WeeklyWorker

21.12.1995

Revolutionary recard

Party notes

I recall with horror the annual ritual of Party recard in the 1970s and ’80s. Around October, a circular would plop onto Communist Party branch secretaries’ mats up and down the country.

‘Have you made plans for/started the recard yet?’ wheedled the opportunist leadership of the Party. ‘Come on you slackers - buck up!’

The torture would begin. The tiny numbers of active Party members would trawl the bloated Party membership list, swollen like gangrene. Most of it was totally inactive; a minority was clinically insane. The whole business was glacier slow, heart-breakingly demoralising and totally futile.

Thus the annual Party recard would limp sadly into the following year - increasingly hysterical missives from the leadership would call on us to ‘complete the recard’ ... in April! Very inspiring.

Of course, the opportunist leadership was desperate to arrest the Party’s inexorable membership decline. They viewed the quantity of the Party, not its quality as the key question. After all, a Labour government - with a few communist MPs and some extra-parliamentary pressure - would introduce socialism, they believed. Consequently the health of the CP was not measured by its ability to intervene in the class struggle, to lead and challenge. Rather, the dull, electoral weight of numbers mattered. Activists existed to service this marshy clot of inactive ‘members’.

Party membership today is qualitatively different. It is impossible to be a member without being active, without being organised. This is the basic definition of a communist. It is the controversy that divided the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks and indicates that we are building a revolutionary Party.

The Party does have an annual recard task, however. Around us there is a periphery of supporters and sympathisers. The Party supporters’ card for 1996 is now available. Branches must place orders, start visiting and signing up. This work should be conducted crisply and in a business-like manner - it should be completed at the latest by mid-January. We must draw every single supporter we have into the work of the Party in some way. We should not be content unless all are approached to:

The Party is no longer obsessed with signing up numbers for the sake of it. However, comrades should constantly be aware of new potential recruits. Cards must always be available and systematic work undertaken to sign up new contacts. The psychological effect for a sympathiser of ‘signing up’ should not be underestimated - for many, it is often the first step to Party membership itself.

And nowadays, thankfully, Party members are people who do things, rather than have things done for them.

Mark Fischer
national organiser