Peace Demo or SWP Marketing Opportunity?

["Martin Spellman" <mspellman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Clip all extraneous text before replying to a message or risk suspension
=======

Re Einde O'Callaghan's comments

        Try and see yourselves as others see you. Most people went on that 
march to
demonstrate -- the SWP seemed to be there with the priority of peddling
their wares. The whole exercise was over the top. How many papers did you
think you were going to sell -- 20,000? 10,000? At some places you couldn't
turn around without falling over a Socialist Worker seller, shouting the
odds like the old rails bookmakers. This only pisses people off with the
SWP.

        No one is preventing you from selling your stuff. What you might 
consider
is why your party leadership allows you to waste so much time and energy in
such a fruitless and pointless way. Most of the papers will have been
bought, prepaid, by the comrades themselves.

        The reason you have to spend so much energy selling the paper is that,
generally speaking, NO ONE WANTS IT. If the Socialist Worker and SWP were in
demand you would have to hold your meetings in theatres and football
stadiums and your papers would have to be thrown out to the thronging crowd
around Marble Arch. I saw no lines forming to buy.

        Consider the Jehovah's Witnesses: they have local meetings that no one
outside the sect wants to know about. They have their papers: 'Watchtower'
and 'Awake' that no one wants to buy -- so they have to go around pestering
people with them. People are prepared to let them indulge their adventist
fantasies down at the Kingdom Hall but do not want to be bothered with them.

        The SWP is not a new organisation and neither is the Socialist Worker a 
new
publication. If people want it they know what it is and where to go for it.
Apart from places like Housmans and Bookmarks you can even get it in the
Charing Cross Road 'Borders' and Malet Street 'Waterstones' (the old Dillons
shop). You will find plenty in the racks there because, as I say, not many
people want it.

        Yet people freely go to newsagents to buy bourgeois newspapers. Because,
bad as they are, they fulfill some need and have to relate to reality, in
some way. Sectarian rags like the SW and the SPEW's 'Socialist' are
tediously dull papers. This is because they exist to amplify the party line
rather than analyse reality. Once you've read one you feel like you've read
them all. The same old names crop up: Harman, Callinicos, Taafe, Woods,
Grant etc. They do not allow their own party dissidents to debate, let alone
outsiders or the world at large. It would be interesting to write a history
of the past twenty five years based only on the accounts and analysis in
sectarian papers.

        The only paper I was interested in years ago was 'Socialist Outlook'
because it at least made some attempt at analysis and had articles by Alan
Thornett, who was always worth reading and listening to, even if you didn't
agree with him. When 'Socialist Appeal' starting reprinting Ted Grant's
sparkling analysis of the 1947 slump you knew it was time to give it the
swerve. Such things can only grow in a controlled environment.

>I suspect taht you are what Paul Foot once called a "non-aligned
sectarian".

        Typically smug and with contempt for those 'outside your church'. For 
all
you know you might have sold me a paper on Saturday!

Martin Spellman