Editorial: An orderly society (1979)

Editorial from the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

A great deal of what is called education is nothing more than the forcing into impressionable minds of the idea that capitalism is the most benign, efficient and sensible social system ever conceived by the human race. A natural extension of that idea is that capitalism should also be seen as eternal and as the correction of centuries of muddle, mistakes, cruelties . . . On this theory, all history was no more than a preparation for the great day when capitalism dawned upon the world, the society of reason.

That version of history — and of society today — obscures and ignores many of the most obvious facts of our lives. How can a society of reason explain away the millions who are undernourished and who starve while food is left rotting in store or is destroyed? Is it logical that a small minority of people should be able to live in unproductive opulence while the vast majority, who produce all the wealth, should endure poverty varying from a genteel but persistent downward pressure to vagrancy?

Can we describe as benign a system which devotes so much of its material resources and its intellectual energy to the design and use of ever-developing methods of killing people and of destroying where they live? Did the inhumanities of former societies teach us so little that we replaced them with one which subjects most of its people to the indignities of a lifetime’s depersonalising exploitation? Do we have no more to show for history than a world which cannot satisfy its people’s needs?

It is the work of socialists to ask such questions — to attack the justification for capitalism. For example, this issue of the Socialist Standard, in the light of the Conservative government’s avowed policy, has something to say about the law as it affects the interests of trade unionists. This is an important matter, for nowhere does capitalism’s propaganda work harder than in its attempts to justify what is known as Law and Order.

This justification argues that the law is as eternal and as firmly based on human verities as it assumes capitalism is itself. It encourages us to believe that the law is a painstakingly constructed code of conduct which protects us all — our possessions, our ability to walk the streets in safety.

To sustain this argument it is necessary to view capitalism rather as through the wrong end of a telescope. Workers suffer a great deal through crime burglary of a working class home which carries off the colour TV, the stereo, some money — or the taking away of a worker’s car from the kerb outside. When this sort of thing happens a policeman will turn up and, with varying degrees of interest, ‘investigate’, which may convince the victim that the law is on his side.

The same may happen when a worker is subjected to illegal violence — when someone is mugged for what is in their purse, or when they are assaulted or even killed during an armed robbery. Again, the law may be seen as aiming to deter and to prevent such things, and the police as the agency to carry out that policy.

This might be more convincing if breaking into a council house and emptying the gas meter carried the same scale of penalty as holding up a Security Express van and taking thousands of pounds. Capitalism reserves its harshest penalties for those who offer the greatest threat to the orderly conduct of its business of exploitation, commodity production and the accumulation of capital. It is that threat the law is intended to resist; it is the interests involved in that, which the state machinery of Law and Order exists to protect.

Whatever the working class suffer as a result of crime is of comparatively little account to the law makers; workers have no property, in any sense of the term, to protect. The subject class in society, they have no position of privilege to be upheld by a coercive state machine. These facts should persuade them to look at the matter with different eyes, and to view the claims of capitalism’s propagandists with suspicion.

While Law and Order professes to work for an orderly society, it licenses massive acts of socially organised murder, destruction, pillage and repression such as the most hardened of criminals could not dream of. Even more — it exists precisely to ensure that those acts continue and are carried out in the most effective manner.

The laws of any social system rest upon the social relationships arising from its mode of wealth production. A class society — where the means of wealth production are owned by a class — will write its laws so as to defend the privilege of the owning class against all threats. Thus the morals of class society are coercive and defensive; in defence of class privilege they will condone any acts, if need be to the very limits of violence. In many ways this is the explanation of a human history spotted with sickening barbarity — all of it perfectly within the law.

How then should trade unionists act when they find themselves in conflict with the law? Do we encourage workers to disregard or to break capitalism’s laws? If in some cases there is no other way, this should not obscure the fact that the problem cannot be removed by our becoming outlaws. Capitalism is not eternal; it can be abolished in a way which the most powerful state machine will not be able to resist. When the working class come to an understanding of socialism, their will to establish the new society will be all-powerful. And socialism will be a world whose morality is that of freedom and human interests, where the coercion and the barbarities of capitalism will be seen as a curiously wasteful episode in human experience.