Letters: Religion & railings (1974)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion & railings

A reading of your interesting 70th Anniversary issue has left me with the impression that the SPGB has no satisfactory explanation for the failure to get through to the working class. I ask you to consider the following hypothesis.

A more propitious ethos must be generated by capitalism, which has already demonstrated its ability to induce a more rational view of the social scene. Remember the blow it has dealt religion. Masses of workers who have never heard of the SPGB or read a secularist tract have involuntarily succumbed to a more materialist view of the world about them. This dynamic power, identified as the ethos, could ultimately produce the untutored, the spontaneous Socialist. The existence of the SPGB is evidence enough that some workers have understood the Socialist case. My belief is that these workers are of a special “type”.

An example of a social trend I see currently unfolding: Many of the restricting inner railings in a large park near here have been removed. The perimeter fence remains — soon this barrier will be seen as an affront. Down it will come (where traffic and safety hazards allow) permitting at last, free and unrestricted access. This changing attitude will widen and deepen until it embraces the whole economy. Workers will then be more readily aware of the restraints on their lives. I visualize conditions in which workers will leave your meetings convinced at a first hearing of the need for Socialism.

To summarize, I am saying the SPGB can’t achieve its aim without a riper ethos, itself a product of evolving capitalism. In the spin-off of an ever-accelerating technology I see many signs which encourage me in the belief that, although at the rather advanced age of 61, I shall yet witness the triumph of Socialism.

F. C. West, 

London E.2.

Reply:

Your letter has had to be shortened for space reasons, but its chief point is that we have to wait upon capitalism itself creating certain trends.

Unfortunately, your examples do not lead us anywhere. In the absence of Socialist understanding people who give up religious beliefs have, generally, only exchanged them for other fruitless ones. You are right in suggesting that capitalism needs religion less now; but it is not short of opiates. And if railings being taken down creates ideas of freedom, that is depressing news because of the number of railings being put up now in the streets and therefore (on that argument) conditioning people to more restraint.

There are simpler, more prosaic reasons why we can “get through to the working class” to only a small extent. In the forthcoming General Election Wilson, Heath, Thorpe and their party programmes will fill the television screens and the newspapers all day every day for three weeks non-stop; our “coverage” will be a flash on TV, if we are lucky, and a sentence or two in the papers.

But do you mean that at 61 (not an advanced age at all) you are waiting to see Socialism brought about? We have active members old enough to be your parents; we are not waiting for Socialism, but working for it. Why don’t you ?