Proper Gander: Stepping on the platform (2026)

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

As anyone with a social media account knows, a price we pay for being able to share our thoughts with a global audience is being open to insults and abuse in reply. People with a prominent online presence, such as influencers and vloggers, attract attacks through making more of their lives available for comment. The messaging forum Tattle Life has threads about various influencers where opinions about them can be posted anonymously. One subject of a thread is GK Barry, who has branched out from running a sex-themed podcast into other media, now including presenting a documentary about Tattle Life for the BBC. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip starts with Barry reading some of the puerile slights written about her on the website, with other people having been victim to worse abuse. She speaks with loved ones of two people who had a presence on Instagram. Richard Davies ran the ‘bowelbro’ video diary of his struggle with cancer, which posters on Tattle Life accused of being faked, even after his death. Princess Dickson took her own life aged 16 after insulting comments about her appearance were repeatedly made on the forum. Her mother, Sophie, and Lisa, Richard Davies’ widow, tried to contact Tattle Life’s moderators about the messages and their impact, with no response.

Tattle Life was launched in 2018, and for many years its owner wasn’t known publicly. In 2023, entrepreneurs Donna and Neil Sands began legal proceedings against the website, claiming libel, harassment and breach of privacy, with the defendant’s identity not disclosed to the Sands. So, they hired a private investigator who discovered the person behind Tattle Life to be Sebastian Bond, later revealed in the press. Before Tattle Life, Bond ran a blog about veganism, whose demise, suggests Barry, made him jealous of other people’s success as influencers. Tattle Life now has nearly 375,000 registered users, with millions more people who just browse its threads. They aren’t only an audience for gossipy messages but also the adverts cluttering up the site. These have generated around £1 million in advertising revenue, according to the documentary. As Lisa says regarding the thread about her husband ‘the footfall to those pages was immense, and for them, that’s money’. So, it is in the site’s financial interest to have contentious threads.

Unfortunately, slurs grab the attention in a more immediate way than a reasoned critique does. It’s doubtful that those who post the most offensive messages on Tattle Life’s threads would repeat them face-to-face with their target. Communicating virtually and anonymously enables people to stir up trouble and cause upset without any personal comeback. Tattle Life’s defenders would say that it holds influencers to account and upholds free speech. In the abstract, this sounds reasonable, but in the real / virtual worlds the context shapes the matter. ‘Free speech’ in capitalism is defined by a legal framework which reflects the prerogatives of the status quo. As Tattle Life is a business, there is a separation between who owns the platform and who uses it, which complicates who owns and is responsible for the content posted there. Even when laws aim to prevent or protect victims, they are only attempts to patch up a system which encourages such problems as defamation and threats. The need to make money is, as always, a factor; here, represented by the site’s income from hosting adverts, which can increase if shocking content attracts more viewers. That a supposed platform for free speech has been mired in secrecy and is driven by money is one of the consequences of the market system.

Recruiting Barry to present a documentary about Tattle Life and the realm of influencers comes across as an attempt by the BBC to court the younger demographic more likely to be scrolling through social media than watching TV. According to Ofcom’s 2025 Media Nations report, only 45 percent of people aged between 16 and 24 switch on any broadcast television in an average week. GK Barry: Toxic Gossip comes across like a primer to introduce this cohort to the documentary format. It follows the usual template of interviews with victims and experts, text of quotes, facts and figures, and the presenter poring over screens between their segments of spiel. Each component is brief so everything fits into the show’s half-hour running time, and perhaps the audience’s expected attention span. Where the format requires a confrontation with the villain of the piece, it ends up as looking quite desperate. The narrative through the programme is Barry’s search for Bond, which includes tracing a location from details in a photo and speaking with his previous neighbours, and culminates with Barry sitting in a car outside his parents’ house and then delivering a letter to them. She doesn’t receive a response from Bond, although Tattle Life’s moderator says ‘for the BBC to include door-stepping harassment of pensioners in the documentary is abhorrent’ in a statement on the forum. They add ‘almost all articles on Tattle Life are misinformation and heavily biased by influencers and their PR who wish to shut down all opinions they dislike’ .

Tattle Life is just one website, which reflects wider issues with the culture of online communication. Social media platforms are run to make money for their owners, who are distanced from those who use or are affected by them. This is built into how they need to operate, which the legal framework tries to facilitate. Ideals of ‘free speech’ have to fit in with this context. The motivation to post ‘toxic gossip’ doesn’t come from social media itself, but from how people are socialised. Having the kind of mindset to want to do this is a result of living in an alienating, divisive environment: hurling insults is an attempt to express some power when someone has little else in their lives. The impact of online abuse on people already vulnerable can be devastating, as the documentary illustrates.

Mike Foster

Editorial: Stop blaming politicians (2026)

Editorial from the June 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Public debate today is obsessed with personalities. Political life is reduced to a revolving cast of individuals who are either demonised as the source of society’s problems or celebrated as its saviours. Few illustrate this better than Donald Trump.

But focusing on individuals like Trump misses the central issue. He is not an anomaly, nor the cause of the problems people associate with him. He is a product of the system in which he operates.

Modern society is organised around production for profit, competition, and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a minority. At the heart of this system lies the wage relationship: the majority of people must sell their ability to work in order to live, while a minority owns and controls the means of producing wealth.

This is where exploitation occurs—not as an exception, but as a normal feature of the system. Workers produce more value than they receive back in wages, and that surplus is taken as profit. It is this process that generates wealth at one pole and insecurity at the other.

Within this framework, politics is not a neutral arena. Governments, regardless of who leads them, are compelled to maintain the conditions for profitable production. This limits what any politician can do. They may differ in style, rhetoric, or policy details, but they operate within the same economic constraints.

In such conditions, it is hardly surprising that figures emerge who are aggressive, self-promoting, and skilled at channelling frustration. They speak to real discontent—but redirect it away from the structure of society and towards scapegoats, rivals, or personalities.

The public, meanwhile, is encouraged to focus on those personalities. Outrage is directed at individuals, elections are framed as moral contests, and political engagement becomes a matter of choosing sides. This keeps attention away from the wage system itself—the very mechanism that produces inequality, instability, and recurring dissatisfaction.

Whether it is Trump or any other political figure, the pattern remains. Different individuals come and go, but the underlying relationship between those who work for wages and those who live from profit continues unchanged.

From this perspective, attacking individual politicians is not only insufficient, it is a distraction. It creates the illusion that replacing one leader will solve problems that are rooted in how society is organised at a much deeper level.

As long as the wage system remains—where the majority must work for wages and a minority appropriates the surplus—inequality and conflict are inevitable, and the kinds of political figures people argue over will continue to emerge.

If there is to be meaningful change, the focus has to shift away from personalities and towards the structure itself. The real question is not who governs, but whether a system based on wages, profit, and class division can ever serve the interests of the majority.

Until that question is faced, the cycle will continue—and so will the conditions that produce figures like Donald Trump.

Proper Gander: Theroux the keyhole (2026)

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

Louis Theroux has built up his career as a documentary-maker since the 1990s, with his trademark approach being to patiently spend time among society’s stranger subcultures to learn about what motivates the people within. The subjects of his latest film are prominent figures in the ‘manosphere’, a loose online network which upholds hard-line versions of masculinity. Netflix’s Inside The Manosphere follows Theroux as he meets influencers who have amassed millions of young male fans through their social media platforms, livestreams and podcasts. Their content extols their values of conspicuous wealth, sexism and conspiracy theories, with the influencers all living extravagant lifestyles and exuding confidence, giving their views plausibility among their impressionable followers.

In Marbella, Theroux visits Harrison Sullivan (aka HSTikkyTokky) and Ed Matthews, whose online content includes videos of macho fitness tips and ‘predator stings’ confronting alleged paedophiles. Sullivan becomes suspicious that Theroux is trying to catch him out and cuts short the time he agreed to spend being interviewed, although he later backtracks after his videos about their first meeting attract more clicks. While Sullivan and Matthews represent the ‘laddish’ style of influencer, Justin Waller from Louisiana is more measured, wearing tailored suits as he drives Theroux around in his Lamborghini. Waller’s material combines business advice with a disdain for feminism, saying women tend to prefer traditional family roles. He and his wife are in a ‘one-sided monogamous’ relationship, and it’s not him who’s monogamous. This arrangement is also a preference of the Miami-based influencer known as Myron Gaines, who claims women ‘want a guy that can lead them and dominate them’. Theroux sits in during Gaines’ Fresh & Fit podcast in which his female guests get objectified, belittled and embarrassed. As Theroux later comments, many of the influencers ‘advocate for traditional values while at the same time wanting to be seen with scantily-clad models’.

The confidence which influencers have in their derisory beliefs about women’s roles comes from their ‘red pill’ ideology. This is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, which we’re told in this context means seeing through the mainstream media’s discrimination against men, although ‘redpilling’ is usually shorthand for adopting a far-right viewpoint. New Yorker Sneako is among the more politicised of the influencers Theroux meets. Alongside being a Muslim Trump-supporter, he claims satanists run the world, leaving clues in pictures of celebrities using ‘one eye’ symbolism and telling people such as singer Sam Smith to become transgender. Predictably, he adds that the aim of this satanic cabal is to establish a single global government. While Sneako denies this is Jewish, other influencers share the conviction that a small group of Jews are behind a plan to promote degeneracy through manipulating culture, especially gender politics.

The outlook spun by the influencers is really a convoluted way of enticing people to buy the financial products they have a stake in. Theroux tests one of Sullivan’s investment opportunities and loses most of the £500 he paid in. Sullivan is at least honest in admitting that what drives his material is what makes money for him rather than what is considered right or wrong. An example is when he says he was ‘clip-farming’ by including antisemitic content while not believing it, as he knew this would generate attention. Getting exposure in order to gain more supporters and therefore customers is the priority. The notion that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ would apparently be confirmed after Inside The Manosphere was released, with Sullivan accruing more followers because of the coverage it has given him, according to an article in the Metro (7 April), which itself represents more promotion.

As the focus of the show is Theroux meeting people, not much time is spent analysing the manosphere’s place in society. This approach either admirably allows the viewer to reach their own conclusions or disappointingly makes the programme feel shallow. Theroux posits how the upbringing of the influencers may have contributed to their mindset in that many of them lacked a supportive father figure, perhaps affecting their attitudes to relationships, such as ‘one-sided monogamy’. More widely, he says they are ‘products of a culture – growing up online in a world that’s changing at dizzying speed’ with long-established male roles challenged. He adds that they now project their trauma by ‘spewing hate’ to an audience of young men looking for something to feel they belong to, preferably with money to buy financial products. The fans of the influencers we see in the documentary clearly feel empowered by what their heroes advocate. Theroux recognises that while the influencers offer hope to troubled men, it comes with a belief that they are living in ‘a matrix purposely designed to make men fail’. He suggests ‘the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers, an illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top’.

The personal traumas which shaped the mindsets of each influencer and follower happened in a world which is ‘designed to make men fail’ (and women too, often in different ways). This is the divisive world of capitalism, driven by aspirations of wealth amid poverty and power amid powerlessness. They have misinterpreted this, though, and don’t identify the economic system itself as structurally creating (nearly all) people’s disadvantaged position, but instead blame the ‘matrix’ of feminism and a supposed Jewish cabal. This poisonous stance has proved lucrative for the influencers because it attracts attention online among vulnerable men, reinforcing a worrying association between wealth and bigotry. The confidence with which this mentality is promoted disguises its errors and contradictions, such as its ridiculous ‘evidence’ for a Jewish / satanic conspiracy and the hypocrisy of its attitudes to women. For an ideology apparently based on dogged independence it relies heavily on fan worship of the influencers. The ‘manosphere’ is both an expression of the alienation which comes with living in capitalist society and a dangerously misguided attempt at compensating for that alienation.

Mike Foster

Agency and responsibility (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Controversy surrounded the 2026 BAFTA Film Awards, in which John Davidson, whose life with Tourette’s inspired the film I Swear, involuntarily vocalised a racial slur during the ceremony, thus generating predictable outrage. Social media rapidly framed the incident as an ‘outburst’, implying intent. The assumption of agency was immediate.

Yet Tourette’s syndrome involves involuntary vocalisations, particularly in cases involving coprolalia. Uttering socially taboo words is not a sign of personal belief but a neurological compulsion. Coprolalia occurs in approximately 10-15 percent of people with Tourette’s and involves the brain’s failure to suppress socially inappropriate utterances. The individual has no control over the content; the words that emerge are often those with the most shock value, precisely because the brain’s suppression mechanism has misfired.

Agency under capitalism

The episode offers a useful case study in how capitalist society understands, and misunderstands, responsibility. Capitalism rests heavily on the idea of individual responsibility. Workers are treated as autonomous units of labour power, assumed to be rational, self-regulating, and fully in control of their conduct. Discipline in speech and behaviour is expected as part of employability and public legitimacy.

Where agency is compromised, through illness, disability or neurological variation, this framework strains. Instead of adjusting its assumptions, society often reasserts them more harshly. The presumption of intent remains, even where medical explanation is well documented.

This reveals a contradiction. When an individual is able to conform, their conformity is praised as personal virtue. When they cannot, their difference is interpreted as moral failure.

The policing of speech

Modern capitalism places significant emphasis on regulated language. Public speech is increasingly scrutinised, not only in workplaces but in cultural life. While there are good reasons to challenge genuinely racist or abusive expressions, the framework often operates without regard to material context.

This is not an argument against challenging racist language. When someone with full agency chooses to use slurs, that reveals values and deserves opposition. The point is that agency itself must be established before moral judgment is applied. Treating involuntary and deliberate speech identically serves neither anti-racism nor disability justice.

The Davidson incident illustrates this tension. A word can be socially harmful in its historical weight and impact. But responsibility cannot be abstracted from agency. To treat involuntary neurological discharge as deliberate prejudice collapses an important distinction.

Capitalist society frequently commodifies ‘inspirational’ narratives of disability. Films, awards ceremonies and media profiles celebrate individuals overcoming adversity. Yet this celebration is conditional. It assumes that disability can be packaged into palatable form. When the unfiltered reality appears, tolerance evaporates. The disabled individual is accepted only so long as they remain manageable.

Outrage as commodity

The rapid reaction online was not incidental. Social media platforms reward immediacy and emotional intensity. Speed outruns verification. The platforms profit from engagement regardless of accuracy. A nuanced explanation of Tourette’s generates less interaction than moral outrage. The economic incentive is towards simplification and condemnation, not towards understanding the material reality of neurological conditions.

Under these conditions, moral judgement becomes performative. Expressing indignation is easier than examining neurological evidence. The result is a form of ‘gotcha’ politics that prioritises signalling over understanding.

The paradox of inspiration

Davidson’s presence at the BAFTAs was itself a product of an inspiration narrative, his life ‘overcoming’ Tourette’s packaged as cultural uplift. But inspiration requires disability to be sanitised, controlled, presented as triumph over adversity.

The moment Tourette’s manifested as it actually does, involuntarily, inconveniently, in a way that cannot be neatly celebrated, the sympathy fractured. This reveals what capitalism often means by ‘acceptance’: the disabled must perform their difference in ways that affirm rather than challenge existing norms.

Responsibility reconsidered

A socialist analysis does not abandon the concept of harm. Words carry histories; their impact is real. But an equitable response requires proportionality and context. If an action is involuntary, then moral condemnation is misdirected.

The deeper issue is the rigidity of a society that demands uniform neurological performance in public life. When responsibility is defined without regard to material capacity, it ceases to be rational and becomes punitive.

The BAFTA incident reveals a system that confuses control with virtue and compliance with morality. It treats neurological difference as character defect and involuntary behaviour as moral choice. A materialist analysis rejects this confusion and demands that responsibility be matched to actual agency, not to capitalist fantasies of the self-regulating individual.

Pablo

Life and Times: Bob Dylan in Swansea (2025)

The Life and Times column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ve been a Bob Dylan fan for a long time. His music is top of my list, as it is of many people’s. I’ve seen him perform live a number of times – in London, Manchester, Cardiff and Birmingham. So why wasn’t I jumping for joy when my local newspaper carried the story that the 84-year old legend was soon to do three concerts (not one but three) in my own little home town – and at a venue a walking distance from where I live? In fact, not only was I not jumping for joy, I didn’t even want to go. Why not? Well, because, as I see it, Dylan has been going downhill musically for a long time – since the late 1990s in fact. The bits and pieces of some of the recent live performances by him I’ve seen on the web have seemed especially dire. So why would I risk spoiling the fond memories I had of him at his best? Don’t get me wrong. He’s still one hell of a wordsmith and, though there was much questioning of his award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, I was less surprised than many. But my perception was that the current package couldn’t be anything but a disappointment – even if the many confirmed ‘bobcats’ attending wouldn’t see it like that.

I relayed news of the concerts to my son, a great Dylan enthusiast too. His quick reply was ‘We’re going and I’ll pay’. So I relented, and on an evening in early November we left the house and walked the relatively short distance along the sea front to see the first concert of the Swansea Arena leg of Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ tour.

What was it like? To be frank, better than I expected. ‘Mixed’ might be the right word – and in more senses than one. Firstly, because he mixed songs from his most recent album (ie ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’) with a selection from previous albums. Secondly because most of the songs he performed from that latest album could, in my view, only be described as dirge-like (and to make it worse some of them seeming to go on forever), while his earlier numbers were well performed on the whole, even if with almost unrecognisable arrangements compared to the original versions. But then Dylan has always been known for going against the grain, despite the fact that, in the content of his songs, any explicitly anti-establishment or ‘protest’ matter is way back in the past. And it must be said that his voice is still strong and that he was, as always in his concerts, backed by a group of exceptionally good musicians. The other thing is that the sell-out audience of 3,000 – to me a surprisingly diverse gathering in terms of age (teenagers to aged hippies) and gender (very much a 50-50 split) – absolutely loved it. ‘What an amazing evening’, one of them who’d come all the way from West Yorkshire posted on a Facebook page the following day. And a good many others had clearly come from afar. Before the start, on our row alone, we chatted with fans from Wrexham, Plymouth, Bristol and Milford Haven. Then at 8 o’clock sharp Dylan and his band walked on, the music started and, after performing for a full two hours, with no breaks or banter between songs, they stood up and walked off. The crowd stood up too and clapped and cheered and shouted for more. But they didn’t get it and the lights came on.

The show over, the question I had to ask myself was whether this, at bottom, was just another example of the way the entertainment industry sells us thrills (often meaningless) to patch over the uniformity and stress of the wage and salary system most of us are compelled to spend our lives in? Was it part of that alienation from mutually cooperative activity which is inherently an obsession with celebrities (people we do not know personally and we may have little in common with) and which is the direct opposite of a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with others?

There’s no doubt that Dylan is some kind of hero to many of those who go to his concerts. And it must be said that he has something unique to offer that makes people listen to him and want to go. Many of his lyrics present ideas and images which, while often anything but immediately decipherable and sometimes downright puzzling, do at least give food for thought and reflection. But it’s the worship of the man rather than of his work that, like celebrity worship in general, I see as questionable and as a symptom of the underlying follow-your-leader mentality that capitalism instils and educates people for. You can like (or love) the music and the lyrics, yes. But to put the individual who produces it on some kind of rarified pedestal seems to me part of that ‘superior being’ idea, which is seen at its worst in the kind of cult worship to be found around ‘charismatic’ figures, whether in entertainment, in sport or in politics.

What’s for certain, however, is that in the kind of world socialists campaign to see established – one without leaders or led, governments or governed and based on common ownership of resources and democratic organisation and decision making – each individual will have the time and space to cultivate their own talents freely and, while no doubt admiring the talents and achievements of others, will be unlikely to see them as heroes. Rather in fact each person will have the confidence to be their own hero.

Howard Moss

Life and Times: Football Is Our Life (2025)

The Life and Times column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’ve always watched football, but I hadn’t been to a match for quite some time when a friend told me he’d managed to get tickets for Liverpool playing Manchester United. Did I want to go? Though I don’t support either team I couldn’t resist. So on a balmy spring evening I found myself at Anfield, Liverpool’s famous ground, among 70,000 other fans of both teams. People milled around everywhere outside the stadium, and when we got in we found ourselves high up in a stand above the pitch looking a long way down. Impressive to say the least. I had a good look around and, among the banners on display, a particularly huge one stood out. It was, being held up by quite a large group of people and it said FOOTBALL IS OUR LIFE. Another banner some way away had the words WE LIVE FOR LIVERPOOL FC.

People’s priorities

I couldn’t help but feel a little sad about this. I appreciate and to a large extent share the love and enthusiasm so many people feel for ‘the beautiful game’ and I can see that it also helps to create the sense of community that may be missing in many people’s lives. But for football or one of its teams to become so all-consuming a part of some people’s existence seems to me a reflection, an admission, of their underdog role, acceptance of a life that does not give them adequate opportunity to develop their own individual talents and capacities and to make their own unique contribution to a common social end.

I am reminded of this too when I go on the website of my local newspaper. Down the side there’s an invitation to click on a choice of three categories of article – ‘Latest’, ‘Most Commented’, and ‘Most Read’. If I click on ‘Most Read’, I know that top of that list will be news of sports stars, actors, singers or other celebrities who are in the news rather than more ‘serious’ matters or events that should be of wide human interest. So, as I write, the biggest audience on this site is not for events in Gaza or Ukraine or how people may be affected by the latest proposed government policy changes, but rather for news of, say, the football transfer market deadline and the pay the stars involved will be receiving.

Media priorities

I was also reminded of my Anfield trip by the recent sad death of one of Liverpool’s star players in a road accident. Diego Jota had died together with his brother when the car he was driving came off the road during an overtaking manoeuvre. Tragic of course, yet the overwhelming grief depicted in the media as being experienced by Liverpool fans brought into sharp focus the phenomenon of mass idolisation of celebrated individuals by people who don’t know them personally. This contrasts with the almost routine acceptance of the fate, whether accidental or not, that may befall ‘ordinary people’ and was illustrated by the tragedy which happened to coincide with the footballer’s death. Dozens of people, many of them young children, died in flash floods in Texas. It was reported on, yes, and words of sorrow and regret were expressed, but in that week’s media coverage this ‘act of god’ in which many ‘ordinary’ people died always took second place to the death of the millionaire footballer whose handling of his Lamborghini may have contributed to the accident that killed him. And the Texan tragedy was also subordinated in many places to coverage of a pop music event – the ‘second coming’ that was the Oasis reunion concert.

Worship and idolisation

Of course, there’s no reason why people shouldn’t take pleasure in and appreciate the skills of talented sports people or the artistry involved in producing music. But is it not a sad commentary on the lives so many lead that this should take the form of displays of near fanatical passion or worshipful admiration – an exhilaration not normally available in the existence they are tied to? Is this not a substitute for the lack of interest, meaning and satisfaction workers experience in the employment activities they’re obliged to engage in to survive and that consume most of their waking hours? Does it not stand as some kind of replacement for the lack of opportunity to express their own talents freely in their daily lives? Is it not a patch of colour in drab lives?

And is it not a pity that so many are unable to see beyond this and seem to place so little value on the everyday heroism of those people who spend much of their time not worshipping heroes but helping others, often those at the very bottom of the social pile?

Meaningful lives

The system we live in spurs us to see certain rich or powerful individuals as more important than and superior to others and to almost merge our own identity with them (think the ‘Swiftie’ fans of Taylor Swift). Is this anything other than a denial of their own uniqueness, a rejection of themselves as meaningful individuals in their own right? As an alternative to this, the society of common ownership of all resources and free access to all goods and services which socialists work to see established will surely be one in which each individual is able to develop their own particular talents to the full, achieve personal satisfaction via meaningful activity and in so doing be recognised and valued for the contribution they make to the social effort. In that society every individual will be their own hero.

Howard Moss

What their papers say (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a popular belief that certain newspapers report things "the way they really are" — without bias. In fact, there are no such things as neutral news items, recognisable entities independent of journalists. Rather, there are those incidents and issues which are perceived by editors as "newsworthy".

Journalists are trained to spot particular aspects of social affairs as suitable material to report on with a bias or “angle". Although we find a slightly different point of view in the liberal, "quality" press from that expressed in the rest, all newspapers have a common standpoint on the profit system — they support it. It follows that what they tell us about the world cannot help but be politically slanted. Last year thirty million people died through lack of food while mountains of beef were produced; thousands were slaughtered in wars while the combatants wished for peace; and millions remained homeless while palatial accommodation stood empty. The press was unanimous in ignoring these contradictions and reserving its astonishment and critical analysis for royal weddings and trying to detect a "new" SDP policy.

Before it is represented in the press, reality is put through the great distorting process. The four main journalistic devices are to personalise, trivialise, historically fossilise and moralise.

They personalise

Society is presently organised on the basis of minority ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. Production is geared to profit for the few, not for social need. Problems like industrial disputes, unemployment and wars are consequences of our social system but the press encourages us to look at them in terms of individual responsibilities. Hence, Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as the demon who has somehow personally engineered the unemployment of over three million people, or else a triumphal heroine who will put "Britain" back on its feet. Strikes are blamed on the personal irresponsibility of reckless trade union leaders. Even self-proclaimed non-revolutionaries like the former Longbridgc shop steward Derek Robinson and the GLC leader Ken Livingstone come in for prolonged campaigns of abuse in which they are reduced to being known as "Red Robbo” and “Red Ken". A variation on this technique of masquerading social issues as personal is to actually personify territories and to speak of "Britain fearing the proposed EEC policy" or “France will be taking steps to ensure that . . .". The persons created by this linguistic trick embody the interests of various sections of the ruling class, so that "Britain’s overseas investments” are in reality the investments of a small minority of wealth owners associated with Britain.

They trivialise

The papers are always littered with inconsequential revelations. We are prompted to turn our heads away from the condition of the world, our poverty and insecurity and busy our minds with matters such as “Why the Duke of Kent is to visit Darlington”, the new rhinoceros at a famous zoo and a thousand other inanities. Socialists are sometimes accused of being killjoys for not wishing to participate in discussions on such matters. But stop to consider why. As they are sliding the neutron bombs into their launching positions are we really expected to open a copy of the Daily Express, read about the man who fell into a vat of custard and still be slapping our thighs as the radioactive dust descends upon us?

They historically fossilise 

Society is in a constant state of change. The institutions, social relationships and problems of today have not always been with us and are only transitory. Journalists give us a misleading vision of society because they have a “photographic” perception of affairs rather than an historical one. They try to present an accurate picture of “the way things are” but they tend to freeze what they look at without seeing each situation as part of a much wider set of social relations which are not only changing all the time, but which we are capable of shaping for our own requirements. Thus, nation states, armies, managers, police and the wages system are all regarded as part of the fabric of society which is beyond any critical comment.

They moralise

On many issues that they examine, journalists pass moral judgement. They try to persuade us that something is good or bad, but the point is that the morality which they peddle is one which favours our social superiors and flies in the face of our own interests. Their moral precepts contort to keep us in place. So strikers who seek a paltry addition to their wage to try and make ends meet are greedy, while business tycoons who acquire additional companies have praiseworthy initiative and enterprise. If a man murders people in North Yorkshire for no reason he is an anti-social wretched villain. If the same man, trained by the SAS, commits the same acts for H.M. Government with a uniform on he will be hailed as a hero. When wealth producers reclaim goods from the wealth owners without paying for them this is theft and is morally reprehensible, but when the capitalists steal from us the fruits of our labour this is making a profit and is seen as morally virtuous.

The press like any other industry is owned by a few privileged people. Three major companies (News International, Reed International and Associated Newspaper Group) own three-quarters of all British newspapers and each company has similar interests in book and magazine publishing concerns, television companies and independent radio stations. In 1948 Lord Beaverbrook said to the Press Commission: “I publish my paper (Daily Express) purely for the purpose of making propaganda and for no other motive”.

Earlier this year. Rupert Murdoch sacked The Times editor Harold Evans because he resisted pressure to take a more right-wing editorial line supporting Thatcher and Tory economic policies. According to Anthony Holden, the features editor, “Mr. Murdoch wants a poodle as an editor” (Guardian, 13 March 1982). The press barons still like to enjoy control over exactly which arguments, about how capitalism should be run, are put in their papers, but there is not a conspiracy of newspaper magnates and most of the time connivance in capitalist propaganda is less explicit.

Nevertheless, the propaganda is always there. Take June 28 this year when there was a brief strike by the National Union of Railwaymen. All the papers were against the workers and with varying degrees of openness took the side of the bosses. Reports were brimming with comments and views from David Howell, the Transport Secretary, Peter Parker, the BR chairman and cabinet ministers, but no report came anywhere near presenting an adequate account of why the workers were dissatisfied with what they had been offered. The Daily Mail displayed a headline “Britain WILL Get to Work” and listed the ways in which workers should attempt to get in to produce profits. On 7 May 1926 the same paper had a similar message for suffering workers: “If you must go about walk as far as you can . . . don't buy more coal than usual. Keep a stout heart and smile at your troubles”. The Sun headline on 28 June was “STRIKE RABBLE" while the Daily Mirror (the paper which claims to stick up for the workers!) spoke shyly about the urgent need to end the strike and for “increased productivity”. The tirelessly liberal Guardian was also urging the railwaymen to “give reality a chance” — in other words “get back to work and stop complaining”. The Times and the Daily Telegraph had identical lines, only couched in more stilted language, whereas the Star took a similar line but with a bare minimum of written language.

Apart from imparting news, the papers also vie with each other to cultivate and cater for a popular culture for their markets. They reinforce ideas about desirable lifestyles, from the adverts in the Financial Times for special credit cards “for people who travel and entertain around the world. People whose lifestyle and income requires and justifies an additional range of financial services" (28 June 1982), to the crude horoscopes and cheap, brash “lighthearted" pages in the gutter press. Pleasure is promoted here as a spectator sport, something you need to get with cash, something where you are “being entertained". The lowest common denominator of interest among an estimated readership is exploited to the hilt to maximise sales. This converts the paper into another type of mass entertainment to be mechanically produced for profit on one side and passively consumed for gratification on the other. As Richard Hoggart observes in his book The Uses of Literacy:

These productions belong to a vicarious spectators' world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment. in which one gains by giving much (p. 340).

The only paper which represents the interest of the working class, because it stands for socialism and nothing else, is the Socialist Standard. The press and the other means of communication can only be used for their proper function — the unrestricted dissemination of ideas and other information — when they, along with everything else, are commonly owned. Raymond Williams approaches this point when he observes:

The irony is that the only practical use of communication is the sharing of real experience. To set anything above this is quite unpractical. To set selling above it may seem normal, but it is really only a perversion to which some people have got used: a way of looking at the world which must be right and normal because you have cut yourself down to its size (Communications, p. 26).

Remember knowledge is power, and every new reader of the Socialist Standard makes the movement for socialism stronger.

Gary Jay

Letter: Nothing has changed (2005)

Letter to the Editors from the August 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nothing has changed

Dears Editors

Twenty years ago, there was a high profile pop concert organised by the Live Aid group, to help the famine in Ethiopia. Now two decades later nothing has changed.

The Live 8 concerts addressed the effects of poverty not it causes. Unless the present social system has changed, for many more decades down the line there will be more Live Aids, more GB summits on this poor continent, and more Bonos and Bob Geldofs, yet all their cries for billions to be spent on aid are still unlikely to make more than the smallest dent in the deprivation.

Although there is criminal incompetence of Africa’s post-colonial black elites (the people who call themselves presidents, prime ministers, and in some instances kings and princes of the continent have waged war on their own people and plundered the continent’s wealth to ever bulging Bank account in Switzerland), the main problem of the continent is capitalism.

It is common knowledge that up to two-thirds of the world’s population are hungry, while millions actually die from starvation each year. Why in a world of potential plenty is so elementary a human need as food neglected for some many people?

Some would deny that we live in a world of plenty and claim that the cause of world hunger is natural scarcity. That in other words, some people starve simply because not enough food can be produced.

In the present state scientific knowledge and productive techniques, enough food could be produced adequately to feed the population of the world.

World malnutrition then is not a natural but a social problem. Its cause must be sought not in any lack of natural resources but in the way society is organised. World society everywhere rests on the basis of the resources of the world, natural and manufactured, by very rich minorities.

Rock stars or any other celebrities will not persuade the rich class to make world poverty history. It’s in fact the world market system that ruled the world. Acting like a natural force beyond human control, it has much power than any national government.

The market creates an artificial scarcity and organised waste that is responsible for poverty and hunger in the world today. The law that governs everywhere is “no profit, no production”.

Michael Ghebre, 

London NW1

Proper Gander: Hacked off (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the September 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

For some journalists, the ‘freedom of the press’ has meant the ‘freedom’ to get information for a scoop by any unscrupulous method, especially tapping phones. ITV’s documentary Tabloids On Trial was a reminder that the ‘phone hacking scandal’ is still being played out in the courts, over eighteen years since it first became public. Much of the programme is taken up with ITV News’s Rebecca Barry interviewing people involved, such as ex-journalists and celebrities. Footballer Paul Gascoigne, now looking older than his years, talks about the damage done by newspaper exposés of his personal life and how reporters learned the details. Actor Hugh Grant alleges that The Sun used information about him gathered through microphones in window boxes, medical records ‘blagged’ from the NHS and burglary. Singer Charlotte Church tells of how she was targeted by the press from when she was a teenager, and says they became an ‘inescapable abuser’. Ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown says that when his phone was hacked, this risked the leak of state secrets to the press. Even Prince Harry is interviewed, telling us that the surveillance and mistrust it led to ‘sucks’. When he won his civil court case against Mirror Group Newspapers in December 2023, the judge ruled that phone hacking and illegal information gathering was ‘habitual and widespread’ in the company.

The spare heir isn’t the only royal to have been affected. In 2005, the royal family (or their staff) noticed that some of the details in News of the World articles about them could only have come from voicemails, so they contacted the police. A reporter and private investigator were subsequently convicted of phone hacking, and the investigation closed after a few months with the Metropolitan Police claiming there was ‘insufficient evidence’ of any other wrongdoing at the newspaper. As Nick Davies, an investigative journalist who uncovered the scandal, says in the documentary, they ‘very very nearly got away with that’. Then, in 2011, it was revealed that News of the World journalists had also hacked into the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler while she was missing. The resulting backlash led to the newspaper closing down.

The Leveson Inquiry began the same year, collating reports from thousands of people who had information about them gained surreptitiously by journalists and contracted private investigators. At the hearings, senior newspaper staff and reporters all denied knowledge of phone hacking, except James Hipwell, who said that it happened daily on The Mirror’s showbiz desk, then overseen by Piers Morgan. Interviewed for the documentary is Paul McMullan, previously of the News of the World, who admits that phone hacking was commonplace and accepted, opining that privacy was something that people may want, but don’t need.

Many of the celebrities and others have won damages in court, and civil cases are ongoing, including that raised by Prince Harry. Cases have been or will be against behemoths Mirror Group Newspapers, News UK Newspapers (part of News Corp, which owns The Sun and now-defunct News of the World) and Associated Newspapers, which includes The Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday. As pointed out by ex-broadsheet editor Baroness Wheatcroft, considering that this is an industry-wide crime with thousands of victims, there have been few criminal convictions. Only eight journalists or private investigators and one senior figure (News of the World editor Andy Coulson) were found guilty of hacking-related crimes. An explanation for this low number suggested by the documentary is that the police were reluctant to investigate because of their connections with the press, described by ex-newspaper editor Paul Connew as ‘almost a mutual backscratching relationship’. Hugh Grant remarks that the police were ‘as dangerous as the reporters’ because they would tip off journalists. An undercover police officer working at a private investigator firm says that what he reported back to the Met was ignored because their senior staff were friendly with those at The Sun. The Tories dropped the Leveson Inquiry before any links between the police and the papers were investigated. The documentary is careful not to go too far here, raising more questions about how close those links between parts of the establishment have been.

The suggestion that phone hacking is part of a bigger issue in a more fundamental way is made by Prince Harry, of all people, in calling the claimants including himself the ‘Davids’ to the Goliath of the ‘vast media enterprise’. He seemingly recognises that even his own status and wealth is dwarfed by the clout of the media industry, with its central role in the capitalist economy. The phone hacking scandal is notable in that it has wronged some of those at the top of capitalism’s hierarchy, also including Gordon Brown. The capitalist class and its representatives benefit from how the system – including the media industry – exploits people, but because they are newsworthy, they’re subject to being exploited by the media themselves. And it appears to be only the very richest victims – like the prince and the ex-PM – who can afford what’s called justice. Even Hugh Grant hasn’t got the money to cover the £10 million in legal fees which a victory in court would cost him, hence him agreeing an out-of-court settlement with The Sun.

Of all those interviewed for the documentary, investigative journalist Nick Davies has the widest and clearest view of the scandal. As he explains, the ‘ruthless determination’ for profits has driven tactics such as phone hacking, ‘blagging’ and stealing, regardless of the welfare of their targets. If these tactics provide information for salacious stories which sell more newspapers, creating more profit, then those tactics will be used. As Paul McMullan states, the illegality of phone hacking didn’t prevent journalists using it as ‘almost an industry standard technique’. Now that this practice has been exposed, the backlash against it has made it no longer feasible, and therefore no longer profitable.

The media industry has changed since the years when phone hacking was widespread. Then, printed newspapers weren’t as seriously threatened by the proliferation of online news providers as they are now. Changes in how we consume news have eroded the prominence which newspapers once had, and the disgrace of the phone hacking scandal has helped speed up their decline. What hasn’t changed, though, is the ‘ruthless determination’ for profits which drives the media industry and those who work within.

Mike Foster

How to live on your £100 a week (1956)

From the March 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the course of this little piece, our readers are invited to try their wits at guessing in a sort of “‘What’s my Line” manner, the identity of the person we have in mind. We can offer no special prizes of vacuum cleaners, cars or trips to Hollywood for any correct answers because you may not have swallowed the Labour and Tory party lines about the class-struggle being a “myth.” You are warned that the person in question could be employed as any of the following—(or has some alternative means of living such as an Old Age Pensioner), a road sweeper, bus driver, school teacher, coal miner, docker, textile worker, an engineer or an “over paid” meat porter in Smithfield Market. Now for due number one, the amount received by our “object” is only £100 per week and the Daily Express, well known for its distortion of Socialism and its supports of wage claim, publishes some details in its issue of January 23, 1956. The “object” says “£100 a week doesn’t go far,” and this is why she lives in a villa 15 miles outside Paris, and is being sued by her husband for £75,000 worth of jewellery.

Ambitious workers whose idea of curing their poverty is to win the Pools, regard this paltry sum as more than enough for the rest of their lives. Simple arithmetic shows, however, that if a Pools winner spent £75,000 on jewellery there would not be much left for that “little car and little house” (the Capitalists always find it pays to keep workers thinking “little”).

Now as the result of the husband’s changed feelings the villa was scantily furnished; “ it contained: one settee, two small chairs, an old garden table, no carpets, no curtains.” Without going to New Bond Street, which caters entirely for the “lower income groups,” we could buy enough working class “furniture” in six months to fill a warehouse with half the “objects” income, and not on the never-never either.

To anyone so naive as to think she is well off she says “it’s about time the truth were told.” She married a Swiss multi-millionaire in Ceylon 18 months ago and “among the presents to her: a Caribbean Island, two cars, a black panther.” Remember that set of cheap pillow cases you bought when Bill got married? In the court she will be claiming £25,000 to furnish her prefab—sorry, villa—plus £100 a week when she is finding it so hard to keep herself, the panther, ten dogs, two Brazilian parrots and two humming birds on.

Answering questions by the Daily Express reporter, whose job in life is to chase around after the wealthy to keep the workers informed, our “object” says regarding the gems and paintings “I’ve no idea of the total value, perhaps £75,000. The Old Masters? I have one—an El Greco he gave me for my birthday.” And about the £400 a month “ That might seem a lot, but it doesn’t go far with a 70 acre estate. 1 live quietly here since the divorce writ came through. 1 haven’t put a foot inside Balmain’s or Dior’s—haven’t bought a thing.” Apart from in London, “where 1 did buy two Borzoi dogs because 1 need some protection here. 1 have eight other dogs all Pekinese.”

If a superannuated worker, at the age of 65, having worked 35 or 40 years for the same exploiter, gets £400 to spend the rest of his life on, maybe 10 or 15 more years, he is considered comfortably off and well provided for yet this sum is a month’s allowance for our hard-up “ object.” In the back-yard—sorry the grounds, among the terraces, the fountain nymph and sagging model teahouse, there was a “huge swimming pool with a great hole in one side ” which the husband does not seem to care about. “I feel he should put the place back in order,” she said. Well, that’s the story, or rather a story, one of the many that come up. "Of course by the standards of her class. Baroness von Thyssen, ex-model Nina Dyer, is hard pushed; after all, Monte Carlo and such places are not kept going by people who get only £100 a week. The amazing thing is that the members of the working class who make all the wealth and are always told the boss can’t afford more wages, continue nevertheless to take a keen interest in the exploits of Sir Bernard Docker, Aly Kahn, Rita Hayworth and Prince Rainier, etc.; amazing that is until we take account of the drab, colourless and repetitive lives workers live. Perhaps, then, we can understand the attraction of the circus.

To understand it is not, however, to condone it, because as Socialists we know the kind of world the workers can establish when they wake up—the world of Socialism, with no contrasts of riches and poverty, peace and war, but a community of social equals freely talcing what they need from the wealth they have produced in co-operation without the hindrance of wages and profits.

Harry Baldwin

TV Review: What’s in a Load of Rubbish? (2001)

Benjamin "the Binman" Pell

TV Review from the February 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

What’s in a Load of Rubbish?

Last month Channel Four screened a documentary called Scandal in the Bins that was the remarkable story of a remarkable man—Benjamin Pell. Until recently very few people had heard of Pell and today, the majority still haven’t. But Pell has been popping up in the pages of Private Eye for quite some time and has recently had some exposure in the national press. Many who have heard of him know him by one of his other names—”Benji the Binman”.

“Benji the Binman” is what some might call “a great British eccentric”. Others might call him a simple thief. But essentially he is a collector. A collector of rubbish—indeed, a freelance collector of rubbish. For the last few years Pell has earned a living of sorts through scrabbling round amongst the refuse of the rich and famous, their agents and solicitors. A staunch Zionist, he began by raiding the bins of pro-Palestinian organisations in London and then moved on from there. The story which really made him—and which turned him into a household name among Fleet Street editors if nobody else—concerned Elton John’s financial difficulties and how they had been brought about through his mammoth and conspicuous consumption.

From that time on Benji has hardly looked back. He claimed in the programme that he is so obsessed with newspapers he used go down to Euston station every Sunday and collect them off the trains but in the last couple of years he has become a key contact for editors and newsroom managers and has had stories that he has ultimately been responsible for printed in almost every national newspaper in Britain. A man with an “anti-establishment” air about him, it is alleged that he has been heavily involved in everything from the Fayed/Hamilton case to the recent leaking of the Philip Gould memos about Blair.

Although his recent successes are reputed to have netted him £100,000 in the last year or so he lives a frugal life at his parents’ modest north London semi, spending a fair proportion of his time in the garden shed where he stores his dozens and dozens of bin bags. Frail and unkempt, his immediate ambition in life is to get a second shed.

Pell’s doctor describes him as an obsessive compulsive and this evidence was used in his favour during some of his many court appearances (whether as a witness, like in the Elton John case, or as a defendant). His interviews for this programme showed that he is certainly eccentric and probably what social workers, years ago, would have called “maladjusted” too. But what the programme also showed— and was at pains to point out—is that whatever he is, he is clearly not mad.

Aware of his eccentricity, Pell will accentuate his unusual behaviour even further to achieve a desired end (such as if and when he gets arrested). In the Elton John case he appeared in court dressed from head to toe in bizarre Elton John memorabilia and took little time convincing the court that he was a harmless nutter who was incapable of being part of any conspiracy of any description. On his late night scavenging forays he will make sure he smells as badly as possible lest he get arrested, as was demonstrated when one of the programme’s hidden cameras showed him being stopped by a police officer who, after a few seconds of questioning, started to search Pell and then hesitated, pulled a face, stopped and then left him to fester in peace.

Rat trap

Scandal in the Bins did a good job showing the human side of Pell—his eccentricity, his very real fear of going to prison and his sheer craftiness. Although Neil and Christine Hamilton were featured saying that Pell had been one of the people who had helped to ruin their lives (as if they hadn’t had a hand in it themselves) Pell showed himself to be at least as hostile to the press as they now find themselves to be. Rightly or wrongly, he sees himself as someone getting as much out of the press as he can by putting his compulsive disorder to use making a living. In the process he causes trouble to the powerful and—more often than not—as a lonely one-man band is the victim of the news corporations’ manipulations, not their primary cause.

Pell claimed that British newspapers are just as corrupt as the people they are allegedly exposing and, naturally enough, he has a ready audience for that view as few outside the British media would disagree with it. Scandal in the Bins had plenty of evidence for it as well. In the most revealing section of the programme two of the most powerful men in the British media—PR guru Max Clifford and Sun political editor Trevor Kavanagh were shown up, with help from Pell, for being the hypocrites they really are.

Clifford’s own PR façade slipped when he walked out of an interview with the programme’s makers shouting and screaming at the film crew for asking him questions about his business methods (even though he didn’t bat an eyelid at their seemingly irrefutable evidence that he had perjured himself in a court case) while Trevor Kavanagh was heard telling an interviewer that the Sun had never paid Pell for a story or for any of his illegal activities. As the tape played, the screen showed copies of News International’s invoices regarding payments to Pell for services rendered. Brilliant television, achieving what few—if any—have previously managed to do.

This is not to give the impression that Pell is an entirely blameless character either—he certainly isn’t. He has done his fair share to upset the lives of those he had otherwise no reason interfering with and has readily accepted payment for doing so. The point is that despite his own clear shortcomings his (partial) co-operation with this documentary did as much to expose the systematic hypocrisy and double-dealing of the British press as anything yet shown. If Channel Four repeat it soon (and no doubt they will) try and catch it if you didn’t see it first time around.

In the meantime, it is worth asking yourself when you next see an eye-catching article in the press—whether it be a “serious” investigation by Insight in the Sunday Times or an expose of some pop star’s business dealings in the tabloids—about where the information for the piece came from and of the unbridled skulduggery that took place to get it into print so more newspapers could be sold and more advertising attracted. And when you’re doing that remember to spare a small thought, at least, for a poor Jewish boy from north London with an obsessive compulsive disorder and a shed full of bin bags.

Dave Perrin

Voice From The Back: Lady Bountiful’s cast-offs (2001)

The Voice From The Back Column from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lady Bountiful’s cast-offs

The working class are used to being insulted and patronised but the Labour government’s latest scheme to deal with the plight of the unemployed smacks of a “noblesse oblige” arrogance unsurpassed since Victorian times. “Female celebrities are queueing up to give their cast-off designer clothes to unemployed women to wear at job interviews. Potential employers are not too sure about the scheme in which they will be facing job applicants from Liverpool, Doncaster and London wearing Cherie Blair’s Paco Rabane trouser suit, Elizabeth Hurley’s scarlet Versace heels or a grey suit formerly worn by the Duchess of York . . . Tessa Jowell, the Employment Minister is backing the idea and has donated a jacket. Mo Mowlam will follow suit.” Times, 10 November.

Art s(m)ells

“Art today serves no socially worthwhile purpose. It’s an extravagant waste of money. Yes, people die from hunger and poverty every minute, and no work of art has ever done anything to save the world. Cloaca [his machine on exhibition in Antwerp’s Muhka Museum] if fed only our finest cuisine by people who can probably only afford a sandwich for lunch. The end product is both art and yet something we all produce ourselves every day. In a sense we’re all artists” visitors have to hold their noses and staff have gone on strike because of the foul smell, yet, according to the report in Scotland on Sunday, 29 October, . . . “the machine’s daily discharge of 200 grams is bottled, signed and sold for no less than £1000 a time.”

Capitalism is lethal

In this country, one in five girls aged between 13 and 25 has made a suicide attempt (a figure which echoes the findings of American research). More young British men—some 2,000 a year—now die by their own hand than by any other single cause except for car accidents. You magazine, 19 November.

You have been warned

Greg Dyke, boss of the BBC, has recently appointed Jeff Randall to be the BBC’s first business editor. According to Randall, he intends to be consulted on every programme dealing with business. So how did this self-confessed admirer of Rupert Murdoch and former City editor and associate editor of the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Times land this influential post? “In May he wrote an article about the BBC’s business coverage that attracted the attention of Greg Dyke. It included the assertion: ‘Running through the Corporation, from top to bottom, like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, is a liberal agenda set by patronising, middle class, guilt-ridden do-gooders who dominate its corridors.” The article’s pay-off was just as likely to endear him to his new colleagues: ‘It’s about time he looked at the Corporation’s institutionalised bias against free enterprise wealth-creators and did something about it.” Times, 10 November.

Dam worrying

A report this week by the Chartered Insurance Institute on the impact of climate change in Britain is sure to cause alarm. Professor David Crichton of Middlesex University, who helped write the report, said yesterday: “Climate change will lead to an increased risk of dam failure. About half the 2,500 large dams have earth embankments, most of them constructed before heavy soil compaction equipment was available.” He also said that he was concerned at the secrecy surrounding the way that they were maintained. The report will say: “The thoroughness of inspection depends almost entirely on how much the dam owner is prepared to pay and the results are never published, not even to local authority emergency planning offices or the emergency services.”

Bullying, USA

One in six people has experienced some form of workplace bullying by a co-worker or superior, according to the Campaign Against Workplace Bullying, which started a two-day conference yesterday at Suffolk University Law School to bring to light the problem and look for a way to help . . . [R]eports of bullying are on the rise, in part due to the rising awareness of the problem and the profit demands of the new economy. “More of us work in investment-driven workplaces, and many see that as a license to be cruel to employees and do so with impunity,” Gary Namie explained. “What’s more, usually they’re promoted for it.” Berkshire Eagle, 28 October.

Hopping mad

A hopping landmine that can leap up to 10m into the air and fill gaps left by minefield clearance operations is being developed by the American military. With a powerful piston-driven foot, ultrasonic sensors and radios, the self-righting mines will be able to detect the distance to neighbouring mines and sense when some are missing. The remaining mines will then be able to hop around to once more form a regular pattern covering the original minefield area. military chiefs have asked that this be accomplished within ten seconds. Western Australian, 30 September.

Poverty and the causes of wealth (2024)

From the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Just before Christmas, the Herald columnist Lennie Pennie wrote a piece that looked at extremely rich people who hoard resources (heraldscotland.com, 23 December). She took particular aim at the royal family, who are apparently described by some as ‘thrifty’ and ‘down-to-earth’ because, for instance, they wear items of clothing more than once!

She wrote: 

‘We should never look at an unequal society within which devastating poverty and extreme affluence are allowed to co-exist as anything other than a structural, governmental and societal failure which demands our immediate attention to resolve.’

Homelessness and food banks exist, while ever more people just cannot meet their basic needs. The UK government spent in one year almost as much money providing temporary accommodation for homeless people as it would apparently take to eradicate homelessness completely.

Unfortunately, Pennie’s approach puts far too much emphasis on celebrities, and the royal family especially, for posing with homeless people rather than really doing something about the problem. Better, she says, to ‘use more of the excessive hereditary fortune to redress the balance.’

The article is entitled ‘Poverty: We need to tackle the causes of wealth’. But it says disappointingly little about the real causes of wealth and poverty. Clearly the two go hand in hand under capitalism. It is not just a matter of the rich hoarding their wealth, but of how they obtained it in the first place and how that implies poverty and destitution at the other end of the scale.

Pennie quotes Oscar Wilde about making poverty impossible, but says little about how to achieve this. The rich, she says, might distribute as much of their wealth as possible to those they wish to help. But that is really not the point: let’s do away with money and inequality and establish a system of society geared to meeting human need.

Paul Bennett

Life and Times: Nice twist, keep them happy – and screw them at the same time (2023)

The Life and Times column from the December 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

As summer drew to a close, an open-air concert was held in the large park in South Wales close to where I live. The star of the show was the singer and social media personality, Sam Ryder, who last year represented the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest. Sam is popular and the tickets, some of them costing £70, went like hot cakes. The trouble was that the crowd didn’t get quite what they expected.

Squashed like sardines

First of all it poured down, so torrential rain and umbrellas made it difficult for fans to get a proper view of what was happening on stage. And then, even in the sheltered VIP area, people, so the local paper reported, were ‘squashed in like sardines’, with one fan quoted as saying: ‘This half-baked shelter resembled an emergency station rather than anything remotely resembling a VIP marquee’. It was an extra £50 if fans wanted a ‘sunbed’ there, from which, in the words of one of them, ‘you got insane views of the stage – you could barely see it’. And the price of refreshments shocked some – £10 for a can of flavoured vodka, £12 for a bag of chips and £40 for a bottle of wine (you couldn’t buy a glass). The only concession – don’t laugh now – was that entry was free for children under two.

A substitute for life?

So it was essentially a money-making enterprise, or, as one soaked-through, disgruntled fan put it, ‘profiteering plain and simple’. But why did people go? And why do people keep going to these events put on by the ‘entertainment industry’, which so often result in disappointment and dissatisfaction? One commentator has said that it’s an integral part of a system that sells ‘weekend thrills’ to people who have to spend most of their working hours engaged in activity (ie, employment) that they find neither fulfilling nor meaningful. On that reckoning, it’s an attempt to substitute for the lack of interest, meaning and satisfaction workers derive from the job they’re obliged to do to survive where they’re regarded as a resource in the money-making machine rather than appreciated as a social asset.

And, if this is the case for music gigs, the same could be said about the various sports events, again mainly organised at weekends, where baying crowds shout their lungs out and seem almost to lose their heads when the team they support plays well, scores a goal or a try or wins a match. An extreme example of this was the wild celebrations that took place in Naples at the end of the last football season after its team won the Italian league title, which led to over 200 people ending up in casualty units, more than 20 of them with critical injuries.

Is this all a foil for the normal docility, the unquestioning acceptance associated with the subservient lives most people lead, tied as they are to the absolute necessity of spending most of their waking hours in a job despite the fact that the income it gives them will very likely be peanuts compared to the pay received by those they worship on the stage or sports field?

A substitute for God?

Or another explanation may be one that a former work colleague of mine used to proffer, which was that going to the stadium on Saturdays to support your local football team is a substitute for something that had now gone out of fashion – going to church. The argument went that it offered people the same kind of oblivion past generations found in worshipping a god or a divinity, with the star footballer or the pop musician a replacement for this. This also stood in as a replacement for lack of opportunity to express their own talents freely in their daily lives and offered some kind of exhilaration that was not available in the existence they were tied to. My colleague usually added the less negative point that this weekend activity also served the purpose of bringing people together in a common pursuit and even giving them some kind of spiritual focus. Not of course that there seems to have been very much that was spiritual in the debacle of that concert in my local park or in the rivalry between opposing fans often played out both in and around football grounds.

Do we need celebrity?

Of course, there’s no reason why people shouldn’t take pleasure in and appreciate the artistry involved in producing music (of whatever kind) or the skills exhibited by talented sports people. And it is possible to do this – and many do – without the displays of worshipful admiration for their heroes shown by pop concert goers or the near fanatical passion of fans at sports events. Only a pity that, under the system we live in, many others are unable to see beyond attachment to heroes, to fanatical fandom, to worship of celebrity.

In a different kind of society, the kind that we advocate and campaign for, it goes without saying people will have the freedom of choice and the ability to use their talents to the full without being prey to the whims or the dictates of a boss, a production target to be reached, or the next twist and turn of the market. In that society there will no doubt be respect, even admiration, for the special talents and abilities of others. But celebrity there won’t be any need for, since people will be their own celebrities.

Howard Moss

Mixed Media: Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern (2014)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern

There was a major retrospective of the work of Richard Hamilton at the Tate Modern in 2014. He is acknowledged as the inventor of 'Pop Art' which he described as 'popular, transient, expendable, low-cost, mass-produced, young, witty, sexy, gimmicky, glamorous, and Big Business.'

The exhibition reconstructs his installation Fun House, originally shown as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1956 show This Is Tomorrow. It incorporates film, music, distorted architecture, op art and Hollywood film imagery and pin-ups such as Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Marilyn Monroe, and Robbie the Robot from Forbidden Planet. It is an homage to 'Americana', as well as a celebration of the new youth and 'pop' culture of 1950s capitalism.

In his 1956 collage Just What is it that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing? Hamilton has a muscle-man provocatively holding a lolly with the word POP and a woman with bare breasts wearing a lampshade hat, surrounded by emblems of the affluence of 1950s capitalism from a vacuum cleaner to a large canned ham. Capitalism is portrayed as 'cool', it was riding high in its 'golden age' of the post-war economic boom, the reformists believed capitalism could work in the interests of the working class, and Macmillan proclaimed 'people have never had it so good.' Hamilton particularly admired the German electrical company Braun and its Chief Design Officer Dieter Rams whose 'consumer products came to occupy a place in my heart and consciousness that Mont Sainte-Victoire did in Cézannes', and in 1964 he began to base works on Braun's marketing images.

After the failure of Keynesian capitalism in the 1970s, Hamilton was horrified by the 1980s capitalist restructuring under Thatcher, and the reintroduction of unfettered free market capitalism. His 1984 installation Treatment Room is inspired by the bleak, clinical style of the capitalist state reflected in the DHSS office or NHS hospital waiting room. A TV monitor where the X-ray machine would be repeats footage of Thatcher from the 1983 Tory Party Conference. His War Games (1991-92) used TV news footage of the 1991 Gulf War which portrayed the war as a sport for viewers and reminds us of the BBC Newsnight coverage with Peter Snow's sandpit and models. Later Hamilton portrays 'war criminal' Tony Blair as a gun-toting cowboy against a backdrop of military inferno in Shock and Awe (2010).

The Hamilton retrospective has some salutary lessons: you cannot 'reform' capitalism to work in the interests of the working class, and war is endemic to capitalism due to competition between capitalist groups for raw materials such as oil in the Middle East.

Steve Clayton