The CPGB-PCC is currently having a debate on the level of dues (10 per cent of net income as the standard rate) that its members pay, which has broached a connected issue of a largely passive attitude to recruitment.
The only thing I would put to younger comrades who are questioning the 10 per cent dues is that back in the 1990s this was seen as very moderate. When I was a supporter, not a member, of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in Oxford in the early 1990s as an FE student (no grant), I was paying £30 a month from about £90 a month earned from gardening and other part-time jobs. And the RCP was constantly on my back to pay for schools, buy books and chip in for things the branch needed. I also had to account for every Next Step or Living Marxism I took to sell and I was expected, without fail, to submit a report on my contacts every week.
No offence to the CPGB-PCC but its actual practice in the late 1990s was much more ramshackle than that of the RCP a few years earlier. (I suspect things had been different in The Leninist faction in the 1980s.) Finance in the RCP was a political issue; in the CPGB-PCC it seemed pretty much down to spontaneity and the individual comrade. I wasn’t great but, bluntly, some well-paid comrades in my cell paid sod-all. Sometimes formal rules aren’t very revealing.
On recruitment and when I read old lags such as Jack Conrad,[i] they strike me as being like those prisoners who are so warped from their incarceration that they begin strongly identifying with the regime and its various routines. Conrad says: “When we get someone writing to us just asking, ‘Have you got a branch in xxx and how much does it cost to join?’, we are inclined not to treat that as a serious membership application. Communists start with programme, politics, principles and proven consistency… not with convenience and bargain basement deals.”
An elementary point would be that there is nothing unprincipled per se with wanting to get involved with a communist branch or with an enquiry about how much a member would be responsible for providing to the organisation. Such an enquiry might suggest that the enquirer wants to get active and that they have at least an idea that the faction needs money. Such enquiries might lead to nothing but it’s a perfectly reasonable request. I’ve seen some of Conrad’s gnomic and unintentionally hilarious replies to actual membership enquiries, which have a distinct undertone of Basil Fawlty telling guests he can’t help them because he’s too busy running a hotel.
Creaking miscellany
But what lies behind not treating such comrades seriously? Simply put, this is a problem of integration and is not a particularly new one for the CPGB-PCC faction. Conrad’s missive, and his creaking miscellany of Corbyn-era activity to inspire new recruits, is partly a cover-up for the fact that the group was unable to develop a national infrastructure in the 1990s.[ii] In truth, if you don’t want to work in the Weekly Worker cell or you don’t live in or near to London then there are probably not many pressing reasons to join. Getting sniffy about people who ask about branches only reflects previous institutional failure. It’s easy to see why some critics have alleged that the CPGB-PCC is just a website and a weekly Zoom call. That’s not correct but it is precisely how it can appear to outsiders and while appearance isn’t everything, it certainly matters.
Much of this was explained by its national organiser in 1999.[iii] In opposition to Conrad’s blank morosity, a purposeful agenda was proclaimed: “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.” You simply don’t hear that confident rhetorical tone from CPGB-PCC leaders anymore.
The comrade went on: “Over the years, this column [Party notes] 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… Fundamentally, it is the weakness of our national cadre structure that has produced our inability to take more of them into our ranks.”
He added: “These comrades do not gravitate towards communism as a result of the impetus of a mass movement, nor from the campaigning work that the party currently undertakes. Again, as I wrote on August 19 [1999], ‘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.”
It is quite clear that Conrad is merely channelling the situation sketched here as it has worsened over the last 25 years. Polemic and focus on a left even more characterised by “sectarian inertia and decline” produces minimal recruits and the CPGB-PCC has shed numbers of its more skilled middle cadre. It did clearly have some optimism in regard to recruits in 1999 but that has now evaporated to the point at which its leader feels able to voice a seeming displeasure at the type of enquiries he is burdened with every week.
As a snot-nosed student, I originally wrote in to the CPGB-PCC in early 1996 with a low-level enquiry. From memory, it was something daft along the lines of “why don’t you have more articles about anti-fascism?” and “I’m interested in the history of the CPGB”. Only enough there for comrade Conrad to quickly hit the delete button. But things were quite different in 1996. I got back a pithy but engaged email that told me anti-fascism was not a strategic goal in the same manner that a reforged Communist Party was. And a short dialogue on communist history led to me parting with £10 to buy some back issues of The Leninist.
In other words, if you treat enquiries as nothing then you get nothing back. If you at least treat them, even sceptically, as something then you might get a positive response. Far-left factions need members, but they also need supporters, sympathisers, friends and even people who, very minimally, feel neutral about them. But before comrades can escape from prison they need to at least be able to inspect the tiles of their cell first.
[i] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1462/letters/
[ii] https://communistpartyofgreatbritainhistory.wordpress.com/2020/07/05/foundation-cpgb-pcc/
[iii] https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/302/recruit-and-integrate/
Lawrence Parker 