we could not win people “simply through hard
work” (The Leninist July 1985).
Indeed, I remember one particularly distasteful argument
from the comrade attempting to make a case for the slackening of our levels
of discipline and membership requirements - what he called “ordinary workers,
like the miners” would be put off joining us, he suggested.
And this in 1985! Just three months after the end of
the miners’ Great Strike! A strategic battle between the working and ruling
classes that had seen the majority of these heroic workers on strike for
one full year, entailing enormous financial and personal sacrifice, denied
benefits by Thatcher, only kept from destitution by the practical solidarity
of millions of workers in this country and around the world, beaten and
bloodied by the new, nationally organised paramilitary police force, with
two comrades from their ranks killed on the picket lines … and then still
marching back to work in disciplined columns after the defeat, defiant
and proud. These were the people that our ‘sensible’ comrade felt would
be put off by an organisation that asked them to make serious sacrifices
for something they passionately believed in.
I remember laughing out loud at him - and the look he
gave me when I did.
But one of the most effective - and profound - rejoinders
to this call for concessions to lazy British ‘exceptionalism’ came not
from one of the British delegates, but from a member of the Communist
Party of Turkey (Iscinin Sesi) who attended our conference
as part of a fraternal delegation.
He told us that the class struggle in Britain demanded
that “… those who put themselves forward to meet these developments must
increase their preparedness, their means and their abilities if they are
to meet the tasks life is demanding … There cannot be any question of
mechanical copying the work of Iscinin Sesi in Turkey. This is
not required by life and no one can defend such a suggestion … [but] communists
who are resolute, dedicated, stubborn and totally committed can play a
great role. There can be no ground given, not even a millimetre, on the
question of hard work - whatever you give, it will not be enough: life
will demand more” (ibid).
Collectively, we should be very proud that we have had
sufficient integrity and guts as a communist organisation to take to heart
these words of a very great communist - comrade Bedir Aydemir, who in
1988 died tragically young of cancer. This approach has meant we have
parted company with a few comrades - a process we always regret, but also
recognise as a normal and healthy part of the life of a revolutionary
organisation that is attempting to push itself forward to “meet the tasks
life is demanding”.
This year’s Offensive looks set to be one of our best.
Apart from the individual efforts of comrades on particular fundraising
projects, the key to it will be the fight to engage our relatively big
paper and cyber readership and win them to financially support the organisation
that produces what they recognise as an invaluable resource for the movement.
We will carry regular reports of SO activities and the
progress of the fund and many readers will be contacted with direct requests
to contribute. But do not wait to be asked - send cheques, postal orders,
cash (no body organs, please) to our usual address, marking the envelope
‘Summer Offensive’.
Two months to raise at least 25k, comrades!
Mark Fischer
