Proper Gander: Lessons from Adolescence (2025)

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

A little over a year since Mr Bates vs The Post Office reminded us that TV drama can still have an impact, Netflix’s Adolescence has also shaped debate in Parliament, online, in the media and round the proverbial water cooler at work. Adolescence has been particularly resonant because the issue of violence from young males which it raises feels both more emotive and widespread. The story centres on a 13-year-old boy who is accused of stabbing a girl from his school. Each episode covers an hour at intervals after the murder, with the first showing Jamie’s arrest at his home. Episode two follows the police’s initial visit to the children’s school, the third is a conversation between Jamie and a psychologist some months afterwards and the last episode looks at how the rest of his family are managing over a year later. The performances from Owen Cooper as Jamie and Stephen Graham as his father Eddie are particularly gripping, with Graham also co-creating and co-writing the series. Impressively, each episode was filmed in one continuous take, which must have involved intricately structuring and choreographing the scenes to get the camera and the actors in the right places at the right times.

The drama gives less emphasis to the details of the murder than to the circumstances around it, gradually bringing out the combination of reasons behind Jamie’s actions. His family isn’t portrayed as dysfunctional apart from his father’s anger, described as a generational trauma passed on to Jamie. His own anger is shown sparingly and as being fuelled by online culture. The ‘manosphere’ to which Jamie is drawn, of emojis, incels, influencers and abusive messages has led him to a view of women which leads to his crime. The script tends to understate the causes: Jamie is outwardly ‘normal’ rather than obviously aggressive. Online discourse isn’t explored in detail, other than several brief scenes where aspects of the ‘manosphere’ are mentioned, hinting at its links with far-right ideology. The meanings behind kidney bean emojis and ‘taking the red pill’ explained by the teenage characters would have been new to many viewers. An effect of this is to tell parents that they may not have understood the nature of online cultures their children are being tempted into, and how this can almost casually slide them into violence. In some ways, this is a modern version of past moral panics about the influence of horror comics, video nasties and computer games on young people, although this feels more serious, given today’s climate with the rise in knife crime and misogyny.

Much of the discussion sparked by Adolescence has concentrated on ‘toxic masculinity’, rather than another factor in what influenced Jamie. His school is depicted as a grim and tense place for children to learn in, taking into account that the scenes there are set only a few days after the murder. The teachers are depicted as policing behaviour more than teaching, while the regimented routines and drab walls aren’t much different from those of the police station or detention centre seen in other episodes. Our society’s institutions and environments encourage and reinforce alienation, with Jamie representing its extremes.

Adolescence isn’t a case study, although because it’s fiction perhaps it can be spoken about more openly than real cases. Its release was certainly timed well to contribute to a broader debate. In the same month, former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate, giving the BBC’s annual Richard Dimbleby Lecture, said that today’s young men need more wholesome role models rather than ‘callous, manipulative and toxic influencers’ online. Also in March, the Centre of Social Justice published its Lost Boys report which describes an increasing divergence between the future prospects of boys and girls, with girls now more likely to later have higher qualifications and higher-paid employment.

Various right-wing vloggers (and Elon Musk) opined that Adolescence is liberal-lefty propaganda which demonises white males and distracts from the proportion of stabbings committed by black youths. Their dislike of the drama is presumably due in part to its criticisms of the ‘manosphere’ they represent. Right-wing commentators were also more likely than those on the left to say that it is being used by the government to justify legislation about regulating online activity. The Online Safety Act 2023 passed into law under the previous Conservative government, and its implementation is still in progress under Labour’s regime. The Prime Minister met with the series’ creators and backed MP Anneliese Midgley’s call for it to be screened in schools with the aim of helping to deter teenage boys from misogyny and aggression. Secondary schools are already obliged to include ‘Relationships and Sex Education’ on their curriculum and updated guidance to cover sexual violence is being planned. Even if the state’s approach of embracing the programme and saying they are taking action over the issues it raises is sincere rather than cynical, it’s still a better PR move than ignoring or disputing the drama.

Adolescence has, at least for a few weeks, connected together various attempts to address concerns about some young males. But to what extent can tightening up legislation about online activity or showing the series in schools or promoting different role models counter misogynistic violence? The context of the problem remains. Titling the drama ‘Adolescence’ points towards the root of the issue being with younger people, especially boys. However, the real cause is found with the social conditions which shape adolescence. Therefore deeper social change is needed, although this risks being ignored among the piecemeal reforms and proposals.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Mr Bates vs The Post Office was reviewed in the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Letter: “Socialism’s prospects have never been better” (2025)

Letter to the Editors from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Socialism’s prospects have never been better”

In 1995 I moved to the ‘City of Three Revolutions,’ as St Petersburg was known in Soviet times, and lived there for ten years. Although my antennas were always up for signals of a socialist spirit, or even just the memory of one, they registered none. My reaction was to dive deeper into the history of the revolution. I began noticing things about it that were out of sync with my reading of Marx and Engels, like the fact that almost all the top Bolsheviks were from the upper class, not to mention that what they did to the workers they were supposedly leading to communism was far worse than what they had suffered under their old masters.

Lenin brought his Bolshevik Party to power on the cresting wave of the democratic workers’ councils in 1917. Then, with a few changes, he essentially restored tsarist autocracy. Freedom of speech, the press, and assembly were again suppressed, and the absolute power of a non-elected monarch, a dictator, reappeared along with a centralized bureaucracy. Under Lenin, the chinovnik-bureaucrat apparatus once more became the master of the land and of thousands of industrial enterprises. It included many tsarist bureaucrats, who, together with a few Bolsheviks, were the bosses in the ministries. Lenin’s bureaucracy blended with the tsarist bureaucracy and quickly adopted the same rules. Everything that upset or challenged the interests of centralized economic and socio-political life was eliminated.

Naturally, the USSR presented itself as socialist. From the standpoint of capitalists the world over, this was confirmed by the abolition of private property and the free market. For Soviet workers, however, their government, though endlessly spewing Marxist phraseology, was a harsh exploiter. The USSR had very little in common with socialism, if by this we mean a society without exploitation and classes. Abolition of private property and nationalization of the means of production are not socialism if the direct producers do not control the economy. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was not a union because Moscow ruled despotically over the regions. It was not soviet because the Bolsheviks eliminated the workers’ councils. It was not socialist as workers’ self-management was destroyed. And it was not republican because there were no free elections. Every word in this ‘USSR’ was a bald lie.

German and Dutch Marxists, including among others, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Leo Jogiches, Paul Levy, Franz Mehring, Otto Rühle, Anton Pannekoek and Herman Gorter, exercised an early criticism of the concept Lenin elaborated in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? whereby a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries would ‘substitute’ for the working class and carry out a socialist revolution in its name. They insisted that socialism was not a party affair and argued that all political parties – even those identifying as socialist – are inherently bourgeois in nature because they always have a hierarchy with leaders who make all the important decisions and followers who do as they are told. The very idea of the political party was a violation of the credo and collectivist spirit of socialism.

For the longest time, I could not understand the phenomenon of well-off, usually well-educated, individuals leading revolutions, people like Lenin, Trotsky, Castro, Guevara, and Mao. The answer is self-evident, but it took me a while to realize this. Intellectuals have two routes to power. One is to join the establishment and work to preserve and extend it in the spirit of Niccolo Machiavelli. For the more daring or desperate, the other way is to lead a revolution and make the establishment theirs. Leftists, including Leninists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, Maoists and other ‘ists’ have a special interest in state capitalism, are based on the exploitation of and rule over the workers, and make up capitalism’s ‘radical’ left wing.

Since the Paris Commune of 1871, the world’s workers have not discovered any other form of revolutionary organization than the council. Councils know no hierarchy, all decisions are taken collectively, and their representatives answer only to their members. This is the form in which the social-revolutionary workers’ movement has clothed itself – like the soviets that were shut down and swept away by the Bolsheviks in 1917-1921, and the similar elimination of workers’ councils (arbeiterrate) in Germany in the early twenties, the councils that were eliminated by the French ‘communists’ in 1968, Iran’s mullahs in 1979, and Poland’s apparatchiki in 1981, among many others.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not say, ‘Unite the workers of the world! They said instead, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Their audience were workers, not upper-class intellectuals with guilt complexes and political ambitions. Indeed, if they are to blame for anything, it is the sanguine hope they gave to so many that capitalism would spread across the planet and take root much faster than it did, along with the expectation that the victory of the proletariat, by virtue of its sheer size and majority alone, would be guaranteed and the world would finally lay the awful system to rest. In fairness to Marx and Engels, however, the first words of the Communist Manifesto, published in distant 1848, are: ‘A specter is haunting Europe.’ The confusion may be due to the pamphlet’s forward-looking last sentence: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ It is now 2025, and there have never been more workers on the planet. Moreover, the hold on them of political parties is largely a thing of the past. The prospects for international socialist revolution have never been better.

Evel Economakis

Reply:

Obviously we agree with your criticism of the so-called USSR and of Leninism but —equally obviously —cannot agree that ‘the very idea of the political party was a violation of the credo and collectivist spirit of socialism’.

The historical figures you list seem to have meant parties based on the principle of leadership such as Lenin’s vanguard party and parliamentary Social Democratic and Labour parties that ask workers to follow them as leaders by passively voting for them. We agree with rejecting that kind of party but most (though not all, not Luxemburg for example) seem to have ruled out the possibility of a political party — as a party contesting elections with a view to winning political control — which ‘know no hierarchy, all decisions are taken collectively, and their representatives answer only to their members’. This is the sort of party we advocate. Such a party is necessary as workers need to organise to take control of the state if only to prevent it being used against them but also to coordinate the changeover from capitalism to socialism.

We have nothing against ‘workers councils’ as such as bodies that workers have formed from time to time under specific historical circumstances, but we don’t see them as a necessarily socialist revolutionary form. Not all the examples you list have even claimed that but advanced various trade-union type and political democracy demands. That said, workers will need to self-organise also in the places where they work to keep production and administration going while the workers’ party uses political control to end capitalist ownership of the means of production.

Editors

Cooking the Books: Prophecies about productivity (2025)

The Cooking The Books column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Sky to cut 2,000 jobs at its call centres in pivot to AI’ (Times, 28 March) is a typical headline these days as generative AI (like ChatGPT) is applied to white-collar work.

In an experiment carried out by an American firm of management consultants in 2023, call centre workers using AI handled 13.8 percent more customer enquiries per hour than those without, business professionals wrote 59 percent more documents per hour, and programmers coded 126 percent more projects per week. Averaging these, they came up with a figure of a 66 percent increase in productivity from applying AI. This they described as a ‘big deal’ because this ‘equate to 47 years of natural productivity gains in the United States’. But they were not comparing like with like.

They took into account only the work-time saved at the last stage of production, ignoring the labour previously expended, which would include in the case of their experiment labour spent on developing, installing and maintaining the AI system. If this had been taken into account, the productivity increase would be much smaller.

That developing and installing AI involves considerable amounts of labour is illustrated by a Sky spokesperson saying that ‘it was making a multi-million pound investment in its Livingston site, near Edinburgh, as part of a transformation “to deliver quicker, simpler and more digital customer service”’.

As the November 1979 Socialist Standard explained:

In everyday language a motor car is said to be ‘produced’ by the workers who assemble it, and bread to be ‘produced’ by workers in the bakehouse; but the labour of these workers is only a part of all that required to produce cars and bread. As Marx put it: “We must add to the quantity of labour last employed the quantity of labour previously worked up in the raw material of the commodity, and the labour bestowed on the implements, tools, machinery and buildings with which such labour is assisted” (Value, Price and Profit, chapter VI).

Let us assume that the ‘previous’ hours of labour needed to produce a commodity are 80, and the ‘last’ hours are 20 — a total of 100 hours. Let us further assume that without additional investment, but merely by simplifying the last operation, it becomes possible to reduce the necessary hours from 20 to 10. It then takes only 90 hours in all, in place of 100. Productivity will have risen by about 11 per cent. But if ‘productivity’ is calculated — wrongly — on the last operation only, it will appear to have increased by 100 per cent. Would anyone be so foolish as to look at it in that way? Well, yes — it is happening every day.

A news item about the introduction of a new machine operated by two men instead of the former ten will be presented as ‘two men do the work of ten’, as if the making and maintenance of the machine did not absorb additional labour. So productivity in that example will be said, wrongly, to have been multiplied by five. (…) As Marx explained, the amount of labour that is saved is not the whole saving on the last operating process, but the difference between that amount and the additional labour required for the new equipment (Capital, Vol.I. Kerr Edition, pp. 426-7). This is the true measure of increased productivity.

The mistaken theories have been responsible for a continuous enormous exaggeration of the increase of workers’ output, and corresponding false assumptions about the growth of unemployment. (…)

The consequence has been that every advance in technology — the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, computers and automation — and now the silicon chip — has given rise to prophecies that enormous numbers of workers would soon be out of work permanently.

China (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wild Ride: A Short History of the Opening and Closing of the Chinese Economy. By Anne Stevenson-Yang. Bui Jones, 2024. xxii +149pp.

This book really is Chinese capitalism up close. Its American author, the mother of a Chinese family, spent over 25 years living in China between the 1980s and 2014, first as a journalist and then as an entrepreneur in publishing and software. This gave her experience of life in China both in its social dimension and, more relevantly to this book, in the economic twists and turns that followed the Mao era (late 1970s onwards) leading right up to the present day. She presents the knowledge gained from this experience in a fascinatingly detailed way and with a turn of phrase that makes it far more readable than any recent academic study of that country’s development.

Unlike many commentators who seek to differentiate China’s economic system from that of the West, she has no scruple about labelling it as capitalist, understanding that, even if the country is far more socially and politically coercive than Western liberal democracies, it still operates, as Western capitalism does, a system of production for profit which divides its population into two main classes, a small one of extremely wealthy people, whether private individuals or state bureaucrats, and a vast majority of others who are forced to survive by selling their energies to an employer (again whether state or private) for a wage or salary.

The ‘wild ride’ of the title refers to the various iterations Chinese capitalism has been through since the extremely backwards state-run capitalism of Mao’s reign (which by the way she calls ‘socialism’ – something we would not accept), and her analysis is detailed and compelling. She sees the ‘ride’, even if in many ways smoke and mirrors, as broadly progressive in the sense of bringing alleviation to poverty in China and, while the system remains politically authoritarian, of being less nakedly repressive than the previous era. However, she sees things as having gone backwards since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, both in terms of autocratic state control over the population and of state capitalism reasserting its primacy over private ownership of capital. And she is pessimistic about the chances of this changing any time soon. It should of course be added that other commentators on China take a different view and think the pendulum is more likely to swing the other way, ie towards the freer, more open exchange of ideas which tends to characterise advanced capitalist development and provides a better terrain for the spread of socialist ideas. But this remains to be seen.

Howard Moss

Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The top 1 percent in the U.S … had a combined net worth of $49.2 trillion by the end of 2024. The combined value of almost 100 million U.S. homes during the same time was $49.7 trillion. 

(Newsweek)

‘Woke’ is not a precise, scientific term. But it typically refers to the attempt to combat forms of oppression – like racism and sexism – on the basis of identity politics, through means like quotas, changes to language, and raising awareness … ‘woke’ policies seek to ‘fight’ oppression on an individualistic basis, whilst completely jettisoning any idea of class struggle, or seeing oppression as being rooted in capitalist society. 

(The Communist)

Trucks carrying commercial goods, which are later sold in Gaza, are charged at least $20,000…while aid trucks are also subject to extortion before crossing to the enclave. Organi is a Sinai businessman, politician and tribal leader allied with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Organi’s name has become synonymous with unofficial profits made out of the suffocating Gaza blockade, particularly from desperate Palestinians attempting to flee the fighting. MEE last year revealed that Organi made at least $2m daily from Palestinians who left the Gaza Strip via the border crossing point with Egypt . . . 

(MEE)

While his crackdowns provoked outrage around the globe, Duterte and his brand of politics remained popular at home even after he left office. His daughter… riding on her family name, was elected Vice President in 2022 in a landslide victory alongside President Marcos Jr, himself the son of a former dictator who ruled the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. 

(Time)

A ceasefire in Ukraine is not about peace. It’s about money, just as the earlier war was. As all wars are, ultimately. An acceptable ceasefire for Trump, as well as for Putin, will involve a carve-up of Ukraine’s goodies. Rare earth minerals, land, agricultural production will be the real currency driving the agreement.

(MEE)

Tren de Aragua’s growth surged as a result of mass incarceration policies that began under Venezuela’s former President Hugo Chávez and expanded under current President Nicolás Maduro. Incarceration rates began to increase in 2009 and were exacerbated by police raids deployed in 2010 in marginalized neighborhoods across the country. Venezuela’s prisons became filled with young, poor men. 

(The Conversation)

The preconditions for a communist or socialist society are (1) the development of a productive potential sufficient to support the reasonable needs of the population and (2) a clear majority who want such a society and understand what it entails. The SPGB’s position is that precondition (1) has been met a long time ago, but we are a long way off from meeting precondition (2). If and when we do have a class-consciousness socialist majority, there is nothing to prevent us from immediately implementing the new society. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to linger on with one or another form of capitalism a moment longer.

(Letter in Weekly Worker)

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