Do you give a damn? (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the September 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you care that someone somewhere is suffering needlessly, then how can you live in peace? How can there be peace when the very system of society we live under is at war against so many human needs? What brutalities have to be committed under our noses before we pause to think, “Why should these brutalities not be stopped?” What brutalities must be committed against our own human consciousness for us not to even care? How damaged are they who hear the screams of starving children and watch the self-torment of the mother with too little money in her purse and see the old couple hobbling for miles because they can’t afford transport and say, “This is nothing to do with me—1 don’t care.”

Christians like to think they have the monopoly upon caring. They weep and they pray for you and then they go on supporting the very system which creates all this mess. They leave big things like systems to god. They pray into the sky and they prey on the hopelessness of millions who fall into their arms, exhausted, confused, uncared for. And then the millions are told they are sinners.

You get a better night’s sleep if you try not to care. Being brutalised is good for the quest for rest. (Others use hard drugs.) Watching that documentary about the prison camp for young offenders in Khazakstan—you’ll know the one if you saw it, because it will have kept you awake too—was a cue for several nights of anguish. Not the hand-wringing of the “nice" politician whose caring sincerity is painted on each morning with cosmetics provided by Avon, but the unstoppable caring of being a human and seeing what is being done to other humans. A baby slowly dying of hunger or thirst is enough to bring a sickness to the pit of your stomach. No wonder the apologists for the profit system sometimes say that those of us who are against it are sick. In a way, we are.

But we should turn our sickness into something more than the despair of empty care. Because however much we care or collect coins or campaigns or hold rock concerts to complain against iniquities, the cause of the trouble remains untouched. It remains and seems to laugh out loud at our futile caring. Care as much as you want, it sneers, and see how much feeling sorry for each other does for you.

Caring isn’t enough. But not caring is enough to dehumanise us. Those who don’t care have lost a big piece of their humanity. It is the piece which resides in everyone else.

So, it really is true that those poor wretches in Khazakstan need our care, not least because the system which can so easily treat them like dirt can next treat us like dirt. Just as it treats prisoners everywhere like varying degrees of dirt. Remember the British prison governor who resigned calling these places “penal dustbins”? And it can treat people on the dole like dirt. And it can treat like dirt wage-slaves who are forced to sell themselves for whatever lousy job comes along. And it can teach children in its schools how to prepare themselves to be treated like dirt. And these may be your children, or you may be those children who have grown up to be treated like dirt. And even if you don’t care that they treat you like dirt, I do because the dirt rubs off on everyone.

So, the starting point for doing what needs to be done is to care that the world is how it is and that we are part of it. There will be no escape through prayer. Lifetimes spent reforming little bits will at best remove this or that speck of dirt from the system. But the system will still be laughing—or, at least, the very few who profit from it will. Because profit will continue to come before need. That is the golden law of the profit system. There is no avoiding it unless you care enough to take on the system itself: to say quite simply that profit should not come before need—that we don’t need production for profit.

One of the few signs of hope in a relatively hopeless age is that many, many people are angry. Their anger all too frequently takes very anti-social forms. But the anger indicates something about how they feel: it indicates that they feel anything at all, and that discontent is in the air. Even the kids who smash up public amenities because they hate the world have not lost the urge to care about what the world is doing to them.

Acting upon this care and consciously organising this mass of discontent is an urgent task. It’s not an ideal or daydream about a bright new future. These humans are being trapped in Khazakstan now. And they are the tip of an iceberg of human wretchedness which, if we don’t care enough to do something soon, will eventually, and in one way or another, make wretches of us all.

Steve Coleman