PORT ELIZABETH, SOUTH AFRICA, October 7—The last few weeks, we’ve been talking about how to recruit active members to ICWP. We need to make sure that they become active organizers for the Party and the fight to destroy capitalism.
We came up with the first step: Utilize Red Flag as the starting point to recruit.
Many times when distributing Red Flag, we give it to people and maybe ask for their contact information but don’t ask them to join. The starting point in our conversation with them should be to ask them to join. That opens some people to consider joining. This gives us something to follow up on.
The reason we distribute Red Flag is for the masses to join us. If we don’t ask them to join, it means we lack confidence, not only in ourselves, but also that the working class can quickly grasp our ideas and join us.
Uneven Development
Studying how some of our comrades were recruited will help not only us but the Party internationally.
With some people here, it didn’t take too long to join and be active. There are comrades here who joined the first time we asked them, like comrades S, F, L and B. These are the comrades who first formed the foundation of our collective. They joined on the spot.
With others it took longer. For example, we struggled with Comrade C for more than two years to join us. So this process is uneven. Studying these experiences helps us understand what is required to recruit active members. It helps answer the question about why workers are not joining the movement in large numbers.
Comrade C was deeply rooted in tribal politics in South Africa, or tribalism, and in nationalism. Both are dangerous ideas. In struggling with him, we had to peel away some wrong ideas. Instead of looking at things on a class basis, he tended to look at things on a racial basis. He believed that anyone who is white is an enemy of black people.
If you ask him now about these views, he would disavow them. He understands that it is imperative to have a multi-racial campaign within the whole working class to defeat capitalism and establish a communist society. We can’t do this exclusively as a group of black people.
We showed that there’s no plural form of race, there’s only one human race.
It’s important when we struggle with potential members to ask them to join all the time. We can’t be content just talking with them. We have to control the narrative. In every discussion, we talk about our communist ideas so they get to see our position about many things.
Even before he joined, we invited him to go with us when we distributed the Red Flag, so he could see the response of the masses and have first-hand experience in putting our ideas into practice.
Another thing we learned from recruiting comrades who were reluctant to join us, who disagreed with our ideas but who are now active members of our collective, is the need to recruit people collectively.
We had to really explain to N what communism is, and many other things. She was not into politics, which was both a good thing and a challenge. We had to explain first what capitalism is.
The struggle with her helped us sometimes more than it helped her. When she couldn’t understand, it showed us that it wasn’t her fault, it was our fault. We need to explain to the masses what communism is so that they can understand it. If they don’t understand, it means we are not doing a good job of explaining it.
A Comrade explained, “There were discussions when she said that every time I talked, she got confused. But when Comrade S talks, everything becomes clear.”
We needed to hear that. Sometimes when you explain something, the comrade doesn’t understand, but other comrades take a different approach and the person understands. It shows that we need to rely on the collective instead of going it alone.
Workers don’t mainly need to have the horrors of capitalism explained. They live it everyday. They are looking for an alternative—which we can give them. There has to be an element of urgency in our work. The objective is for workers to join us.
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