Workers Socialist Party vs. Independent Communist Labour League

From the January 1938 issue of The Socialist

On Sunday, October 3rd, a debate was held with the Independent Communist Labor League, (formerly, the Communist Party Opposition or Lovestone Group). The debate took place at the headquarters of our Local Boston, 12 Hayward Place, Boston. The I.C.L.L. was represented by a Mr. Mautner, while the W.S.P. spokesman was Comrade I. Rab. The subject debated was "Whose Principles Are Correct: Workers Socialist Party or Independent Communist Labor League?"

Mr. Mautner, in his main talk laid down the major  tenets of his organization. In doing so, he said that the I.C.L.L. was concerned with the tactics and strategy for setting the masses in motion. He quoted Frederick Engels to show that "a great national movement, no matter what its form, is the real starting point of working class development," pointing to the 400,000 members of the Auto Workers Union as an example of such a movement, adding, "Some were formerly Ku Kluxers and members of the Black Legion, now they are good workers for the cause of labor." This union activity, he continued, led to a formation of a Labor Party, "something totally new." He further went on to say, "We expect to be in opposition to the Labor Party in the future, but now the problem is to break the workers from their old ideology."

Mr. Mautner spoke of reforms, recognizing that such measures help bolster up the capitalist system, but claiming, however, that fighting for reforms has value in that it teaches the working class the need for political action.

In dealing with Russia, Mr. Mautner described the situation there as a "Proletarian State" where the Russians are engaged in "Socialist construction." However, current history forces him to note "bureaucratic distortions existing there." Despite this, he claimed the Soviet state is organized exclusively for the workers, pointing out, however, that the new socialist economy in Russia had not yet developed a new terminology, therefore, "wages" really means "certificates." "The workers receive according to their deeds."

Mr. Mautner concluded by maintaining that a Labor Party program in America would lead to a Marxist program.

Comrade Rab, in his main talk analyzed the differences in principles between the two organizations. He listed the four main differences as follows: (1) The value of parliamentary activity; (2) The question of reforms; (3) The question of trade unionism; (4) The analysis of Soviet Russia.

In dealing with the first, Comrade Rab stated briefly the Party's position on parliamentary action, concluding this point by showing that the I.C.L.L. maintained that the revolutionary act comes about with the smashing of the existing state; that it must be an armed uprising led by a matured vanguard, a position contrary and opposed to that of the W.S.P. which defined the revolutionary act as the seizure of political power by a class conscious majority of the proletariat.

Discussing reforms, Comrade Rab maintained that the only way the workers can improve their lot is by the establishment of Socialism. He showed that the I.C.L.L., on the other hand, supports a "struggle for daily aims based on the existing stage of understanding."

On the trade union question, he brought out that although economic organization of the workers is very necessary in order that they sell their labour-power to the best advantage, unions have many limitations and weaknesses. Unions must depend upon numbers rather than on understanding. They cannot, in the long run, alter the downward trend of working class conditions. They are concerned primarily with wages and  hours problems rather than with overthrowing capitalism.

In dealing with the Russian question, Comrade Rab denied the existence of a Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Soviet Russia as accepted by the I.C.L.L. He pointed out, among other things, that the U.S.S.R. is going through a period of capitalist development and showed that the social relations of a capitalist economy exist there.

Mr. Mautner opened his rebuttal by asking Comrade Rab where there was surplus-value in Russia. Next, he denounced the use of the ballot saying, "When a Socialist Party advocates the ballot it breaks away from the principles of Socialism." "Marx stood for the smashing of the state." He insisted "what the workers need is a revolution based on soviets."

Comrade Rab in his rebuttal answered the questions raised by Mr. Mautner. Dealing with the question of "surplus-value in Russia," he defined surplus-value as the wealth that is extracted from the workers through the wages system. In Russia they have all the relationships of capital and wage labor and therefore, surplus-value. The existence of inheritance and income taxes, a banking system, laws pertaining to investments and interest, together with workers living on the barest of subsistence alongside of another group living in luxury—all go to describe surplus-value production or capitalism in Russia.

On the question of political action, Comrade Rab showed that the Socialist working class does not smash the state, pointing out also that marx in no place advocated the smashing of the state, pointing out also that Marx in no place advocated the smashing of the state, but on the contrary advocated its capture so that the workers could, "lop off its repressive features and transform it into an agent of emancipation."

Dealing with the Labor Party he showed its many weaknesses, how it was used for class collaboration, reforming and administering capitalism, and therefore against Socialist principles.

In conclusion, he called for a united front for Socialism.

According to the arrangements for the debate, the question period took place between the main talks and the rebuttals. Most of the questions dealt with the experiences of the British Labor Party.

Capitalism's Crowning Crime. (1916)

Editorial from the July 1916 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our Masters’ Bloody Orgy

Nearly two years have passed since the European war of extermination began, and the tale of slaughter continues on an ever-ascending scale. No nation—as a nation—can hope to gain by this war; no class—not even the capitalist class, as a whole—can hope to reap pecuniary or other benefit in the end from this sanguinary conflict.

It is quite true that our patriotic masters are at present in very many cases reaping enormous profits; it is also true that the necessities, and even the sufferings, of the people provide these vampires with their chief opportunities ; yet it is the capitalist class that must pay for this war in the long run. The workers cannot. Their wages represent barely their average cost of subsistence; and though this may, as at present, be disregarded for a time, it brings in its train a degradation of labour-power and a loss of efficiency that means still greater loss to the master class. The capitalists cannot recoup themselves by continuing to substitute chaff for oats in the feeding of their beasts of burden.

The smaller capitalists, it is true, are likely to suffer most, if not all, of the loss. The big fish are feeding upon the smaller ones. The financiers and the larger industrial capitalists (they are all one, nowadays) will continue to reap a golden harvest. Small wonder, then, that the magnates are in favour of the ruthless prosecution of the war to, at least, the last Frenchman, and the last rouble. Small wonder that any peace talk is stigmatised by their literary prostitutes as a "dastardly intrigue" or a "dangerous manoeuvre," while what they call a "premature" (!) peace is condemned as "an incalculable disaster to civilization."

Mr. Henderson follows the lead. The war has meant promotion to him. His unflinching resolve to maintain his position to the very last is unmistakable. At Northampton on June 24th he reflected his own sacrifices for the Allied cause when he solemnly warned his hearers against "peace talk" by "enemies abroad who boast that the Allied Powers are conquered, and a few mistaken people at home who have done little or nothing to prevent the Allies being defeated."

Truly, the millions of men physically wrecked, mutilated, or done to death in this useless war for dirty trade weigh as nothing in the balance for these bloodthirsty servants of capital. For them the incalculable sufferings of many millions of men, widows, orphans, and dependents is a mere "regrettable necessity," an occasion for insulting and utterly inadequate charity, an opportunity for little homilies on "our" duty to "our" country. All that really matters is the security of the property and the profit of the national capitalists! Soldiers, workers, and silently suffering dependents are mere pawns in the game, in which the control of the world-markets is the stake. Even so, the state of the ''game'' is stalemate rather than checkmate; and rumour has it that peace negotiations have been entered upon, but cheated of fruition owing to discord among the Allies. Whatever truth there may be in these repeated rumours it is impossible to say, but it is equally impossible to entirely disbelieve them. The only sure thing is that meanwhile, the conflict grows in intensity, and the human sacrifice to capitalist greed more awful.

This war is, indeed, merely a phase of the great class war. It is a crowning example of the ruthless sacrifice of the propertyless of the world to the interests of those who own the world. The thieves of Europe have fallen out, and their slaves must fight as well as toil. And this fact must never be overlooked, that the wine press of capitalism crushes out the life blood of the workers to till with profit or power the bins of the possessors of the earth in peace as well as in war.

Yet even as we realise how grave and how intense is the suffering inflicted on the working class during the long drawn-out years of "peace," the mind recoils with greater horror before the vividness and intensity of the present all-engulfing murder madness of Europe. How long is this crowning crime of capitalism to remain superadded upon the fundamental and age-long industrial exploitation of the many ? How long will the workers stand it? It is not as though there were no way out. It is not as though conditions barred every avenue of hope to the workers. The capitalists are clearly parasites. Hireling workers, the slaves and victims of this hellish system, actually run the world for these parasites. Yet, chiefly through ignorance, the workers of Europe allow themselves to be pitted against each other in a war of extermination for the supposed interests of their masters. Is not the untold suffering, now and to come, of men, women and children of more importance than the interests of those waxing fat. on the profits of war stock, munition industries, or the people's food ? Are the people to be for ever sacrificed to the Moloch of capital? Surely it is time the workers used their brains in their own interests. The callous brutality, the greed and hypocrisy of the ruling class of all nations could hardly ever be clearer than it is to-day. The workers have only to discard the blinkers of patriotism to see this plainly.

National war is the inevitable corollary of capitalism. It can only be made impossible by Socialism. On every ground, indeed, Socialism is the real and living hope of the toiling millions. It alone can harmonise material interests, and make the good of the whole the immediate interest of each. Bitter experience and soberer thoughts are making increasing numbers of men and women realise that it is commercial rivalry, caused only by the capitalist system, that is the actual and fundamental cause of war. They are beginning to see that it is in reality immaterial to a wage-worker whether his employers or rulers be German or French, British or Russian. The real enemy of wage workers is not any foreign nation, but the employing or capitalist class of every country. And it is this enemy class that, in pursuit of what it thought was its interests, is still, after nearly two years of carnage, urging the working class to even madder efforts in the extermination of each other. This exploiting class has secured the concentration of all the scientific genius and energy of the world in the brutal and savage work of destruction and human slaughter. Not content with the long-continued and ruthless robbery of defenceless proletarians in what it calls peace, it now causes their wholesale annihilation in a vain effort to extend or safeguard its spheres of exploitation, and plunges them into an ever more insane intensity of conflict, until, seemingly losing almost every vestige of control over the bloody carnage its greed has evoked, it threatens to drag the last remnants of civilization ' down below the lowest depths of savagery.

John Bird Rehabilitates World War One (2014)

From the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

John Bird, founder of The Big Issue, has rewritten history in his article The Necessary War (4-10 August) which states 'the First World War was an imperative conflict for Britain and France to fight as Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany would have propelled Europe back to the Dark Ages.'  It is an essay full of 1914 anti-German propaganda.

He identifies the Kaiser 'with a withered arm' as a reason for Germany starting the war. Bird writes that 'it would have been an absolute disaster for Germany to have won the First World War.' This the country that brought us Goethe, Beethoven, and Hegel. He writes Germany would 'turn Europe into an Africa; open for rape and pillage and plundering' which is ridiculous. Britain declared war ostensibly to defend neutral Belgium which had committed atrocities in the Congo Free State where natives were maimed and slaughtered for profit.

Bird dismisses the idea of 'generals who from the comfort of their officers clubs sent the masses to their death! Over the top and into oblivion' culturally epitomised in Oh! What a Lovely War and Blackadder Goes Forth. What about Haig's contempt for the working class evident in his diary entry 'mostly gamekeepers and servants' after hearing 13,000 men were killed in three hours during a battle.

He makes the ludicrous assertion that Napoleon caused the First World War. We know the 'Great Man' theory of history but Bird surely needs a dose of the Materialist Conception of History. The war was the outcome of decades of competing capitalist interests, the fact that the predominance of British and French capitalism was being challenged by Germany, French hurt pride over the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, and Britain's determination to halt German access to the oilfields of the Persian Gulf.  Bird needs to take a history lesson.

His article was an insult to the homeless people who sell his magazine. Fortunately the same issue carried our advertisement stating that ‘we oppose all leadership, all war.’

Steve Clayton

Undercurrents (1984)

Book Review from the March 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialist Arguments, (eds) D. Coates & G. Johnstone, Martin Robertson, 1983, £5.95

A book all socialists would like to write is one in which the nature of capitalist society is clearly and simply exposed, along with its supporting ideology and mythology. After reading such a book it would be impossible for anyone to listen to a speech by Margaret Thatcher without laughing: it would give everyone effective counter-arguments to racialist rantings: it would stop everyone talking about monetarism and make them consider the abolition of money as a practical alternative: in the face of its relentless logic and wicked humour all of the smarmy apologists for capitalism will be reduced to stuttering incoherence: and so on. Finally it would tear to shreds all of the common arguments against socialism and it would be printed in all languages; becoming the major work that convinced the workers of the need for a peaceful democratic revolution, co-ordinated to bring about a classless, moneyless, world socialist community.

This is not such a book. It is intended to be the first part in a series of "socialist primers" aimed at building "the protective wall of a sophisticated and widely-understood socialist counter-culture" around "the left", prior to winning the battle of ideas among the workers. So the final verdict on this project must await the completion of the series of books; meanwhile some observations can be made.

It is amazing that the editors managed to hold together a group of contributors with such widely differing views. All are united under the slogan of "a socialist alternative to . . .", but for Labour MP Frank Field a socialist alternative to the present fiscal system means a return to tax exemption in place of the personal tax allowance system; while David Coates, after Marx, criticises trade unions for not:

 . . . using their organised forces as a lever for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say, the ultimate abolition of the wages system. (p. 78).

All shades on the political left get a showing in this book, from a concern with the most meagre reform of capitalism, to a partial apology for street violence:

In claiming self-defence as a justification for employing force/violence, socialists and black organisation are challenging . . . the general claim by the state to represent the interests of the people as a whole  . . . (p. 220).

Statements like that make you feel the authors are walking an intellectual tightrope in their attempts to include as many views as possible in their chapters, for shortly after the last quotation the same author writes:

In and by itself violence can neither achieve nor sustain anything of which socialists can be proud. (p. 225).

But the statements on violence during the revolutionary transformation to socialism, if they are to mean anything at all, must make clear the conditions under which socially sanctioned force may be used against hypothetical obstructive minorities. Gordon Johnstone is finally unable to do this and has to hope that the socialist revolution will be less violent than other social transformations in history.

The reason for this and many other failings in the book is that nowhere do the authors state how socialism could be brought about, except that an overall impression is given of an accumulation of reforms leading to a more "egalitarian" society, alongside inspired work by labour leaders, plus a good deal of state confrontation, with massive expansion of workers' councils, much argument and a little use of democratic procedures.

Some light is shed on this political eclecticism by the editorial introduction:

We have asked our contributors to ensure that they make plain the nature of the disagreements on the left in their particular field, so that no section of the socialist camp need feel alienated by any gratuitous sectarianism . . . (p. 4).

I wonder what parts of this book the left will find most attractive; the penny-pinching reformism, the labour politics or the revolutionary asides? Bob Jessop argues, absurdly, that they should espouse all parts and advocates that a:

three-fold strategy requires socialists to work at a distance from the state, within the state, and against the state. (p. 105).

Crudely put it means we should smash, ignore and reinforce the state — which about sums up my response to this book. The good bits make it worth reading. They may increase as the series goes on and the authors realise that the triple advocacy of reform, bolshevism and revolution just makes a mess of socialist consciousness.

B. K. McNeeney

The "University of the Working Class" (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opponents of socialism have periodically attempted to undermine the plausibility of the socialist case by pointing out that some of the pioneers of the socialist movement were not people driven to become revolutionaries through an assessment of their own class interest.

Although this argument is of little real import, Engels, William Morris and even Marx have received this kind of treatment, being portrayed – rightly or wrongly – as having been brought up in ‘well-to do’ families with a privileged education to match.

This is not a charge that could ever seriously be laid at the door of the men and women who founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When the founder members broke away from the Social Democratic Federation in 1904 they were in most respects representative of the rank-and-file of that organisation. Unlike the SDF's figurehead, the wealthy old Etonian, Henry Hyndman, the founder members had  occupations and formal education typical of the working class of the time.  A large number were skilled manual workers, including the core of the Party's most prolific speakers and writers. Jack Fitzgerald, for instance, was a bricklayer who went on to teach others his trade, Jacomb was a printer who – up until the early 1920s – designed and laid-out the Socialist Standard , Watts was a wood carver, while Anderson was a house painter. There were others though, of whom T.A. (‘Tommy’) Jackson was the most notable example, who drifted from job to job and into and out of employment, something typically not unrelated to their uncompromising advocacy of Marxian socialism.

What made these revolutionaries extraordinary was not just their implacable opposition to the poverty and iniquity of capitalism but their attitude to knowledge and to critical analysis. They had the keenest of senses that knowledge was power – or at least potentially so. Having no university education they were largely self-taught, prime examples of what has sometimes been called the working class 'autodidactic' tradition.

Macintyre in his A Proletarian Science commented on how members of the SDF, SLP and SPGB were at the forefront of this tradition and of how – through engagement with classic texts on politics, economics, philosophy and anthropology – they searched for an understanding of the grim society around them:

“It is noticeable that the intellectual development of our working-class activists began as a process of individual discovery . . . And in which ever direction their interests lay, these autodidacts exhibited a characteristic intellectual tone: they were great respectors of fact and intellectual authority; earnest, even reverential, in their treatment of the text; and they brooked no short-cuts in the search for  knowledge. Alongside this deference to literary authority, one must put the fact that it remained their education, for they defined both the purpose and the boundaries of their intellectual exploration and the books they read assumed significance in this light.” (pp.70-71)

Not only did these autodidacts treat their own education with great seriousness and dedication, so, in the same manner, did they seek to transmit this knowledge to others. From the outset the Party spent much time in the training and education of its members, with classes on history, political philosophy and – above all – Marxian economics.

Indeed, Fitzgerald was to claim that a key element in his own expulsion from the SDF had been that he had organised economics classes that had been conducted by workingmen like himself rather than by the Federation's leadership. Fitzgerald was among a handful of early members who had attended classes on Marxian economics conducted by Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, a man who had been part of an earlier ‘impossibilist’ revolt against the reformism of the SDF when the ill-fated Socialist League was founded in the 1880s. Attendance at such education classes and immersion in relevant texts was considered a vital part of the education of socialist activists, and we reproduce an example of a typical Party education syllabus after this article.

The autodidactic tradition was still visible in the SPGB long after its foundation. As the Party expanded over time so new waves of self-educated workers joined who honed their knowledge of society, together with their ability to dissect concepts and theories, in the Party's education classes. Some of these members were as good examples of the self-educated working class polymath that it is possible to find. Adolf Kohn, who was to become a mainstay of the Party as both speaker and writer until the Second World War, fed his thirst for knowledge (and that of other members) by setting up his own bookselling business, importing socialist classics from abroad that were otherwise unavailable to members, such as those published by the Charles H. Kerr company in Chicago.

Moses Baritz, from Manchester, a fearsome Party speaker and one of its most colourful characters, travelled across the world spreading the socialist message to other English-speaking countries in North America and the southern hemisphere, becoming a recognised expert on classical music, eventually broadcasting on BBC radio and writing for the Manchester Guardian.

Other autodidacts in the Party had their lifetime pursuit of knowledge immortalised by the capitalist press: Gilbert McClatchie (‘Gilmac’) had an impoverished early upbringing in Ireland before emigrating to Britain and taking a job as a book-keeper among other things, being best known for his knowledgeable historical and philosophical articles in the Socialist Standard and his writing of Party pamphlets; on his death he was recognised by the Times for his contribution to political thought. No less an autodidact was Ted Kersley, who spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and had little by way of any formal education, but became an expert art dealer, featuring in one of the finest radio broadcasts of its kind called “The Art Trade Runner”. He received the same accolade from the Times as Gilmac, though on this occasion his decades of activity as an SPGB propagandist went curiously unmentioned.

In most respects this autodidactic tradition was just as apparent among the large number of new members attracted to the Party in the ‘hungry thirties’, and then the period during and just after the Second World War, as it had been among the founder members. The ebullient tyros who joined the Party at this time were less likely to be in gainful employment than the Party's founders because of the effects of the depression, but their thirst for knowledge was no less. When not scratching around trying to eke out a living many spent their time productively elsewhere – in libraries, education classes or anywhere else that was warm, cheap and lent itself to mental stimulation. In writing of autodidact and one-time SPGB member Harold Walsby, the sociologist Peter Sheppard described this phenomenon well enough:

“Until about the middle of [the twentieth] century alternative arenas [to the universities] did exist, sometimes if perhaps briefly eclipsing the universities in brilliance. Probably the most enduring was that provided by the little nonconformist groups of the extreme Left - anarchists, dissident Marxists and others who were energetically active from about 1880 until the rise of the New Left in the 1950s, a movement that was, or soon became, firmly located in the universities. In the 1930s and 1940s, anti- Establishment politics was located in meeting-halls, in and around the outdoor speaking-grounds, and in cafes such as those of the side streets of Soho . . . A world in which brilliant, down-at-heel intellectuals and Bohemians mingled with prostitutes and petty crooks, and which fostered complex and passionate debate and nurtured polemical powers, [a climate which] sprang into being for a short but heady time”. (www.gwiep.net/site/pshwit.html)

Until the 1940s very few Party members had the opportunity to attend university (disparagingly described by some in the SPGB as capitalism’s “education factories”). Frank Evans, who had an economics degree and Hardy, who was something of a protégé of Professor Edwin Cannan at the London School of Economics before eventually becoming chief research officer for the Post Office workers’ union, were notable exceptions. A handful of members after the Second World War attended the London School of Economics and other Higher Education institutions – mainly as mature students – but from the 1960s and 70s onwards the situation began to change more noticeably. Technical progress under capitalism and the growth of productivity associated with it led to a decline in the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers demanded by the system and a commensurate growth in the demand for workers with highly developed technical skills, such as engineers, scientists and researchers. Parallel with this went the growth of the administrative apparatus of capitalism – the civil service, local government, the health service and of course, the education system needed to produce such workers, all needing developed specialist talents but also the type of transferable skills supposedly provided by a university education.

The expansion of Higher Education necessitated by these developments led to a change in the composition of the Party’s members that was entirely reflective of the wider changes in capitalist society. Even then, those with a developed educational background have typically become socialists despite their formal education rather than because of it and many are those who claim to have learnt more of worth about society inside the SPGB than outside it.

Perhaps today, the specialisation that characterised the knowledge of earlier Party members is not as pronounced as it was in the days when the Party would wheel out a Fitzgerald, Hardy or Goldstein to lock horns with aspirant politicians or pious academics on the finer points of economic theory. Now, the knowledge of members is probably more eclectic than it was, the product of wider reading and some advancements in knowledge associated with the growth of disciplines like computer studies and

environmental science that were previously unheard of. But the underlying Marxist education of members has still been largely the product of the desire of individual men and women to make sense of the world around them, seeking out a holistic and coherent worldview which is absent from university curricula. In this, the Party, with its reliance on formal definitions, the application of logic, and its evaluation of world events over a century, still has an important part to play as a repository of knowledge, experience and analysis of capitalism. This is why, no doubt, more than one sage has commented that the SPGB has been “the university of the working class” in this respect, perhaps now – at least almost as much – as then.

DAP

Electronic Heroin (2014)

The Proper Gander Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone switching on half way through Web Junkie (BBC4) might think they’ve tuned in to a grim dystopian drama, rather than a documentary. Uniformed teenagers march through a Chinese boot camp with drab walls and blandly functional furniture. Some have been tricked into joining, or have woken up there after being drugged. All have been sent because they have been diagnosed with ‘internet addiction’, which the state claims is ‘the number one public health threat to its teenage population’. More than 400 such boot camps have been built across China since ‘internet addiction’ was classified as a clinical disorder. Web Junkie: China’s Addicted Teens follows several teenagers and their parents through the treatment provided by the Daxing ‘Chinese Teenagers Mental Growth Centre’ in Beijing.

This treatment to encourage ‘mental growth’ is a bizarre combination of lectures, drill exercises, medication, ‘self-reflection’ in an isolation room, patriotic songs and group therapy. The latter are awkward conversations between the children, their parents and nurses, mostly about their distant relationships. In one of his lectures to a class of parents, the centre’s professor connects family problems with being too pushy for academic achievements. This is the only time in the film that raises wider explanations for ‘internet addiction’ (or ‘electronic heroin’, as it’s called). The faults in society which make some teenagers prefer a virtual life aren’t discussed. Nor is the possibility that ‘internet addiction’ is a social construct, although if the centre’s authorities realised this, they would be doing themselves out of a job. The existence of these centres reinforces the definition of an ‘internet addict’ and therefore fuels the issue.

The regime at the Daxing centre looks more like that of a prison than a hospital. Despite claims of a 70 percent success rate, its inmates are mostly disparaging of its programme and the notion that they have an illness. Even if prolonged internet use has affected their relationships or motivation, getting them to sing and do press ups probably isn’t the best way to address the problem. And even if they are ‘cured’ and can rejoin society as a productive unit, they’re likely to end up in a dull office job, still sat in front of a computer for eight hours a day.

Mike Foster