Clothing and Caps
You can design your own T‐shirt by putting colours, graphics and slogans on to the front and/or back of blank tshirts. You can do it in the GIMP or Paint graphics program on your computer. Try to verify you are buying your blank tshirts and caps from fair trade sources.
Caps are even easier to design. A cap needs to be specified as to its colour and a badge, or a slogan, or both (e.g. badge in front and slogan at the back). You can contract out the printing of the T‐shirts or silk‐screening your own T‐shirts makes a good branch social activity.
Can you make money from T‐shirts and caps? It is not likely. Given that your main aim is political, namely agitational propaganda (Agitprop), it follows that if you are also trying to make money then you are trying to do two things which do not correspond. Serving two masters is a recipe for failure in any field.
It is better to maximise the political benefit, and to try to recover the costs in an all‐round way.
Therefore, by all means do sell, but also try to get your clothing project funded in other ways, for example by outright donations and by ‘crowd funding’.
Books. Badges, Newspapers etc.
The discussion about T‐shirts and caps could extend out to include other kinds of merchandise such as badges, literature, and other kinds of clothing such as track suits and sweat‐shirts. A full discussion of the business of merchandise would have to be extensive and to include long‐term accounting for all “overhead” expenses, plus stocktaking and the writing‐off of damaged and unsaleable goods. Such a discussion will quickly become over‐elaborate for our purposes, because at this level, we never have the means to sustain such activities as businesses over time. So we will not do that. But in the next item, we will consider what it is to run a stall as a one‐off, occasional activity, and not primarily as a serious money‐making affair.
The secret of funding Party and mass movement activities is to make them all generate a small surplus as they go along.
Now, we are saying that the apparently money‐making activity is no different. Like all our activities, it has to, taken overall, generate a small surplus, including from funding and from outright donations taken.
The distinction between political activities that also attract money, and money‐making activities that carry a political message, is found to be no distinction at all. For us, the political intention is the governing intention.
Stalls
You can use a folding table like a card table or the plastic market tables available from Bunnings and camping stores as well as garage sales. It can be set up in the street, or in a mall, or in a hall at an event or a conference or meeting to create a ‘stall’.
It is as well to think of the purpose of your stall as being to serve the cause, rather than to have an objective of making a big lump of money. Of course you must pass any surplus to your Treasurer and you must account in some satisfactory way to your Treasurer for all the receipts and payments of funds, and for the stock of goods, which must also be properly conserved. You should, as with all Party or mass‐movement activities, strive to generate a surplus, and not to carry debts back into the organisation.
It should be your intention to put on a good show, and to give a good experience to anyone who might come to your stall. You should therefore try to become aware of what such people might expect to find. Experience will in due course make you aware of what this is. People will in fact tell you what they want.
They may want to make a cash contribution to the Party, and you should be open to that, and ready to process it, with a receipt book, for example. They may want to join the party, so you should have application forms and be ready to follow a correct and effective procedure.
People may want current literature of the Party, it’s Constitution and Program some classic books etc. You might not be able to keep all of these, but you may be able to bring some of them. A good principle is to b ring whatever you can get of such things to your stall. Not everything on the stall will have a cover price or a tariff price, but you can ask for donations.
Clothing and merchandise has been mentioned in the previous item. As we have said, the main thing is not to lose money, but to give a political experience to the masses, and to do whatever business may be appropriate to the political aims of the organisation.
A check list for holding a successful stall:
- Lightweight folding table
- Cover for table in identifiable colours
- Newspapers and Party literature and booklets
- Books, CDs, DVDs etc
- Clothing
- Stickers
- Badges
- Petitions
- Membership forms
- Receipt book
- Blank paper or note book
- Pen
- Small float of coins and notes to give change
- Stripe app or Square card reader to accept payment by card
- Trolley to easily transport everything to and from events
- Fold up chair might be needed
- Leaflets for upcoming events
- Sun screen if you are going to be outdoors for any length of time
- Water bottle and snacks
- Power bank to keep your mobile charged for communication and receiving electronic payments.
Standing behind your stall, you become the public face of your organisation. You become a public representative of what your organisation stands for. As such it becomes clear that what you are doing is no more or less than Agitprop . You do it with different means, but the aim is the same. It is part of the mission to educate, organise and mobilise.