Summer Offensive
Doubling up in a quiet week
Over the seven days since I last reported on this year’s Summer Offensive, just £630 has been added. This takes our running total to £2,026. Not good, by any means, but not disastrous either. Comrades in the CPGB went into this year’s campaign clearly recognising that it was going to be a tough one.
We have lost an number of older
financial big-hitters over the last 12
months. New comrades tend to be
younger and with markedly less
disposable income. So this week’s
sluggish performance may be a
reflection of that.
Alongside that bit of ‘demographics’ is politics, however. Comrades in the party office have been ‘doubling up’ this week - that is, organising for routine party tasks and events like Communist University, the SO itself of course, the fringe events at this year’s Marxism (the annual school of the Socialist Workers Party), planning for interventions at this year’s freshers’ fares with Communist Students, etc.
But also, as anyone with half
a political brain will know, Iran
has exploded this week. As an
organisation centrally involved in
supporting Hands Off the People
of Iran, the CPGB and its comrades
have been instrumental this week
in coordinating the campaign’s
response.
CP/Hopi comrades have been in
daily, sometimes hourly contacts with
activists inside Iran itself. They have
been arranging mass mail-outs to Hopi
affiliates, members and supporters,
agitating for practical measures of
solidarity with the mass movement. We
are the key organisers of a series of
emergency meetings taking place
round the country on the crisis, aimed
at arming militants in the movement in
this country with the arguments to
make sense of the news coming out
of Iran, filtered as it is through the prism
of western media clearly pursuing it
agenda for a ‘colour revolution’
headed by Moussavi.
This underlines the point I made
in last week’s column about the way
we ‘factor in’ donations made to
campaigns and organisation we
politically sponsor. Hopi urgently
needs money and I urge comrades to
donate now. A good percentage of our
readers will quite possibly have been
directly approached already by the
campaign for financial support in this
emergency period.
There is no contradiction between the SO and support for Hopi. Healthier finances for this campaign mean less pressure on the resources - whether financial, logistical or person-power - of the CPGB, the organisation that has put its money where its mouth is, as far as this vitally important initiative in the workers’ movement is concerned.
To be mentioned in dispatches this week from amongst our readers - there were 14.935 of them online - are comrade CW for his useful £20, doughty stalwart JM for his £50, TG for his fantastic £100 donation to the Weekly Worker (much appreciated, comrade), PM for a solid £60 and comrade WD, who found £10 out of what must be a rather shrivelled purse for this year’s Summer Offensive.
Still early days comrades, but now we need to step things up!
Howard Roake
