A saint or a menace?
Words which did not appear in the many tear-stained obituaries for Fenner Brockway, who died last month, were "hypocrite" and "dangerous". According to his admirers, Brockway was a saintly man who longed for a world where everyone — employer or employee — basked in the ecstacy of mutual prosperity; where there was absolute equality between one and another; where all nations, suddenly seized with insight into the futility of war, disposed of all their armed forces and weapons and resorted instead to the quieter, cheaper method of settling their differences though civilised discussion around the conference table.
Anyone who persists in these types of fantasies, in face of all the evidence to disprove that capitalism is basically a sane system, which with a change of heart, could be made to run in everyone’s interests, should be derided. Instead, they are liable to be deeply respected — especially after they die. The obituaries for them don't just regret their death but do so with a touch of wonder and guilt, that the world was so stupid not to heed the teachings of the departed saint.
Brockway was a prime example of this. An ardent, lifelong campaigner for peace, a conscientious objector who suffered imprisonment during the First World War, he was also a prominent member of the Labour Party which so ardently supported both World War One and Two and almost every other occasion when British capitalism needed its working class to take arms, to be killed and to kill their fellow workers. This veteran marcher for CND was an MP supporting a government which was emphatically opposed to dismantling the British nuclear armoury and was an ardent proponent of nuclear power stations. This champion of the dispossessed supported a party which, when in government, fought to keep the living standards of British workers in check, to the benefit of British capitalists. Finally, this man who stood for equality, a life-long opponent of the House of Lords, ended his days sitting on its benches, ennobled as Lord Brockway.
There are many ways of describing such inconsistencies of behaviour but hypocritical is to the point. But is it fair also to say that Brockway was dangerous?
People like Brockway are part of the very tradition of the Labour Party. Although their professed principles, which excite such admiration, should lead them to oppose the party they are among its most steadfast supporters. Whatever anguished twists Labour’s record requires of them, they are equal to the situation; they cling stubbornly to the party no matter what offences it commits against working class interests.
The effect of this is to persuade many people that at heart the Labour Party is not really as we experience it; its inner conscience, personified by members like Brockway, is pure and one day will take over the entire party. So workers continue to vote Labour — for capitalism with all that means in terms of human repression, poverty and suffering. Like any dangerous hypocrite. Brockway had a lot to answer for.
Rough stuff
Hijackers are in the forefront of that exclusive group of people whose actions are certain to provoke one of Thatcher's famous rages or to set Reagan's autocue whirring out the folksy platitudes. No words are too strong to condemn them; they are cowardly, subversive. indiscriminate outlaws who take no heed of the values of civilised society.
In fact, hijackers often personify many of the qualities which Thatcher and Reagan profess to admire in themselves — like sacrificial devotion to their cause, courage in the face of overwhelming odds, a ruthless will to carry out their mission not for their own benefit but for that of their comrades-in-arms. When the media tell us that the SAS or the Royal Marines have behaved in that way Thatcher is quick to praise them and to win a little electoral advantage at the same time but when the same qualities are in evidence from the "enemy" they are somehow transformed from the stuff of Boys' Own Paper into excerpts from the nastiest of video nasties.
The hijackers consider themselves to be at war with bigger, more impressive powers. In such a situation guerilla actions are the customary tactic and among these the hijack is now established as effective. Those who condemn it do so on the implication that war can be a civilised affair, fought to a kind of Queensberry Rules so that everyone who gets killed or wounded can take solace from the fact that it all happened in the most considerate and ordered fashion.
What virtue is there in the notion that something as viciously destructive and anti-human as war would be more bearable if all the participants kept to a set of rules? It would be futile to search for a state whose record in this respect is unblemished. Every one has its intelligence organisation — a spying. assassinating, dirty tricks department who have the utmost contempt for any "rules". We are allowed to know very little about these shadowy bodies but what we do know is that their speciality is not the metaphorical pre-fight handshake but the knee in the groin, the gouge of the eye.
The British and American ruling classes and their state machines are among the leading exponents of these tactics and when they are exposed in this they are unashamed, they make no apology for conforming to the needs of capitalism's persistent and worldwide conflicts.
So the indignation about the hijackers is bogus. There is no such thing as a legitimacy of war. Rather than pursue such fanciful mirages workers should stand aside from the brutal cynicism of it all, to ask how to abolish war itself.
Take your turn
Britain’s doctors are clearly worried about nuclear war. Perhaps they suspect the fragility of the premise of official advise about getting yourself to hospital if you have been injured by the bomb — that the medical profession will magically be immune to its effects.
However there is nothing like forward planning and the British Medical Association has recently issued some guidelines about who should be treated, and who left to die, in a nuclear holocaust (the government, not surprisingly, have been reluctant to grasp this particular hot potato).
These are some of the guidelines: readers are advised to keep them handy, so that they can make sure of their place in the queue for treatment after the bomb goes off. Burn or blast casualties will not get priority if they have also suffered from radiation; thickness bums over more than 15 per cent of the body means that you will almost certainly be abandoned to die; no time is likely to be spent on cardio respiratory resuscitation; the elderly will have the lowest priority and anyone over 60 suffering from burns will not get fluid replacement. Finally, if you have an injured limb which in normal conditions you would expect to be treated and cured, you may find that in the post-nuclear world it is simply hacked off, to save time.
It is a searing comment on this society, that trained doctors and nurses should have to give their attention to so grisly a business. But it is all too close to reality; the BMA estimates that about half the population of this country — 28 million people — will be wiped out in a nuclear conflict with six million more seriously injured. And. as we know, the bombs are still there, waiting in their silos and submarines and aircraft, to wipe out millions if ever the powers of capitalism decide that that is the only way of sorting out their rivalries.
The BMA document makes another illuminating point. Priority in treatment will also be given on the basis of ability, knowledge and social usefulness. And who comes out tops in this? Stockbrokers? Aristocrats? Merchant bankers? Well no — these heroes and heroines of capitalism come a long way down the list. Up at the top will be carpenters, plumbers, stonemasons — and the people who run hospital generators.
This is a comment, not just on nuclear war but on who are the really indispensable people in society, on the values and rewards of capitalism and how they hold back human progress.
Handy hints
Are you well off? Are you about to cash in — if you have not already done so — on the immense Thatcher-planned bonanza of productivity and prosperity? A lot of government propoganda says that you are. What do the facts say?
The latest figures available showing the level of "official" poverty — too bad if yours is unofficial — say that in 1983 nearly 16½ million people, which is about 30 per cent of the population, were struggling along on an income of 140 per cent of what was then the Supplementary Benefit level. The statistics covering 1985 have not yet been published; it is whispered in the poverty lobby that when they do come out it will be to show a sunnier picture, not because poverty has become less harsh but because the government has redefined it.
Does it matter, if you're among the officially poor? Money isn't everything, after all. According to a medical study for 1987 the kind of poverty which comes with unemployment coincides with men being 40 per cent more likely to die of all cancers, 75 per cent more likely to die of lung cancer and twice as likely to commit suicide. Of course, that could be coincidence ... A study by Peter Townsend and others suggests a clear link between serious deprivation and higher mortality. Last year the British Medical Association, which is not famous for being subversive, drew attention to the surveys which show how children whose parents are chronically unemployed tend to be stunted.
The Department of Health and Social Security, perhaps under the impression that this was living up to its title, recently issued some advice to the poor. "Don't shop when you're hungry", the ministry urged their claimants. "You may be tempted to buy more than you need". This is exactly the kind of humiliation experienced by out-of-work people in the 1930s which, the experts assure us, would never happen again, now that we live in the age of enlightenment. Nearer reality was a comment from someone who is not unemployed, a mother of four who works as a shop assistant, in the Observer of 17 April: "I was brought up poor. I never thought it would go on for ever, on to my children and maybe now their children's children".
For the working class poverty does go on. blighting the lives of one generation after another. Mass unemployment is a factor which harshly worsens a condition which will be with us for as long as this social system is allowed to endure — and so will the humiliation which goes with the deepest kind of poverty, when useful people are of no account because they are redundant to the drive for profit.
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