Letter: Manipulation and Brainwashing (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

The September Socialist Standard article "Manipulation and Brainwashing" made a good point: "the people responsible for this manipulation (of the masses| are the cadres of intellectuals serving the interests of the ruling class, who reinforce its sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life are: psychologists, economists, historians, sociologists and other people in public life".

However, I think making this point in such a few words runs the risk of putting some of the people working in those fields off the Socialist Party, who would otherwise be favourably disposed towards us.

Is it easy, in many cases, to distinguish which activities of these "cadres" are serving the interests of the ruling class and which ones are beneficial to socialist arguments? For example there are psychologists (who are integrated into the system) who have demonstrated time and again that some people behave in socially harmful ways, not because they’re "born that way" or are "bad/evil", but because obstacles to socially useful development (which proved to be insurmountable) have been placed in their way by society.

Cliff Begley,

London WC1

Halo Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The negative and potentially fatal effects of belonging to a cult are well documented. There are many accounts written by those who escaped from the clutches of a cult. Within a cult subordination to another’s will can result in handing over total life control, including financial assets, essentially being a slave, to whom anything might happen, including sexual abuse, and at worst being forced into mass suicide.

History is littered with individuals who claimed some sort of ‘divine’ right or ‘divine’ spirit to coerce others into providing them with wealth and power, from Indian gurus influencing people in the music industry to American and other evangelists who offer not just ‘afterlife’ but material wealth in the here and now. Just send us twenty dollars or more…

Among Wikipedia definitions of cults is a comparison to ‘miniature totalitarian political systems’. A 2021 piece in Psychology Today says ‘no one joins a cult; they are recruited by systematic social influence processes’ and ‘destructive individuals and cults use deception and undue influence to make people dependent and obedient’. Also, ‘cult leaders are typically malignant narcissists and want people who will be obedient to them’. On vulnerability it says, ‘no one joins a cult voluntarily; they are recruited into it. There is lack of informed consent. Everyone has vulnerabilities’.

The best way to highlight the dangers of cults is to shine a light on them. In late July/early August the BBC ran a two-part documentary on the Jesus Army – Inside the Cult of the Jesus Army. They also ran a piece related to the documentary entitled Investigating one of the UK’s most abusive cults. The effect that membership can have upon an individual’s mental health is highlighted by the comment of an ex-member of the cult: ‘One contributor, Nathan, “despite struggling to come to terms with the fact he was groomed and sexually assaulted, admitted he would likely return to the Jesus Army if it reopened”’. A documented aspect of cults is the sexual abuse that takes place within them: ‘About one in six was sexually abused, according to a review of the damages claims of some 600 individuals’.

Around the same time The Guardian ran an article called The rise and fall of the British cult that hid in plain sight. It’s a long piece by an ex-member of the Jesus Army, a woman who, when quite young, was forced into the Jesus Army by her ‘normal’ family joining it. She echoes Nathan’s comment by explaining that the reason people stay in cults is due to ‘the thought of leaving a domestic relationship, with the additional anguish of abandoning one’s family, friends, money, job, and support system, along with the inherent threat of going to hell’.

The only ‘hell’ that exists is the current social system which encourages predation on people who are alienated from their fellow human beings because capitalism encourages the pursuit of wealth and power by whatever means possible.

DC

Slings and Arrows: The Wages of Philanthropy (1953)

The Slings and Arrows column from the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Wages of Philanthropy

A poet of the eighteenth century commented that “Virtue is its own reward.” That thought is often quoted and applied, especially when workers want a rise in pay. It is nice to know, however; that occasionally virtue brings other and more tangible rewards than the mere satisfaction of knowing one has been virtuous.

When, in 1892, Lord Rowton built the first of his enormous lodging-houses, he did so because he believed (Daily Express, 30/4/53) “every man should have a room to himself—with a door—for 6d. a night.” Five such lodging houses were established and although every man was entitled to pay his sixpence and get his room—with a door—only the poor turned up. The rich, either ignorant of these facilities, or not wishing to stop the poor using them, continued to reside at the Ritz or Claridges. But time has a habit of evening things out and in due course the rich were duly rewarded for their consideration, as we shall see.

It is a far cry from the nineties of the last century to the present time but Rowton Houses still go on and although the price has increased to 2s. 3d. per night nevertheless there is a constant demand for accommodation. So much so that the dividends on the capital of Rowton Houses Ltd. has recently been increased. Its properties are reputed to be worth £2,000,000, and the shares, if the firm were sold, would have a break-up value of £10 each. The City Editor of the Daily Express tells us that although the share and property dealers are envious and would like to do a deal in Rowton House shares their chances are slender, for the shares are held by people “who put service to the not-so-wealthy before profit.” It is perhaps a coincidence that the shares of Rowton Houses are regarded as gilt-edged and that that institution of putting “service before profit,” the Britannic Assurance Co. hold 11,000 shares. When “service to the not-so-wealthy” is accompanied by an increased dividend then virtue gets more than its “own reward,” and when Ecclesiastes wrote “Cast thy bread upon the waters and it shall return after many days ” he little dreamed that it would return buttered.

The Rest is Silence

Dr. Dalton, bright star in the Labour firmament, has published the first instalment of his three volume autobiography. Apart from a few admissions and statements, the book has no merit either as a work of literature or a study of political events. In the normal course of events this book would not be mentioned in these columns as it would be a waste of space to do so. But some of the disclosures are worthy of comment because they throw a significant light on the present Labour leaders who pretend to be more prescient, and more faithful to the cause than the idols of yesteryear.

Dr. Dalton tells us in 1953, that he knew in 1924 or 1925 that Ramsay MacDonald was vain, conceited, snobbish and untrustworthy. But between those years and 1931 Dalton was his supporter and indeed served under him in the second Labour Government. Never, until after the debacle of 1931, did Dalton and the rest of the gang who pretend to have known all along, say one word which would lead either the electorate or rank and file Labourites to believe that all was not well with the Party leadership. On the contrary their mouths dripped honeyed words of admiration.

Dalton quotes Tom Johnston as saying “If the party meeting only got to know of a few things like this, they’d all be climbing up the walls, not just the I.L.P. but the soberest trade unionists in the Party.” But if Dalton knew and Johnston knew how was it that the Party meeting did not know? The truth was concealed.

We are left then with two conclusions. If MacDonald betrayed the Labour Party and was suspect all the time then those who suspected him were culpable. If on the other hand, they did not know, but pretend to do so in order to appear wise, then what reliance can be placed on them? Here they were, working day by day with men whom they now call traitors and they remained blithely innocent of the fact. Are these the leaders who ask for support because of their qualifications?

We are also indebted to Dalton for telling us something of the quality of the Labour leadership. He tells us that when the Labour Government was being formed in 1929, would-be Ministers besieged MacDonald and some of them wept and fainted in their anxiety. What a disgusting spectacle.

That is the sort of thing that goes on when Leaders take refuge in secrecy and when they rely for support as they must do (or they wouldn’t be leaders), on the political ignorance of their followers.

Who knows but that in another twenty-five years we may be reading some future Dalton on some present day traitor or betrayer of the Labour Party. For judging on past experience we don’t know.what goes on in the hierarchical section of the Labour Party; the Party meeting does not know and the rank and file do not know. We can only guess. And we are on reasonably safe ground if we venture to predict that the present day Labour Leaders are as anxious as those of the past to remain leaders, and to take power in order to run capitalism.

Whose Mother isn’t using Persil?

Among the American prisoners released by the Koreans are a small group, who according to the Authorities have been infected with Communist propaganda. And, since the United States is a land of freedom, and the right to think as one pleases is upheld by the American Constitution, this small group has been sent to a hospital for treatment. The treatment will consist of reading books and seeing newsreels approved by the authorities, so that they may be cured of their infection. The State Department announces: “The privations, and dangers suffered by prisoners of the Communists, may have made them susceptible to the Communist brain-washing techniques.”

Here is some peculiar reasoning. Are we to understand that the way to make people agree with and become permeated by one’s ideas is to make them suffer privations and dangers? If it is true, as we have been told by sundry journalists, that American prisoners of war were badly treated by the Chinese and Koreans then how could a “small group” become infected with their oppressors ideas? No one has heard of any Jew who suffered in concentration camps at the hands of Hitler, having to be "brainwashed” because he had become convinced that the Germans were a "Master race.” How then could prisoners subjected to "privations and dangers ” by their captors become convinced of the benefits to be derived from their ideas?

If it is because of the ill-treatment, are these returned prisoners to be even worse-treated so that they may become imbued with the benefits and joys of the "American way of life ”?

As if these unfortunate prisoners have not had enough, psychiatrists have been turned loose on them in order to "brainwash” them back to a belief in free enterprise, democracy, and Americanism. It has not yet occurred to these psychiatrists and “brainwash” experts that men who have been held prisoners for many years and whose subsequent release is dependent upon their change of attitude, will "brainwash” themselves so fast as to outdo any claim made by the makers of Persil soap.

If it were not so tragic this whole episode would make a good subject for an Aldwych farce!

S.A.

Blogger's Note:

The February 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard carries an interesting article by 'Ivan' on Rowton Houses.

Between the Lines: From the people who brought you John Wayne (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

From the people who brought you John Wayne

When all that stands between us and the mass annihilation of a third world war are a few hours on the clock, who will we have to turn to and find out what is going on? Who will be telling us that it is right to fight? Who will say that the enemy is satanic and must be defeated at all costs7 Who will insist that the wasted lives of war are heroic gestures? Who will scream at us from morning to night that war is noble, that 'our side' has god on its side, that 'they' will never win. even if most of us must die to stop them?

It is one of the sickest ironies of capitalism that if there is a third world war, fought over the interests of the competing millionaires and billionaires, it will be the media, which is largely paid for and almost totally ideologically obedient to those billionaires and millionaires, that will have the monopoly on explaining what is going on. The capitalists not only possess the power to blow us up, but they have the power to con us into believing that it is right and necessary that we should be blown up.

The power of the media is never more dangerous than in time of war. It is then that the lies become bigger, the audacious assaults upon our intelligence greater, the resorts to half-truths and historical distortions grosser. If the news broadcasts are always but an echo of the interests of our masters in their world affairs, in war time the news becomes a blasting verbal cannon-fire of propaganda

In this war in the Middle East the TV newsreaders have done everything but put on uniforms. They have been recruited to the task of justifying the military force of 'our side' and attacking without explanation the 'madness' of the newfound enemy, to whom Britain used to be a major arms supplier. It is like Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four: four years ago Saddam was the friendly dictator who could be relied upon to kill the Iranians: now that he is the official enemy people who have never even heard of him before must be taught to hate him with a passion that only the media can whip up.

Who will the next hate figure be? What further methods will the media use to brutalise us into screaming that we want war? It is a dangerous box which workers have invited into the corners of their living rooms: it emits the poison gas of pro-war propaganda. Never mind all the reports of on links between TV violence and real violence — what about the link between news reporters who glorify war and tho widespread support for the indiscriminate slaughter of warfare which that generates? Or is that a legitimate use of TV to corrupt the minds of tho vulnerable7

Turning women into thugs

Speaking of corrupted minds and also of war — the two are closely linked — Channel Four showed a truly frightening documentary called Soldier Girls (16 August, 11pm). It was directed by Nicholas Broomfield and Joan Churchill. (Broomfield must be one of the most powerful and perceptive makers of documentaries depicting the lunacy of nationalism and militarism) The documentary was about the training of women to become soldiers in the US army. There are few things more disgusting to see than rows and rows of women, capable of producing life, lined up with guns and idiot's uniforms, learning how to destroy life. The documentary showed with awesome clarity just how these trainee thugs are brutalised, their sense of dignity and decency is forced out of them as they learn to become nothing but unfeeling cogs in the killing machine. Those who do not conform are punished by crazed officers whom the Iraqi army could only hope to match for madness.

One trainee, Private Johnson, made it clear from the start that the lunacy of army life was not for her. The officers tried everything to push her into line. What angered them most was that she kept on smiling as they shouted at her. Soldiers are not meant to smile. They punished her, they lectured her, they verbally assaulted her, and still she smiled when she should not have done. In one part of the documentary Johnson is taken into a room by two officers for what is laughably called 'counselling'.

A uniformed female officer and a male nutcase scream and shout at her The latter tells her: "Every time I look at you, Johnson, you got that same smart-arse look on your face, that same silly little smile. And then you got the gall to tell the lieutenant that you want to stay in my goddam army — and not do a damn thing for it. That's what irks me, Johnson You don't give a damn. The troops can't stand you. I mean, even our worst troops out there can't stand you. They don't even want to be around you. You are the type that irritates people just by your presence, without oven opening your mouth. Haven't you realised, Johnson, that you have that capacity to piss someone off just by standing there? Just the way you stand radiates total apathy, complete uncaring about god, man, animal, life water . . ." Incidentally. Johnson was black and the two officers were white. At the end of the documentary Johnson is seen leaving the army; if there are medals for smiling in the face of military madness. Johnson should receive one.

The only difference between training US killers and training Iraqi ones is that the latter are more likely to be killed. Perhaps the Middle East lunatics talk more about the god who is not there; the American screwballs talk about red. white and blue rags on poles which they would die for. It is all crazy — and those who deliver its messages are crazier still.

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

Virgin on the Ridiculous (1995)

TV Review from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Channel Four has recently been showing a season of horror films, and viewers could have been forgiven for thinking that the kind of torture exhibited in Witness: True Love Waits (4 July, 9pm) was an entirely new addition to the horror genre. The action centred on Nashville, Tennessee, where the devotees of the local Baptist churches have taken to insisting that their children take vows of celibacy until they marry. Much of the documentary was taken up with film of local church “leaders" instructing teenage children in what is, and is not, permissible behaviour before marriage according to the “Holy Scriptures". Teenage girls were advised to spend six months "finding Jesus" before entering into any sort of relationship with the opposite sex whatsoever, and after this period of holy probation, only talking, holding hands and some forms of dancing were deemed permissible.

And were the teenagers happy with this state of affairs? Were they buggery. Most were torn between guilt at offending Jesus before descending into hell for all eternity, and expressing their natural sexual inclinations in a healthy manner. The boys were sad and guilt-ridden, the girls either brainwashed automatons or tearful would-be rebels. Most demonstrated signs of what is commonly called neurosis. One teenager was so deliriously happy with her lot that, when asked to recant her past sexual indiscretions before the church, she spent the entire time sobbing her heart out, barely able to speak the guilty words that were tearing her apart. After the ordeal, she ran back into the congregation to the arms of her parents, looking for consolation from the twisted mentalities that were so intent on making her life a misery. She probably had nowhere else to run.

Truly, what bastards these Christians can be, like most fundamentalist religious fanatics. Brainwashing, manipulation and humiliation were the techniques used to get the right result for Jesus and that was only the public face of it. Without a doubt, True Love Waits was one of the most terrifying programmes seen on television this year, and should have been compulsive viewing for anyone toying with the ideas of any of the barmy god-squad outfits that infest modern capitalism. It was a truly disgusting sight to see slick twenty-something preachers feeding guilt on a plate to vulnerable teenagers. "No touching below the neck! No 'dirty talk’ and certainly no passing of bodily fluids!" Verily, the devil's liquids are everywhere and are not to be trifled with until couples are “united in Christ".

Good News

Despite all this nonsense there was some good news. For despite the attractions of the "community" of church, with its friendships. singing and sense of common purpose, there were doubts. Oh yes, big doubts, and the flock were forever in need of shepherding away from the green grass of Satan's meadows. Straying from the path seemed quite common, and the leaders always needed to be on hand to quell any misgivings or slap wrists (mind you, we weren’t told of their views on masturbation but can guess).

In one ceremony reminiscent of Nazi Germany, the young believers were encouraged to bring the Devil's Music to church and burn their tapes and records in front of the congregation. To put it mildly, most looked less than ecstatic at the thought, and one girl said that secular music played such an important role in her life that she wouldn’t. Some eventually turned up with bags of old tapes to destroy, but most did so with what was visibly no enthusiasm for the project These were, in truth, the sort of people who were manipulated into burning Beatles' records in the sixties when John Lennon made his famous remark about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus". However, most modern Bible-bashers should care to remember that the fuss soon died down when American teenagers realised that Lennon wrote better lyrics than Jesus and could play the guitar as well.

What True Love Waits showed was what history demonstrates all the time. Religious indoctrination can never be wholly successful for the very reason that much of it is so evidently at odds with human instinct. Primarily the instincts to love, to play, and to have sexual intercourse for the sheer pleasure of it which characterise the human species. The turnover of adherents to Evangelical and Baptist churches seems to be even greater than that for those mind-numbing Trotskyist groupings, and it is not surprising.

Of course, even a broken clock is right twice every twenty-four hours and not absolutely everything in the Christian creed is wrong, just most of it. Indeed, if the teenage church-goers of America care to take one piece of advice from the Bible it might be "go forth and multiply", an adage which, in a slightly different context, should be directed at their religious manipulators and tormentors too.

Dave Perrin

Shamima Begum, the Demon Bride (2023)

From the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Jihadi bride’ Shamima Begum and her fight for repatriation are back in the news. This time there appears to be evidence to suggest she and her two companions were trafficked, with various newspapers carrying the latest story. It may come as no particular surprise that Shamima and her two school friends Khadiza Sultana, now dead and Amira Abase, presumed dead, were recruited and helped with their journey from the UK via Turkey to Syria in February 2015. All the girls were between 15 and 16 years old.

A BBC online news article on 30 August reads ‘Shamima Begum and her two friends were smuggled into Syria by an intelligence agent for Canada’ (bbc.in/3h7Cbbd). In Reuters Europe (21 November) it says: ‘Likely a victim of child trafficking her lawyers also said that Begum and her friends entry into Syria was “facilitated” by a Canadian agent working for ISIS’ (reut.rs/3VUKFB7). It seems that the information for those articles comes from a claim made in the book The Secret History of Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj. Five Eyes is the network of intelligence sharing between Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This information may have been known as early as 2015.

There was a Reuters (Ankara) news article on 12 March 2015 by Tulay Karadeniz in which the writer states: A spy who worked for a country in the US-led coalition that is fighting Islamic State had helped three British girls to cross into Syria to join the militants has been caught, the Turkish Foreign minister said on Thursday’ (reut.rs/3iJGLN5). This information came only a month after the girls left the UK. The British public will have heard about this only recently.

Shamima is now 23 years old and is still languishing in a detention camp in Northern Syria. Her UK citizenship was revoked in March 2019 by the then Home Secretary Sajid Javid. The British government is not in theory allowed to deprive a British citizen of their citizenship if that is the only form of citizenship they have. Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that ‘Arbitrary deprivation of nationality which means deliberately moving to make a citizen stateless is prohibited under these instruments’.

The UK government contended Shamima could apply for Bangladeshi citizenship as her parents were Bangladeshi nationals and as she was under 21 at the time she supposedly could automatically qualify for Bangladeshi citizenship. Bangladesh has continuously denied that possibility. In any case Shamima was born in the UK and has never even been to Bangladesh, her culture is British.

Shortly after arriving in Syria she was married to a Dutch fighter and convert to Islam and went on to have three children who all died young. Her youngest was born in a refugee camp and died within a month of a lung infection. The conditions in these camps were appalling, with temperatures reaching 50 degrees Celsius in summer and below freezing in the winter, bad sanitary conditions and almost non-existent healthcare.

Responding to the death of her last child in the camp Jeremy Hunt stated ‘Shamima knew when she made the decision to join Daesh she was going to a country where there was no embassy, no consular assistance, and I’m afraid those decisions awful though it is, they do have consequences’ (bbc.in/3iLmkzi). But how could a 15-year old have had any idea of what was in store for her when she left the UK?

What makes a girl not yet 16 willingly leave her home, travel to Syria to marry a man she had not even met? Is it romantic notions of marriage and children of her own, a life away from the boredom and monotony of Bethnal Green, or the seduction of going to help her religious compatriots in the face of perceived injustice and alienation, or was it just an ill-thought-out teenage adventure? Shamima maintains she was just a housewife looking after the house and children and said she was assured they (Isis) would take care of her and she would have a perfect family life, but whether she was just a housewife as she claimed or she allegedly sewed explosives into suicide bombers’ vests we probably will never know.

The hypocrisy of accepting that girls of the same age and older were trafficked and abused in the Jeffrey Epstein case but not for Shamima and her even more unfortunate school friends is striking. She has been vilified and demonised in the press, and the British public seemed to be in agreement with her being made stateless. Could it be that women are traditionally regarded as the caring nurturing sex and Shamima was an abomination, or was she made the scapegoat, an example of the government showing it was doing something, picking on the easy target of a young girl?

Since the fall of the Caliphate, the international community was faced with dealing with more than 52,000 ‘foreigners’ stranded in Syria. Thousands returned to their respective countries independently and unmonitored and thousands of others were repatriated to some, including women facing arrest and imprisonment. Out of more than 400 former fighters believed to be back in Britain only about 40 (in 2019) have been prosecuted, most have been placed in rehabilitation schemes. It not as easy for women and children to make their way back home.

The Guardian (26 November 2020) reported that 35 children and 15 British women were being held in barbaric conditions at a camp in Northern Syria. A report by the Rights and Security International charity described conditions as inhumane and degrading, unsafe environments, physical violence common and psychological trauma. Children living in the camps suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and hypothermia with the effect on these children of starting the whole cycle of alienation again. You have to wonder what kind of society turns a blind eye to deliberately causing suffering to women and children, somehow making them responsible for nationalism and war.

The Shamima Begum situation brings up so many issues. The fact that the government can take away what we consider fundamental rights but which turn out to be mere privileges which can be given or taken away arbitrarily. What constitutes a danger to security and the state, your political beliefs, like being a communist in McCarthy’s America? What constitutes an illegal organisation, one that is contrary to the status quo? The misogyny of not only the Islamic fighters wanting what could be described as ‘comfort women’ and the attitude of the British government towards making an example of a young girl. Islamophobia and nationalism rearing its ugly head, seeing them as the savages, fanatics, the ‘other’, dividing workers with god on both sides. The state’s lackeys, the media, constantly pushing the official narrative, hiding news from the public, guiding our opinion to suit the state agenda. We have no idea what is ‘fake news’ anymore.

The world is divided with constantly changing borders, constant wars. The arms industry is the second biggest industry in the world. How many other Shamimas are out there? It does not have to be like this, we could live in a borderless, stateless moneyless society where we co-operate rather than compete. All it takes is a little imagination and the belief that we humans are not the greedy aggressive creatures we are told we are. We are family after all.

Carla D.

Between the Lines: Begging on the screen (1987)

The Between the Lines Column from the February 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Begging on the screen

The ethic of capitalism is pretty clear: if you need money work for it. if you cant work for it beg for it. That is why telethons, with all their gushing goodwill towards "those in need" and their righteous pleasure in “using TV to do good” are sickening events. Both BBC and ITV run them as regular events, no doubt because they pull the viewers in and clean up TV's image the channel that cares.

Terry Wogan and Sue Cook hosted the pre-Christmas BBC telethon Children In Need. With a few smiles and famous faces to keep the punters from pressing their off buttons, the object of the exercise is to persuade workers to donate pounds to charities for poor children. And some of the phone lines when you proudly call in to offer your ten quid are manned by famous names like . . . well. I didn't actually catch the names because I hadn't heard of any of them but just think, you could phone in to help a child in need and maybe talk to Bonnie Langford.

The show lasted for several hours, during one section of which Esther Rantzen actually brought on stage several exhibits — yes, children in need — to show to the viewers in order to prove how important it was to lift that phone and donate some of your huge income.

What sort of a system is it that can take a crippled child, or another who is dying of a terminal illness, and use them as TV exhibits because only by parading them as objects for begging can funds be raised to help them? As the evening went on Wogan and the team were becoming ecstatic with philanthropy: "My word, this is marvellous: we've collected over £2 million — that's more than twice as much as an hour into the programme last year". Then came the big push to make it three million. Come on, wage slaves, forget the fact that 16 million of you are living on or just above the official poverty line, phone Bonnie Langford or some other nonentity and do your bit.

In the end, amid ecstasy which would lead the innocent observer to believe that they'd solved the problem of poverty, the collective viewers of BBC 1 donated £6 million. "What a warm-hearted lot you all are" said Wogan. whose fee for each of his three-night-a-week BBC shows has made him a millionaire several times over. Of course, he was right: the workers giving to help needy children were being decent and caring and co-operative and all of the other things which at other times the people who defend charity tell us that human nature prevents us all from being.

The success of shows like Children In Need depends on the fact that the working class really does want to live in a world without impoverished and suffering children. But £6 million will not do the trick; it is pathetic — an indication of just how futile it is to ask the class which does not possess to give money to those who possess even less.

According to recent US research, the governments of the world spend £100,000 a minute on weapons to kill people. Children In Need was on the air for six hours: that means that on average £36 million was spent on preparations to blow up children (and the rest of us) during the time that a one-off £6 million was collected to help those in great need. After the show ended - and as you read this article the £100,000 a minute continues to be spent and you do not need to phone Bonnie Langford to donate your tenner.


Blinded by the light

American TV films about kids caught up in crazy religious cults must be second in popularity to ones about aircraft disasters It is a good theme for a film: "normal" American kid meets devious cult member who lures him/her into a movement which robs them of their freedom, funds and self- respect. Parents try to rescue them and the film ends with the de-programming scene wherein the innocent victim returns to "normality" with the aid of cruel but kind experts.

Of course, the reason so many of these films are being made is that so many American kids, especially in California and the seemingly affluent West Coast cities, are so discontented and frustrated with the capitalist rat-race that the security of crazy religions like the Moonies and Scientology appeals to them. Blinded By The Light (C4. 9pm. 6 January) was a not very well-acted film of this kind teenage son is won over to peculiar cult led by a sinister Father Adam, parents aim to kidnap him back to deprogramme him, sister infiltrates cult with a view to winning brother back to "normality".

Cults were shown to be totalitarian, dogmatic, uncaring, mind-damaging institutions — which, from all the evidence, they most certainly are. But — and this is the problem which such films never address — they are not that different from all religions. including the state-endorsed ones which "normal" wage slaves are encouraged to believe in.

The motto of Father Adam's cult was Joy Through Humility and it was made plain that disciples were expected to receive salvation through submitting and degrading themselves. Sounds a lot like Christianity to me. The cult members were told that they must work only for the cult, must live within it and renounce their previous lives, even to the point of giving up their old names. So what are monasteries and convents? But I've never seen a film showing how innocent young fools are conned into joining them.

Religion, by definition, is an organised form of dogmatic belief (as opposed to scientific knowledge) and hierarchical command: after all, what is god but a totalitarian dictator? Just as films like this one never explain why one form of crazy behaviour is good for the soul and another is a sign of indoctrinated madness, so they do not show why it is that young people are attracted in the first place to join such sickening cults. Can it have something to do with the phoney sense of community which they offer, as opposed to the extreme poverty of feeling and sense of alienation which characterises the so-called affluent lives of the American young?


Chinese puzzle

It is interesting to note how little TV coverage BBC and ITN have given to the quite significant protests in the major cities of China recently, as opposed to coverage they give to protest movements in Russia. usually involving far less people. Could this have something to do with the fact that state- capitalist China has now become a major Western trading partner and therefore the establishment here does not want to give too much encouragement to any movement to destabilise "our Communist allies", whereas state-capitalist Russia is still a military and trading rival?


What you think

In 1987 this column will be publishing a selection of the points which you send in about TV output. Write and let us know what has made you sick on TV recently or what has opened your eyes to an aspect of capitalism you hadn't recently thought about, Send your letters or postcards to Between The Lines, c/o The Socialist Standard. If none of your points appear you can assume that none have been sent in.

Steve Coleman

Las Vegas: Everyone’s a Loser (2020)

From the January 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Las Vegas is Spanish for The Meadows. A settlement was established there in 1905. Before that it was just an oasis in the Mojave Desert.

Nothing strange about an oasis in the desert. A well with water for the weary traveller and his camels. Trees to shade them from the hot sun while they rest. I see it in my mind’s eye.

‘Hold on there, mate Camels?’

Joe Zentner tells us that ‘Bactrian camels were imported from Manchuria to San Francisco in 1860 and put to work as pack animals in Nevada’ (‘The Desert Camel Experiment: Camels in America’s Southwest’ Link).

True, the experiment was not a great success. Camels are suited to soft sandy terrain. Much of the Mojave consists of ‘desert pavement’ with sharp-edged rocks that cut the poor creatures’ feet. Camels are not long-suffering beasts of burden. When in pain they kick you and spit at you. The camel drivers didn’t like that.

Anyway, those days are long gone. By 2018 the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area was home to 2,227,000 people. It also had over 42 million visitors. In the middle of the desert.

Local aquifers provide a mere tenth of the metropolitan area’s drinking water. The rest is taken from Lake Mead, which even though fed by the Colorado River is shrinking fast. The city government wants to build a pipeline to pump in water from three valleys in Utah. Opponents of the scheme say that the pipeline would turn the valleys into dustbowls.

As for the sun, it is hotter than ever. Las Vegas has a few trees, but the cooling effect of their shade is outweighed by the ‘heat island’ effect of its concrete and asphalt. Daytime temperatures remain above 100°Fahrenheit (38C) throughout the summer. On some days the thermometer goes over 110° (43C), the official record being 117° (47C) reached on June 20, 2017.

All temperatures higher than that of human blood (98.4°F/36.8C) endanger human life and health. Most people are able to live in Las Vegas only thanks to air conditioning, which gives further impetus to global warming.

But what about building workers and others who have to work outdoors? Starting shifts at the crack of dawn and ending by noon provides only partial protection. How do the homeless cope? Residents of homeless shelters, pushed out into the heat for most of the day? Where do they get the large amount of fluid they need to drink every hour so that they can perspire, cool their bodies, and survive? The hotels and restaurants don’t want them hanging around.

The fastest-warming city

And it gets hotter every year. Las Vegas is the fastest-warming city in the United States. Its average temperature has risen by 5.8°F since 1970. The corresponding figure for the country as a whole is 2.5°F.

What are the sources of the livelihood of these 2.2 million people in the middle of the desert? How do they pay for all the goods that have to be shipped in for their consumption?

Agriculture? In the middle of the desert? What would they farm? Cacti?

Fishing? Forestry? In the middle of the desert?

Mining? Are there valuable minerals in the desert?

Gold and silver used to be mined in the area, but that came to an end long ago. The Techatticup mine in Eldorado Canyon closed in 1942.

Manufacturing? Do they make anything?

No.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said on her journey through Wonderland.

Their livelihood comes from gambling, tourism, and entertainment. That explains why they get so many visitors.

But the tourists come mainly for the gambling. Without the gambling there would be few tourists to pack into hotels, restaurants, museums, bars, and brothels or entertain with shows and concerts.

The pivot of Las Vegas’ economy is gambling. The city has over 100 of the largest casinos in the United States.

What is gambling? Without delving into technical details, we can say that gambling is a set of deceptive games of chance used to transfer money from a large number of ‘losers’ to a much smaller number of ‘winners’ – the main winner by far always being the owner of the gambling establishment. In 2013, according to a study conducted at the University of Las Vegas, the 23 largest casinos (the study ignored the others) pocketed over $5 billion of their visitors’ money.

Sinister ways

Why do people gamble so much?

Julian Crowley has detailed ‘ten sinister ways casinos keep you gambling’. They include:

• additional oxygen pumped in to keep you awake;
• ‘psychedelic’ carpets with garish patterns and clashing colors, also to stop you dozing off;
• ‘mild, looping’ background music for its hypnotic effect;
• food and drink served to you (often without charge) right at the gambling table;
• no clocks to remind you of the passage of time;
• no windows to remind you of the world outside;
• slot machines that convey subliminal messages.
• Last but not least, it is deliberately made difficult and time-consuming to exchange your remaining chips for cash and find the way out of the maze-like floor layout.

But the main reason why people gamble is that the casinos encourage them to focus on the tiny chance of winning rather than on the much higher probability of losing. They are misled by frequent ‘near wins’ and paltry wins. Flashing lights ‘give you the impression that winning is constant and all around you.’ When someone is allowed to have a big win a huge fuss is made and there is lots of publicity, but security staff intervene if anyone tries to film people who are losing.

It is true that gamblers may enjoy the experience of gambling even when they are losing, even though there is photographic evidence of individuals in front of slot machines or at the gaming table who are clearly in great distress. It’s also doubtful whether pleasure taken in the process of gambling, where it exists, often outweighs the distress felt later, when the gambler realises just how much money he or she has lost – money that could and should have been spent on other things. Gamblers risk loss of their homes, breakup of their families, bankruptcy, even suicide.

A social ‘bad’

Gambling then makes no net contribution to human welfare. On balance, it is a social ‘bad’ rather than a social ‘good.’ As gambling is the raison d’être of Las Vegas – the only reason why this big city exists in the middle of the desert – it would be better for human well-being if Las Vegas were to become once more what it was before 1905 – an unsettled green oasis.

In a socialist society the city of Las Vegas will in all likelihood be abandoned. Because it is in a place where it makes no sense for people to live. The local flora and fauna are adapted to the desert environment. People are not. In past ages no one would have dreamt of living here. It was a place to take refreshment, rest a while, and travel on.

The city of Las Vegas will be abandoned in a socialist society also because in such a society gambling will not exist. Gambling will not exist because people will feel no urge to gamble, for they will have free access to whatever they need. Money itself will not exist.

That does not, of course, mean that no one ever does anything worthwhile in Las Vegas. There is surely fantastic music being made there. Great tacos too. The music and the tacos will continue to be made in a socialist society. But not in the middle of the desert.

Stefan

Advertising by Stealth (1958)

From the November 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Slight Subliminal
There is proverbially no sentiment in business, and obviously no conscience in advertising. There is, however, a curious ethic of "fair play” which picks on one way of victimizing people among a thousand and demands that it be stopped. Thus at the present time “subliminal” advertising seems likely to be banned as too mean a method of what in any case is achieved in plenty of other ways.

The “subliminal” technique is a visual one, devised for the cinema and TV. In Chamber’s Dictionary it means “beneath the threshold of consciousness"; it consists of flashing a word or a symbol so swiftly that the brain registers without awareness that the eye has seen. Its first test in a cinema in America involved the words “ice cream,” and according to the Sunday Pictorial, which sounded a furious alarm (“Home Office Must Act”) on its front page on October 5th: “Ice cream sales in the interval took a tremendous upward leap, and the customers did not know why.”

It was announced in the House of Commons earlier this year that advertisers are forbidden to use subliminal suggestion on television in this country. There is, however, the promise of an American horror film in which nasty symbols and words like “blood” and “death” are flashed. Calling this "rape of the mind,” the Pictorial reported that "screams of horror are almost doubled when the symbols are used” because "without realizing it, the sub-conscious mind of the audience is flooded with thoughts of death.”

That this is low and objectionable could not be contested: what, one wonders, will future social historians make of the twentieth century? The suggestions made about it, however, extend far beyond those simple considerations. Through the subliminal technique, it is said, ideas and fears may be planted in the mind by stealth—it means, in fact, the beginning of thought-control. “Advisers to the Pictorial” made the demand for a ban indisputable by saying: “This is the sort of terror that George Orwell visualized in his book '1984.’ This is Big Brother’.”

Orwell’s earnest, mistaken book: what a lot it has to answer for! And, curiously enough, it never succeeded in showing any such terror. For all Orwell’s efforts, its horror lies chiefly in physical brutality; its Thought Police are simply plug-uglies, its hero hectored into seeing two and two as five ultimately not by suggestion but in fact by pain, privation and fear. One wonders, again, what the future could show the past in obtaining conformity, acquiescence, and self-deception. The Roman Catholic Church held millions in subjection for centuries without a single subliminal symbol; the Kaiser’s picture in the papers roused fury equal to anything in Orwell’s “hate week.”

Subliminal suggestion is undesirable, but there is no evidence to date—discounting the somewhat naive “tests” described in the Pictorial—that it is anything more than a new way of advertising. True, it carries the stigma of unfairness, of invading the person’s mind while his back, so to speak, is turned. Is that any more unfair or any more undesirable, however, than browbeating him into submission, which is what much modern advertising does? It is hard to see the difference between slipping a name into the subconscious and imprinting it by nagging repetition: few of us today will not carry the news of the New Blue Whitener to our graves.

Advertising has for many years employed techniques of suggestion; if the subliminal is rape of the mind, then these may be said to have tried taking liberties with it. The implications, for example, of all the symbols of masculinity and female desirability: Twice the Man on Whatsaname. What Makes a Woman Magnetic, Handsome Men are Slightly Sunbronzed. Where all suggestion techniques founder is on their own basis of competition. Presumably it is not difficult to rouse anyone’s wishes for strength, security, health or charm: what no advertiser has discovered, however, is how to make conflicting and contradictory claims effective on the subconscious.

It is all very well to find that more people bought ice cream after a subliminal flash, but the same effect could have been produced by any of half a dozen others means (overheating the cinema, for example). The real test is not whether they can be persuaded to buy more ice cream, but whether it will mean anything at all when they are told to buy four brands simultaneously, each one in preference to the others.

Every person in our society must always be on his guard against attempts to regulate his thoughts: government. press, church, school and advertisement are at it all the time. The facile common picture—Orwell’s one—of twentieth-century man as having less and less autonomy of thought is, however, completely untrue. It is the opposite which is true. For all the black patches, all the prejudice and cruelty and acceptance of things which ought not to be, man today is far more knowledgeable than ever before. That is not man in the abstract, typified by a few; it means man everywhere, walking the streets and going to work and reading the paper and watching the television. Knowing more, he is more critical and altogether more sensible than he has ever been.

The only really effective means of subjecting people’s minds is ignorance. The Catholic Church has already been mentioned; there are innumerable other examples— kingship, war propaganda, every persecution in history, including that of the Jews. While on the one hand new techniques of mass communication are developed and put into the hands of the few against the many, every day man grows in knowledge and so in ability to think for himself. It is worth reverting to advertising for a moment to point out that after forty years of mass commercial advertising a great many people remain more or less immune to it, and the growth of ventures for “consumer research” suggests that knowledge is far more effective than symbols.

“1984” has not come yet; nor will it This is not the trouble with the modem world. Much of its technical development points the way to the kind of world that could be; as things are, it is the organization of society now and nothing else which stands in the way of man’s full development. For that only a little more knowledge is needed. The enemy is ignorance.

Robert Barltrop

Proper Gander: Pulling The Trigger (2018)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Derren Brown’s television shows are both fascinating and disturbing to watch, as they highlight something we usually prefer not to think about – how open we can be to manipulation. The ‘psychological illusionist’s stunts often involve making people ‘choose’ to do exactly what he’s conditioned them to.

In Brown’s latest experiment – Sacrifice (Netflix) – his aim is to manipulate his subject into willingly taking a bullet for a complete stranger. He makes this even more of a challenge for himself by choosing someone who is openly against immigration to sacrifice themselves for someone in the country illegally. Not that Phil, his subject / guinea pig / victim, knows this is going to happen. Instead, Phil is told that he’s taking part in a documentary about a new microchip which he agrees to have inserted in the back of his neck. He believes this will make him more confident and decisive, but in reality there’s no microchip and it’s Phil’s conviction, along with Brown’s conditioning which create this attitude. Phil comes to associate a trigger sound and a tap on the head with being fearless and even not feeling pain, demonstrated when a needle is pushed through his hand. Brown also needs to make Phil develop more empathy, especially with people from other backgrounds. Fortunately, his methods here are more honest and benign. To change how Phil sees himself as all-American, a DNA test is arranged which reveals that his heritage stretches back to Scandinavia, Russia, the Middle East and, significantly, Mexico. Even more powerful is a simple exercise where he and a stranger maintain eye contact for four minutes, which ends with tears and a hug.

Phil is told that the therapy and the filming are over, and several weeks later Brown tests whether his real plan has worked. In the middle of the Californian desert, he sets up a fake bar, rigged with hidden cameras and actors playing its staff and customers. It’s engineered that Phil is driven out there and gets befriended by a group of what he thinks are racist bikers. He joins them as they drive off in pursuit of some Mexicans also in on the stunt. The Mexicans are caught, are made to admit they’re in the country illegally and the bikers get ready to shoot them. Waiting in the van, Phil hears the trigger sound played through the radio. He decides to intervene, and indeed stands in front of the Mexicans when the biker fires his gun. Brown rushes out and tells him it’s all been staged. Phil’s relief that he hasn’t really been shot dead presumably overrides any understandable urge to punch Brown’s lights out for what he’s done.

The formula of conditioning someone and then surreptitiously testing its effectiveness was also used in Brown’s 2006 show The Heist. Under the guise of a motivational seminar, Brown implanted the urge to rob a security van in a bunch of middle-managers without them knowing. He instilled in them a ‘just do it’ attitude, associated with the colour green, a song by the Jacksons and the action of rubbing their leg. The seminar was deliberately peppered with words to subconsciously promote taking money, and each of the attendees were given a toy gun to symbolise their new-found gung-ho outlook.

Without the attendees realising, he then tested which were most receptive to authority, and therefore would be more likely to accept his manipulation of them. After challenging them to steal some sweets from a shop, he moved on to re-enact the notorious Milgram experiment, carried out at Yale University in the 1960s. In this, volunteers are asked to administer electric shocks to someone as a punishment for getting answers to questions wrong, unaware that the shocks aren’t real. Over half of Brown’s middle-managers gave what they thought were lethal doses, just because someone wearing a white coat told them to, a result similar to that of the original Milgram experiments.

As with Sacrifice, the actual point of the exercise took place next, when the participants thought they were no longer being filmed. The four who were most suggestible were each invited to a meeting and asked to bring their toy guns with them. Concealed cameras filmed them in turn walking to their appointment in London, past a green poster of a leg captioned ‘do it’, as a car drives along blaring out the Jacksons song. So when the subjects see a (fake) security van parked ahead of them, they’re unknowingly primed to act on all the cues they’ve learned. Three of the four instinctively pull out their gun and hold up the (actor) security guard, running off with the money until Brown stops them.

Brown’s stunts make it look easy to manipulate unwitting people to commit acts as extreme as armed robbery, self-sacrifice and, in 2016’s Pushed To The Edge, shoving someone else off a height to their apparent death. The set-ups may be elaborate, but his techniques – placebos, triggers, conditioning – are unsettlingly straightforward. He doesn’t say that everyone can be so easily moulded, though, as he selects people who are most suggestible and receptive to authority. So is Brown warning us about the dangers of allowing ourselves to be led? He says that his latest show has ‘an ultimately humanitarian message … about stepping out of the [political or social] narratives we live by’ (NME, 15 October), such as Phil’s nationalism. Brown rightly points out that these narratives can be limiting and divisive, and that we can become kinder to others by changing our outlook. Showing a die-hard xenophobe apparently giving his life for someone they would otherwise hate is a drastic way of demonstrating this, and manipulating them into it is a strange and contradictory way to make the point. This seemingly hasn’t bothered those who have taken part in Brown’s stunts, who he says have found the experience ‘the most positive and transformative thing they’ve done.’  If, like them, we excuse how Brown’s techniques are deceptive and even cruel, he teaches us some interesting lessons about how our thoughts, values and actions can be shaped.

Mike Foster

A brief history of Public Relations (2011)

From the April 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are workers brainwashed by capitalism?

If you want to know the truth, you cannot rely on newspapers. We have that on good authority – in fact, on the authority of the more honest newspapers. (The more honest papers are those that are read mainly by capitalists who need reliable information about the world in order to make investment decisions, as opposed to those that are read mainly by workers.)

In a startlingly frank appraisal of the history and practice of the public relations (PR) industry, The Economist (18 December 2010) admits that PR was invented in the early 20th century to counter working-class struggles, and rising popular resentment against capitalism, by getting newspapers and journalists, until then sympathetic to the workers, on the side of the business class. American business was at the time worried by the rise of a new phenomenon: public opinion. The business élite feared this, especially as it was developing in an anti-capitalist direction, and were determined to take control of it and manipulate it for their own ends. PR’s founding father, Edward Bernays, was quite explicit about the aim: ‘the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised opinions and habits of the masses’.

That all this is true, and that the century-long and ongoing pro-capitalist PR campaign was and is a great success, to the extent that there are today no mainstream media outlets that are not pro-capitalist, is pretty much indisputable. This means that, today, newspapers and news programmes (those read and watched by the working class) are not what they appear and claim to be. Their role is not to enlighten and inform, but to mould public opinion so that it reflects the interests of the capitalist class and the state. ‘News’ is propaganda, not genuine journalism.

The truth of this has, however, led to a logical but erroneous conclusion among many radical thinkers – that the working class accepts capitalism because it has been brainwashed into it by clever capitalist PR. The argument can even take a Marxian-sounding form: capitalist society, say some Marxists, maintains and reproduces itself through the dissemination of the ‘ruling ideology’ – i.e., the ideas, beliefs and values of the ruling capitalist class – and its acceptance by the working class. The working class, in accepting these ideas, as they learn them from newspapers and so on, is thereby integrated into capitalism and comes to accept its own subordination. This theory has the added appeal, for Marxists, of seeming to explain something that stands rather in need of explanation in Marxian theory – the failure of the class struggle to materialise into the revolution predicted by Marx.

The argument is compelling but mostly false, as shown in an excellent essay by Conrad Lodziak in the journal Radical Philosophy (‘Dull Compulsion of the Economic: The Dominant Ideology and Social Reproduction.’ No. 49, Summer 1988). The essay, and the empirical data and ethnographic studies it draws upon, is obviously now dated in some respects. But its arguments are still strikingly relevant and persuasive. This article will reprise Lodziak’s argument and briefly consider its implications for socialist politics.

Dull compulsion versus brainwashing

The idea that working-class acceptance of capitalism can be ascribed to the workers’ ‘false consciousness’, Lodziak calls ‘the dominant ideology thesis’, and it is, he says, ‘taken as a self-evident truth amongst a majority of the left’. But is it true? It is, after all, a proposition capable of empirical proof or disproof. Do workers in fact believe and accept the ideas that make up the ‘ruling ideology’? The answer, says Lodziak, is yes – and no.

It is true that most workers accept certain key ideas that are essential to the continuation of capitalism – for example, they accept the justness of ‘a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work’, they accept meritocracy (the idea that it’s OK for people to rise above them in the social hierarchy if the rise is based on merit and talent), they accept that most people should get a job or career and strive to ‘get ahead’, and so on. They do not, however, universally accept or agree with other aspects of the ruling ideology, such as property and inheritance rights, principles of capital accumulation and the right to a profit, state neutrality, occupational structure, distribution of incomes, the right to manage, and so on.

At this point, a Marxist might say, OK, the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ is then justified: the working class does accept the most important aspect of the ruling ideology, which is the acceptance of the inevitability of working for wages. But this is not so, says Lodziak. To prove the ‘dominant ideology thesis’, you must show not just that workers accept certain ideas, but that those ideas are sufficiently important to them for them to commit to the ideas and act upon them. And this is where the thesis falls down: ‘the required degree of ideological motivation appears to be absent amongst a majority of the populations of advanced capitalist societies’. Instead, what you find is ‘an absence of belief’: passivity, resignation, bewilderment, confusion, disorientation and marginalisation are all more important in determining working-class actions than so-called ‘false consciousness’. And the explanation for this passivity is easier to find in ‘largely publicly identifiable features of the social environment’ than in ‘some mysterious process of class brainwashing or collective hypnosis’. 

The ideas which do dominate working-class thinking tend to be those ‘directly relevant to the practical and immediate demands of the everyday life-world as experienced’ – ideas related to things over which workers do have some control, such as deciding whether to resign and look for a new job, or wait for a promotion; whether to get married, or divorced; how to organise home life and what to do with free time, and so on. Workers’ thinking is, quite understandably and sensibly, focused on finding security, and avoiding insecurity. This is impossible without building relations of dependence and subordination with an employer, the state, or a breadwinner. Workers are materially, not ideologically, subordinated; economic necessity and state coercion are more important than ideology. Workers do what they do because they must – not because they’ve been tricked into thinking it’s a good idea.

This also goes some way to explaining why Marx’s prediction of revolution was premature, and why workers often eschew ‘oppositional’ politics. ‘Workers rightly believe that opposition may lead to redundancies or closures, and that it may be impossible to get another job.’ And the more intolerable the alternatives are, the worse the prospect of unemployment is, the worse pay and conditions workers will be prepared to accept – explaining the present government’s determination to push through punitive benefit reform, even though unemployment is on the rise.

In short, the consciousness of the working class is best understood not in terms of ideology, but in terms of ‘needs-based motivations’. By talking in terms of indoctrination, the left displays an ‘insensitivity to the lived experience’ of the working class.

Political conclusions

We in the Socialist Party are often accused by our opponents, and even sometimes by our supporters, of not having made any progress in our 100-year history. What the foregoing arguments should have made clear is that it is not within our power to make the kind of progress demanded of us. The working class generally is ideologically indifferent, and accepts capitalism because it must. The only thing that can disrupt this to the advantage of socialists is, says Lodziak, ‘effective oppositional practices inscribed with oppositional viewpoints’ – in other words, the development of the class struggle. We can contribute to the development of this struggle, and we do, but it is not within the power of a small party such as ours to determine its course. The failure of sufficiently large and powerful oppositions to arise is down not to a lack of energy or dedication on the part of socialists, nor the absence of a sufficiently clever socialist advertising campaign, but to the power of economic necessity and state coercion.

This article may seem to have argued itself into a corner. If all this is true, what can be done? The answer may not satisfy socialists who understand the urgent need for radical change, but it is inevitable all the same: we just keep struggling.

Lodziak has three other main concluding points of advice for any socialist opposition. (The commentary that follows the advice is of course ours, not Lodziak’s.)

First, participation in organised politics must be made sufficiently attractive to entice people out of their privatised worlds. This means that the boring treadmill of reformist politics and the ridiculous sectarianism, authoritarianism and leadership-dominated activity of Leninist sects is out. Of course, the Socialist Party has not been wildly successful at attracting people, but it is a commonplace on the left that we have at least managed to be human and charming, make our meetings places of free and open discussion, and our activity the result of freely arrived at decisions and voluntary activity. Our members tend to join and remain members for life; most rival leftist outfits operate a ‘revolving door’ policy.

Second, ‘effective opposition is, amongst other things, always an effective ideological opposition’, which means engaging in a ‘vigorous and continuous ideological contestation in the public sphere, not only in challenging the dominant, but also in the advocacy of oppositional alternatives’. Again, we cannot claim sufficient success in this area, but we have at least taken the challenge seriously, unlike the left generally, which is content to pander to prejudice rather than challenge it, propagate the ruling ideology rather than contest it, and mock the advocacy of alternatives as utopian. Credibility for socialism, says Lodziak, can only come from ‘the relentless public display of commitment to oppositional alternatives, and from the unwillingness of agents of opposition to compromise principles’. Yet again, the Socialist Party, unlike the left, can lay claim to a proud history of doing just that.

Third, we need to demonstrate the relevance of socialism to the needs of the vast majority. Most people will not struggle or even vote for abstract things or ideas, says Lodziak, but will fight to win material benefits to improve the quality of their lives and guarantee the future of their children. This might seem to argue against the Socialist Party’s case. Indeed, we are often accused by our leftwing opponents of doing nothing but try to win support for abstract ideas. This is not true: what we have tried to do is show that many of the material benefits people are fighting for are only possible of realisation in a socialist society. If what you want is a pay rise, then you can join a union. If you want to fill the lonely, empty nights, you can join an evening class or the local darts team. And so on – workers will need no advice from socialists on these counts. But what if you want a full and satisfying life for you and your children – with meaningful and enjoyable work, plenty of free time to spend with your family, friends and loved ones, and to pursue your interests and passions, a life free of stress and anxiety and boredom (if you’re lucky), and of extreme poverty and violence and war and environmental catastrophe (if you’re not)? In that case, you will have to think carefully about what socialists say. What we say is that this is a laudable aim – indeed, our rightful inheritance as human beings – but is impossible to achieve under capitalism.

This is clearly a difficult argument to make, especially to ‘ideologically indifferent’ workers. But we live in interesting times – capitalist crisis is to a large extent making our argument for us, and making it more strongly and reaching more people than we have ever been able to. As the foregoing arguments should have made clear, crisis can have the effect of making workers feel even more insecure and therefore even less likely to become socialist. But it also calls into question the viability of the system, and makes it more obvious than ever that it cannot satisfy our needs as human beings. This crisis has a dual potential: it makes aspects of the socialist case for us, even as it threatens to drive the working class further into the welcoming arms of capitalist domination and exploitation. Which way it goes is down at least in part to what socialists and workers think and do over the next decade. Our work as socialists is therefore more urgent than ever.

Stuart Watkins