Of course, we might have been born this way. Out of the womb, programmed to a kind of madness which makes us into callous competitors in a race which we are unlikely to win. Maybe we are all swines. Perhaps it is punishment for Eve eating that apple. Diseased, rotten bodies of human nature, wandering around looking for ways to express our inherent nastiness. Murder, rape, corruption. dishonesty . . . we should be grateful to the cops, the bosses, the teachers and that overwhelming sense of guilt for the sins which we think we have committed and the worse ones which we are sure that we are on the verge of committing — grateful to these forces of repression for stopping us from being our horribly, humanly natural selves.
Maybe. And maybe Jesus Christ died and was born again. Neil Kinnock is a principled socialist and the Moonies have the answer to all our problems if only we'd open our ears, closely followed by our wallets, and listen to The Truth. Life is too short for maybes. To hell with these creeps who tell children that as humans they are wretched and must repent; to hell with our 'defenders' who tell us that we must have armies and bombs. 'Man being what he is', to hell with the screwed up view of humanity which defines love as being confined to a gymnastic display beneath the sheets. Human nature is not an illness. Human beings can act in many ways, and do. How we behave is not determined by God (who is a figment of the powerless imagination) or by Nature (which is not our mother any more than the virgin Pope is anyone's father). Whatever we are — and we are all kinds of people, from caring volunteers who help the aged to vicious muggers who rape them for kicks — is a product of the society in which we live, learn and create ourselves — or are created by others who have decided what we should be.
Every day of the week Intercity trains travel across the country carrying on them vast numbers of workers who are 'on business' for the company. There can be few tortures worse than sitting next to a troupe of these travelling human calculating machines. They carry files and study graphs and talk with passion about how 'we' could increase sales in Accrington if only R&D would pull their fingers out. What boring lives these salaried servants of another class's parasitism lead. At least the factory worker does not waste time thinking about how to boost profits as he reads the paper on the bus each morning. The system has sucked these workers in: with their travel allowance, annual invitation to the MD's golf club and non-taxable ulcer, they have been swallowed into a world of caring about buying and selling and investing and hiring and sacking — a world where the cash register rings and they feel a tingle right across their soul which is not there.
Every morning on London local radio those who are part of it all are invited to talk all about it on phone-in shows. In case three hours is not long enough there is another three hours every night. Phone-in shows are like Chinese take-aways: eat like Emperors and feel hungry two hours later. But it is worth the effort, for amongst the long hours of bland noise there are those moments when clarity supersedes cliche and you are persuaded that Harry of Hatch End is speaking in a language that his bosses did not want him to learn. But for every conscious Harry there are scores of callers who have been truly sucked in to the rut of the profit system. They spend time working out ways to run it, enforce it, reform it, celebrate it. They are suckers for capitalism. This morning's topic: how to stop so many wicked workers from using the tube without a ticket. On comes Bill from Barking who is barking mad because there are too few ticket collectors; Lil from Tooting reckons that there should be stiffer fines for wage slaves who do not pay their way to work; Jack from Camden is of the view that it is all a sign of the times and nothing can ever be done to defeat the inevitability of the status quo. Meanwhile in the House of Lords a gaggle of half-dead time-wasters debate the best way to preserve badgers. Across the country thousands of reform groups plan ways to preserve red phone boxes and make prisons more humane. It is known as performing a rôle in society.
Children have the right idea. They have better things on their minds than making bosses richer and cheering on Our Boys in the Gulf. But with ''maturity" — that awful descent which marks our graduation out of innocence and into The System — comes the need to think about money and status and who is consuming whom and what and for how much. Society schools children into knowing their places within the vast scheme of things, or rather, into this huge, schemeless mess of uncontrolled relationships called the capitalist system.
In most areas there are people commonly referred to as simpletons. The ones who are not quite all there; misfits, social deviants, the crazy ones. These are the people who. sometimes because of their brains, but more often because of their surroundings, have not been conditioned to standard precision. They are rejects in terms of what the system requires from its subordinate, wealth-producing class. Of course, if society ignores them they will become confused and alienated. They will wander the streets talking to themselves, because sometimes that is the only phone-in show worth being on. They will laugh about jokes which bank clerks and social workers cannot comprehend and perceive visions which only the mad. i.e. not wholly conditioned, could entertain. For many such people life becomes one of frustration: either 'treated' by society's modern witch-doctors, the psychiatrists, with drugs meant to subdue and normalise them, or left alone to ponder the meaningless disorder of a world which appears to have meaning to those who are its tamed beasts of burden. Every so often a deranged wage slave takes a gun and does what medals are awarded for in the army — or stages a siege or frightens a baby. Such actions feed a million prejudices: ah. so this is what humans will do if they are not conditioned to be slaves, economically and culturally.
Socialists never tire of explaining that the working class is exploited: we produce everything that is in and on this earth and what we produce is stolen by the minority who own and control this earth. This is the intolerable inequality of the capitalist system.
But that is not all that is intolerable. It is enough, to be sure, to make workers rise like lions and topple this rotten system once and for all. But. just as bad — some might think even worse — than the economic oppression which this system embodies is the cultural slavery which it requires of its unconscious millions whose non-opposition keeps capitalism alive. That subordination which requires workers to smile blissfully to the latest chart-topping, mind-numbing, consciousness-crushing hit; to dance away the nights to the chat of DJs whose mid-Atlantic drawls confirm that "everything's gonna be alright"; to dream about big cars and big houses and big career opportunities; to choose your fantasy from the impoverished store of images which offer Princess Di or Joan Collins or (for those who are definitely not conversationalists) Samantha Fox. The cultural slavery of Big Mac, Albert Square and Dewsbury parents who must neurotically protect their little Bisto kids from having curry sauce on their school dinners. Is it worth it? If we were born that way life itself would hardly be worth the bother. But human nature has not destined us to be neat little cogs in the dizzying wheel of the system. We are conscious; we can imagine; we can plan together, we can stop being part of it.
Steve Coleman
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