This Superiority Notion (1963)

From the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

It should be obvious, really. Whenever they test another H bomb, or run into another economic crisis, or whenever a politician opens his mouth and puts his foot in it, or whenever we think about the strain and ugliness which are the modern substitute for living, it should be obvious. Capitalism, is not a desirable or a sensible method of running human affairs.

But instead of being obvious it is infuriating. There are the facts, there is the mass of evidence, all screaming for attention. Yet the message gets through, if at all, only slowly. For one reason or another the working class still like capitalism. This is not to say that they like war, or any other problem that capitalism brings with it. They think of these things almost as elements outside human control, like the weather. But capitalism they do like, they support the system which leaves the ownership of the means of life to a very few of the world’s people. They support the system of rich and poor, of palaces and prefabs, of ripe pheasant and Spam.

If at any time the workers have to think about why they like capitalism they may say that it gives everyone his chance and that it is our own fault if we are not all like Paul Getty or King Saud. Or perhaps they will offer some equally inane reason. But mostly the working class do not think about why they support capitalism. They absorb the ideas of the system effortlessly. As if by instinct they build up a wall of ignorant, indefensible ideas which all play their part in sustaining1 the social system of destruction and insecurity. And that can be very infuriating.

It would take up many issues of the Socialist Standard to enumerate every one of these ideas. In any case, they have all been dealt with at some time in the past. Let us now take a look at just one of the strange notions with which capitalism is supported on its pedestal of ignorance. This idea is a popular one among the working class. It is also, in some ways, a surprising idea. Let us call it the Superiority Notion. It is, simply, the conviction which many workers hold that they are in some way better than anybody who comes from another working class group.

In one of its most easily identifiable forms, the Superiority Notion is. race prejudice. White workers think that they are better than coloured workers; even if they do not want to discriminate against Negroes they often feel sorry for them, just as they would for someone who had cancer. Colour prejudice is so widespread partly because its victims are most easily recognised. Race prejudice itself extends beyond mere white-against-black antipathy, reaching out to embrace anyone who is “foreign” It is almost a tradition among English workers, for example, to distrust some types of foreign workers. (Some, on the other hand, they may trust; many English workers think that Chinese people are naturally honest.) They are content at one time to blame the troubles of the world onto French temperament, at another onto German belligerence, at another onto American irresponsibility. (Although we should notice that this particular fallacy has its fashions. Young workers nowadays think it glamorous to be Italian, but that is not what their fathers, in 1941, thought.) In England, in other words, many workers think that the only person who can be trusted, the only person who makes a desirable neighbour or workmate, is English, while and gentile. In other countries they have their own version of this particular prejudice. A popular idea on the Continent is that everyone in England is a horsey fop.

The Superiority Notion does not end at race prejudice. It is common for workers in one part of a country to think that they are better than those in another part. In Southern England they think of the North as an endless slag heap, with flat-capped dinosaur-brained inhabitants to match. In the North they think the South a cissy lot, a pretentious bunch who sound their aitches alright but are strangers to a good day’s work. This feeling can even extend to different parts of the same town. There is at least one dilapidated area in London, dissected by a dirty canal, in which the slum-dwellers on one bank think themselves better than those on the other. These examples could go on for a long time.

The basic ingredient of the Superiority Notion is that, no matter how depressed a worker may be, he can always look down upon somebody else. Even those who are themselves the victims of widespread prejudice have their own Notion. Some Negroes look down upon other coloured people: some Jewish workers regard Negroes as inferior, and so on. And if we ask why the Notion is so popular, is the answer that the working class occupy such an inferior situation in society, and eke out such restricted lives, that it is practically essential to their peace of mind to be able to console themselves with the idea that somebody, somewhere, is lower than they are?

The Superiority Notion is booming, for example, in Southall in Middlesex. Southall has a rubber factory, a massive lorry works, a cereal factory, a canal, a gas works and a ten pin bowling alley. It also has a large Indian and Pakistani population, who have taken some of the jobs at the rubber factory and the gas works for which it is now difficult to get white workers. So Southall also has a race ignorance problem because, apart from any personal objections there may be to the immigrants, there is also the usual deep-rooted opposition to strange men whose skin is a different colour and who speak a language which sounds incomprehensible.

So the Southall workers feel superior. Yet a walk around the place quickly puts their Notion into perspective. Street' upon street, the dingy houses stretch away. Sometimes they are houses which were built in the 18th. Century; sometimes those which were built since 1900. Some are even post-war. But the drab sameness, the cheapness and the restrictions, are all there. These houses, standing in the richly combining vapours of the molten rubber, the exhaling gas works, the oozing canal and the roasting cereals, each day feed the local industry with its supply of human ability. To be blunt, Southall is one of the dreariest imaginable working class areas. It is a problem to appreciate how anybody who lives there could keep up the pretence that he is better than anyone else. But the Southall workers manage it.

There is only one way to deal with this ridiculous situation and that is to cut right through the middle of it with the facts. Socially, there are only two types of people living under capitalism. One type is the capitalist who can live without going to work because he owns places like the gas works and the canal and he gets the profits from them. The other type is the worker who does not own any factories or anything like them and who can only live by working for a wage. For the worker, capitalism is an unpleasant system. It brings him problems like war and insecurity and the ever present strain of balancing his budget. It puts him to live in places like Southall.

But capitalism does something else. It separates and illuminates the fact that all workers all over the world, whatever language they speak and whatever the colour of their skin, are suffering the same sort of problems. The capitalist world has innumerable Southalls—and many worse places besides. Thus capitalism makes it plain that the interests of workers everywhere are the same; to get rid of their problems, to get rid of capitalism. To do this, they must get rid of their Superiority Notion, in all its forms, and of the other baseless, ignorant ideas which keep capitalism going. Capitalism itself, day by day, piles up the evidence in favour of its own abolition. It stares the working class in the face.

It should be obvious really . . . But this is where we came in.

Ivan.