Buy Me (1996)

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

Sitting alone in an Indian restaurant has its pros and cons. The most obvious advantage is the lack of any polite requirement to share dishes. Leave such selfless collectivism to Methodist picnics. The confused belief that socialists favour everyone dipping into the same trough comes from the same stable as the belief that socialists want everyone to be dressed in grey uniforms (an indignity forced upon schoolchildren by conservative defenders of capitalism, not socialists). There is an advantage to be gained from solitude—an advantage too often turned into unattainable luxury for those whose time is rarely their own and homes are usually crowded. So, to be seated in the high-street Taj Mahal with a good book and your own onion bhajee is no bad thing.

The disadvantages come when you are stuck next to a table occupied by the salary slaves from hell. There is no escaping. Buried as you try to be in your book, the loud voices and objectionable chatter is intrusive to the extent that you have no choice but to become their auditory captive.

It was an illuminating experience— in a perverse kind of way. At the next table were two young men (late twenties) and a slightly younger woman. The men were employees of an investment bank. The woman, a law graduate, wanted to become one. Her interview was next week. Their job was to show her how to go for their job. Her job was to find out precisely what lies she needed to tell, clothes she needed wear, postures she needed to adopt and enthusiasms she needed to fake to convince their employers that her ability to be exploited was worth buying. It was an undignified scene. “Tell them that you find investment banking really exciting”, counselled the first one; “But don’t forget to badmouth commercial banking. Investment bankers hate commercial bankers,” added the second, like a big kid telling his mate how to get into the Bash Street Gang. “What about if they ask me why I want to work for them in particular?” she asked, her apparent innocence belying an immense willingness to assume the most disingenuous beliefs. “Well, you tell them that you’ve always admired us because we’re dynamic and know the market well,” responded the first one, resembling a boy forced to learn a catechism. “And whatever you do, let them know that you want to be at the cutting edge of international finance.” Other cutting edges were on my mind at the time, but I stuffed my gob and desisted from adding “restaurant rage” to the new-wave of tabloid crimes.

Never before has the utter prostitution of the job-seeker been quite so clear to me. What difference was there between the woman at the next table and a hooker learning the ropes? At least the hooker might have some sadness at her transformation from human into commodity. Not so the would-be investment banker. She was fully seduced by the pimps of capital, not only ready but eager to do whatever they would pay her for.

Increasingly it has come to pass that finding a job is less a transaction than a relationship, a faked affair of the heart. How often these days do we see salary slaves spending their leisure hours plotting new ways of serving the company? A whole new area of management has emerged designed to make workers excited in their exploitation. They call it corporate participation. “If you feel good we feel good, if we feel good . . . “ company talk has been diminished to the level of a Eurovision pop song; the responses expected from workers have reached the nadir of Maoist chants.

There are now books in the stores on how to sell yourself. I never picked one up in the fear the covers are made of glue, but those who have read them describe how depressingly objectifying they make you feel.

Maybe there are more proles who can afford to eat out these days, but at what price? Next time I’ll get a takeaway and eat it in the local Job Centre.

Steve Coleman

Whispering Sweet Nothings (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the June 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blah, blah; blah, blah; Blair, Blair. This column has decided that a change is as good as a rest and it is time to commit ourselves to utterly platitudinous cliches. Away with this talk of bosses, wage slaves and unseemly class struggles. What politics needs today is a good dose of empty rhetoric—and by Jove, we’re out to let you have it, bang between the eyes (as our role models, the boxing commentators, say).

A political cliche in the hand is worth two in the bush, and a stupefying slogan in time saves nine.

Perhaps there is some truth in the observation that most political speeches these days read like the outpourings of a cheap word processor which has been deprived of human contact, but let none be deceived that cliches are a recent invention. Even before the inane banalities of Major Clinton and Paddy Blair, creative depths were reached by orators of old whose capacity for saying nothing was in direct proportion to what they had to say.

Take Hitler, for example. By most historical accounts this “evil genius” had verbal powers which could hypnotise a crowd faster than Churchill could down a litre of brandy. In fact, Hitler was a transparent nutter, a loud-mouthed cliche-merchant who, without the musical build-up and the theatrical setting would have been regarded merely as an out-of-work painter with an irreparable groin injury. Watching newsreels of Hiller’s rants, as well as those of Mosley’s pathetic echoes, is an invitation to a cliche-spouting competition. Take away the mass unemployment, hyper-inflation and defeat in a recent world war and Hitler's platform at Nuremberg would be about as popular as the Catholic Evidence {sic) League in Hyde Park on a drizzly Sunday. Or take Thatcher. (Take Hitler, take Thatcher. . . take the bloody lot of them.) another sufferer from chronic verbal diarrhoea. Takeaway the TV cameras, the specially-invited audiences and the VIP label and put Maggie on a platform in any high street in Britain; she wouldn’t last ten minutes. Which is nine minutes longer than her successor would last and longer still than Reagan who reportedly went through the entire 1984 presidential election campaign without responding to a single spontaneous question.

Cruel commentators have labelled New Labour’s new-look, brand-new, extra-new-ingredients, we’ll-swap-four-of-your-old-claws-for-one-of-our-new-ones Object as being a bit. . . er, wordy . . . and, well, empty. Hot air, to be precise. The Blur leadership need not feel slung by such criticism, for in committing themselves to such apple-pie platitudes they are merely following a long-preserved record of cliche, going back to their party’s founder. Defining socialism in June 1896, Keir Hardie surely surpassed even the new Clause Three-And-A-Quarter when he explained it to mean “brotherhood, fraternity, love thy neighbour as thyself, goodwill towards men, and glory to God in the highest”. Now, that is what you call a relentless commitment to unadulterated cliche.

So what if almost everything that every politician says sounds the same? Has it not occurred to Generation X, whom the sociologists tell us are characterised by a universal disdain for politicians, that they sound the same because they stand for the same thing? Try selling Coke and Pepsi without, after a while, descending to cliches about fizz, bubbles and cold soda on a hot day. Nobody accuses Pepsi ads of dwelling on the obvious merits of ice-cold drinks or Kellogg of talking too much about breakfast instead of lunch, or Punch and Judy of pursuing the same boring quarrel when they could always go to Relate and patch things up. So why expect defenders of a social order which should by rights have been put on the scrapheap with the Hillman Minx to have anything original to say?

It is high time that voters stop bleating about the cliched vacuity of those who seek to lead them and realise that secondhand tripe is quite good enough for anyone seeking to be led. Or, to put it another way, "You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it think”,

Steve Coleman

Not any answers (1996)

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

Knob-twiddling, the perennial pastime of the compulsive radio listener, has been greatly stimulated by the growth of deregulated airwaves, allowing for new stations of aural passion to be visited by the rover in search of a casual broadcasting relationship. Like trainspotters, the lowest of the lonely in the world of atomised leisure pursuits, the wireless addict delights in finding new programme timetables to collect and tune in to. While the rest of humanity lives its life (or pretends to), the radio junkie listens in to the one-way conversations of radio which serve as cultural life-support machines to the alienated, uncertain aural consumers who want reality sorted out for them on the hour every hour.

I grew up in a world which had just stopped listening to wireless, but in which some of us still listened to radio: the poor cousin of the telly. We laughed at The Clitheroe Kid, worried along with Mrs Dale, squirmed at the pompous smugness of Any Questions (still there; still smug) and went to sleep with the pips from The Shipping Forecast. As infancy' turned to adulthood the Home Service became Radio Four (arguably one of the greatest quality services still relatively undamaged in Britain), the Light Programme became Radio Two (the home of the terminally middle-aged) and the pirates, having been destroyed by the authoritarianism of the then Postmaster General, Tony Benn, gave way to the vacuous ramblings of Tory Tony Blackburn and Radio One.

Deregulation of the airwaves has been a gradual business (and business it is), starting in the early Seventies and culminating in the effective auction of the airwaves which has flogged off licences to whoever thinks they can make a fast buck out of grabbing listeners’ attention. Most people who still listen to radio are fairly fixed in their dial location (with occasional moves within one format, such from Radio One to Virgin or from Radio Three to Classic FM), but for some (the hard-core addicts) the urge has been to roam into hitherto unknown territories.

All of which is to explain how and why it was that a terrible thing happened to me on the way to the phone-in. There I was twiddling merrily in search of the latest from Harry of Hatfield or some other undiscovered philosopher (for, had he been alive today, Socrates would surely have been a regular caller to any phone-in going) and suddenly this lunatic is screaming at me in a fashion reminiscent of an out-of-work evangelist. Now, many a time I have sat transfixed and mortified before my TV set when travelling in the USA, where Coming To Jesus is a big industry. Listening to this previously undiscovered radio station was no different, just more amateurish and more embarrassing for being on the same dial as Radio Four.

Premier Radio is London’s Christian station and, at least at the time of writing, its awfulness has become compulsive. Its presenters, who mainly recite passages from the bible and play songs about clapping your hands for god, do their best to appeal both to the blue-rinsed ladies of Surrey who believe that wireless went downhill the day they allowed an unmarried mother on the The Archers and the fully-certifiable God Squad whose permanent stupor of gullible belief is know by them as being saved. So, the station balances precariously between phone-ins peppered with dull hymns on which old ladies call into to pray that Jesus will come to shoplifters and bad sorts and occasional touches of raving barminess.

An example of the latter was a twenty-minute talk by a born-again vicar whose justification for the laying on of hands so that “Jesus will come all over the sick and cure them” was in no need of Freud to decipher it.

Quite why Premier Radio should exist when socialists are not even allowed to buy advertising space on the airwaves is one question; another is why anyone can still be satisfied by this unadulterated crap. And then yesterday evening, in self-torturing pursuit of the clues, a mock-sincere voice came on and explained how this station was different, for it was there to appeal to those with nobody in the world to care about them: the lonely, the poor, the distressed and lost. God, they were informed, cares about them—as he will carefully explain once they snuff it. And then, instead of turning to Luke or John, as the presenter urged us to, I took another look at that brilliantly descriptive passage by Marx: “the heart of a heartless world . . . the sigh of the oppressed”. Be it from pulpit or high-tech studio, where there is religion there is misery and where religion meets misery its job is to tell the miserable to wait for hope in the next life. The experiment is over; I have heard the voice of salvation and twiddled the knob on my radio until it went away. Of pseudo-saviours the world has had more than its share; and at least everyone knows that The Archers made it up.

Steve Coleman

The ghost of Christmas yet to come (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is Christmas morning and little children lay half-snuggled, half-sleeping in their beds awaiting the miracle of the gifts as advertised on TV and available for a price in their local shops. Parents toss and turn in the next room thinking of empty purses, overdrafts and sinister threats from the building society. Meanwhile, in the misty twilight between bad and worse, lurks the grim-faced oracle of times-yet-to- come. Can it get worse under this profits-first, needs-second system? Come, little ones, and see the bleakness of Christmas-yet-to-come.

You remember a time when there were just beggars squatting in the doorways. Folk knowledge had told that they were not always there, but it is all rather hard to remember. Then came the first of the families. Most disconcerting. The first dead body you walked round, careful to avoid the stench and flies, was always the one that stuck in your mind. Poor little thing—not enough money to feed it and the others, so . . . Then came the neighbours who had collapsed under the swamp of the threatening letters from the moneylenders. She was on drugs; the doctor put her on tranquillisers so that she would never properly have to think of those hopes she once had when he had the little shop and they bought the house. It makes you stop and think when you see the people from down the road out in the street begging for a few quid to feed the ones who might survive the winter.

Of course, the Straw Laws helped none. Jack Straw was one of the most hated Home Secretaries ever (they all are, aren’t they?). Although the Sun was full of praise for his measures to hose down the pavements at five each morning. “Spraying the No-Hopers", the kids call it. And the Prescott Act. long in planning but only realisable with a government that could get the unions to support the scheme, has done wonders to put the young jobless in uniforms and give them a dose of good old-fashioned discipline. The Lib-Dem amendment to cut all welfare payments to scroungers without A1 workfare reports was highly praised in a Guardian editorial.

The deaths from the nuclear blowout in the Ukraine show no signs of letting up. What woman would want to be pregnant this Christmas, with the rate of miscarriages and still-births greater than the number of healthy children born? Everyone saw it coming. After Chernobyl, when that report was issued in the late Nineties about the cover-up on deaths from radiated beef, there was a short scare that if another one went up it would be goodbye to a few million Europeans. They never said it would be as bad as it was when the next one did blow up. Will the war with Russia ever end? These weekly nuclear-alert drills are getting everyone down.

Who would have thought there would be a civil war in the USA? It’s the kind of thing we used to read about in history books. You expected it in Ireland or Yugoslavia, but somehow it all looked so stable from a superficial point- of-view . . . hundreds of thousands dead and who knows how many maimed and homeless? The wags say that the IRA are taking collections in Dublin pubs for the New York Police Militia who have been taken as political prisoners by the Nation of Islam.

The ads become more depressing every day. And there are so many more of them, even on the BBC now. Everyone wants to sell you insurance. It’s like one big protection racket. That one about the little boy with leukaemia who gets turned away from the State Market Hospital and has to sell his bike to get some painkillers . . .  I mean, come, on. there are limits to taste.

But that's the thing: there are no limits. The future of the profit system is not a subject for the delicate of taste or the nervous in mind to study. Best think that everything will just go on as it is. What a horrible thought! Best not think at all.

And the children wake up to find at the end of the bed the bargain models of the goodies which advertisers spent millions persuading them they wanted. What it is to be a carefree infant on such a lovely day. The parents take confidence that the kids will always be snug and forget for a while the abject poverty which the majority of the world’s kids are living in right now. The Queen will come on after the Tesco chicken-bites and reassure them that all is well in this sickest of social orders. She is the Ghost of Christmas Present. And whether what we have allowed ourselves to think for a while about the times to come does come? Well that is up to us to permit or forbid, for we make history, and we alone have the power to stop nightmares from coming true. Even Scrooge could see that. 

Steve Coleman

No Words, No ears (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the October 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

People these days walk down the street talking to themselves. Some are in the business of earning a living. Others are off their heads. The distinction is a fine one.

The mobile phone is surely the quintessential image of a society in which nobody talks to anyone, but needs to pass messages to everyone. As humans we walk down our street with heads lowered in ease we are approached by a neighbourly smile—a sure sign of madness in the contemporary capitalist conurbation. As labour-power commodities, going about our business of making rich pigs falter, we talk endlessly into little pocket-sized machines which wire us up invisibly to our slave cages.

On a morning train between Liverpool Street and Cambridge I suddenly had a horrible vision, worsened by the fact that my eyes were open and what I thought I saw was real. More people (or “customers” as we must now known them) were talking to their phones than to each other. A little boy talked to his tired mother, asking why trees were green, but she told him to shut up and then bribed him with a Mars bar. Having attempted without success to talk to the man opposite (something along the lines of “It’s a lousy bloody day, isn’t it? What parasitical crook are you off to make profits for?”) I watched him press his magic buttons, activate the compulsory nasal tones of the travelling twat in middle management, and proceed to talk gobbledcgook all the way to Harlow about sales figures and the need to beef up quality control. Upon arrival in Cambridge he opened an attache ease and very carefully, one-by-one, opened and closed each of his files, glancing only once and with the contempt of a busy man at the novel which was my anachronistic connection to someone else’s mind.

Now, there can be bad novels (such as every one ever written by Jeffrey Archer) and there can be good uses for mobile phone (such as calling 0171-622 3811 in one of those emergencies which we all have when someone asks a tricky question about the break-up of feudalism and you need to get a back-issue of the Socialist Standard in a big rush). But, these points accepted, can it not be said that books and reading are signs that we are human, and capable of consciously realising our own humanity, whereas the mobile phone, with its alienated purpose of allowing commerce to be intrusively articulated everywhere from the cricket stand to the honeymoon suite, is a sign that the profit system is robbing us of the very’ character of our uniqueness as a species: the ability to communicate thoughtfully? Have you ever heard a mobile-phone-user reciting beautiful verse or treating a friend to a song via the mysterious innards of the cordless leash? No. they are too busy nodding verbally to every want and whim of the boss. They connect to a ventriloquist, but never quite realise what that makes them.

Then there are the head machines, purchased cheaply to ensure that the mind in transit is always blocked out by a thumping beat. Take a Walkman and be sure that your mind will never wander. Did Marx ever think that convincing wage-slaves of the need for freeing themselves would involve having first to teach them how to lip-read? On the train from Cambridge back to Liverpool Street where another man in another grey suit and grey face talks greyly into the greyness of another conversation with the commerce that now runs through the air like a plague, another woman with another small boy (not the one who wondered about the trees, for this mother has put a dummy into her boy's mouth, as if preparing him for future life) has her cheap earphones overflowing into the jabbering atmosphere. Listening into your neighbour's conversation these days offers a choice between sales curves and drum machines.

Back in Liverpool Street, a sort of unofficial border zone between the City of London and the East End, I head eastwards to buy a salt beef sandwich (on rye, plenty of mustard) with a sweet-and-sour cucumber. Walking past a doorway there is a woman declaring vociferously to herself that the messiah has come down to earth and is currently living in a bedsit in Brick Lane. Passers-by ignore her or stop to sneer. I stop to ask her whether the messiah would care to enter a public debate at a location of his choosing—the cost of the hall and the collection would be shared. But she persists in ranting to herself and my curiosity is overwhelmed by hunger.

One-way communication is a waste of time. No, worse, it is anti-human. Be they evangelising to themselves, plotting sales or listening to machine-made drum beats, they are so far from communicating as to be speaking the language of the deranged—the new universal language of capitalism. 

Steve Coleman

Losers, this way (1996)

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

Nothing is amusing about amusement arcades. Rename them Depression Arcades. Distraction Arcades. Escape Retreats for the desperate. Losers’ loitering places.

Only this mad system can assume that there is amusement in pushing coins into a slot and hoping that more will come out than you put in. There is nothing amusing about money. Only when we don’t need to pay to become happy will there be true amusement.

There is a smelly tackiness about these arcades where flashing neon lights illuminating pound signs and ceaseless bleeps and pings contaminate already dingy streets. Boys who might just be men push and pull on the lever of the machines with the ferocity of warriors fighting not for gold but brass. They fight for their coins with the deranged rage of people who have a repressed awareness that they are competing for the loser's medal. Anyone who needs to bet with small change has lost before they start. Menacing-looking louts who look like they failed the audition for a home in Albert Square patrol the aisles of amusement and stare at the losers with the look of prison guards attending serial killers. Rent boys mingle with dribbling old drunks and prematurely old women who drag on fags, not sure whether their purses will be empty before their stomachs are. Nobody looks remotely amused. They look so unamused that they could be in church.

And in a sense they are. They are in the Temple of Mammon, pursuing the ultimate amusement of the jingle-jangle money system. Rules of the game: no money and you’re out—down and out.

Sitting in one of these stinking places—the smell is either urine or sweat, but not a sniff of happiness—it is tempting to defy the rules and insist on amusing yourself. Take out a good novel and read it; pull out a whistle and play a tune; tell a joke. “You trying to take the piss?”, the menacing oafs would ask. “I thought this was an amusement arcade,” you say, “and I’m amusing myself. Yes, I must say I feel decidedly amused.” The amusement guard turns out to be a black belt in random street violence.

Of course, in the good old days workers used to sit round the old piano and sing songs. What a load of old tripe people come out with; the foolish illusions of nostalgia. Most wage-slaves never had pianos—and those who did tormented themselves with hymns about Jesus and damnation and silly ditties about being happy. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile!” Hardly a prophetic overture for being sent down a trench to kill other poor stuck-in-the-mud mugs singing German songs of distraction. The past was much like the present, only they were less sophisticated at building the amusement machines.

Not that many years ago fruit machines were straightforward. You put in your sixpence, pulled the handle, waited for three plums to appear, they didn’t and you either put in another sixpence or went away feeling miserable. Two cherries meant you got your sixpence back— only to lose it with the next pull of the handle. At least you knew where you stood.

These days losing money is an elaborate business. The game screens are like modern battlefields and the would-be loser is faced with an array of buttons requiring at least three hands to operate with any skill. My father used to lose ha’pennies pushing marbles into one another. I was a child of the one-pull fruit machine. Kids today watch their coins orbit the galaxies and commune with other life forms before they finally see them disappear into the magical sphere of the arcade owner’s bank account. The thieving coin-collector-state-licensed gaming operator, no less—is well amused. As ever, our loss is their gain. The poor man in his amusement arcade, the rich man (or his errand boy) in the Stock Exchange. We’re urged to gamble for pound coins. They’re gambling on the wealth which we produce. Their jackpot is announced in small print on the share pages of the newspapers every day. The compensation prizes are in the £3-an-hour Jobs-Vacant column. Which might just leave a few quid over at the weekend for a trip to feed the amusement meter. 

Steve Coleman

More Satanic Verses (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hell is Camden Town as the sunsets. Drunks stagger towards gutters which are home; the children of the hypodermic needle inject some bought and deadly fake happiness; the old ones who chatter to themselves speak of “bastards” who tried to push them off the bus and bomb shelters where the roof leaked; the girls on the game pursue what only something as monstrous as capitalism could boast of as the “oldest profession”, selling submission for the price of fast-food; a man with a metal stick limps nowhere in particular and curses blacks, as if they all made him lame; a Dickensian figure whose arse is literally hanging out of his trousers sings “There’ll Always Be An England” and holds out his dirt-caked hand for pennies that will not come; kids lie in doorways in sleeping bags which should be used for jolly camping trips, but are now the substitute for home for thousands in a country which has more empty houses than homeless people; and the police shoot past in cars with Nazi-like sirens, now to collect their kebab and then to intervene in a fight between two wage slaves who enjoyed their evening’s release from misery so much that they tried to kick each other’s brains out over a penalty decision in a football match.

Graffiti on the wall says “Wogs Out”, “Cath Loves Jason”, (who is probably the Jason who will always be separated by a thick glass TV screen) and “Don’t Pay The Poll Tax” (as if the Council Tax is somehow' a merciful release from oppression). Now here is it scrawled “Dante Woz Here”, but it feels like there could not have been a much better inspiration for his vision of Hell than the streets which we have become used to. Perhaps that is the one thing worse then eternal damnation: not knowing that you’re in hell.

Camden Town is not unique. It just happens that this writer is there frequently, witnessing the destitution of the people of this late-twentieth-century abyss and the impossibility to pass by without the inner sense of wanting to vomit, as if the malignant sore was within rather than all around. Visiting Easterhouse in Glasgow or Handsworth in Birmingham or Toxteth in Liverpool or St Pauls in Bristol or the South Bronx of New York the same gaping pits of urban hell scream out, echoing in their impotent rage the high boasts of the market which will provide life for anyone at a price—and will strip you layer-by-layer of living dignity if you are short of the price.

The hell which was Auschwitz or Dachau is the most pregnant image of brutality available to our modern senses. Nothing compares with the total awfulness of systematic, industrial genocide. Visiting Dachau, the overwhelming memory is not the gas chambers or the starkly sadistic regulations on the wall or the infertile land all around the camp where plant life simply will not grow; it is the hill overlooking Dachau camp where houses stand and stood as workers were being tortured and exterminated. Somebody was looking on. Perhaps they walked the dog or told the children not to run too close to the wire. Maybe they too just vomited within, refusing to lift a finger because it was someone else confined to hell for now .

But the most moving scenes from the camps—for this writer at least—were the photographs of liberation. We do not know what those who survived were thinking. But we know what they were entitled historically to think: Why, oh why, did you not come sooner?

Be clear, this is not about saving other people—although wishing to unlock the doors of hell is no act to be ashamed of. But the platitudes of moralising salvation can be left to others who make a business from it, sitting in their golden Vatican palace and archbishops' mansions weeping crocodile tears for the poor “who will always be with us” as Christ was so eager to remind us.

Why abolish hell on earth? Because it is near me and its stink can't be avoided. Because its flames are unpredictable and catch passers-by who imagined they were safe. Because most people reading this are only an insecure job and a few pounds in the bank away from the gutter. Because Dickens, when his family lost its money, was confined to the hell of Camden Town and after a century of energetic reforming the ragged wretches of its streets would still be recognised by him. Perhaps because it is impossible to be a complete human while others are being dehumanised before us. To live on the hill overlooking the death camp of our own times—which we don’t call death camps because only the future recognises the indifference to such miseries which are so conveniently and euphemistically hidden from the moment of the present tense—is to be a collaborator in something so awful that one must either ignore it or destroy it, putting in its place something which seems decent.

Steve Coleman

B&Q bargain of the week — Dignity Stripper (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The case of Phil Cheeseman, who was sacked by B&Q for refusing to participate in early morning team exercises and chants at their Luton superstore, has received rather less media coverage than O.J. Simpson. As a sign of the times it is worthy of the closest scrutiny; from the newspaper, Luton/Bedfordshire on Sunday came the news of Mr Cheeseman’s sad failure to live up to his employer’s requirements:

" 'I was really excited when 1 got the job because it was my first permanent employment in four years,' said Phil, 'but from day two they had us singing and dancing and chanting a silly rhyme. They even played party games like bobbing apples, standing on chairs and jigsaws. I was as a customer advisor but I never actually spoke to a customer. ’ But B&Q general manager Craig Higgins said he believed ‘passionately ’ in the unusual training methods . . . ‘We need to perpetuate a real spirit of teamwork . . . Not every game is a success— apple dunking wasn’t, ’ he conceded, adding that Wednesday morning’s game of human machines was a good example of a successful game. ‘Each department was asked to produce a human machine with each person being a moving part in that machine—one department was a clock, another a vending machine, another a typewriter, and one a forklift truck . . . We finish off with aerobics—the admin department has formed a group called the Adminettes— and then do the store chant.' "

The report on Cheeseman’s dismissal for “not being a team player’’ mentioned that there were 3,000 applicants for the 250 jobs in the new superstore. Making them jump through hoops would have been the easy option.

Now, this is the point. As a wage slave you can expect little in the way of luxurious comfort and less in the way of security. But there is a third aspect of decent life which you can expect to be stripped of also: Dignity. It’s a precious resource and it’s fast going out of fashion. From beggars on the pavements to shop workers forced to chant like Maoist victims of re-education, there is a distinct sense of noses being rubbed in the dirt.

The stinking service ethos is now everywhere. When once surly counter-staff would yawn in your face and sneer at the faceless buyer as if they half expected you to have to show them a ration book before you could purchase your kippers, now well-trained smiley-servants wearing silly hats and inane badges greet us all as “customers” and pretend to care whether we are having a nice day. In the USA this phoney insanity has reached its nadir, with almost every restaurant filled with slave-like waitresses (more often than not working to pay for their university tuition fees so that they can learn “Business Management”) who recite the entire menu, including “today’s specials”, while pouring iced water for you, helping you to take off your coat and panting for a few-dollars tip. It’s enough to put anyone with an ounce of self-respect and a controllable hunger right off their nosh.

Once on an aeroplane about to land in New York, the stewardess (or sky skivvy) urged us all to get on our feet and do a quick work-out to prepare us for our arrival. A few Japanese complied, thinking it was Federal Law, and the Californians present participated with the zeal of cull members. I asked for a whisky and contemplated opening the window for a spot of fresh air. The thought of a few hundred on-the-spot joggers being sucked out over New Jersey made the landing feel smoother.

They can take everything away from you, the bosses can. With their money and power they can leave you for dead. They can repossess your home and make your children go hungry and deny you paid work and force you to queue up for a state hand-out and blow you up in their wars and pollute the very air that you must breathe to live. All of this they can do with impunity—as long as they are allowed to by the majority.

But no lousy little manager is going to take away my self-respect. The agonies of destitution would be preferable. Phil Cheeseman, whoever he may be, did right to tell them to stuff their human-machine games and company chants up where the sun doesn’t shine. Being “done” by exploiting idlers is bad enough, but expecting us to Do-It-Ourselves, whistling while we work at selling their shoddy crap, is the final nail in the DIY coffin of our dignity.

Steve Coleman

O. J. (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Certain combinations of letters from the alphabet, without forming words, convey a curious symbolic significance. Phonetically meaningless letter-clusters like JFK, Plc, CP and PhD have entered our common discourse, turning us each into little Second World War codebreakers. We have only to see a Plc to know that They own more than Us (not to be confused with U.S.) and are probably crooked. JFK invokes tedious murder conspiracies and it is hard to think of a CP or an SWP without expecting a dead Russian to introduce himself to you. U.N. equals impotence, E.R. is for arrogance and GMTV is a password for ignorance.

CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC, closely followed by BBC 1, are in the midst of an obsession about O.J. Guilty or innocent? For a state which murdered over a hundred thousand people with two atomic bombs it is a somewhat belated shock at the news of a murder. Daytime soaps have vanished from US TV as millions tune in to the latest dramas of barking dogs and melting ice-creams which comprise the evidence in the O.J. trial. Never since J.R. was shot have so many Americans been so involved in a matter of such earth-shattering triviality.

The fact that O.J. is rich means that he can afford the best defence lawyers on the market. The fact that he is black means that he needs them badly. How many black workers are waiting on Death Row right now while the world holds its breath to see if O.J. will be O.K.? A Los Angeles Times survey conducted last month found that 65 percent of those polled knew the name of the Judge in the O.J. trial (Ito by name, which is possibly two letters in Korean: a man who looks permanently surprised that he is not a waiter in a fancy restaurant), whereas only 45 percent knew the name of Newt Gingrich, the reptilian Republican who makes Toad Clinton look vaguely sane.

Orwell’s horrible prediction that words would one day be so diminished that nobody would have anything left to say which the state did not want them to say is probably no more than a tax inspector’s fantasy. In fact, far from being dominated by Newspeak or suppressed into pitiful silence, the tendency is to let the chattering millions choke on their own babble. A people prattling about whether O.J. is an S.O.B. is unlikely to notice that a black American is more likely to be in prison than in university.

Babble has reached its nadir with the latest pollutant of the airwaves. Talk Radio UK. (Of course, U.K. is a coded euphemism for an enforced combination of countries; what Tory right-wingers would call a super-state when UK is replaced by EU.) You know' how advertisements for the Sun are shouted by loutish buffoons for whom salesmanship sounds like a kind of threat? Well, Talk Radio UK is like that all day; It is like a philosophy seminar conducted by the Mitchell Brothers from EastEnders, with callers who drone endlessly about O.J. and their sexual secrets (revealed to anyone bored enough to listen).

Given the job (assuming for a few paranoid moments that there is such a job) of ensuring the passivity of the working class there would be two potential strategies. One of them, which we may call the Iranian Solution, would be to torture the life out of anyone suspected of an independent thought. This approach is big in Teheran and Damascus and provides healthy profits for torture equipment manufacturers in Coventry, although it is costly on bullets and wages for the army, screws and secret police. The cheaper way can be thought of as the Talk Radio UK Solution. Let them eat cake; let them talk crap — same principle, different century.

Trying to hold a conversation with a fourteen-year-old about computers is an invitation to a world of alphabetical derangement. It is the nearest experience on a personal level to sitting day after day in the Stock Exchange where language has been reduced to figures, catchphrases and communications where buttons have relieved brains of the need for activity. It is a world of codes written by idiots to convey the rules of idiocy.

Talk Radio UK, the First national commercial radio in Britain, tells the story of a world where reality has become a lost cause. They don’t talk about life, they talk about talking about life. The U.S. legal pundits whose daily reflections about the O.J. case give some poor wretches something to wake up for, are not talking about truth or justice or evidence, but about how these things are being talked about—or, more often, not talked about. Blabbering about blabbering: the pastime of a society in which life is increasingly acted out rather than lived. The irony of O.J.’s limited acting talent which was employed to make profits for a movie called [Naked] Gun is only matched by the recent decision of the rock megastar, Prince, who, going one stage further than turning himself into an initialised rock code (U2, UB40, El7, INXS), is to be known in future by a shapeless squiggle. Surely a future presidential candidate in the making here. 

Steve Coleman

Help, you’re trapped (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less than you produce. Give the surplus to your boss. Survive on your wage. Spend it on buying back what you and the other wage slaves have produced. No wages left. Need money. So . . . get up in the morning. Go to work. Receive as pay less that you produce . . .  Repeat until you die or are thrown on the scrapheap.

That is your life. You call it being employed. “Luckier” than the poor sod next door: he’s unemployed, forced to look for a boss to exploit him. Employment is exploitation It's legalised robbery: you produce the goods and services and others, who possess the means of producing, get rich. Employment is a trap. You're in it.

The sole reason for workers being on earth is to be employed—robbed—trapped. Without us there would be no surplus value produced. If it could be created without us perhaps we would be culled like seals. But we are necessary to the system. Out of the hole which capitalism has dug for us comes profit. Lots of lovely profits to keep the rich rich. Aren’t they lucky to have us?

But you never asked to be in this trap. Tough luck. It was an act of birth. “Sorry. Mrs Bloggs, but you've given birth to a wage slave" Workers are those who own virtually nothing worth selling except ourselves: our mental and physical abilities, our work. (That’s why we’re called workers—because we’re forced to work ) “Well done, Lady Fotheringdale-Smythe, you’ve given birth to a healthy baby parasite, no sooner out the womb than the inheritor of five company directorships and a trust fund worth more than Worker Bloggs will earn in his lifetime as a wage slave.” No trap for baby capitalist. Well, somebody has to mind the Caribbean beaches while the rest of us look after the factories and offices.

Illustration by George Meddemmen 

You want to get out of the trap and be like the loafers who live off the surplus? Easier said than done, wage slave. You might try robbing a bank. The prisons are full of wage slaves who tried escaping from the trap only to book themselves into a cell. Or do the lottery. There’s always a hope that the fifteen-million-to-one odds will go your way. And that is precisely the function of the lottery: to offer hope to the trapped. Pay a pound and purchase your illusory crack in the cell wall.

Or you can grin and bear it. Most do. Some don’t. Suicide is always an option. (At least it’s not illegal any more.) Or drugs. Yes, the shop doorways are full of kids who thought they could have a little Ecstasy within the trap. Or you could always turn to religion and screw up your mind without shooting drugs. Pie in the sky when you die. But what about life before you die? You're not here to live, wage slave You're here to produce profits. Living is something you can attempt in your own time.

In this trap your time is rarely your own. Most of it is spent being employed. That’s what you're here for. That’s what gives you the right to go home at night and prepare to work the next day. A slave couldn't go home. Slaves belonged to the boss. Slaves had no rents or mortgages to think aboul. You do, sucker. No sooner are you let off the employer’s chain it ’s back home to a place that you must rent or borrow money to live in. You’d probably prefer to live somewhere else. The trap can get a little cramped. That’s the luck of the draw: if you were one of the one percent who own and control the earth's resources you would have had a stately home, or a mansion at the very least, to pass away your idle hours in. But your idle hours are all too few. Unless you’re unemployed in which case you’re forced to be banging on the exploiter’s door begging him to legally rob you. And then it’s back to doing time for the profit system.

You work as you work because you're trapped. You live where and as you live because you’re trapped You travel in a lousy car in congested traffic or in overcrowded public transport on which you pay to go to be exploited because you’re trapped. Your children are born into the same trap as you’re in and they are sent to school to learn how to be trapped. You are well and truly trapped in the profit-grinding machine of this rotten social system And your bosses call it freedom.

And in a way you are free, because like every trap there is a door. The fact that those pointing the way out are labelled loonies or troublemakers might lead you to stay put. You might even be scared of the freedom which lies beyond the cage. At least in the trap you get your wage, just like a dog on a lead gets its bone. You are free to accept your bone to chew on. Tory bones. Labour bones. Green bones. Trotskyist bones. Hie well-adjusted inmate likes his bone.

Steve Coleman

A Disturbed Sunday (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the May 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sunday morning at nine o'clock and the day begins. For some this is the Lord’s Day. Like calves on a day trip to Calais they make their weary ways in ever-decreasing numbers to the Houses of Ignorance where they close their eyes, fall to their knees and heave the impotent sigh of the oppressed in the face of a heartless world. Having sacrificed Saturday night to the brewers' profits (“And before the Lord’s Day it was the landlord’s day ") my head was in no state for spiritual interference. But what was this? Thump! Thump! Thump! It felt like Cantona had entered my cerebral cortex for a quick round of training: my head had been invaded by the shit hitting the fan. Boing! Clash! Thud! Help—I've become trapped in a Batman movie with sound effects provided by the Ministry of Love . . .  But wait a minute, speaking of love . .

“Jesus Loves You!" The awful, invasive, torturous, untuneful thumping “music" has stopped and now a man is shouting in the street about sin, love and the Big Man beyond the clouds. Not content to wake up an entire street with his boring bawling, he then proceeds to sing (solo) about how Jesus wants us for sunbeams. He has a voice which is not quite heavenly, but certainly like nothing on earth. By now—several of us are staring out of our windows, rubbing our eyes and cursing the bassoon player who is rubbing his mouthpiece in preparation for eternal damnation, otherwise known as the next tune. The head nutter has finished his harangue and deposited a pile of War Cry newspapers into the hands of little children who run up and down the street stuffing them through letterboxes. I contemplate the parole conditions for justifiable homicide: “What are you in for, mate?” “I impulsively slaughtered an entire Salvation Army band by battering them with their own instruments.” At least the Krays only tortured their own.

There is something depressingly ugly about hymns. The men who wrote these dirges to god must have been possessed by a degree of melodic dysfunction unequalled until Bros went on their first world tour. There is nothing intrinsically bad about religious music (Mozart's Mass is the best work he composed and cantorial tenors can put Pavarotti through his paces), but hymns are relentlessly miserable in their transparent propagandist!). In the early part of this century militant American workers (known as Wobblies) were refused the right to advocate socialism from street platforms while the Salvation Army (referred to by them as the Starvation Army) were left alone by the cops. So the Wobblies took on the Army at their own game (Why should the bosses have all the bad tunes?) and Joe Hill, their greatest songsmith, wrote some of the most joyful workers’ songs ever sung. Only the barmiest socialist would favour standing in residential areas on Sunday mornings with loud wind instruments and a megaphone singing Wobbly songs. So what gives these Christian manic street preachers the right to try and drive us all mad.

And come to think of it, who needs the nauseating tintinnabulation of their wretched Sunday bells? Why must our children having morning assemblies were holy hog wash is forced upon their innocent minds? And why can’t you switch on the TV on Sundays and national holidays without choirs recruited from The Addams Family imposing their lousy liturgies upon us?

Cartoon by George Meddemmen.

These thoughts were passing through my throbbing head when the rat-tap-tap of an unwelcome visitor propelled me to the cave door with a club in my hand (a rolled- up War Cry was the only weapon available in the frenzy of eagerness to settle scores with the Salvationists.)

“Do you believe in a world where there will be no more wars and everyone will live as one like brothers and sisters?" The question was posed in unison by two young women (possibly sisters, possibly from the planet Belch) who both held tracts in their hands. “Yes, I do." I said. This was not the answer for which they had been pre-programmed. They looked at each other and prayed as they panicked. "So you’re a Christian?” said the first one, divinely guided in her quick wittedness. I responded by giving them a lengthy lecture on why religion is a reflection of humanity’s former ignorance of causation, how the world we live in is unmistakably material and why my head was by now severely aching from the Salvationists’ cacophony.

"But we’re nothing to do with them " they asserted in one voice, as if they had just been invited to associate themselves with the BNP's Satanic Section. “They’re not real Christians,” they reliably informed me, "although we respect them for what they do and hope that one day they will come to see . . .” Go forth and multiply, I proposed, as the door accidcntally slammed on their noses. Let them fight their sectarian disputes in the afterlife while we of mortal flesh provide useful nourishment for worms.

I went back to my bed, but sleep eluded me. It’s hard to sleep after the brain has wakened. The thought was sobering and unintendedly inspirational. “And it came to pass that the brains of the religious did awaken and they did deliver their minds from the delusions of god. . ." Meanwhile, back in Iran, the mullahs’ torturers attach electrodes to the genitals of those who deny the faith and the evangelical fascists of the US Bible Bell plan which book to ban or burn next.

Steve Coleman

Down with Prisons! (1996)

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

The common belief that prisons are full of dangerously anti-social people from whom the rest of us must be protected is a lie. It is a lie so popular that even to question it is deemed to be an act of the wildest utopianism. We are taught to regard the imprisonment of the few as some kind of guarantee of the security of the many. But the many feel far from secure. And the imprisoned are mainly harmless, or harmful only to the extent that they are treated as they are.

As a child I remember a cop coming to the school-cum-prison in which I was being educatcd-cum-indoctrinated-cum-incarcerated to tell us all about what would happen if we broke the law. He carried the authority of a man born only a little too late for a career in the Gestapo and he terrorised little children with fears of the dire consequences of their wrongdoing. Boys with stolen sweets in their sticky pockets almost wet themselves. The cop painted images of dark dungeons presided over by men with the tolerance of Old Testament gods. We all agreed that this was no place to end up in. Next time our class went shoplifting the look-out arrangements were especially vigilant.

Years of being conditioned to fear the awfulness of prison hardships and indignities has done much to strengthen the unhealthy respect for property which so pervades the working class. Most people are afraid to take any of what they themselves produce, not because they believe it really should belong to the property-owning minority (the real thieves) but because they dare not break the thieves’ laws. They are scared. The prospect of prison is supposed to make us scared.

As a means of teaching people to respect private property prisons are remarkably unsuccessful. Most inmates come out with more knowledge about how to get away with breaking the law than they had when they entered. There is no evidence at all that prisons do anything very much except scare people who are not in them and brutalise those who are. The tragedy is that most of those in there have been quite well enough brutalised by the deprivations and degradation of being propertyless in a property society without needing a prison regime to roughen their edges.

The vast majority of the prison population is locked away fro one reason: they have violated the sanctity of property—taken what does not belong to them. Why have they done this? Aside from the odd cases (not infrequently fictitious) of millionaires’ wives roaming around department stores and stealing for attention, the main reason for stealing, whether from shops or cars or houses or workplaces is lack of money and lack of the hope of making a mark in society without gaining things which cost more than can be paid for. Stealing is a consequence of poverty and of powerlessness. Take away these factors and who need steal? (Take away money and property and who could steal?)

Millions of prisoners are incarcerated across the world simply for disagreeing with the government. From the tortured wretches in the hell-holes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (apparent international enemies, but all at one when it comes to the Dictatorship of Property) to those in Britain who refused to become conscripted killers in time of war (the “crime” which sent so many socialists to prison) or pay their poll tax, what are these but prisoners of conscience? It doesn’t pay to stand by your principles under capitalism. In China there are approximately ten million political prisoners locked away in camps. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the trade boycott.

And yes, there are the few—a small minority even within the minority of the prison population—who are so damaged, so ruined by their upbringing and circumstances, and so driven to brutality that they have murdered, raped and committed unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity. Is the humane response to brutalise them further by locking them in cells and punishing them for what society has made them? It has become a commonplace of mean-minded conservative sneering to deride those of us who counsel compassion and understanding for those whose deeds the tabloid press choose to call evil. (Their evil-spotting becomes remarkably myopic when it comes to nuclear buttons and bombs dropped from legalised terrorists in the name of international order.) well, call me a “do-gooder” (which is preferable to being a do-badder) or a softy, but the truth is that only spite can justify taking an inadequate person and making them less adequate by throwing them into the hopeless despair of imprisonment. These places are an affront to a society which declares itself with haughty arrogance to be civilised. They are monuments to the barbarity of a system which cannot afford compassion and support for the damaged and so buries itself in the futile and spiteful torments of punishment.

Steve Coleman

Nothing to lose but our keys (1996)

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

This is a world of locked doors. Never in the history of humanity have so many people needed so many keys to achieve so little.

Sitting in a bottom-of-the-market cafe, one leg of the wooden chair shorter than the others so that it was compulsory to rock as one searched through the grease for the cheap fodder, a fellow comes in with a bunch of keys which were almost as big as himself. He was not the biggest of men; perhaps he was picked on when he was at school. But did he have keys! He threw them on to the rickety table as he ordered his bacon sandwich and coke—it sagged under the weight. What the hell did such a little man need so many keys for? What prizes of the universe were waiting to be unlocked by him? An estate agent, perhaps? No, not smooth enough. A prison screw? Too small, no permanently clenched fist. A jeweller, maybe? Not with a suit like that. Not in a cafe like that. There is a theory (just invented) that the weight of the keys people carry around with them is in directly inverse proportion to their significance in the world. Perhaps he just had keys cut, any old keys, to show the tall people that he had lots of things that they could never get into.

Locking things up is the symbol of a society obsessed by exclusion rather than freedom. From the “mine” of useful possession soon arises the “keep out” of property consciousness. So, “This is my house and I planted the flowers myself" quickly degenerates into “This will never be your house or garden, so watch out for the electrified fence, the screeching alarm bells, the barking killer-dogs and the locks attached to anything worth having, and many things which aren’t.” If they could lock up their flowers at night they would.

Even the most natural urges are inhibited by locks with coin slots in them. It was years ago, on a long road from London to the cold and dreary English seaside, that the need for a crap became imperative. In the middle of a small country town a sign appeared (like a miracle, only it had been put up by council workers) pointing out that the Olde Village Church and Gift Shoppe was hither and the public toilets were thither. Old churches have now become places for flogging dodgy souvenirs to transient tourists. It will do them more good than praying, I pondered. But contemplation was not the order of the day. I was a man led by his bowels. A sharp ache directed me to the “public convenience”, only to discover that it was far from convenient for the penniless public. I stood with five-pound note in hand trying to squeeze it into the penny slot which unlocked the lock, as I tried simultaneously to squeeze my body into contraction mode. The place stunk of stale urine: capitalism’s convenience store for the public. I tried to offer a passing user five pounds if he could open the door for me, but the misunderstanding which ensued was best ended soon. Eventually, I submitted to human nature in a clearing in the New Forest.

It is hard to avoid the effects of locks, guards and alarms. The streets groan under the screams of car alarms, the yuppies’ mating call, which are ever-present and always ignored. If you want a supermarket trolley it must be unlocked. Public libraries, once the rare embodiment of free access in a world of property, are now locked for much the week (cuts) and special collections are locked away (fear of thieves). Security from theft is the great justification of locks. If you don’t lock it up (tie it down, chain it up, keep it secure) thieves will get at it. But what are thieves? People who take what is locked up. Property is defined by its inaccessibility. Exclusion from, not freedom to, is the philosophy of property. Take what is locked up and you will be locked up. The man was right about having nothing to lose but our chains.

The power of class is manifested by locks. If you own the factory, offices or shipyard the keys are yours. Go in when you like. As a worker in these places you are locked out every night. Even if you want to work, the doors will only be unlocked if they choose to employ you. When profits are down and there’s nothing left to milk you for they lock you out. The lock-out: capitalism’s way of telling you who owns the world. And even when they sell you the borrowed freedom to have your own key and “own” your home, watch the locksmiths move in the moment the debt arrears are more than the permitted limit and they decide to remind you who really owns a mortgaged property.

And yet, locked as we are into this prison-like property madness, the cell door is open. There are more of us than the guards, and with the slightest collective shove the locks would be shattered. A world without keys could be ours. “Utopia” sneers the hopeless man with the shrunken, locked-up mind.

Steve Coleman

Miracle in Mornington Crescent (1996)

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

The number 24 bus is not known in the records of classical legend as the site of miracles. Nobody on the number 24 bus route has ever turned water into wine (although later at night cans of4X have been seen to turn to urine) and rarely have moving statues been seen occupying the seats reserved for the elderly and pregnant women. No, it was certainly no miracle which happened last Monday morning; teams of Vatican investigators will not be treading their way from Rome to Mornington Crescent (for it was there that it happened) to record the mysterious happening. There are no miracles; it was no miracle. It was simply a slightly extraordinary event. When I say extraordinary I am not alluding to those strange and semi-credible happenings so frequently found within the dull, unwanted pages of Readers Digest (publisher: the CIA). There you will find stories of women who didn’t know they were pregnant and then one day, while enjoying a casual game of beach volleyball, gave birth to triplets, each of a different ethnic background. Or men who fell from fifty-storey skyscrapers on to a passing bus in which was sitting their long-lost twin. Extraordinary! Incredible is the concept which springs to mind. Presumably the CIA use Readers Digest as a sort of testing ground for human gullibility. The theory must be that if they believe it in the Readers Digest, why not try it out on the suckers in the rigged Latin American election? So let’s be clear about this: we are talking neither of miracles nor stories of the strange and mysterious. All that happened on the 24 bus last Monday was a mildly noteworthy set of circumstances.

I had just returned from a weekend speaking trip to Glasgow. The exhaustion of overnight travel and the joyful memory of a fraternal visit fought in my mind as I made my weary way to the job. Robotically, from shower to letterbox, right shoe on and then left shoe, up the street to the bus stop, the drill was performed and the miserable queue of job-seekers who had sought, found and were fed up was waiting as usual. The bus came. And then . . . 

It began when a woman in the bus queue, carrying a particularly bulky suitcase, stooped to lift it only to find herself pounced upon by two men who insisted upon helping her carry it on. That was kind. Then came a boy who discovered that he was ten pence short on the fare. The woman with the case took out ten pence and paid it. “I’ll pay you back, missus,’’ said the boy. “Pay me when you win the lottery, love,” she replied. The boy’s fumbling for his coin had made the bus a few seconds late and, as it moved off, along ran a man clearly anxious to get on. The driver stopped, opened the doors and smiled at the latecomer. “That was decent of you,” said the man. “You’re more than welcome, mate,’’ said the driver. “I hope you’d do the same for me.” It was at that point that the blind man asked the best stop to get off for University College Hospital. A debate occurred. Passengers vied with one another to be more helpful. “Look,” said the girl in a leather jacket who had recently been reading the Sun, “don’t you worry about the best stop; I work only a few streets from there and it won’t take me five minutes to walk you to exactly where you want to go.” The passengers approved. The woman with the suitcase passed around wine gums. We only took as many as we needed. (I took none.) A couple of Dutch tourists got on and discovered they were going the wrong way for Camden market. But an old man suggested another market where things were cheaper and you could get musical Christmas cards at half price. Whatever musical Christmas cards are, the Dutch couple seemed happy and were soon sharing in the wine gums. The boy offered to show them round his school (they were teachers it turned out) and the blind man told a story of how he had once taken the day off school to go to a Beatles concert. At which point the bus driver asked if anyone would mind if he played an old Beatles tape which his friend had made for him. We all assented. Quite a few sang. It felt like a trip to the seaside. It felt like every day and every journey and every destination should be like this, or, at least, less like it usually is. It felt as if we were a convoy of travelling pups having a lick at our own humanity. It tasted good.

So no miracle occurred. It was probably hardly worthy of note. But it happened and probably it happens much more often than is recorded. People were decent. For the few minutes of that journey on that bus we all overcame the tremendous temptations of this system to push and shove and trample upon one another and act inhumanly, all of which happens daily in the name of “healthy competition”. And then that competitive indecency is paraded before us in the name of “human nature”, as if we are not pups but rotweilers. And so humans are taught to hate themselves—to put muzzles upon themselves lest they bite. But in truth we are happier co-operating than biting or fighting. It was co-operation which allowed the species to survive, after all. And alienated as the profit system makes us from the reality of our species, there are moments which are not miracles—moments when mothers feed their babies and children play in the park and the elderly are crossed over busy roads and one person simply smiles at another without a sinister motive—when humanity triumphs over capitalism. These are not miracles or incredible events. They are merely spectres of what could be if we were to live as we might live.

Steve Coleman

Mustn't Grumble (1996)

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

“Watcha Ted. Howya doin’?" 

“Not so bad. Can’t complain.”

To which the present writer’s response is “Why not?” if you can’t complain, what the hell are you supposed to do in the face of the insecurities, indignities and discomforts of life as a wage slave? We are taught to applaud the stoical resilience of retired workers who are old, sick, impoverished and treated like dirt, but refuse to mope around feeling sorry for themselves. “Old Charlie had a lousy life, but one thing you can say about him, he always had a smile on his face.” What was Charlie, some kind of a desensitised imbecile who was scared of expressing the misery of the social reality which was crushing him? Why put up in silence with a bad lot? “How’s life with you?”, they ask, waiting for an inaudible half-grin, half-sigh—the greeting of the complacently hopeless slave. “How am I? I’ll tell you how I am . . .  and I’ll tell you how you are while I’m at it.”

Such thinking was prompted by a recent viewing of one of those old black-and-white films about British POWs in the Second World War who, stuck for years in camps and bullied by Nazi thugs, always kept their peckers up and whistled “There’ll Always Be An England” every time their rations were cut. This drab display of abject tolerance for oppression, combined with deference for the officers (whose main role was to send the men to dig holes which invariably led nowhere) and endless tommy grit, sums up a particular strain of working-class acquiescence which is nauseating to view and worse still to live amongst.

In The Captive Heart Gordon Jackson is blinded in the course of doing his bit for King and Country. Asked how he was by an officer he responds with the slave’s motto, “Mustn’t grumble.” Has John Major considered adopting this as his slogan for the next election? “Stuck in a slum with no job . . . insufficient text books to go round the class you’re teaching . . . waiting in casualty for three hours for admission to a hospital ward which they can’t afford to keep open . . . unemployed and been left by your wife and kids . . . well, what we say is MUSTN’T GRUMBLE!”

Give me Basil Fawlty as against George Dixon any day. True enough, Fawlty was trapped in a world of endlessly repeated frustrations and impotent bitterness but, for all his cheerless disdain for his small-business, culturally pointless life as a hotel landlord, at least he knew there was a problem. Old George Dixon whistled while he worked, worked till he dropped and never broke the master’s rules. He was poor but he was happy—it was the happiness of the willing slave: a role model for the millions who viewed his ungrumbling antics.

There is much to be said for happiness (not least that it feels a lot better than sadness), but perhaps the price of becoming free to control our lives is to recognise just how unfree to be happy the vast majority of us actually are—and always will be under this lousy profit system. We are surrounded by endless commodities, the range of which grows by the day, offering us freedom from stress, anxiety and sorrow. The phone-in shrinks offer callers and listeners huge promises of release from misery. Everyone is urged to “talk about it” whether it’s the news that your daughter has been forced to go on the game or you’ve just lost your executive job or you woke up this morning realising that life in the rat race is for rats and not humans. Talk long enough, they imply, and you will learn to smile in the face of adversity. Mustn’t grumble, after all.

Simply grumbling is a waste of time. It’s like endlessly scratching an itch without searching for its cause. But it is one step up from refusing to grumble—fearing to scratch the itch in case it offends anyone. The next step is to grumble with a view to end grumbling, and the one after that is to grumble collectively (rhythmic grumbling; could this not become a future Olympic sport?).

All is far from lost. Last week a Gas Board worker came to fit a radiator. The following exchange took place:

 "Morning. Come to fit the radiator? " “You seen the bloody snow out there? You can bet Cedric sodding Brown doesn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn to drive across town in the snow fitting radiators. All that bastard knows how to do is make fat profits and sack people.”
"You’re right there. That's what this system's all about. ”“System? I call it a bloody racket, not a system.”
"Yet people put up with it.”“They shouldn’t. They should complain.”
"We should complain. And we need to blow what it is we’re up against.’’
“Well, there’s more of us than them. We should overthrow it, never mind complaining.”

Now, there’s an encouraging thought. Mustn’t grumble—unless, of course you’re a thieving parasite who thinks you’ll forever own the earth. In which case large amounts of grumbling followed by much trembling would seem to be your historic fate.

Steve Coleman