Little John has a major idea (1993)

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The good news is that John Major (a British Prime Minister) has at long last come up with a big idea. The bad news is that it is an extremely stupid idea.

In the course of capitalist history the attempt to explain why some people behave anti-socially has given rise to more than a few barmy theories. For the early Christians, undisturbed by any scientific thoughts, the explanation was simple: God made all men (for which include women) sinners. We were born to be anti-social. Only those who repented by conforming to the Church and the property morality it propounded would be saved. Hundreds of years ago the churches ran the prisons; the Inquisition was not characterised by the New Testament injunction to “turn the other cheek”.

As theology became increasingly discredited in the light of science, the rise of pseudo-biological explanations of anti-social behaviour emerged. To the Social Darwinists it was all clear: human violence was part and parcel of the beast-like struggle for survival to which humans were biologically destined.

Pseudo-science

At the end of the last century the biological blind alley of Social Darwinism laid the path for an equally diversionary side-road: the new pseudo-science of criminology. Cesare Lombroso, the father of this bogus science, attempted to explain how it was that some people were criminals and others not. It was all very simple: criminality was a consequence of physiological make-up. As Lombroso put it:

  The criminal by nature has a feeble cranial capacity, a heavy and developed jaw. projecting eye ridges, an abnormal and asymmetrical cranium . . . projecting ears, frequently a crooked or flat nose . . . Their moral degeneration corresponds with their physical, . . . The criminal by nature is lazy, debauched, cowardly, not susceptible to remorse, without foresight . . . his hand-writing is peculiar . . . his slang is widely diffused . . . The general persistence of an inferior race type.

In the USA pseudo-scientists are still at it. For example, at the time of the LA riots a number of commentators turned to the nonsensical book, Violence and the Brain, written by two “professors" called Mark and Erwin and arguing that rioters are people with dysfunctional brains. (Funny that Reagan and Quayle never made it to the riot, isn’t it?) Another book, by Wilson and Herrnstein called Crime and Human Nature, argues that criminal tendencies are in people’s genes. In short, certain babies are born to be criminals. This leads one to wonder why the police do not use their resources more efficiently by targeting maternity wards and arresting the genetic criminals at birth, thus achieving a maximum crime clear-up rate before the crimes are even committed!

If you think that these ideas are crazy there is a simple reason for it: they are crazy. They are the ridiculous inventions of desperate ideologists who have to explain why it is that property society, with all its alleged advantages for human growth, gives rise to so much violence, disorder and frustrated spite. The fact that over 90 percent of crimes are property-related is embarrassing to a society which pretends that anyone can live well if they try. The truth is that millions of people try very hard and get nowhere; some of them turn to illegal robbery to make money (as opposed to legalised robbery, to obtain profits) or violent acts to give vent to their misery and frustration.

Stupid idea

On the subject of frustration, it is now time to return to the little matter of John Major’s idea. Since his accidental elevation in 1990 Little John has lived in the shadow of the mad priestess of Big Ideas: Margaret Thatcher. Nobody could accuse her of having any lack of big, big ideas. Like Hitler, Stalin and the authors of the Bible, she was full of them—the barmier the better. Thatcher was always opening her mouth and making news. Not so Little John. To most people he is just a wimp and an idiot. And not liking to be seen for what he is. he decided to make a speech which would say something Big.

On 3 February this year Major addressed the Tory Carlton Club. He was on home turf so could be sure of at least polite applause. He decided to speak about the problem of inner-city crime. (A few of the Club members nearly had heart attacks when they thought they heard that he was going to talk about crime in the City—now. there's a subject for a big speech!).

Now, Little John was not taken in by all this talk about born sinners, feeble cranial capacities or criminal genes. These are outdated stupid ideas. So John Major came up with a brand new stupid idea. And the next day it made it on to the top headline of the Independent:

PM BLAMES


SOCIALISM FOR


CRIME

Now that is what you call a really stupid big idea. Here is the key paragraph from the speech:

  Socialism must face up to its failures. It must recognise the harsh truth that it is where, over many years, the state has intervened most heavily, that local communities have been most effectively destroyed.

To begin with, socialism has never been tried, let alone failed. We challenge John Major or his supporters to tell us where common ownership, democratic control or production solely for use has ever existed.

But we expect half-witted Tories not to know what socialism means. More interesting is Major’s assertion that inner-city crime is caused by there being too much state interference. This comes from the head of a government which has expanded the police, put more people into prisons than any other western European country and is currently planning to interfere with the unemployed by making conscript labourers of them. Own goal. John.

Going from bad to worse, Major then proceeded to deny that there is a causal relationship between poverty and crime. It is mere coincidence, we must assume, that so few street muggings are committed by gangs of millionaires. (They are free to do their mugging legitimately.) Alas, Little John has not read the Home Office research document published in 1991 by the civil servants of his own government. It stated that property-related crimes increased in relation to economic hard times. The number of burglaries in Britain went up during the recession of the early 1980s, down during the 1987-8 boom and up again with the slump of the 1990s.

Furthermore, the Independent reported last 13 October that the government was giving careful consideration to its public expenditure cuts for fear that too many cuts will result in an increase in violent crime. So, it seems that Little John is acting on the basis of an explanation of the cause of crime which he now claims not to believe in.

We look forward to the emergence of the next Major Big Idea. What will it be: “PM SAYS THAT O-LEVELS ARE BAD FOR THE INTELLECT?" or “MAJOR PROPOSES NEW DISNEYWORLD ON BEAUTIFUL SHETLAND COASTLINE?"

Steve Coleman

A policeman's lament (1991)

From the May 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

“I see around me a great sea of wrongdoing that seems not to lessen”. So declared Sir James Anderton, the Chief Constable of the Greater Manchester Police, announcing his forthcoming retirement. Anderton often claimed he was moved by god to act as a scourge to the sinful. This was something he shared with Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. Anderton may be in serious need of professional help but the essence of his view, that society is plagued with the problem of crime, is held by many people.

Crime, there is no doubt, occupies the imagination. It takes up a great deal of the column inches of newspapers. We are routinely bamboozled with documentaries, soap operas, films and videos about crime. We hear radio broadcasts and read books about it. There is now in Britain even a magazine dedicated entirely to morbidly poring over famous murder cases. The level of crime and the so-called “law and order debate” are major policy issues amongst political parties at election times.

Yet what is commonly understood by "crime” is much less extensive and less deep a social problem than is often portrayed. Research in Glasgow has recently demonstrated that over 30 percent of news stories in several national newspapers are about crime, but this does not reflect the actual level of criminality in society. As Nick Ross always comforts his scared late-night viewers in “Crimewatch UK", the chances of actually being the victim of crime are infinitesimally small.

One reason for the high profile coverage is that news about crimes helps support a picture of humanity as being eternally and necessarily dogged with the prevalence of crime.

But what is "crime"? It is tempting to quickly interpret the word as meaning wrongdoings associated with violence, especially homicides. In fact, probably the best definition is that a crime is any type of conduct or event or state of affairs designated as criminal by the state. What states designate as crimes will vary with the times and the historical circumstances. There is nothing intrinsic in criminal behaviour that runs commonly through all crimes for all times. Anything can be made into a crime.

93 per cent of all crime is property-based.

But crime, as defined by the state, is not even principally about random and brutal violence delivered in a haphazard way. Most so-called crime is about people in the working class trying to alleviate their poverty. According to recent Home Office figures. the police in England and Wales recorded 4.5 million offences in 1990, of which 94 per cent were non-violent crimes of property (Independent, 28 March). So even in a world of institutionalised violence—a society of the legitimate violence of the police truncheon and the prison cell, of the recruitment of people as trained killers in the military forces—even in this brutalising environment, people on the whole arc resistant to the use of violence.

What causes crime?

Historically there have been a great many and varied accounts of what causes crime. Thus in 1746 Cesare Beccaria, who was later to become a professor of Political Economy in Milan, wrote An Essay on Crime and Punishment in which he opposed "capricious justice and barbaric punishment". Punishments, he argued, "should be certain, prompt and only just in excess of the gain to be had by the crime”.

He regarded humans as essentially rational beings who only opted for crime if there was a good chance that it would pay. Aristocrats whose ancestors had acquired their original wealth through plunder and merchant explorers who had negotiated their gains with powerful arsenals could only agree. Beccaria’s book was condemned by the Catholic Church in 1776 for its rationalistic ideas but the basis of his theory has had an enormous influence, especially its implication that if you fix the punishment at the appropriate level this will deter crime as the potential criminal will then rationally opt not to commit it. This type of reasoning is still very popular with governments: the Home Office is forever playing around with the system of punishments and finely tuning them so that it can "beat crime".

There are a number of things which can be said about this theory but one thing is clear: it has not worked. The level of crime in Britain and in several other countries which have used this theory has not significantly altered in any respect.

A century after Beccaria another Italian, Cesare Lombroso, wrote a book in 1876 called The Criminal Man in which he claimed that criminals were a race apart from ordinary people. Lombroso had been affected by Darwin's theory of natural selection (much of which he didn't seem to understand) and saw criminals as throwbacks to an earlier age. Criminaloids could be detected by how hairy they were, the shape of their nipples and the type of eyebrows they had.

This theory was popular with the ruling class because it meant that if criminals were pre-programmed to be that way in any event then there was no need to spend money on expensive social reforms designed to stop people being forced to turn to crime. A stack of theories built on the foundations of Lombroso's basic concept of the criminal as a person set apart from ordinary people persist to this day.

There is no proven evidence for this view that criminals have a particular biological or psychological make-up. Hundreds of experiments of various scientific methods, including "endocrinological profiling" and "encephalographic screening" of so-called known criminals and normal people, have failed to discover any defining characteristic which is indicative of criminality.

Property is theft

Most crime, as noted, is property crime—offences like theft. So, over the course of a year, we are really just looking at a small number of members of the working class aiming to get goods worth a few hundred or a few thousand pounds. We should not get too engrossed in all these petty cases and the moralising obsessions of the Daily Express but should see things in their wider context.

Today a few men and women live in unbounded. extravagant luxury' gaining £100,000 per day or even hour. They do not do any work in order to acquire their wealth. It would go to them whether they were awake or asleep, in Manchester or Malibou. They are socially parasitic on the energies of the working class of wage and salary earners. Ninety percent of the population create all the wealth—excavate, mine, construct, design, service, clean, maintain, teach, nurse, cook and grow. We build the luxury houses and then go home to live in cramped accommodation. We build the Pullman coaches and then pay to travel second class. The wealth we produce, in other words, is appropriated by the ruling class with intent to permanently deprive us of the goods (to quote the Theft Act 1968). That process, however, is flattered with the name of “the wages system". If we try to get back some of the wealth we have produced, then that is called theft and is a crime.

Apart from the routine way in which the social system robs people, it also kills and maims. Each year hundreds of people are killed by companies who have knowingly taken calculated risks with people's lives. Some of these deaths have been carefully documented by the Health and Safety Executive. The London Hazards Centre has estimated that 600 to 700 people die every year from occupational injury caused by the recklessness of their employers— about the same number as personal homicides.

We are living in a class-divided society where a minority of men and women between them own and control most the the world’s wealth. Production is not run for human needs; it is run for profit, so if there’s no profit in allowing someone to work or produce food for starving people then these things won’t be done.

The radical transformation of society that socialists propose is to put the means of producing and distributing wealth in the hands of the whole community and to let the principle "from each according to ability to each according to need” be put into practice. In these circumstances, crime as it is commonly conceived (petty theft, muggings and the like) will no longer have a reason to exist.

Anderton thought he could change the conduct of individuals by personal pressure and the force of the law:

  I did have a kind of dream that I might, by example and protest, change the course of things so powerfully, and influence society and the country in the matter of rightful conduct, that they would turn away from crime and disorder and wilful criminal behaviour. Sadly, this has not happened. (Guardian.,15 March).

Marx, by contrast, pointed out that people get their ideas and types of conduct from the world around them. The economic structure of the rat race makes people behave like rats:

  . . . so what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences . . . what is truly human in it . . . Crime must not be punished in the individual but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed. If man is shaped by his environment his environment must be made human. (The Holy Family).

Gary Jay

Is Crime Hereditary? (1975)

From the December 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The nearest thing in contemporary newspapers to Beachcomber’s “Dr. Strabismus (Whom God Preserve) of Utrecht” is Professor Eysenck. Dr. Strabismus produced useless masterpieces such as artificial wigs and dummy glass eyes; Professor Eysenck produces statistics which are supposed to have Profound Implications. The difference is that Dr. Strabismus was a parody created by a well-known humorist. Eysenck, unfortunately, is real and is therefore taken seriously.

During October Eysenck made two announcements of statistical discoveries. The first, and farther-reaching, one was the existence of hereditary criminal tendencies. The evidence presented was from a number of adopted children. Those whose natural parents had criminal records showed a higher propensity for getting in trouble themselves, even though they had been brought up in different surroundings by law-abiding foster-parents: heredity triumphing over environment. The second announcement, made in a television discussion, was that Eysenck had found statistics to support the claims of astrology. What was not explained was whether the stars cancel out heredity, and if the impulse from Aquarius make up for an embezzling father.

The danger in this kind of thing is that Eysenck is a “popular” investigator, in both senses of the word. He is responsible for superficially instructive books such as Know Your Own IQ and Know Your Own Personality, designed for mass readership; and his conclusions tend to affirm common prejudices and therefore to be readily received and referred to as authoritative. The man in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists who said “Go in any chemists’ shop and ask the bloke” is now likely to say “Professor Eysenck says it’s true”. There are large numbers of people, who through ignorance, believe that some are born good and some are born bad; they are approximately the same people who believe, for the same reason, that black men are inferior to white ones; and Eysenck enables them to say “Told you so”.

Circumstances and Cases

In dealing with crime the fundamental question is not the make-up of the individual but the make-up of society. What is crime? When a law is passed, those who offend against it are criminals; when it is annulled, a criminal section becomes a law-abiding one. During the last war a number of laws were enacted and very strictly enforced. A person found with food he had not given rationing coupons for, or who left his job without permission, was liable to a heavy fine or imprisonment. The fact that the war is now thirty years distant makes that seem rather astonishing, but many people were convicted for those breaches of the law. At other times and places the holding of wrong political or religious opinions has been a crime.

An up-to-date example, shown in various newspapers on 2nd November, is that of a couple convicted for incest. The case was followed by correspondence and discussion, much of it remarking that the existing law is archaic; one newspaper, the Sunday People, suggested that the couple appeal against the order for them to separate and thereby make a test case In the recent past the offence was regarded as intolerable, and they would without doubt have been given heavy sentences. If, as seems feasible, a change in the law is made in the not-distant future, it will mean that a class of criminals will automatically become respectable citizens. What then becomes of the hereditary propensity to that crime?

The question can be taken further. The most widespread of all crimes is stealing, in one form or another: robbery, embezzlement, fraud. All of them are obviously connected with the desire for money or what money is seen as providing in possessions, comfort and display. It is not suggested by Eysenck or anyone else that the desire for these things is a reprehensible inborn tendency. On the contrary, it is usually praised as “ambition”; and so far from being hereditary, it is taught as an essential to personal and social well-being — children are urged to be “first” and “top”, and shown examples of people who have succeeded. The criminal’s motive is learned from society; his error is choosing the wrong way.

No doubt it would be said that this is the point, that there is a section who persistently make that choice in the face of prohibitions. One important answer is that a high percentage of crime is due to nothing of the kind, as the court reports in local newspapers show: people steal when they are in need or in debt. But underlying this is the property foundation of the society we live in. The law is a social apparatus for its preservation. Its basic concern is protection of the class ownership of the means of production and distribution, and of necessity the products too; so that in practice it centres on property at all levels. If, as Socialists advocate, private ownership were abolished and there were free access to all the wealth of society, the effect would be the same as the limited one now produced by the dropping of an irrelevant law. That class of crime — the largest one — would immediately disappear. Will Professor Eysenck communicate this to the genes of adopted children?

Class and Heredity

Prejudices are ideas, of a sort. The saloon-bar oracles who find Eysenck’s proposition to their taste are voicing the kind of idea the ruling class likes. It means that the capitalist system is not to be blamed for a social problem: how can it be, when the cause of crime is individually organic?

The same gift to capitalist thought was made at the beginning of this century by Cesare Lombroso. He held that crime arose from physical and mental anomalies, due to degeneration or heredity or even reversion to a primitive evolutionary stage; criminals could be identified by definite physical characteristics. Lombroso’s concern in fact was reform, to obtain more humane treatment for criminals by destroying the supposition that they were responsible for their acts or could be cured by punishment. His theory was accepted, however, for its usefulness in substituting hereditary and psychological causes for social ones.

If the records of forebears govern people’s conduct, few of us would escape the taints Eysenck claims to discern. The genealogical fact is that over only three or four centuries we are descended from a relatively small number of ancestors. Because of the high rate of early death in the past, a single survivor in the seventeenth century can and does stand as the progenitor of several hundreds in this century. It is fairly well known that most people can, if they like, trace some “blue blood’’ in their ancestry; for the same reason, and probably with less difficulty, there are less honorific elements to be found by all. It can also be added that most nations have in their fairly recent history some huge act of barbarism in which large numbers of the population took part. Do genes then pass a moral judgement to avoid the repetition of such behaviour? Such a conclusion being obviously silly, the advocates of the “hereditary evil” idea have no choice but to say it was the need or the standards of the time, i.e. a social phenomenon. Quite right; but they should then explain why this explanation is abandoned over crime.

One other aspect which should be mentioned is that material presented in a statistical form is often taken to be undeniable fact. It should be appreciated that Eysenck’s findings are of “statistical relationships”: that is, sets of figures which are pointed out to be similar and therefore possibly linked as cause and effect. These are — as he admitted in the discussion of astrology — anything but conclusive and often thoroughly misleading. A light-hearted example given some years ago concerned the observation that the audiences at strip clubs had a high proportion of bald-headed men; a “statistical relationship” would suggest that watching such performances caused baldness, despite other and likelier explanations.

There is no question of anything having been proved; the area for proof is non-existent. The fault, dear Eysenck, is not in our stars or our heredity but in our social system. The point is to change it.

Robert Barltrop

Grandest larceny (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

In nineteenth century Italy lived one Cesare Lombroso, a Jewish doctor who served for a time with the Italian army. Lombroso spent a lifetime trying to prove that such considerations as the shape of one’s head, the nature and extent of tattooed designs, even an analysis of one’s urine and faeces, were critical factors in the determination of actual or potential criminality. (One of his more enterprising followers — Salsotto — saw significance in his own observation that a surprising number of criminal women were particularly well endowed with hair between the pubes and the umbilicus, and that down on the face was common among women found guilty of infanticide.)

Lombroso was seeking what Christopher Hibbert in his scholarly review of crime and punishment, The Roots of Evil (Penguin Books) described as the “atavistic type — the born or instinctive criminal”. (He — Lombroso — concluded his life’s work with a study of spiritualism.)

As Hibbert has noted, however, Lombroso’s contemporary, the French magistrate Gabriel Tarde, was not impressed. He wrote:

If one examined hundreds of thousands of judges, lawyers, labourers, musicians, taken at random and in various countries, noticing their different characteristics, craniometric, algometric, sphygmographic, graphologic, photographic, etc. as Lombroso has examined hundreds and thousands of criminals, it is extremely probable that we should ascertain facts not less surprising; thus, for instance, we might succeed in finding instinctive lawyers.

(Tarde, Criminalité comparée)

Tarde, who was clearly ahead of his time, believed that the origins of crime were mainly social. But even today, when the more thoughtful might be expected to opt for the reason of a Tarde rather than the shaky premises of a Lombroso, a great many remain reluctant to accept that crime (other than that of a purely pathological nature) is a consequence of our social and economic condition — a result of physical and mental deprivation manifesting itself as poverty, oppression, hunger and insecurity.

This being so, it is unsurprising that the responsibility for crime is so rarely placed where it properly belongs: with the system which spawns its causes — capitalism. So it is also unremarkable that the penal systems of the world, even where they are most ‘enlightened’, should place more emphasis upon punishment and retribution, if not downright indifference and neglect, than upon any recognition that the criminal or young offender is a victim of circumstance.

Institutionalised Theft

It is in the interests of the capitalists that their benefactors, the working class, should remain disabused of any such heresy as the suggestion that capitalism is to blame for criminality. Or, indeed, any other of the social evils for which it is responsible. It follows that they — the capitalists — must do everything in their power to cover up their own culpability. They must disguise as best they can an expropriation of socially produced wealth on a scale so vast as to constitute the grandest of all grand larceny. For the capitalists — sole owners of the means of production and distribution — rob us daily of the fruits of our labour.

Socialists, having as their authority not only the Labour Theory of Value as developed by Karl Marx but their own experience as workers to draw on, know that this is true. Enormous wealth in the form of surplus value is taken from the workers as a class. Acting more or less in concert, and to the virtual exclusion of the seven to ten per cent who constitute the capitalist class, we are responsible for digging the mines, cultivating the land, crewing the merchant fleets, operating the machines of industry, staffing the hospitals, prisons, schools, offices, and all the various agencies of government, local and national. Workers do everything from performing the most dangerous and soul-destroying manual tasks to engineering some capitalist’s tax evasion; from the production of capitalism’s military hardware to the design and construction of its yachts. They are its news gatherers, editors, censors, and its street corner newspaper vendors. They manipulate the businessman’s stocks and shares and they sweep the Stock Exchange floor. They provide capitalism with its armies; they die like flies in its wars. You name it, they do it. And how? By selling their physical and brain power to the highest bidder — if they’re lucky! And for what? Enough to live and reproduce on commensurate with what it costs to ‘educate’ and train them. (So, under the capitalist system we can expect to see the farm labourer working long hours in filthy conditions and in all weathers, receiving perhaps half the wages of, say, the skilled mechanic — who in turn is ruthlessly exploited at the point of production.)

Spirited but Misguided

Many spirited but misguided workers, seeing ahead of them only a miserable life of toil, boredom and relative, if not absolute poverty, take to the more attractive and, as they hope, rewarding path of crime.

What they do not always appreciate is that capitalism has some trumps to play against them from the start; cards with the words ‘police’, ‘judges’, ‘prison’, ‘army’ and so on indelibly stamped upon them. For under the rales of capitalism, theft, coercion and retribution are the exclusive prerogatives of the capitalist ruling class. (Mass killing, for example, is OK provided it is authorised by the State — the executive arm of the ruling class — and sanctified with a drum-head service.)

Workers, then, must be kept in their place. Should they, by their actions, threaten the ‘right’ of the capitalists to own everything, then that place is prison or some other ‘corrective training’ establishment. Once inside (and this can be true even of your friendly neighbourhood police cell these days), almost anything goes, from the warder’s boot to the administration of Largactil. (This extremely powerful sedative, otherwise known as chlorpromazine, if taken in large doses can cause “liver and kidney failure, mental and physical infirmity” [New Statesman, 2.11.79], Prisoners commonly refer to it as the ‘liquid cosh’.) Such retributive indignities as three to a cell and slopping- out are the small change of a system which, as the recent May Committee’s report has indicated, is close to breakdown.

Cant and Hypocrisy

As if this state of affairs was not already vicious enough, we have recently been regaled with the sight on television of the Tory faithful, in a condition approaching orgasm, adoring a smirking William Whitelaw as he outlines his plans for his spanking new Special Detention Centres, in which certain categories of young offender will receive ‘short, sharp shock treatment’. There can be few things in British politics quite as repulsive as your Tory redneck and his mate when they scent blood. (In this respect they have nothing to teach the dogs with which they torment defenceless wild animals.) All in all, then, just one more demonstration — if any were needed — of the indifference of capitalism’s lackeys to the true plight of the disadvantaged.

Hypocrisy is another unlovely characteristic of our masters’ customary behaviour, especially as it relates to ‘law and order’ — the rallying cry of the politician the world over. Those who welcome the bludgeons of the police Special Patrol Group when deployed against demonstrators or picketing workers can be relied upon to bare their fangs and snarl for revenge when confronted with the ‘bower boots’ of the football ‘hooligan’. As the poet A.E. Houseman put it: “Some can gaze and not be sick,/But I could never learn the trick.”

It is plain, then, that workers are confronted with an exacting but essential task - one which calls for an all-out effort; first, to understand what Marx and his contemporaries meant by the ‘class nature of society’, and then, in the light of this understanding, correctly to interpret the behaviour of those who stand to profit most from capitalism, as set against the response of those for whom it can offer nothing but suffering. Then, and then only, will workers find themselves asking the right questions.

And the most penetrating, if by this time the most rhetorical, must be: ‘Who under capitalism are the real crooks; and who the true victims?’

Richard Cooper