I'm looking for input from people who have experience in communist/"radleft" parties/anarcho collectives – no matter the size of said orgs. First, bullet points, second, a longer expose, third, questions.
• I have experience in several parties, more than 12 yrs of it.
• You join a party, you do stuff, and as a mere member/activist you aren't even concerned about the flow of money in it – you just wanna do "cool stuff".
• But as you get more experienced you realize that money matters: who puts in how much? How is it distributed? Who decides about the distribution?
• I came to understand that it is one of the most crucial aspect of organizing that almost never gets questions by new or mid-term members.
I have 5 stories related to this:
1) a party wherein besides the negligible membership dues (around $2/month), a sudden influx of considerable money flow came in because they successfully grew to such a size in mere 3 years that members started receiving parliamentary wages (big bucks), council/municipality wages (mid-tier bucks), and "outside observer" statuses and wages at municipal governments (low-tier bucks, but basically "free money" for almost no work). There were absolutely no internal guidelines/rules about the partial redistribution/reincorporation of said wages in/into the party, so when literal WHOs started receiving "top 10% wages" they still paid the measly $2/month like anybody else. Rampant corruption followed, said members were constantly lobbied to, some of them laid down for porky, shady business, nepotism (e.g. hiring family members as "consultants") and it obv. resulted in a bourgeois party even when it started quite radical, since money is convertible to power, even inside a party;
2) smaller, more radical party, that had at least the decency to have an internal (albeit non-written) rule (which, as such, caused later shitflinging) about giving the above mentioned paying positions to low-income, hard working proles. Obviously more meritocratic (by "hard work" I meant party work) and more Marxist-y (proletarian-oriented). Like half a dozen members left the party for being pissed off at not being offered those semi-juicy positions. (Always have your rules written in the party constitution, comrades!) Still, the party had some – at this time, at least, internal – large donations (e.g. communist lawyer who had large savings) donations, but people like him ended up in the central bur
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