The need for Socialism
Your article on “Ideas and Understanding” in the August issue of the Socialist Standard is a masterpiece, a real gem of materialist, historical and economic analysis. No other writers can equal the writers in the Socialist Standard; one is journalism, the other educational informative matter.
I have read and re-read it many times and I enjoy each reference. There is that much data packed into the one article that I find it difficult to break down into less than eight headings to do it justice.
But let us take just one, “the problem of communicating Socialist ideas”. There are literally thousands who have heard the SPGB case about getting Socialist knowledge i.e. economics, history, politics, understanding, as people read our literature and hear our speakers. They all say "true, I accept the case”, but how few see the necessity of joining the party prepared to work for Socialism.
Why the “left-wingers’ ’etc. still fool about with reforms and other myths beats me, unless it is sheer funk and fear. Surely they have wasted enough time and energy by now to see the futility of their activities. Because if the working class do not become Socialists then as your writer concludes, they will drown in the slough of degeneracy, degradation and base primitivism — poverty, worry, insecurity, illness, frustration etc., is their lot under capitalism, but there is a world waiting to be won and used.
The tragedy is, that the working class cannot think about anything except in terms of work, wages, money, trade, rent, rates etc. Cannot they see the vast waste, luxury and uselessness that goes on in capitalism? and the vast possibilities that men and women can enjoy with common ownership, democratic control and production for the use of ALL.
Harold Shaw
Gloucester
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