Wez
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Perhaps a weekend live radio broadcast from H.O? Initially online and then DAB if it is successful? I have experience as a broadcaster and would be up for it. A mixture of radical music, debates, phone-ins etc. Minimal online tech and a sound proof room together with a DJ and tech guy wouldn’t be too expensive.
Two of the many things that the Party has learnt in its 100 years of existence are that:
a) It is not our fault that the working class cannot hear us and
b) There is no magic formula that can transform someone into a socialist.
No political party has had a membership that has fought so tirelessly and consistently for socialism and any accusation of being complacent or sectarian etc. is an insult to those who have given their lives to the struggle. Every conceivable tactic has been tried but in the end it is history that will decide if and when we will be heard by the millions who will make the revolution. Our job is to be here for them when such a revolutionary epoch arises.
The same question applies: what made you into a socialist? Like you I thought of myself as a socialist before I encountered the SPGB (a brother in law who pointed out the difference between Bolshevism and socialism helped) but without the SPGB I may still have ended up a cynical lefty. What was ‘your journey’ to socialism? I suspect it is similar to others in the Party and features a high level of what I call a ‘high facility for criticism’; in other words we take nobody’s word for anything until we’ve thought it through ourselves. This represents a contrast to the way many others acquire information (authorities in the media, parents, peers etc.).
Many have spent years trying to figure out why there at not many more socialists and trying to find out what to do about it with the assumption that we must be doing something wrong. What is much more productive is to attempt to answer the question: why am I a socialist? Assuming that we’re not an alien species what is it about us that makes us so different politically? Answers to this question have been proposed but instead of constantly assuming we’re doing something wrong or that we could do something different ask yourself why what we do was sufficient to make you a socialist. As with so much in life the answers begin with such an insight.
I’m surprised at being the ‘anarchist guy’ having joined the Socialist Party in 1980! Actually I thought Alan was talking about you EM.
Erich Morris above is typical of the elitist approach to socialism – he knows all of the answers but somehow ‘the workers’ need some kind of transitional education programme before they can achieve his lofty level of consciousness. What is his background – probably one of the lowly workers to whom he now condescends. As for that old ‘maximum and minimum’ programme nonsense – it’s been tried and has failed time and again. The consistent failure of reforms only leads to political cynicism.
‘ We won’t be able to throw off such accusations so we will suffer the slings and arrows of left-wing criticism.’
If we didn’t suffer left-wing criticisms then we wouldn’t be doing our job and the Party would have no point to it.
‘ When people recognize great orators, great writers, great educators, great debaters, those possessing such talents become the focus of the media, turning them into “leaders” because of the interviews and attention. A election candidate will receive more credence than a branch member. We all tend to defer to the authority of knowledge and communication skills.’
Primarily leaders are those who do your thinking for you – a kind of parental substitute, which is why the need for them is a sign of political immaturity. The talents of oratory, knowledge in certain areas and writing skills are just that – they are not ‘leaders’ in the political sense. We may defer to such people for inspiration and information but they do not make our decisions for us as that’s what democracy is for. People quite often confuse such talents with supposed ‘leadership skills’ but if they really know what they’re talking about they themselves will reject any such description.
‘However, why is it that individual thinkers and writers can make an impact and be influential?’
Who have you in mind here? There have been many writers who burn brightly for a while, courtesy mainly to marketing, but their ‘impact’ and ‘influence’ have changed nothing. Rarely , if ever, do these writers possess anything approaching socialist consciousness – which is presumably partly why they become popular (for a while). There is so much ‘reinventing the wheel’ out there that is marketed as something important and new. I agree it is not what we say but how we say it and who we say it to. I’ve always thought it a mistake to assume that those on the left are more likely to hear us since they too can represent reactionary authoritarianism just as much as the right. I believe our contempt for leaders is an important barrier for most people because of their political immaturity. What to do about this has obsessed socialists for a hundred years without a consensus emerging.
The psychological conditioning in capitalism goes much deeper than is implied by your outline of George Lakoff’s theory (which I have not read). Here’s what I believe to be one of the definitive works on the subject: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/index.htm
I think that Dave B’s quotes above settles the matter. The ‘Diggers’ of the English revolution prove the Marxist case that you cannot impose an idealist form of communism on an economically underdeveloped culture/system. That it was attempted at all by Winstanley and his comrades emphasizes the Bourgeois nature of the revolution. Marx was definitely a man ‘made by history’ in the sense that he represented the confluence of three traditions: German philosophy, French politics and British economics – that is what makes him so fascinating. He also represents the decisive break with socialist idealism which you would seem to be undermining. The fact is that we live now in a global capitalist system and that is precisely because once exported from Western Europe that system inevitably became ‘universal for all parts of the globe’ – as predicted by Marx.
I would need more than that letter to convince me that Marx didn’t believe that socialism was only possible, both in terms of production and consciousness, in a society which had experienced mature capitalism (wasn’t this the Menshevik position?). If he did believe that then history has proved him profoundly mistaken. Haven’t we always maintained this position? – and as one advocated by Marx?
