Communist parties are meant to be organizations of action rather than simply representing an ideology. They are supposed to do stuff. When there is a natural disaster in China for example, they often send out the CPC members to help with disaster relief. You are actually expected to participate in things so naturally you have to be a bit picky.

A person does not have to be a member of the party to view it positively. People generally view their fire department positively despite not being firefighters themselves. As long as the party is doing good work people will view it positively even if they are not themselves a member of it. In fact, letting in people willy-nilly can hurt the party's reputation if it negatively impacts their work.

I think maybe a decent way to understand this is to compare it to a hospital. For the sake of analogy, we'll assume a hospital that is for the public good, not one that is gutted by capitalist privatization (otherwise, the analogy gets screwy).

With a hospital you:

• Recruit from "the masses", but you don't let just anyone be a medical specialist. They have to go through training and experience to hold an important role in the hospital. Both "theory and practice" are required before they can take on an important role without supervision.

• In spite of the hospital's most important services being administered primarily by specialists (as opposed to just anyone who will volunteer), it is notably still a service that exists for the people, not for the personal advancement or enrichment of the specialists at the expense of the people.

• Patients generally can still make choices about what happens to them (the medical professionals are not just dictating everything to them, though there may be situations where they take charge if it's bad enough).

Not a perfect 1:1 thing, but trying to get at the idea of how there can be times when a kind of benevolent institution can exist without simply being "dictatorial" in the way people consider scary and also has to be somewhat strict in who does the actual roles (else it loses what makes it successful as an institution).

The popularity of the party is not dependent on it having large ranks, but from its effective party work in critical sectors.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks argued for a professionalised vanguard party of dedicated individuals, so not only do they have advanced class consciousness but they dedicate their lives to bringing about revolution. So support for the party from outside should come from the effectiveness of this strategy, though it's crucial to note that the active agent here is the party for the workers and the support will materialise itself simply as a natural reaction to correct and effective party actions. This is true for communist parties both inside and outside power.

On the other hand the Mensheviks (and later the Trotskyists) argued for mass participation, which is also common in social-democractic parties today. This dillutes the quality of the party work, as militants will not be normally expected the level of commitment from a vanguard party, which among other things leads to a less effective party (and therefore less interest from outside). Other than that, another key point is that it also harms party discipline and theoretical consistency, leading to all sorts of sectarian and revisionist infighting that the principle democratic centralism is meant to prevent.

They prioritize those people with connections to various sections of the working class, real workplace and community connections; and they utilize their cadre formations to expand on those connections and make them deeper, so that every member of their party represents many more real members of the community.

The Party is supposed to be the vanguard of the proletariat they don't need to be "popular" they need to be leading the charge. The revolution doesn't need to be communist it just needs to be proletarian. The parties job is to make sure that they are leading the charge so they get hold of the reigns when all is said and done. Some party members need to be popular with the mases but they are just there to legitimize the parties seizing of power.

Well to give an off-the-cuff answer its not a matter of 'accepting' everyone into the Party, but rather that the Party is an expression of class-consciousness, which coupled with the vanguard of the proletariat in a leading & organized position is able to organize the revolution from the level of a strategist. Through an organic chain of links it is able to generate organizations for the middle-strata of the proletariat. Crucially, the Party maintains a mediated relationship with the masses. To accept everyone into the Party is to lose the necessary strategic element of revolution, prostrating itself to spontaneity, subordinating ideology to politics. It is, in a word, opportunism.

They go into the communities and help people with their struggles.

i would reject a communist group with that kind of mindset. we are in no position to be so focused on strict application of "what communism really is" at the expense of educating others against capitalism. we need to help deprogram and depropagandize the masses. especially in America, the proletariat are largely ignorant and kept that way. someone who is willing to apply leftist politics to their personal belief system should be seen as a potential ally. encourage those people to continue to think and expand their knowledge. class consciousness is not going to form if we means test the collective.