First published 04/17/2003 12:20
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We need a bigger Communist Party USA
The following is a summary of the plans for our upcoming drive to win new members to the Communist Party. The drive, which kicks off May 1, includes increasing the circulation of the People's Weekly World and raising money for the Party's fund drive. These are all interrelated and one builds on the others.
We Communists have to be deeply involved in the struggle for peace, in the huge spontaneous growth of the peace movement, in the many rapidly expanding coalitions. This is the meaning today of building a united people's front against the ultraright.
This will set the stage for the 2004 elections, a struggle to wrest control of the presidency and both houses of Congress away from the Republican ultraright.
But we can't lose our party in the mass movements, no matter how important they are. We have to build the Party, build our independent base, and recruit. This is necessary so that we can speak to many more people in our own name, build unity between coalitions and movements, and step up our fight for socialism, for the future, in the movements of today.
Most Communist parties in major capitalist countries, and even many in the developing world, are similarly engaged in this rebuilding process.
We need to recognize that quantitative changes lead to qualitative changes; we can't just work a little harder and expect huge breakthroughs all at once. We have to start with realizable goals and then build on them.
Party building means . . .
Party building means asking people to join. It means setting and meeting recruiting goals. But it also means increasing subscriptions and distribution of the People's Weekly World (PWW).
It means building the group of activists around us who work with the Party. It means planning educational work to support the drive and consolidate the new members.
Our goal is more new members, but we're not only interested in increasing our numbers. We want to build the Party among workers, trade unionists, people of color, youth and women, activists and leaders.
We must recognize that each club and district is different, in size, history, experience, makeup. Therefore, decisions must grow out of clubs and districts setting their own priorities.
We propose to offer a menu of choices, a list of possible ways to participate in the recruiting drive. Each club can then pick from those possibilities the two or three tasks that will be realistic and also move it to a higher level of recruiting and outreach work.
Each potential new member is different and they join for their own reasons, not for our reasons. We want people to join in order to share our work, but they may join because they need help in strategizing in the work they are already doing.
We want people to join who are committed communists, but they may join before they have a clear idea of what a communist does. We want people to join in order to increase our size so we can have a bigger impact in our mass work, but they may join in order to find out what Marxism has to teach them.
Some people are ready to join as a radical form of protest against the Bush administration and the multinational corporations. We want to encourage all people ready to be active to join, whatever their previous level of political activity or organizational experience.
We have to learn to pay attention to how to move people closer, how to bring more people around the Party, and how to translate the political capital we have built up into a larger Party.
We need to engender a Party-building spirit in our work - we are not just hard workers for the mass movements, we are also revolutionaries building the party of socialism.
A big part of this is increasing the circulation of the PWW. That is why the circulation drive of the PWW is running concurrently with our recruiting drive.
Our club lists of potential recruits are also lists of people who should be getting the PWW, and winning them to subscribe is a big step on their path to membership.
Distributing the PWW and getting subscriptions are essential aspects of Party building.
Fundraising, asking others for financial contributions for the work of the Party, is another crucial aspect of enlisting those we work with to help guarantee that the Party thrives. We can't function, we can't grow, without increasing the amount of money we raise.
While many Party members are extremely generous with donations from their own pockets, raising money from those we work with builds our base, gets people to commit to supporting our work and to working more closely with us and identifying with our program.
Personal visits, letters, requesting advance gifts and bequests, selling buttons, bumper stickers and T-shirts, all lay the basis for expanding our work. Political Affairs (PA) and the YCL are also having building drives at the same time. PA has a goal of 1,000 new subs (they already have 200!) and the YCL has a goal of 250 new members.
We want to have widespread discussion of what it means to be a communist today, what the Party has to offer that is unique, what things we do better than other organizations, what special contributions we make to the trade union movement, the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and many others.
Part of our goal is to produce and distribute to districts materials which will help after the drive, materials that we should start to have on hand everywhere all the time - brochures, items for sale (T-shirts, mugs, caps, buttons, bumper stickers, posters, etc. - not to have all of this immediately, but to start building up our inventory of such materials), videos, new members classes and discussions.
These are some aspects of building a culture of recruiting.
The Party-building drive committee will soon issue a plan, complete with a calendar of events and a menu of options for clubs and districts.
Included will be a document to stimulate discussion, experimentation and initiative in all bodies of the Party. Our clubs and districts vary widely in size, composition, history and in the challenges they face.
Each collective of the Party needs to pick from the menu of options those that best fit their circumstances, that are realistic and have the potential to advance our struggle to build our working class revolutionary party to a higher level.
1. Schedule a discussion in your club, district or other collective about the drive, your goals and potential.
2. Develop a list of friends and contacts who can be asked to subscribe to the PWW or PA, asked to contribute financially to the work of the Party, and asked to join.
3. Set a realiztice numerical goal and let us know what it is.
4. Schedule an event about the Party's approach to the struggle for peace, with a national or district speaker.
This drive has to help us build our clubs in neighborhoods and workplaces. We need to grow, but we also need to focus our growth in our clubs' concentrations.
Revitalizing clubs and focusing our work on specific concentration areas must be part of our long-term strategy for reaching specific groups of workers, building recognition of our consistent struggle for defeating the ultraright, and developing an independent base of supporters and friends for each club.
We also ask commissions to make any additional suggestions or proposals to this menu that can help recruit workers and the nationally oppressed.
Calendar
April:
* Bill Davis to chair drive committee, Jarvis Tyner, Scott Marshall (Labor Commission), Marc Brodine (Washington State), Gail Ryall (Northern Calif.), Joe Bernick (Ariz.), A.J. for the YCL and Jen Barnett (PWW) as well as possible additional people from Southern Calif. and Ohio.
* The job of the committee is to stimulate discussion throughout the Party, produce the necessary materials, plan tours, coordinate with the PWW Circulation Drive, PA, the YCL, and the Party Fund Drive, and to evaluate this drive and plan next year's drive.
* Start visits to districts & clubs to discuss and plan drives.
* Issue materials for the recruiting piece of the drive.
* Build mailing and recruiting lists.
* Revised environmental program.
May-June:
* The drives - fund, recruiting, and PWW circulation.
* Big Tour - national chairman, CPUSA staff, PWW staff? Focus on issues of peace and human survival.
* May Day events by some clubs or districts - extra attention to planning the first week of the drive.
* Fund appeal letter to arrive May 1.
* Tour to North Carolina and Tennessee.
* Public meetings, house meetings, Internet follow-up, advertising campaign in the PWW and PA, articles on the drive in PWW, articles on redefining what it means to be a communist in PA, issue brochure on the importance of finances for the Party and movement - dues, members, sustainers, wills & bequests, contributing work and tools, spreading the word.
* Issue brochure on socialism.
* Run "What the CPUSA means to me" ads in the PWW & PA (other possible ideas: "I'm a card-carrying member," "I joined, why don't you" - all with photo of one member and short quotes from that individual on why they joined, what it means to them, why others should join, too).
* Explore other ad possibilities - subway signs being one example, and national publications or student newspapers
July and August
* July 4 rally in at least one city; possible theme: "Celebrate the Next American Revolution."
* Series of new members/prospective members classes/discussion groups.
* Evaluation meetings in national and state boards, Organizing Department, Finance Department, PWW Editorial Board, with the goal of using results and proposals from the evaluations to design 2004 drives, design several additional pilot projects to run before the 2004 drives.
What's new on PWW website?
Over the past few months many changes have taken place on the PWW website. Online viewers can now subscribe, via pay pal with a credit card, and order "No War for Oil" bumper stickers, also, via pay pal.
Two new features have been added to the left-and sidebar of the website. The first is a navigation feature - the "Sections" category. The Sections" category breaks the weekly paper down into five subsections - International, National, Labor, Peace and Analysis - making navigation easier for our viewers who are specifically interested in those topics.
The second is an interactive feature - the "Headlines" category. This category enables viewers to submit their email address, enabling us to contact them about updates and changes to the website.
The PWW website has also continued to make available PDF versions of the lead stories each week. The website can now be reached by typing either www.pww.org or www.peoplesweeklyworld.org into your web browser.
- Tony Pecinovsky
National conference to examine health care issue
We will be hosting a national party conference on "The Crisis in Health Care and the Fightback" at our center May 17-18 in New York City.
In order for the conference to be effective in moving the Party into action we need the full participation of all districts. We will be calling each district to discuss with you conference preparations, your ideas, and who should be attending from you district.
While, of course, we want to put emphasis on health-care activists and professionals, we also want to guarantee the participation of district leaders and trade unionists.
Comrades already involved in health-care fights, from seniors fighting for prescription drug benefits, to industrial workers and their families whose health-care plans are being torn up, to activists fighting for comprehensive, universal health care, will all bring especially valuable experience to the conference.
In addition we also want to think about close friends and coalition partners that we would like to invite. Hopefully, the conference can help us build new relations and consolidate old ones.
We urge as many districts as possible to put the conference on your district board agendas as soon as possible so we can get the best possible mobilization.
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