The popular media wisdom that John Major is a nice fellow, but an incompetent idiot is wrong in one respect. Nice fellows do not kick you when you’re down in the gutter. Major, who as Minister of Social Security under Thatcher, passed the legislation which has forced so many young, unemployed workers to be homeless and sleeping in shop doorways, has now told a Bristol newspaper that beggars are "offensive" and an "eyesore".
But does it really matter that John Major’s alleged niceness is about as solid as his political future? According to the media, for whom John Smith as a living political leader was generally portrayed as something of a dull mediocrity whose main talent lay in drawing a standing ovation from the thieves of the CBI, the same politician once dead embodied almost every virtue required for canonisation. This depiction may well be deserved: the Labour leader may well have shared the compassion of Mother Theresa (he certainly seems to have shared her religious stupidity) and the desire for social change which would have made the unemployed employed, the impoverished well off and maybe even the blind to see and the lame to walk. Virtuous intent and sincerity are not the issues.
The fact is that when you support capitalism you find yourself having to do some very nasty things. Governing the capitalist system means accepting the position where a very small minority of millionaires and billionaires own and control the resources of society while the vast majority own nothing more than the ability to work. It means accepting and enforcing wage-slavery whereby the majority who produce must labour to make rich the minority who possess. It means accepting production for sale and profit rather than production solely for use. So that if profits are threatened food must be destroyed while the hungry starve and homes must be taken away from workers who cannot afford the rent or mortgage payments and work must be denied to those who cannot be milked for profit. Accepting capitalism means sending young workers to die pointlessly so that their masters’ profits, trade routes and resources can be protected or expanded. The moment you commit yourself to play any part whatsoever in the maintenance of the capitalist system you mast accept its priorities and, regardless of moral aspirations, will be dragged into the depravity of excusing its callous indifference to human needs.
And so back to Major and the beggars. We do not suppose that John Major, the lad with two O-levels who ran away from the circus for the bright lights of the bank, has ever sat down and decided to regard his fellow human beings with the callous contempt that he has exhibited. But as an errand boy for the profit system, which is all that any Prime Minister ever is, what else can he do but blame those who are the most obvious victims of capitalism? The only alternative would be to hold capitalism to account.
In 1945 the great hope of the welfare state was presented as a way out of the Dickensian darkness of early capitalism. We have no reason to doubt the sincerity of many of those reformers who promoted such hopes. They believed that a capitalist Labour government could achieve the impossible task of putting profits first whilst providing care for those in need as well. In the years of economic expansion following the destruction of the world war this seemed to be possible. Most workers had jobs and the state schemes to build cheap homes and basic hospitals and elementary social services seemed affordable.
Half a century later the futility of such reformism as an overall solution to the problem of capitalism is obvious to nearly everyone. John Prescott, in a pathetic attempt to cast himself as a fiery radical by calling for a return to 1945, is now in a minority even in the Labour Party. From the heir apparent, Tony Blair — a man with the mind of a Kinnock and the sincerity of a Clinton — there will be no talk of reforming capitalism out of existence. The capitalist parties do not even pretend any more that they are something else.
The welfare state promised an end to beggars on the streets. And for a time they were not there. For most of the present writer’s life it was rare to ever see a person begging on the streets of London. It was the sort of awful feature of capitalism that we knew went on in Delhi or Bangkok, but not here. Now it is impossible not to see beggars: in the cold wind and rain we see kids and the elderly shivering in blankets in doorways and cardboard boxes.
Some of them have been thrown out of psychiatric hospitals to save the government money. Some of them only ended up in these hospitals because of wretched home conditions which forced them to turn to the streets. Most have no hope for a future. A surprisingly large number are workers who used to have jobs, used to have homes, used to be across that thin line which separates wage-slaves like us from wage-slaves like them.
And in a nasty bid to boost his support amongst the mean-spirited and the vicious John Major kicks them when they're down. That it has backfired on him is proof that workers are not wholly gullible. Just like when government Ministers carved careers out of being insulting about the promiscuity of single mothers while they were creating single mothers as fast as they were closing down coal mines, most workers have taken the measure of their integrity. That is why politicians are more unpopular now than ever they were.
Politicians should not be allowed to get away with it. Beggars should not have to beg. Both curses call for one solution. Abolish capitalism. In a society of common ownership and democratic control of resources, where all will have access to the store of social wealth, who will need to lie to gain votes or beg to gain money?
Steve Coleman
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