Golden week, golden duck and hitting target
Howard Roake explains why we wash dirty linen in public
The last seven days have seen a major boost for the Communist Party’s annual fundraising drive, the Summer Offensive. An impressive £3,930 has been added, bringing our running total to exactly £17,600. This leaves us extremely well placed to hit this year’s minimum target of £25k by August 15, the last day of our annual school, Communist University.
I’m confident because, in many ways, Communist University - which starts this Saturday, August 8 - is a high point of the party’s work over the whole year. Over a period of eight days, comrades and friends of our organisation debate, argue and learn from each other in 22 sessions animated by a culture of sharp, no-holds-barred polemic. In vivid contrast to every other organisation on what brands itself the Marxist left, the timetable for our school is not only packed with knowledgeable speakers from beyond our ranks who will present challenging ideas to the participants, but also features discussions that will inevitably provoke controversy and dissent within the ranks of the CPGB itself.
Take the afternoon session on Monday August 10. Mike Macnair will defend and expand on the ideas that informed his recent articles in this paper, exploring the proposition that Labour remains a bourgeois workers’ party and that, consequently - under the concrete political conditions pertaining in today’s Britain - a Labour vote in the June 4 European elections was a perfectly principled tactic for revolutionaries, given the political paucity of the alternatives (July 23 and 30).
This, the majority position in our ranks, provoked strong opposition from some CPGB comrades. The controversy featured in these pages and was exhaustively explored in our aggregate of July 4 (see Weekly Worker July 9).
We plan to ‘wash our dirty linen in public’ once more and revisit this debate in our annual school. Likewise with the question of the characterisation of the British National Party. On the final morning of the school, August 15, James Turley will present his view that the BNP remains a fascist organisation, notwithstanding suits and ties replacing their DMs and drainpipes. He writes that the CPGB majority’s “frankly bizarre fixation” on the existence or not of “extra-parliamentary fighting formations” is useless in a correct political estimation of today’s BNP (Weekly Worker July 30).
Now, many on the left would look at what I have cited above as examples of the weakness of the CPGB. For the organisations of the ostensibly Marxist left, open differences in their ranks are a source of shame. The last thing they want to do if they have differences is actually to put them on an open platform at their annual school - which, for these sects, serves primarily as a recruitment fair rather than a genuine attempt to clarify theory. As a consequence, theory atrophies; practice degenerates.
The strength of the CPGB’s approach is being recognised by increasing numbers of comrades in the movement - a fact underlined by the relatively large number of comrades from outside our immediate ranks who have contributed to this year’s Summer Offensive. There is an urgent need for a mass, Marxist party of our class. It is finally time to leave way behind sectism and the disastrous waste of working class effort, time and talent it entails. There is also a growing recognition that this paper is the current motor for that fight.
Special mention this week to comrades JE for his £25 - despite his membership of another organisation, he appreciates the politically challenging read presented by the Weekly Worker with each edition, he tells us; SL adds to previous donations with £25; DT sends £30 from south Wales; WD sends £20, her seventh contribution to this year’s SO (and with “£50 more to come”, she promises); JB takes another chunk out of his target with £268 and JME sends £120 and looks forward to participating in this year’s Communist University.
A total of £45 was donated by three of our 12,027 online readers last week. But an extra special mention to two comrades. First, comrade JS - a much valued supporter of this organisation. Our comrade has sent through a tremendous £1,000. A fantastic boost!
Second, I must pay tribute to comrade BL for his outstanding role in organising the solidarity cricket match between Hands Off the People of Iran and the Labour Representation Committee, organised in aid of the Workers Fund Iran (won without breaking sweat by Hopi, of course). It was followed by a benefit gig in deepest Hackney. Just under £1,500 was raised for the WFI in total (all money comrades raise in their political work during this period counts towards the SO - we don’t adopt a narrow, CPGB-only approach).
Comrade BL thus helped enormously to make this a golden week for the SO. Particularly as his own contribution with the bat consisted of being out first ball, to a delivery that sat up and begged like a trained labrador to be smacked to the boundary. An achievement which, I understand, is dubbed a ‘golden duck’.
Top work, comrade.
