The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

So They Say: Protests too much (1977)

The So They Say Column from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Protests too much

An article in The Spectator of 12th November entitled “The irrelevance of class” which attempts to justify its title by showing how various important men have risen from what are discreetly referred to as “humble births”, reminds us that the class war still prompts professional hacks (and quacks) to issue it, at regular intervals with a formal death certificate. The entire irrelevance of class structure within society led the writer of the article to over 50 column-inches to make his point and if The Spectator is prepared to pay for and publish this sort of thing, we have high hopes for our own submission entitled “The irrelevance of air—hot and cold.”

The inconvenient obstacle to the claim however is one of fact. Obstacles of this nature may or may not impress Spectator’s writers who are prepared to spend a good deal of time apparently in dealing with what they consider “irrelevances”, but it cannot seriously be denied that capitalist society is divided, on the one hand into those who own and control the means of life and on the other, into those who must work for a member of the owning class in order to live. If this class division were non-existent, or irrelevant, we could only express surprise at the great deal of verbiage mustered to assure us of the claim.

Not cricket

Although the owning class as a whole have class interests in common, namely the retention of private- property society and they will unite on issues which may threaten this, each member also has individual interests in the day-to-day business of increasing their particular share of the social wealth, and this process obliges them to enter into battles among themselves. Whereas the working class, the non-owners, represent a class enemy to be held off by a variety of means, other members of the capitalist class are rivals and as such require direct attention.

Fresh diplomatic protests have been tendered by the Government over breaches in agreements by Japanese (Motor) manufacturers to hold down sales in Britain.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

The British motor manufacturers claim that the Japanese are carrying out an “invasion” of the British markets contrary to an undertaking given by the Japanese to restrain sales to the UK. It all sounds very reasonable—an arrangement between friends. The Japanese motor men have argued before that it had all been a misunderstanding and they may well do so again. The fact that the British government now argues the case on behalf of its own national manufacturers shows that they are not deceived. Both parties are aware that “undertakings” are weak restraints on the pressures of capitalist expansion.

Making the point, in the same newspaper, was the Chairman of the Welsh council of the CBI who advises his members that British manufacturers can satisfactorily meet Japanese competition by putting in “the same intensity of effort as the Japanese”, by which he means a greater degree of exploitation of the British working class. This gentleman was speaking from experience. He is the chairman of a machine-tool company.

Last year I put one Japanese firm out of business and two other Japanese firms have given up their markets to me.

(Daily Telegraph, 10th November 77)

It seems probable that the aforementioned Japanese firms may be petitioning him soon to give an “undertaking” for restraint.

Plenty of problems

The Japanese Prime Minister has become increasingly concerned at the economic problems he faces as the yen rises against other currencies and the exporters are finding it more difficult to compete successfully in overseas markets. He now refers to exports as a “negligible factor in expanding economic growth in future.” The new strategy he revealed is to be the stimulation of home demand by increasing public spending, which we seem to have heard somewhere before.

Mr. Fukuda neatly put his finger on one of the major difficulties facing the Japanese, who are by no means alone in the matter, and shows that capitalism, despite the efforts of so-called planning, simply continues to produce problems and contradictions. The profit motive governs production.

The important thing is to create demand in the midst of the problems of overcapacity and unemployment.

(The Times, 11th November 77)

Capitalist ideologies

The Chinese are said to have approached the British government with a view to ordering Harrier jump-jets. Apparently the so-called socialists are faced with a build up of forces on their border with the other so-called socialists, the Russians. The fact that the British government also refers to itself as “socialist” no doubt lends justification to the approach and completes the picture of this happy socialist band who act so differently from the capitalist governments. To an un-trained eye it would appear to be a straightforward business arrangement.

However Britain is a member of a NATO organization called Cocom whose function is to prevent the sale of weapons and plant for producing them, to “communist” countries. America is also a member and it might be thought that they would, as they are entitled, veto consideration of the order. Surely the Americans would not permit any hole-in-the-wall arrangement between all these “socialists". It appears however that the Americans have an un-trained eye in the matter. They have their reasons too.

The fact that there is a company to company agreement between Hawker Siddeley and Macdonald Douglas to manufacture the Harrier under licence in no way interferes with the sale of the Harrier by Britain to other states, I was authoritatively informed yesterday. A non-British member of Cocom’s coordinating committee told me a few days ago that the United States rarely raised any objection to the export of strategic materials to a Communist country if it was produced or manufactured in America.

(Daily Telegraph, 9th November 77)

Direct elections: another non-issue (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The attitude of the Socialist Party of Great Britain towards the Common Market has been consistent: that it is a political and trading arrangement between capitalist States. Whether Britain should have gone in, should stay in or should withdraw does not concern the working class. Thus, during the 1975 referendum, we urged workers to vote neither “YES” nor “NO” but, if they wanted Socialism, to indicate this by writing the word “SOCIALISM” across their ballot paper.

This attitude distinguished us from all others calling themselves “socialists”, most of whom were urging a "NO” vote on a variety of grounds. For instance, we were urged to oppose the Common Market on the ground that it rules out the possibility of establishing “socialism” in Britain because it infringes “the sovereignty of parliament”. But, in imagining that Socialism could be established in just one country or that “socialist measures” could be taken within the framework of capitalism, those who argue like this show that they don’t know the first thing about Socialism, which can only be world-wide like the system, capitalism, it will be replacing.

What such people in fact stand for is not Socialism at all, but British state capitalism. The sort of anti- Common Market propaganda put out by these people—the left wing of the Labour Party and the so-called Communist Party—is falsely done in the name of Socialism. By waving the Union Jack and playing on British nationalism, they reveal themselves as opponents. Socialism can only come into being when workers throughout the world have, among other things, got rid of all national prejudices and come to regard themselves as citizens of the world.

The Common Market, even if it evolved into a United States of Europe or something similar, does not make the establishment of Socialism any harder. It does not undermine the institutions (the ballot box and parliament) which the working class should use to establish Socialism. It is true that the Common Market does transfer the right to legislate in certain fields to its own law-making body, the Council of Ministers (not the European Parliament which is not a legislative body at all). But the Council of Ministers is made up of representatives from the governments of the Member States, which in turn are responsible to their elected parliaments. Thus, if we argue at this purely constitutional level (which apparently we must when dealing with the arguments of the Eric Heffers and Norman Atkinsons), the Common Market could not hold up the establishment of Socialism, for, if socialist majorities existed in the national parliaments of its Member States, this would automatically mean that the Common Market’s law-making body would also be controlled by socialists.

We are not interested in using parliaments to pass laws dealing with trade, patents, social security, free movement of labour, etc.—in short, laws to administer capitalism—but only in using them for the one revolutionary purpose of abolishing capitalism and establishing Socialism. The diminution of the powers of the British parliament brought about by the Common Market does not mean that it—or the parliaments of the other Member States— can no longer be used as an instrument to establish Socialism.

The so-called European Parliament is not really a parliament in the generally accepted sense of the word. It has no law-making powers (and has a final say as to how money should be spent in a very limited sphere) and plays a purely consultative rôle. Common Market regulations—which really do have the force of law, some being directly applicable in Member States without needing to be enacted by national parliaments as well—are made by the Council of Ministers on proposals from the Commission in Brussels. It is the Council of Ministers, not the European Parliament, which in the Common Market carries out the functions normally associated with parliaments (law-making, approval of the budget).

Nevertheless, it has been agreed (by the Council of Ministers!) that the European Parliament, instead of being appointed as now by the national parliaments from amongst their members, should be directly elected in all-Europe elections to be held in May or June next year. That these elections will take place is not yet absolutely certain since each Member State has to pass legislation to permit them in its country and if any one fails to do so then there will be no elections anywhere.

The “left wing” of the Labour Party, in accordance with its nationalist state-capitalist aim, is trying to stop Britain passing the necessary legislation. Once again we are told that direct elections to the European Parliament is something socialists should campaign against. Once again we disagree. Nevertheless, we can recognize that it is better that political bodies under capitalism should be directly elected instead of appointed from above; this makes it easier for the working class, when they have become socialists, to take them out of the hands of the capitalist class.

This does not mean we advocate direct elections to the European Parliament, but merely that, now this has been offered by our rulers, it is something that can be accepted. Thus, our attitude to the elections when (and if) they take place next year will be the same as to all other elections. We will use them to publicize Socialism; and we shall be urging those who want Socialism to write “SOCIALISM”— or “SOCIALISME” or “SOZIALISMUS” or “SOCIALISMO”, as the case may be—across their ballot papers.

Adam Buick

Letter: Class interests (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class interests

The party’s Seventh Principle states that “political parties are but the expression of class interests". Accepting that the Conservative, Liberal and Labour Parties all look after the interests of Capitalism, which particular section of the capitalist class benefits from which party?

Who does the Labour Party represent? Stockbrokers seem to believe in it, as the F.T. Share Index shows, but which businesses are actually supporting it. by donations etc? Could you name some businesses and types of business which stand to benefit from Labour policies as opposed to those of the Tories?

The Seventh Principle stands as a generalisation. There is no generalisation worthy of the name which does not apply in specific instances. Therefore, would you give some details?

F. S.

Newcastle

Reply:

All sections of the capitalist class, industrialists, mine-owners, bankers, ship-owners, newspaper proprietors, manufacturers and property-owners, and building consortiums, benefit from all the major political parties. After all, the political parties govern in their interests. There is no special group of capitalists who are preferred to others, but it is common knowledge that MPs of all parties lobby for particular business interests, and act as public relations men and consultants to large companies and industrial organizations. Historically, the Tory Party represented the interests of ship-owners, newspaper proprietors, bankers, mine-owners and landlords. The Liberal Party represented industrialists, manufacturers and small business men. The Labour Party look over the Liberal Party’s policy but was originally formed to represent trade-union interests. These distinctions no longer exist, and capitalists of all kinds will support any political group irrespective of its ideology, as long as it can keep order and advance their interests. Some sections, such as the landlords, claim that Labour governments legislate to their disadvantage, and cite the Rent Acts as an example. However, the Rent Acts were introduced by a Conservative government in 1915, and the Tories have extended these against the landlord at various times.

Without any doubt the Tory Party receives large donations from big manufacturers like Tate & Lyle and many others. McAlpine, the millionaire road-builder, is their Chairman. These donations used to be made in secret but now have to be declared on the firm’s accounts, and many rich individuals make donations through the “Old Boy” network. How else could they maintain the expensive electoral machinery, full-time agents, and professional propagandists and large head office premises. It is not possible to give specific details as these donations are not publicly announced or recorded.

Another type of support given by big business to the Tory Party is in the type of campaigns against certain Labour Party measures. In the recent campaign by the banks against nationalisation, hundreds of thousands of pounds were spent, and undoubtedly some of this money would have found its way into the Tory Party. The same thing would have applied in the case of the campaign run by a federation of ship-repairing interests against the nationalization of the aircraft and ship-repairing industries.

The Labour Party also has rich supporters, including a number of millionaires: the late Eric Miller, who hobnobbed with Harold Wilson, Jimmy Goldsmith, Cotton the Birmingham property millionaire, Charles Forte and many others. These rich people do not give their support unless they receive something in return; whether this be a subsidy, honours, export credit, a licence, a Government contract, or some other form of Government assistance will depend on the particular circumstances. The Labour Party receives the bulk of its funds from trade unions through the Political Levy, and the sponsorship of some of its MP’s, but it is a capitalist party which believes it can run capitalism in the interests of the working class. Occasionally it will make attacks on certain rich people or luxury industries, and the worst excesses of capitalism, but it will not attack the system.

The main issue between Tory and Labour government is on the question of state control of industry and nationalization. Here is a classic example of the interests of the capitalist class being represented in different ways, and this is precisely what Clause 7 refers to. The Tories want to cut down expensive government, reduce taxation, and state intervention. To the extent to which the state intervenes bureaucracy grows and inhibits the growth of capital. This is the main bone of contention. It would be impossible for governments to show partiality to certain sections of the capitalist class over a long period, as they are all watching one another and will take good care that nobody gains an advantage. This is where their parliamentary hacks come in. The fact that a party like the Labour Party is predominantly composed of workers does not prevent it from acting in the interests of capitalism, for the simple reason that the workers support capitalism.

Editors.

Letter: Socialism's Economics (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism's Economics

The article on socialism in September’s SS (p. 166-7) went beyond the evidence on human desires in the hypothetical new society. But it clearly declared that many wants may have to go unsatisfied. It did not indicate how such decisions would be reached. It pointed out that Socialism would be similar to capitalism in being a system of co-operation and social production, but it did not show what we could put in place of the price system as a means of economic communication. People would have to work, but how would they know when enough is enough? In short, where is the socialist economics that will make an economy based on common ownership viable?

“RAW" tells us (1) that it must be technically possible to keep people free of deprivation and (2) people need to have socialist understanding. He tells us that the first requirement has been met even though people like the Hyde Park questioner may feel deprived. The second is a different matter. Capitalism did not have to solve this, RAW says. Perhaps he thinks the knowledge that even children have mastered to buy sweets should not count as knowledge. On this I do not agree. However, what about the knowledge we will use to economize our wants in the new society? This seems to have been ignored by RAW.

Workers are only “forced” to work in capitalism because they want to live. The same “force" would exist in any society that depended upon effort to supply needs. The two obstacles facing the SPGB are different from the ones RAW mentioned. They are: (1) A viable socialist economics that would theoretically expound the new society as modern economics expounds capitalism. (2) A political theory of how to manage law and order in the new society. I think it is fair to say that while they remain unsolved Socialism remains a half-baked idea.

David McDonagh 

Birmingham

Reply:

We are afraid that the trouble is that like many people, you feel that a harmonious system like Socialism is really too good to be true and therefore spend your time looking for all possible faults (which is fine) but find problems which won’t exist (which is unnecessary). You bring up the old difficulty: "What if everyone wants a Rolls Royce etc? Chaos must reign!” Under capitalism though, most people know they will never even ride in a Rolls, let alone own one, so that’s fine! The rich who rule the earth, can drive the Rolls Royces, and the people who build them can wait for the bus, and so that's fine! What you don’t grasp is that we will only have Socialism when the majority of people are socialists; that is people who know what Socialism is, and are determined to get it. Such people will not wreck Socialism because society may not be able to afford to produce Rolls Royces. The “economics” that you seem to require is in part a result of looking at the future. Socialism, with the conditioned eyes of the present, capitalism. Socialists who go through the revolutionary process of establishing Socialism will work in their own interests sorting out their material requirements. It may sound simple, but it is not only the SPGB that says it is possible to solve all the material problems i.e. it is technically possible to do so. It is only socialists though who have suggested the practical way of doing so. Why not spend your time thinking about the real problems that afflict us now, and not the imagined ones of the future? And join with us in getting rid of the cause of these problems?

So far as your question of law and order is concerned, there is not space to go into that here. We would refer you in particular to The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Engels, which shows that law is a product (and therefore a problem) of property society, and will be of no relevance to property less society, i.e. Socialism.

Editors.

Letter: The Rate of Profit (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Rate of Profit

Did Marx hold that the rate of exploitation of workers increased inevitably? This appears to contradict his theory of the falling rate of profit, though I am aware he adduced counteracting tendencies that could increase the rate of profit?

Robin Cox

Haslemere

Reply:

The outstanding feature of what Marx wrote on this subject is his insistence that he was dealing only with tendencies, some working in one direction and some in the opposite direction. So at the beginning of Chapter XIV in Capital Vol 3 he wrote: “For this reason we have referred to the fall of the average rate of profit as a tendency to fall.”

The chief factor leading to a fall in the rate of profit arises from the tendency of the composition of capital to change in the direction that of every £1,000,000 capital invested a larger part takes the form of constant capital and a smaller part variable capital (wages). He illustrated this (see Chapter XIII) by showing how, with the same rate of exploitation and the same amount of surplus-value, the rate of profit on a capital of low composition would be 50 per cent. and on a capital of higher composition 20 per cent.

In Chapter XIV he listed some counter-acting tendencies, the first of which was increasing the intensity of exploitation, i.e. extracting more surplus-value from the workers.

But the capitalist cannot increase the intensity of exploitation simply because he wants to. He has to take account of the degree of resistance the workers can put up. Marx dealt with this in Chapter XIV of Value, Price and Profit. He showed that the actual rate of profit “is only settled by the continuous struggle between capitalist and labourer, the capitalist constantly tending to reduce wages to their physical minimum and to extend the working day to its physical maximum, while the working man constantly presses in the opposite direction. The matter resolves itself into a question of the respective powers of the combatants.”

That this is not just an academic question is shown by Engels in his 1892 Preface to The Condition of the Working Class in 1844, where he points out that in the fifty years since 1848 the factory workers “are undoubtedly better off” and that the condition of the workers organized in trade unions “has remarkably improved since 1848".

On the other hand a glance at Chapter XIV of Capital Vol. 3 will show that some of the factors listed by Marx as tending to raise the rate of profit are still operating.

It should also be borne in mind that in dealing with the rate of profit Marx was concerned with the workers in the productive sphere where alone value is created. This should not be confused with the different question of the proportion of annual national income received by the whole working class. In Chapter II of Value, Price and Profit Marx accepted the possibility that at that time 86 per cent. of the population received only 33 per cent, of the national income. Even if that figure exaggerated the actual degree of inequality, it is undoubtedly true that 86 per cent. of the population in this country now receive a larger proportion of national income than when Marx wrote.

Editors.

Letter: World Wide (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

World Wide

After having received two issues of the Socialist Standard I must say what an excellent magazine it is, exploring the fundamental principles of both capitalism and Socialism. Although I largely agree with the aims of your organization there are a few points in your declaration of principles that I disagree with. (1) The Working class is not confined to those who "produce but do not possess”, as over half of its number work in the so called service industries, and a good many others are on the dole. (2) The population of this country benefit from the exploitation of the less developed countries, just as the capitalist class benefit from the exploitation of the working class, and therefore requiring a majority of the population of this country to be in favour of Socialism before its establishment is, on an international scale, like demanding that a majority of the capitalist class must be in favour beforehand on a national scale. Being a socialist, and therefore an internationalist, I consider this prerequisite of Socialism to be both undemocratic and politically naive. (3) I do not consider that the SPGB is the only party ‘seeking working class emancipation’, and consider that if you accepted this you could play a very constructive part in the victory of revolutionary Socialism in this country. After 73 years I would have thought that you would have realized that there was something wrong with your methods. (4) Socialism, at least in the short term, will not make material poverty 'give place to comfort’ for the majority of this country’s population, as first the discrepancy between our wealth and that of the less developed world has to be rectified. Despite these disagreements I do strongly sympathize with your party and its aims, and would like to find out more about its views.

K. Knight, 

Exeter

Reply:

On point (1): You are correct. The working class is not confined to those employed in manufacturing industries but consists of those who do all of the necessary work of capitalist society. The definition is based not on the kind of work but the need to work. The vast majority own no part of the means of production and distribution and must therefore sell their mental and physical energies. their labour-power, to the capitalist class. Those “on the dole” share the same class relationship to the means of living as their employed fellow-workers.

(2) The capitalist class exploits the working class by paying workers less in wages than the value of the wealth which they as a class produce. Workers in this country (as in the rest of the world) are paid for the value of their labour-power. They do not get a bonus because of conditions in, say, South America. Following the dictates of the system capitalists everywhere seek to invest and trade in the most profitable manner and will take advantage of conditions in the poorer areas of the world. The propertlyless majority in the less developed countries are exploited by their "local" capitalist class.

We do not understand how the requirement that a vast majority of the working class must be in favour of Socialism in order to get it can be undemocratic.

(3) We do not know of any other party, in this country, which has Socialism as its sole aim and there is no other way to working-class emancipation. There are other parties which share some of the same terminology but they are only interested in our support on their terms, i.e. for some short term or reformist aim. We cannot have Socialism until the vast majority of the working class is ready to organize to that end. If it were possible to get Socialism on our own and make the world a present of it we surely would. For 73 years only the SPGB has kept the issue of Socialism clear and alive. During that time the same arguments have rotated in opposition—and workers have followed leaders up the same blind alleys. There is no short cut to the spread of Socialist knowledge. However if you have some fresh ideas or can tell us of some different method we are ready to listen.

(4) We agree with you that the first priority for Socialist society will be to ensure that every human being has enough to eat. Socialism will very quickly solve such problems as hunger by removing the fetters from production.

Editors.

Letter: 'With apologies to Alice' (1977)

Letter to the Editors from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

G. W. Walford (London N. 1): “We have answered three questions and that is enough ... Do you think we can listen all day to such stuff?” (With apologies to Alice; except that it is not three questions but one familiar assertion, repeated ad infinitum.)

Blogger's Note:

I don't know about three questions but George Walford did have at least three letters in the Socialist Standard in 1977:

• May 1977: What is our IQ?
• Jul 1977: Class & Understanding
• Oct 1977: Class and Ideology

SPGB Meetings (1977)

Party News from the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

He's telling us (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Since the quantity of money capable of being absorbed by the circulation is given for a given mean velocity of currency, all that is necessary in order to abstract a given number of sovereigns from the circulation is to throw the same number of pound notes into it, a trick well known to all bankers. 

(Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, p. 136, Kerr edition)

Socialist Sonnet No. 215: Bloody Bondi (2025)

   From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

Bloody Bondi

There’s blood in the sand, sharks circle offshore.

An unridden surf is still surging in

Under an ascendant unflinching sun,

Rapacious gulls hover and dive and soar.

Beach bags wouldn’t have been packed with bandages,

Flip flops and sun block, but no tourniquets.

A day for standing down and being at ease

With the world awhile, away from its rages.

Folk gathered comfortably together,

Sharing a common weal for a few hours,

Unaware agents of much darker powers

Were preparing for a change in the weather.

How the day started! How the day finished!

With humanity, once more, diminished.

 

D. A.

Life and Times: Bob Dylan in Swansea (2025)

The Life and Times column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time. His music is top of my list, as it is of many people’s. I’ve seen him perform live a number of times – in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham. So why wasn’t I jumping for joy when my local newspaper carried the story that the 84-year old legend was soon to do three concerts (not one but three) in my own little home town – and at a venue a walking distance from where I live? In fact, not only was I not jumping for joy, I didn’t even want to go. Why not? Well, because, as I see it, Dylan has been going downhill musically for a long time – since the late 1990s in fact. The bits and pieces of some of the recent live performances by him I’ve seen on the web have seemed especially dire. So why would I risk spoiling the fond memories I had of him at his best? Don’t get me wrong. He’s still one hell of a wordsmith and, though there was much questioning of his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, I was less surprised than many. But my perception was that the current package couldn’t be anything but a disappointment – even if the many confirmed ‘bobcats’ attending wouldn’t see it like that.

I relayed news of the concerts to my son, a great Dylan enthusiast too. His quick reply was ‘We’re going and I’ll pay’. So I relented, and on an evening in early November we left the house and walked the relatively short distance along the sea front to see the first concert of the Swansea Arena leg of Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour.

What was it like? To be frank, better than I expected. ‘Mixed’ might be the right word – and in more senses than one. Firstly, because he mixed songs from his most recent album (ie ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’) with a selection from previous albums. Secondly because most of the songs he performed from that latest album could, in my view, only be described as dirge-like (and to make it worse some of them seeming to go on forever), while his earlier numbers were well performed on the whole, even if with almost unrecognisable arrangements compared to the original versions. But then Dylan has always been known for going against the grain, despite the fact that, in the content of his songs, any explicitly anti-establishment or ‘protest’ matter is way back in the past. And it must be said that his voice is still strong and that he was, as always in his concerts, backed by a group of exceptionally good musicians. The other thing is that the sell-out audience of 3,000 – to me a surprisingly diverse gathering in terms of age (teenagers to aged hippies) and gender (very much a 50-50 split) – absolutely loved it. ‘What an amazing evening’, one of them who’d come all the way from West Yorkshire posted on a Facebook page the following day. And a good many others had clearly come from afar. Before the start, on our row alone, we chatted with fans from Wrexham, Plymouth, Bristol and Milford Haven. Then at 8 o’clock sharp Dylan and his band walked on, the music started and, after performing for a full two hours, with no breaks or banter between songs, they stood up and walked off. The crowd stood up too and clapped and cheered and shouted for more. But they didn’t get it and the lights came on.

The show over, the question I had to ask myself was whether this, at bottom, was just another example of the way the entertainment industry sells us thrills (often meaningless) to patch over the uniformity and stress of the wage and salary system most of us are compelled to spend our lives in? Was it part of that alienation from mutually cooperative activity which is inherently an obsession with celebrities (people we do not know personally and we may have little in common with) and which is the direct opposite of a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with others?

There’s no doubt that Dylan is some kind of hero to many of those who go to his concerts. And it must be said that he has something unique to offer that makes people listen to him and want to go. Many of his lyrics present ideas and images which, while often anything but immediately decipherable and sometimes downright puzzling, do at least give food for thought and reflection. But it’s the worship of the man rather than of his work that, like celebrity worship in general, I see as questionable and as a symptom of the underlying follow-your-leader mentality that capitalism instils and educates people for. You can like (or love) the music and the lyrics, yes. But to put the individual who produces it on some kind of rarified pedestal seems to me part of that ‘superior being’ idea, which is seen at its worst in the kind of cult worship to be found around ‘charismatic’ figures, whether in entertainment, in sport or in politics.

What’s for certain, however, is that in the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – one without leaders or led, governments or governed and based on common ownership of resources and democratic organisation and decision making – each individual will have the time and space to cultivate their own talents freely and, while no doubt admiring the talents and achievements of others, will be unlikely to see them as heroes. Rather in fact each person will have the confidence to be their own hero.

Howard Moss

Pathfinders: Cheating the reaper (2025)

The Pathfinders Column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s a dark and ghoulish story for your Christmas-time delight. Back in September, just before the wall-to-wall media orgy of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un met up for a big military parade in Beijing, accompanied by their chums Lukashenko of Belarus, Pezeshkian of Iran and Min Aung Hlaing of the Myanmar junta. This self-congratulatory Comic-Con of the Marvel Supervillain Universe was chiefly notable for a ‘hot mic’ moment in which Putin and Xi were overheard talking about the prospects of human longevity. According to reports, the conversation went like this:

Putin (aged 72 at the time): ‘Biotechnology is continuously developing… Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and [you can] even achieve immortality.’

Xi (also aged 72): ‘Some predict that in this century humans may live to 150 years old’.

Ha ha, they wish. One of the few consolations of being an elderly worker in capitalism is that no matter how rich these capitalist bastards are, they can’t cheat death any more than you can. This little soundbite reveals that they are keenly aware of that fact too. It’s just not fair, is it? You go to all the trouble of demolishing democracy, crushing your opponents, cowing your population, and making yourself dictator for life, only to have death pull the rug from under you just like it does for the little people.

It’s not just the autocrats, of course. Donald Trump, while not believing in exercise or healthy food, nevertheless appointed ‘longevity enthusiasts’ including RF Kennedy to key health posts. Rich Silicon Valley tech bros like Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos also harbour Methuselah aspirations, reasoning that if there’s any way to extend life, their money will find it . There are individuals like Bryan Johnson who are so obsessed with longevity that they will put themselves through the most punishing and joyless regimes in order to wring life out to the very last drop. Instead they are likely proof of the old joke that renouncing all pleasures doesn’t make you live longer, it just seems like it .

Though it’s still considered ‘fringe of the fringe’, there is a history of research into longevity, from plasma therapy to fusing old and young mice together, and even injecting pureed monkey testicle into the human scrotum. Instead of seeing death as the great leveller, why not treat it as a preventable disease like any other, for which treatments can be found? The Greenland shark can live for 500 years or more, and only starts dating at 150. There must be sound biological reasons for that, aside from living in a perpetual icebox.

The World Health Organization in 2018 included old age as a disease in its 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases, until vigorous protest made them remove it again. For critics, pathologising a universal process involves serious ethical concerns, stigmatising old people as ‘having something wrong with them’ .

And there is the big picture. Death is the reason we exist. If animals didn’t die, there would have been no evolution and therefore no us. If humans became immortal, society might ossify, and you’d have to abolish children. But never mind big pictures and bleeding hearts, think of the profits. ‘They are interested only in the biomolecular and the monetisable… They seemed strangely uncurious [sic] about the enemy they have declared war on. Ageing to them is simply a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’.

In any case, no one wants to make workers immortal, only the super-rich. Putin, famous for his ludicrous bare-chested-on-a-horse publicity photos, is fixated with being a ‘healthy strongman’, and goes everywhere with ‘an army of doctors’. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and has put billions into anti-ageing research, stem-cell cloning and organ transplant technology. It’s also scurrilously reported that he bathes in deer blood, a traditional Siberian shamanic ‘remedy’. In all this he is no doubt encouraged by his inner circle of hangers-on, who warmly appreciate that keeping him alive is their ticket to staying in power.

What’s the reality behind the hopeful hype? Professor of vaccine immunology John Tregoning points out that you can’t keep swapping out failing organs indefinitely because a) general anaesthetics are a calculated risk that increases with age and each operation, and b) there’s a high risk of MRSA infections, including sepsis, with every transplant op. Putin would be playing Russian Roulette, over and over. Cloned organs are not a thing, so you’d need a lifetime of immuno-suppressants, with an ever-present threat of fatal infections. There is not an endless supply of suitable organs, in fact there’s a world shortage. There is some state-of-the-art work using genetically modified pig organs, but if you survive six months after a transplant, that is considered an ‘amazing feat’.

Meanwhile, Tregoning adds, the rest of your body would still be ageing. The largest organ is your skin, and how would you replace that? ‘Even if you could replace all of the internal organs, you’d need to replace your muscles, your bone, your skin, everything is aging at fairly constant rates…. Just putting a new heart in is like taking a 1980s Ford Cortina and putting a brand new Porsche engine in and expecting it to run fine’.

On top of all that, brain connectivity declines over time too, and there’s no known way to reset that. There is some horizon research into a class of drugs called senolytics, which eat dead cells and scar tissue and may be a way to reboot the human body from the inside out, but for now they only work with fruit flies and nematode worms, and have toxic side effects.

Happily, today’s ruthless autocrats stand no chance of cheating the reaper. But new ones will replace them as long as capitalism survives. The world’s workers need to wield the political scythe where it would do most good.

Paddy Shannon

Violence and war: Are they inevitable? The long view (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

It’s become widely accepted that, for well over 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers, humans like us, lived in egalitarian societies. So why, beginning around 12,000 years ago, did most of them, within a relatively short period of time, give up that lifestyle for settled agriculture and, in so doing, move to a different way of life and new social structures, where a dominance hierarchy of the few began to take over from equality for all, leading to exploitation, slavery, violence and war?

The invention of scarcity

The answer to that is multi-faceted. But, broadly speaking, such a transformation can only have come about as a result of environmental factors pushing people into the imagined greater security that the longer-term and more abundant supplies of food and other materials derived from farming would have been capable of producing. The trouble is that, once that happened, there was no obvious going back, as it brought with it the creation of hierarchies and states and rule by those few who in previous societies would have been considered anti-social for their dominating tendencies. That minority would now have much freer rein for their deviant behaviour, resulting in struggles for power, the development of classes and rulers and ruled, and the emergence of what came to be considered natural orders headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and high priests, with the majority living at a lower level of subsistence than as hunter-gatherers (‘the invention of scarcity’, it has been called). This in turn gave rise to full-scale predatory social systems (first slavery, then feudalism, and now capitalism) where the majority have been kept in check by tiny, privileged minorities either by the threat of violence from higher authority and/or by ideological constructs or smokescreens such as tribal loyalty or nationalism.

Original sin and the free market

In the lens of recorded history the result of these dominance structures and of the conflicts over wealth and resources that have arisen between the privileged ruling minorities has been (and still is) large-scale violence and continual wars. And over most of this history, the explanation for this found in writings, both secular and religious, has been that conflict between humans is the natural state of things. Christianity, for example, expressed this through the idea of ‘original sin’, while commentators not dependent on religious doctrine tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, the 16th century Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings were ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. Similar views were expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, which argued that human beings are greedy by nature and that human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. The following century, the economist Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, also famously insisted that private interest (or ‘self-love’) was ‘natural’ human behaviour, justifying a society based on the ‘free market’, where everyone seeks their own self-advantage regardless of the social and economic inequality that goes with it. Some questioning of these views did begin in the 19th century with the writings of Charles Darwin and early practitioners of the science of anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan. But it was only in the 20th century, with the increased flowering of anthropology and the new science of archaeology, that serious doubt was cast on the belief that human beings were deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive, as new perspectives emerged from growing evidence of how people had lived and interacted in the pre-farming era, the overwhelmingly longest period of human existence on earth.

Not that the traditional ‘fixed human nature’ view simply went away. It continued to be expressed in much popular writing in particular. Examples of this between the 1950s and the 1970s were books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and imaginative fiction like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (and arguably George Orwell’s Animal Farm too). It also carried on coming from some ‘scientific’ sources, for example Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and, most recently, Richard Overy in Why War (2024). Such writers tend to see war as having been constant throughout the whole of human history, suggesting that humans are war prone and have what Overy calls ‘a psychological predisposition for warfare’. And this leads that writer to conclude that ‘if war has a very long human history, it also has a future’.

But, overall, the last 30-40 years have marked a significant shift in perspectives both among social commentators and scientific experts. Among a slew of studies on this and allied topics (some of them reviewed in this journal), titles like Beyond War, The Human Potential for Peace, Team Human, Survival of the Friendliest, and Ultra-Social tell their own tale. The majority of these writings conclude from their authors’ investigations not that human beings are non-violent and non-prone to war per se but rather that violence and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to it by circumstances. Even the widely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, though often cited as supporting the idea of innate human selfishness, on close examination does no such thing. In fact it is largely a book about altruism and cooperative behaviour. Even its writer is on record as saying that its title may have been an unfortunate one and that perhaps a different title such as ‘The Immortal Gene’, or even ‘The Altruistic Organism’, might have been more appropriate.

Highly flexible or pro-social?

Highly relevant in this connection too is the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent 50 years researching the origins of war and has been called ‘the greatest living scholar of human warfare’. In an article in Scientific American in 2018, entitled ‘War is not part of human nature’, Ferguson notes that the overwhelming evidence on war, which he defines as armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group, suggests that it was not always present among humans. Instead it began as a result of societal changes at varying times in different locations but with its earliest signs appearing around 12,000 years ago – so closely coinciding with humankind’s first experiments with agriculture. In a later article (2023) in the journal Public Anthropologist, he states: ‘Our species is not biologically destined for war. War is not an inescapable part of social existence’; and ‘Obviously, we are capable of war and often choose it. The question is whether evolution tilts us in that direction. I say no.’ His findings, he says, show that: ‘egalitarian mobile hunter foragers generally don’t make war’ and that ‘agriculture and states went along with more war’. His most recent book, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? (2023) reiterates this with the conclusion that ‘Men are not born to kill but they can be cultivated to kill’.

This is a perspective also echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Here Harari makes a clear statement about humans as essentially flexible creatures, insisting that human behaviour is shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. He goes on to say that, if our social arrangements were determined simply by our biology, then there would never have been the wide gamut of behaviour patterns, relationships and cultures which we know about and which can also be witnessed in what we see around us now.

Some studies go even further than this, seeing humans as naturally ‘pro-social’ beings with cooperation not competition, peacefulness not violence as their intrinsic default. In such studies, qualities such as kindness and empathy are seen as existing ‘naturally’ in the overwhelming majority of humans, as long as overwhelming forces don’t get in the way of it. The historian Tine De Moor, for example, in The Dilemma of the Commoners (2015), claims that ‘history teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’, that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and that ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’. This kind of outlook is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind. A Hopeful History (2021) in which he presents arguments many have found compelling that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal and cooperative and that the outstanding feature of human behaviour is the desire to act together and to display tolerance and mutual support even if circumstances are dire. As part of the evidence for this he points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis without any prospect of gain or reward. John Gowdy’s Ultra Social. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), though in most ways a quite different kind of book from Bregman’s, echoes a similar message with statements like ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’ and with an insistence that, if we have a ‘nature’, it is a ‘pro-social’ one, a natural inclination, to be empathetic, associative and cooperative.

Such considerations about human behaviour have been accompanied – and often confirmed – by the more detailed and scientific studies of primeval hunter-gatherer societies that modern technological methods have made possible. A recent study, for example, analysing evidence of traumatic injuries in 189 individuals from 25 different sites revealed healed bone treatment, suggesting a story of mutual aid, patience and dedication among those people (Victoria Romano and others, ‘Bone trauma and interpersonal care among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina’, International Journal of Paleopathology, December 2025, pp.10-24). It has been estimated that around one in five hunter-gatherers would have been likely to suffer some kind of injury or disability and while most wounds would have been the predictable bruises and fractures of daily life requiring only a short break from everyday activities, others were likely to have been worse, leaving individuals unable to hunt, gather, grind plants, craft tools, etc, for months, or perhaps a lifetime. Here we are presented with evidence that those suffering in this way would have been cared for by the community, even if they were not economically ‘useful’. Such research, therefore, lends weight to the ‘pro-social’ arguments many are making about a fundamentally benign human nature.

But in the end, whether humans are intrinsically ‘pro-social’ or simply highly flexible, the evidence is that, while violence and war are certainly possible forms of human behaviour as both history and the present show, coexistence without violence or war also presents itself as another possible form of human behaviour. This was a reality recognised as far back as 1985 in Unesco’s ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, in the following terms: ‘Biology does not condemn humanity to war … It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature’. And the undeniable fact is that the vast majority of interactions that take place in daily life between human beings are co-operative, peaceful and harmonious, not rude or cruel or anti-social. We do not normally expect to have arguments or experience serious friction with our fellow humans in the course of our daily activities, and most of the time we don’t. And, on the relatively rare occasions when that does happens, it stands out – precisely because it is rare.

Cooperation or competition?

The broader point here is that, while we do not say that the kind of society socialists advocate and regard as eminently possible will be entirely argument or conflict free (no human society could be), we do say that the scope for argument and conflict will be far less than in the competitive, insecure society we live in under capitalism. This society, in both its ethic and its organisation, runs directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It drives people to compete with others, to try to get the better of them and even to do them down. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans and often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections and competitive situations created for us in our daily lives, most of us still manage to be largely kind to others, to cooperate with them and to share. In a new kind of egalitarian society, one of free and equal access, with no buying and selling or wages or salaries, with co-operative endeavour, and with technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy need and not for profit-making ends, is it far-fetched to believe that such behaviour will come fully into its own?

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Books mentioned in the article that have featured elsewhere in previous Socialist Standards

• Sep 1969: A review of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
• Aug 1993: A review of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
• Nov 2015: A review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• May 2021: A review of Humankind. A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
• Sep 2022: A review of Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

Proper Gander: Manipulated by the Monoform (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mass media is a ‘systematically organised, one-way path from the producer to the spectator. Constantly. Constantly. And that is not communication. We should try and find some other word for it. And it’s certainly manipulation’, according to film-maker and theorist Peter Watkins, who has died at the age of 90. His words come from a 2001 video interview following the release of his film La Commune, through which he aimed to use the medium of film-making to communicate, rather than just present one interpretation. The film re-enacts the Paris Commune of 1871 and was made in a less hierarchical, more democratic way than found in the mass media’s usual output, by having non-professional actors improvising scenes and shown discussing the views of both their characters and themselves.

La Commune was the last film Watkins made, after which he honed his theories about how the media industry functions for his 2004 book The Media Crisis. His films, in one way or another, focus on conflict between states and between classes. Their subject matter includes nuclear war (The War Game, The Journey), oppression of political activists (Punishment Park, Evening Land) and historical flashpoints (Culloden, La Commune). His two productions of the late 1960s, Privilege and The Gladiators, share the theme of the elite using the media to divert and channel working class dissent. These films employ a setting of the near-future to examine this, while his theories about film-making investigate how this happens in real life.

Watkins argued that the mass audio-visual media (MAVM) industry moulds the reactions of its audience through the style and arrangement of its products. He called the prevailing template for films and programmes the ‘Monoform’. This is defined as ‘a formatted and repetitive TV language form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure’ (Notes on the Media Crisis, Peter Watkins, 2010). This is a familiar description of dramas and documentaries with predictably linear plots, scenes too short to explore details and mood-accentuating soundtracks. This style is particularly noticeable in the common practice of documentaries starting with a quick summary of the programme to come, reducing what could be a complex subject into a couple of minutes (before then reducing the subject into only forty-or-so minutes for the rest of the duration). Watkins continues ‘Because of its extreme rapidity (especially the version developed over the past 20 years [ie, from circa 1990]), the Monoform gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning […]. It is organised to create pre-determined responses, which means that before the audience sees any Monoform film or television programme, its producers already know how they (the audience) will react – or at least such is the intention’ (ibid). In emphasising how the format or approach adopted by film-makers can be used to push an agenda, Watkins is echoing Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said ‘the medium is the message’ in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. As the MAVM is owned by corporations, their films and programmes are intended to reinforce acceptance of the social framework of which the MAVM is a part, as well as make a profit for their shareholders. The Monoform followed by the MAVM’s products reinforces this acceptance by discouraging critical thinking about that social framework. Here, Watkins’ views have similarities with those of Frankfurt School luminary Herbert Marcuse, who described how capitalism utilises the mass media as a means of social control, including by stifling anti-capitalist thought.

A film or programme’s style, music and editing support the priorities of the media industry even if its content appears to criticise society. Watkins says ‘The fact that many filmmakers and media intellectuals believe that a radical subject or a powerful theme in themselves create an ‘alternative’ cinema is another paradox. In most cases it is only the content that could be considered alternative: a radical theme per se does not challenge the over-riding problem of hierarchical form, process and structure. In fact, it only confuses the issue, and is a prime reason why critical thinking on the role of the MAVM has not developed beyond a limited point’ (ibid). This may explain why films and TV programmes haven’t prompted truly radical political action, even when they often depict capitalism’s failings.

Another way that programme-making is shaped by its capitalist context is what Watkins called ‘the universal clock’. This refers to how television shows are made in uniform lengths to allow time for adverts within and between them on a fixed schedule. The prerogatives of the marketing industry are important enough to limit the running times of programmes, chiefly those on traditional broadcast channels. YouTube has its own norms for how advertising affects content, with commercials intruding upon videos mid-sentence, and vloggers interrupting their spiel to promote their sponsors, both in a crass way which makes the scheduling of TV commercial breaks almost seem polite in comparison.

Watkins gave a cogent, class-conscious account of how the media industry’s role in capitalist society impacts on the nature of its products. Films and TV programmes project the hierarchical structure of capitalism through the way they are edited and paced, regardless of their content. The template followed by MAVM output is intended to present a one-sided view, reinforcing acceptance of the status quo and discouraging critical discussion among the audience. In his own films, such as La Commune, Watkins tried to counter these tendencies through his collaborative, improvisational methods, with the consequence that his work became unattractive to major studios, distributors and broadcasters. His marginalisation, to some extent, proves his theories right. He has left us with not only a set of challenging, passionate films but also a valuable contribution to explaining how capitalism’s media industry has to operate, by manipulating us, its consumers.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Further reading on Peter Watkins from the Socialist Standard archives

• Oct 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 1
• Nov 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 2
• Jul 1966: Review of The War Game
• Oct 1980: Review of The War Game