I haven’t posted about this yet, but I quit Communist Party USA in mid-November 2023. Since quitting, I’ve been focused on getting several major health issues treated, building the Flint chapter of the Michigan Mutual Aid Coalition (MIMAC), and in addition to our mutual aid work, trying to build the basis of an educational program...Read More “Why I Left The CPUSA” »
It wasn’t political power that the CPUSA leadership was worried about, it was specifically “dues paying members”.
“Political power” is a fuzzy concept; “dues paying members” is a measurable proxy. Alternate proxies (crowd size at events, number of people on contact lists, interest in or curiosity about leftism) seem much harder to measure and much less reliably connected to political power.
I can see room for improvement, but the bottom line of “does this tactic help our organization grow?” seems reasonable.
Pretty sure you can use “dues paying members” as a valid metric without using it as an excuse to scuttle community outreach programs.
If your org is too weak to do two things at once, your org isn’t strong enough to worry about reaching for political power.
The solution here is to grow the org, so we’re back to the question of whether mutual aid can be an effective way to do that.
One way or the other, you’re going to be doing mutual aid projects with your comrades to help other comrades.