Rip-Van-Daily Mail Wakes Up (1951)

From the August 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

At last it has happened fellow workers, a great revolutionary discovery has been made, a discovery so outstanding and unique that it requires a large headline in the Scottish Daily Mail (18/6/51). There it is friends, in bold letters, the statement of the century, "Lack of money makes crooks,” and on reading further, we find that this headline alludes to a report by a Stockport, Cheshire, committee set up to examine juvenile delinquency and the increase in petty pilfering in large stores. Now this reason for stealing is really quite new; after all, who would think that a child seeing all sorts of fancy things laid out before him in a shop, would take one, just because his old man hasn't the where-with-all to let him buy them. There must be some other reason surely.

We know of course what the "pulpit parasites” say about theft. As far as they are concerned, it is something that is "born" in the child, and all those children that are good throughout their lives, and don't covet their neighbour's goods, especially if their neighbour (metaphorically speaking, of course), happens to be their boss, will eventually climb the gold stairs and spend the rest of eternity sitting around in a long white nightgown doing an act like Harpo Marx only more solemn like. The  "bad” ones, so we are told, usually end up on a lower stratum, wielding a shovel in an atmosphere that would create a demand for asbestos suits.

Then there are those modern witch doctors, the psychologists. They’ve got their own reason for a child stealing and it is usually something like this. When three weeks old, the child saw its mother hit his father across the skull with a rolling pin. This left a lasting impression on the child’s sub-conscious mind (also on the old man's skull), and Junior has spent the rest of his days taking things, not knowing why, of course, but really because he is looking for a tin helmet to protect his pop from any more rolling pin massage.

Lastly, we come to the S.P.G.B., who have been saying for almost 50 years what the Scottish Daily Mail has just found out, and that is, that material conditions are the determining factor in human behaviour. They go even further than that, and point out that the main cause of the vast majority of problems that face the working class today is poverty, and that the sole cause of this poverty is the fact that the working class only receive back, in money form, a proportion of the value they put into the commodities they produce. But wait a minute, this being true, it must mean then, that the Capitalist, who pockets the difference between what his workers get for their wages, and what he gets for the commodities the workers produce, is really doing a large bit of stealing himself. Tut, tut Somebody had better tell the Scottish Daily Mail quickly so that they can get it into the news, and then perhaps we may see the following headline, "Lord Nockalot steals £10,000 from his employees in previous financial year.” Yes, perhaps.

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