Words that bear repeating. (1917)

From the September 1917 issue of the Socialist Standard

Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our good will and socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.

The World for the Workers.

— S.P.G.B. Manifesto, September 1914.

Editorial: The strikes in France (1953)

Editorial from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The strike movement which began on 5th August among Post Office workers and quickly spread to transport, gas, electricity and many other state and private undertakings and involved at its height some three or four million workers was still in progress a fortnight later; though by that time some workers had returned to work because their strikes had been deliberately limited to one or two days, and others had been reported as drifting back. As a movement to demonstrate workers' solidarity and to bring pressure to bear on the government and the employers it was complete and highly efficient. As was remarked by one observer, the Paris correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, “rarely has any strike movement in France, planned and announced in advance, been so successful ” (Manchester Guardian, 8/8/53).

The spark that set off the Post Office strike was a report that the Government’s “emergency” economy measures included reductions of Post Office staff and extending the age of retirement on pension. It was later denied that the Government had ever intended to make the later retirement compulsory but a possible explanation is that they were preparing the way and only the unanimous demonstration of resistance by the strikers made them repudiate it. The reason why the strike was enthusiastically joined by millions of other workers demanding higher wages was that the workers in general were finding their low standard of living being further reduced by rising prices. Mr. Douglas Jay, in the Daily Herald (13/8/53) estimated that “the average wage-earner in France today if he is single, gets a wage not much above two-thirds of what the British wage-earner gets." It is only through the higher rate of family allowances in France that the worker, if he has a wife and three children, has an income about equal to that of workers in Britain. Mr. Jay also pointed out that under French rent acts rents are exceedingly low—he goes so far as to claim that "the British worker’s family on the average spends eight times as much on rent as the French.”

But he went on to say:—

“However, these cheap rents—which the new decrees are to raise—are not much consolation to the French worker. It is partly just because food prices are so high that he has little to spare for anything else." (Italics, Mr. Jay’s).

Although Mr. Jay draws attention to these facts he fails to see how hollow they make the social reforms of the “Welfare State” which he and the French Labour leaders so blindly support. Unless the workers use their only industrial weapon, the strike, to fight for higher wages; low rents and social insurance benefits merely operate to enable employers to pay a low money wage. This is further borne out by Nora Beloff, writing from Paris to the “Observer” (16th August, 1953) on the condition of French workers.

"An official publication has revealed that they enjoy an even smaller proportion of the national revenue today than before the war: the substantial rise in social benefits has been more than offset by the severe drop in real wages. The Civil Service is proportionately worse off than am employees of private business."

So much for the alleged benefits of the “Welfare State” and of being employed by the Government.

The strikes themselves have had some very interesting features. It has been customary in Western Europe, including Great Britain, for Governments and some trade union officials to see in every strike the hand of the Communists; but the French Postal strike was started not by the Communist Union but by the anti-communist French Post Office Workers’ Union belonging to the “Labour Force” trade union federation. They took the initiative first in the Post Office and then in other industries, and the Communist Trade Union Federation (C.G.T.) and the Christian Trade Union Federation later joined in. It happens that the “Labour Force” Union is stronger than the Communist and Christian Unions among Post Office workers, though the C.G.T. claims in all 2,000,000 members as against about 800,000 in the “Labour Force” Federation and the same number in the Christian Federation. As the Times remarked (7/8/53) “ No Communist interference seems to have been needed to start the trouble.”

But though the excuse of Communist “plotting” could not be used this did not prevent the French Government from threatening to use all measures to smash the strikes, including the movement of tanks into Paris (News Chronicle 18/8/53).

The French Prime Minister when he ordered the movement of tanks might have recalled the outcry three months ago when Russian tanks in Eastern Germany were used to overawe German strikers; but the Western Governments' reaction then was very different. They approved the strike and made horrified protests about the tanks, and with their approval the American Government has been distributing millions of food parcels to the hungry East German workers. But this time it is the French tanks not Russian, and there has been no offer by Western Governments of food parcels for the hungry French workers. The Daily Worker (11/8/53) seized on this and denounced British and other unions in the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions for their decision to give money to help the East German workers while not doing the same for the workers of France and Italy. But the Communists are actually taking up a still worse attitude. Some British unions have agreed to give financial help to the French workers, while the Communists, instead of helping the strikers against the Communist Government of Eastern Germany pretend that they were not strikes but “American-inspired riots.”

The real tragedy of the trade union movement in France and in the world generally is that most trade unionists allow themselves to be diverted from single minded concentration on working class unity because of their attachment to nationalism and to support of one or other forms of Government of Capitalism. Except for a brief spell after the first world war and again after the second world war the international trade union movement, which before 1914 was a single organisation paying at least lip-service to international working-class unity, has been divided into bitterly hostile camps, the W.F.T.U. supporting Russian State Capitalism, and the I.C.F.T.U. supporting Western capitalism; not to mention the Christian and Independent groups maintaining isolation.

One hopeful aspect of the strikes in France was the way in which workers in the three rival groups (Labour Force, Communist and Christian) came out on strike together, temporarily forgetting their rivalries. This, and the fact that the strikes in Eastern Germany have demonstrated the workers’ defiance of the Communist dictatorship there may give reason to hope for some future movement towards world working class unity.

In the meantime the divisions in the French trade union movement endangered the strikes. It is of great importance, especially in a more or less general strike, that there should be common action not only to come out on strike but to go back as a united body. It is equally important that such strikes should not be allowed to drag on until, under pressure of starvation, workers begin to drift back one by one. This danger was heightened in France by the efforts of some of the leaders of the three main groups to outmanoeuvre and discredit each other in the conduct of the strike and by the parallel tactics of the Government and the employers to play one off against the other.

The Passing Show: Our way of life (1953)

The Passing Show Column from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our way of life

Mr. Blundell, leader of the European elected members of the Kenya legislature, has been devoting deep thought to the cause of the Mau Mau trouble. He has reached his conclusion: the disturbances stem from the fact that one section of the people in Kenya is trying to impose its rule on all the rest. Does this mean that Mr. Blundell is now an opponent of the rule of a small white upper class over all the original inhabitants of the country? Not a bit of it. This is what Mr. Blundell had to say:

The problem is one we have had since 1916. Since we brought British administration to this country, for more than fifty per cent. of that time we have had reluctance by the Kikuyu to accept the benefits of law and order and our way of life, with the prosperity which can stem from it, except on their own terms. This is a challenge by the Kikuyu people—whether actively or passively sustained—to impose their rule on all the other people this country. (Times, 25/7/53).

This accusation by a member of a ruling class which has recently come into Kenya and stolen the best land there, that some of the original inhabitants are trying to do what Mr. Blundell and his class have already done themselves, would be merely funny if its implications were not so serious. In fact the speech, by showing the attitude of mind of the whites in Kenya, goes far towards explaining the outbreak of violence on the part of the Kikuyu.

 

* * *

 

Reservation of amenities

 

While Mr. Blundell upholds the cause of white supremacy in Kenya, Dr. Malan upholds it in South Africa. The latter's policy of apartheid, when presented by a skilled exponent, can be made to sound almost harmless. All it means, it is said, is that the white people and the black people of South Africa are to keep themselves to themselves, and are to develop along their own lines in their own areas. No superiority is implied of one race over another, it is alleged. But recently some courts in South Africa have been taking this kind of propaganda at its face value, and have been refusing to convict Negroes of offences against the apartheid laws unless it was shown that amenities of equal comfort have been reserved for them in railway stations, trains, post offices, etc. Dr. Malan has now given his answer. His Minister of Justice (sic) has introduced a Bill which rules that “reservation of amenities for a particular race or class of people cannot be invalidated merely because no similar amenities have been reserved for any other race or class’’ (The Times, 4-8-53). This reveals the apartheid policy for what it is. The South African ruling class has the same feeling towards the working class it oppresses and exploits as any other ruling class has: it fears them, because they are in a numerical majority. But this fear has been developed to a higher pitch in South Africa because the workers there have a different racial origin, and a different colour of skin; and because, for historical reasons, the workers of South Africa have not yet achieved the level of education and the standard of living which the workers of Western Europe and America have gained. The desire of the South African ruling class to keep the workers in subjection, and to maintain inviolate the present class-structure of South

African society, bears fruit in the racial superiority theories, and the apartheid policy, of Dr. Malan.

 

* * *

 

Public ownership à la Morgan Phillips

 

In those industries which were taken over by the Labour Governments from 1945 to 1951, some changes were made, but the basic capitalist structure was preserved intact. Since the 1951 defeat and the loss of ground at subsequent bye-elections, the Labour Party have had to face the fact that the workers, having experienced what the Labour Party called “Socialism” —that is, nationalisation—are for the present less prepared to support them at the polls in sufficient numbers to return them to power. So they have been casting round for new ideas. And their new proposals show that they contemplate making even fewer changes in industries they take over in future. Instead of making (for example) the mining machinery and machine tools industries wholly state-capitalist, Morgan Phillips proposes that a future Labour Government should merely acquire a fifty-one per cent. shareholding in certain key firms within these industries (in an article m the August issue of the Labour Party magazine, “Fact”). Mr. Phillips continues to use the term “public ownership” to describe the projected organisation of such industries, but at least he is now more chary of calling such plans “Socialist.” And so he should be; the Labour Party is more and more revealing itself as merely another capitalist party.

 

* * *

 

The work-insiders

 

Incidentally, what of all those people who have told us in the past that they disagreed with us, but that they were going to join the Labour Party in order to “work from within,” and change it into a Socialist party? They are clearly failing to do this, as could have been forecasted (and was). There is only one party for Socialists, and that is the Socialist Party.

Alwyn Edgar

The Nature of War (1953)

Pamphlet Review from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Must Man Wage War ?” by F. A. Crew. Thrift Books No. 18.
 C. A. Watts & Co., Ltd. 1952. Price 1/6.

After the news of the Atomic Bomb in 1945. scientists in general, and atomic physicists in particular, got rather hot under the collar because they had done the pioneering research work which led to that horror of horrors; now with the possibility of bacteriological warfare the biologists are searching their consciences. Professor Crew has much experience of both warfare and scientific research, as he served in the army in the first world war, was Director of Medical' Research at the War Office in the second, has been in the Territorials for 36 years, and since 1928 he has been a university professor of biology. He uses this experience and the data which is available on recent wars to analyse many aspects of war in this book. He has done this because, in his own words, “I have come to wish to be a citizen of the world, not of the world as it is but as it could be ” (preface). He divides his study into three chapters on the biological aspects of the causes, conduct and consequences of war.

The Cause of War

There are some people who suggest that warring is inherent in human beings, because we are born aggressive, and therefore there will always be wars. However the professor does not fall for that fairy tale, pointing out that,

“Aggressiveness may be inborn, but this attribute is expressed only when specific outside pressures are brought to bear upon the developing individual. He may be prepared to display aggressiveness, but there is no intrinsic need that he should ever be called upon to do so.”— (Page30.)

After examining the way people are brought up, and how aggression is fostered in this bitterly competitive world, he comes to the conclusion that,

"He can develop in a competitive world where men, wanting the same thing, fight for it ; or he can find himself in a world in which all things are shared."—(Page 32.)

When such arguments are pointed out to some people they will reply that although that may be true of “us civilised people,” there are other peoples, such as the Indians, for example, who are readily classified into warrior and non-warrior types, into those who by virtue of their genetic endowment come to display those attributes which distinguish the fighting man, and those who, because of a different genetic constitution, are inevitably timid and cowardly, and thus are unsuited for a military career. To such people, the professor, who is a specialist in genetics, the science of inheritance, replies simply,

“There is no evidence which proves beyond all doubt that one ethnic, political, or social group is, for purely genetic reasons, superior to another in respect of military attributes."—(Page 20.)

Having brushed away these mental cobwebs, he considers the structure of society, noting that in modern society,

"Certain groups exist which are in no way productive but live on the surplus created by the productive groups. The maintenance and reproduction of non-productive groups can only be achieved, therefore, by the maintenance and extension of power, of their dominion over the productive groups."—(Page 15.)

He goes on to point out that war began in earnest with class society and is inherent in a class society, concluding that,

"Wars are no longer waged for material things required for subsistence; they arise out of the productive relationships of groups concerning the acquisition of surplus."—(Page 36.)

This is because the ruling class, which is unproductive and lives on the surplus produced by the large majority of society, has something to gain from victory or lose by defeat, but the vast majority, the working class, gain nothing from war but sorrow, loss, and mutilation. However without their willing participation wars could not occur. Why then do they allow themselves to be persuaded to support it?

Noting that in capitalist society there is much human unhappiness, for millions of people spend most of their lives performing tasks which are both dull and tedious, giving neither physical nor mental satisfaction, and so live lives that are drab and featureless, he concludes that,

"Wars are made possible because the lives of so many individuals in the modem State are so grey and so dull, so complicated, and so unsatisfying.... War promises that which the individual has sought in peace and failed to find. It fills a life which has been empty. It unifies a people,... in short, war remains possible because in peace there so little to satisfy the creative urge of the mature and skilled and to enlist the energies of adventurous, restless youth.”—(Pages 34-5.)

The Conduct of War

Chapter 2 starts with an analysis of the way people are prepared for war, and then goes on to a description of a number of aspects of modern war. For example, he points out that in wartime hospitals are emptied of the tuberculous so that those injured by bombing, or on active service, can have the beds, and that in the army the men are exposed to conditions that lower their general well being, so making them prone to diseases such as tuberculosis. The result is that during the war the number of people suffering from this disease increased tremendously.

As germ warfare has been in the news in recent years and much has been written of it, but little substantiated, the following comments by an expert biologist are of interest.

“That it is possible to manufacture weapons of great lethality out of existing biological knowledge is beyond all reasonable doubt; that such a weapon already exists is highly probable} . . . the biological bomb could be used in such a way that it would surpass the atomic bomb itself as a weapon of mass terror; it is cheap; it could be produced in complete secrecy, no vast plant tucked away in the remote desert being required for its manufacture.

"Certainly it is not beyond the ingenuity of man to produce such a weapon. It must presumably take the form of a package of exceptionally virulent pathogenic micro-organisms or of parasites of one kind or another which, being deliberately let loose in the enemy’s country, initiates an epidemic among the human population, its animals of economic importance, or its crops."—(Pages 65-6.)

Some Consequences of War

There are some people who think that war is beneficial to the human species because it is eugenically selective. They think that the “stronger” eliminate the “weaker” so the “fitter” or “better” only survive, and in this way humanity rids itself of inferior types. On the other hand there are others who suggest that in war it is the most worthy who are the first to be killed, so that it is the “better” who are killed and the inferior types that survive in most cases. They suggest that it is because war claims the “cream of the youth” that economic crises and other evils of capitalism occur, as those left cannot cope with the difficult problems that occur. The professor points out that neither view is sound. The first because tactics and weapons are far more important in war than any possible slight difference in biological make-up; the second because it has never been established that it is the “betters” who are killed off. With the mass attacks on civilian populations, which have become commonplace in recent times, such arguments are rapidly losing any appeal that they may have had in the past.

He discusses colonisation by conquest and points out that in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, Britain France and Germany each gained by conquest millions of miles of territory, and so extended their domination over millions more people. However, in the twentieth century all the lands of primitive peoples have been colonised, so war is between nations of more or less equal technological development, who come into conflict over raw materials and markets. Since the Great Powers are highly industrialised they produce weapons of a new and more terrible type, and so war becomes more and more horrible.

What of the consequence for the working class? He says that more than 27 million people were killed, by war, between 1914 and 1918. Some of these on the battlefield, but many by the general lowering of resistance to disease that occurred through worry, anxiety, long hours of work, and lack of nourishing foods. For example, the influenza epidemic of 1918 was greatly aggravated by war conditions, and even after 1921 the mortality rates were considerably higher than would have been expected if the war had not occurred. Having mentioned the 8,000 T.B. patients discharged from sanitoria in the second world war, and its disastrous effects, he goes on to consider how war breaks up homes and so leads to an increase in crime, and considers the statistics on the lack of housing. Then, with a few well chosen examples, he shows that although the British working class got nothing but misery, disease, violence, and premature death, from war, the plight of the workers of the other countries of Europe was even worse. Such is the lot of the worker in capitalist society; be always gets the dirty end of the stick!

The Prevention of War

After this powerful indictment of war he considers that,

"The prescription for prevention is the complete transformation of the social inheritance and of the social structure, which by its very nature must periodically yield warring. . . .  A unified world must be created in which in peace the needs of the bodies, the intellects,, and the emotions of all shall encounter the means of satisfaction." —(Pages 36-7.)

He concludes that,

“The only remaining obstacles to the achievement of this aim are those that reside in the minds of men."— (Page 38.)

He states that he will work actively to oppose war.

So far, so good, but how are we to go about this? Professor Crew gives no consideration to that very practical question. However, from the analysis we see that to prevent war, capitalism, the society of classes and therefore of wars, must be replaced by socialism, the society of human beings where war cannot exist. To do this it is necessary for the majority of the people of the world to understand capitalism and desire to introduce socialism. The change in human society will then be made by sending a majority of socialist delegates to the parliaments of the different countries with the mandate to make the required legislation, for parliament is not merely a “gas-house,” but is the seat of power. Then the power will be transferred from the ruling class, the capitalists, to all mankind. Such is the nature and purpose of the socialist revolution. The Socialist Party is the instrument fashioned by members of the working class, to carry out this historic task. 

Conclusion

The terminology used in this book has not the precision of the Marxist terms that the socialist is familiar with. Often the word State is used when country would be more accurate, nation is used when peoples are meant, and the capitalist, or ruling class, are often referred to as power groups. The author does, not seem to be sure of his analysis of the state capitalisms of Russia and Yugoslavia. As to formulating organised action on the basis of this analysis of society the writer gives us no lead, and in the preface he even supports the present armament drive and the present warfare in Korea!

However, this text of 81 pages is a powerful indictment of war, and the capitalist society that breeds it. Therefore it should be on every socialist’s bookshelf next to “The Socialist Party and War,” for it treats certain aspects of war for which there was not room in that pamphlet. We are glad that priced at 1/6 it is within reach of all workers.

R.J.J.

The dogs do bark (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lowly but surely the match sellers, street singers, hawkers and blind fiddlers are coming back. Not as many as in the past, because there is still no mass unemployment; the writer, raised in East London in the years after 1918, remembers beggars in every main street. Undisguised begging is, of course, legally prohibited (nevertheless, it is still done in every big city in the world); the mendicant has to have something to play or something to sell, or, as an extra indignity if he can afford neither, he must sing for his succour. The war, which provided jobs even for the unfit, and its aftermath, which gave gratuities to the soldiers and pickings to the spivs,, took away the beggars. Now there aren’t the jobs and there isn’t the money, and the beggars are re-appearing.

Begging today is a series of unenviable one-man businesses, lacking organization or enterprise. It was not always so. The heyday of beggars was in the reign of Elizabeth the First. They went in gangs, hordes and regiments, often highly organized, with their specialists and their hierarchies. Some unknown rhymester of the sixteenth century coined a jingle which went:

“Hark! Hark! The dogs do bark—

The beggars are coming to town.”

It was no children’s song then, but a piece of grim news.

The numbers of sixteenth and seventeenth century beggars are astonishing. In London there were twelve thousand among a population of less than two hundred thousand in 1600. Holinshed recorded that

“. . . there is not one year, commonly, wherein three hundred or four hundred of them are not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place and other. Henry the Eighth, executing his laws very severely against such idle persons . . . did hang up threescore and twelve thousand of them, in his time.”

It was the same all over Europe. Huberman claims that a quarter of the people in Paris in the 1630's were beggars. The Low Countries swarmed with them. In sixteenth-century Switzerland, according to Renard and Weulersse:

". . . when there was no other means of getting rid of the beggars who besieged their houses or wandered in bands about the roads and forests, the wealthy even organized hunting parties against these wretched homeless ones.”

And in Spain, books like “Lazarillo de Tonnes” and Quevedo’s “Great Rogue” described in minute detail the organizations of beggars.

Where did they all come from? Many were peasants, driven from their land by enclosure and rack- renting. In the fifteenth century they had pulled down enclosures, started fires, risen in impotent protest; now they became beggars. Others were soldiers, returned penniless but with a taste for plunder from the continental wars, or set adrift from the disbanded feudal armies. The dissolution of the monasteries added former servants and retainers—"abbeylubbers,” they were nicknamed—to the ragged hordes; and took away, too, the principal source of charity to vagrants. Then there were chapmen, strolling players, gipsies, ballad-mongers, scholars—Gamaliel Ratsey and Luke Hutton, the Elizabethan highwaymen, were University men— and ever so many more. There was no work to be had, and no charity; the new owners of the land had no tradition of generosity to the poor. It was beg, steal or starve.

By the 1570’s there were huge guilds and fraternities of vagabonds; he who joined had to undergo initiation and serve an apprenticeship. The vagabonds, like the law, saw no difference between vagrancy and crime. They had their own dialect, called Pedlars’ French or the Canting Tongue, a mixture of Elizabethan English with the varied contributions of soldiers, foreign beggars and vagrant monks; some of its words—cant, foist, booze, crank—are still with us.

The head of a beggars’ fraternity was known as the Upright Man—certainly nor uprighteous, for he usually had more than one mistress, and they were called Morts or Doxies. Plain beggars were Rufflers; then there were the Clapperdogens, who blistered their flesh with arsenic and herbs to gain pity.. The Counterfeit Cranks ate soap to feign fits and the Abraham Men pretended to be mad, while Dummerers folded their tongues in their mouths to be thought dumb. If a beggar got his bread by telling tales of misfortune, he was a Freshwater Mariner. Among the petty thieves, there was the Hooker or Angler, who carried an iron- hooked staff and “fished” to good purpose with it; the Foist, who picked pockets; and the Nip, who slit purses when their owners looked the other Way—“a knight of the knife,” Ben Jonson called him. Most common of all in London was the Coney-catcher, or confidence trickster—the forefather of the spiv. There were Upright Women, too; Mary Frith, known as Moll Cutpurse, was the head of a gang which for years terrorized the Shooter’s Hill area.

The administrators of Elizabethan England tried hard to solve the problem. In 1571, a census of beggars and rogues was attempted; the following year, the famous edict was published by which "lusty and valiant beggars” were to be

". .. grevouslye whipped, and bumte through the gristle of the right Eare with a hot Yron of the compasse of an ynche about."

This seems to have offered little discouragement, and in 1598 further measures were introduced, including the instruction:

"Every vagabond found begging is to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and openly whipped, until his or her body be bloody."

At the second offence, a beggar became a felon, and was liable to be hanged.

Whipping, branding and hanging gave no solution. In 1601, alarmed by bad harvests and what Thorold Rogers describes as “a growing disaffection,” Elizabeth’s last Parliament passed the Poor Law Act which, in general principles, remained unchanged until 1834. It made relief of the poor the task of each parish, to be paid for by compulsory Poor Rates. Did it solve the problem? Well, three years later, James the First was condemning vagrants to be branded with a large “R” on the left shoulder and. on a second offence, summarily transported to Virginia.

Some people had their own ideas of a solution. Edward Hext, a west-country Justice of the Peace, thought the beggars were merely lazy:

"Work they will not, neither can they, without extreme pains, by reason (heir sinews are so benumbed and stiff through idleness, as their limbs being put to any hard labour will grief them beyond measure."

Others said that drinking and gambling caused all the trouble; still more people put it down to the growth of London, which doubled its population between 1558 and 1600. Parliament tried to check the metropolitan spread as unsuccessfully as it tried to combat the beggars.

It was the growth of capitalism that did it. In the sixteenth century the merchants were securing the accumulations which were the starting point of industrial capitalism; and at the same time the other necessity, the class of free labourers, was coming into being. Broken away from their former security of subsistence, the beggars were part of the nascent working class, coming face to face with poverty and the freedom to starve. Gradually, as urban life developed, the vagabond fraternities fell away; in their place came organized crime and disordered medicancy. The poor were to be always with us.

In eighteenth-century Scotland there was the same problem. Fletcher of Saltoun estimated—probably too lavishly—that there were two hundred thousand “sorners,” or sturdy beggars: a sixth of the population. Some, called “gaberlunzies,” were licensed by the Kirk Sessions to beg from door to door, in country districts they were the carriers of news and the repositories of folk-lore.

And so it went on. More Acts of Parliament (usually passed in emergency or as the result of panic); the stocks, prison and transportation for the beggars. Defoe, who had reported the lives of the indigent in “Moll Flanders,” asked for work-houses in “Giving Alms No Charity”; eighteen years later, in 1722, they were set up. The nineteenth-century Poor Law Act made the workhouses places of terror. Not surprisingly, people did their best to keep out of them. The legislators tried hard to stamp out begging. Vagrancy Acts were passed in 1824, 1838 and 1873, and in 1904 a committee was set up by the Local Government Board to enquire into the whole thing.

Legally, the following activities are banned. Begging in public, or causing a child to beg; having no home or visible means of subsistence, or being unable to give a good account of oneself; telling fortunes; exposing wounds to get alms; peddling without a licence; failing to maintain one’s family. The Vagrancy Acts brought into being the street singers, the unmusical musicians and the rest.

Consider, then, the beggar. Brought into being by capitalism as the “free” labourer, without work or hope; scourged, branded, killed, hunted and ridiculed— tramping and mumping his way through four centuries, sometimes violent, sometimes obsequious, the symbol of the dispossessed. He was an angry peasant in 1553, a ruffler in 1603, a fugitive from the workhouse in 1853, a legless ex-soldier with a barrel-organ in 1923, and is a kerbside singer in 1953. Consider, too, the failure of brutes and humanitarians alike to do away with him . . .  and then consider the world that could be.

Robert Barltrop

"What agonizing thoughts . . . " (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

What agonizing thoughts must sweep 

     The doubting Christian mind 

When reason waking from her sleep 

      Immortal God to find 

With drooping faith and frantic pain 

      Scans the wide universe in vain.

W. W. Ford.

Blogger's Note:

More information on W. W. Ford via his January 1958 obituary.

Betting and the clergy (1953)

From the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

That pious organization, the Churches' Committee on Gambling, has been getting quite hot under the famous collar, to judge by their annual meeting in London.

It appears that an enterprising firm dealing in football coupons had the audacity to send some of them to the Secretary of the above-mentioned organization, the Reverend J. Clark Gibson. He says: “They have been sent to me at my home quite unsolicited and unwanted. What would happen if I were bumped off one night and the police came in and these coupons were found in my home, I do not know." (Daily Telegraph, 27.3.53). Of course the reverend gentleman would not know, seeing that he would be as dead as mutton.

Other speakers complained of football pool coupons being sent to them. To illustrate that pool betting is a game of chance and not a matter of skill, the Reverend Clark Gibson brought to the Committee's notice a device similar to a child’s puzzle, with a glass front and fourteen horizontal divisions. In each division is a ball, and the top of the gadget is marked with 1, 2 and x. It is shaken and the coupon is filled in according to where the balls settle. All this, mark you, to prove that this sort of gambling is a game of chance!

Dr. Ellison had this to say: "The danger the country is faced with is the setting up of an industry of gambling. If the gambling habit were allowed to establish itself further it would bring moral collapse." Dr. Ellison should know that the gambling habit has been established for years. Presumably a "flutter" on the horses would be classed as gambling—in which case the gentleman in question should reprimand the British Monarchy, who are not above attending race meetings and, being human, may indulge in speculation. And then there are the gamblers on the Stock Exchange— but, of course, that is entirely different!

Another contributor to this jolly little gathering was Lord Ammon, former Labour M.P. and Member of the Government, who said: "Wages were never higher and we have full employment, yet never was so much being spent on betting and drink. These things indicate a rapid decline in moral standards." Full employment is a somewhat elastic term. Lord Ammon as one-time member of the National Dock Labour Board will know the uncertainty of employment for dockers under "full employment."

It is significant that not one of these guardians of our morals speaks of war being a danger to morals. Their voices are silent on the vilest form of gambling, juggling with human life for the capture of world markets and trade routes. They are more concerned with letters being thrust through their doors. A group of people sets up rules and calls them morals, and an inert mass obeys them.

Social life is largely governed by do's and don'ts. Our rulers and preachers would wish the people to obey these edicts to the letter. That some of them don’t is an ever-increasing anxiety to our rulers. How can society remain stable when there are such rebellious transgressors? It really is too bad, think the clergy. For their very existence is at stake. They must assert themselves at every opportunity, and the Churches' Committee on Gambling knows this.

When it comes to raising people's living standards, religion is usually silent. Practical work was never done by priests—they come in at the death.

J. Crowe.

Party News Briefs (1953)

Party News from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

A last-minute reminder to members and sympathisers that our Autumn Delegate meeting is being held at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London, on Saturday and Sunday, September 5th and 6th, commencing each morning at 11 a.m. A Dance will be held in the Conway Hall on Saturday evening and the usual propaganda meeting will be held there on the Sunday evening commencing at 7 p.m. London and Provincial speakers will address the meeting.

* * *

"Questions of the Day" in a revised and enlarged edition is now available in restricted quantities. Further deliveries are expected soon. Obtainable from branches or the Literature Committee at Head Office, price 1s. per copy or 1s. 2d. post free.

* * *

The Party held another of its week-end schools at “Treetops” Holiday Camp in June. This year the attendance was not large, probably on account of the weather. Several comrades who notified their intentions of attending, altered their minds at the last moment, making organisation very difficult. However, despite these drawbacks, it was a happy gathering. Comrade Willmott led a discussion on Anti-Dühring and Comrade Turner opened up on Trade Unions.

Phyllis Howard

SPGB Meetings (1953)

Party News from the September 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Editorial: On the move . . . (1985)

Editorial from the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

 

. . . for socialism

 

The governments recently introduced board and lodgings rules (see Socialist Standard, June) which forced thousands of young people to move around the country every few weeks or risk having their benefit cut, have been declared illegal in the High Court and the DHSS will be compelled to pay arrears to those whose benefit was reduced.

But it should be noted that it is not on humanitarian grounds that this decision has been made. On the contrary, it was the method by which the regulations were introduced that has been declared unlawful. According to the decision, Norman Fowler had no powers under present legislation to designate board and lodging areas within Britain or lay down time limits for those staying in them.

Mr Justice Mann, hearing the case, made this quite plain when he said:

In my judgement a decision to the effect that able-bodied and independent young people who live on supplementary benefit in lodgings should move from one area to another in search of employment, after a stay judged appropriate for the quest in the first area, does not come within any distance of being outrageous (quoted in The Times. 1 August. 1985).

Maybe he should have taken a look at the annual report of the Manpower Services Commission published at the end of July, which shows that for those aged 18--24 (the age-group affected by the regulation) the unemployment rate is 24 per cent. Of the 1,166.000 unemployed in this age group, 29 per cent have been unemployed for more than a year.

Unemployment is unlikely to affect those present at the American Bar Association's recent London jamboree, where two lawyers gave a paper in which they described the way high unemployment has curbed industrial action and led to lower wage settlements. Unconcerned about the plight of the unemployed themselves, they expressed fear that high unemployment might lead to problems in the future if the apparently docile and compliant work force was in fact saving up their grievances.

The authors have good reason to be worried. But let’s hope that workers do not continue passively to accept the sufferings that capitalism daily serves up, and recognise that strikes for higher pay are not enough. It would be nice to give the American Bar Association something to really worry about — like socialism.

Running Commentary: Rich and well (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Rich and well

 

After the successful operation to remove a cancerous growth from his colon, President Reagan advised Americans to have a medical check-up "if you think something isn't right". This might have rated as the most sensible words Reagan had uttered had the facilities been freely available.

In Britain we do have free health care, but that doesn't help the thousands of people who die from curable cancers every year because they aren't detected early enough. Take cervical cancer for example. If detected early enough there is an almost 100 per cent guarantee of a cure. And yet the screening programme, which was begun twenty years ago. has not improved survival rates: about 2.000 women die of this cancer each year (The Times, 23 July). At present there is a backlog of 25.000 samples waiting to be tested at one laboratory because of under-staffing. Similarly, cancer of the ovary causes 4,000 deaths a year in Britain. As yet there is no national screening programme because of the high cost of ultra-sound scanning equipment.

The moral of the story is clear: if you happen to be Ronald Reagan or any other member of the ruling class who can afford to pay for the best that medical science can offer, then your chances of early detection and cure of cancer are probably high. The rest of us, who have to rely on medical services restricted by considerations of cost, might very well end up as one of the 100 people who die in Britain every day from curable cancer of the breast, cervix, ovary or bowel.

Class “justice”

During the miners' strike 646 people were charged with offences of riot and unlawful assembly which, if proved, carry a possible maximum penalty of life imprisonment. Those cases are now being heard in court. Since their arrest those charged have been under the considerable strain of stringent bail conditions and in fear of the possible imposition of jail sentences if they were found guilty.

In July and August a succession of such cases have been thrown out or dropped for lack of evidence, the most notorious of which related to incidents at the Orgreave coking plant on 18 June last year. Fourteen of the 98 miners charged with riot or unlawful assembly on that day walked out of Sheffield Crown Court when the prosecution abandoned its case after 48 days of the trial. One of the policemen who gave evidence admitted that part of his written statement was inaccurate and that around 20 policemen present at Orgreave were given "rough dictation" of what they should write down. "We just wrote out what we were told" said PC Browning of Merseyside police.

The fact that similar cases against many other miners have also been dropped or lost should not blind us to the class nature of the “justice" being handed down: public order offences like unlawful assembly are inherently political since they can always be used by a nervous ruling class against what is seen as a threatening working class. In the case of the miners' strike the bringing of such charges against so many men served the intended purpose of removing as many as possible from the picket lines and criminalising miners in the eyes of their fellow workers. Once the strike was over there was no point in creating working-class heroes by convictions and imprisonment.

Suffocated

It took 20 years for the ban to be lifted on the showing of the film The War Game. But just in case you thought that freedom of speech was alive and well in Britain, in the same week as the screening a ban was imposed on another TV programme, At the Edge of the Union. It was to have shown interviews with representatives of two organisations in Northern Ireland which advocate the use of political violence. Despite the producers' claims that the programme did not advance the cause of either but rather aimed at exposing the similar backgrounds, motives and behaviour of the men interviewed, the Board of Governors of the BBC, under pressure from the government, decided to withdraw it.

There are a number of ways in which the ruling class can control the media. In Russia it is done directly by government censorship of what is broadcast; in the western "liberal" democracies the means used are more subtle. On the one hand it is achieved through the ownership of TV and radio stations by capitalists like Rupert Murdoch, who exercise effective editorial control through their control of the purse strings. In Britain, the BBC is supposed to be editorially independent although the Home Secretary has an effective veto over any programme.

In the case of the Northern Ireland programme he did not have to use that veto—a few well-chosen words to the BBC governors and they did his dirty work for him. This is not surprising really, when you consider some of the members of the capitalist class who sit on the BBC's Board: Chairman. Stuart Young, senior partner in the city accountants. Hacker Young; Lady Faulkner of Downpatrick; Watson Peat, member of the British Agricultural Council and a prominent figure in farming and food production; Sir John Johnston, former diplomat; Malcolm McAlpine, director of McAIpine construction company.

Margaret Thatcher, in a speech to the American Bar Association, made her intentions plain prior to the programme's banning: terrorists, she said, must be denied the "oxygen of publicity". But democracy also

requires "oxygen" — the oxygen of freely available information and freely expressed views. It is we, the workers, who are being suffocated by the curtailment of those freedoms. consistently starved of information which will enable us to make up our own minds.

Beating Thatcherism (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

How do the Labour Party propose to unseat Thatcher and her abominable crew? They tell us that this is a priority, that life in Britain will not be worth living again until this thing called Thatcherism is dead. By Thatcherism they mean a mixture of hard-faced indifference to the people's suffering and a mission to intensify that suffering — and all at the whim, or to solidify the dogmatism, of that woman in Number Ten. The existence of Thatcherism, say members of the Labour Party, is to be seen in the unprecedented dole queues, depressed wages and living standards, ruthless cuts in government spending on housing, hospitals, social services. education . . . The conclusion which we are invited to draw, before we go to the polling stations, is that when the Labour Party have slain Thatcherism and have got themselves installed into power things will be very much better.

But is it true that political parties behave as the Labour Party says the Tories are? Capitalist parties are, after all, concerned to get power and they can hardly hope to do that by upsetting too many of the voters. At times — in fact for much of the time — they carry out policies which should not be popular. like sending workers to die in the wars of their ruling class or imposing cuts in workers' living standards. But they can manage to do this without incurring too much electoral damage if they seem to be in control of the situation and provided they can persuade the voters that all the suffering and restrictions are a necessary preliminary to a bounteous future. So the Tories can get away with a Falklands war and with a Nigel Lawson and a Norman Tebbit.

It is, then, nonsense to say that a government deliberately creates unemployment; indeed if they had the power to do this, perhaps at the whim of a Thatcher, on any significant scale, they would also be able at whim to stop creating it — to abolish unemployment. But so far that trick has evaded every government faced with the problem. The same facts apply to workers' pay. No doubt, if British capitalism could run profitably and competitively while allowing free rein to pay claims the government would not be inclined to intervene. Wages would rise on demand, while the government looked benevolently on, waiting to reap the electoral harvest. It is not any politician's evil intentions which are responsible for expenditure cuts or for wage restraint; these things are part of a government's desperate. futile efforts to manage the uncontrollable capitalist system.

The Labour case against the Tories, with which they hope to destroy Thatcherism, now rests on a promise to organise the British economy to such effect that unemployment falls, production expands, medical and social services and education blossom and wages rise smoothly and predictably. They make it sound all so easy that it is fair to ask why their predecessors, many of whose memories are honoured in the Party, found such triumphs so far beyond their ability. Implicit in these promises is the assumption that capitalism can be controlled and that Labour will succeed in that, while the Tories fail, because their motivation is more humane. This claim, however, does not line up with historical fact. One thing which was abundantly clear whenever Labour has been in government before, in 1929. 1945. 1964 and 1974, was that they were not in control, whatever their motivation. In fact they continually whined that their good intentions were being undermined by events outside their influence — economic storms, currency crises and the like.

There is no evidence that things will be any different if there is another Labour government. They have learned nothing from their experiences, they still aim at running British capitalism, which means that their programme is simply a rehash of the plans and policies which were exposed as failures when they were tried before. To begin with, the Labour Party are again feeling out the prospects for some sort of pact with the unions which will provide for voluntary wage restraint. Labour now say that they have rejected the concept of statutory restraint, just as they did in the past before they went ahead and tried to impose it. This sort of voluntary policy used to be called the National Plan or the Social Contract; the latest version is called the National Economic Summit. Just as George Brown in 1964 called the union leaders and the employers' representatives round the table to sign a Declaration of Intent to ignore the realities of capitalism, so a future Labour Chancellor will get the same people into something called the New Economic Assessment. Whatever comes out of it will sound very grand and make some good copy for the reporters but it will completely avoid the basic cause of our economic problems — the essential anarchy of commodity production, the essential class rivalry between employers and employed.

In the past such arrangements may have succeeded in holding back wages for a while but in the end a government have been forced to intervene — unless, as is happening now, a slump is in operation helping to do this for them. The Labour Party's latest policy statement A New Partnership — A New Britain promises ". . . an immediate and substantial programme of public investment and repair. It is true that expenditure cuts have affected workers badly; for example in the case of hospitals the Observer of 4 August 1985 reported that many urgent operations are being postponed through a lack of hospital beds (‘nothing short of mental cruelty" said one eminent cancer specialist); that patients are sometimes being left to recover from operations in corridors; that wards are closing despite a long waiting list for beds. We are all familiar with these disgraceful situations but no one should be under the impression that all of this is happening at the malevolent design of wicked Tories. In the past Labour governments have acted in the same way. Richard Crossman, who was a Cabinet minister in the Wilson government of 1964/70, recorded in his diaries that the Labour Chancellor. James Callaghan, was in 1964 "committed to a huge cut back not only of consumption but also of public expenditure, on the social services in particular" and that in January 1967 Callaghan "proposed a cut of £500 million during this period, concentrating on housing and health".

It suits the Labour Party now to try to gloss over the memories of the times when they were "concentrating" on attacking at the most sensitive points of working-class poverty. Now, apart from their more specific promises, Labour is busily putting it about that they will build a better Britain because they are simply more humane, cleverer and calmer than the Tories. When Tory Chancellor Nigel Lawson recently made his desperate effort to rally Tory morale with assurances that brighter times are in the offing. Labour's Shadow Chancellor Roy Hattersley warned that this was a case when "panic is accompanied by predictable and increasing ineptitude". Well Hattersley may be right; perhaps the government are in a panic but, if Crossman is anything to go by, the Wilson government was not free of the same problems. Crossman recorded the paralysing effect the financial and economic crises of the 1960s had on James Callaghan: “As Chancellor Jim was for some months psychologically out, clearly exhausted, nearly physically broken . . . " (which was. perhaps, why the Labour Party went on to elect him leader and so made him Prime Minister). Callaghan. of course, resigned as Chancellor when, in spite of their repeated assurances that they would not devalue the pound because of the depressing effect this would have on our living standards, the Labour government found themselves compelled to do so — which again shows how out of control the situation was. Crossman was also scathing about some of the other people who, when he stood up to sing The Red Flag with them at Labour conferences, were supposed to be his comrades in the struggle to introduce "socialism" to Britain. Michael Stewart was ". . . a bit of a nightmare . . . bureaucratic, vain and enormously sensitive about his own status”; Roy Jenkins was "conspiratorial"; Tony Benn "a complete flop". A lot of the other ministers were "a terrible collection of old lags who should be got rid of'.

So what this all means is that, by any standards, the Labour Party offer no real alternative to the Tories. Perhaps, through a mixture of plausibility, an apparent confidence in their own talents and a desperate hope that the voters have short memories, they will indeed unseat Thatcher and her crew. It will make no difference, to the capitalist system or to the problems endured by the working class. So who cares? Only those who are aware of the pressing need for a real alternative and for a genuine, permanent, fundamental change in society.

Ivan

Sex and the free market (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

What glorious offers the market presents us with: if you can afford to pay the price there is little that is not on sale. Food, clothing, shelter, theatre, books . . . and sex. The market knows no limit to what it can tempt the buyer with. You want sex? Then hand over the cash, sign the cheque. American Express will do nicely. In a buying and selling society sex is a commodity an item to be purchased — and money is the key to access.

The supplier of the sexual commodity is called a prostitute. There are some male prostitutes who sell to women and many males who sell their services to other men. but the overwhelming majority of prostitutes are women. As members of the working class, who have nothing to sell but their labour power, prostitutes sell sexual satisfaction — or, at least, the crude pretence of it — to male buyers.

What is the state of the market? It is difficult to assess how many prostitutes there are in Britain. Certainly, there are thousands of full-time prostitutes, thousands more who earn part of their income by selling sex, and — as will be explained further on — many thousands more who are effectively prostitutes, even if that is not in their job description. The number of prostitutes working in the cities is growing, with more women workers each month entering the supply end of the sex market. This recent increase can be explained: firstly, the recession which has led to mass unemployment has hit female workers hardest and therefore women and girls who would once have earned a wage through more conventional employment are now forced to make a living "on the game"; secondly, the low wages and unacceptably tedious jobs usually offered to young girls who are on the dole leave many of them deciding that any way of making a living is better than the indignity of the dole queue or extra-exploitative employment; thirdly, the growing rejection among female workers of the traditionally idealised image of being a wife within a happy family has led many to seek freedom from the stereotypical role of womanhood, only to discover that freedom under capitalism amounts to no more than the opportunity to become an independent item of sale on the market.

Romanticised images of prostitutes who are only in the job because they choose such work are mythical and insulting to the women who end up doing a job that no human being should have to do. Such images are akin to the popular depiction of tramps as "eccentrics" who sleep in the gutters by inclination rather than compulsion. We can dismiss the bogus picture of the high-class whore who lives in an apartment in Mayfair, dresses in Paris fashions, wears the best perfume and sends her children to public schools. In reality, most prostitutes are miserable, frightened and ashamed women who have been trapped into the job in the illusory hope that it will offer an escape route from poverty. Every day a stream of young girls travel to the big cities, their numbers increasing as small town poverty becomes more wretched believing that they will find relief from their impoverished existences in what proves to be a bewildering environment in which money is the sole passport to survival. It is no coincidence that red-light districts are usually in the close vicinity of main-line coach and train stations. In order to survive — to eat. to pay rent, to buy some clothes which might help them obtain a "decent" job — it is tempting to accept the offer of the pimp who tells them that they will be provided with security as his employees. Drug addicts, usually driven to their addiction by their frustration with a world of buying and selling, find themselves further frustrated by lack of money to buy drugs. These are ready recruits for the pimps. And the worn-out old women who are lonely and miserable and often sick, they too are driven onto the streets as discount commodities — “you can have her for half-price as she’s past her prime".

While seduction is erotic, the efforts of the sex-sellers are cold and loveless and hollow; if the pleasures of sex are exciting, the hurried moments of purchased sex are dull and dehumanising. The market not only turns practical existence into a struggle in which those without money lose, but also generates a sickly emotional poverty — a bankruptcy of human feelings.

Getting back to market values

In those glorious years of "Victorian Values”, so beloved by she who presides today over the screwing of the British working class, the rich grew prosperous thanks to unfettered exploitation while tens of thousands of women workers were turned into prostitutes. There were 80,000 prostitute women in Victorian London (Prostitution in London, Mayhew and Bracebridge. 1862). a figure supported by the most reliable academic source of the time, the medical journal, The Lancet, which declared in 1857 that one in every sixty houses in London was a brothel and one in every sixteen women a prostitute. Three years later The Saturday Review stated that there were 360,000 full-time prostitutes in Britain. Contrary to the conventional belief that Victorian sexual practices conformed to a strictly "decent" code of moral values, it is clear from an examination of historical facts that poverty, then as now, forced workers to throw decency and values to the wind. Indeed, with one in every sixteen London women forced to sell sex in order to earn a living, one can understand why our present Prime Minister, motivated by a desire to push workers off the dole queue, is so anxious to revive Victorian values. It was not only women "on the game" who were considered to be sexually purchasable in Victorian Britain: most servant and factory girls were considered open to offer by those with the money to take their pick. Victorian autobiographical tales abound with rich young capitalists who desired a female employee of theirs. How could women workers afford to refuse these offers, knowing that their future employment was at stake? (Still today, many a female employee has to make the undignified choice between accepting her boss’s advances or getting the sack). And how could women, slaving for hours for a pittance of a wage, find it easy to resist the temptation to sell their sexual favours for a sum greater than they might earn in a week? So it was that those who owned and controlled the means of wealth production and distribution demanded and obtained power over every aspect of those they exploited. (Incidentally, this was but a subtle continuation of feudal morality which gave the landlord the right, and the female serf the duty, to engage in property-determined sexual relationships.)

We would be wrong to imagine that Victorian conditions no longer exist in the modem capitalist world. In Bangkok, for example, it has been estimated that one in every three females is a prostitute. And even those employed as wage slaves in the hideous sweatshops of that city are vulnerable to the sexual demands of those who can afford to buy what is not officially for sale.

Where capitalism forces workers into undignified acts there are always moralists ready and waiting to blame the wage slaves for their sins. The vicars, never far from the scene when hookers are in town, are there to sample the wares and then tell the wretched women to repent. Repent for what for being too poor to afford to live in idleness. like the rich ladies of the capitalist class whose parasitism the vicars are there to defend? The venereologist. William Acton, writing in 1857. listed as the main causes of prostitution "natural sinfulness", "the preferment of indolent ease to labour" and "fall from virtue" (Prostitution. Considered In Its Moral, Social And Sanitary Aspects). According to William Bracebridge, prostitutes were not real women: "there is a great abandonment of everything that one may strictly speaking denominate womanly". And if prostitution was caused by sin. as was the common view, then the task of moralists had to be to offer the poor sinners severe correction an activity which many a vicar has indulged in with less than lofty motives. Gladstone, the Liberal Prime Minister, earned the popular nickname "Gladeye". in recognition of his strenuous efforts to redeem "fallen"" women — usually back at his place. Special refuges for so-called fallen women were set up in the mid-nineteenth century — places designed to deny their occupants any kind of sensual comfort in the hope that abstinence would make them forget their sinful impulses.

Prostitutes have always been expected to feel guilty for being the victims of poverty. Not all have complied: on 24 February. 1858 The Times published a letter from an unashamed prostitute — signing herself "Another Unfortunate'" — in which an extremely clear explanation of the cause of her misfortune was given. The letter led to widespread shock among the miserable moralists, causing the editor of The Times to respond, disgustedly:

They have no remorse or misgivings about the nature of their pursuit; on the contrary, they consider the calling an advantageous one, and they look upon their success in it with satisfaction (25 February. 1858)

One might apply the same words to the editor of The Times, being a man paid a fat salary to publish lies.

The letter from "Another Unfortunate” is a unique insight into why a working-class woman became a prostitute, which would apply today as then. She describes her colleagues as "we, who are not fallen, but were always down" and asks

Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society to abuse me? Have 1 received any favours at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer in society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass? Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard. Sir?

She was correct: capitalism creates the walking symptoms of the market disease and it ill-becomes apologists for the market to condemn them.

In The Times of 3 July, 1985 Peter Kellner commented on an article which had appeared a week earlier in the Sun. The latter rag, in its usual effort to search the sewers for news unworthy of adult reading, ran a story under the headline PROSTITUTE CHRISTINE IS A TORY COUNCILLOR It seems that Christine Pearson, a councillor in Thanet, had been revealed by the Sun to be a practising prostitute. The validity of the report is of no concern here. Kellner's comment on the story is worth quoting, however:

I can see no coherent argument for terminating a Conservative councillor's political career on the grounds that she has been accused of selling sex . . . I defy anyone to name an occupation that applies Thatcherite principles more completely than prostitution. It is. surely, the ultimate form of flexible, non-unionised. labour-intensive small business.

People in glass houses

Under capitalism, if you are a member of the working class you need to sell what you possess — your mental and physical energies to whomever will make a purchase. All workers are prostitutes for wages. How many women are employed as barmaids, hostesses in clubs or waitresses in restaurants and are told, either explicitly or implicitly. that part of their function is to give a few thrills to the customers? How many secretaries and others employed in traditionally female jobs have little option but to accept that they are partly employed for their ornamental value? How many young girls are conditioned to want to be glamour models, even if that means being paid money to be humiliated? How many wives would soon lose their source of income from husbands if they refused to provide sex and who dictates the terms of its provision, the one with the money or the one who is dependent? How many parents condition their daughters to behave in ways which will make them desirable to men with money looking for wives? Did not Marx refer to marriage as "legalised prostitution" and, for millions of women, is it not their role in life to be the property of a keeper? Of course, there are important distinctions between these ways of earning an income and prostitution, but the distinctions are not half as great as some would like to pretend. A letter under the headline "Life In The Pool" in The London Standard of 2 July, 1985 makes the point:

I cynically regarded my former job as a secretary as mental prostitution. This was crystallised by a spell or two in Civil Service typing pools. A nice lady sits at a desk with a register in which she enters men who want their letters typed and selects from a mass of available girls somebody to minister to one of these men . . . When the girl returns from being dictated to her name and the time she spent with him is entered. Then how long she takes to do the work (A kind of madam, the supervisor7)

Capitalism conditions workers to deceive themselves into thinking they are not quite as downtrodden and humiliated as the next person: whites are thankful not to be black, men think they are better than women and women who are not "on the game" are glad to be living in more civilised conditions than those who walk the streets. But, in one way or another, all of the virtually propertyless class are walking the streets, selling what they have to whoever will pay to take it from them. Who is the wage slave to condemn the prostitute?

The right to sell your body

In recent years movements have emerged, not seeking to abolish the cause of prostitution but to make it easier to suffer as a prostitute. Without doubt the laws on soliciting, like most laws under capitalism, are designed to punish the victim. In Britain the law does not punish the consumer who buys sex, but the women who sell it meet with several legal impediments. Opposition to these laws has come from two sources. Firstly, there are those grotesque libertarians of the so-called Right groups like the Federation of Conservative Students and the Libertarian Alliance who argue that no laws should exist to fetter any commercial transaction, be it the sale of heroin or the selling of sex through regular market channels.

Secondly, there are those feminists who have demonstrated the limitation of their social understanding by demanding the right of prostitutes to carry on their business undisturbed. Being reformists — whose aim is to mend and not end this rotten system the feminist campaigners do not have as their objective the eradication of the poverty which forces women to sell their bodies to men surely, not the action of liberated women — but the entitlement of women to pursue their undignified and oppressed employment in legal safety. While there is nothing wrong with prostitute women forming a trade union to defend themselves against market pressure (as they have done in some countries with state brothels), it is utter stupidity to equate such action with the quest for “women's liberation".

The legal right to be a prostitute gives the opportunity to be abused, exploited and wasted as a human being. Those who identify with such a right are the enemies of all workers, both women and men, and should be treated with the hostility reserved for those who obstruct the path to genuine human liberation.

Steve Coleman

When the bough breaks (1985)

From the September 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The dismal roll-call of children who have been battered and tortured to death by their parents has recently had some well-publicised names added to it. With the trials and sentences of the batterers complete, the next stage is the process known as An Enquiry. which should more properly be called How To Make (almost) Everyone Happy By Missing The Point. These cases of child abuse did not appear unexpectedly out of happy, united homes; in each case the child was imprisoned in what is known, in the Town Halls of this country, as a Problem Family, which usually means that a local authority social worker had the job of keeping a protective eye on the child. And that, of course, means that when the child's miserably agonising death revealed too late that all was not well there were, in the personal shape of the social worker and the bureaucratic shape of the local Social Services Department. some scapegoats conveniently to hand. In the popular press social workers now rate, in the league table of denunciation. a little above football hooligans and a long way below professional killers in the armed forces and social and economic parasites like Princess Michael. The press love cases of child abuse for the copy they provide; nothing sells newspapers like an apparent official malfunction which can be given an indignantly human angle in two-inch front page type. Then everyone — the judges, the politicians, the media hawks, the Sun readers — can feel better, provided they can forget the fact that nothing has effectively been done about an extremely nasty problem.

Given the essentially defenceless appeal of a child, it would be strange if cases of battering did not arouse some powerful emotions. The media exploits these responses with demands for vengeance plastered up with some sort of assurances that something will be done to prevent it happening again Racist mumblings were also heard when two of the recent cases — Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry — involved black parents but there is no evidence that a coloured skin makes for a neglecting, violent parent. A few days later a white mother was given life imprisonment for the murder of her white child and one of the most notorious cases of recent years, which resulted in the establishment of a set of rules for social workers, police officers, doctors and the like, was that of Maria Colwell, a white child who was beaten to death by her white stepfather. If there were a disproportionate incidence of child abuse in black families it would be readily explicable by the extra dimension of social alienation in their overall poverty — which makes a useful starting point in any discussion of the subject.

The cry for revenge on the child batterer is answered — perhaps if there is enough public interest in the case — with long prison sentences. Punishment does not end in the court room, for it is no ghoulish myth that violent treatment is meted out by other prisoners — female as well as male — to anyone convicted of such offences. The people who were sent to prison in the cases of Jasmine Beckford. Tyra Henry and Christopher Stock will probably count themselves lucky if they complete their sentences in undisturbed isolation behind a locked cell door. Of course the prisoners are not supposed to take matters into their own hands in this way — in fact officially they don't — but they probably need some reassurance that, no matter what they have done to get themselves into prison, there are others who are held in even lower esteem.

It is, after all, a relief to have a scapegoat to ease any nagging doubt about where the responsibility lies for a situation too stressful to be openly faced. Sometimes a family needs the common cause of a sick or wayward child to plaster it into unity; in the same way this society needs its deviants and criminals to provide a diversionary explanation for its inherent inadequacies. The parents of a battered child fall easily into that role and close after them are the people who in many cases have legal parentage — the local authority social workers. It is not unknown for social workers to be custom-built for the type of media assassination which is based on professed outrage at the alleged laxity of present day morality. Many are comparatively young, recently qualified, female and single, with no experience of parenthood themselves. In the case of Jasmine Beckford there was something else, an added piquancy — the social workers came from abroad.

Whatever impression may be gained from the columns of the gutter press, the life of a social worker is not all drinking coffee, sitting in at long meetings and composing jargon-laden casework assessments. When they are involved in child care cases they are immediately faced with a dilemma. The parental rights which have passed to the local authority, and which the social worker is paid to administer, are in conflict with capitalism's concept of the family, in which parents have not only the obligation to raise their children into profit-making members of the working class but also some rights of possession over them. This ideology has its own mystique and when a child is taken into care it is usually on the assumption that it would be healthier, and that the case could be closed, if it were eventually returned to its parents. This course often involves a risk, which the social worker is not always discouraged from taking although of course the real risk-taker is the child, who rarely has any say in the matter.

This illustrates another dilemma of social work, which is that its function is to reconcile people to the irreconcilable. Members of the working class — those who depend on employment for their living must endure varying degrees of deprivation which, if they become identified as social casualties by falling sick or getting old or simply being inadequate. spiral down into destitution. Social workers move among the most serious casualties to bandage them up and send them back into the fray, which rarely means anything more hopeful than returning them to the conditions which they were originally unable to cope with. For social workers and their clients, progress is often measured in the ability to pay all the bills out of a state benefit giro, to learn the knack of survival almost like Royal Marine Commandos on an endurance exercise in the wilderness. Social workers operate at the sharp end of poverty; their working life is largely a succession of slums, malnutrition, mental and physical disablement, social conflict. To come through it they need to be like commandos themselves, especially as their wilderness becomes more threatening under the government's policy of spending cuts.

And that brings us to the question of what the scapegoats are protecting the rest from. Child abuse existed a long time before the first lady social worker ventured a sensibly shod foot into a graffitied council estate. It has not been unknown in the ruling class. In the late nineteenth century the wife of the ninth Earl of Carlisle, whose home was at Castle Howard, bore eleven children and then, with her fanaticism and antagonism, drove them all away from home; two became alcoholics and all five sons came to an early death. The future twelfth Duke of Bedford was made to stand silently on one side while his parents ate. until his father dismissed him; he later committed suicide, like another of that dynasty of disturbed, unhappy people. There is some evidence that child cruelty is a repetitive problem, passed from one generation to another. As an article in Community Care (27 June 1985) said: "So many awful things may have happened to the parents that emotionally they are still children". A 1973 study Born To Fail (National Children's Bureau) — showed how some children were born into conditions of social adversity which affected every aspect of their health, family relationships and education. Another, similar investigation published in 1982 followed up this work with conclusions no more optimistic. One common result is that:

Many of the families have not been able to remain together through their difficulties and the children have been received into care of the local authority. (Children In Adversity, Peter Wedge and Juliet Essen.)

So it was not surprising when the NSPCC recently stated that there is a connection between the increase in unemployment and that of child abuse. Poverty pressure is very destructive of human relationships; the Marriage Guidance Council believes that unemployment puts an extra strain on marriages already in difficulties; two specialists at a Glasgow hospital have reported that children in the deprived districts of that city are up to 100 times more likely to suffer diseases serious enough to need hospital treatment; the Nuffield Centre at Leeds University has said that the evidence of a link between unemployment and suicide is "overwhelming".

Families which are sick, worried, sliding into the sort of desperation with which unemployment flavours their normal poverty are not serene, optimistic, healthy and they are therefore unlikely to be able to deal with what are accurately called the everyday problems of life. Accurate because under capitalism life for the vast majority of people is not an experience of joy or fulfilment but a grinding problem which they face every day. One of the sharpest elements of stress in a suffering family is its children, who have not yet been conditioned into acceptance of a world where adults have to produce wealth which they can't get at. even though they need it desperately and where a few people can be born into riches beyond measure while millions suffer deprivation. The very dependence of children makes them especially vulnerable to, and expressive of, the stresses of poverty. To an adult who has been driven into a pitch of frustration and an angry cynicism about human interests and safety children are too easy an outlet for despair. Like capitalism's other social problems, child abuse cannot be separated from its context.

What then of the family? Why doesn't it protect a child in peril, rather than acting as its prison and. perhaps, as its execution chamber? The apologists of capitalism tell us that the family is a protective, caring organ (remember the Tory campaign about supposed Victorian morality?). In fact an important part of the family's role under capitalism is to socialise its children to brain-wash them into accepting that, like their parents, one day they too will go out to work to provide for their own family. The child's real talents, its basic emotions, its need for expression, quickly become strait-jacketed into that stifling ideology. In the process the child is taught that its parents should be its protectors and confidantes; but many of them find that working-class existence is no preparation for sensitive parenthood.

What it amounts to is that the family, far from being protective, is perilously fragile When it fails, its very privacy exacerbates the problems, sometimes to the point at which a child is killed amid an angry conspiracy to conceal the awful truth that it was all too predictable and avoidable. This then is a plea for a new look at the problem of child abuse. Not just another solemn enclave of ministers and councillors and managers; a great deal of that went on after Maria Colwell was killed and out of it came an elaborate machinery of consultation and buck-passing which did not save those poor kids who have died recently. Whatever reforms are introduced are overwhelmed by the inhuman crush of capitalism's events.

So this is a plea to the people who suffer the frustrations and indignities of capitalism, who mostly come through heroically but who sometimes lash out blindly in some unspeakable act with such terrible consequences. It is a plea to turn away from scapegoats and towards an examination of this society and at what it does to human beings. It is by our decision, that the world is organised as it is. By our decision we can change it. into a great place to grow up in.

Ivan