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Weekly Worker 647 Thursday November 2 2006 Subscribe to the Weekly Worker

Development needed

Fighting fund
Hit and visit

I am grateful to ‘Dave Dig’ (who seems to be connected to the Respect office) for pointing out to me re the CPGB website that “hits are not the same as visits” (Letters, October 26). Believe it or not, I did actually think they were the same thing. So, when I talked about 15,000 hits the previous week, I am told I should have said visits.

Sorry to disappoint you, comrade ‘Dig’, but those who know more about these things tell me we had 125,000 hits (individual switches between pages) that week. Over the last seven days, however, I am happy to say that the number of our readers went back up to the average of recent weeks - 23,584 visits (ie, people logging onto our site) and 139,508 hits.

Anyway, how does all this translate into cash (which is what I’m supposed to be talking about, after all)? Well, out of those 23,584, just one comrade thought to give us a donation - thank you, KI, for your £25. Via snailmail, however, results were rather better: a total of £105 last week, including gifts from two regulars - TR (£60) and SW (£15).

So, leaving aside the notorious ‘hit or visit’ controversy, not a bad month all in all. We exceeded our £500 target for October by a much needed £205. But don’t let’s rest on our laurels - don’t forget those months when we fell short earlier in the year. Let’s see if we can end 2006 with three consecutive successes. Over to you, comrades!

Robbie Rix

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Most of the world is in urgent need of infrastructural and industrial development. Therefore in terms of our immediate programme we accept the idea of CO2 convergence and reduction. Given the vastly uneven levels of carbon emission (USA: 5.5 units per person; EU: 2.2; China: 0.7; and India: 0.2), there can be no question of equal sacrifice.

The plain fact of the matter is that industrially developed societies are much better placed to manage climate change than impoverished ones. They can afford to put in place flood defences, operate robust social security systems and, if need be, relocate people in an orderly fashion.

There are still those enchanted by the dream of universal and balanced development under the existing capitalist system. The Frank Furedi-inspired Spiked website comes to mind. Stupid - that or, more likely, they are paid to pull the wool over people’s eyes. Capitalism means uneven development by definition and a declining capitalism must exacerbate that to the point of de-development. A capitalist Bangladesh can never achieve parity with western Europe or the US. Today such countries face a further descent into the hell holes of barbarism, not the steady ascent to the peaks of civilisation.

What climate change demands is not the suspension of the class struggle for higher wages, land redistribution, constitutional reform, etc: rather global coordination of the working class for the positive supersession of capitalism. What our fraught and increasingly strained relationship with nature demands is the elevation of the class struggle into a challenge for state power.

That is our main task and that requires organising communist parties in every country - under a Communist International - and winning the battle for extreme democracy.

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