Letter: Are We Normal? (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are We Normal?

At speakers’ corner the other Sunday your speaker said ‘‘We have no geniuses in our party, we are ordinary members of the working class”. Who are you trying to kid? Perhaps yourselves?

How can you be ordinary members of the working class when you belong to an extraordinary organization? Perhaps you mean your members represent a cross-section of the working class in intelligence. That in itself is debatable, but it has nothing to do with normality.

Ordinary people on hearing the socialist case do not become socialists, only those made aware by exceptional circumstances. In other words, the Socialist Party acts as a catalyst in developing ideas that are themselves fairly advanced. The group of people you aim at are in this situation of advancement.

How then you will ever communicate the socialist idea to the majority of people who, whilst having the intellectual capacity to understand, have not the learning (through no fault of their own) to understand at the level you persist in speaking at, is beyond me. No matter what you think of yourselves, you appear alien. This is no way to go about working-class emancipation; you are supposed to enlighten, not frighten.

I commented in a previous letter at your ‘‘angry” approach. The left in Britain, the Socialist Standard says, has not had an increase in support in 50 years—but then have you? Reach out to the people. It’s all very well having high-powered debates and discussions, it may be great fun, but who are you going to convince? A few trade unionists and university students, perhaps. But the average man in the street? I think not.

Sell yourselves. You have to (initially) speak and work in language that is not alien to the vast majority. I realize that your resources are low, your membership small, and the media is hostile to your cause. But you squander what little resources you have.

I am a person outside of the Party. I am commenting on how the Party might appear to the average person who has heard of it. By the way, the average person cares very little about the starving millions in Bangladesh. Bring the arguments down from the heavens to the earth, commenting on how Socialism will affect us as individuals in our own special environment.

David Waite

Imperial College

Reply:

Maybe socialists are extraordinary! Most of them, however, are not geniuses. Moreover, even if one were, for example, highly adept at mathematics, that would not help one to understand Socialism.

You are angry. You suggest that we ‘‘sell ourselves”. Do you have any suggestions as to how we should do this? You say we are unlikely to convince anyone but a “few university students and trade unionists”. Well, a very wide section of the working class belongs to some trade union or other; firemen do and so do civil servants. What differentiates the trade-union member from the rest of the working class?

The average person may feel unable to do much about the starving peoples in Bangladesh, but one of our aims is to get the “man on the Clapham omnibus” to question everything which happens in the world. When someone realizes why butter mountains, wine lakes etc. exist alongside starving millions, he is on the way towards understanding capitalism. Once the “average man” (or woman) understands how capitalism works, he (or she) will want to set about trying to replace it. And in working out what to replace it with, people will see the necessity of Socialism.

Editors.