Finance And Accounts

As I explain at the start of The Press and Democracy and Church of Democratic Enlightenment I want to keep some public account of CODE finances so people will know that financial contributions they make are spent on CODE and democracy. It can only be loose, not specifying every receipt, and there are even reasons for confidentiality here: people who discount their services for the cause of democracy can't have a public precedent set by that. But I think people will buy and contribute more freely knowing where the money is going.

The accounting exercise is one I am unfamiliar with, the trick being of course to distinguish money going to CODE from money to me personally. But I think the thing to be clear about first is that there is no question of my just paying for CODE - can't afford it. So the outlays will state outlays on CODE - like printing books - and receipts from the sale of books coming back to me up to the amount of expenditure - I'll recoup costs. Other CODE expenditures by me which are not in themselves revenue producing I'll charge against CODE revenue from any source - eg profits from the books.

I think the only real qualification of this is that I'll take $100 a week as a wage, if the money is there; that's $5000 a year for pretty much full-time work. In the "Purchasing this book" sections in the books, I make the point that the idea that people are going to get power for nothing, by people working for free, should at no stage be countenanced, least of all by me. This goes to the idea that expecting people - CODE chapter leaders - to work politically organising their members and informing the community for free is the road to failure. I would recommend that CODE chapter leaders who are well enough off to work for free not do so, but still charge their members the same, mostly token amount, as other leaders, even though they don't need the money. This is because, no matter how rich you are, taking payment from someone, however little, means you are financially obligated to them in the service you provide. I think it's a good little motivator of all sorts of quality control, that certainly being a great challenge of CODE. I think that also has theoretical significance for people's relationship to capitalism and the free market, but that's for somewhere else.