Wilful little press
Howard Roake brings us up to speed on the Summer Offensive, and a little local difficulty
Few comrades reading this column will be unaware that the CPGB’s website has come under viral attack. For several weeks, individual readers were reporting strange ticks and quirks whenever they logged on, but we were slow to get our more technically proficient comrades to go after the problem in a systematic way. When they did, they found something malign lurking deep in the script of the site and - as readers have seen - immediate action was taken.
The stripped bare site that currently greets comrades as they log on is the necessary first stage of re-establishing our previous level of web presence, then going beyond it and significantly enhancing our profile on this hugely important medium. Meanwhile, our web counter shows we had just 874 readers last week.
We were already in the process of a redesign intended to increase the accessibility and scope of the site. We need more material on it, organised in more rational information streams and a far more imaginative use of video and audio resources. This was a slow process - the comrades with the requisite skills have to fit the work in around full-time jobs, family commitments and the general constraints of living as a worker in bourgeois society. We, like most left political organisations, are in no position to simply buy the skills in.
The current crisis will encourage all comrades concerned to up the tempo of this work. But there is a more important lesson here than just ‘get on with it’ - apposite though that is. This experience should remind us that our freedom to make communist propaganda is not something to be taken casually. It is irrelevant whether the attack on our site was the wheeze of some maliciously apolitical, masturbatory ‘Johnny-no-mates’ stuck in a back bedroom (a very possible scenario), or something rather more serious (the Stop the War Coalition’s website has also come under attack).
What we must take on board is that the historical right of the popular classes to disseminate radical, oppositional ideas has always been contested by the ruling elite - whether through direct repression or more subtle means. The web is still a relatively new medium of global communication and education, so comrades will be aware of the ways in which dictatorships such as those in China or Iran go to great lengths to block access to information and ideas that could help subvert their rule. (The bureaucratic apparatus of the Socialist Workers Party initially attempted something similar. It was unsuccessful - but it does give a nasty taste of the sort of ‘socialism’ Callinicos and co would have in store for us if, heaven forefend, they ever had a sniff of power.)
The working classes and their champions have fought long and bitter battles for their right to a voice - against legislation to make publications prohibitively dear, against countless prosecutions for sedition, against criminal libel and blasphemy laws that resulted in sentences of imprisonment and transportation that in sum totalled many hundreds of years. The freedom of the press - and in particular, the revolutionary and communist press - was not gifted to us through the beneficence of the ruling class: far from it. It is still a contested right that we have wrested from them against their will.
The flood of pamphlets, petitions and tracts from below that was such an important feature of the English revolution many encompassing forms of utopian communism - thoroughly rattled the powers-that-be. “The governing classes were terrified at the apparition of the wilful little printing press”. We noted the Chartists, George Holyoake.
From more recent history, we recall the ban on the Daily Worker under defence regulation 2D at the start of the World War II, when the party opposed what it rightly called an imperialist war - even if motivated by unprincipled reasons.
The renegade from the ‘official’ CPGB, Douglas Hyde, gives a quite inspiring description of how the party put in place illegal underground presses and “in most places the party organisation ... rose to the occasion, and ... factory workers and intellectuals, young fellows and girls and working class housewives traipsed the streets of London and elsewhere, defying bombs and police to get the paper out” (D Hyde I believed London 1952, p97).
As an annual boost to the coffers of the party, Summer Offensive cash meets many financial demands that press in on us for the rest of the year. In that sense, it ‘balances the books’. But an essential use of our money this year will be to ensure more protective barriers are thrown up around our ability to carry on producing our ‘wilful little press’ in paper and, crucially, web form. This will require time and money - but it will be time and money very well spent.
If you value the Weekly Worker and its main platform, can you help with a donation? This week, £1,638.50 arrived in our office, bringing the running SO total to £3,664.50 as we go into our third week. Donations ranged from a welcome £7 from comrade IR, to £246 (PM), £400 (TM), £135 (TB) and £180 (AM). All very useful in keeping our campaign moving along at a tidy pace.
However, sooner rather than later we need to seriously think about picking that pace up, comrades!
