Onward, Christian soldiers (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The armed forces must be prepared to play a new rôle in enforcing democracy in Britain should the present system of government break down.” Thus, the Very Reverend John Field Lister, the Provost of Wakefield Cathedral, as reported in the Yorkshire Post of 15th July.

This gem of current religious philosophy was delivered on the occasion of the laying-up of the regimental colours of the First Battalion of the Coldstream Guards at Wakefield Cathedral. He went on to say: “More and more nations are finding that government is almost impossible to carry out. This may be because democracy is a Christian concept and that without it, it cannot succeed.

“When governments break down, then we have seen in one country after another that the military have to be brought in. It might well be that in the years which lie before us the armed forces will have a new and different rô1e to play, and how important that role will be.” There followed some all-too-familiar references to the power of the unions, the possibility of a general strike, etc., etc.

It is to be hoped that the guardsmen on the receiving end of this will have learned something about their function in the eyes of supporters of the capitalist class. They are themselves members of that same working class they may be ordered to suppress.

Richard Cooper

Education for what? (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Tory MP for Wokingham, William Van Straubenzee, addressing his constituency advisory committee recently, must have sorely disappointed some of his less-discerning friends when he claimed that it would be quite unrealistic—“pie-in-the-sky” was one phrase he used—for Conservatives to think of unscrambling the comprehensive schools and turning back to the grammar-secondary-modern system. (Times Educational Supplement, 8th July.)

His words, however, will have reassured his more realistic industrial and commercial masters, for whom the comprehensive system had become essential if they were to compete successfully with their capitalist rivals elsewhere in the world.

For this reason, if for no other, one may be confident that Straubenzee’s views broadly coincide with those of his party bosses, Mrs. Thatcher and Norman St. John-Stevas, whatever they may feel obliged to say publicly. It is obvious that neither of them will be particularly anxious to restore the educational privileges of the self-styled middle class if, as they clearly do here, they happen to conflict with the interests of the capitalist class they represent. (No doubt they would also privately argue that it is not, after all, the continued existence of the public school system that is at risk.)

Of course, the introduction of comprehensive schools has made no significant difference to the principle of selection enshrined in the 1944 Education Act. Only the manner in which the selection is engineered has changed.

Neither has the overall condition of the end-products been altered in any way. Those school-leavers who can find jobs are obliged to sell their labour- power in the form of a commodity to capitalist employers. The remainder help to swell the ranks of what Karl Marx accurately described as the “reserve army of capitalism”—the unemployed.

And in the end, a major imperative of capitalism— that its education service should, as nearly and as effectively as possible, match up to that system’s requirements—will have been consolidated.

Richard Cooper

The great education debate (1977)

From the July 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

To a socialist the name of that true-blue servant of capitalism, Peregrine Worsthorne, does nothing to inspire respect. However, the reactionary outpourings of such as Worsthorne are often quite revealing of what constitutes the true, if publicly unexpressed, thinking of our — and their — capitalist masters.

In the Times Educational Supplement of May 6th under the headline “Why not cut back when so few get anything from school”, we have laid before us the crude reality of education under capitalism. On Tuesday 3rd May Worsthorne addressed a conference at the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education. The following is a part of what he had to say:

It is extremely important that education be geared to ’the needs of society, but we need to be brutally realistic about what the needs of society are. It will always be a minority who take the decisions and the rest will have to accept them. You may jigger about with the means of choosing the élite as much as you like but now, as never before, society has to face the inescapable necessity for the development of a formidable élite.

As if this were not enough, Worsthorne proceeds to really rub our noses in it:

Industrialization meant that most people needed practical intelligence less than ever, and education aimed at encouraging personal development was of the wrong kind for an overcrowded world.

And later:

Most people are going to have to live in a subordinate role, however we dress it up.

And to crown it all:

It is difficult to admit that the great majority will not have satisfaction at work or in other parts of their lives. Politicians and journalists cannot do much about it. Teachers are asking for trouble if they think they can. To encourage children to believe it is all going to be different when they grow up is wrong and will cause a great deal of unhappiness.

Now, the Roehampton Institute of Higher Education represents only a relatively obscure élite in itself, a factor which may have contributed to the onset of Worsthorne’s attack. However, his honesty on this occasion is indeed refreshing.

He is stating what is true under capitalism. Independence of mind breeds thought and thinkers tend to ask awkward questions — too awkward, that is to say, for those who own the means of production and distribution. Their survival as capitalists depends upon the disciplined and acquiescent wage-labour of everybody else, including what that means in the deliberate restriction of working-class education.

Richard Cooper

Bottom class (1979)

From the September 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all subjects which are of any significance when coming to grips with a proper understanding of life under capitalism, education is one of the most vulnerable to confusion and misrepresentation. Even many so-called experts pretend to difficulty when called upon merely to define it. (W.O. Lester-Smith, for example, opens his Penguin book Education with the observation: ‘Defining Education has been likened to a parlour game, an innocent but useless way of passing the time'). And although we have all — in this country, at least — been exposed to a greater or lesser degree of formal schooling we seem to have emerged from the experience blind to its true aims and purposes.

The irony of the situation is absolute. The very process which, if we are to believe the hypocritical rubbish we hear and read on the subject, should have endowed us with the knowledge and the confidence to ask challenging and searching questions, and the automatic right to receive truthful and objective answers, has instead made more or less unquestioning conformists of us; at least over fundamentals.

This is no accident; it is the first duty of those responsible for running popular education systems under capitalism to produce, not independent-minded rational human beings, but docile and potentially exploitable units in a capitalist-owned, wealth-producing machine.

Primary Connection

In an article on education contributed to the 11th (1910) edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica a Professor Welton, formerly of Leeds University, had this to say about the apprenticeship laws of Henry VIII which, he observed, ‘contained the earliest germ of state interference’ in education. (It may here be remarked that this assertion applies, presumably, to the British Isles only: the classical Greek state understood and exercised such interference thousands of years earlier).

 These laws obliged children between five and thirteen years of age who were found begging or idle to be bound apprentice to some handicraft. If the immediate object was the prevention of crime rather than education as such, this early legislation is at least significant of the primary and intimate connection that exists between popular education and industrial and economic needs.

Professor Welton, were he alive today, would have no reason to modify this viewpoint.

Of course, capitalism as we understand it did not exist in Henry VIII’s time; neither did the working class, (at least, not in the form in which it has developed under capitalism). The difference today is that an enormous propertyless working class possessed only of its labour-power in the form of a saleable commodity must be made to serve the interest of the property-owning capitalists. Furthermore, that working class must be conditioned to accept that this state of affairs is both natural and inevitable.

Short shrift

Under capitalism the education system is controlled by the state, which in turn forms the executive arm of the capitalist ruling class. In order to ensure that the needs of this class are met, Acts of Parliament are passed which set out what is expected of educational administrators and educators. The 1944 Education Act, for example, which (and I again quote Lester-Smith) ‘in its very first clause gives us a Minister whose duty it is to direct and control local authorities in carrying out national policy’ also instituted (selective) secondary education for all in place of the elementary/grammar school system, thus hoping to meet the need of the capitalists for a more educated labour force. Other provisions included those having to do with the government of schools; aspects of the curriculum; the compulsory practice and teaching of the Christian religion; registration and hours of attendance and their enforcement (the normal school week relates closely to the working week which children will later experience in adult life); and many other considerations. All of these provisions are subject to the attentions of an inspectorate and an advisory service.

It seems almost superfluous to add that anyone employed as an educator or an administrator who steps out of line can expect short shrift. Those who doubt the validity of this assumption should remember what happened to Michael Duane and Risinghill Comprehensive School, of which he was the unorthodox headmaster. Or they may recall the summary treatment accorded some of the staff of the William Tyndale School who were even more unconventional in their interpretation of their duties. But we have yet to hear of cases where those teachers who enthuse over God, Queen and the capitalist system have been disciplined for expressing their views.

Smoke screen

One of the problems of trying to explain the true nature and purpose of education under capitalism is that of the sheer density of the smoke-screen which surrounds the subject. Even the most ‘progressive’ of observers seem reluctant to face up to the —for them— unpalatable truth. Our education system is no less a matter of massive and universal indoctrination because it happens to be hedged about with half-truths (or, indeed, downright lies!) about ‘child centred learning’, or ‘pastoral care’, or ‘free expression’, or ‘equal opportunity’ or ‘community schooling’ or whatever. And as for the teachers: are they not also indoctrinated products of the very system we attack; ready and willing to ‘correctly’ interpret whatever educational jargon happens to be currently in fashion?

What about the more objectionable procedures? All those vicious devices for separating the sheep from the goats: intelligence tests (based partly on the statistics—now known to be phoney — of Dr. Cyril Burt); eleven-plus examinations; bi-lateralism; Leicestershire Schemes; streaming and setting; internal and external examinations, and so on; all carefully calculated to provide the capitalists with the latest breakdown on society’s winners and losers.

Naturally, it cannot be allowed to stop at the classroom door. The sports field, the gymnasium and the swimming pool have their part to play too. Children must never be allowed to dream of a world in which there is no competition; so the omnipresent struggle to ‘prove’ oneself is as important here as it is in the examination- room. The house-point and the tin trophy reign supreme; with the added bonus, for the capitalist, that their future employees will also be physically fit enough to ensure the maximisation of their profits together with the minimisation of absenteeism through illness.

‘Middle class’ snobbery

A great deal of nonsense has been written and spoken about the so-called comprehensive schools. Many people are still determined to believe, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary, that these institutions provide the key to an egalitarian — or ‘socialist’ — future. Unless these people are also prepared to believe that the capitalists have at last taken leave of their senses, such optimism reveals itself for what it really is: empty clap-trap, unsupported by a shadow of proof. These confused idealists seem undisturbed by the fact that successive governments, of whatever stripe, have pursued the same goal: the more efficient means of selection provided by the comprehensive system.

It is not difficult to sec why these governments have behaved in this manner. A regime which, hitherto, had given a ‘privileged’ 20 per cent or so of the nation's children an anachronistic education in the grammar schools while allowing the remainder to drop through the sieve into the under-equipped secondary moderns was proving no match for the less-exclusive and more efficient systems obtaining in, for example, the USA and the USSR. The snobbery of those workers in the self-styled ‘middle classes’ could no longer be allowed to obstruct the desperately-needed industrial and economic advance which had become imperative if British capitalism was to survive the arctic winds of world competition. Something had to happen. That something proved to be the comprehensive school.

It follows from this that the bone tossed by Thatcher to her own Stray dogs—the repeal of legislation to compel Local Education Authorities to complete re-organisation along comprehensive lines—will not be allowed to interfere with so fundamental a reappraisal of capitalism’s real interests. The large majority of schoolchildren will continue to attend comprehensive schools where they can the more effectively be graded and conditioned for their future role as wage-earners; or, in reserve, as the unemployed.

At the beginning of this article reference was made to the misrepresentation, not to say downright obfuscation, to which education is subject; also to the fact that a definition of it proved too elusive even for many ‘experts’. It should now be possible to conclude with one:

  Education under capitalism is the primary means whereby the ruling class enables itself to obtain the services of a more or less conditioned, unrebellious and conformist working class, willing to sell its labour power in exchange for wages. It is also the means whereby the working class is prepared to fulfil all those functions — military and civil — necessary to maintain the capitalists in their privileged position as sole owners of wealth and the means of wealth-production.

Richard Cooper

Beanos with cheesecake (1979)

From the May 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

  There are now three almost identical tabloid newspapers competing in their efforts to misinform workers in Britain. 

Capitalism — the accumulation of wealth through the exploitation of working-class labour-power—is the inevitable social development of commodity-production to the point where abundance becomes possible; and where only the circumscriptions of the profit-system itself prevent society from freely producing and enjoying wealth.

But where—an innocent inquirer might ask—does all this leave us when we turn our attention to such seemingly useless ephemera as the popular—some would call it ‘gutter’—press? And in particular, Fleet Street’s undistinguished and indistinguishable troika. The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star. A cooker, after all, is a cooker; a car is a car; and although these commodities are coming off the production-lines even tinnier and more unreliable than their tinny and unreliable predecessors, they do have their practical uses—their more tangible qualities.

A moment’s reflection, however, should be sufficient to convince us that, despite its tawdry and fleeting characteristics, a tabloid—or a so-called “quality” newspaper— is no less a commodity, produced for sale with a view to profit, than those other more substantial items. (Last year, for instance, The Sun produced a profit of more than £13 million— a considerable figure by any standards).

Here, however, the analogy ends; for a newspaper, unlike the cooker and the car. has little material value. (If, that is to say, we except its undoubted uses as wrapping-paper for fish-and-chips, or as fire-lighting material). Its qualities are self-evidently abstract and representational and, under capitalism, on a par with those of a megaphone in the hands of a political huckster. For what we buy from our newsagent is, after all, merely what the capitalist press-lords think is ‘good’ for us and, of course, for them: their own political opinions, to begin with. And what is ‘good’ for us often includes their idea of the type of material which can most successfully seduce us from the dangerous exercise of thinking for ourselves. Hence, the acreage of easy-on-the-eye illustrations ("We liberated the nipple”, roared The Sun, recently) and the column-miles of trivial rubbish which occupy most of what remains. Those few journalists—and there are some, no doubt—who are allowed to submit meatier copy are either chosen for their relatively uncontentious political and economic views or kept well away from such delicate areas. (When, for example, can we expect to see the likes of Marjorie Proops discussing family or marital distress within its proper context—that of a class-based society in which, given the intolerable pressures to which millions of us are subjected, it is astonishing that many more of us do not succumb to breakdown and despair!)

Ironically enough, some insight as to the true nature and purpose of the tabloid press may be gained by comparing titles with content. The very last qualities one may expect to find within the columns of The Sun, the Daily Mirror and The Star are enlightenment or a reliable reflection of the truth; certainly about those matters which could be of any conceivable value for working-class consciousness—and all three journals claim to reflect or illuminate our aspirations and interests. At best they are shallow and uninformative and. particularly when it comes to news of world affairs, as prone to sins of omission as of commission. At worst they are vicious exploiters of personal grief and human weakness, their editors and reporters trawling for salacious gossip, cheque-books in hand, in the murkiest of waters; always ready, of course, to justify their miserable activities with hypocritical references to ‘the freeflow of information in a democratic society’. In between these two fairly approximate poles we have the more conventional forms of entertainment—pages and pages of it, crammed with sensational trivia masquerading as the truth about showbiz and sports personalities, together with exaggerated accounts of the latest gladiatorial contests in the boxing-ring or on the sports-field. (The Romans had a phrase for it all: “panis et circensis”—bread and circuses!—very useful for keeping the otherwise restless plebians from overturning the patricians’ apple-cart)

Finally, there is the inevitable commercial advertising of a type which is deliberately aimed at what is sometimes revealingly termed the ‘down-market’ consumer.

Naturally the three doughty and almost identical warriors are busily tearing each other’s throats out in the interests of what they would euphemistically describe as ‘healthy competition’. The circulation of The Sun, for example, has now substantially overhauled that of the Daily Mirror which—or so The Observer (8/10/78) would have it—has cheapened (how? one wonders!) its product in its efforts to re-capture its market. The Star seems to be wallowing in the wake, not only of its main competitors, The Sun and the Daily Mirror, but also of its sister-publication, the Daily Express. (This latter newspaper and the Daily Mail constitute the remaining prime sources of mis-information in tabloid form). And this despite a truly heroic effort to outdo them all in journalistic mediocrity. (Perhaps Victor Matthews, its proprietor, was hoping to emulate the remarkable success of The Sun, the title of which had been acquired by Rupert Murdoch in 1969 for £600,000—IPC. from whom he bought it, are still licking their wounds, no doubt!) But there must surely be a limit to the amount of junk-journalism which an already-overloaded market is able to absorb.

However, all newspaper owners do share one overriding interest: the preservation of the political status quo; whether that be under the ‘chairpersonship’ (how appropriate that ambiguous word seems in this context!) of Margaret Thatcher (currently championed by The Sun and The Star) or James Callaghan (favoured by the Daily Mirror). Nobody can accuse Victor Matthews and Rupert Murdoch, or the owners of IPC, of timidity when it comes to the defence of the capitalist system. And it is increasingly apparent that they will go to any lengths in terms of journalistic incontinence in order to succeed.

Given this assumption we can safely draw a veil over that all-too-familiar nonsense we still hear from time to time about so-called editorial independence. By way of confirmation we have on record the words of no less a personage than the editor of The Sun himself, the aptly-named Larry Lamb. He is reported as saying (Observer, 8 October, 1978):

  Mr Murdoch and I had a long discussion about the kind of newspaper we envisaged. It emerged, fortunately, that we had virtually identical concepts. We have never had a prolonged discussion about the policy of the newspaper since that night.
 The venal Larry—self-styled ‘leftist branch secretary of ‘NALGO’ in his youth—has evidently found his true vocation.
  And at shop-floor level? It is reliably reported that the Sun’s sub-editorial and other staff, working under that redoubtable editor, sneeringly dismiss their own product as “The Beano".

Richard Cooper

A death on the ocean wave (1981)

From the August 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The profit making drive of capitalism demands that no institution, however steeped in the traditions of history, is immutable or inviolate. Nothing—and most certainly not the vapourings of the nostalgically-inclined—will be permitted to stand in the path of exploitation and accumulation.

So it is with that steadfast and patriotic instrument of human misery and oppression, the Royal Navy. In an age in which British capitalism, no longer in a position to plunder the riches of a colonial empire, has found it more convenient to throw in its lot with Western Europe, the Navy in its present form has come to be seen as an increasingly expensive anachronism. (Philip Geddes, in an article contributed to the New Statesman of 29 May, compared the cost—£7 million—of a Leander class frigate of eight years ago with its £130 million successor, the all-missile-armed Type 22).

That the Navy is still required to “defend" British shores does not alter the fact of the increasing irrelevancy of much of its hardware: an ocean-going battle-fleet is a highly impracticable proposition when it comes to keeping open the Channel ports. And, as Geddes has observed, “The fishery-protection and offshore-resources squadron is something of a joke—sometimes, its ships can be outrun by modern trawlers." In short, some sections of the sea-going Navy are ripe for the chop.

The Navy is also farcically top-heavy in other areas. For example, there is an admiral for every front-line ship currently in commission—nearly 100 in all. The Admiralty also employs 32,000 workers in its naval dockyards and a further 5,700 personnel in its administrative and design departments at Bath. So the dockyards are to be run down and savings made elsewhere.

These decisions must be viewed in the context of the government’s determination to arm itself with a Trident missile submarine fleet. For this baleful indulgence Britain’s capitalists must stump up £6 billion—a figure already challenged as a gross under-estimate. Then there is the (again, conservatively-estimated) £10 billion to be found over the next ten years to pay for the replacement—with the Tornado—of the ageing Jaguar and Vulcan bombers. Set these figures alongside military spending during the current financial year alone of £12.3 billion, to which must be added the £220 million spent so far on the recently-launched and almost certainly abortive aircraft carrier Ark Royal and we have some measure of British capitalism's current arms-spending problems.

One conclusion must stand out clearly from the current debate on the condition of the Navy and of the armed forces as a whole: it has nothing to do with a reduction in the destructive capacity of the British ruling class. As has been indicated, if the Navy is to be pruned it is because it has become, at least insofar as its surface vessels are concerned, inordinately expensive, and highly vulnerable to attack from guided missiles.

The Trident missile system, on the other hand, is massively effective and relatively invulnerable. A frigate tied up in port or sinking in the Channel is no match for a submarine containing—should the Defence Ministry opt for the most advanced form of Trident—sixteen D5 missiles each fitted with fourteen independently-targeted warheads.

Arms Sales

A revealing—and wholly characteristic—factor in ruling class thinking on armaments is what is sometimes euphemistically termed “spin-off”. This means the sale of military hardware to “friendly" powers. Such sales not only line the pockets of the arms manufacturers and traders but can also offset in part the manufacturing country’s own arms budget. Capitalists the world over vie with each other to exploit the available markets. One has only to recall the deal short-circuited by the Iranian revolution—made by the British government to sell the Shir-Iran tank to that other implacable enemy of the working class, the late unlamented Shall of Iran, to understand how much profit is up for grabs in such transactions. Not that such profiteering is confined to western capitalism: its eastern counterparts, as represented by Russia and China, paddle in the same stinking morass.

The crowning irony, even to those who view the more bizarre of capitalism’s activities with relative equanimity, must be the projected sale, by the USA, of arms to the Chinese. And this coming on top of the disclosure by US Government officials that the USA has equipped two listening posts in north-west China for the purpose of monitoring Russian missile tests. What price America’s alleged ideological differences with “communist” China now?

But in this same field, perhaps the ruling class of India must take the highest a- ward. In 1978 ninety of their surplus Centurian tanks found their way, through the Spanish arms firm Barrieros Hermanos and a Norwegian broker, Fearnley and Eger Chartering, of Oslo, to, of all places, Pretoria. (Guardian, 15 May).

Both western and eastern capitalists can fall foul of their own perfidy as a consequence of shifting political and economic alliances: the USA and Vietnam, for example; or Russia and Egypt. In each case the client state changed sides. But, whichever way the cat jumps, the mercenary crooks who enrich themselves by dealing in arms are unlikely to require a change of pillow in the night. Rather will they buy themselves a new phrase-book.

The cost of fighter aircraft has become astronomically high. Jan Connell, Defence Correspondent of the Sunday Times (29/5/81) quotes a study by James Fallows, Ex President Carter's speechwriter: “One aircraft manufacturer estimates that 'if present trends continue, by the year 2054 today’s entire American defence budget would buy just one plane' ”. Dare we hope that capitalism will one day strangle itself in the entrails of its own ludicrous “defence" policies?

Who Loses

As for us of the working class, we may indulge ourselves with hand-wringing lamentation — our masters' withers will remain unwrung. The fact remains, however, that it is through the efforts of the working class alone that the arms race is allowed to proceed at all. Who, after all, makes the weapons? Who makes the machines that make the components that go to make up the weapons? Who works the mines? and who pours the steel? Indeed, who makes the paper and metals to provide the capitalists with their money-tokens and their bills of exchange, without which no marketing could take place? One thing is certain: it is not the capitalist. (But who will sweep up the profits?)

The largest question of all, however, must be: who are destined to slaughter each other in unprecedented numbers with the sterile products of their own labour-and brain-power in the next of capitalism’s wars? Once we start to ask ourselves questions such as these we are halfway toward finding the answer to others even more pertinent. But such interrogation is a service we can only render ourselves; nobody else can do it for us.

Richard Cooper

Media harlots (1979)

From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

You cannot hope 

to bribe or twist, 

thank God! the 

British journalist.

But. seeing what 

the man will do 

unbribed, there’s 

no occasion to.

(Humbert Wolfe).

Bribery and Graft can—and do—take subtle forms. So can pressure on one’s job; especially in times of heavy unemployment. Otherwise, how else could the master class persuade workers such as journalists, type-setters, television and radio news-readers and interviewers, editors, chat-show hosts, camera crews, engineers and the like, to sustain the unremitting stream of heavily-slanted clap-trap with which we have been assailed over these past few months.

I refer, of course, to the well-orchestrated and wholly unprincipled attack which has been, and is being, directed at millions of workers whose resentment at finding their already modest standard of living even further eroded has boiled over into open — if uninformed — rebellion.

However, while recognising the effects of, on the one hand, the economic stranglehold the capitalist has on his hired labourers, and on the other, the lack of a true understanding of our condition as wage-earners under capitalism, it can do no harm to point up some of the shadier verbal and other techniques employed by the press, television and radio to convince the public of the greed and perversity, not to mention downright callousness, of striking trade-unionists (as if these same strikers were not themselves also members of the public!).

No doubt readers of this journal will have their own store of prize examples; including, perhaps, that memorable occasion on which Angela Rippon, reading the news, referred, apparently quite unconsciously, to  ". . . trade unionists and other extremists . . .” And that shining moment during which listeners to a morning news round-up-cum-chat-show could have heard an interviewer attempting to trap a lorry-driver picket into confessing that he fiddled his time-sheet in order to make up his money. (His ingratiating manner as he did so caused swallowed porridge to rise back into at least one listener’s throat. But when a BBC toady next interviews the Director-General of the CBI, take note of the obsequious little chuckle he manages to emit as he concludes a tendentious performance studded with gently sympathetic leading questions with his “. . . and thank-you, Sir John”).

From the screaming prejudice of the lady before the pickets (Look North, 24 January) to the Consultant Physician who spent a day refusing his selective services to trade union card-holders; (Radio 4, 25 January) from the threat to day-old chicks (due to have their necks wrung later, anyway) to the brigade of outraged ladies busy sharpening their umbrellas; from the priest who used his morning radio God-Spot (Friday, 2 February) to denigrate hospital workers and the like, to that other consultant (the same programme) who was whipped in to elaborate his contention that we should dispense with the less-than-dedicated services of half the hospital ancillary workers anyway; broadcasting and the press have been having a field-day.

What workers responsible for preparing and presenting such malevolent harlotry should remember is that it is directed against themselves—just as surely as at social workers or lorry-drivers, or hospital porters, or school caretakers, cooks and cleaners. It is intended to create a climate in which a more deferential working class accepts the specious argument that to ask for a few measly quid a week more in order merely to try to restore a deliberately-engineered cut in their wage-packets is to "bring the Nation to its knees”; or to create “uncontrollable inflation”; (who actually prints the money, anyway?) or "bring down your Labour Government". (The writer emphatically denies possession).

But the thoughtful worker can learn a valuable lesson from all these manifestations of capitalism in crisis. Our present system cannot be made to function efficiently no matter which government holds office, crude attempts to shuffle off the blame for the current state of affairs onto disaffected workers using the media of broadcasting and the press to do so reveals a blatant and cynical determination on the part of the capitalist class to hide this truth from the only other section of capitalist society which has the power to put things right: the 90 per cent of us who constitute the world's working class.

And that 90 per cent includes the ‘front’ men and women who push loaded news at us all via the airwaves and the printing-presses.

Richard Cooper

Our Masters' Voice (1982)

From the March 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the manifestly cheap (The Muppets) to the mystifying (Jesus of Nazareth), Lew (Lord) Grade and his cronies, at enormous profit to themselves, have socked it to us until (or so one might reasonably have supposed) our corporate stomach for the products of their tawdry road-show could take no more, thus hastening their downfall. The truth, unfortunately, lies elsewhere. It is that the recent collapse of Grade's extensive empire came about not so much because the public rejected his patronisingly inferior offerings but because of sheer boardroom incompetence.

To cut a long story short; it appears that Grade fancied himself, not merely as a highly successful light entertainment entrepreneur, but as a would-be film magnate in the grand tradition. Unfortunately for him and his fellow shareholders the film side of his enterprises never really got profitably under way: his biggest flop among some thirty-odd others was Raise the Titanic, which all but sank his Associated Communications Corporation (annual turnover, £250 million).

But, in order properly to understand the true nature of this growing catalogue of greed, graft and mismanagement—in itself a fair reflection of the euphemistically named “entertainments industry" as a whole—we need to remind ourselves of how it all began. Grade (believe it or not, a one-time professional Charleston dancer) had his chance, and took it, in 1954 when, on being awarded the Midlands Independent Television licence, he set up Associated Television (ATC). Dubbed from the start “licences to print money”, the ITV franchises lived up to their name. Through advertising and the promotion of a great deal of such unmemorable rubbish as that referred to above, Grade and his fellow operators seemingly could do no wrong. Grade's empire expanded almost as rapidly as his own ambitions. His board gave him every opportunity to do more or less as he pleased. They lived to regret their trust: Grade badly misjudged the American market for his films and ACC ran up debts in excess of £75 million. (All of which must be one further rebuff for that other slick operator, Harold Wilson who, in recognition of Grade’s services in helping deflect attention from his own betrayal of the working class, presented Grade with his fancy ermined robe and bloomers and bundled him off to the Lords.)

The grenade that blew up in Grade’s face was his attempted payment to his, by that time, evidently dispensable financial manager. Jack Gill, of a bob or two by way of beer-money in lieu of the boot— £560,000 cash, no less; not to mention other acceptable little perks, such as the quarter-million-pound house he lives in. Gill swallowed this insulting treatment with a brave smile—the City did not. A major shareholder, the National Association of Pension Funds, has secured an injunction withholding payment. In due course, no doubt, we shall be treated to yet another swinish struggle around the pig-trough. I don’t know about the Muppets, but Jesus of Nazareth must be throwing up all over the place, wherever he resurrected himself to.

Episode three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-nine of the ACC farce sees, slithering in from the wings, the salivating figure of one Robert Holmes à Court. This South African born lawyer turned asset stripper from Australia (they do get about, these capitalists, don’t they?) has developed his alternative skills to a fine art. The trick, apparently, is to exploit the not infrequent coincidence on the stock market of low share prices and high asset values: buy in the shares at knockdown prices, wait for take-over bids, and then sell dear. Should this ploy fail then the companies themselves can be bought at bargain-basement prices and the assets sold off. (See David Philip, “Moving in for the kill”, New Statesman, 29/1/82.)

What, it may be asked, is à Court inheriting? Well, for one thing. The Muppets, and for another, Jesus of Nazareth — mortgage on future sales? £22.7 million—an awful lot of loot for some of the most puerile and patronising codswallop ever passed off as “entertainment” to a punch-drunk, unresisting public. This, however, is not all. Along with the papier-maché and the pseudo-religious we have ACC assets variously estimated at between £50-100 million, taken over for £15.5 million, the sum Holmes à Court paid for 51 per cent of the non-voting shares of the company. These assets include Classic Cinemas. Stoll Moss Theatres, Northern Song (which holds copyright on many Lennon and McCartney songs), Bentray Investments, Elstree Studios, Central TV and Jetsave, the travel company.

As will be appreciated, there is a great deal more to these unlovely shenanigans than is necessary or possible to describe here. The question is: where does all this leave us of the working class? One thing is certain: we’re unlikely ever to find out if we never venture deeper than, say, the surface of our television set. There are the very soundest of reasons we owe it to ourselves to subject, not merely television, but the communications business in its entirety, to the closest and most critical scrutiny. Take the political and economic nature of its ownership and control. We hear enough from our masters and their lackeys about state control of the means and content of media communication in so-called communist countries, most of it no doubt true enough. But the clear inference is that our own media is free from such domination—which is manifestly untrue.

But even if there were no state control—which there clearly is in the way senior appointments are made, or in funding—the media under capitalism would still find itself in the strait-jacket of business interests. Anything that runs counter to these interests is bound to be circumscribed, or mutilated, or banned—in a gentlemanly fashion, of course, behind closed doors, and with an oily smile. After all, what millionaire is willing to allow a fundamentally dissentient voice a chance to be heard, and heard regularly, exposing that same millionaire and the system that spawned him to the penetrating criticism of an informed and hostile working class viewpoint?

To confine ourselves to TV and Radio: if we accept the necessarily innocent abstractions of music, and the coded, less menacing, language of the more adventurous broadcast theatre, what are we left with? It is an unremitting diet of the innocuous, the banal, the slanted, the censored, the hypocritical, the chummily familiar or ingratiating, the half-true and the bare-faced lie. When the inevitable industrial disputes happen we see and hear, with monotonous regularity, ordinary working people and union leaders alike subjected to thinly-veiled hostility from front persons who have evidently never recognised their own status as members of the working class, leave alone forgotten it.

Then we have the other side of the coin. Tune in of a morning to the likes of Brian Redhead and his mates and note the manner in which they deal with, say, the Secretary of State for Employment, or the Chairman of the CBI. And then compare it with their approach to some underpaid, undereducated, relatively inarticulate striker. It never fails to leave a thoroughly nasty taste in the mouth of one listener, at least. As the Glasgow University Media Group has discovered, bias in the media can be disarmingly subtle, as can obsequiousness, or politically loaded hostility. But our own carefully analytical listening and viewing can usually reveal more than enough to put us on our guard.

By the same yardstick it is instructive to study, as objectively as rising irritation and frustration will permit, those programmes—usually televised—which purport to give a voice to “the people". Watch how, after suffering perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes of anodyne and unproductive opinionating, somebody “starts” something by putting a provocative spoke in. Jill Tweedie, in a revealing piece for the Guardian of 1 February, has asserted that these people are “plants” put there to wake things up a bit. This may or may not be true: what is worth noting is that rare occasion when a genuine “uncooperative” strikes home with something slightly more fundamental or politically embarrassing. Watch how the “chairperson” adroitly, and with the assiduous co-operation of the cameramen and sound-technicians, manages to beat a diplomatic retreat. Of course, as that notorious scourge of the Establishment Robin Day would confirm, such undemocratic antics can be suitably recognised and rewarded.

Our message is plain. Workers can and must make the effort correctly to interpret, in the light of their own experience, the gigantic con-trick that is being swung on them, not only by the likes of Grade and Holmes à Court, but by the equally dangerous, if urbane and discreet, ex-public schoolboys of the BBC’s upper echelons. The swindle is perpetrated for two main reasons. The first, and most obvious, is to make money. The second less apparent but not less insidious—is that, under capitalism, the bulk of the media in general, but the broadcasting media in particular, is obliged to play the role of “Our Masters’ Voice”.

Richard Cooper

Retired Hurt (1985)

From the October 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under capitalism old workers, like the old machinery they may have been operating, or the old car they may have been driving, lose their commodity value as they wear out — or, more accurately, as their masters insist they wear out. The machinery, having some small value as scrap, ends up in a foundry, no doubt. The old workers find themselves suddenly and ignominiously translated from "useful” members of society into what are euphemistically termed the “senior citizenry". From this moment on they are free, as was Voltaire’s Candide, to cultivate their gardens if they have one. The bitter truth is that the majority of such workers end up as crushed as that elderly car they could only barely afford to keep on the road when they were working. Having sold their labour and brain-power for the smallest sums their employers could get away with; having tolerated for the best part of a lifetime a system which all too few ever bother seriously to question or examine; is it any wonder that when we are unceremoniously cast aside we experience an isolation which can have devastating — even fatal — consequences. Only now are we able to see how insulting are the euphemisms with which capitalist society hardly bothers to cushion this final rejection. Not that the relinquishing of a life of wage-slavery should in itself constitute any great sacrifice. Indeed, it should rather be a matter for rejoicing. So why isn’t it?

It is estimated that of a UK population of around 56 million some 18 per cent, or something of the order of 10 million, are of retirement age (60 for women. 65 for men). In addition we have now to include growing numbers of workers who are accepting early retirement — a euphemism for disguised redundancy resulting from the continuing economic depression. Whatever the exact figure may be. the accumulated experience and wisdom embodied in so vast a number — and this in just one country — is enormous. For it is not to be supposed that, because so many workers are thrown on the scrap-heaps of the labour market they have nothing left to offer. And in a world which is so manifestly in need of all manner of skills it is as obscene to waste such expertise as it is to allow grain or fruit to rot; to pay farmers not to grow foodstuffs, while millions starve. However, as we have already stated, labour-power is a commodity bought by a capitalist with a view to the realisation of surplus value, a proportion of which constitutes profit. But during a depression labour power may find itself without a market in a world which is over-producing — not in terms of need, but in terms of price-maintenance, which alone ensures profitability. So what hope for older workers, whatever their skills, when millions of younger workers are tossed aside to join the dole-queues? What it all boils down to is that we do not live in a society in which men and women may elect to do useful work (or not, as the case may be). What we actually see is something quite different.

The penny-pinching meanness of the standard old-age pension denies many millions of elderly people, who spent their lives producing surplus value for our capitalist masters (not to mention cannon-fodder for their generals) any chance of dignity in what is left of their lives. Quite apart from simple domestic hardship (sometimes lethal in its consequences) there is the inability of the old to play a full part in the life around them. Suddenly the salient feature of the capitalist system — that everything, but everything, seems to cost money you are no longer in any position to afford — dominates your every waking moment. However, since money paid out to old-age pensioners constitutes a tax on the surplus value which would otherwise accrue to the ruling class it is easy to see that no major increases would easily be tolerated. The domestic and social deprivation of ten million units of what, stripped of all cant, is seen by the ruling class as clapped-out labour power is an integral feature of capitalist society. (How long before we are offered voluntary euthanasia along with the barometer and the plastic garden gnome?)

From the cradle to the grave we are subjected. in one form or another, to the depredations and exploitation of the capitalist system. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that there are rich pickings to be had out of the old and infirm despite their own evident penury. The reason for this paradox lies with the arrangements under which numbers of old people are boarded out in private nursing homes. Phil Cohen (Hiving off the Elderly, New Statesman, 7th December 1984) has described how, as a result of "privatising" what have hitherto been the responsibilities of the state, the DHSS has been pouring money into the coffers of the "privateers''. Old people, often ill and bewildered. are being bundled out of NHS hospital wards and dumped, usually against their will, in private nursing homes away from their own communities. The wards are then closed down in an attempt to accommodate the government's financial impositions. In the meantime the capitalist sharks, having smelt blood, are homing in for the kill on the property market ("large country houses, educational establishments, hotels, etc") in order to exploit their new and evidently lucrative opportunities.

The cold steppes of society at large for the retired are one matter (a subject by no means exhausted in the foregoing). But what about that closer, warmer relationship which is supposed to exist within the circle of the family? The harsh truth is, that in the molecular society which is so essential to the survival of capitalism, it rarely exists. We live in a jungle, the laws of which allow for precious little distinction between the familiar and the foreign. Workers who struggle to feed, clothe and shelter a family of their own are bound to find the additional responsibilities of caring for ageing parents an almost intolerable burden. Of course, the same pressures are visited on all those unmarried women who sacrifice their own lives to the needs of their parents. Coupled with such embarrassment is the — understandable — independence of outlook which the old workers bring to their new, and as often as not unwelcome, circumstances. A woman who has brought up her own children. cooked in her own kitchen, managed her own domestic finances, finds it difficult to relinquish such hard-won sovereignty, however threadbare it might have proved. Of course the sparks must fly (and given the cramped living space which most of us are obliged to occupy it is a miracle if they don't). Of course workers, of whatever age, provided they are not reduced by illness — senile dementia, for example — to absolute dependence, would ideally prefer to live their own lives. That this is so rarely possible has to do, not with any omission on their part, or that of their families. It is just another seemingly intractable contradiction of the social and economic system which thrusts so many of the more vulnerable of us into this impasse.

Some might argue that little better should be expected from the heartless bunch that governs us at present. And isn't it true that Labour — or whatever — is stamping impatiently in the stalls only waiting for the chance to put matters right? This is a dangerously naive illusion which can have no reference to events, past or present. Where, for example, were no fewer than seven former Labour governments on being reminded — as indeed they were, plaintively and often — that millions of workers, lifelong wealth producers for their respective masters, have been, and are being, plunged into a thankless and degrading poverty? The answer is, that Labour administrations have found themselves no better placed to deal fundamentally with this problem than have any others. It is an ineradicable feature of the capitalist system. As such it is pointless and diversionary to draw attention to, or attack, this or that personality. The deep and abiding love and affection felt for Thatcher within the Socialist Party is as profound as anything to be discovered within the pulsating breast of her Denis. However, we delude ourselves if we begin to think that any transference of these sentiments to the unlikely Neil Kinnock can make the slightest difference. Indeed, we would deserve our inevitable disappointment. So, what must be done?

The only answer to this and our many other problems is the democratic overthrow of the capitalist system itself — nothing less will do. For it is capitalism alone which is responsible for them. And this historic work is a task for all members of our class — including the "retired".

Richard Cooper

A message for Cathy (1990)

From the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Somewhere in the middle of the Byline broadcast 'Cathy Where Are You Now?' (BBC1, 9 July), which was promoted as a sequel to the twenty-year-old documentary drama 'Cathy Come Home', viewers may have heard a familiar lament to the effect that we all "have a right" to a roof over our heads. Let us state at the outset that if there is one essential need among many others that under the capitalist system we have absolutely no right to it is a home. Were it otherwise none of us would be without one. Cardboard City could exist only as a sick joke in a tuppenny historical satire. That exploiter of human need, the landlord, would have gone the way of the slave-trader and the witch-burner.

What failed to emerge from the broadcast in any other than an incidental sense is that housing, far from constituting an inalienable right, carries no higher status than that of an entitlement conditional upon the would-be purchaser's having enough money to pay for it. Since most of us are dependent on a wage or salary, what we finally own is not a home, which is the property of the money-lender, but a mortgage. Moreover, as with any other commercially-negotiated loan, it has to be paid for—"serviced", as the euphemism has it—and expensively at that. Mrs Thatcher's "property-owning democracy" is, for most of us, a shadow of a thing, productive of nothing more substantial than nagging worry if not illness and, for a desperate minority, even suicide. That this judgement applies as absolutely to those of us who are buying "our" council houses as to any other house-buyers is axiomatic (Mrs Thatcher’s "gift" of a qualified ownership has already been paid for in rent over the years). Erstwhile council tenants can be—and indeed are being—evicted where they default on their new mortgages.

And what, exactly, have these council tenants been offered? A quick trip round the average council estate should disabuse even the most hostile among the self-styled "middle classes" that its occupants, where they are able or willing to buy, are "getting something for nothing". Built on the cheap, many of these mean ghettos have degenerated into underserviced and infested slums, veritable universities of disaffection and crime, where the policeman enjoys a higher profile than the social worker or the health visitor. The sorry truth is that thousands of council tenants, far from being able to buy their all too basic accommodation, stand in arrears of rent and are in no position to clear their debt.

For many—nowadays a majority—who are obliged to resort to the private market, theirs is in many respects an equally depressing plight. While government ministers juggle cynically with their recurrent financial crises (an endemic feature of the capitalist system they so enthusiastically espouse) house-buyers are finding their mortgage repayments increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to meet. Let borrowers introduce the term “rights" when they next meet their building society manager in yet another effort to renegotiate their loans. Their reward must be, if not the uncomprehending stare, then the patronising smile of the worldly-wise money merchant whose primary purpose is to safeguard the building society's assets, not to provide shelter for the "impecunious".

Skid Row and Cardboard City

In the case of that increasingly large number of erstwhile "proud home-owners" who are forced onto the street, there remain the hotel room and the shared kitchen and lavatory already discovered by so many single parents—usually abandoned young mothers—and their children. A few statistics provided by the Byline programme help to illustrate this growing scandal. In 1966, homeless families in emergency accommodation numbered 4.400; in 1989, that figure had risen to 38,000. In what was described as an average hotel of thirty-six rooms the occupants shared one kitchen bookable in advance, forcing many to resort to the junk food market or to shift for themselves late at night— too late for the children, who had to make do with a stop-gap meal earlier in the evening.

In these circumstances it is hardly surprising that so many homeless people are prepared to risk police and local authority harassment by taking to the road in converted vehicles, or living in tented dwellings. Squatting continues to provide some homeless with a roof but relentless official pressure backed by changes in the law have made this option much more difficult. Such makeshift arrangements as vehicle conversion, fixed of mobile, do at least afford a measure of independence, tenuous though that may prove to be. The long-tolerated experiences of traditional travelling people such as the gypsies, for whom harassment of one kind or another has always been a hazard, are visited upon these more recent and, in many cases, involuntary nomads. Authority in its various manifestations has always and everywhere found it difficult, both socially and politically, to come to terms with those who demonstrate a readiness to break free from its magisterial control. Police harassment. often prejudiced in itself, is in reality a response to any uninformed public resentment which may contain more than a hint of jealousy.

The final depth for all too many, however, has to be the cardboard boxes of Skid Row. During a recent Nick Ross phone-in the Housing Minister, Michael Spicer, was heard earnestly reminding us that Cardboard City is populated by the single homeless male—as if, even were it entirely accurate, this dismal fact constituted an extenuating circumstance for government to cling to as it peddles its miserable excuses. We are now informed that the government will commit fifteen million pounds to the task of clearing city pavements of their down-and-outs. That this is cosmetic—mere political opportunism—is searingly obvious. What an advertisement for "popular capitalism" in Britain, one of the world's richest countries (but rich for whom, one wonders?) that visitors to London should have to run the gauntlet of the cardboard squats of the moneyless and jobless as they negotiate the precincts of the concert halls, bridges and underpasses of the capital city. Why. even poor old Mother Theresa confessed to shock. So they'll find a barracks for them and then amend the law to prevent them from returning to be stumbled over. Out of sight, out of mind. Charles Dickens would have relished such material: Spicer's ugly cant would have made his mouth water. So what is to be done?

Providing homes no problem

At this point the 'Cathy' follow-up collapsed into bathetic nonsense of the “nobody should have more than one home” variety. "People who are prepared to work hard should be allowed a loan. Security? Why, the house they promise to build, of course”. ‘‘Bricks and mortar should be released for all who want them". ("Released"? There's a euphemism for "sold", if you please!). Nowhere in the broadcast was it even hinted that, were we all to enjoy, as of right, adequate housing the capitalists, who control the building industry would be bankrupted. Abundance in any commodity spells ruin for the profiteers. Prices would plummet and production cease.

Paradoxically, the planet itself is made of building materials. And in this country alone the necessary skills abound. Thousands of building workers are unemployed. The accumulated experience of centuries could be brought to bear on matters—heating and ventilation, for example—that even the Romans could approach with confidence. It could all happen but for one baleful impediment: under capitalism capitalists must capitalise—or perish. This inescapable requirement applies as surely to state capitalist Russia and China as to the mixed economies of Japan and the USA. The money system serves to facilitate what amounts to a form of rationing in the means of life itself. And the misery this entails is allowed to continue in order that a small minority class of parasitical manipulators should be maintained in the life-style to which it is accustomed.

So the only answer to housing deprivation, as to all other such “problems” under the capitalist system, remains unfettered production to meet need (as opposed to profit). Which means the end of capitalism. All of which leads to one unavoidable conclusion: whereas the world's capitalists understand this perfectly clearly, which is why they make—and have always made— such monstrous and unprincipled efforts to conceal the truth from the rest of us, we, the working class, who produce everything, have hardly begun to. Until we do, the Cathys of this world must remain homeless.

Richard Cooper

CND: an exercise in double-think (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lazarus-like, CND is groping its way out of its grave. Having already demonstrated, over a number of years, the utter futility of its activities, it seems determined to point up all over again the lessons we—and it—should have learnt from its earlier failures and disappointments. And in consequence, time seems to be standing still. There is a strong whiff of what the French term “deja-vu” in the air: it has happened before and—or so it seems—we are about to go through it all again. But before CND starts yet another of its barren exercises let us recall some other human experiences from which we should have learnt a vital lesson, however bitter.

It has been estimated that more than 10,000,000 military personnel alone died during the First World War. A further 50,000,000 people, military and civilian, perished in the Second. More millions have died in South-East Asia, Africa, South America and in many other smaller theatres of war. In addition to these, many millions may be reckoned to have died from starvation, malnutrition and disease in the so-called “third world” countries. All these catastrophies are so vast as to defy comprehension. And anyway, converted as they have been into an arid statistical exercise, they seem devoid of meaning. Perhaps we need to turn, for understanding, to the vignettes of human tragedy rather than the great traumas of world war and mass starvation. To take an example or two:

A file of blinded British infantrymen, each with his hands on the shoulders of the man in front of him, and silhouetted against the sky, crocodile their way back to some Flanders field dressing station.

A press photographer pulls off the coup of a lifetime: he photographs a soldier of the Spanish Civil War at the precise moment of his death from a sniper’s bullet.

In some German concentration camp lethal gases wreathe around the walls of a sealed chamber packed with naked men, women and children.

A skinless and screaming child, unfortunate enough to have been in the path of an American napalm attack, rushes imploringly toward a news-cameraman.

In Cambodia the calculated genocide of a million or so anonymous peasants and their dependants has been exploited in an international diplomatic chess-game played out by would-be rival alliances.

It will be noticed that in none of these events have nuclear weapons played the remotest part. Yet the human suffering involved is no less poignant.

But what, it has to be asked, do these and numberless other terrible events inspire in the minds of the vast majority of people today? Shocking though it is, and difficult though it may be to reconcile oneself to it, the answer is: relative indifference. Workers whose political consciousness has been hampered by their “educators” and by the mass-media are unwilling to identify with, and therefore do not care deeply about, such matters. We seem to be inured to the sufferings of others, however graphically they may be illustrated. But then, as is implicit in the above, perhaps that very presentation is, in part at least, responsible for this indifference. The bloody images flickering away in the corners of our living-rooms are taken as being ail of a piece with the tomato-ketchup dished out to us by the “entertainment” moguls.

Perhaps we can no longer discriminate between fact and fiction. Indeed, it is probably intended that some such confusion should exist. After all, the “suspension of disbelief” can all too easily slide into a suspension of belief. Certainly much of the gory drivel which passes for “entertainment” these days breeds a callousness and insensitivity which must blunt any attempt to understand the true plight of those millions of our fellow-workers who possess nothing at all, leave alone a television set.

“But surely”, we hear you say, “most people cannot avoid caring about such things?” Not so. Most of us are unable to care because we have never been encouraged to understand the true reasons why otherwise normal men and women have this “inexplicable" capacity to behave so cruelly toward their fellow human beings—of whatever nationality, including their own. In the absence of any such understanding it is all too often put down to “human nature”; or “God’s will”; or “Fate”; or some other metaphysical characterisation.

Socialists are often scornfully asked: “What, then, are these reasons you keep harping on about?” We reply: The true—and only—reason is the existence, in our times, of the capitalist system, and the implacable determination of its principal beneficiaries, a tiny handful of greedy and power-hungry wealth-owners and their acolytes, to preserve and enhance their class status. These latter are cynically indifferent to the anguish of those who happen to be standing in the way of their miserable ambitions.

It has been observed that our masters would rather wade up to their necks in our blood than concede an inch of real power in their determination to cling to their privileges. Looking back over recent history alone, who can deny the truth of this observation? From Passchendaele to Stalingrad; from Belsen to Hiroshima: from Vietnam to Chile; from Dresden to Cambodia: nothing has been allowed to stand in the path of capitalism’s ruling classes; most certainly not the agony of the innocent millions who, possessing only their capacity to work and reproduce, have died like cattle in their wars, in ignorance of the true reasons for their pointless martyrdom.

However, in speaking of our apparent indifference to our fate under capitalism, it would be wrong to oversimplify. As the opening paragraph of this article has indicated, some of us care, however ineffectually. The streets of the world's cities frequently bear witness to this. Banner-carrying processions made up of earnest individuals from all walks of life and of all manner of opinions and beliefs may be seen parading this or that “cause”, or deploring this or that outrage. All credit to them (one might observe) that they have the guts to get out and do what must surely stick in the throats of so many of their numbers unused as they are to making such “public spectacles” of themselves.

Unfortunately, willingness to put up with blistered feet and the jeers of bystanders isn’t nearly enough. Unaccompanied by political understanding, such uninformed “witness” must inevitably dissolve; at best, into an emotional and platitudinous wallow in a tepid and vaguely unsatisfactory bath of self-righteousness: at worst, into the vicious, not to say ridiculous, punch-ups of Grosvenor and Red Lion Squares. But whichever way it goes one thing is certain: our economic and political masters will have lost no sleep. For once again they will have had demonstrated to them that the true responsibility for the human misery which leads to such demonstrations—capitalism itself—has once more gone unidentified and, therefore, unexamined and unthreatened. Demonstrators and their critics alike will have been restored to their television sets and what passes for “news”-papers and, with varying degrees of scepticism (or, more likely, none at all!) will already be harvesting yet another crop of lies and half-truths. As for our masters: they, no doubt, will shortly increase the pay of the police “for services rendered”. A handful of sycophantic press humbugs can confidently expect to be remembered in the next Honours List. And for the rest of us, life, with its attendant miseries, frustrations and risks, will proceed as “normal”.

So demonstrators, including those of CND. are certainly successful in one major respect at least: they deflect even the more politically-conscious from a true recognition of our existence—and therefore of our condition—as a class. They undermine a proper understanding of the capitalist system in a way which can only bring relief to, for example, the manufacturers of the very weapons they march to abolish. But—worst of all—they drain workers of energy we can ill afford to waste in what should properly be our common struggle to achieve an enlightenment without which socialism, our only remaining hope and goal, is not possible.

Richard Cooper

Secondary schools: educating for conformity (1980)

From the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the time of writing, a by no means insignificant proportion of the nation’s young, along with their parents, friends and relations, are holding their breath. The cause of this trauma, which occurs annually, is the impending announcement of the ‘O’ and ‘A’ level examination results.

Ever since the examination answers were written, markers drawn from the ranks of the teaching profession — retired and active — have been busily scratching away with their black and red pencils. Their job is to sort out the relative merits or demerits of the scripts they have been given and to deliver the ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ as the occasion warrants.

And a great deal hangs in the balance. Some students wish to enter their sixth-forms to attempt the next hurdle. Others have a conditional offer of a place at a university or a polytechnic. Many more hope to enter industry or commerce, or the “public” services. All, however, share an overriding concern: the nature and quality of the meal-ticket they must, if they are to live, acquire at the end of it all. For this is what the exercise is all about. Put another way; what, in effect, is happening is the ‘intellectual’ classification of the working class for and on behalf of the only other class—the capitalists.

It is important to remember also that by far the larger proportion of working class youngsters have already been weeded out. They are now performing the intellectually less-demanding—and usually lower paid—tasks imposed upon them by their capitalist masters and by their own circumstances. Or—more likely—they are unemployed.

From the foregoing it is evident that it is at examination time that education most clearly reveals itself in its true guise—as a transparent device for facilitating the grading and selection of wealth-producing units (sometimes described as ‘hands’) in the capitalist machine. We can forget all that cant about a ‘broadening of the intellect’; or the ‘widening of one’s cultural awareness’; or the ‘ability to express oneself; or ‘the flowering of one’s personality’. Teachers may sincerely believe that such inflated and plainly hypocritical claptrap is the prime purpose of their ministrations: it’s a dead certainty that the employers and their executive committee, the government, do not.

And if it appears that the three r’s are receiving less attention than, in the eyes of the prospective employers, they ought, then we can confidently expect some political hack at the Department of Education and Science to launch a campaign to put matters right. (Under Labour this duty was enthusiastically prosecuted by that darling of the media and doyenne of the Labour Party’s right wing, Shirley Williams).

It is no accident that the practice of, and instruction in, religion is compulsory in schools. This has been and remains a bare-faced and utterly cynical attempt on the part of the master-class to inculcate in the minds of young people a suitably docile and submissive attitude towards life under capitalism. Usury; exploitation; power-seeking and corruption in high places; culminating in the conditioning of the working class to accept war, with its possibility of a nuclear holocaust: such things require a foundation in ‘morality’ if our masters are going to get away with it. The Church and its handmaidens, the educators, have always proved ready and willing to perform the useful task of supplying it. It is relatively unimportant that the vast majority of young people reject out of hand the ridiculous incantations of the ‘lay brethren’ in their schools; (most of whom don’t believe a word of it themselves anyway); the fact remains that capitalism will have been provided with a mask of respectability, however superficial.

Another necessary pre-condition in the process of training the workforce of the future is an unquestioning acceptance. of competition as an essential fact of life. In the majority of schools this is taken for granted. There have to be winners and losers no matter what the consequences. The humiliation and sense of failure which afflicts so many of ‘education’s’ victims, so often expressed in belligerence or apathy, are accepted as unfortunate but unavoidable side-effects.

In fact, this state of affairs constitutes the beginning of a deliberate process which is essential to capitalism's survival—the division and sub-division of the working class against itself. (And what could be more dangerous and alarming to the capitalist class than a workforce which stands united in a common interest and understanding, alert to its conditions as a class and ready and willing to subject that condition to critical scrutiny?).

Schools, then, can be compared to the nurseryman's greenhouse; by the time the seedlings have reached the stage where they are ready to be introduced to the harsher environment of the garden a great deal of thinning out will have been achieved. The tougher plants will have been suitably conditioned to face their new circumstances. Likewise the products of our schools, moulded into shape and unquestioning in their acceptance of the society into which they were born, are ready to join the bigger rat-race of the world of work. Those who enter the institutions of ‘higher learning’ are as yet one stage removed from this world; the remainder, compliant and unrebellious, are only too ready to sell their labour power to the highest bidder—or to don the uniforms of capitalism’s forces of oppression and repression.

It is clear that this is possible only up to a certain point: the capitalists may have no call for the services of the school-leaver. This is the case at the present time. Capitalism is in the latest of a lengthening line of periodic crises. Unable to find markets for its increasingly uncompetitive commodities it reduces production or closes it down altogether, throwing workers on the dole. And if there is less demand for ‘educated’ workers there is clearly less need to spend as much as hitherto on schools and schooling; hence the harshness of the education cuts. (No doubt when boom time comes around once more, new cash will be forthcoming to pay for the higher standards which will then be demanded).

So what do the employers get for their money? (and it is their money which, in the form of taxation, pays the educators to do their preparatory work for them).

The first thing they get is choice. They are now able to select from the available pool of suitably sieved and classified labour and brain power those qualities and skills which, following a further period of training and conditioning (but minus the religious bunkum, of course) are best calculated to provide them with the highest return. Or they can, if they happen to be, say, the Home Office or the Ministry of Defence, select potential policemen or soldiers or whatever, from among those who by background, inclination and malleability are most likely to prove reliable in their determination to conform to and co-operate with the status quo.

Another quality the employers can be confident of commanding is a fair degree of punctuality and endurance. The school day is deliberately designed to match, more or less, the normal working day its charges will later experience. Children who have ‘clocked on’ at their school for many years are conditioned to accept without query clocking on at their future place of employment. And having arrived they are unlikely to abscond especially if the result of any such absenteeism is a loss of earnings and/or the receipt of their cards.

Again, young people who have been subjected to the approved interpretation of economic and social life under capitalism, and who have been carefully shielded from any objective and free discussion of possible alternatives, are hog-tied. With no basis upon which to challenge the existing order of society they are neutered before they are even able to begin the inevitable struggle with their future exploiters. (The unemployed will have received the same conditioning and, provided they can be kept sweet, they offer the capitalists a fine opportunity to keep down wage-costs in the scramble for jobs).

What, then, must we learn from our school-days? It is that compulsory secondary education, contrary to what we are frequently led to believe, is not primarily intended to benefit its recipients. Its main purpose is to provide the capitalists with a docile work-force, trained and conditioned up to a level necessary to achieve the highest possible rate of profit. Alternatively, the ‘educators’ must supply the ruling class with the obedient and conformist policemen, soldiers, civil servants, and so on, essential to its surviving as a class. These conditions are obtainable only given a thorough grounding in competition, doctored history and phoney moral rectitude, backed up by coercion—with or without corporal punishment. Success can be achieved only given the absence of a proper examination of alternatives, and in circumstances which preclude truly hostile or analytical questioning in open debate. Such a regime is amply exemplified by our secondary schools.

Richard Cooper

Drugs are no substitute for action (1980)

From the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Problems”, together with the belief (carefully fostered by the hucksters, humbugs and dupes of the mass media and politics) that they exist in isolation, are hallmarks of capitalist society. Such is the case with the so-called drugs problem. Unrelated to anything except itself, it has apparently sprung from nowhere in particular. It is a social aberration; a product of “the times”; a passing fad, perhaps; or merely one of the more risky forms of self-indulgence.

What is never explained to us—least of all by such agencies as the BBC, with its “phone-ins” and its “audience-participation” jamborees—is that the “drugs problem”, along with all the other “problems” afflicting mankind, can be directly attributed to a universal condition: the existence of world-wide capitalism. In fact, drugs and drug trafficking can be no more dissociated from the capitalist system than leprous sores can be dissociated from leprosy. For, first and foremost, drugs are commodities; produced for sale with a view to profit-just like food and clothing; weapons of war; houses and hospitals; schools, newspapers and furniture. As with these latter, vast fortunes are realised from the drugs trade.

Capitalists are parasites and, true to form they have battened on the more vulnerable sections of the working class the young and curious among whom there has existed in recent years, a measurable increase in collective spending power, however temporary. (In this exploitative exercise the drug manufacturers and traffickers are joined by the sharks of the rag-trade and the pop-music “scene”; motor cycle salesmen; glossy-magazine publishers', tobacco and drinks manufacturers; and rubbishy gew-gaw sellers of all descriptions.) Junkies and pot-smokers are not alone as victims of capitalist exploitation: the harassed and overwrought suburban housewife has to find cash to pay for her chemicals, likewise.

It would be misleading, however, to ascribe the increase in the incidence of drug-taking medically prescribed or otherwise—solely to an increase in, and subsequent exploitation of, social spending power. To do so would be to ignore the role alcohol and tobacco (both of which are drugs) have played and are playing in our society. For centuries these commodities have been resorted to by millions of people who, by any standards, were poor. And they were, and are, resorted to for much the same reason that makes other drugs of one sort and another so popular among some sections of the working class today; the pressures of day-to-day living in impoverished and intellectually bankrupt circumstances. Competition at school or work; low wages; unemployment; domestic strain resulting from inadequate or non-existent housing; the sheer philistinism of the urban and suburban environment which millions of us are obliged to call “home”: all these factors and many more can lead to the doctor’s waiting room; the night chemist; the psychiatric hospital; or the street corner pusher.

And what about the doctors? Can they be blamed for their resort to the prescription of sedatives or stimulants when confronted with supplicants—and the word is used advisedly—who may be beside themselves with worry and frustration? (The irony here is that the incidence of nervous tension and breakdown among doctors is higher than among many other groups of workers.) The doctors might argue (and who would quarrel with them?) that at least their ministrations afford some control of a situation which, if left untended, could easily see their patients thrown to the wolves.

Doctor prescriptions

One can only conclude, then, that many doctors who use drugs as bolt-holes when grappling with the mental anguish of capitalism's casualties do so because they recognise their own inadequacy when confronted with the conditions which lead to the need for them. Unfortunately, not all doctors can be trusted to behave themselves — however ineffectually — as is evidenced by that proportion of their number who succumb to the corrupt blandishments of the drug-salesmen in return for material rewards of one kind or another.

Not that “business ethics” is anything other than a transparently dishonest euphemism for what is, in reality, merely the grease which lubricates the machinery of institutionalised theft. Sometimes our masters mislay the grease-gun: the following is taken from an article entitled “The Third World’s Deadly Pharmaceutical Trade”, printed in New Statesman (31.8.79):

“In Bangladesh a British doctor overheard a salesman from a US multinational recommending to a local practitioner that he prescribe the diuretic drug frusemide to reduce swellings in a child which had been caused by kwashiorkor, a deficiency disease. When the doctor intervened to protest that the drug would be more likely to kill than cure, the good merchant replied that the child would die anyway”.

If many people take to chemical palliatives in order to alleviate worry and despair others do so in a spirit of rebellious non-conformity, or to bring some colour into their otherwise drab and mediocre lives. With the aid of a “joint”, and to the accompaniment of the latest instantly forgettable outpourings of this or that unremarkable pop-group, these workers seek the world of S. T. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan or some other equally unattainable nirvana. The trouble with ersatz “heavens”, however, is that one is obliged to re-enter the real world sooner or later, and to re-discover the unpalatable truths from which one has tried to escape. We discover that nothing has changed: the “gardens bright with sinuous rills”, in which sits and warbles the “damsel with a dulcimer”, have rudely translated themselves into some litter-bestrewn vacant lot, the only home of vagrants and drug addicts.

But, more importantly, drugs share responsibility for a form of exploitation which not only provides capitalists and would-be capitalists, along with other crooks and pushers, with enormous and increasing profits. They deprive workers even of that little independence of thought and action which may remain after the education system; press, radio and television; politicians; trade union leaders, and the like have finished with them. Workers who, in whatever free time they are permitted, are languishing in a chemically-induced torpor, are in no condition to stand up to their oppressors and fight back. If there is one human quality which gains nothing from association with drugs it is the ability to think clearly and accurately.

So the capitalists have it both ways: the system of which they are the sole beneficiaries, and which plunges the working class into a lifetime of work and worry produces, at enormous profit, the means by which those same workers may be seduced into impotent anaesthesia.

As for the state—capitalism’s National Executive Committee—they are in business to assist capitalists in their exploitative pursuits, not to hinder them. Drugs law is calculated to regulate profiteering from the drugs trade in the interests of “respectable” capitalism, not to “safeguard the Nation’s health”. If the cultivation and marketing of, say, hemp is ever legalised, it will come about because the colossal profits to be made out of these practices are at present finding their way into the “wrong” pockets; something all “good” capitalists abhor. (And it must be remembered that the capitalists—characteristically—are showing precious little concern at the mayhem caused by cigarette smoking and alcoholism.)

Drug “abuse”, then, is symptomatic of a universal malaise: capitalism. When socialists speak of abuse we are thinking not so much of illicit drug peddling; nor are we primarily concerned with the self-administration of drugs. Our target is the true obscenity the profit system itself, with its inbuilt drive to accumulate capital no matter what human misery and distress is engendered on the way. We as workers owe it to ourselves and our descendants to resist the blandishments of our capitalist masters. We must learn to fling their rotten wares back into their faces and, with clear heads and firm convictions, begin the task of working ourselves out of our present fix.

Richard Cooper