02.09.1999

Recruit and integrate

Party notes

In the Weekly Worker of August 19, I wrote this about our current stage of development as a group:

“Despite our committed and assured cadre, our organisation still exists as a school of thought on the revolutionary left rather than a coherent national organisation able to affect the political outcome of events by social weight, not simply by force of argument. This is something we must strive to remedy.”

This is a recognition of two things. First, it underlines the seriousness with which we approach the Party project. Seeing it through will not consist in having clumped together a few hundred members, supporters and sympathisers, re-designing your headed notepaper and declaring yourself to be the Party. I also emphasised this when I quoted from our November 1990 conference. Even as we took the banner of the Party, we wrote that “our main task remains reforging the CPGB. Although we have the name of the Party, the Party itself has been liquidated” (my emphasis The Leninist January 30 1991).

Second, it is an implicit condemnation of the profoundly philistine culture of the left. Even as a school of thought, this organisation has been able to punch way above its weight for many years now. This should tell our opponents something about the robust nature of the ideas we defend and have fought so pugnaciously for. On second thoughts, perhaps they have taken note, as most organisations have preferred to circuit the ring squeaking rather than stand and fight.

It is clear that the numerical growth of this organisation and the commensurately wider dissemination of the ideas we defend will be an important factor in the positive resolution of the programmatic crisis that is sucking much of the left under.

The question is how, of course. Over the years, this column has consistently referred to the problems we have had with “recruitment”. In hindsight, it is clear that this has given a slightly misleading impression of the difficulties we face. In fact, our problems start not with people applying to join our organisation, but in integrating them into viable local organisations and in establishing organic relations between these embryonic Party ‘cells’ and the Party as a whole.

In fact, people are constantly applying to join the Communist Party - some 20 alone in the quiet month of August. Fundamentally, it is the weakness of our national cadre structure that has produced our inability to take more of them into our ranks.

This is exacerbated by the nature of these recruits and how they come into contact with the Party in the first place. The majority tend to be quite politically isolated, even if they happen to find themselves in other left organisations when they first contact us. A significant number of the comrades are young, still politically raw and - our key problem - passive. Communist politics is a bit of a spectator sport for them. Their identification with the politics of communism is sincere and enormously positive. Quite how they as individuals will be able to fit in to the project of the Party as expressed weekly in the pages of our paper is another matter.

This is also because they come to us from a standing start - from reading the paper, from the internet and even from the telephone directory. These comrades do not gravitate towards communism as a results of the impetus of a mass movement, nor from the campaigning work that the Party currently undertakes. Again, as I wrote on August 19, “The historically low level of the class struggle has shifted the emphasis of the Weekly Worker heavily in the direction of polemic and debate.” This “polemic and debate” takes place with a left largely characterised by sectarian inertia and decline. It is not, in other words, a place where potential recruits drop out of the trees, no matter how hard we shake them. Our new Party contacts come almost exclusively from outside the realm of today’s organised left.

Although this is encouraging, it also underlines just how philistine the cadre of other groups are when they denounce the ‘elitism’ of the Weekly Worker. This alleged insular approach apparently renders it unreadable by that mythical category, “ordinary people”, or young comrades new to politics. A quick rummage through our weekly postbag and the relatively healthy numbers of people applying for membership of our organisation belies that patronising nonsense.

Yet it lands us with the problem outlined above - how to integrate these comrades, how to make them full members of the Party? It is not a difficulty we would prefer to be without - it is better that people are trying to join us than not - but nevertheless it is a frustration.

When we look around at the rest of the left for ideas on how to handle this, there are certainly plenty of lessons. Almost all of them negative, unfortunately.

First, there are organisations such as Workers Power, the Socialist Party or the Socialist Workers Party. Such groups’ ludicrously ‘upbeat’ perspectives about the nature of the period are contradicted repeatedly by their organisational stagnation or actual decline. Every week, Socialist Worker will feature a box telling us how many people have “joined” this week (in truth, how many have filled out membership cards). The paper never carries an honest appraisal of its organisational fortunes, its problems as well as the successes. This renders its regular assessments worthless.

Similarly Peter Taaffe’s “red 90s” are yet to materialise. They have just another four months left to turn up. Yet the sober realities of class struggle, and the dramatic decline this has precipitated in the membership and influence of the Socialist Party in England and Wales is not considered worthy of honest, open examination. Its turgid weekly paper therefore largely consists of low-level agitation puff and ‘feel good’ items about the organisation’s fortunes. SPEW comrades tell us that the new recruits The Socialist occasionally reports tend to evaporate as quickly as they materialise. Having recruited them on a low level, SPEW almost inevitably loses them on a low level as well.

Workers Power is something else. Some time ago, it circulated a readers’ questionnaire which - incredibly - asked subscribers whether they would like to see a letters page in their monthly paper. I think we can safely assume that WP does not receive floods of letters every month but then decides to spike them because of the current format of its paper. Obviously this little group does not get any letters: it produces a press that is dead, a paper that tiny numbers read and no-one responds to. (Why would you? The deeply sectarian WP has no consistent record of printing seriously critical letters.)

There is a world of difference between attempting to impart some momentum and enthusiasm into the work of your organisation and its recruitment and simply telling yourself and your audience lies. We are clear that the fight to build our organisation takes place in the context of a profound period of world reaction and this reflects itself in the number and nature of the people who gravitate towards us. While we think these levels are healthy, all things considered, we are not in the business of trying to fool anyone.

The role of the Weekly Worker will be key in transforming the relatively substantial layer of supporters, sympathisers and partisan readers we have around us into new members for the Party. We intend to start featuring more regular reports of our work with contacts in these pages, offering comrades more of a chance to feed their opinions and experiences of Party work into their paper.

This has been a neglected Party task. Yet it is clear that - given the current stage of our development - it is important area of work in which we can make real progress.

Mark Fischer
national organiser