The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain (CPB) will be having its bi-annual Croydon congress in November 2023. In a resolution slated for the event, the CPB’s executive committee (EC) pitches the idea that it continues to be a “recruiting party”, in line with recent growth. These gains are real enough but from some digging into its membership figures and finances, and considering the previously quoted resolution, ‘Building the Communist Party and its influence’, there is still an element of ‘chocolate teapot’ about all this, even though, unlike at times in the 1990s and early 2000s, the CPB’s short- to medium-term survival is not in doubt.
Courtesy of various documents collected by the Electoral Commission, I have collated membership figures for the adult party (not including the Young Communist League [YCL], although some younger comrades will have dual membership of youth and adult wings) and total dues for the last 10 years and expressed the latter as yearly dues per member.
| Members | Dues £ | Per member £ | |
| 2012 | 922 | 87614 | 95 |
| 2013 | 924 | 97708 | 106 |
| 2014 | 917 | 94853 | 103 |
| 2015 | 772 | 93513 | 121 |
| 2016 | 769 | 88106 | 115 |
| 2017 | 734 | 84841 | 116 |
| 2018 | 775 | 81392 | 105 |
| 2019 | 761 | 80608 | 106 |
| 2020 | 985 | 84112 | 85 |
| 2021 | 1147 | 105412 | 92 |
| 2022 | 1189 | 125550 | 106 |
The interesting period is 2015-2019, when Jeremy Corbyn was in ascendancy and all left groups bled support to His Majesty’s Labour Party. The CPB lost, according to its figures, roughly around 100-150 members. Its growth started in 2020 when the Corbyn project had collapsed. In its 2015 statement of accounts (prepared in 2016), the CPB explained the sudden drop in membership thus: “The reduction in the number of members in 2015 reflects a more strict interpretation of the rules relating to members in arrears. A significant number of these lapsed members subsequently renewed their membership in 2016.” But in 2016-19 the membership figure remained in the 700s and nowhere near its previous level in the low 900s. If, as the CPB maintained, a vague “significant number” returned, then this was obviously offset by a continued leakage to Corbyn’s Labour. This should be unsurprising, given that the group was largely reduced to low-level cheerleading for the hapless Jeremy and his gang of CPB-inspired advisers.
Therefore, some of this growth (from, say, 761 in 2017 to 1,189 in 2022) will have been partly made up of ‘returnees’ briefly lost to Labour (and no doubt some disgusted Labour members not previously CPB supporters). Another significant group will be from encouraging YCL members (quite correctly) to take out membership of the adult party. The CPB’s problem will be keeping this growth going when that exodus of Labour lefts (which has also undoubtedly helped the YCL) dries up. At the moment, this uptick has the feel, alongside a Socialist Workers Party rival still licking self-inflicted wounds, as a shuffling of old cards rather a new pack.
There’s also the fact that anyone can join the CPB, pay it a little money, not do any actual communist work but still remain on the books as a member. This method of ‘mass’ party-building, inherited from the old ‘official’ CPGB and opposed to any notion of a cadre party (which insists on activity and commitment as a criterion of membership), means that organisations such as the CPB are in a near-constant cycle of administering and exhorting the majority of the inactive membership. Therefore, we can see from the chart that in 2013, the CPB gained £106 in dues per member, per year; in 2022 that figure also stood at £106, which, with the travails of inflation, represents a reduction in real terms. Membership growth doesn’t then suggest a more financially committed membership. (Some of the severe drop in 2020-21 could be pandemic-related, of course.)
New CPB members are, however, expected to attend an interview with local branch officials. In many cases this will be perfunctory but (as suggested to me by other comrades), some of this process will be about weeding out potential oppositionists, particularly in the light of the group’s issues with the YCL and the appearance of small factions of critics around sites such as Communist Reconstruction.
And the CPB EC is fairly sanguine about non-active members in ‘Building the Communist Party and its influence’. For example: “The party will make renewed efforts to encourage all women party comrades to be active.” Subtext: lots of women comrades aren’t active. Similarly, the organisation has problems with integrating and retaining. The EC says: “We will work systematically to improve the experience of new members, ensuring that branches support, and rapidly integrate them into their work.” Subtext: we are struggling to retain new members. But these issues are endemic to groups that simply let large amounts of people join on a minimal basis, being embedded in a broader issue of passivity that stems from a strategic goal of relying on the Labour Party to initiate socialism.
Despite the undoubted bounce in the CPB’s current step, these are not what one would call firm foundations.
Lawrence Parker 