Proper Gander: Grander designs (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Kevin McCloud’s Listed Britain (Channel 4) is a tour round the country’s architectural heritage, particularly buildings which have been awarded ‘listed’ status. These are those which, because of their history, rarity or style, are deemed worth protecting. A listed building may not be demolished or altered without permission from its local planning authority, and renovations are expected to be carried out using sympathetic materials and techniques. Classifications differ across the UK: In England and Wales, ‘Grade 1’ confers the most protection, with ‘Grade A’ as the equivalent in Northern Ireland and ‘Category A’ in Scotland. The organisations which oversee this are various extensions of the state; in England and Scotland they are ‘executive non-departmental public bodies’.

Without safeguarding our most significant buildings, the country would become ‘a retail park with aspirations’, according to presenter Kevin McCloud. Old structures ‘speak through the generations’, being physical reminders of the past. When we see their brickwork, carvings or fixtures and fittings, we can imagine the people who made them and the circumstances in which they lived. However, buildings get built because of the prerogatives of landowners and business owners rather than in the interests of those who construct them. The series’ second episode covers structures which were intended to express the elite’s position in society: ‘the status symbols built to impress, dazzle and dominate’, as McCloud puts it. Chatsworth House and gardens in Derbyshire were intentionally designed ‘to communicate power’. Inside the main house, the most ostentatious display of wealth is the Painted Hall, which boasts an overwhelming range of murals above a cantilevered staircase, summed up by McCloud as ‘gargantuan’. The estate was and is owned by the aristocratic Cavendish family, whose successive Dukes of Devonshire prompted expansions during the 18th century, including demolishing part of a nearby village which apparently spoilt the view.

The building which most obviously embodies political power is the Palace of Westminster in London, completed in 1876 in the ‘Gothic Revival’ style. So, fittingly, Parliament is housed in an imposing, regimented relic of an outdated era. Also appropriate is that the structure has long been deteriorating and attempts to patch it up are too costly to be viable. McCloud wonders if the £35-40 billion needed to renovate the palace is worth it, as the same amount would fund the salaries of every NHS nurse for over two years. He asks ‘do you want to see democracy crumble? Do you want to see all vestiges of it disappear, turn to a pile of dust, or do you want to repair it, keep it going?’ ‘We as a nation have to collectively decide’ he adds, although the crumbling parliamentary democracy he describes doesn’t really enable us to ‘collectively decide’ how the state functions.

As illustrated by the Palace of Westminster, listed status doesn’t prevent a building from sliding into decline, and less prominent or unused sites are more vulnerable. The money system holds back buildings of historical and aesthetic importance being adequately maintained because the required skilled workers, specialist techniques and specific materials tend to be prohibitively expensive. Places attract income from visitors if there’s a lot to see, but there isn’t in 14th century Baguley Hall in Manchester, for example. ‘Financial viability and money is always the problem’ says heritage expert Catherine Dewar about the struggles with its upkeep.

Listed status isn’t only granted to buildings well over a hundred years old. Cathedrals in Coventry and Liverpool from the mid-20th century have Grade 1 classification, as does another place of worship. Being a hub for the insurance market, the Lloyds building in London is like a cathedral to commerce, where its congregation of underwriters and brokers put their faith in the economy. Completed at the height of yuppiedom in 1986, with its pipes, lifts and facilities on the outside to leave more space in the middle for business, the Lloyds building looks like it’s ‘made by machines’, and made for the machinery of capitalism.

Not all listed buildings reflect the power of the elite: a hidden grotto lined with seashells and London Zoo’s Modernist penguin enclosure were more personal passion-projects. The programme is also keen to emphasise the ‘positive energy’ of community groups, campaigners and craftspeople working to preserve heritage architecture.

A framework for listing buildings could exist in a socialist society, although the context would be different to that of today. The notion of a cherished building under threat of destruction sits more in capitalism than socialism, as the impetus for destruction is invariably money-driven. Any scheme for listing buildings in a socialist society would be shaped by how they are ‘owned’. The understanding and application of who owns buildings would be unlike that in capitalism, where possession is held by individuals or organisations, and ‘legitimised’ by legislation and money.

The situation with Mavisbank House in Midlothian, Scotland, highlights some of the quirks of ownership in our current society. Constructed in the 1720s as the first villa in the Palladian style in Scotland, by the late 20th century the building was a ruin. The Lothian Preservation Trust’s aims of restoration were complicated by Mavisbank’s ownership not being clear. Its last documented owner claimed he sold it to three probably fictitious people, and he also sold off its access roads so its actual owner may not legally be able to get to it.

In a socialist society, buildings and their environment would be the responsibility of the community as a whole. So, there would be no separation between ownership and who uses buildings, avoiding one of the restrictions of the capitalist system. As a socialist society wouldn’t ration its resources with money, another barrier to maintaining buildings wouldn’t apply. Any rules about protecting significant buildings would be decided democratically and managed by whatever method is most accountable and fair. There would still be disputes over whether or not a particular construction should be retained, but their resolution would be more straightforward and transparent, compared with the financial constraints, hierarchies and bureaucracy of capitalism.

Mike Foster

The Passing Show: Agitators (1962)

The Passing Show Column from the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Agitators

It has been an accepted ruling-class myth for a long time now that strikes are caused by people called agitators. Whenever industrial trouble breaks out, the management’s bloodhounds set out to track down “the agitators”, the sinister background figures who are at the bottom of it all. The papers try to convince us that the workers concerned are perfectly happy with whatever wages and conditions the management sees fit to grant them, and that they would work away at their benches making ever greater profits for their masters without a single complaint — were it not for “the agitators". This must be one of the least convincing theories ever produced, even by a ruling class. It received another severe blow recently, at Ford’s Dagenham works. Here, as at many other factories, these powerful agitators who bring the men out on strike when they don’t really want to stop work are usually identified as the shop stewards. At the end of May the Ford Motor Company rejected outright a pay claim, not offering even sixpence a week more. So the shop stewards, ”the agitators”, called a one-day token strike in protest. But the men simply turned down this proposal, and continued work.

With the band in front

This underlined still further the obvious fact that workers come out on strike when they want to come out on strike, and not merely at the behest of agitators. No agitator in the world could make men strike if they didn't want to. Shop stewards, men who serve on strike committees, and so on, simply march with the band in front. Children love to run to the head of processions, and march in front of them, to pretend that they are the leaders. But if the band turns off down a side street, the “leader” has to go with it or be left marching on his own, a general without an army. And there is no sadder sight than that.

All day and every day

We are often treated in the press to learned articles about “the real reasons” for the trouble at any industrial plant where there have been a number of stoppages. But there is no need to go beyond the fact that the workers are exploited, plus the methods adopted by managements to screw out ever more surplus value. It is now agreed by almost everybody that the tasks which the workers have to do to stay alive are boring, monotonous, repetitive, soul-destroying, and offer no opportunity whatever for them to satisfy their basic human creative instincts, their need to do a job in which they can take a pride. The correspondent of the Observer (3-6-62) quoted one of the men at Dagenham:

The monotony of the work is another thing that gets you down. You take the Anglia handbrake. Putting it in involves turning four screws, 30 handbrakes an hour, all day and every day.

This particular job consists of putting in 120 screws every hour in every working day throughout the foreseeable future. The worker has to do every two minutes exactly what he did in the last two minutes. These newspaper articles, surely, are tackling the problem from the wrong angle. What causes astonishment to the impartial observer is not that there should be so much trouble at Ford’s, but that there should be so little elsewhere.

Salvation of souls

There is so little beauty in the lives of people living under capitalism, and such a large proportion of the few beautiful buildings remaining to us from earlier ages is destroyed every time we have a war, that one would think what we have is worth preserving. But some authorities in the Church of England believe otherwise, Not long ago the President of the Society of Antiquaries of London was protesting that the Chancellor of the Diocese of Ely had decided to demolish three ancient parish churches — Denton, built largely in the seventeenth century, and Woolley and Islington (Norfolk) which are mediaeval. In reply to this protest, a reverend gentleman from Worcester said that the purpose of the Church “is the salvation of souls and not the provision and upkeep of museums and ancient monuments.”

It is as if the worshippers of Athena Parthenos decided to knock down the Parthenon which was built as a temple for Athena, on the grounds that nobody now wants to pray to Athena in it—which of course nobody does. The fact that a particular superstition was once practised in a particular building doesn't make it any the less beautiful, but obviously the diocese of Ely sets more store upon the preservation of superstition than of beauty.

Cloisters

A similar instance of the benefits of private ownership is the case of William Randolph Hearst and the Spanish cloisters. Hearst, it appears, never even saw the cloisters, which dated from the twelfth century; but he heard that the monks in a remote part of Spain were prepared to sell their cloisters, so he sent along one of his employees to buy them. He then had to assuage the anger of the local villagers (real or pretended) at the removal of this relic by further large payments to them. Next he hired workmen to dismantle the cloisters stone by stone, had a sawmill built to make the cases to pack the stones in, and then had an extra twenty-one miles of railway constructed to transport the stones when they had been packed. They were taken all the way to Hearst’s gigantic fake castle at San Simeon in the United States, and there stored in enormous warehouses along with other art treasures which Hearst had bought from every corner of the world. This vast collection, not even unpacked, was still there when Hearst died years later.

Amber fountains

The next actor in this tragic farce is George Huntingdon Hartford II, an American multi-millionaire who has bought Hog Island near Nassau in the Bahamas, re-christened it Paradise Island, and is now at a cost of twenty-five million dollars turning it into a fantastically luxurious kind of Super-Cinerama playground for other multi-millionaires. A double room at the Ocean Club is said 'continued bottom left to cost up to £50 a day. It is not yet finished. Above the Ocean Club a “gently rising succession of terraces" is to be constructed, and at the summit, above the illuminated swimming pool, the purple creepers and the amber fountains, there will be erected, and floodlit, William Randolph Hearst’s twelfth-century Spanish cloisters. Huntingdon Hartford bought it. complete with packing-cases, from Hearst’s estate. But there is one small fly in the ointment. The plans for the cloister cannot now be found, and no-one knows how the stones are supposed to go together.

It seems that everything that capitalism touches, it defiles.

Alwyn Edgar

Exhibition Review: Modern Times (2006)

Exhibition Review from the June 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard 

‘Modernism 1914-1939: Designing a New World’, Victoria & Albert Museum, London, until 23rd July, £9 adults.

This is an engaging, varied and well structured exhibition put together by the V & A, focusing on ‘modernist’ approaches to architecture, art and the application of science between the wars. The exhibits, ranging from paintings and posters, through to recreated designs and excerpts from film shows like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Chaplin’s Modern Times, are suitably and accurately described throughout, generally being set in an appropriate theoretical context.

Although modernism was a varied and dynamic movement, its central themes were an important part of early twentieth century life. In particular, the search for human improvement (if not perfectibility) through the application of the scientific method, rationalist approaches to problem solving and the consideration for human progress that permeated art and architecture, were important milestones in the history of capitalism. With modernism, they probably reached their fullest expression so far.

Some sections examine the link between modernism and concepts of social and political utopia, particularly those emanating from the workers’ movement, and others invite consideration of how authoritarian regimes in Russia, Germany and Italy either enthusiastically used – or reticently accommodated themselves to – modernist precepts.

The work of modernist artists such as Mondrian and architects such as Le Corbusier are stunning and prominently featured, along with subsequent applications of their work. Indeed, it is evident (and telling) just how often the design innovations and imaginative approaches of such individuals were limited or distorted by a social and economic system with its own imperatives and strictures, from giant ‘social housing’ projects to the commercialisation of art.

Not everything that came out of modernism was commendable by any means – the ‘Taylorism’ of the modernist factory production line being a particularly mixed blessing. But it is interesting to imagine how a socialist society – which could have been far more closely aligned to the general modernist approach – might have utilised and applied modernist ideas and techniques for the benefit of humanity. In fact, it is difficult for a socialist to take a tour of the exhibition without thinking this at almost every turn.

By the early twentieth century, the capitalist system had developed a worldwide division of labour and sufficient productive capacity for a socialist society built on abundance to be viable as a possible alternative to it. In this sense, capitalism had become politically obsolete. But at a social and technological level, modernism in this period represented both the struggle to transcend and improve capitalism at the same time, to ensure that forward-thinking, scientific and structured methods were applied for the improvement of society. In the absence of socialist revolution, this took the form (even if by default) of trying to renew or perfect commodity society for the perceived needs of humanity.

In many respects, this represented the apogee of conscious, coherent planning and scientific application within capitalism. Thereafter, it influenced post-war reconstruction before being buried by the eclecticism, anti-rationalism and general scepticism towards grand projects for human advancement typified by the anti-scientific backlash of ‘postmodernism’.

Today, postmodernism represents the incoherence and chaos of a capitalist society that has spurned systematic attempts at social improvement, being a product of the commodification and isolation of everyday life, with the attendant breakdown of social relationships and coherence this has involved.

For all its faults, modernism represented a hope for a brighter future through the search for collective human improvement by scientific, rationalist methods and planning. In rejecting this, postmodernism has since confirmed capitalism’s inability to progress in a sustained and coherent manner, and is symbolic of its general descent into impotent micro-politics, disorder and the intellectual void.

Dave Perrin

Pathfinders: Round in circles (2011)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Round in circles

Ever since a gaggle of mushroom-intoxicated neolithics first got the idea of piling a big flat stone on top of two uprights people have been having creative ideas about the living spaces of the future. Over the length of social history living spaces have evolved, from medieval all-purpose pens containing bed, hearth, toilet, animals, humans, rats and plague, to the Victorian taxonomic mania for cataloguing and categorising, putting every human function from snoring to shitting to snooker in its own walled chamber. Now things are changing again as central heating and double glazing, as well as a pressure of space and cost, drive a return to more open-plan knock-throughs and multipurpose domestic environments (‘The Story of Our Rooms’, BBC Online, 12 April).

With the high priority now being placed on low-carbon living and low-impact building methods and materials, science is increasingly being designed into planning models. As old structures age and have to be replaced anyway, what if – say the scientists – whole cities could be redesigned to factor in all the known elements necessary to make them virtually self-sustainable?

If one were really to rebuild whole cities from scratch, imagine the energy savings. A city like Los Angeles, a chaotic urban mega-sprawl, is a huge energy sink which forces most people to drive miles to their nearest supermarket, and even more miles to work. Rational planning might have optimised all utilities and transport networks into the very crown joules of ergonomic design. And big cities have their own form of economy of scale, with smaller environmental footprints and higher standard of living per capita than small ones. If one were to pull them down and start again, one could build modular urban centres that were carbon-efficient, pedestrian-friendly, accessible and navigable.

Some planners promote designs for just this (New Scientist, 26 March). Zeitgeist’s Venus Project is another, 3D rendered attempt. The trouble is, even on the page these symmetrical designs look soul-destroying, like laboratory mazes for lobotomised rats. It’s no wonder many Zeitgeist supporters are reportedly in two minds about the idea of self-sufficient circular cities. Somewhere in the debate about efficiency the human element gets left out. What is beautiful about old cities is their riotous and labyrinthine irregularity, forced on them by the constraints of city walls and overbuilding, as well as their elaborate and artistic but ‘inefficient’ construction. The more planned a cityscape is, the more dreary it tends to look and the worse it is to live in. Well-meaning but paternalistic experiments in 1950s urban planning gave rise in the UK to the horrors of high-rises and disaffected concrete council estates, with all their attendant social problems, as Lynsey Hanley documents in her entertaining book Estates: An Intimate History (Granta, 2007).

Could planners ever plan efficiency to look like Venice or Rouen or York? Does the future always have to look like a plastic Thunderbirds set? Nowadays there is the potential of wiki-citizenry to offer collective input so as to avoid planners imposing antiseptic structures on our aesthetic sensibilities. But this just might mean a committee-designed camel instead of a geek-planned horse. Sometimes there is something human and endearing about organic inefficiency. In socialism there will no doubt be plenty of people calling for large-scale ‘social engineering’ projects. Let this be the first salvo fired in opposition to such notions.

A Poor Motivator

Interestingly, given all the hoo-ha about ‘obscene’ bankers’ bonuses, not many ever question the apparently self-evident truism that money is a great motivator. Socialists have always gone against the commonly received wisdom by claiming that, conversely, money is actually a poor motivator and in many cases no motivator at all. As evidence we cite the voluntary sector, so large that it is known as the ‘third sector’ of the economy, but then we might be biased given that we propose a social system composed entirely of volunteers. Support however comes from studies which suggest that not only are external motivators like money decoupled from internal ones like interest, commitment or curiosity, they may indeed be inversely related, so that an excess of one can lead to a deficiency in the other (New Scientist, 9 April). It is perhaps surprising and counter-intuitive to learn that financial rewards actually reduce the incentive to work hard, but “the facts are absolutely clear”, says one long-time researcher. “In virtually all circumstances in which people are doing things in order to get rewards, extrinsic tangible rewards undermine intrinsic motivation”. Next time you hear some know-nothing blather on about how money drives progress, you might point out that the science says otherwise. People are not spurred on by money, they are simply whipped on by fear of poverty.

Capitalist Priorities 

‘Owing to unfavourable economic conditions the search for the ultimate explanation of life, the universe and everything has been suspended.’ Perhaps this is pitching it a bit strong, but with the Large Hadron Collider due to close for a year for extensive repairs you would have thought that this was precisely not the time to be shutting down its nearest and dearest rival, the Fermilab Tevatron. The Tevatron, named because it can accelerate protons up to energies approaching a trillion electron volts or 1 TeV, is supposedly obsolete now because the LHC can manage energies up to 7 TeV. Of course that’s in theory. In reality the LHC has only once reached half this energy, has already broken down twice and now is due for another extended pit-stop. Most notably, of course, it hasn’t found anything, unlike the Tevatron which last month announced the discovery, to within 3 orders of certainty, of a new particle that may be evidence of a ‘fifth force’ of nature (‘Tevatron accelerator yields hints of new particle’, BBC Online, 7 April). Meanwhile the famous Higgs, as well as mythical dark matter ‘neutralinos’ could be lurking out there in any eV range, so even with two colliders operating it would be like two explorerers searching for penguins, one in the northern hemisphere and one in the south. Keeping the Tevatron going would cost a measly $35m – peanuts by their standards – and there’s no engineering problem, but the beancounters have given it the thumbs down. Any socialist comment on capitalist priorities at this point would be as redundant as a Chicago physicist.

Paddy Shannon

Pathfinders: Stories from the city (2020)

The Pathfinders Column from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

People ask a lot of questions about socialism in practice, some we can answer, some we can’t. But nobody ever asks what the architecture would look like.

It’s not a pressing social issue, after all, like food or disease prevention. In fact it’s rarely discussed at all, except to complain about some new local monstrosity. When you think about it though, there’s something a little strange about this. People who live in rural areas often have a great familiarity with their landscape and its features, right down to individual tree and plant species. They know the language and vocabulary of their environment, and this knowledge undoubtedly adds to their appreciation of it.

The majority of the world lives in cities, and the built environment has its own language and vocabulary, that of architecture, but most of us don’t know much about it. We know ‘door’, ‘wall’ and ‘roof’ but not ‘quoin’, ‘corbel’ or ‘voussoir’. We rush past buildings every day without really noticing them. We might acknowledge that some grand buildings are beautiful, but we can’t really understand or appreciate what’s interesting about them because we don’t have the words.

Architecture is applied art on a giant scale, and it’s immersive, because you live in it. Some of the art is good, some terrible. It’s also a living historical record of the past, its moods and crazes and fads. It has a function, obviously, but it likes to make statements too, sometimes grandiose political or aspirational statements, that tell us how ruling class ideas have changed over the centuries. If you know how, you can read these messages as plainly as words on a page. Learning even the rudiments of this language can be a revelation. Your own city reveals itself in a whole new light.

It’s not hard to pick up some basics. Just four category words virtually encompass the past thousand years of building in Britain. They are Gothic, Neo-classical, Vernacular and Modern.

Gothic started with the Normans and became de rigueur for churches and cathedrals, and often for colleges and legal institutions. It was all about the power of God, so it features a lot of pointed arches, lofty verticals and spires reaching heavenward like arms in supplication. The point was for commoners to gaze upward with their jaws on the floor, mutter a reverential What the Fuck? and vow never, ever, to argue with the beings who could create such soaring marvels.

Neo-classical is anything that looks like it’s from Ancient Rome, such as pillars with a triangular ‘pediment’ on top, or rounded triumphal arches. Empires didn’t come more bad-ass and macho than Rome, which is why the growing empires of the Renaissance revived its styles and it finally arrived in Britain with Inigo Jones in the 17th century. Instead of piety, it was all about muscular statements of state power. You often see it on banks or theatres or museums, as well as government buildings. Not surprisingly, the Georgians and the Victorians, who had a high opinion of themselves as rulers of an emerging globally dominant power, couldn’t get enough of the neo-classical style, and neither could Mussolini later on. But changing political priorities could change tastes. When the Houses of Parliament burnt down in 1834, a discussion ensued about what to replace it with. Neo-classical was the obvious choice, however the Americans had just finished rebuilding the White House in the neo-classical style after the British had burnt it down in 1812. Relations were still somewhat frosty, so to avoid any connotation of republicanism the architect Charles Barry was tasked with producing a Gothic design, which in turn kick-started a Victorian Gothic revival.

The Victorians, incidentally, were exuberant mash-up artists who would throw caution to the winds and chuck in any feature from any style they liked without the least concern for artistic or historical integrity. The more you learn to read their architecture, the more you start to understand their mindset. They were world conquerors in matters military and scientific. Rules were for other people.

‘Modern’ architecture is a catch-all for anything post-World War 1, when looking forward started to seem better than looking back, so that revivals went out of the window and modern capitalism was anyway more interested in making money than making grandiose and costly statements. Trends did exist though, like the short-lived Futurism of the 1920s, which swiftly looked dated, and the Brutalism of the 1960s, a distinctly Orwellian statement that said unattractive things about encasing populations in hideous concrete boxes and gave architects a notoriety they’ve never really recovered from.

What’s always gone on in the background and is also hot today is the ‘vernacular’ style, which is designing buildings in local materials and in the local or regional style, so that they fit harmoniously into their surroundings instead of clashing horribly with them. In theory anyway.

When you start thinking about the socialist architecture of the future, you realise that all bets are off. First you would have to ask how people wanted to live. Would they stay in settled communities as now, or move around constantly, exploring the entire world and ‘working their passage’, in the sense of helping out with odd jobs wherever they happen to be? Would the current global urbanisation trend continue, or go into reverse, with cities becoming depopulated? There are pros and cons to this question. Would there be a need for public buildings, perhaps to house representative decision-making bodies, or is this an obsolete democratic methodology when everything can be done directly and online? What weight would be given to aesthetic statements, if it meant more expenditure of work and resources? Perhaps socialist architecture would be plain and functional as people found pleasure in things other than the built environment, or perhaps it would surpass the exuberance of the Victorians, or even the Gothic period, with no effort spared in reflecting the magnificence of a new and free social era. Even the design of the simple domestic dwelling is open to question. The practice of having separate rooms for specific purposes only really started with the Victorians. Would people still want to live private and secluded lives in their little walled space, or would sharing of lives and living space become the new normal? There might be a revival of something like the ancient Roman model, where people use public baths and eat out, and only go home to sleep. Perhaps even the concept of ‘home’, in the sense of a permanent personal abode, could become obsolete.

All of these questions will certainly shape the architecture of the future. And let’s not forget emerging technologies like translucent wood for windows, hydro-ceramics for zero-energy air conditioning, light-generating sulphur concrete and self-repairing concrete, high-insulation bricks, nano-alloys, phase-changing materials, gels, carbon-fibre, aluminium foam mouldings, clear solar panels and much more. In the end, nobody can really answer the question we started with, what socialist architecture would look like. Maybe the best response we can give is: what would you like?

Paddy Shannon

Prisons (2001)

Book Review from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Behind Bars: The hidden architecture of England’s prisons. Allan Brodie, Jane Croom, James O Davies.

To socialists this book is an abomination, as repugnant as “Floral Displays at Auschwitz” or “Idi Amin’s recipes for vegetarians”. But hey, you say, don’t get wound up, it’s only architecture, it’s only art. If this were so the book would be merely in bad taste. But it isn’t so. In fact it’s a thoroughly distasteful example of the reformist’s art.

To explain: the first part of the book is indeed a history of prison architecture and surprise, surprise, not all prisons look the grim Victorian monstrosities of popular imagination (although window bars and locks are recurring architectural themes). In the second section of the book, however, great pains are taken to contrast the prisons of today from those of yesteryear. The pointless labour of the treadwheel, the brutality of corporal punishment, chains and tin buckets to piss in, are all recalled. And today’s prisons? Images of children and animals, as if jail is a kind of friendly club for malefactors (Tony and his frigging budgie in HMP Grendon took the biscuit for me). But a prison is a prison for all that. A cell is nothing but a cell.

For all the 200 years of reform, prisons, like the poor, are still with us. Prison is an indictment of the capitalist system. Prison means punishment, generally punishment for the infraction of property laws. In the more exceptional cases of punishment for personal crimes, it results in the further alienation of already psychologically damaged individuals, who need treatment not punishment. Socialism means the abolition, not just of nasty jails, but of all places of punishment.

Keith Scholey

Architects on the dole (1990)

From the December 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

When people think of architects images of a be-wigged Christopher Wren come to mind. Or there is the image of a corrupt businessman like John Poulson. For tens of thousands of workers and their families it is an image of a faceless designer who throughout the fifties and sixties packed them into wind-swept concrete slums many of which are currently being blown up.

However, images aside, there is one characteristic about architects which is generally forgotten, namely, that most are members of the working class. Of course Sunday Telegraph editorials like to portray them as members of a fictional "middle class”, as do the academic textbooks written by sociologists, a sect who are to capitalism what the Schoolmen were to feudalism.

But architects are workers whether they like it or not. because they are employed by those who own and control the architectural practices. These employers buy the architect’s mental and physical abilities to design and supervise the construction of a building exactly in the same way as a contractor buys the labour power of a bricklayer, a carpenter or a ground-worker. So in terms of the production and distribution of commodities architects are just a small constituent in what Marx called the "Collective Labourer". When put to work this collective workforce creates value and, through its exploitation by the capitalist, surplus-value in the form of commodities which are then sold on the market for a profit.

As workers, architects' ability to sell their labour-power to an employer is dependent upon trade conditions. In a boom there is no problem, and workers can obtain higher wages and better working conditions since their employers do not want production disrupted thereby jeopardising profits. But in a trade depression workers are expendable because the employers, in finding that their commodities are not selling, find that it is unprofitable to exploit the workers’ labour. Some workers are lucky in these conditions and retain their job. others are laid-off or made redundant. Such is the precarious existence for workers under capitalism.

The building industry is in a depression at the moment. Irrespective of whether people need houses—being forced to live with parents or friends, or in bed-sits and hostels, or to squat or sleep rough—if developers. whose only concern is profit and capital accumulation, find that they cannot sell the commodities that their houses and flats are they curtail production. They will either invest their capital elsewhere or, if they have over-produced, they will go bankrupt through not being able to meet their creditors' demands on time.

Sacked
As a result of the present depression in the building industry many architectural practices have found work hard to come by, particularly those which were working for large house-builders and speculators in the City or Docklands. Bankrupt developers and capital moving out into sectors with higher rates of profit show that the owners of these businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to exploit their workforce. According to a recent report in the Architect's Journal (September 1990):

  The swiftness and severity of downturn in workload has alarmed many. In post-boom London and the South-East some practices are facing oblivion.

The report also cites a Department of Environment figure which claims:

  an 18 per cent fall in construction orders during the second quarter compared to 1989—the most dramatic decline for a quarter of a century.

The Architect's Journal in a telephone poll of 78 architectural practices found that employers had laid-off 133 architects in the last six months. During the next six months it believed that "another 55 redundancies are expected" in these offices. Over at the Royal Institute of British Architects, a business club which represents the class interests of those who own and control architectural practices. Tim Pritchard of the RIBA Appointment Bureau exclaimed:

  Some practices simply have no one left to sack. We're hearing now of practices on the ropes: they are down to the partners and the next stop will be to wind-up. Virtually every large firm is sacking: the effects are beginning to ripple North.

Bearing in mind that many architects see themselves divorced from the working class and the "operatives’’ on the building sites, it is tempting to have little sympathy for their current misfortune. Unemployment is a ruthless leveller. Now architects are having to join the ranks of the unemployed. They are in good company because Wren was sacked by his employers too. And, as they go through the humiliating and degrading experience of the Unemployment Office, they might like to reflect upon exactly what class they really belong to. Propertyless and dependent upon a wage or salary they fall fairly and squarely into the working class: the majority within a class-divided society.

With a good deal of humility, rather than aligning their interests with those of a hostile class they might also like to consider, along with the rest of our class, the urgent need for workers to take conscious political action in pursuit of their class interests to abolish capitalism and replace it with socialism.

Socialism will be a society which values design, construction and production for the pleasure these give and the use to which society can put them in meeting men's and women's needs. Architects will find this infinitely more rewarding than the way capitalism currently exploits them for its own profitable ends as disposable commodities on an unpredictable and anarchic world market.

Richard Lloyd

Architecture and Politics: The Key to the Radiant City (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Architecture is not fulfilling its mission as long as it has not provided a roof (tectum) for all that should be sheltered. In this sense it should concern itself with collective services, with the agglomerations.

Letter from Paul Otlet to Le Corbusier, 1928

No architect in this century has had more influence through his ideas, buildings, and books than Le Corbusier. So much of modern architecture shows signs of his influence that it is impossible to imagine how different most of the buildings going up around us would have looked had he not existed. In city planning some of the methods he proposed 40 years ago — such as complete separation of cars and pedestrians — have only recently taken root in the minds of a few planning authorities. His ideas on almost every aspect of architectural design — from the free facade and buildings on stilts (pilotis) to 'brute concrete’ and sculptural building form, to name but a few — are still such a potent force and subject of controversy today that it may seem surprising that architects play down his political views (which he expressed no less strongly than his views on design) and even appear to ignore them.

But this is not really so surprising. To most architects and city planners politics is an embarrassment, and although every building programme is at the mercy of political and economic forces they consider these to be outside their professional scope altogether. Le Corbusier was notorious for his unique ‘arrogance’ and ‘outspokenness’. And although his political views were unsystematic, it is very encouraging to find this unique man starting out from the need to provide all his fellow-men with a decent environment and from there working out a programme similar in many respects to Socialism.

He was born in Switzerland in 1887. In 1933 his book The Radiant City (one of many) was published in France. (In a republished edition in 1964, the year before his death, he endorses everything he says in it.) The Radiant City is designed for leisure, sun, greenery, and open sky; large expanses of parkland separate rows of apartments; the playing-fields are right outside the apartments; the roofs are 60-foot-wide sun decks (beaches, in fact); the street no longer exists (except inside the buildings); homes are fully soundproofed and air-conditioned; there are nurseries, swimming-pools, and laundries minutes away, and industry in a separate zone two or three miles away (but minutes by car or bus) . . . Even though many architects disagree with various details of Le Corbusier’s scheme, it is hard to see how anyone can quarrel with the standards and quality he was aiming for. A utopia? Far from it—it was well within our technological and other resources back in 1930. Only the political structure prevented it then and prevents it now. Listen to what Le Corbusier says:

  It is recognised that industry is submerging us with products that are irrelevant to our happiness. We have been propelled by machines into a false adventure, into a misadventure: these machines that can produce ten or 20 times as much as we ourselves ought to enable us to work at least five or ten times less. Modern industry, organised according to the laws of supply has inundated us with useless consumer goods. Wandering down this primrose path, allowing one thing to lead to another, we have finally allowed ourselves to be taken over entirely by what we call free competition, which is to say a form of slavery, which means that any effort is immediately countered by an opposing effort . . . we have become merely a flock of rams, horns locked together . . . The flock’s strength is drained away, yet it is not moving . . .  we can make no progress! Free competition has been forced to invent advertising, the prospectus, the exhibition, product prizes, etc.: all those competing have to summon up all their energy to cancel out the efforts of their competitors. 

  It is indisputable that this frightful competition gives rise to the most violent emulation and effort. 

 But is it also certain that the human spirit is incapable of creative enthusiasm when faced with fruitful tasks? 

  An economy based on demand would put an end to the reign of the travelling salesman and the advertising agent, but it would necessitate a programme . . . for the production of useful consumer goods. Though not a narrow and exclusive one. The mind must always be left enough elbow room to satisfy its deepest purposes: quest for quality, supremacy, straggle and competition — but on the fertile soil of disinterest.  

   Our programme will concern itself with consumer products of a useful nature and with the redirection of industry onto the path towards its true aims; with providing work for all and guaranteeing every man his daily hours of freedom; and with providing physical sites and quarters designed to permit the man of today to enjoy this new freedom without constraint, instead of being hemmed in like a hare in an ever-dwindling square of wheat at harvest time.
(Le Corbusier's own italics etc. throughout all extracts.)

Le Corbusier also underlines the socialist case in his attacks on money —though he doesn't make it too clear whether he would get rid of it altogether or replace it with some ‘purer’ form of exchange.

  Let us measure the full and cruel meaning of our present state: for some time now, we have been working merely for money. 

  A deceptive goal. It stimulates only a few of our qualities and leaves the most precious of them inactive. Worse, it encourages the defects in human nature . . . 

  If society were to reorganise itself, to distribute the fruits of its labour in a new way, then our concern for money could diminish, and our energies, freed in this way, would find the roads opened towards goals set by higher passions.

And of his programme for a new environment he says:

  It means replacing the violent, savage, cruel and ruthless civilisation of money with another based on harmony and collaboration; one in which each member of society will feel himself a vital agent in this enterprise . . .

Le Corbusier realised that his plan for a Radiant City involved the ‘replanning’ of private property (though he did not go so far as to suggest abolishing it). In August 1932 he wrote that until then he had never found it necessary to discuss politics or economics; but through his professional life he had encountered an obstacle: unproductive property. Land which could form part of a wonderful human environment, in which the senses were no longer starved, in which freedom and privacy were possible, and in which work was cut to five hours a day and leisure used to the full, was lying waste — derelict, uncultivated, or misused.

  Today we own land, but without any obligation to work it. In fact, a law which no-one would dream of disputing gives one the right to work it or not, just as one wishes.

And the ‘denaturalisation’ of property, he adds, made impossible the kind of work from which springs collective action. The present form of land tenure is invested with private rights antagonistic to the public right. ‘But if the public right is infringed, then THE INDIVIDUAL SUFFERS.' And in the caption to an aerial view of Alsace, showing plots of farmland endlessly subdivided between heirs for generation after generation: “We live in a machine age, but machines cannot be used here.”

Capitalism forces its workers into the moulds that best suit its ends, regardless of whether these moulds cramp its workers' spirit. Le Corbusier passionately resented this. He poured scorn on football stadiums and other 'arenas’ in which the few are paid to perform while the many — whose need for active sport and whose ability to enjoy it is no less—sit and watch. He lamented the fact that most city-dwellers leave one compartment giving onto a street, (home) for another (work) and in between experience nothing but asphalt or stone under their feet, the ephemera of the daily paper or advertisements in their mini, poisoned air and smoke in their lungs, and barely a tree or a decent-sized stretch of sky, greenery, or water in sight.

But his programme had serious limitations.

Although he believed that architecture and city planning would, one day become extensions of politics, sociology, and ethics, he believed that ‘research into the correct solution for this problem (common ownership of land) is not part of the architect’s professional task.’ More food for the myth that ‘professional politicians' are essential! But in fact Le Corbusier planned to toss the problem to another profession: the law. ‘Let the lawyers find a way!' he exclaims. And:

  It must be the task of our jurists to find a way of initiating the indispensable changes in present land tenure . . .

And although he wants international standardisation for building components, an international technical language, and so on, his thinking is still in national terms. He refers constantly to “mobilisation of the country’s land” (i.e. France’s) and to a national authority. Perhaps it is this acceptance of the nation state that leads him to accept war as inevitable — he points out the great advantages of pilotis for raising buildings above clouds of poison gas, and proposes armour-plated roof-decks to resist aerial bombardment.

Nevertheless, his political awareness is amazingly advanced compared with that of most architects. This is perhaps because his mental scope exceeded theirs. After all, it is terribly difficult to work out a viable political philosophy all on one’s own. There may be millions of people (architects among them) who, on having Socialism explained to them, will say: “That’s just what I’ve believed for a long time—but I could never put it properly into words!” And we believe with Le Corbusier that, despite the scornful laughter of cynics and spokesmen for capitalism, “there is a power for enthusiasm in the human soul that can be made to. explode”.

A.M.B. 

Exhibition Review: Bauhaus (2012)

Exhibition Review from the August 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

  “To create a new guild of craftsman, without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist” – Walter Gropius

It is apt for an exhibition about the Bauhaus, the Modernist architecture and design school to be taking place at the Barbican (till 12 August), that icon of brutalist architecture.

Architect Walter Gropius, inspired by William Morris, established the Bauhaus in Weimar in Germany in 1919 where he aimed to challenge the hierarchy between fine and applied arts, by creating art for the people, fashioning functional artistic products, and creating an aesthetic to counter bourgeois furbelows. Klee wrote it was “a community to which each one of us gave what he had.” The exhibition features paintings such as Kandinsky’s ‘Small worlds’ and Feininger’s ‘expressionist’ ‘Studio window’ and ‘Cathedral’.

The working class in Berlin went on general strike in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 and armed struggle ensued. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) government (akin to the Labour Party) brought in Freikorps soldiers to crush the revolutionary uprising, and socialists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered. A year later, when threatened by the right-wing Kapp putsch, the SPD felt no shame in calling on workers to strike to save them. Gropius designed an ‘expressionist’ Monument to the March Fallen in honour of workers killed in the putsch.

The Bauhaus was part of a cultural renaissance that took place in Weimar Germany which included cinema like ‘The Cabinet of Dr Caligari’, the theatre of Brecht, paintings by Grosz, the Frankfurt School of Fromm and Marcuse, Hirschfeld’s struggle for sexual law reform, and Reich’s ‘SexPol’ clinics for the working class.

The Bauhaus exhibition features products from its workshops such as the Wagenfeld table lamp, Brandt tea services, Albers’ tables and Breuer chairs. Gropius drew up designs for the ‘total theatre’ of Brecht-producer Erwin Piscator. The workshops were ultimately making exclusive products for the affluent and not for large-scale manufacture. Gropius had not solved the dilemma that Morris had faced.

In 1928 Marxist architect Hannes Meyer was appointed Bauhaus director and moved away from aesthetics and artistic intuition towards functionality and building theory. He believed buildings should be low-cost and fulfil social needs: “the people’s needs instead of the need for luxury”. Meyer expanded the workshops on a co-operative basis to meet the requirements of industry: his aim, the “harmonious organisation of our society”, and interestingly the Bauhaus made its first profit in 1929. The photography workshop was established; Maholy-Nagy made his trippy film ‘A Light Play’; there was the Warholian Metal Party; and the Bauhaus students moved towards Marxism. Gropius had built workers houses for the Torten-Dessau estate, which Meyer extended by building balcony access apartment houses. Meyer also designed the ADGB Trade Union School in Bernau.

Meyer was sacked in 1930 because of the politics and went to Moscow as an architecture professor. Eventually he ended up in Mexico. In the 1930s he was an active participant in the discourse about suppressing the bourgeois concept in architecture.

The Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis who deemed its concept as “degenerate”.

Steve Clayton

The Last Word: Moving statues (1997)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

The Last Word column from the July 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The proposal of the boorish old drunk, Boris "the booze" Yeltsin, to remove the embalmed body of Lenin from its tomb in Red Square and give him a "decent Christian funeral" (as opposed to what would presumably be an indecent one) has set me thinking. Old Lenin has been lying in state for over seventy years: a mummified memorial to his years of unblushing lying as head of state: a veritable dictator in a fraudulently described “workers’ government".

The plan is to hold a referendum in St. Petersburg to decide what shall be done with Lenin. Has it occurred to the commerce-hungry Russian leaders that there is a market out there for Lenin relics? To be sure, they would not fetch much in St. Petersburg if forced to compete with fresh sausages, but think of the profits which could be accrued if Lenin cuttings were flogged off to sections of the dwindling world Trotskyist movement? The British SWP, which these days resembles a walk-in mausoleum for the praise of long-dead Bolsheviks, would surely pay a handsome price for a bit of prime Lenin anatomy. (Think of the jealousy it would inspire amongst the others Leninist cults: one can see now the RCP forging its very own fake Lenin testicles.) Lenin's left big toenail would be worth at least the price of Paul Foot’s salary for one month. Why not call in Camelot to ensure that the spoils are divided fairly?

Of course,Yeltsin did not invent the idea of kicking men when they’re dead. As ever, the English state was the pioneer in the field of brutality to the disinterred bodies of its enemies. For the sake of children and the nervously-inclined, we shall not describe what they did to Oliver Cromwell for having the audacity to temp as a monarch.

Historical revenge is not sweet.The sight of the crowds booing Ceaușescu, the hideous Rumanian dictator (Sir Nikolai, to you, for he was knighted by the Queen for services to British trade) was a joy to watch, but why did they have to spoil it all my executing him? It is so much pleasanter to rout ones enemies and then leave them to rot in bitterness. (Lenin’s successor, Stalin, never quite grasped this point — as Trotsky was to discover.) Only the weak need to murder and torture to assert their strength.

The problem of what to do with offensive monuments is a real one. When they pulled down the statues of Lenin all over central and eastern Europe in 1989/90 they were actively destroying the symbol of a lie which had imprisoned them. There are some statues in Britain which cry out for such justice. The vast metal-wasting edifice of the parasite, Victoria, which stands close to Buckingham Palace: the offensive statue of the gratuitous aerial murderer, Bomber Harris: the statue at the end of Camden High Street, London to the callous free-marketeer, Cobden; these and numerous others across the land will surely be candidates for the sledgehammer of the people once the streets are truly reclaimed.

The case for vandalism, though seductive, is weak. The disfigurements and destructions encouraged by the Cultural Revolution in China were a futile attempt to dislodge the minds of the millions from the past by knocking down its superstructural architecture. For this socialist (though not necessarily for all) there will be a safe place for buildings of genuine beauty in a society of equality. Why on earth deny to future socialist generations the splendours of Westminster Abbey or Christ’s College chapel in Oxford or the Hindu Temple in historical Neasden simply because they emerged out of unearthly folly? William Morris’s dream of turning parliament into a storage place for manure was a teasing fantasy, but missed the point: surely, the objective must be to get the shits out and use the place productively. Why pour more manure on to centuries of past deposits?

There may well be a role for Buckingham Palace in a sane society. The sight of the ex-Queen and her old man serving tea and sandwiches to visitors to London would cheer us all on many a rainy day.

As it is, the profit system has its own way of disposing of exclusive assets. In France there is a huge row over the sale, for £30 million, of Voltaire’s old estate at Ferney. The fear that some philistine Yank might drift in and insert a pinball machine at the place of the desk where the great man once wrote his brilliantly funny novel, Candide, has caused locals to protest in the vain sort of way that people without £30 million tend to protest. Even Buck House has been opened to the vulgar hordes. Surely it can only be time before Camelot will sell tickets for a night out with Andy—or Edward, if one is so inclined. An alternative might be to offer the Lenin mausoleum as a new home for the dwindling Windsor family and open their palace to the kids who are sleeping on the streets within a mile of it. Now, that really is a foolish idea—isn’t it?

Steve Coleman