Censorship and Freedom: the Longford Report (1972)

From the November 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

It used to be said of certain parliamentary constituencies that a sheep or a scarecrow would be elected by them if it bore the rosette of Conservative or Labour, whichever was favoured there. Likewise, it is predictable that the direst rubbish will be acclaimed by sections of the population, so long as it is rubbish supporting Christianity and seeking to put more fetters on people’s lives. And that is the essence of the Longford Report on pornography, whose long-awaited foregone conclusions appeared at the end of September. Despite the adverseness of reviews such as Bernard Levin’s in The Observer, one has actually to read the Report to find how low it is: a methodological mess, a rag-bag of contradictory allegations given the name “evidence” and ulterior motives called “conclusions”.

One example will show what the Report is at. In the general introductory section, the third chapter is headed “Violence and Pornography”. A lengthy paragraph associating social revolution and the “underground” with violence leads straight into an account of Julius Streicher and Der Stürmer. Streicher, it is said, collected pornography. The counter-information that Hitler did not is given backhandedly: “very little is known about Hitler’s own interest in pornographic materials” — i.e., being wicked he must have had some even though we’ve no evidence for saying so. However, Hitler was “probably” impotent, and his mistress (a contradiction there, surely?) Eva Braun "may, it is thought” have practised lesbianism with her sister. Over the page, and we are back with hippies and “peaceniks” playing sexual perversions.

Making Dirt Stick

The Longford Report is the dirtiest book in town, throwing and smearing mud in all directions. Some of it is hair-raising in crude audacity. The special sub-committee on advertising which finds “We are satisfied with the disciplines that the advertising industry has voluntarily imposed upon itself” comprised four members—of whom two are Chairmen of advertising agencies. The sub-committee quotes from and recommends the British Code of Advertising Practice, and points a special finger at one publisher refusing to observe it: curiously enough, Paul Raymond, proprietor of Men Only, which was raided by the police shortly after the appearance of the Report. Note should be made, too, of the nature of censorable books proposed in a chapter by Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard: “Not unsuitable because of anything: just unsuitable.”

The conclusion of the Report is a draft “Obscenity Bill”, with two prime concerns. First, a new “test of obscenity” is laid down:

For the purposes respectively of the Obscene Publications Acts 1959 and 1964 and of section 2 of the Theatres Act 1968, an article or a performance of a play is obscene if its effect, taken as a whole, is to outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large.

The second object, with particular reference to the theatre, is that the sections of existing Acts allowing for “public good” as a defence against prosecution “shall cease to have effect”. As stated in the 1959 Act, this defence is

that the giving of the performance in question was justified as being for the public good on the ground that it was in the interests of drama, opera, ballet or any other art, or of literature or learning.

Lord Longford has denied that these changes attempt to extend censorship. Of course they do. What is the Report about, except to demand that what Longford, Mrs. Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard (and eleven ecclesiastics, and Moral Rearmament) disapprove of should be banned?

Who Constrains Whom?

The Socialist attitude to these questions can be simply stated. We are against all censorship, and in favour of unrestricted expression of opinion and sentiment by everyone. There is no reservation in this statement. “All” does not mean all except that of obscenity, etc., and “everyone” includes our opponents (those involved in the Longford Report, for instance: atrocious as it is, no Socialist will deny or impede their right to say any of it). Nor is the argument one of artistic merits and the interests of the higher things in life. The position is that while any one section of society has the power to regulate what others may see, read or know, the minds of the majority are held in chains.

Part of the Longford case is that the minds of many need to be chained. Mrs. Whitehouse is quoted as saying “it has nothing to do with taste, it has everything to do with the kind of world we are trying to build”. A “senior consultant, F.R.C.P. and former Dean” refers to “the necessary function of government in preventing mental pollution by the mass media”. Masud Khan, editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library, proposes that pornography (but not censorship, however) is “inherently fascistic”. Lord Platt is recorded as having visited the Study Group to say that the Bible — “on sale in children’s bookshops, in school libraries” — contained disgusting pornographic material and was likely to corrupt children; but perhaps that is not what the Study Group wanted to hear.

Thin Air

Yet, for all the laborious efforts here to prove a case for banning pornography, it remains unproven. David Holbrook cites psychiatrists, philosophers and biologists. The American President is quoted pronouncing the non sequitur that if the mind is elevated by great works it must be lowered by bad ones. The only decently-researched item in the Report is the Appendix by Maurice Yaffé, summarising the voluminous findings of the US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, 1970, and other recent enquiries. This Appendix is referred to several times in the main text of the Report, making one wonder if any of them (apart from Holbrook and Mary Miles, who add a disapproving paragraph) read it. For the conclusions on page after page are that no evidence exists for connecting pornography causally with anti-social behaviour or sexual crime, or for claiming any effect on children.

Indeed, there is one factor which is treated altogether curiously by the Report. Notwithstanding the impression given by phrases like “widely sold” and “big business”, the fact is that pornography is expensive and hard to get. How many of the newspaper readers have ever seen, let alone bought, it? The Report tells how Mary Stott of The Guardian went to the Study Group’s office “simply anxious to see her reactions to hard pornography”. If it were as over-accessible to the public as Longford’s crew represent, why did not Mary Stott pick up a bundle at the corner shop long before? The cheapest price for a pornographic booklet is about £3 (the same as an agency ticket for Oh, Calcutta!, with which the authors of the Report seem obsessed). In those terms, the talk of easy availability to children is a monstrous red herring. The pious question asked, “Would you like your child (or godchild) to read this?” needs a supplementary: If you would, can you afford it?

Propaganda & Capitalism

The point is not at all frivolous. Most people’s views on pornography are founded not on what they have seen of it but on what they have heard. The first chapter of the Report speaks of “the influence of literature on behaviour, with special reference to the Bible, Das Kapital and Mein Kampf”. If one grants that these books have been widely influential, the influence has not come through reading them. The first and the third have been pressed on populations among which it is difficult to find persons with more than vague knowledge of what is inside them. The number of people who have read Capital is, even today, relatively small. The influence has come from their presentation for propagandist purposes, in directive renderings to which independent reading would be an antidote. This is another side of censorship where the censor seeks to form his subjects’ conclusions for them, laying down the reaction which makes reading unnecessary and imposing social and political penalties on whoever reacts otherwise.

The purpose of censorship is to support the rule of class-divided society. Thus, though Socialists oppose it, we do not campaign for its abolition: the belief that any class government anywhere can permit this is unrealistic. Politically, the reasons why capitalism needs its Official Secrets Acts, libel laws and prohibitions on incitement to this or that are obvious enough. In the field of what is called morality, the purpose is simply to ensure that the working class gives no trouble. In this regard, the hypocrisy of the “establishment” should be seen for what it is. Despite all the talk about art and humanity, the authorities stiffen or relax censorship on strictly practical grounds and only to a marginal extent because of theoretical arguments. Considering all that goes on in our world — supported by the contributors to the Longford Report — it is the depth of cynicism to speak as if seeing a dirty book were the worst thing that could befall a child. If only it were!

Exploitive Society

Of course there is no case to be made out in support of pornography, any more than there is one for football or detective novels or jig-saw puzzles or a thousand other recreational phenomena. The condemnation that large sums of money are made from pornography comes strangely from supporters of capitalism, which exists by making money out of every human desire and need. Much bigger profits are made out of “just” wars, housing shortage, and taken-for-granted activities which poison the environment. Presumably the Hodder company will make profit from the publication of the Longford Report; Malcolm Muggeridge is paid for writing and speaking against pornography and birth-control; but no-one suggests that the viewpoints presented are thereby disqualified.

However, there is one comment on most pornography that is not made in the Report. Its nature is, above everything else, exploitive. Its subject-matter is seduction, humiliation, infliction, indignity — people persuaded or made to do things for other people’s gratification. Far from violating the values of present-day society, this picture of personal exploitation accurately reflects them. That is the real difficulty for the censors in defining pornography. Its forms may be elusive, but the content is no different from that of the allegedly respectable functions of a society based upon the exploitation of man by man. Perhaps the indignation of the Longford Study Group is Caliban’s rage at his own face in the glass. One can see in it also, however, the bitterness of disappointed Fabians. A lifetime’s social reform was supposed to turn the working class into sober, moral, acquiescent people: and here they are, as recalcitrant and randy as ever.

Freedom, not Humbug

Don’t be taken in by the Longford Report — or by the majority of its opponents. Censorship can never be in the interests of any section but the ruling class. It is not stated like that, so the arguments for it have to be specious ones invoking illusory menaces and the welfare of the young and “vulnerable”. On the other hand, most self-styled “opponents” of censorship are seeking not its abolition but its transfer — themselves to have freedom, others to be shut up. Socialism means the freedom to say, see and know without restriction. It is worth saying also that this includes not being forced to accept what one does not want; but that is a freedom capitalism won’t give us either.

Robert Barltrop

Lonelyhearts: A Parody of Living (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The sexiest years of our lives” the News of the World called them, reviewing the changes which have occurred in sexual customs and behaviour during the last twenty-five years. “ ‘Today’s teenagers have burst open the sexual cage. They will never be driven back to the old taboos’, says the Sorensen Report on Adolescent Sexuality” — shouts The Sun. Film-stars boasting that they were not legally married to the fathers of their children. Over a million British women “on the Pill”. Stage productions like Hair and Oh, Calcutta! with completely starkers casts. Every pub, almost, with its Go-Go girls and strippers, and Saturday-night “divorced and separated club” dances. Family planning is free for all, screams the poster on the wall — make sure they are really wanted. The Borough of Camden actually pays taxi fares of girls needing advice urgently.

Forty-five years ago Dr. Marie Stopes (authoress of Married Love and pioneer of the first free birth- control clinic for working-class women in Islington, London) had her book suppressed and a six-month prison sentence which, however, she never served. With all this new-found freedom and frankness, discarding absurd Victorian prudery and hypocrisy, we should all be as happy as sandboys, as free as the air, having it away like rabbits without a care in the world.

But what is the truth? We live in the era of the broken marriage. Divorce and separation have reached staggering proportions, leaving behind them a legacy of grief and anguish hard to visualize. Children become “latch-key kids”, some “juvenile delinquents”. The matrimonial courts are snowed-under with cases, and the jails hard-pressed to cope with the 250,000 maintenance allowance defaulters. The weeklies reap a rich harvest running hundreds of adverts by men seeking women, and women the companionship and sociability of men. This writer remembers well buying a copy of Der Abend in Frankfurt, to find more advertisements by lonely men and women seeking partners in Germany, than in England.

These adverts along with Compat, Duet, and “divorced and separated” clubs are a peep under the lid of a seething cauldron. They are the harrowing heart-cry of the victims of a vicious and depraved society, capitalism, which denies many the exercise of those elementary physical functions which even lower animals enjoy instinctively.

A desperately lonely bachelor seeks an attractive lady.

“Surbiton Surrey’ ’is longing to make somebody happy.

A lonely English bachelor seeks lady for friendship and marriage.

And so on, page after page after page. Neither is it true that the advertizers are merely, or even mainly, interested in sex. Many go out of the way to state their social interests: “dancing”, “walking”, “music” — in fact, "Lonely Teacher” declares himself a “genuine socialist”.

Incidentally, nearly all the males advertized by Marriage Bureaux are “nearly” six feet tall, which doesn’t say much for us shorties who can only muster about five feet eight. Some have not only motor-cars and “good positions”; they are “cultivated”, “travelled”, “intelligent” and “humorous”, they own town and country houses, boats and caravans (one even has his own private plane) — and are still unhappy. One widow advertizes “a good home” for the lucky applicant. Such inducements can only arise in a private-property society where possessions are considered the criterion of contentment. Nevertheless one bright spark announces:

A gentleman, 46, tall, indolent, with no material possessions seeks a lady, whose religion is unimportant.

On the other hand:

A Continental lady with small capital would like to met an understanding gentleman for early marriage.

She probably got a flood of replies asking how small is “small”.

How paradoxically absurd that men and women, who are crammed together like sardines in public transport, homes and employment, have to advertize their frustrations. Hundreds of thousands are milling about like the exploding electrons in an atomic pile, crashing into other marriages and threatening their stability in a social chain-reaction.

Compare the unhappy plight of these “intelligent”, “cultivated”, car-driving bachelors and divorcees, forced to advertize their poverty of companionship, with the joyous freedom of the primitive savage, secure in the knowledge that all the women of the opposite Gens were his lawful, rightful wives, while all the men were the husbands of his Genswomen.

. . . the law enabling the strange Papuan, thousands of miles from home to find frequently, from Tribe to Tribe, women who will without resistance guilelessly surrender to him.

(Engels, Origin of the Family p.54) 

One can hardly restrain a smile at the quaint Victorian terminology still used by even such an iconoclastic pioneer as Engels. The idea that women “surrender” to men is exploded even under capitalism nowadays.

The absorption of women into commerce and industry has made them less economically dependent on men as Engels, Bebel and others predicted. This, and the cheap efficient small car instead of the pram, the washing machine in place of the wash-board, central heating and electrical machinery have partially emancipated women from drudgery in the kitchen and submission in the bedroom. Socialism will continue this process by emancipating women completely.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s great merit lay in his realization that our attitudes change with changing economic conditions, and that the family as a form of social organization evolves. Under slavery, male slaves had no sex life (officially, anyway). All female slaves were automatically the Master’s concubines, if required. Under feudalism sex was confined by the Church, for the lower orders, to the marriage partner for life. To the aristocrat the marriage was to land, not a bride. In this way the Hapsburg dynasty gained control over half of Europe. This form of repression inevitably produced prostitution which, however, never flourished then as under capitalism now, where literally everything is on sale for money.

For primitive man the choice was wide and free. Children were the social responsibility of the whole tribe. The absurdly individualistic private possessive relation to their own children of many proletarian mothers today was unknown. With the extension of knowledge and culture comes the advent of individual sex-love, although Engels held that it was impossible before the Middle Ages:

It goes without saying that personal beauty, harmony of inclinations, intimate intercourse, awakened a longing for sexual intercourse, but from such relations to our sex-love is a long way yet.

(Origin of the Family p.92) 

Sexual relations will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity, a breed of men who have never had occasion to buy the surrender of a woman for money, and women who have never had occasion to surrender to any man for any other reason but love. Once such people are in the world they will not give a moment’s thought to what we, today, believe should be their course.

(ibid., p.100)

Relieved of all economic problems, unsatisfactory unions will be dissoluble immediately on the simple decision of one or both parties. Mental compatibility and mutual achievement will gradually supplant physical satiety as the years pass. The individual family of private-property society will be superseded by the great social family of all humanity.

Hail to our sons and daughters! who, learning from the fumbling blunders of their stupid and clumsy parents, will attain a noble happiness we can never know.

Horatio.

Education and Sex (1972)

From the January 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard 

There is an old story about the teacher who, perhaps desperate for something to liven up a dull lesson, asked the kids to tell her exactly what they were thinking about as she showed them a picture of St. Paul’s. All went well until she got to one little boy who said he was thinking about sex. Now really desperate, the teacher asked him why he was thinking about that? Because, he said, he never thought about anything else.

Now every adult who was ever a child knows there is a lot of reality in that old joke — perhaps too much reality for the comfort of some parents who deceive themselves that, whatever the neighbours’ children might do, theirs would never defile themselves with anything as messy and abandoned as sexual activity. There are certainly elements of fantasy and self-deception about the current outcry over sex education and about what is called pornography — about magazines which admit that we have pubic hair, about films which agree that human beings take part in sexual intercourse and about shops which sell devices claimed to make the experience more excruciatingly enjoyable. All this, need it be said, at a price — sex is one of our growth industries and there is some shrewd money invested in it.

This money might be thought to be pretty safe; sex, as Marilyn Monroe is supposed to have said, is here to stay. The question is, how should we deal with it? It seems like a dirty trick of human development, that the urge is strongest when we are young, in our earlier teens. But any teenager who indulges the urge and becomes a parent as a result faces severe economic problems; a worker does not expect to reach his peak earning power until he is in his forties.

This does something to explain the theory popular with psychologists, educationalists, and indeed with almost everyone else, that youngsters are emotionally unprepared to have children and that until they reach the magic age of emotional readiness they must control — that is, suppress — their sexual drive. This opens up a gap, between desire and fulfilment, which of course most youngsters try to bridge. Usually this is by masturbation which, they are warned, might cause a vicious circle of loneliness, depression, consolatory masturbation, loneliness more acute, deeper depression . . . (This is a modern, more refined version of the old hell-fire and brimstone stuff about masturbation stunting your growth, or making hair grow from the palms of your hands. Who can dispute that the more knowledge on this matter the better? Who can wonder, that youngsters are restless, in revolt?)

One fact which has not been adequately faced by the Lord Longfords of the world is that the suppression of sexual drives can itself cause powerful emotions, which are often more difficult to control than is a mere sexual urge. Sometimes suppression may mean fairly minor problems like feelings of personal guilt which, however unpleasant they may be for the individual, do not usually extend far beyond himself. But there can be worse; the search for substitute virility symbols in aggressive behaviour — the big motor bike and the black studded jacket, uniforms in the fight with chains and knives. And at the extreme there is the chronic sex offender who can deal with his guilt and frustrations only by unloading them — by shocking or damaging or even destroying other people.

It is tempting — and it may not be entirely unfair — to guess that the vociferous denouncers of sex education are themselves pretty strong on guilt and probably confused by the fact that sex is so eminently marketable. Capitalism, they should realise, does not spurn the chance to make a profit. A lot of the porn which can be bought freely in most newsagents is rather clever, mixing fact with fantasy, titillation with discussion, all on a delicate implication that the reader is virile enough to satisfy every one of those gorgeous, naked girls and to outdo in performance all those kinky letter-writers. More probably the reader is desperately deprived, paying his furtive money in an unhappy attempt to idealise feelings which he cannot manage in any other way.

This is another reality too painful for many people to face. The tragedy is, that there is no reason to feel guilty about sex, any more than about eating or sleeping. Yet the guilt is often instilled in childhood, by parents who extend their property relationship with their children to the point of neurotic possessiveness and who fear sex as a private, exclusive act which separates their children from them. Sometimes the end result of this relationship is the sexual offender, going his lonely way in the public park.

One wonders what valid objection these parents can have to sex education which, after all, takes on a job they feel themselves unable to do, suppressed as they are in the stifling privacies of the family under capitalism. Perhaps they too, on the trim housing estates, sheltering behind the beloved car at the kerbside, fearful of their job and of their standing with the neighbours, need help. But private property society does not give priority to such needs; wage slaves can exist, and be profitably employed, without anyone probing their deeper emotional deprivations. In any case, among the innumerable indignities which capitalism imposes upon human existence, which should have priority for therapeutic attention? Martin Cole, maker of the famous, controversial sex education film Growing Up, obviously thinks that sexual neuroses should be pretty high on the list: “I think,” he said in an article in The Guardian (1/5/71) “teenagers should be promiscuous.” Any more, we might ask, than they should be well fed, secure, healthy, happily creative instead of uselessly employed?

It is worth dragging out the fact that sex is a necessary human function, which must have been performed with some degree of relief and enjoyment by the parents of Mrs. Whitehouse and Lord Longford. Sex can be a uniting factor but it can also be divisive, even destructive. Capitalism puts pressure on us to confine sexual activity to the marital situation (there is little reality in this, of course — even for the working class and less for their masters, who can afford any number of affairs and of children illegitimate or otherwise.) But monogamous marriage is an extremely complex relationship, formed upon many expectations which the partners have of each other — social, economic, sexual and the rest. In rare cases (and whatever the women’s magazines might say they are rare) all these expectations reach some level of consistent fulfilment and the marriage as a result is tolerably stable. In most cases the impossible is not achieved; if the couple are honest enough or rich enough they go to the divorce court.

In this situation it has been difficult for sex under capitalism to be treated as other than a matter of private, almost furtive, shame. This neurosis has been bolstered over time with propaganda of varying degrees of crudity, like the good old theory of original sin and the fallacy that the Roman Empire came to an end, not through any discernible historical reason but because its inhabitants were crazy libidinos and perverts. Then there is the boy-meets-girl theory in which sex and marriage is like a jig-saw puzzle, a matter of waiting until the right shaped piece comes along to fit in with us. (This was once very popular in those women’s magazines and they have always sold as well as any porn.) As the market for pornography develops and as sex education spreads, these attitudes should break down and a newer set of neuroses, probably going under the title of sexual freedom, may flourish and will be twisted and used to justify and bolster the inhumanities of capitalism.

And what will be the end of it? The idea that we stop feeling guilty about sex and simply enjoy it can be extended — should we not also set out to enjoy all types of intercourse and the satisfaction of all our appetites? For example, the vast majority of people spend nearly their entire life doing jobs which they detest and which degrade them to an inhuman level of boredom and servitude. An education which attacked that situation and the damage it causes would be a direct, explicit attack at the basis of capitalism. Yet if the sex educators are to be consistent, if they are to fulfil their professed aim of human happiness and harmony, they should settle for nothing less.

What holds them back? The simple answer, which also applies to so many other reformers whose ideas are superficially sound and attractive, is that they accept the basis of capitalism while they reject some of its effects. Sexual activity is bound up with some extremely powerful human emotions which might be usefully investigated, but only if this is in human terms. The psychiatrists can scrape around on the surface for as long as they are able but they are doomed to failure as long as they remain blind to the fact that only a free, humane society can respect human feelings.

Ivan

. . . A Much More Private Letter (1973)

A Short Story from the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

My Dear Daphne,

It was very nice to see you the other day and to see you looking so well. Your mother and I were pleased to hear that you are settling down so well at university but since you went back I have been doing a bit of thinking (I get a lot of time for that nowadays) about some of the things you said to us.

I am probably more anxious than your mother, about the pitfalls you must be wary of in your future. You told us about all those layabouts at university, who go there only to have a rest for a few years and who do only enough work to get a pass. It made me very angry, that I am paying to keep these people in idleness. We have always taught you the value of hard work, in the moral sense, and this applies whether you are at university or in a job. It applied to me ever since I left school, all through my time in the army and in the jobs I’ve had since my demob. So when you talk about trying for a good degree and then going for a big job with a large firm, one of the stable ones which are not going to pack up, I think you are on the right lines. You will be set for life.

By the way when I took you back to university the term before last I did not notice any of those layabouts among your friends! In fact I liked the other students you introduced to me. Although they were young they seemed to have an instinctive respect for me and they were quite happy to just let me sit in your room while they got on with their chat. A pity they are not all like that. I think your idea, to make the first examination the stiffest and the last the easiest, instead of the other way round, would weed out a lot of the layabouts and make sure that universities are places for people who want to work.

I hear so many stories about what goes on at universities these days. Drugs and sex and communists stirring things up. I know you are a sensible girl. Your mother and I have told you right from the start that you must be on your guard against all men, who are interested in only one thing from you. Up to now you have taken our advice and we hope you carry on like that. You know that drugs are just filthy and you only have to start on them, take the smallest piece of cannabis for example, to get addicted and end up in an early grave. As for the communists, they are another kind of drug really and just as destructive. Just after the war, when I was still in the forces, I voted Labour because everyone was doing it then but I am glad I saw where all that would lead me. We cannot afford to relax in this free world and you in a university where the communists are so active must be really on your guard.

I am not grumbling at you because we know you are sensible and we are very proud of you. You have always listened to what we have said to you and we think that provided you watch your step over the next few years you are all set for a good career.

You were not the only visitor I had last week because Stan Bloomfield came to see me. It was mainly to clear up one or two details from the firm, like me keeping up paying into the pension fund and settling my holiday pay. I think Stan knows what it means to be told you are redundant after all those years with a place but I know he appreciates that I worked my notice properly and left the job in apple-pie order when I left. I hope soon I can think about another job and I don’t see why I shouldn’t get one at the same managerial level. Do you want any good kitchen hands at your university? (Ha ha).

I think I’ll close now. Don’t forget to write to me and come to see me again as soon as you can. If you cannot manage to come before the next holiday don’t worry too much because I shall be here for a while yet. The tablets they are giving me are making me a lot calmer and when I start the electric shock treatment next week I hope for a really big improvement but the doctors say it will be a few months before I will feel well enough to go home.

God bless, from your affectionate 

FATHER.

Ivan

The Permissive Society (1971)

From the April 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a list of the most misleading phrases, those used to denote and characterise eras of social history would surely be near the top. The Naughty Nineties; the Roaring Twenties; the Age of Elegance; the Golden Days of this and that. Because, for the majority of people, the times thus described are nothing of the kind. The only one which rings true is The Hungry Forties, and that falls short of adequacy for a nineteenth-century decade of horrible starvation.

The present age is, of course, that of the Permissive Society. Like the other phrases, it suggests an infection of us all — abandon, indulgence, Rabelaisian laughter everywhere: the triumph of the libido. The truth, however, is that to most people it means only the goings-on they read about in the newspapers. The nude, the freaked-out and the orgiastic are a province touching slightly, if at all, the pattern of life in suburbs, villages, and Council estates. Few, really, of Greater London’s millions feel the breeze of the Swinging City. Indeed, how can it be otherwise? Permissiveness is there, but restraint on participation in it is imposed not by morality but by income. No man can be a sybarite on twenty pounds a week.

The participants in the Permissive Society, then, are the young and the better-off. For the latter, that is no change. “It’s the rich what gets the pleasure, the poor what gets the blame’’ is a handed-down line in a bawdy comic song where the joke is a rueful reference to the way things always are in class-divided society; who has not detected, in condemnations of permissiveness, annoyance because the pleasure is not now considered a private privilege of the rich? One may see how it was in Victorian England by reading, for example, the Radical novels of G. W. M. Reynolds where part of the attack on the upper class was continual reference to their debauchery. But it is only ten years since the prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley case asked the jury if they would wish their servants to read such a book. This vein of criticism of permissiveness reminds one of the old joke about the titled lady on her wedding night asking her husband if the working class enjoyed such raptures and responding to the affirmative with: “Well, you must try to have them stopped. It’s much too good for them.”

Perhaps something similar comes into the perturbation over the permissiveness of the young. It is natural enough for adults with low wages to be resentful of adolescents getting as much as they, able to buy seeming luxuries that a lifetime’s labour never knew — and, apparently, rebutting all the constraints and disciplines which were held to be moral because they were essential. Nor is there any doubt that adolescent life has altered in the last fifteen years. The discovery of the young as a huge consumer group, and the socio-economic pattern-changes which have made one generation’s work-life dissimilar to — and therefore uninfluential over — the next’s, have done that.

Thus, books and films which were “not suitable” for young people are now open to them. The non-conformity in dress and hair-styles has been the display of freedom from older influences. The true significance of the Beatles and Rolling Stones in their emergence ten years ago was rejection in clothes, hair and demeanour as well as in musical form and content of the established, taken-for-granted roles for young males in contemporary society. Moreover, the extensions of secondary and higher education, as parts of general adaptations in capitalism, have meant that young people are in this movement at the same time as they are still in school. This in itself has given fuel to the older generations’ resentment: here are youngsters, never earned a penny yet but behaving with adult licence — as if adulthood were certifiable only by going to work.

The commonest condemnation of "permissive” behaviour among the young is, curiously enough, an uninformed one. In this age, it is said, they bed together instead of waiting for marriage. Practically every week there is still some clergyman in the newspapers drawing attention to the illegitimacy figures and telling how many girls are in the family way when they marry at his church. Anyone who has studied family records — a genealogist, for example — can put right this delusion that it’s modern times. The parish churches’ own registers of baptisms, the only records of births before the State took over in 1837, are universally studded with what they called “baseborn” children. Stratford-on-Avon has an entry for the birth of William Shakespeare’s child, five months after his marriage. Whatever may be different for the young, that has always gone on.

To all this has to be added a small flow of openings-up of forbidden frontiers. Nudity on the stage and in films; the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality; the interlarding of TV plays and sketches with what used to be called “barrack-room language”; the recurrent arguments over pot and pornography, with the possibility that either or both may become legal in not too many years. If most people see little or nothing of these things at first hand, their existence as topics is probably enough to shock and to promote the conviction that we live in a society which has changed because its norms have broken down.

And that is just what has not happened. The norm of capitalist society is production for sale and profit, with all human activity either directed or inescapably conditioned by it. The permissive society is, above everything else, a commercial phase: an everybody’s-doing-it sales concept like high-speed gas or the cult of the white-enamel kitchen. The truth is seen in fact when aspects of permissiveness are used by respectable sounding firms whose executives probably go to church on Sundays and personally deplore the laxity of the young. The Electricity Boards, using one of the most provocative girl-pictures extant for advertising; the petrol ads with the girl and the phallic pump; all the incitements to buy which indicate instant sexual intercourse as reward for doing so.

Much of it is obvious enough. The paperback-book industry has had the jackpot rung for it by permissiveness. The theatre has thriven from it — even Shakespeare appears to have a fresh round now with nude Juliets and more literal interpretations of the bawdy bits. The cinema, which was near dying in the ’fifties, has had a new lease of life by becoming the vehicle for whatever wouldn’t do for family entertainment on TV. General Booth built a new Christian sect to popularity with the maxim “Why should the Devil have the best tunes?” A hundred years later, commerce has reconsidered the point and found randiness better than music.

But is there not at any rate a by-product in that people can nevertheless feel more free and be happier in their personal relationships, because barriers of convention are broken down? If there is, it is only marginal. Margaret Powell, in one of her books about servant life, remarks that one reason why working people felt guilty over sex was the conviction that something which was enjoyable and had not to be purchased must be wrong. The whole point of the commerce in permissiveness is to see that people do purchase it, as far as that can be made possible; and it is hard to see that improving the quality of life. As with the Beatle upsurge, emblems and even feelings of unconventionality are quickly appropriated for sale in the market. What happened to the Flower People? Their style and regalia made a dress-shop vogue, their most lasting effect is the floral shirts on Marks-and-Spencers’ counters.

Permissiveness is an awful word, if you think about it for only a moment. It means, literally, what is allowed. It assumes a society in which dispensations are made by “them”, areas of apparent licence permitted under watchful eyes: the complementary assumption has to be that the permission may be withdrawn at any time. That is, indeed, how most people see it. The common expression by someone who has, say, read a boldly-written book is: “Wonder it was allowed to be printed.” And the assumption is well-founded. The recent attacks on International Times and Oz show this clearly enough; neither publication is specially admirable, but both went beyond the permission for permissiveness. In some ways, Victorian society was more permissive than ours. Certainly no generation before the present one has been so pried and spied upon, its every movement noted and filed to underline the restrictive power of commerce and the State.

The things implied in the idea of a thoroughly permissive society are desirable. It is desirable that people should be free, both psychologically and socially, to find the fullest satisfactions; that responsibility and harmony should be the guides to conduct instead of moral sanctions and legal prohibitions. What has to be appreciated is that these states of affairs are dependent for realisation on the organisation of society as a whole. On one hand, it is not possible to create them within a society whose inherent tendencies are antithetical to freedom and responsibility. On the other, personal freedom is dependent on solid social conditions as much as on attitudes of mind.

Sexual freedom, for instance — since the permissive society is about that more than anything else. For all the emancipated talk, the exercise of freedom in this area of life really does demand a different bricks-and-mortar environment from the one most people get under the capitalist system. The minimum requirements are privacy, hot water, warmth and not being tired, and one can add more desirabilia like a comfortable bed and nice surroundings. Given the perfect partner and the most liberal frame of mind, one cannot do justice to lovemaking in a cold room where the neighbours hear every word and every creak of the bedspring and there is only the kitchen sink to wash in.

Thus, the road to freedom must be paved by a revolution in the way people live materially. And that is not all. There are the questions of the status of women in society; of racial and social barriers; of the continual money worries from which no working person is free, that impede expression and fulfilment in every sphere; and of the commodity-making and marketing of every human need. It has been the aim of drop-outs and reformers alike to meet these problems either personally or socially. That it cannot be done is evidenced not by argument, but by a look at things today. The answer can only be a transformation of society, changing the basis and the purpose on which it is organised.

Socialists have sympathy with all those who want the liberations a permissive society promises. The sympathy must be specially strong for the young people grasping this illusion of freedom to find themselves caught in the commercial bondage of capitalism after all. What they — we, all of us — need is a free society in which mankind can, for the first time, find fulfilment.

Robert Barltrop

Motives of militarism (1971)

From the January 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is just over ten tears ago that peace time conscription (one of the Attlee government’s steps towards socialism) came to an end (by order of a Tory government). For the most part, National Servicemen agreed that the time they spent in the forces was a stilling bore. Some swore that they spent almost the entire two years sitting around with virtually nothing to do; others, that any sporting prowess was the passport, through a corrupt adjutant, to a cushy posting.

The surprising fact was that so many of these men, after their demob, could recall the episode without experiencing an overwhelming urge to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Very few were really angry about those wasted months; they looked back on it all with an amused tolerance, perhaps even with some affection.

They remembered the time spent square-bashing under roaring NCOs, the kit inspections with everything moronically clean and laid out in monotonous pattern. They swapped memories of barrack room japes and booze ups as if service life was one long revel. Many a demobbed clerk used to announce his morning arrival at the office with "Orderly officer! Stand by y’beds!” It was almost as if, in very drab lives, being plucked out into the service was one isolated, treasured patch of colour.

Perhaps those gentle memories were a rationalisation of what was actually an unpleasant experience, which the conscripts could not contain or justify in any other way. If there is a massive guilt complex at large, it has probably been successfully projected; a recent Opinion Research Centre poll said that 43 per cent of those questioned about conscription favoured a return of it.

At this time of long haired, protesting, questioning, free-loving, delinquent, youth — a return of conscription? It is useful, to take that as a starting point.

If we played the old psychological party game and asked a collection of people what word came immediately to mind when we said “Army”, a fair number would reply “discipline". And it is discipline, with elements of orderliness, smartness, cleanliness, which present day society is supposed to lack. A large part of the Services’ efforts goes into this discipline business and the instilling of it is the basis of all those parades, saluting, stamping, polishing, shining, folding, adjusting . . .

A plainer, but more accurate, way of expressing this is that it is intended to induce a state of mind in which the disciplined ask no questions. They obey — even the word of an ignorant, bull-headed man whose only advantage is in the stripes on his sleeve. Men who can be trained to co-operate enthusiastically in pointless activities like making sure they walk about a barrack square in exactly the same way as a few hundred other men can also be trained to give of their best in other, equally pointless, activities. They will, for example, if the man with the stripes tells them to, do their best to kill some other, equally disciplined and conditioned, man who is wearing a different uniform.

Once in that mindless mob action, it takes some courage to make a stand. Conform — that is the password. When you are in the mob you take everything like a soldier. That includes your work (which may mean killing your fellow conscript on the other side), your punishments, your drink. Even your sex. The old conscripts may backlash, now that they are in their thirties and forties, at the so-called Permissive Society and the current attempted ventilation of some of the more suffocating phobias of sex. It was different in their day, when a soldier was applauded for taking a local wench upright in an alley at the back of a dance hall. That, after all, was the soldier's way . . .

This professed contempt for women is in fact part of an obsession which finds its place conveniently among the myths of capitalism. That is the obsession with manliness, the notion that a man must act in a particular style and must confine his interests to particular fields. Thus in advanced society a man may be employed in a factory, he may relax in some sports, he is pressured to adopt certain dress styles, even to like particular drinks (like in the T.V. ad for Courage bitter). To step out of this pattern — for example for a man to put on an apron and do the housework while his wife goes out to work — would be to put doubt on his sexuality, even his sanity.

There is of course a vast amount of research which destroys the idea that the respective roles of men and women in society are fixed and necessarily logical. In fact capitalism allots to them the roles which fit in with the system’s needs and priorities. Predictably, capitalism justifies this with a campaign which glorifies the roles it has allotted and by erecting a huge edifice of prejudice. In this way, manliness and militancy are connected; the soldier stamps his way around, he shouts his commands. He demonstrates strength.

The crucial point here is that the reactions and the disciplines which are instilled by military life are in their way very useful to capitalist society outside. Capitalism is a social system of privilege in which the vast majority are underdogs. If they ever realise their sheer power, if they ever see through the system’s deceptions, then the days of privilege are numbered. A great propaganda effort is devoted to delaying the day of reckoning.

Workers are taught that in many things conformity is a virtue; they are taught that mass production is good because it is more profitable. The ideal which is dangled before them is to live in one of a regiment of semis, with a Ford in the gutter outside and two point three (or whatever point it is) children to take out an endowment insurance on. They are taught docility, that the life of the worker who accepts his lot is good (those endowments mature someday) and getting better. Anybody who gets impatient at the slowness of the “improvements”, or who wants more than an improvement, must be a neurotic, a long hair, a hippy. It would obviously do him good, knock all that nonsense out of him, if he had to go in the Army. A pity they don’t bring conscription back . . .

This is no more than an attempt at an easy answer to all the doubts and questioning about capitalism and its effects. Militarism is itself suppressive, an attempt to harden bodies and brutalise minds to the point where they are ready to obey any order, tolerate any obscenity. But the questioning will go on and militarism is no more than an obstacle to be surmounted. If there is no discipline in this it is not the discipline of the barked command, the automatic obedience. It is the discipline of knowledge and in the struggle between the two there is no doubt about which shall overcome.

Ivan