Why socialists recruit
One of the core activities of any even vaguely serious socialist organisation is recruiting people. The reason should be obvious. You can’t change the world with ideas alone. To think that you can is to be like the “valiant fellow” Karl Marx refers to in the preface to the German Ideology, one who “had the idea that men were drowned in water only because they were possessed with the idea of gravity”.
Just as you can’t protect yourself from drowning by fighting against “the illusion of gravity”, so too is it impossible to overcome capitalism with the idea of socialism. Capitalism, like gravity, exists as a reality independent of our individual ideas and intentions. We could spend our whole lives imagining, writing and talking (or, these days, creating Instagram reels) about how things could or should be different, but if we leave it at that, we’re unlikely to make even the smallest dent in the edifice of the status quo.
Ideas are important. Marx himself famously spent many years of his life researching, thinking and writing about the dynamics of capitalism and how it can be overthrown. He realised early on though that, as he put it in 1844 in his draft introduction to his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “The weapon of criticism cannot ... replace criticism by weapons”, and that “material force must be overthrown by material force”.
How then to create the kind of “material force” that could pose a challenge to the capitalist system? Theory, Marx went on to say, “also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses”. If your anti-capitalism is restricted to the inside of your own head, it’s useless, but if you can join together with enough people of a similar mindset you can start to do things like organise protests, strikes and other potentially powerful “material” expressions of socialist politics.
Socialist ideas, in other words, become a material force through socialist organisation. And the bigger the organisation, the more powerful the force.
Organisations can draw on the collective knowledge and experience of their membership to educate and train new layers of activists (hence Leon Trotsky’s comment “the memory of the working class is in its party”). They can debate and test political strategies and coordinate actions to maximise their effectiveness. They can pool resources and skills to increase the reach of their organising, publicity and recruitment efforts (the capacity to regularly produce a publication like Red Flag is an example).
It’s because they understood this that Marx and his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels were serial joiners, and builders, of organisations. In 1847 they joined the London-based group the Communist League. The league, Engels wrote, “consisted of communities, circles, leading circles, a central committee and a congress”. It had a set of rules and produced socialist publications. Most famously, as of February 1848, it had a manifesto, written by Marx: the Manifesto of the Communist Party (more commonly known as The Communist Manifesto).
Later in their lives, in 1864, Marx and Engels helped form the International Workingmen’s Association. The International, like the Communist League before it, was a formal, membership-based organisation with a constitution, a program, various levels of leadership, regular congresses and publications. It aimed to draw together the various strands of the socialist movement in Europe into a single, cohesive and thus more powerful whole.
Marx and Engels and Co. may well have done this with a little more flair than (unfortunately) many of today’s socialist organisations can muster. The basic principles, however, remain the same. Socialists don’t want just to sit around thinking or talking about changing society; we actually want to change it. And just as in Marx’s day, the main prerequisite for that (beyond the reality of capitalist exploitation that first creates the conditions for working-class resistance) is to bring together a critical mass of like-minded people into an organisation.
Of course, you don’t need to be a Marxist to understand the importance of building political organisations. The Greens, the Labor Party, trade unions, environmental NGOs—all of them put time and resources into recruiting new members and supporters. It’s one of the ABCs of rank-and-file trade unionism, for example, that you should make notes about conversations you have with your co-workers to keep track of issues that come up and individually tailor your recruitment efforts.
The more recruitment is going on among organisations of the left like trade unions, the better. The fewer and smaller we are, the easier it is for the established institutions of capitalist society to govern in the interests of the rich and powerful. Their side is highly organised. In addition to the capitalist state, with its army of bureaucrats, its police and prisons and its many instruments of ideological control (state-funded media, the education system etc.), there’s a mass of industry peak bodies, think tanks, conservative NGOs and so on to help defend the status quo. The more disorganised and atomised our side is, the less potential there is for us to challenge that imposing edifice in any serious way.
Organisations recruit people in ways appropriate to their circumstances. Parties like the Greens can recruit in large part merely through the high profile they have in political life. That doesn’t work so much for revolutionary socialists because, for now at least, we don’t have much of a profile. The pool of people who might be open to getting involved with a revolutionary socialist organisation, with the relatively high level of commitment that entails, is also much smaller than for parties like the Greens. That’s why socialists concentrate our efforts among students (who, historically, have played a key role in many radical struggles), participants in protest movements and existing trade union activists.
Complaining, as some do, that it’s inappropriate for socialists to try to meet and recruit people at rallies, whether opposing the genocide in Gaza or around any other issue, ends up just being an argument against socialists recruiting, full stop. Protests attract the most radical and committed layer of people in society, and these are exactly the kind of people socialists want to recruit. We don’t want to do this out of a desire to “profit from the movement” or “impose an outside agenda” or any of the other anti-socialist tropes that come up. We want to do this because—taking the question of Palestine as an example—we think building a bigger socialist movement in Australia and around the world is key to taking on the immensely powerful military, economic and ideological forces standing in the way of Palestinian liberation.
If you oppose socialist politics, and think, for example, that there’s a better way to win Palestinian liberation, then argue, organise and recruit on that basis. If you’re right, then you will hopefully be able to prove it in practice. If, instead of doing that, you just want to complain about socialists recruiting as if it is in itself something reprehensible, then (assuming you’re not actually just a reactionary aiming to defend the existing order from challenge) you’re not damaging just socialists; by casting suspicion on the idea of recruitment and organisation in general, you’re damaging the entire left.
