The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

Passing thoughts (1949)

From the August 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

To rebel against convention is a good thing; a sign that the bonds of tradition are loosening. To rebel against wage-labour is a better thing; a sign that the understanding of social bondage is dawning. To rebel against wage-labour and to understand how to end social bondage is the best thing; a sign that comfort and security for the whole of humanity is within measurable distance of accomplishment.

When two young people love one another how sad it is that lack of money so often interferes with their unity. When two young people love one another and unite how still more sad it is that lack of money so often breaks up their unity. What a paradise Britain would be shorn of buying, banks and dividends.

The tragedy of modern war is that thousands upon thousands of bright young lives are snuffed out before they can enjoy to the full their birthright, love and laughter; the essence of the tragedy is “Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.”

A dreamer is a common butt of the stage, the screen and the platform; but when the dreamer keeps his feet upon solid ground and dreams of those things that are possible then his dreams merit serious thought instead of idle laughter. A Socialist is a dreamer, but he dreams of a world that can and will be.

Doctors, psychologists, social workers and government officials speak with smug satisfaction about the modern treatment of mental troubles, and the wonderful hospitals provided for poor mental wrecks. How shocking it is to realise that all their work and satisfaction proceeds from the wrong point of view. The mental sufferer is treated from the individual point of view, striving to adjust him to his surroundings instead of striving to alter the surroundings so that maladjustment cannot occur. Since the upheaval of the industrial revolution and social absorption with speed, with markets, with wars, humanity has been unable to adjust itself fast enough to rapidly changing conditions; it is always mentally behind, and unluckier sections mentally break down. When the world becomes a place of security and happiness by removing the source of these too rapid changes, maladjustment, and the resulting mental disorganisation, will vanish.

Gilmac.

Letter: Too Young (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too Young

I am writing to you because I would like your views on these points:

I am sixteen years old, have left school and now go to work. I do not pay tax, but will be doing so next year!

What I would like to know is, if at 16/17, 1 can get married and have children, pay tax, and N.I. I can own a car and pay the insurance, tax etc., have a home, or business, and own a passport, also possibly, smoke, just like may I add an adult.

Then why is it that 1 cannot vote, buy alcohol in a public house, gamble, i.e. horseracing, bingo, etc., see ‘X’ films, and even enter certain clubs, discos?

I think this ’law’ is pathetic. Why should a person between the age of 16-18 have the burdens of an adult and not have the ‘pleasures’? They are still legally children or is the word youths??

I, and many people of my age will never agree to this ridiculous law!!

I have written to various political parties, and 1 cannot wait to read the various reasons for this ‘mockery’ of a law.

I would appreciate a reply.

Stephen Johnson

London, E.2

Reply

It looks as if you are unfamiliar with the case put forward by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, so we recommend that you read the Object and Declaration of Principles printed on the inside cover of this journal.

The discrepancies which make you angry are, in general, between laws which governments have passed on different accounts at different times, all in the interests of capitalism. Those which aim to make adolescents “independent” for purposes of government finance come in conflict with others concerned with “public morality”. It is quite likely, particularly if pressure groups arise, that a revision of legislation will eventually be attempted to remove some of the anomalies.

If that happens, don’t imagine that you (or those who are your present age at that time) will be emancipated. Legislation is not carried out for “fairness” or on ethical grounds; the enticing promise is to get you on a more appropriate kind of chain. To give an example, the demand for the voting age to be reduced from 21 to 18 arose largely from military service and the 1950 Korean war in which Britain was involved. The anomaly pointed out was that young men could kill (or be killed) but not vote at 18. Well, then . . .

Why not raise your sights? In the world of capitalism the great majority of people between 18 and the grave would tell you they do indeed have the burdens of adults but haven’t had much chance of the “pleasures”. Socialism offers a world of equal access to everything society can provide, without any section excluded or dependent on permission by authorities.

Editors.

Labour and Tories at home (1955)

From the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

The annual conferences of the two major parties were studies in political contrast. For the Tories it was a splendid spectacle—a jamboree of quietly exulting hearts.

For Labour it was a half-hearted acceptance that “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark," a reluctant realisation that Nationalisation is no well-seasoned Socialist plank but a worm-eaten structure full of bureaucratic dry-rot over which the paint of 80 years' propaganda has worn very thin.

Now a three year policy committee is to be set up to try to substitute new planks for old. There will, of course, be much hammering and sawing by the party chippies and at the end a bag of political sawdust and shavings. 

The Conference chairman, Dr. Edith Summerskill, began the proceedings with a diagnosis of the ills of the body politic. She discovered the Tory Chancellor as the malignant cause. One felt, however, that her forceps were not so anti-septic as they might have been. The Labour Party do not like Mr. Butler, not because of his blue blooded origin, but because of the pink Fabianism he adroitly puts to the Tory cause. Now the Conservative front bench has taken to importing back room boys, Mr. Butler, with their aid, has devised vote-catching policies and captivating slogans. He appears a shrewder and more imaginative politician than his Labour counterpart Mr. Gaitskell, one of Labour's bright boys, who has taken a degree in something.

Dr. Summerskill also lamented the fact that the Labour Party has lost its emotional appeal for youth. She said they now take full employment for granted and even want something more. In short, the Labour Party are unable at present to exploit the fear of mass-unemployment. She added that Labour used to think work was synonymous with happiness. While it may be true to say that to be out of work is to be unhappy it does not necessarily mean the converse is true. Dr. Summerskill, it seems, is mildly astonished to discover that because a youth may earn his own living it does not follow that “ his cup runneth over."

Indeed, the very work which Dr. Summerskill once thought was synonymous with happiness can itself be a source of industrial frustration and as pernicious in its effects in one way as unemployment is in another. One has only to think of the large number of youth working on semi-automatic processes. The routine and drudgery often involved in junior clerkships. The thousands of boys and girls in blind-alley occupations or the soul destroying tasks of many unskilled occupations; or even the gap between what career examinations so often promise and what they actually yield. All of which is perfectly consistent with a system based on costs and profits.

To work is one thing. To earn a living is Capitalism's distorted version of it. “ To work for money,” said Marx, “ is not really to work at all.” It still remains a major indictment of Capitalism that it cannot effectively gear the creative capacities of men to the productive processes. Perhaps because many of the industrial young lack a productive outlet they seem deficient in social outlook, and seek relief from the treadmill of aimless work in the treadmill of aimless leisure.

The Tories claim, however, to attract more to their youth organisation than does the Labour Party. This may merely signify that young suburbia places a greater prestige value on a half-pint drink in the local Conservative Club than in the local boozer or Working Men’s Institute. The Labour' Party is, however, setting up a new youth organisation to compete with the Tories in catching 'em young.

Strangely enough, it was Gaitskell whom his rival Bevan once contemptuously called a dessicated calculating machine, who made the biggest emotional impact on the Labour Conference by himself emotionally announcing that “he was a true Socialist." This public avowal of faith, the first it seems he has made, earned him the biggest ovation of the Conference. It might earn him the party leadership from the discredited Bevan and the ageing Morrison.

And of what did this public avowal of true Socialist faith consist, which wrung the heart of Mr. Gaitskell and the withers of the Conference? It was that vague innocuous tenet that has done service for every political creed—“ Equality of opportunity.” Mr. Gaitskell, however, further qualified it by adding, ‘“reward should go to work and merit and not to wealth and position.” Here was the authentic voice of the Intelligentsia who believe that the division between intellectual and manual labour is an eternal dispensation. Such “equality of opportunity” would exclude any opportunity for equality.

Bevan, as usual, was “full of sound and fury signifying nothing.” While the Bevan demands for bigger and better doses of Nationalisation earn support from the constituent Labour Party, it is against the political trends of the time. Moreover, words like Public Ownership, Workers’ Control and even Nationalisation, are becoming political swear words, offensive to the delicate ears of sober Labour leaders and eminently respectable T.U. chiefs.

The last-named regard Bevanism as a disease, whereas it is merely a symptom. No doubt the Labour Party strives to have differences with the Tories but its net effect is to produce differences within itself which militate against it being an effective political whole. Thus the price of some permanent difference with the Tories would be the price of a permanent split; clearly an impossible situation. Yet for the Labour Party to be free of splits would be tantamount to declaring itself politically redundant. That is its perpetual dilemma. Because the Labour Party is part of an established two party system in a monolithic political structure its internal weaknesses are a matter of concern for Labour and Tory alike. The Labour Conference gave no sign that they would be remedied.

Tory Conferences are never complicated by attempts at policy making. Every delegate is deeply aware of his political station in life to which it has pleased the Conservative Central Office to call him. Only the Leader makes policy. To question it would be sacrilege. The Leader in his wisdom does of course delegate power to eminent colleagues and consult High Finance and Big Business.

Following the Churchillian precedent, Mr. Eden was not present at Conference proceedings. On the last day, however, he turned up and made a moving speech. Leaders on such occasions always make moving speeches. The Conference usually opens with a prayer, then the annual platform pep talk from the Conservative Elders, followed by well prepared speeches from the Conservative young and closes with a moist-eyed, deep-throated rendering of “Land of Hope and Glory.”

Nevertheless, the modern Tory Party, unlike their rivals, present a suave facade of party unity. There may be dissensions but they are conducted in well-bred, modulated voices. Deep down there may be fierce jealousies and rivalries but they scarcely ruffle the silken surface. Even when Churchill, old, arrogant and overbearing, became an embarrassment to the Tories there was no strident “Churchill must go” campaign. People who pricked their ears caught faint murmurings but no one heard distinctly, for the Tory door was shut and the windows closed. Just as when Butler, who blotted his copy book at Munich, lost out to Churchill’s white headed boy, Eden, for the premiership, no one yelled—“we wuz robbed.” While the Tories divide they never split.

After the crushing defeat of the Tories in 1945 many said “ they were sunk.” The same view was held in their 1906 debacle. But the Tories have a strong survival instinct. Quietly, efficiently, they salvaged the craft, gave it a coat of new paint and refloated it. Also they were able to cash in on their opponents’ mistakes and the disappointment Labour’s terms of office brought. The tide turned. People, who in 1945, voted against old Toryism began to vote for “New Look” Conservatism. In 1945 the Tories’ greatest liability was their pre-war domestic policy. In 1955 the Labour Party’s greatest liability is their post-war record.

The Tories are supposed to be traditionally stupid, a myth probably self-perpetrated to their own advantage. Actually they are shrewd and flexible politicians. “Dishing the Whigs” is as adroitly practised by them as it was by Disraeli. Because they are the traditional representatives of wealth and property, they regard themselves as the rightful rulers of the realm. The difference between them and the Labour Party is that Labour believes it can govern. The Tories know they can.

As for the Welfare State it is much more Tory “Socialism” than Labour “Socialism”. Long ago Industrial Feudalism was a Tory ideal, where workers would have “rights ” as well as duties. Indeed the New Welfare State is only old Tory reformism writ larger. While it may have features not wholly satisfactory to the Tories it is the current expression of their age-long political paternalism. While circumstances may make them modify it here and there they will keep its main structure unimpaired.

At present they seem to have a decided political edge on their rivals. Only the possibility of a slump, it appears, can boom Labour’s falling stock.

Ted Wilmott

'Terror in our schools' (2006)

From the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare.

This was the headline covering the front page story in the Belfast Telegraph on 12 August. The story was under the by-line of Linda McKee but the editor obviously thought it deserved greater exposure because the same story in almost the same words and sensational statistics appeared again on page 7 under the name of Dan McGinn.

We learnt from a screaming sub-heading that 1,000 pupils in Northern Ireland had been suspended from school for attacking staff. The body of the news item reduced the stridency of the headline by telling us that the figure of 1,000 was for a period of three years and that only 14 of the cases concerned merited expulsion. Statistically the article could have said that less than 0.047 per cent of pupils in Northern Ireland were accused of abusive behaviour towards teachers every year and between four and five of the complaints on each of the three years were serious enough to merit expulsion. The truth, however, has less impact than the sensational and it is the sensational that sells newspapers and makes profits for the self-interested moguls whose papers have such an important input into the formation of our opinions.

In this case the front page author was not only skilled in sensationalising but she was able to tell her readers how to resolve the problem. She tells us that the dreadful happenings she depicts happened ‘without proper punishments’ leading us to the assumption that punishment – by definition an act of violence – is the answer to the problem of violence.

Influenced youth culture

For the media, reports of bad behaviour, assaults, stabbings, teenage drinking, attacks on the elderly and the like are daily fare. Good behaviour is rarely news, perhaps because it is much more common than the stuff the press reports and, indeed, is what the public regard as normal despite frenetic media persuasion to the contrary.

That said, it is true that violence against the aged, alcohol- and drug-induced violence and muggings have become unsavoury aspects of social concern. Now there are burglar alarms where often people were careless about locking their doors at night and a night-time fear of errant behaviour often imposes a curfew on the elderly and the timid in many town and city centres.

We have to examine the causes of these patterns of behaviour against the background of the present way of life and to show that they are part of the myriad problems for which capitalism has no answer and another reason for considering the rational socialist alternative to the way we live.

Capitalism created a need for those employed in the production and distribution of its goods and services to posses a basic knowledge of what became known as the Three R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic. Accordingly the capitalist state institutionalised basic education as a legal requirement. But at that stage education beyond the basic was all the system required of working class children. ‘Their betters’, the scions of the rich, could have their educational horizons widened at universities to enrich their lives and prepare them as ‘leaders’ of society. Giving the working class the ability to read, however, opened the floodgates of knowledge and speeded the debunking of many of the myths on which religious morality is based.

Demand of the labour market

It is probably true to say that the capitalist political administration in its urgency to provide a more technically efficient labour force now robs the young of an important segment of childhood. Children are forced into the educational process at a younger age and within a few years their educational apprenticeship into the competitive demands of the labour market means that they are working at school and at home for a greater part of each day than those actually at work.

Now the schools have become educational factories, with harassed teachers themselves under compulsion to justify capitalism’s investment in what is still quaintly referred to as education and pupils induced to sacrifice their vital formative years in the hope that it will make them more competitive – by definition more aggressive and with fewer social concerns – in the hard world of capitalism.

Because education in capitalism is about creating the most efficient varieties of wage slaves those deemed by early audit to be a poor educational investment are rejected and stigmatised as failures. Further attendance at school in these cases often becomes a form of punishment and it is easy to see how young people, rejected and labelled failures, can build antagonisms towards teachers, schools and towards the society that has branded them.

The effect of New Labour’s charges on third-level education – the mountains of debt now facing working class students who earned the right to compete for the more specialised jobs – has not yet worked its way through the system. It is not hard, however to appreciate the disillusion and alienation of a qualified teacher, for example, with a debt of £20,000 who can’t get a job and finds him- or herself filling supermarket shelves.

In the wider field, news true and false is now an intensive, heavily-capitalised, industry pumping out all sorts of information twenty-four hours of every day while concealing anything that might reveal the real cause of most of the news that is reported. Without exception, all the major news media, print and electronic, promote the patriotic fervour that is so utterly meaningless and shallow; even commercialised sport, art, culture or any other human activity is used as a conduit to an aggressive xenophobic competitiveness that blights understanding between peoples. Hence, we get things like football hooliganism, so roundly condemned by those who do most to promote it.

Political clout

The search for the news commodity is borderless and inexorable: media lies and hype make politicians celebrities just as media lies and truth can strip them and castigate them when there’s kudos in a story or when they threaten some interest of the parasites who own a section of the news media. We hear how the results of a general election can be determined by the owner of a rag like the Sun and how governmental consideration is given to policies that might not find sympathy with some media mogul with more political clout than a million voters.

We are well, if not accurately informed; however disinterested we might be we cannot escape the knowledge that social democracy does not exist and our political democracy is at the level where political parties do not win elections; their opponents simply lose them while millions do not vote because they have abandoned the idea that their votes are of any real value.

Meanwhile, the wars go on somewhere every day; so does the competitive brutality of the marketplace, its money shuffling, and corporate swindling and corruption. The disgusting self-interest of leading politicians and public figures the swingeing poverty of social services and the application of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to the problem of errant youth, visionless, disillusioned, often intellectually deprived and now, under New Labour, left to the tender mercies of the police.

Richard Montague

Voice From The Back: Statistics (2004)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Statistics

From an American learned journal Mental Health Journal of the Berkshires (Spring 2004) comes an interesting review of James Gillespie’s book Preventing Violence (published by Thames and Hudson). Dr Gilligan is a trained psychoanalyst who has worked in the Massachusetts prison mental health system interviewing violent inmates, for 25 years. “Unemployment breeds both poverty and shame . . . and as Gilligan reports, for every one percent increase in unemployment, there is a 6 percent increase in violence. Statistics show the US has the greatest gap between rich and poor of any of the developed countries: the richest 225 families have $1 trillion (that is 1,000 billion dollars!), equal to the total wealth of 47 percent of the world.”

Debtors

“Personal debt is about to break through the £1 trillion ceiling in the UK for the first time, realising the worst fears of consumer bodies. The Bank of England said yesterday that UK mortgage lending increased by a record £9.8bn in April, leading City economists to predict that total outstanding debt would breach the thousand billion pound threshold” Herald (3 June). Behind these cold facts and figures lie the reality of many men and women of the working class living with anxiety and fear. Wasn’t capitalism supposed to lead to happiness and prosperity? So why in such a wonderful world do so many men and women of the working class find themselves in a desperate debt situation?  

 

Students

Capitalism is a very competitive society. It sets capitalist against capitalist, hence war. It sets worker against capitalist, hence strikes and lock-outs. It sets worker against worker, hence nationalism and racialism. There is another aspect of competition that effects young workers. Trying to convince potential employers that they are better material for exploitation than their rivals has led to some workers doping themselves up. “The number of teenagers relying on drugs such as Prozac to see them through GSCEs and A-levels has soared with prescriptions reaching 140,000 in less than a decade . . . The statistics – from the government’s watchdog, the MHRA – also highlight the pressure being put on students by the exam system. They say how that in 1995, 46,000 anti-depressants prescriptions were given to teenagers between 16 and 18 in full-time education. By last year this had risen to 140,000, more than treble the amount” Observer (6 June).

 

Death of a nobody

That capitalism is a cruel and uncaring society was well illustrated by a news item in the Times (11 June) reporting the death of a Japanese worker in his Tokyo flat. ”Only one thing distinguished it from hundreds of other lonely deaths that occur in Japan every year – the dead man’s body was two decades old. The newspaper by his side was dated February 20, 1984. In a busy residential district of the world’s biggest city, he had lain undisturbed and unidentified for 20 years.”

 

Nice for some

“Millionaires around the world saw their ranks swell to 7.7 million last year as economic growth quickened and stock markets recovered. The world’s wealthiest people were worth an estimated £15.8 trillion in 2003, with their riches forecast to grow, according to an investment bank survey known as the World Wealth Report” Herald (16 June)

Greasy Pole: Be kind to a hoodie (2006)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although David Cameron, in his speech on youth offending, did not actually advise us to get out and hug as many hoodies as we could find, he should have suspected that his speech about the need to “…understand what’s gone wrong in these children’s lives” would be quickly summarised by the media in those sensationalist terms.

 Perhaps he thought he was being original (he wasn’t) or courageous (gambling would be more accurate) or progressive (in fact it’s all be thought of and said before). By the time of his speech hoods and hoodies had become, in New Labour speak and other such trendy verbiage, an issue.

For example last May the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent banned anyone wearing a hood, along with those who swore or behaved in similarly challenging ways. But there were apparent problems in this as there has yet to be a satisfactory definition of a hoody – does the term include the enthusiasts who gather on railway platforms to make a note of train numbers? When does an anorak become a hood, with all that implies in terms of a threat to mug old ladies who have just collected their pension from the post office? If a hood is made of the finest cashmere wool and sold in a trendy Notting Hill boutique is it still an aid to an offender trying to hide their identity? And what would the genuine hoodie think about having a fleshy Old Etonian approach him in the street, when he was out looking for an opportunity to do a bit of swift robbery, and start to hug him? Wouldn’t that be enough to put anyone off a life of crime forever?

Bluewater said they were delighted at the effect of their measure, which they claimed was responsible for a marked increase in their customers – although how many of  these were reporters and assorted media hacks is not known. Hood manufacturers made no comment; the company Bon prix continued to advertise its wares with pictures of pretty girls and muscular, handsome young men and slogans like “Ladies, your favourite hoodies at great prices . . .” Tony Blair was delighted – with his eye on the readership of the Daily Mail he recruited Bluewater’s experience as justification for his government’s introduction of Anti Social Behaviour Orders. Amid the panic a few voices were raised in question – like Harold Williamson, a policy researcher at Cardiff University, who thought “We need more politicians who are courageous, who stand up and say ‘Look, this is a complex issue and we need to think about it seriously’”. And there was David Cameron, adopting the role of the courageous politician who had something to gain by taking a markedly different, possibly unpopular, line :

 “The hoodie is a response to a problem, not a problem in itself…But hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They’re a way to stay invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, blend in, don’t stand out.”

And then, crucially:

“… it’s about family breakdown. It’s about drugs, it’s about alcohol abuse, often it’s young people who are brought up in care when they should be in loving homes."           

Children Acts

This did not go down well with Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (and, as we shall see, of Bromley and Chislehurst), who would have preferred the traditionally tougher attitude Cameron had expressed only weeks before, when he assured the Centre for Policy Studies that "We support tougher sentences" and ". . . improving the effectiveness of the courts, and the CPS, and making sure that our prisons really work". Furious Tory bloggers declared that they would never vote for the party while he was leader. Labour spin doctors, grateful for this opportunity to label the Tories as soft on crime, trotted out slogans about Hoody hugging. Nobody seemed to notice that Cameron was a bit out of date, in that he was advocating something which once almost had the status of accepted wisdom and was an article of faith among Labour Party members. The Children and Young Persons Act of 1969 was something of a zenith in the post war reformist legislation about crime. It was intended to deal with youngsters who had committed offences through local authority "care" rather than the courts. Decisions about whether a young offender stayed at home or went into residential care would be taken by Social Workers instead of magistrates (which did not please many a magistrate). The Act was driven by a mass of enquiry such as the Longford Committee which was set up in 1964 by the Labour government and which concluded that many of the offences by youngsters could be accounted for by their social conditions and that, therefore, the remedy lay in an examination of those conditions. In 1968 the Home Office stated that

"It has become increasingly clear that social control of harmful behaviour by the young, and social measures to help and protect the young, are not distinct and separate processes. The aims of protecting society from juvenile delinquency, and of helping children in trouble to grow up into mature and law-abiding persons, are complementary and not contradictory."

Futility

That was a long time ago, before the political parties concluded that there were more votes to be won through a repressive, rather than permissive, policy about crime and punishment. Michael Howard was among the more adept at this, rousing Tory conferences with flaming speeches on the theme that prison worked, advising criminals that "if you can't do the time then don't do the crime". Then there was John Major whingeing that what was needed was to "condemn a little more and understand a little less". And now there is Tony Blair and "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" which, as time passes and the criminal statistics do not support Blair's optimism, has come to mean simply being tough on crime. It will be interesting to see how long Cameron is able to persist with the policy of "understanding" and "loving"; he could not have been encouraged by the result of the by-election in Bromley and Chislehurst which, the first test of his popularity since he won the Tory leadership, saw the 13,342 majority of the staunchly right wing Eric Forth slashed to just 633.

Cameron is being accused now by his own membership of changing the Tory party so that it is almost indistinguishable from the Labour Party. Indeed, in the matter of the hoodies he has said more than Blair at his most ambitious would have dared to. Perhaps, like Blair and his drive to erect New Labour, Cameron calculates that his best chance of winning power is to make the two parties so similar that it is not just impossible but also pointless to search for enough difference between them to be worth a vote either way. But reality is clear. The politics of capitalism is the process of choosing between two or more parties which to all intents and purposes are identical. To make that choice is crass futility, while capitalism's problems, like violent crime, remain impervious to all efforts to legislate them out of existence. Instead, why not go out and hug a hoodie?

Ivan

Education and Sex (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard 

There is an old story about the teacher who, perhaps desperate for something to liven up a dull lesson, asked the kids to tell her exactly what they were thinking about as she showed them a picture of St. Paul’s. All went well until she got to one little boy who said he was thinking about sex. Now really desperate, the teacher asked him why he was thinking about that? Because, he said, he never thought about anything else.

Now every adult who was ever a child knows there is a lot of reality in that old joke — perhaps too much reality for the comfort of some parents who deceive themselves that, whatever the neighbours’ children might do, theirs would never defile themselves with anything as messy and abandoned as sexual activity. There are certainly elements of fantasy and self-deception about the current outcry over sex education and about what is called pornography — about magazines which admit that we have pubic hair, about films which agree that human beings take part in sexual intercourse and about shops which sell devices claimed to make the experience more excruciatingly enjoyable. All this, need it be said, at a price — sex is one of our growth industries and there is some shrewd money invested in it.

This money might be thought to be pretty safe; sex, as Marilyn Monroe is supposed to have said, is here to stay. The question is, how should we deal with it? It seems like a dirty trick of human development, that the urge is strongest when we are young, in our earlier teens. But any teenager who indulges the urge and becomes a parent as a result faces severe economic problems; a worker does not expect to reach his peak earning power until he is in his forties.

This does something to explain the theory popular with psychologists, educationalists, and indeed with almost everyone else, that youngsters are emotionally unprepared to have children and that until they reach the magic age of emotional readiness they must control — that is, suppress — their sexual drive. This opens up a gap, between desire and fulfilment, which of course most youngsters try to bridge. Usually this is by masturbation which, they are warned, might cause a vicious circle of loneliness, depression, consolatory masturbation, loneliness more acute, deeper depression . . . (This is a modern, more refined version of the old hell-fire and brimstone stuff about masturbation stunting your growth, or making hair grow from the palms of your hands. Who can dispute that the more knowledge on this matter the better? Who can wonder, that youngsters are restless, in revolt?)

One fact which has not been adequately faced by the Lord Longfords of the world is that the suppression of sexual drives can itself cause powerful emotions, which are often more difficult to control than is a mere sexual urge. Sometimes suppression may mean fairly minor problems like feelings of personal guilt which, however unpleasant they may be for the individual, do not usually extend far beyond himself. But there can be worse; the search for substitute virility symbols in aggressive behaviour — the big motor bike and the black studded jacket, uniforms in the fight with chains and knives. And at the extreme there is the chronic sex offender who can deal with his guilt and frustrations only by unloading them — by shocking or damaging or even destroying other people.

It is tempting — and it may not be entirely unfair — to guess that the vociferous denouncers of sex education are themselves pretty strong on guilt and probably confused by the fact that sex is so eminently marketable. Capitalism, they should realise, does not spurn the chance to make a profit. A lot of the porn which can be bought freely in most newsagents is rather clever, mixing fact with fantasy, titillation with discussion, all on a delicate implication that the reader is virile enough to satisfy every one of those gorgeous, naked girls and to outdo in performance all those kinky letter-writers. More probably the reader is desperately deprived, paying his furtive money in an unhappy attempt to idealise feelings which he cannot manage in any other way.

This is another reality too painful for many people to face. The tragedy is, that there is no reason to feel guilty about sex, any more than about eating or sleeping. Yet the guilt is often instilled in childhood, by parents who extend their property relationship with their children to the point of neurotic possessiveness and who fear sex as a private, exclusive act which separates their children from them. Sometimes the end result of this relationship is the sexual offender, going his lonely way in the public park.

One wonders what valid objection these parents can have to sex education which, after all, takes on a job they feel themselves unable to do, suppressed as they are in the stifling privacies of the family under capitalism. Perhaps they too, on the trim housing estates, sheltering behind the beloved car at the kerbside, fearful of their job and of their standing with the neighbours, need help. But private property society does not give priority to such needs; wage slaves can exist, and be profitably employed, without anyone probing their deeper emotional deprivations. In any case, among the innumerable indignities which capitalism imposes upon human existence, which should have priority for therapeutic attention? Martin Cole, maker of the famous, controversial sex education film Growing Up, obviously thinks that sexual neuroses should be pretty high on the list: “I think,” he said in an article in The Guardian (1/5/71) “teenagers should be promiscuous.” Any more, we might ask, than they should be well fed, secure, healthy, happily creative instead of uselessly employed?

It is worth dragging out the fact that sex is a necessary human function, which must have been performed with some degree of relief and enjoyment by the parents of Mrs. Whitehouse and Lord Longford. Sex can be a uniting factor but it can also be divisive, even destructive. Capitalism puts pressure on us to confine sexual activity to the marital situation (there is little reality in this, of course — even for the working class and less for their masters, who can afford any number of affairs and of children illegitimate or otherwise.) But monogamous marriage is an extremely complex relationship, formed upon many expectations which the partners have of each other — social, economic, sexual and the rest. In rare cases (and whatever the women’s magazines might say they are rare) all these expectations reach some level of consistent fulfilment and the marriage as a result is tolerably stable. In most cases the impossible is not achieved; if the couple are honest enough or rich enough they go to the divorce court.

In this situation it has been difficult for sex under capitalism to be treated as other than a matter of private, almost furtive, shame. This neurosis has been bolstered over time with propaganda of varying degrees of crudity, like the good old theory of original sin and the fallacy that the Roman Empire came to an end, not through any discernible historical reason but because its inhabitants were crazy libidinos and perverts. Then there is the boy-meets-girl theory in which sex and marriage is like a jig-saw puzzle, a matter of waiting until the right shaped piece comes along to fit in with us. (This was once very popular in those women’s magazines and they have always sold as well as any porn.) As the market for pornography develops and as sex education spreads, these attitudes should break down and a newer set of neuroses, probably going under the title of sexual freedom, may flourish and will be twisted and used to justify and bolster the inhumanities of capitalism.

And what will be the end of it? The idea that we stop feeling guilty about sex and simply enjoy it can be extended — should we not also set out to enjoy all types of intercourse and the satisfaction of all our appetites? For example, the vast majority of people spend nearly their entire life doing jobs which they detest and which degrade them to an inhuman level of boredom and servitude. An education which attacked that situation and the damage it causes would be a direct, explicit attack at the basis of capitalism. Yet if the sex educators are to be consistent, if they are to fulfil their professed aim of human happiness and harmony, they should settle for nothing less.

What holds them back? The simple answer, which also applies to so many other reformers whose ideas are superficially sound and attractive, is that they accept the basis of capitalism while they reject some of its effects. Sexual activity is bound up with some extremely powerful human emotions which might be usefully investigated, but only if this is in human terms. The psychiatrists can scrape around on the surface for as long as they are able but they are doomed to failure as long as they remain blind to the fact that only a free, humane society can respect human feelings.

Ivan

The Reason of It. (1920)

From the October 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

To save the next generation is, according to "Lloyd's News" (8.8.20) the mission of a tearing campaign through London, that is to be inaugurated by a "distinguished body" representing all denominations and young people's organisations, headed by Mr. Lloyd George and the Bishops of Barking and Stepney.

These gentlemen, fresh from the contemplation of the divine spectacle of the butchery of millions of working men, the starvation of millions of working-class women and children, the drowning of thousands of seamen, the murder of miners, the atrocity of Amritsar, recoil with horror from the "paganism" of the rising generation.

Therefore, fellow workers, Lloyd George and Co. would fain lead your little ones away from the "appalling examples of licentiousness all around them." To do this they will not consider such sordid material things as tenement life, child factory labour, insufficient and adulterated food, clothing, etc., in short, the beastly conditions in which the children are reared. No! They will appeal to the heart, because to admit that conditions are responsible would of necessity involve the alteration of those conditions.

David, however, is not concerned about the vices or virtues of the workers, but, as the representative of the capitalist class, he is perturbed at the growing tendency of the workers to question and criticise the institutions of capitalism.

Mr. George knows that in view of the more frequent and more violent manifestations of the class struggle, greater attention must be paid to the dulling of the intellects of the potential wage slaves. Those beautiful dreams; Homes for Heroes; Fields of Waving Corn, have failed to materialise. Instead there are the keener competition of children with their parents, a growing army of unemployed, prostitution, famine, and disease rampant, dark clouds hovering over the industrial field, and the probability of more wars. No wonder that our children will have need of the "corrective of the self discipline of Christianity."

So our far-seeing capitalists see to it that every inducement is made to working-class children, to entice them into the wage-slave organisations—the boy scouts, girl guides, bands of dope and glory, etc. Our children must be taught to believe in the humility of man, the sanctity of poverty, the shame of idleness, the chastening influence of disease— for the workers. Yes ! Because the capitalist class desires "good and faithful servants," cheap, docile, and ignorant wage slaves. And to get them there is no better preparative than religion.

While the worker's head is full of such notions as God, the devil, and the hereafter, to him his slave condition on this planet is a minor affair. He looks upon his revolting conditions as heaven-sent and unchangeable. That his life and destiny should be controlled in just the same way as the machine which he is compelled to tend gives him no food for thought. The ownership by a small section of society of the economic resources of the whole community, "always has been and always will be"—in his mind.

The Socialist, however, has analysed society from top to bottom. He knows and understands the laws of the development of the social organism. Religion he explains as having its origin in ancestor worship, and owing its development to the changing economic conditions, which will also be responsible for its disappearance in the future. The poverty and degradation of the working class to-day he knows is due to the private ownership of the means of life.

Therefore, reader, he suggests to you that instead of thinking about "changing your heart," you should consider the alteration of the basis of society—to establish in place of the present system, one based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth.

What is your view?

A. H.

News in Review: Youth (1964)

The News in Review column from the December 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

AT HOME

Youth

The latest news is it's with it to be young!

You can be a Mod or a Rocker and make a nuisance of yourself at the seaside in the summer. Or you can be a Beatles fan and make a nuisance of yourself, off and on, at London Airport all the year round.

You can twiddle your transistor and you can wear the latest snazzy clothes.

You can be a young criminal; about half of all indictable crimes are committed by people under twenty-one. Or you can be one of the rising number of cases of veneral disease; Dr. Leslie Weatherhead recently told the Public Morality Council (wow!) in London that he thought your sexual behaviour was “verging on a national disaster.”

Yes, you’re with it. Nobody’s ever been like you before and nobody’s ever going to be brilliant enough to be like you in the future.

But what else did that old square Weatherhead say about you ?

  I am sure that if there was another war they would give their lives for their country just as readily as my own generation has done.

And do you know he’s probably right, except that you haven’t got a country to give your life for.

Let’s have a look at you, youngster. There are plenty of mealy-mouthed sociologists, religicos, politicians, newspapermen, who try to kid us that you’re socially significant. They make long, dull speeches and they write long, dull articles trying to prove that you are in revolt.

They say that you break and enter because you’re dissatisfied with society. You catch a dose because you are bewildered by the pace, the pressures and the priorities of modern capitalism.

Well you’re not the first person to get het up about such things. Your mum and dad were het up, just after the last war. They thought everything would be alright if they voted Labour. Your grandparents were het up after 1918. They went on hunger marches, maybe they even signed the Peace Pledge. They thought they were going places, while the squares of those days held their hands up in horror.

But when the crunch came they were no better than the rest. In capitalism’s hour of need they were not found wanting. They joined up and gave their young, frustrated, bewildered lives—or helped to kill equally confused and hapless people on the other side.

And while this was going on the people who are really het up—the people who have understood the problems of society and have thought their way to an answer —were quietly and steadfastly making their stand.

They have seen many het ups like you come and go, these people, and they arc not impressed by them; they know that they all end up the same way. They even regard some of the het ups—again like you—as one of the problems to get het up about.

Think about that, the next time you go on a rave. It’s with it to be young but if you don’t do something soon none of us may be with anything any more.


The exiles' return

It is difficult to decide how best to describe it.

Expediency? Resilience? Forgetfulness, perhaps? Whatever it is, no politician who aspires to the heights should be without it. .

We all remember the late Aneurin Bevan, who spent a lot of time upsetting his colleagues on the Labour Front Bench but who could always reconcile himself to eventually uniting with those same colleagues. Before he died, Bevan had managed to forget that Hugh Gaitskell was a “desiccated calculating machine” and was Gaitskell’s most loyal and useful deputy.

Consider now the cases of Mr. Ian Macleod and Mr. Enoch Powell. Both of these men have recently returned to the Conservative Front Bench, and both have an interesting history.

Mr. Macleod once seemed to be Macmillan’s favourite son; it was even whispered that he was sure to take over the Tory Party when Supermac finally gave up. But Macleod got the hot seat of Colonial Affairs, which cost him a lot of favour among the Settler lobby (Lord Salisbury called him “too clever by half"). So it came about that when Macmillian resigned, although Macleod fancied his chances, he was never really in the running for the leadership.

Macleod showed his pique—or whatever it was—by refusing to serve under Douglas-Home and by taking himself off to the editorship of The Spectator, from which vantage point he bombarded his party with a sensational article which attacked the “magic circle" who selected Sir Alec as Prime Minister.

Now for Mr. Powell. He is one of the knobbliest of politicians, one who must be getting to know the way back from the self-imposed wilderness. He resigned from the Conservative government at the same time as Thorneycroft threw in the Chancellorship (Mr. Macmillan’s “little local difficulty”), came back at the Ministry of Health in the big reshuffle in July 1962 (although the policies he had resigned over were still operative) and finally refused to continue in the government when Douglas-Home became Premier. For this last refusal, characteristically, Mr. Powell gave no reason.

Since then, Powell has got into the headlines with some dourly reactionary speeches which have been too much even for Mr. Quintin Hogg, who called him “a sort of Mao Tse-tung of Toryism.” (Soon after that Mr. Powell likened Harold Wilson to Louis XIV, which proved that beneath that grim exterior there lurks something like a sense of humour.)

It is evident that both Macleod and Powell have been able to forget, or suppress, or what you will, the memory of those days they spent on the outside looking in. They could not bring themselves to work under Sir Alec when he was Prime Minister but it is apparently a different matter now that he is only Leader of the Opposition.

But there has been no political change to justify this reversal. So what else could have changed? Could it be the men themselves? Or could it be that the Conservative defeat has thrown the leadership struggle wide open once more?

Both Macleod and Powell have posed as men of inflexible principle. We are accustomed now to high flown speeches and dramatic political gestures. Underneath them, a politician is a politician for all that.


ABROAD

Kruschchev goes

What with the fall of Mr. Kruschchev, and the return of President Johnson to the White House, the last few weeks have been a busy time for the political seers.

These gentlemen have all been hard at work, speculating on what the Brezhnev/Kosygin dictatorship will mean for the future of the Soviet Union. They have all been analysing the portents for the United States, now that the votes there have so decisively confirmed the Democratic Party—or at any rate that part of it which sticks to the Johnson line—in power.

This all makes interesting reading on a winter Sunday afternoon but apart from that is worth very little. Government policies, in all countries, are largely mapped out for them by the conditions of capitalism at large. Sometimes these conditions force a new government to go directly against their election programmes, as they forced the Roosevelt administration in 1932. The New Deal, far from being a policy which the American electorate enthusiastically voted for in advance, was hammered out after the election—the Roosevelt platform had been one of balancing the Budget as opposed to the deficit financing which his administration eventually imposed.

But whichever party comes to power runs capitalism in roughly the same way. This is not to say that different governments do not bring any changes at all; only that whatever changes they may bring are quite insignificant. A Goldwater administration would probably have cut back the Democratic plans for limited spending on what are called social services. The new Russian government may launch a cautious peace offensive against China.

None of these changes affects the basis of society, and it is this basis which lays down the policies of governments. Johnson will have to live with, and may find his plans upset by, the international disputes of capitalism. Over these disputes hangs the massive threat of a nuclear clash. Brezhnev and Kosygin have the same problems, and they approach them in the same way as the American ruling class; one of their early appearances was at the parade in the Red Square, taking the salute as the tanks and the missiles and other horror machines trundled past.

What are the limited significances of the new governments? Johnson will probably run the affairs of American capitalism in a strictly down-to-earth manner. No risky adventures for him, no posturing on the Brink, no pandering to outraged patriotic neuroses. But if ever the situation demands that the Button be pushed, Johnson's finger will not falter.

The manner of Mr. Kruschchev's going indicates that something has happened in the Soviet Union over the past twelve years. In Stalin’s time, nobody was eased out of power on the excuse that they were ill; to lose favour was to face the execution squad. The fact that the big influence in Russia now seems to be shared by two men may mean that the present is a short interregnum from which another, undisputed dictator may emerge, much as Kruschchev himself did.

But none of these speculations, or changes, are worth bothering about. Whatever the political complexion of a government, and whatever promises it may have had to make to get power, it is largely helpless when gripped by the events of capitalism. The lives of the working class—the ordinary people—in Russia and the United States will be essentially unaffected by changes at the top.

Which means that the skilfully organised vote in the Kremlin, and all those hands which Johnson shook, did not mean a thing.

POLITICS 

Committee of 100

Stand by for another amazing performance by those ever-ready masters of double-think, double-speak, double-act—the Committee of 100.

For those of you who have just come in, the Committee of 100 were, not so long ago, the reckless dare-devils whose tactics of direct action were going to force the government to renounce nuclear weapons. They packed Trafalgar Square. They sat down in Whitehall. They were arrested by the score, the aged Earl Russell among them.

They had all manner of offshoots, like the Spies for Peace, who thought that they were helping to get rid of the Bomb by revealing the whereabouts of the emergency government centres.

They got up to all sorts of gimmicks, like planting Trees of Peace inside the wire of the bomber bases and holding an auction outside to sell off the aircraft.

They were a lively bunch.

But while this was going on the British government were turning out their Bomb and so were the Americans and the Russians and the French and the Chinese and goodness knows who else.

Then a funny thing happened. Or rather, several funny things.

First of all the Committee of 100 started to organise a lot of demonstrations about things which have nothing to do with the Bomb. Things like housing. Like industrial relations. The Greek government. (Some of them were framed by Detective Sergeant Challenor.) Racial disputes.

Then Earl Russell made it quite clear that the days of his demanding total, unilateral renunciation of the Bomb were over. He was, he said, now prepared to welcome “partial measures . . . as, for example, the lessening of military budgets . . .”

Did this cause second thoughts in the Committee? At any rate, some of its prominent members decided that its activities were becoming too remote from its original object, and they threatened to resign unless the Committee got back to the simpler proposition of Ban the Bomb.

But the Committee of 100 are still at it. Their latest idea, according to The Guardian, of 29th October, is a “ . . . series of study groups in an attempt to bring together Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Arabs and Israelis and to discover the facts behind the tensions in South Africa.”

The only sensible reaction to this is to wonder what sort of a dreamworld the Committee of 100 are living in.

Greeks and Turks are not lighting each other in Cyprus because nobody has thought of running a study group to bring them together. The same is true of the Arabs and Israelis. And, after the millions of words which have been written on the racial problem in South Africa, it is amazing that the Committee should think that their puny study group can add anything of any value.

These problems, just like the others which the Committee of 100 dabbled in in the past, are bound up with the tensions and disputes of property society. The Bomb itself springs from those very disputes. There is only one way to abolish them, altogether and at once.

That is to end capitalism and replace it with Socialism.

And what does the Committee of 100 do towards that? Exactly nothing. In fact, with their contradictory propaganda and their inconsistent activities they only add their weight to the many other organisations which confuse the working class. In that is their indictment.

The Committee of 100 obstruct society’s progress towards the world of freedom and brotherhood. When they finally go out of their confused and hapless existence there should be not a glimmer of regret.

BUSINESS

Fifteen per cent

Ask the Man In The Street to tell you how the price of a commodity is fixed and he will probably reply that the manufacturer finds out its cost of production, adds on a bit for his profit and that’s that.

There is no need to be an economics don to suspect that there is something wrong with that theory. What fixes the cost of production itself? Are there no limits to the amount added on for profit? What happens to the price if another manufacturer undercuts ?

These questions were all given an airing when the government imposed the fifteen per cent import levy. The popular notion is that an increase in duty inevitably means an increase in price—and, presumably, that a decrease in duty means a decrease in price.

Even before the latest surcharge, there was abundant evidence to refute that notion. For example, some years ago certain types of steel were allowed into this country duty free, because there was a severe shortage of the stuff. But as the British steel industry's productive capacity caught up with its orders the government came under pressure to abolish the duty concession.

This they eventually did. Now what happened to the price of imported steel? Such was the competition between the steel companies that the Dutch state steel works at Ijmuiden actually reduced their price to take account of the duty, so that British car makers could continue to buy Dutch steel at the same price as from the Steel Company of Wales.

This does not always happen. If their market allows them to, some manufacturers may pass on an increase in duty or tax. Others may actually be able to put up their prices by more than the extra duty. Others may have to absorb the extra, wholly or partly, themselves.

Here are a few of the different reactions to the new fifteen per cent surcharge.

Harvey’s put their port and sherry up by 6d. a bottle. Canon (Geneva) absorbed the entire surcharge on their best-selling Canonet camera. In motor cars, the reactions were various: Saab (Sweden) raised their prices by anything up to £66. Renault (France) put up their prices, but on average over all their models by only 1.55 per cent, much less than the extra duty. Mercedes (Germany) increased the prices of all their models except their smaller 220, which is unchanged. Volvo (Sweden) bore most of the levy themselves, raising their prices by less than one third of the fifteen per cent.

We do not have to look far for the reason for these varied reactions. Renault’s increases were about the same as those recently imposed by the British car makers. Mercedes held the price of the 220 because it is a comparatively new model, in a range which they do not want to price themselves out of.

In other words, the foreign car firms considered the surcharge with both eyes on their competitive prospects in the British market. The board rooms of Ford and B.M.C. must be under no delusion that they can now luxuriate behind a comfortable tariff wall. They know they have to take account of the market forces of capitalism at large and its pressures on the fluctuations in prices.

No change (1984)

From the January 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was hardly noticed at the time, but last May the British penal system, which does not have a reputation for moving swiftly with the times, underwent an historic change. As a result, the prospects are that a lot more youngsters will be going to prison than before, which probably gave some excited relief to those who nurture a punitive lust towards young criminality. Like much superficial and irrelevant adjustments, this was called a revolution. In fact it was nothing more than the abolition of the Borstal system and its replacement by something called Youth Custody.

The first Borstal was set up in 1902, in the village of that name in Kent, as an experimental training camp for young offenders. This was greeted as a great humanitarian advance, for the young had traditionally been harshly treated when they broke the law. In the 18th century 90 per cent of offenders who were hanged were under the age of 21; in 1838 Parkhurst was converted from a military hospital to a young offenders' prison, where the shackles and the whip were in regular use. The experiment at Borstal was regarded as a success and the Prevention of Crime Act 1908 (which did not, of course, prevent crime nor even offer any perceptive notion of what it was) gave birth to an entire system of the places.

The draftsmen of the 1908 Act set out the new institutions' objects in ringing terms, dear to the hearts of the legislators of the day:

  . . . places in which young offenders may be given such industrial training and other instruction and be subjected to such disciplinary and moral influences as will conduce to their reformation and the prevention of crime. (Quoted in Justice of the Peace, 19 November 1983).

Nearly sixty years after the Act, the Home Office were sure that these objects were being achieved for the Borstals, they said, were providing ". . . all-round development of character and capacities — moral, mental, physical and vocational . . ." (The Sentence of the Court, 1969: HMSO).

Well, that was not quite how many of the Borstal boys remembered them. One will never forget the immediate assault he was subjected to on his arrival, before he had had time to break any of the rules, to show him what would happen if he did. Another has bitter memories of his first, character-forming, day when he saw a friend beaten because he couldn't wash the floor to an officer’s satisfaction. He was, in fact, in the last throes of leukaemia: when he died, a couple of days later, the governor had the boys assembled to suggest that they might like to contribute to a wreath.

The intention was to model the Borstals on public schools, which were supposed to breed into youths the insular prejudices which had helped subdue so much of the world into the British Empire. They were divided into houses, supervised by people who anywhere else would have been known as prison officers but who in Borstals were called housemasters. There was an emphasis, at least in theory, on house spirit, physical exercise and career training. A lot of money was spent on some of them; one had a library, a sports field and a shed full of racing boats such as might have been the envy of a public school. Others were huge purpose-built complexes with classrooms, workshops and a farm. It was of course useful to display such Borstals to visiting parties of judges and magistrates who were looking for reassurance that they were doing the boys a favour by sending them there. Other Borstals were rather less favoured; they might be converted military camps, some from the Napoleonic Wars; one of these could expect, on a typical day, to have over half its inmates — boys aged between 15 and 21 — to be homeless when they were released to face the rigours of life at what was called liberty. The prospects of such boys were poor; a Home Office Research Bulletin in 1978 found a 60 per cent reconviction rate among homeless ex-prisoners. (Making Good, Martin Wright. Burnet Books, 1982). The main problem facing these boys would have been eradicated if they could somehow have moved upwards into the other class in society, where a housing problem is not known, but no Act of Parliament was ever drafted with that in mind.

There was in fact one way in which the Borstal did provide the best schooling in the country. They were the Oxbridge of criminal education, where boys who had previously bungled their offences could learn how best to steal a car or break into a house. One graduate, now middle-aged, put it something like this:

  When I left Borstal I was 18 and I had to make a choice. I’d learned how to make crime pay; should I go straight or go back at it, only properly this time? When I looked at the profits I could see there was really no choice so I went back at it. Got my own little business together then I packed it in. Till I got tempted with this little lot.

But it was not their futility, nor any violence or corruption about them, which brought about the end of the Borstals; it was simply that, in the eyes of the legislators and of the people who vote for them, they were not doing their job. For the past twenty years or so, a flood of statistics has borne into public awareness the impression that crime is predominantly the act of poor young men from an urban environment. Throughout the period 1972-82 the highest rate of known crime per 100,000 of the population has been in the male age group 14-17 and the next highest in the male age group 17-21. In 1982. the most recent year for which figures are available, the rates were 76 and 73 respectively while for all age groups it was about 22. Even allowing for statistical quirks — for example many of the offences committed by teenagers are by their nature more likely to come to the notice of the police than are some of the more premeditated and sophisticated crimes by adults — the figures give a clear enough picture and it is one of widespread disaffection among the youth of Britain.

Certainly, that was the message reaching the courts, with their daily stream into the dock of youngsters who had taken cars, broken into houses, or picked a pocket. But when the courts came to exact their revenge. they often found their powers restricted by the Criminal Justice Act of 1961. This Act forbade the courts to send anyone to prison, if by their age they were qualified for a sentence of Borstal, for any period between six months and three years, with the intention that a sentence of any intermediate length must entail Borstal training. This was Parliament’s response to the developing problem of juvenile crime, which it hoped to deal with by something officially defined as training rather than with something condemned as punishment. (Those were high days for the theories of social work as a palliative to capitalism's ailments; the inevitable failure of social work has opened the way for a return to a harder policy of restraint and punishment.)

More than one judge, impatient to imprison some miserable, quaking youth, fretted at the restrictions of the 1961 Act; for one thing, Borstal training meant that the Home Office decided when the offender was released, instead of the judge fixing it by the length of sentence. Flower-hatted Tory ladies and puce-faced gentlemen gave vent to their outrage at the apparent indulgence of teenage louts and ne’er-do-wells. Stimulated by a typical media panic, there was a White Paper and a “debate" and then another Act of Parliament. The original noble aims of the Borstal were forgotten and they were quietly put to death; the signs at the gates were replaced with others which proclaimed that what had been a Borstal is now a Youth Custody Centre; new forms were printed; the housemasters went back into uniform and to being called prison officers. In one way or another, judges and magistrates can send youngsters to some sort of prison for whatever time, short or long, they decide — and the signs are that they are happily taking their chance. According to the Guardian of 14 September 1983, in the first two months of the Act's operation the number of inmates aged 15-20 in the Youth Custody Centres increased by about 1,000; a crisis of overcrowding is now looming, to rival that in the adult prisons.

The treatment (for that is what it is called) of offenders is officially judged in terms of its effect on re-offending. No “treatment" method has such a “success" rate that it outdistances the rest and presents a clear economic choice for a government to invest in. No method offers any comfort to the law-makers and this is especially the case with juveniles who are given custodial sentences, for up to 80 per cent of them re-offend within two years of their release (Martin Wright). This says a great deal, not so much about the offenders but about the penal system and the society in which it all happens and which the penal system is supposed to defend.

The legislators and the sentencers — and reformers — turn their attention to the character of the offender, which at least allows them to ignore the character of this society. Crime happens mainly in urban areas because they are the concentrations of population which capitalism set down so that workers could live near the places where they were exploited. The history of this, of the expulsions from the land and the pitiful trek for survival to the towns, is one of extreme cruelty. Urban pressures are different now but in their way they are as fierce and destructive as ever. The towns and cities are places where economic and social alienation is made explicit, where people can lie dead in their homes without anyone knowing, where the homeless skulk through the parks and the streets, dirty and ignored.

Capitalism's social engineers encourage us to escape this fate through an attachment to the family and they have an ideal of this — an inturned. private, passionless unit where appetites and emotions are kept in check to promote our docility in exploitation. Capitalism’s family breeds neurosis as it socialises its children into a passive acceptance of their place as wage slaves. But at the same time this family has little resilience; it breaks under only a slight pressure and when that happens its members are left bewildered and damaged, sometimes to the point of seeing themselves as freakish. Children of one-parent families, for example, can often go through agonies of embarrassment in their relationship with other children who have both a mother and a father at home. An impressive number of such children take the role of social deviants and end up in the dock and with the cell door clanging into place at their backs.

For this is not a social system based on majority human interests. It cannot encourage. nor even manage, any challenge to its basic character; it must respond with discipline and repression. It cannot condone human freedom because to do so would undermine its structure of privilege feeding off poverty.

Almost unnoticed — and so far unmourned — the Borstals have gone now, and there are other places which operate on the same blind and brutal deceptions. Meanwhile capitalism goes on, with its poverty, its repression and its human alienation. “Is there not,” observed Marx, “a necessity for deeply reflecting upon an alteration of the system that breeds these crimes, instead of glorifying the hangman who executes a lot of criminals to make room for the supply of new ones?”

Ivan