We live in a society which is full of scared people. Millions of men and women who are scared of powers which they do not control. At work you fear the boss, even if you have never met him—even if he only ever manifests himself through the anonymity of a company logo. The boss is Capital and Capital is King: if the economic overlord does not like you, if you are not delivering the profits to order, then you will be thrown out of a job. The incessant insecurity of employment will be transformed into the nightmare insecurity of unemployment.If you are an unemployed wage slave you live in the constant fear that you will become too poor to exist. You stand shaking on the verge of the living hell reserved for workers who have no money. If you have a home you fear falling behind with the mortgage payments or rent. Repossession is your constant threat. If you are homeless and have joined the growing army of workers who must sleep on the streets, then be sure to fear the friendly reminder of your poverty from the policeman's boot. When you walk down the streets of most cities you are scared. Who is behind you? The ethic of competition makes you prey for the bully who robs from the poor. You are scared of war. Unless you are crazy, in a world crammed full of the weaponry of mass destruction you feel miserably insecure about the prospect of the next full-blown market shoot-out.
The media, over which the vast majority has no control whatsoever, thrives on popular fears and depicts a world of beasts, be they East Enders' wretched brutes who fight and con one another or the ugly caricature of Dirty Harry: Winner Man. The government, with its laws and machinery of coercion, scares you: “Do as we say or suffer the force of violent sanctions". You submit because you are frightened not to. Fill in the census with its meaningless questions about ethnicity, discuss your sex life with the Department of Social (In) security official, keep off the grass and away from the Earth because it does not belong to you. We live in a "Keep Off—Keep Out— Keep Quiet" culture, and if you think of resisting, beware, for you may be labelled The Enemy Within. You fear the price of resistance; who knows how the powers that be will retaliate?
Fear is characteristic of the normalised wage slave. You were sent to school to learn to become scared. You were taught the skills of conforming, obeying and stifling awkward criticisms. Indeed, you were taught to be afraid of your own fear: it is not "manly” to be scared. It is "manly” to suffocate your self-respect until you have a slave's contentment with the sound of the whip hitting someone else. It is so much easier to down eight pints of lager and cheer in unison in a football stadium than to face up to the fears which this social system thrusts upon us.
This fear which is the daily companion of most workers is not something natural. To be sure, there are natural fears: physical dangers which threaten all of us occasionally and some to the extent that it destroys them. But most of the powers which assault the working class are the product of the way that society is organised. They are the socially-created effects of a social cause. The cause of our fear is the capitalist system.
The truth about capitalism
Under capitalism the means of wealth production—factories, farms, mines, media, means of communication and transportation—are owned and controlled by a small minority of the world's population. The world is run for the purpose of accumulating profits for that capitalist minority. In the pursuit of profit, the needs, feelings, hopes and dreams of the vast majority. who are the wealth-producers, will inevitably be hurt. Capital uses (exploits) the working class and also it abuses us in many ways. It makes workers subjects of a set of economic, political and social relationships which we do not control. In fact, even the capitalists do not control the workings of their system—the system ultimately controls the capitalists and the governments which rule on their behalf. The truth about capitalism is that the workers are economically disenfranchised from real power and the bosses only imagine that they are in charge; everything is chaos and disorder: nobody knows what will happen next.
Under capitalism it is quite sensible to be scared. The record of the system is one of persistent disasters, usually unexpected. Just as one social problem is apparently being reformed out of existence two more emerge to plague us. Plans and policies to improve the system fail, either immediately or in the long term. Optimistic prospects of peace collapse when new ruling gangs with unforeseen appetites for profits make war a necessity. In late 1989 the capitalist leaders were celebrating the end of the Cold War, the outbreak of world peace, freedom from the threat of military strife—and exactly a year later they were preparing for a potentially global war commencing in the Middle East. Even at its moments of greatest hopefulness, capitalism only offers the reasonable observer grounds for worry.
The result of this fear-inducing system is a society characterised by socially-caused suicide statistics (rising in recent years amongst teenagers) and massive addiction to drugs, both legal tranquillisers offered to the fearful by helpless doctors and the illegal variety, used as an illusory form of escape by those for whom fear and insecurity have become too much. This system sells escape as one for the most sought after commodities. Holidays offer a fortnight of artificial relief from the worries of everyday wage or salary slavery; there is escape through film and escape through astrology and escape through bopping up and down to the sterile non-songs of Jason, Kylie or the latest packaged boil-in-the-bag superstar. Escape is the dream of the captive. The prison of capitalism, which captivates us in the trap of working for wages and buying everything we need for money, makes the fantasy of escape an appealing one.
Mass emotional repression
Capitalism requires repression. Not only that visible, brutal, blood-stained repression which comes out of the barrel of a gun. or other means of state coercion. Mass emotional repression is the order of the day. Workers must learn to know their places, fear stepping out of line, feel afraid to question what it is not for us to question—run and hide, mentally if not physically, when talk of freedom is in the air. The “fear of freedom" (to use the term popularised by Erich Fromm, whose writings have much to offer us in examining the psychology of capitalist life) is amongst the greatest barriers to majority socialist understanding in the world today.
The problem is that to understand the possibility for social revolution—socialist liberation—people have to want to be liberated. to become free, to overcome the forces of oppression. For many workers such a desire for freedom is too much to cope with. To think about the socialist demand that the we should emancipate ourselves from wage slavery involves making the admission that we are now slaves and then accepting the desire to be something better. This recognition presents a difficulty to workers who have become accustomed to their condition: the happy slaves and the victims of fear who tremble at the thought of seeing what the system has reduced them to and what they could rise to become in a free society.
In a socialist society humans will be free. The most basic social freedom of all is free access to the goods and services we need. Capitalism can never offer such freedom. The market is the antithesis of free access. Socialism means that the common store of global wealth, including all services and the widest artistic opportunities, will be free to all. There will be no money. Each will take from what is available according to their needs, just as all will give to society according to their abilities. Co-operative, democratic human freedom will prevail.
With this economic freedom from the shackles of the market will come a profound emotional freeing of people from the burden of living in fear of powers beyond them. No more bosses, no more gods, no more money-worship, no more moral absolutes. Stateless, leaderless and classless humanity will be free to explore what we want to make of ourselves. The dreams which had previously been confined to fear-free utopian visions will be on the social agenda. Humans will be free to live with a consciousness unhindered by the fears which come from always having to look over your shoulder.
The psychological freedom which many have sought through individualist therapy or mystical diversions is only going to be possible when there is a collective fightback against the fear-culture of capitalism. If the movement for socialism is small today it is not because most workers have heard our ideas and rejected them. Nor is it the case that those who have rejected socialism have done so consciously. For millions of workers the dream of being free from all the fearful strains of life under this anti-life system is a powerful one. What is needed is the strength to act and the knowledge that conscious, democratic action for socialism is the way out. To our fellow frightened workers we say: Don’t be afraid; it’s time now to give the capitalists something to worry about.
Steve Coleman
Blogger's Note:
Illustration by George Meddemmen.
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