If the Marxist critique of capitalism is common sense to most people, then it already has wide currency. My impression is that in fact it is not. While people in general have many insights into their oppression, their take on the system as a whole does not have the coherence and logic of a worked-out ideological system, Marxist or otherwise. Otherwise we could hardly expect to observe 97% of the electorate voting for the candidates of the plutocracy.
I don't think this has to do with just the language; I think the notion of a comprehensive ideology is foreign to most people, except for some fundamentalist types. After all, such ideas are pretty rigorously excluded from the media and the schools.
> The basic ideas of socialism, that democracy would be
> extended to the economy, that we can run things ourselves without bosses to
> tell us what to do, can also be "sold" to a lesser degree if expressed in
> plain, commonsense terms. ...
I haven't found this to be the case in advancing such ideas to my co-workers. Apparently the sort of people who think they can run things themselves, in the sense of doing jobs and getting money without the governance of bosses and their capital, often do so, leaving the others (whom they might otherwise influence and inspire) drudging mindlessly in the office and the factory. The petit-bourgeois option, still available for many, serves very well as a safety-valve for working-class dissidence. Instead of forming unions and coops, the sharpies turn into libertarians and fill Usenet with wailing about taxes and regulation.
I consider this widespread lack of will toward autonomy, individual _or_ communal, to be a fairly serious problem for both socialism and anarchism -- the moreso for anarchists, since I suppose non-anarchist socialists believe they can order people to be free. Speaking of Marxism, I wonder if Mr. I-am-not-a-'Marxist' ever contemplated the possibility of such a development. Eventually it might lead to serious problems for the bourgeoisie, but not of the sort depicted in the _Manifesto_.