Dire straits
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It’s called gathering interest, gaining visibility, getting people to visit our site, then we’d actually get people to learn and understand what socialism is.
Currently all that we do is debates, leaflets which has been clearly shown to not work for (and I have to stress) over a 100 years.
ALB I’d be happy to do the placard outside of a bus station ect, the bank one would likely (again) get people thinking we’re for a decree on money and do more harm than good, we need to understand the majority doesn’t go to talk to those holding placards, they just see the placard and form an opinion based off of that.
Hence why I said the placard outside of an Apple store or outside a transport station would be effective, some people would see it think “hmmm good point, I’ll check these SPGB out later” and then we’d gather interest, hence an opportunity for our site to teach, hence also the dire need for hyperlinks to videos showing how it might work so people don’t get scared off.
We have to change strategy , we have to adapt to what works.
I’m not calling for changing our policy, I’m calling for us to adopt strategies that will get people to visit our site AND once they do, they can actually get an understanding of what socialism is, in a simple and quick way.
Let us note that this party has never had over 2000 votes in any general election, the last time we got over 1000 was in 1997, this, for the oldest Socialist party in a country of millions is nothing short of tragic.
As we both agreed, and as Marx and other theorists explained quite well, the doing away with money would be a natural process, if we make the “abolition of money” our talking point again we’ll not win the majority over, or get people to visit the site.
Firstly we desperately need a hyperlink on our site to videos showcasing how it might work in a practical simple way that people can understand, secondly once that is done we desperately need to gain visibility by holding placards outside popular businesses, supporting Palestine, supporting workers movements ect to get people to talk to us and to our site.
Is that 1000 votes figure correct?
Of course, the SPGB will never be on the streets “supporting Palestine” or any other nation-state. Like I said in the beginning, I find it surprising that someone who went through the admissions test is coming up with things like this. Have you had much contact with actual members?
I can only agree with Actual Socialist 10 that it is extremely difficult for people to conceive of a system without money. It is such an integral part of their lives that it seems unimaginable to them. However, so it always was with a ‘new’ idea, but that hasn’t prevented it happening and people then regarding it as normal. Who, for example, could have imagined in times past, when religion was so all-prevailing that you could be punished by stoning or even death for not attending church on Sundays, that belief in religion would in the future become very sparse indeed and attending Church would be a strictly minority activity. And more widely, as Ursula Le Guin famously said, ‘We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable, but so did the Divine Right of Kings’. So, though this seems ‘impractical’ to a lot of people, that will change with time – even if perhaps not too quickly, and evidence of that is that groups all around the world are now evident on the internet putting a similar idea (e.g. ‘Moneyless Society’, ‘World of Free Access’, ‘Yenomin’, Zeitgeist’, ‘Money-free Society’). Yes, they represent a very small minority of people at present, but idea do change and develop. If history shows nothing else, it shows that. When people react to our idea with responses like ‘that’s insane’, as our comrade has found, well that’s to be expected (it’s how I reacted initially), but we shouldn’t be put off but simply persist, in the knowledge that the view of the world we’re putting across and our solution to the crisis-ridden society we live in are sound, even if it’s not going to happen immediately. I also agree with the idea of ‘getting personal’ and it’s something I personally always try to do when putting across socialist ideas. But what we shouldn’t be doing is joining in with the Left in their attempts to try to solve the problems of capitalism within capitalism. We know it can’t work. You can’t use the system to fix the system. Even if somehow, we, or workers generally in Britain, were able to do sommething to stop the Gaza mayhem, we’d still be left with the 60-odd other conflicts taking place in the world – and some actually worse than Gaza (e.g. Sudan). So, even if I’m not agreeing with Actual Socialist 10 on his Gaza point, there’s no question that the more we have comrades like him/her looking for ways for us to be active and above all to become visible, the better for us and the more our organisation is likely to grow and our ideas to spread.
<But what we shouldn’t be doing is joining in with the Left in their attempts to try to solve the problems of capitalism within capitalism. We know it can’t work. >
That’s for reforms, of course it can’t work, history shows that, that’s why I’m a socialist.
I think there’s a misunderstanding in what I’m proposing.
What I’m on about is forcing the government to stop supplying Israel, a strike would LIKELY do this if enough people joined (1 million plus), because as I’ve stated, businesses would force the government to change their policy as they’d be losing money.
Most importantly however is such a proposal would only have positive repercussions for our party, even if it fails WE’D GET NOTICED.
The people would also start to understand their power and thereby socialism, making them more ready to accept the truth once they visit our site.
Let me stress I AM NOT advocating for us to join protests in the name of a Palestinian state or reforms!
I am for us joining protests AND calling for a strike in the name of the Palestinian worker, for peace!
Sudan is a good point too, LIKE I SAID many times now, we SHOULD also do these things for other conflicts when they are in the public mind, whether they be international or in the home front, for example the placard idea outside of a business or station.
These are things that will get noticed by the people, thereby causing them to talk to us, visit our website and LEARN what socialism is.
I propose a Palestine strike action because it’s a hot topic right now.
Hence I also said we DESPERATELY need simple videos showing how it might work so people aren’t too overwhelmed once they do visit our site.
Is that 1000 votes figure correct?
Actually, as recently as May this year we got more than that in the Greater London Assembly elections, even over 2000 in one constituency (even if it’s because GLA constituencies are bigger than parliamentary ones).
The highest number of votes we have ever got in an election was 4050 for the European Parliament elections in 2009 in the London Region.
The highest we have got in a parliamentary election was 899 in Bethnal Green in 1959.
We were still dead last in each of them…
Or near dead last, even satire candidates got more votes than us…
Our current tactics are not reaching the people.
I honestly don’t know how you cannot see that…
Again, I will stress, what I’m calling for would not change our policy in the slightest, it would just get people to visit our website and take notice.
You’re right in that we should get creative in how we spread awareness of socialist ideas. And you’re right that real world interactions are more powerful than online ones.
But it seems to me that some of what you are saying *is* a change in policy. The stuff about a general strike is just wishful thinking on your part.
<The stuff about a general strike is just wishful thinking on your part.>
How so?
Hundreds of thousands marched for peace before.
The problem with marches (as we know) is that they’re ineffective, if anything capitalists just make a profit off of it through food sales, transport, ect.
Because of this the workers then gain apathy and a sense of powerlessness.
That’s why protests are getting smaller.
A strike on the other hand hits them, and it hits them hard!
Strikes, whenever big enough do force change even if (again) as socialists we know it’s not what will actually stop this capitalist cycle of madness.
Like I said, yet again, I’m calling for a strike, because A) it would generate interest in the party and B) because if enough join, it would actually stop our government supplying Israel, likely spreading to other countries, making the workers realise an ounce of the power they actually hold.
(We should only enact a strike once we got the numbers promising they will take part. A strike of a few will do nothing but lose them their jobs)
I suggest you read through some of the early issues of the Standard, when they dealt with this kind of thing.
If you think there is an appetite for a strike to stop the armament of Isreal, I suggest you start by talking to your colleagues at work. But I’d also warn them that such types of strike are not covered by trade union legal protections.
I detect a certain over-optimism in the idea that supporting a mass strike in favour of Palestine will get us noticed. It’s true that the more our ideas come to public attention, the more it’s likely that people who are ‘ready’ for socialism will come over to us. So it might get us a bit of attention, but broadly speaking we’d be swamped by all the other organsations who were part of it and were putting forward reformist and easier-to-digest ideas. In reality there isn’t a ‘magic bullet’, just a slow grind, and the more of us that can be part of that the better, and the less slow the grind will be. It’s frustrating, I know. I’ve been frustrated for years, but there just isn’t any other alternative. But it’s also satisfying putting across a case that can’t be faulted for coherence and constant verification from what happens in capitalism.
Wow, again I have to just say wow.
<I detect a certain over-optimism in the idea that supporting a mass strike in favour of Palestine will get us noticed>
This is literally what made the Workers party so massive, Galloway’s calls to action regarding Palestine.
Like I said, if we don’t adapt these strategies, other parties who call themselves socialist and are anything but will keep taking the spotlight, we will never be noticed and our slow grind into irrelevance will continue.
I’d understand if we were at least gaining more members even if slowly, but Moss, we’ve been hemorrhaging members for decades now…
Why is everyone so deadset against this??
I am not calling for reformist platforms, I’m simply calling for us to get active.
Just a simple call for a strike (even if unsuccessful), would get people visiting our site giving us an opportunity to teach them, hence like I said, we also need to brush up on our language and insert videos so people who visit our site can clearly understand that this is not some utopian view.
What is wrong with that??
I’d understand the skepticism if I was calling for us to call for a “living wage” or a “Palestinian state”, but again, I am simply calling for us to adopt strategies that will get visits to our site and once they’re on our site videos that can display complex sounding ideas.
You’ve been on some of the fortnightly anti-Gaza war protest marches and so will have seen the variety of papers and leaflets on them calling for all sorts of ways to free non-Jewish workers in Palestine from direct oppression by the Israeli state.
“Smash Israel”, “Socialist intifada”, “workers government”, etc, etc. from the various Trotskyist and Maoists groups. I was going to say I hadn’t read them all but suspected that at least one of them would have called for a general strike.
I then checked and found that I was right:
This is from the “Workers Revolutionary Party”. But it hasn’t raised their profile nor the number of votes they get when they contest elections — they get about the same as us.
We certainly do need to do more and maybe different to draw attention to the need for socialism but starting a campaign for a general strike over the Gaza war wouldn’t do this. So it’s back to the drawing board.
Hi Reuben
It is certainly encouraging to hear new voices and new ideas about how to move the SPGB forward. The current state of the Party is pretty grim, if we are to be honest with ourselves, although it has to be said we are going through very strange times at the moment with the death cult of nationalism on the rise everywhere. Dip a toe into that cesspit of seething bigotry called X and you will see what I mean. It’s quite depressing….
Even in the case of Gaza that you mention, with the appalling actions of the Zionist state, the people opposing this are mostly still flag-waving nationalists ( I love that quote by Arundhati Roy: “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s minds & then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”)
The thing is you have to develop a certain sense of philosophical stoicism in the face of all those depressing developments. You can’t let them get you down. There is no magic bullet that we can use that will instantly transform our circumstances since our development and fate as an organisation are largely driven by forces beyond our control.
We are not entirely powerless, however. There are things we can and ought to do and I go along with many of your suggestions.
Regarding reference to a moneyless society, I am on several FB sites that advocate for a post-money society. One is quite large with nearly 24K members. Here´s the link
Some years ago I put forward a proposal about members and sympathisers getting more actively involved on internet forums by linking to this site. A few comrades do this on a regular basis but we are nowhere near tapping the potential this approach offers. It’s a pity because most new members come via contacts made on the internet.
See this for example
https://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/search?q=ten+minutes
Another thing we could do on a much larger scale is social events and I have in mind the kind of weekend social events that Lancaster Branch has arranged in recent years. Not much help to me, I know, as I live in the south of Spain but then is a socialist holiday by comrades in the UK in Sunny Spain out of the question?
Well they got a 1000 in the last general election, in comparison to our 193…
Also they must’ve kept it real quiet since I had not seen anyone calling for that before, so either their members didn’t do enough to get it noticed or something else.
In any case this just proves me right, they have more members than us, get more votes, and parties such as The Workers party get an even greater lions share of the votes because they’ve adopted those strategies.
This back and forth is becoming rather tedious, to finalise can someone please explain to me how us simply becoming active, calling for the peace which we all want and believe in, calling for action to such effect would hurt or hinder our party in any way, shape or form?
Like I’ve said before, leaflets are not working.
This is not an opinion, it’s verifiable fact.
Calling for action such as a strike for peace in Palestine would demonstrably get us noticed, show workers their power (if successful) AND it’s something we actively want.
Again, please explain to me how this is counter productive to our views.
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