He Communist Party in Britain has at this moment only some 35,000 members. This makes it sound small by comparison with such Communist Parties as those of, say, France or Italy, which are millions strong. But if such a comparison is to be of any real significance we need to observe the different roles and the different circumstances within which they function.

In France and Italy there are no mass Socialist movements. The result is that the biggest mass working-class party there is the Communist Party. Under such circumstances the party consists of a hard core of well-indoctrinated, highly disciplined members, who know what they want, where they are going and exactly how they are going to get there, and a great mass of less well instructed members who follow the party ‘line’ most of the time but cannot by any stretch of the imagination be described as well-instructed Marxists. The role of the hard core within such a party is to try to leaven the entire lump, to raise its ‘Marxist-theoretical understanding’ (to use the Communists’ own jargon) and to keep it constantly active on behalf of Communist policies.

In Britain, the workers’ mass movement is Labour-led and the Communist Party is small. Its role in such circumstances is precisely that of the hard core in the continental-type Communist Party, i.e. to make the great working-class mass as Marxist as possible and to activise it on behalf of Communism. Had the Labour Party been prepared to admit the Communist Party as an affiliated body (as it once hoped would be the case, and for which it runs campaigns from time to time), the job would have been made much easier for it. But early in its life it was disaffiliated and so, whilst seeing itself as the Marxist hard core of the wider Labour movement, it must do its leavening from outside, so far as the political wing of the movement is concerned, although it can work from within in the case of most of the trades unions and the co-operative movement.