Benjamin Hill
28th January 2010, 15:27
In the latest issue of the Weekly Worker, 802, I sent in the following letter, which got published:
For dummies
I’ve been in contact with the ideas of the Weekly Worker and its forerunner, The Leninist, for about a year now and it arranged many of my uncomfortable ‘gut feelings’ into a coherent picture. For this service alone I would like to thank the comrades of the CPGB for their (often disregarded) work.
But there is a problem too. As the CPGB falls ‘out of tone’ with so many of the far left, many people simply don’t understand what it is that its ideas entail - mostly because these people have only been exposed to their organisations’ version of The Truth. Questioning a whole system of ideas is quite a high learning curve for many and therefore it isn’t at all surprising that the Weekly Worker often gets dismissed as a “gossip rag” and what not. For this reason also the CPGB is only really popular with those who either love to do some leftist train-spotting or hold an ungrateful position as ‘loyal oppositionist’ within their own organisation and try to stir up the battle of ideas.
So to lower this learning curve and introduce other members of the far left (and indeed the working class in general) to the (real) ideas of Marxism, wouldn’t it be a good idea if some literature was written with this public in mind, a sort of ‘Marxism for dummies’, so to speak?
Benjamin Hill
I guess this not only goes for the CPGB, although they're holding a relatively unique position due to their emphasis on actually provoking critical thinking. The main issue with them is the high barrier for new people.
Other organisations, most in fact, have it the other way around: Low barrier literature for new people, but treating the reader as a consumer rather than a potential critical thinker and political activist. Basically the attitude of most organisation is "read our theory to understand reality, follow our line and go sell this newspaper".
Is there no line in between these extremes?
For dummies
I’ve been in contact with the ideas of the Weekly Worker and its forerunner, The Leninist, for about a year now and it arranged many of my uncomfortable ‘gut feelings’ into a coherent picture. For this service alone I would like to thank the comrades of the CPGB for their (often disregarded) work.
But there is a problem too. As the CPGB falls ‘out of tone’ with so many of the far left, many people simply don’t understand what it is that its ideas entail - mostly because these people have only been exposed to their organisations’ version of The Truth. Questioning a whole system of ideas is quite a high learning curve for many and therefore it isn’t at all surprising that the Weekly Worker often gets dismissed as a “gossip rag” and what not. For this reason also the CPGB is only really popular with those who either love to do some leftist train-spotting or hold an ungrateful position as ‘loyal oppositionist’ within their own organisation and try to stir up the battle of ideas.
So to lower this learning curve and introduce other members of the far left (and indeed the working class in general) to the (real) ideas of Marxism, wouldn’t it be a good idea if some literature was written with this public in mind, a sort of ‘Marxism for dummies’, so to speak?
Benjamin Hill
I guess this not only goes for the CPGB, although they're holding a relatively unique position due to their emphasis on actually provoking critical thinking. The main issue with them is the high barrier for new people.
Other organisations, most in fact, have it the other way around: Low barrier literature for new people, but treating the reader as a consumer rather than a potential critical thinker and political activist. Basically the attitude of most organisation is "read our theory to understand reality, follow our line and go sell this newspaper".
Is there no line in between these extremes?