The Between the Lines column from the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard
Primitive . . .
Marx wrote about the increasing misery of the working class. By this he did not mean, as some who have tried to refute him have suggested, that wages would fall lower and lower, material conditions ever more harsh. Marx was right: the quality of living under capitalism becomes ever-more impoverished.
Country File (C4) provides a pleasant diversion on the bleakest of urban Sunday lunchtimes. It has features on farming and conservation and the world of animals: it reminds the viewer that, stuck with the noise and dirt of an artificial city, there is an environment beyond which is richer in what is natural and more in harmony with the senses. On 8 January it had a report about a growing social problem: rural violence committed by young frustrated workers in small country towns and villages — the children of the land whose daddies do not own the fields and whose futures are in the cities, where there is more chance of jobs. Others involved in recent acts of rural criminality are farm labourers whose jobs have been made more tedious by mechanisation and who are often paid below-poverty wages for making landowners rich. A police officer from Avon and Somerset spoke of how Saturday-night gangs were terrorising villages and vandalising beauty spots. There have even been reports in the press of the senseless slaughter of farm animals for fun.
No doubt there were irritated viewers in Devon or Yorkshire who switched on expecting to see how big turnips can be and how green fields can look in the right light. Such people would do well to ponder that life is becoming increasingly empty for vast numbers of young workers, squashed as they are between the obscenities of the bomb and the social mind of a world which is civilised only to degree that it offers hope when there is a likely profit attached.
The following evening World In Action (ITV, 8.30 pm) reported the results of a nationwide survey which revealed that women were more afraid of violent assault in the streets than death from cancer, being killed on the roads or nuclear war. Ninety per cent feared being attacked if they went out at night. Sixty-seven per cent said that they never go out at night alone. What an indictment of a so-called civilised society it is that the majority of women — the majority of the population — are too frightened to go out alone in the evening. This is the social-pay-off of the competitive society. The streets become a jungle where anyone with money, however old, frightened or disabled, is prey to the muggers. Women workers are right to be scared. Street assaults are frequent: more dangerous weapons are now used by the muggers (in imitation of our rulers who also like to sophisticate their murder instruments regularly); and most of us live in badly lit environments, which assist the fast-money attackers. The thief thieves because it is an easy way to make money. Ethics do not enter into it; he is a reflection of the economic motives of the more successful robbers in the City, whose activities are strictly legal.
It is not just that women are likely to be attacked, but that they feel threatened. Every walk in the dark streets feels like preparation for an attack. Young men are eight times more likely to be mugged than women, but this is a deceptive statistic: women are less likely to be mugged because so many are forced to seek refuge in their homes every night. They are under curfew. There is no way that a society which scares its inhabitants to that extent can ever be worthy of the description of “civilisation". The simple-minded blame the muggers, as if knife-carrying kids have chosen such a way of life as an alternative to the gentlemen's club. Socialists blame the profit system.
. . . and civilised
The same people that the profit system twists into muggers could, in different material circumstances, behave like the people of the Baka tribe, shown in three programmes by Channel Four called
Baka — People Of The Rainforest. Modern society sneers at such primitive social relationships. The programmes allowed us to glimpse into the moneyless, wageless, stateless world of one of the few extant pre-property societies. Of course, the Baka are productively unsophisticated and have to work harder than they would need to do had they access to labour-saving technology. They are still innocently religious, regarding Nature as something above them and largely beyond control. It would be foolishly romantic — although very tempting — to depict primitive communism as The Way We Should Live. But what if we took all of the machinery of production which exists in modern Britain (where women are afraid to walk city streets and rural areas are echoing to the sound of furious working-class frustration) and combined it with the human relations of classless equality which characterise primitive communities? That is the prospect which world socialism holds before us now. We could have a society where people co-operate to produce the best that there can be to satisfy the needs of all; instead we have a society shown to us in a documentary by Clive James called
Postcard From Chicago (11 January, BBC1, 9.30 pm) in which we were introduced to the gangs which inhabit the city's slum areas. These gangs — The People and The Folk — do not merely shout abuse at each other. They shoot — to kill.
Gang warfare, born of urban poverty, is a game that ends in murder. Often the killers and killed are in their mid-teens. Now. James is one of those "witty" types who likes to enchant the half-witted with empty aphorisms. It's seductive viewing, but a lot of tripe is squeezed into the maxims. For example, in watching workers making hamburgers in Chicago (note: you will always see James watching people work) he stated that “Marx had it all wrong”. There is no alienation; these descendants of Polish immigrants feel close to their work and are grateful to be close to food — unlike in Poland where they would have to queue for it. This self-evident rubbish is supposed to pass for serious social commentary. By the same reasoning. Rolls Royce car producers are not alienated from the luxury cars they produce — even though they may travel home from work in a second-hand Cortina. Clive James is, in fact, a virulent anti-socialist. That he is witty and entertaining makes him an all the more potent one.
Is Britain free?
Panorama (BBC1, 9.25 pm. 9 January) was all about the diminishing freedom which many of us perceive in Britain at the moment. The government, in the name of freedom, has made numerous moves to curtail trade union and civil freedoms which workers fought hard to win. But even without the much-discussed Thatcherite assault, a society without free access to goods and services can never be free. That conception of freedom was not once mentioned in the programme. It is as if the fullest extent of “freedom" can only ever mean a loosening of the chains. I fell asleep after ten minutes of the great debate about whether Britain is unfree, woke up to see Willie Whitelaw sounding silly and switched over to Minder (ITV), where one can see a far more vivid picture of phoney freedom and increasing misery under the capitalist social system.
Steve Coleman
Blogger's Note:
For some reason the February 1989 issue of the
Socialist Standard misnamed '
Baka — People Of The Rainforest' as '
Baka — Children Of The Rain Forest'. I'm not sure what happened there. In 2012 the writer/director of the original documentary, Phil Agland, wrote and directed a follow up documentary entitled, '
Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest'. It can be viewed at the
following link.
