Tiny Tips (2025)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Brazil, Russia, and South Africa top the list for wealth inequality, each posting Gini coefficients around the low 0.8s. These scores imply a highly concentrated distribution of assets relative to the rest of the population. Several energy-rich economies—such as the UAE and Saudi Arabia—also rank high, reflecting significant concentrations of financial and real assets among upper tiers of wealth holders. Country Gini Coefficient 2024: Brazil 0.82, Russia 0.82, South Africa 0.81, United Arab Emirates 0.81, Saudi Arabia 0.78, Sweden 0.75.

[ZeroHedge]

. . . Latin America remains the only region in the world that has not shown a clear decline in child marriage over the last three decades. Nicaragua has the highest rates within the region and ranks 14th globally with 10% of girls marrying or entering a union before age 15. Among boys, 19% marry or enter a union before the age of 18. Here are the main reasons for child marriage in Nicaragua… Poverty continues to affect a large portion of Nicaragua’s population. The United Nations reports that 48% of people live below the poverty line. Continual climate disruptions devastate the environment and worsen economic conditions. High levels of organized crime and human trafficking also contribute to insecurity. Many families marry off their children to ease financial hardship and improve their economic situation, resulting in increased levels of child marriage in Nicaragua. Furthermore, Nicaraguan society continues to enforce cultural and gender norms that pressure girls to marry young and bear children.

[The Borgen Project]

At the centre of the criminality in Gaza today are armed gangs, whose members are often drawn from the territory’s powerful clans. These clans are extended families that have historically played leading roles in their communities – but have also, at times, operated like local mafia. During the recent conflict, clans have settled old scores with violence. Gangs associated with the clans have expanded into racketeering, drug dealing, kidnapping, robbery and extortion. 

[The Conversation]

The rally was a good time with a positive vibe, and I’m glad to see Americans coming together in opposition to one tyrant. But until and unless we start coming together in opposition to tyranny itself — the state per se — and in support of liberty for all, the only question is how much more kingly and despotic our next ruler will get than the previous one got. 

[CounterPunch]

(These links are provided for information and don’t necessarily represent our point of view.)

Halo, Halo (2025)

The Halo Halo Column from the August 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Not for the first time comes a report of a 45-year-old Afghanistan man marrying a six-year-old girl. He reportedly has two wives already and paid the child’s family for the ‘marriage’. The report notes that ‘since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, child and early marriages have been on the rise’. It’s said that this rise is due to ‘worsening poverty and strict restrictions on women and girls, especially the ban on female education. UN Women reported in 2024 that this restriction has led to a 25 percent increase in child marriages’ (tinyurl.com/m54ty4jy ).

A Pakistani 72 year old Catholic male has, after 23 years on death row, been acquitted of a blasphemy conviction. He was originally charged with ‘insulting the Prophet Muhammad” – a capital offence in Pakistan’ (tinyurl.com/yu8xpysj). It has now been ascertained that he had mental health problems, so could not be held accountable. It’s expected that this defence will be used in dozens of other blasphemy cases.

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Did you know that the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum is striking at the very foundation of European civilisation? If you’re going to pee people off you might as well go the whole hog. The museum, supposedly, has also ‘insulted’ god and every catholic in the world. Respect!

Who is making this outrageous claim? TFP Student Action Europe is. This is a right-wing catholic organisation founded in 1960. It would appear to want to set the world clock back to medieval times, unlike the global political movement masquerading as a religion which sanctions child abuse and wishes to turn the clock back to the seventh century. What does TFP mean? Apparently, it stands for tradition, family and property.

This is to be found on its website: ‘The Seventh and Tenth Commandments protect property. Property… (is) the guarantee of freedom. If it is not respected, we will automatically be led by socialism. Together, these three values, tradition, family and property form a protective wall against Marxist, socialist, and communist ideology’.

So why all the kerfuffle? It’s caused by a condom. The item in question is a very old condom, one that’s two hundred years old. We would suggest that it shouldn’t be utilised for its intended use as it’s probably well past its best before date. The condom ‘features an erotic print of a nun and three naked clergymen about to engage in a sexual act’. Surely the important question should be, was it consensual? So, the TFPSA finds this condom ‘sacrilegious’ and displaying it goes ‘far beyond moral and spiritual boundaries.’ What one wonders do these would-be moral arbiters think of the temples in India where they could view the erotic carvings on the walls? How do they find the Amsterdam red light district?

Apparently ‘Dutch conservative Christian group Civitas Christiana has been demonstrating outside the museum calling for the condom to be removed.’ Is the removal of a condom really wise? One thought that Catholics were mandated to practice safe sex at all times? (tinyurl.com/2jsk59bw).

DC

Crisis and scandal – Happy New Year? (2025)

From the February 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The first few days of 2025 has seen the news dominated by two features, neither of which are anything new. That there is a housing crisis is a frequently covered issue, while, unfortunately, reports of sexual exploitation are all too common.

Friedrich Engels, accounting for the many privations he documents in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England, draws what would have been a controversial conclusion. Despite laissez-faire being the dominant economic attitude he voiced the necessity of the state playing a much more active mitigating role.

Subsequent history bore this out. The slums and overcrowded tenements of the new industrial towns Engels saw had, just 45 years later, resulted in government action. The 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act enabled London councils to begin building houses, with Bethnal Green seeing the first of these in 1896. This initiative was extended to councils outside London by the 1900 Housing of the Working Class Act.

The poor physical health of so many working men revealed by First World War recruitment led to such state intervention being further extended in 1919 by the Housing Act. Also known as the Addison Act, it made housing a national responsibility, requiring local authorities to build 500,000 new homes over three years. The rationale was that healthy homes would furnish a healthy population. How ironic and tragic that over a century later, during a time when health services are being overwhelmed, there is currently a housing crisis.

The present government, echoing the one of 1919, has done what it seems all governments do when facing a serious social problem, it has set a target. 1.5 million homes to be constructed by 2029, around 370,000 a year. That is 140,000 more than the quota set by the previous administration. All well and good, to an extent, if building on that scale actually happens. The real problem ultimately is not housing but wealth, or the lack of it.

A recent radio interview with a woman in Liverpool illustrates the difficulties. She has two young children and presently is having to live with her own mother in her two bedroom home. This means the younger mother and her daughters are required to share a bed. Her local authority has a duty to house this woman and her children. Its failure to do so is due not to malfeasance, but to not having the physical property to supply. Nor does it have the resources to build houses.

Affordable housing, whether to buy or rent, is supposed to be an obligation on builders. However, builders do not build to meet need, they do so to make profit. They are driven by the same ethos as all of capitalism. More modest, cheaper properties do not cost substantially less, pro rata, to build than larger, premium properties that can command higher-end prices. A house, just like a single brick, is a commodity that must return the best possible profit for its maker.

Around Barnsley, for example, there are a number of brownfield sites for which planning permission has been granted. Many of these permissions have subsequently lapsed without a brick being laid. Whatever potential for profit exists or existed on these sites it seems insufficient for the market to act. The local authority has not been unwilling or obstructive, nor is there an absence of housing need. No matter whether targets are set locally or nationally, that need will not be met if there is a more pressing need for money.

No matter how sympathetic the radio interviewer, the listeners, politicians and pressure groups, that Liverpudlian woman and her children are, in brutal capitalist terms, not economically viable. It is quite possible that those children, and all too many like them, are or will become vulnerable. The scandal dominating the news at the moment is the seemingly huge sexual exploitation of children, dating back over decades.

Like the housing crisis this is by no means a new phenomenon. The age of consent to marry, in England in 1700, was 12 for a girl, 14 for boys. The Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885, raised the age to 16 for girls, with more severe punishments for those procuring those under 13.

Just as housing need is addressed by politicians setting targets, so they deal with this exploitation through establishing, or calls to establish, enquiries. These meet, gather evidence, propose action and then the story drops from the headlines until it re-emerges years later when little has changed.

How such things are legally considered reflects the prevailing economic structure of society. The 12-year-old requirement referred to the minimum age a girl could marry and was first established in the 13th century. Then the feudal system based on land ownership led to marriages via which estates could be secured and expanded through marriage. The Crown, then being the arbiter of law, determined that minimum age by which a female could wed.

By the time Engels was writing his book capitalism had become, and still is, the system through which social relations are produced. Virtually anything can be turned into a commodity for sale. It is a system based on the exploitation of individuals’ labour.

That labour might be employed in making widgets or supplying a service. Child labour in the UK is mainly prohibited except for a few exceptions that are highly regulated. When it is sex work that’s the issue, and there are children involved, legal and moral disapprobation is invoked.

However, for those so steeped in capitalism’s overriding ethos they are willing to risk repercussions, legislation is an inconvenience to be circumvented. If there’s a demand there will be suppliers. The worldwide trade in illegal drugs is a more visible example.

These crises and scandals are undoubtedly connected. At the root of both is money and the power it confers, or nullifies, depending on a person’s financial circumstances. Houses will be built, young persons traded, if there is profit to be made.

For as long as capitalism is allowed to continue, both legal and illegal pursuit of profit will be the ultimate determinant of whether people’s needs, in all respects, will be met. Political posturing and moral handwringing will not make a fundamental difference. Crises and scandals will remain distressing and recurrent features of headlines.

Dave Alton

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the June 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Who knows what goes on behind the closed doors of convents? Bitter Winter (19 April) reported that the French Dominican Sisters of the Holy Spirit were so aggrieved at the behaviour of one of their nuns that they asked the Vatican to send in one of its Gumshoes to investigate her. The Sister was then effectively fired. Displaying secular umbrage she then took herself off to a tribunal and got herself awarded two hundred thousand euros for false dismissal. The tribunal apparently found the investigation biased because the Cardinal in charge of it was ‘friendly’ with another nun known to be an opponent of the one in question’.

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‘An influential traditional priest aged 63 has sparked outrage in Ghana by marrying a 12-year-old girl… During the ceremony, women speaking in the local language Ga told the girl to dress teasingly for her husband. They can also be heard advising her to be prepared for wifely duties and to use the perfumes they gifted her to boost her sexual appeal to her husband.’ Apparently, the girl (shouldn’t that be child?) ‘started the rites to become the priest’s wife six years ago, but the process did not interfere with her education.’ She will also be ‘educated’ in her ‘marital responsibilities such as childbearing’. An NGO reports that 19 percent of girls in Ghana are married before they reach eighteen and 5 percent get married before their fifteenth birthday (BBC 1 April).

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Charlie Hebdo is a French Private Eye-type magazine. In 2006 the magazine reprinted twelve cartoons depicting the founder of Islam which the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten had published in 2005. This did not go down well in certain sections of society. In 2015 two Algerian brothers entered the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed twelve of the staff and wounded eleven more.

In 2022 Salmon Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses was attacked in New York. He was stabbed several times and as a result lost sight in one eye and the use of one hand.

In 2021, an educator in West Yorkshire was teaching religious studies. ‘The lesson that sparked the controversy was designed, ironically, to explore issues of blasphemy and free speech, and of appropriate ways of responding to religious disagreements’ (Guardian 31 March). What triggered the subsequent furore? He showed a cartoon which may have been one of those originally published by Jyllands-Posten. ‘The school immediately suspended the teacher, and ‘unequivocally apologised’ for using a totally inappropriate resource, promising to review the curriculum with “all the communities represented in our school”’.

The teacher was forced to leave his post and is apparently still in hiding.

Ain’t religion wonderful.

DC

Suffer little children (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Monday, 15th August, at King’s Cross, a crowd of irate men and women roughly handled an eighteen year old girl who was alleged to have thrown scalding water into the face of a two-year old girl. One can well understand their indignation. No one in his right mind can see a helpless child misused —or can he?

A few years ago, between the years 1939 and 1945, children were being killed, maimed and wounded by the countless hundred. True, people were indignant. They threw up their hands in horror—cursed the men whose vile duty it was to release these missiles—and went home to knit comforts for their compatriots who were performing the same deeds upon children of another country.

And when the war was over, hundreds of children on the continent of Europe, orphaned or completely divorced from their families by the war, lived like wild animals in bombed cities. Their world was a jungle. They learned that scrounging and stealing, sharp practice and prostitution were their only means of livelihood. Italy supported many such misfits. Who can see the film “Sciuscià” or read Giussepe Berto’s “The Sky is Red”—of young boys locked in barrack-like prisons, or of girls, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen or even less, selling their immature bodies for a handful of food or a bar of soap—without wanting to weep or vomit?

Into these conditions come the mealy mouthed social workers. A recent “March of Time” film proudly announced that several hundred of these children had been reclaimed “ in the glory of God.” For what? To learn the virtues of hard work and honesty, of religion and cant: to be convinced that it is both righteous and correct that at some time in the future they shall be the instruments by which a further generation is pitched into the degradation from which they themselves have risen.

But is there really need to look to the exceptional circumstances of war? Take a stroll round the mean streets of any industrial area and view those grim three-storied buildings that masquerade as schools. Listen to the lessons imparted therein. How are kids to know that French workers are more than sub-humans living upon snails and filthy postcards; that the Germans (or are they Russians to-day ?) do other things besides rob, plunder and devour their young? How are kids to realise that when mother says “she can’t afford it” to their simplest demand, it is an indirect result of the humility and toleration that they themselves are taught? An ageing schoolmaster once told the writer that when he came down from college he too had high ideals, but “you’re beating your heads against a brick wall.” He did not recognise that just like a miner or a factory hand he is employed to train children as cheaply as possible.

Education! The word itself derives from the verb “educe,” which means to “draw out.” The teacher’s job is not to draw out potentialities but to cram in— to cram in the bare amount of facts and the abundance of fantasy that will keep the worker fit and happy in his position of slavery.

And when school is over for the day, what then? Football in a side street, a game of cricket in the park, or down the market with Mum learning how to save a penny here and there and how to ask for two separate pounds of potatoes to get a double “ turn of the scale.” Of course, there are some wonderful institutions for kids. They can join a youth club and learn “citizenship” or the Air and Army Cadets and learn how to kill. Yes, truly wonderful institutions!

Suffer little children! Whether it be individually at the hands of some poor warped mind or en masse as the children of a subjected class, suffer they must in this system of society, whether the conditions be boom, slump, war or peace—and the road of escape will not be found in the classroom. The experiences of the factory, the dole queue, the army, the battlefields provide your education. The world is your university. Wake up and use it!

Ronald.

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.” The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million. “It’s a very good country for the rich man. Chauffeurs, servants, big houses. The question is, who is suffering? The common man.” :

[Link.]

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The anti-Muslim politician Geert Wilders, whose Freedom party (PVV) won 24 seats and third place in the Dutch national election last month, says he is forming international alliances to launch branches of his Islamophobic party across the Western world. Almost 1.5m Dutch people voted for the PVV in June. “The message, ‘stop Islam, defend freedom’, is a message that’s not only important for the Netherlands but for the whole free Western world.”

[Dead Link.]

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The United Nations estimates that each year 5,000 mostly Muslim women and girls are shot, stoned, strangled, stabled, burned, or smothered by family members with the intention of cleansing shame from the family’s name. While most of these crimes occur in the Middle East and South Asia, immigration is taking them around the globe.

[Link.]

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Fears are growing for the fate of thousands of young girls in rural Mauritania, where campaigners say the cruel practice of force-feeding young girls for marriage is making a significant comeback since a military junta took over the West African country. Aminetou Mint Ely, a women’s rights campaigner, said girls as young as five were still being subjected to the tradition of leblouh every year. The practice sees them tortured into swallowing gargantuan amounts of food and liquid - and consuming their vomit if they reject it.

[Link.]

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As 14-year-old Nguyen Hoang Anh was being branded with hot irons, had solvents poured in his wounds and had his teeth pulled out with pliers, those who heard him ignored his cries. In most countries, suspicions of any kind of child abuse, let alone such a horrific case, would rouse a small army of social workers and police. Vietnam, however, has no such public system and only loose laws protecting children and other vulnerable people. “We don’t consider beating a child to be violence against children,” concedes Nguyen Hai Huu, director of the Ministry for Labour, Invalids and Social Affairs’ child-protection unit.

[Dead Link.]

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An Indian court has ruled that Hindu gods cannot deal in stocks and shares, reports said Saturday, after an application for trading accounts to be set up in their names. Two judges at the Bombay High Court on Friday rejected a petition from a private religious trust to open accounts in the names of five deities, including the revered elephant-headed god, Ganesha. “Trading in shares on the stock market requires certain skills and expertise and to expect this from deities would not be proper,” judges P.B. Majumdar and Rajendra Sawant said, according to Indian newspapers.

[Dead Link.]

Voice From The Back: Between $373 billion and $1.6 trillion (2000)

The Voice From The Back Column from the July 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between $373 billion and $1.6 trillion 

. . . is what it will cost to clean up the sites polluted with uranium in the USA, depending on how thoroughly the job is done. But there is a much cheaper way, according to Sandia national laboratories of Albuquerque, New Mexico—leave it to nature, which will neutralise the radioactivity—in time, a very long time. In other words, do nothing, as millions of other capitalist firms are doing with their pollution.

In Lewis Carroll’s madcap world, 

. . . Humpty Dumpty declares, “A word means what I say it means”. It seems that Brian Souter, the Scottish multi-millionaire and homophobic would agree with Humpty Dumpty: “His inspiration comes from the Church of the Nazarene, a fundamental American sect based in Kansas City. Although it takes a harsh line on all matters sexual, it allows him to get on with business. As he explained, the sect’s “ethics are not irrelevant but some are incompatible with what we do because capitalism is based upon greed. We call it dichotomy, not hypocrisy” (Observer, 14 May). In another book, even more fantastic than “Alice”, it states: “It will be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” This has not scared off our Brian from accumulating a reported fortune of £300 million out of the exploitation of the working class. After all, such contradictions in the eyes of the deeply devout Souter, are a “dichotomy not hypocrisy”.

Freedom—as long as you pay 

. . . is the heading of a column in the Irish Independent earlier this year. Gene Kerrigan says, “It’s like there are at least two Irelands, side by side. In one Ireland, an Ireland where fantasies come true, entrepreneurs receive windfall profits of a kind that used to be built up over generations. In the other Ireland, an all-too-real Ireland, people lie for hours on hospital trolleys, untreated, because we have never made up for the health cutbacks of a dozen years ago. Is it unfair to suggest that there might be a cause-and-effect relationship between fantasy Ireland and real Ireland? Ireland is the sixth most “economically free” country in the world, says the Edmund Burke Institute, a ‘right-wing think tank . . .’ The woman in her 80s, who worked hard all her life, paid her taxes, and is now free to gasp her last on a trolley in an overworked hospital, would no doubt find the surveys interesting if she had the breath to comment.”

Sisters of mercy. 

In the 15 January edition of the Irish Independent, a review of an episode in a three-part television documentary, Stolen Lives, recounts the interview with Kathy Byrne who, as a child was placed in one of the industrial schools for girls: “A nun walked in and gave me a whack with her hand and said: ‘how dare you get ink on your dress.’ She was going mad at me and she said, ‘you’re coming with me.’ Kathy breaks into a sob at the memory: She took me to the little place called St Brigid’s and . . . she just beat me and beat me and beat me and beat me. She just beat me everywhere. I was crying for my mum. Please mum, please mum, help me. I missed her so much, I couldn’t believe where I was. And the nun said, ‘You can call your mother all you want. She’s dead.’

Amnesty International, 

. . . in a recently produced leaflet, are appealing for your financial support. On the face of it, it is a powerful appeal. There cannot be a human being worthy of the name, on reading some of the examples of tortures that occur inside modern world society, who is not profoundly moved: “Take the case of Nang Mai. Nang was seized by solders in June 1997, in her township in Myanmar—not for any particular offence, but simply belonging to an ethnic minority. She was repeatedly raped, covered with wood and burnt alive.” Every human being must feel repugnance at such brutal acts. The leaflet goes on to tell us about blowtorches being applied to a person’s face in Algiers. Such barbarities happen all the time inside capitalism. So what is Amnesty International’s solution to such horrors? Send a cheque for £250 or £10 or £other (please tick box). This will enable them to help future Nang Mais or blowtorch victims by “applying pressure to governments around the world”. Our solution? Get rid of the whole awful social system that causes such horrors. We don’t want to apply “pressure to governments”. We want to see an end to the rotten system of capitalism that is the basis for such unspeakable crimes.

Trotskyist tactics summarised 

One learns by failing. Silk Road, Chinese Fortune Cookie.

Capitalism, poverty and child abuse (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The allegations of satanic rituals involving children in Rochdale and the Orkneys, and the life sentence passed on David Hammond in November 1989 for the brutal murder of his five-year old daughter Sukina have provided the national newspapers with a lot of sensational material in the last two years.

The NSPCC estimates that between 50 and 100 children are killed by their parents each year and that a further 16,000 are abused. Child abuse cases reported to them have risen by 20 percent in the last year (Guardian, 19 March) and 7 of their 66 teams claimed to have evidence of Satanic rituals involving children (Daily Telegraph, 19 March).

The murder of children by their parents is not new. Infanticide was used to control the population and to prevent children born with defects becoming a burden on the community. In China even today baby girls are sometimes killed, where boys are preferred in families limited to one child.

In 19th century London 80 percent of illegitimate babies put out to nurse in the notorious "baby farms" died. Some died of childhood diseases associated with poverty. because their mothers could not afford to pay for their children to be looked after properly. Others were murdered for gain after the fees had been collected.

P. T. Resnick, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969, listed various reasons why parents murder their children: altruistic killing to relieve the victim’s realistic or delusional suffering, whether or not followed by suicide; acute psychosis; elimination of an unwanted child (as when paternity is in doubt or the child would be a financial burden); accidental or unconscious motivation; and spouse revenge—the so-called Medea Syndrome (after Medea in Ancient Greek mythology who, following desertion by her husband, killed their two children, saying: "Thy sons are dead and gone, that will stab thy heart").

Children are frequently warned by parents, teachers and public information films not to talk to strangers. This deliberate inculcation of a suspicious and fearful attitude to strangers is probably more harmful than helpful as at least 88 percent of child murders are carried out by members of the victim’s own family. The same mistrust of strangers is instilled into children to "protect" them from sexual abuse. But children are far more likely to be abused by relatives.

Poor get the blame

Commenting on the strong link being being abused as a child and anti-social behaviour, including child abuse, later in life, Sir Keith Joseph when Minister of Health and Social Security coined the phrase “cycles of deprivation". His argument was that parents brought up in deprived circumstances were responsible for bringing up their children in similarly deprived circumstances.

The political right-wing favours this type of “victim-bashing" approach because it avoids the pressure for social change. To blame the poor for their poverty ignores the fact that capitalism creates the wretched conditions in which many workers live. Capitalism fosters inequality and workers brought up in deprived circumstances have great difficulty in making economic progress. The worst schools, the worst social amenities and the worst job opportunities are all the very poor have access to. Children from poor families are under greater pressure to leave school as soon as possible in order that they can work and contribute to the family income. In addition, some housing estates have such bad reputations that it is difficult for workers living on them to borrow money or obtain mortgages. This has more to do with the continued deprivation from one generation to the next than any moral deficiency or lack of ability on the part of the workers.

Internal stresses within a family, personality clashes, sibling rivalry, incompatibility, worries about health, and misunderstandings between the different generations are similar for rich and poor alike. But the external stresses caused by poverty, unemployment, bad housing, overcrowding or homelessness only affect those who have to work for wages. It is these external stresses, and the fact that workers will have faced many of these problems during their own childhood that makes physical abuse more likely to happen in poor homes.

Poverty is violence

Social workers have failed to protect children because under capitalism their function is social control:

We have seen that the ruling class cannot maintain its exploitive domination simply by the direct repressive apparatus of the army, police, courts and prisons. Its legitimation has to be engineered through a range of ideological mechanisms. Social work operates primarily as part of these mechanisms.

(P. Leonard, Poverty Consciousness and Action, 1975).

Capitalism distorts relationships. By putting a price on everything and subordinating all activities to the need to make a profit it has made us all rivals. It is no surprise that children have been regarded as their parents’ property, because capitalism prizes property above everything else.

Hypocritically, individual acts of cruelty are condemned by politicians while children are allowed to starve in underdeveloped countries to maintain profits. In the Phillipines children work long hours in what amounts to little more than slavery without much condemnation from European reformers, some of whom are happy to reap the profits that are made.

In the case of Sukina Hammond the Daily Star carried huge headlines “Whipped to Death" and gave lurid details of the child’s suffering. But only a handful of cases are reported in this way. The majority of children killed by their parents will not be mentioned because they are not newsworthy enough. Even in death Sukina Hammond was exploited for a headline.

Workers owe it to themselves, their children and to future generations to remove the profit motive, the property tag and all the rivalries and suspicions which are inherent in competitive societies. Perhaps then children like Sukina Hammond will not have died in vain.

Carl Pinel

Between the Lines: Male violence (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Male violence

Channel Four's Brookside (Mon and Wed 8pm, Fri 8.30pm) has woken from its recent slumbers in a controversial attempt to lift its ratings, now down to little over three million. By introducing the gruesome Trevor Jordache character—a wife beater and child abuser— Brookside has once again set the daytime TV shows a-chattering. And with good reason. Brookside have simply introduced the best (and most original) storyline into a British soap for ages.

The background to the story has been that the Jordache family, of mother and two teenage daughters, had previously been moved to get [away from] husband and father Trevor, convicted of physical assault and sexual abuse. After ferrying them around bedsits for two years, the authorities have now found the Jordaches an inadequate “safe house” on Brookside Close. Unfortunately they have been beset by Trevor's unwelcome attentions once again on his release from prison. Having wiled his way back into the Jordache household with a cry of poverty, the plot has essentially been revolving around Trevor's increasingly hideous behaviour and the plans of the desperate mother and eldest daughter to kill him rather than face his continued assaults—or the alternative of eviction from their new "safe house” on Brookside Close if the authorities find out about Trevor’s return.

The portrayal of this sticky situation has been graphic, bringing into the homes of millions the torment suffered by those women and children with a monster in their midst, a monster mentally equipped for his wrong-doing by a society where sex is cheap and dirty and where violence appears as the "easy” solution to problems. The most interesting aspect of the story is the way in which, beyond the ratings hype, it has illustrated how monumentally badly capitalism copes with the situations it itself has helped create.

Viewers may well ask themselves whether a two-year spell couped up in a dingy prison cell was appropriate for a man whose actions towards those he professes to love have persistently bordered on the pathological. Dealing with any such individuals in a socialist society would not be easy, and no-one pretends it would be, but as Brookside has amply demonstrated, capitalism is at a complete loss, unable to provide the institutional framework to help those individuals who may not be able to help their own actions, let alone provide a situation where mother and children can live in safety and comfort.

Life should never be as brutal as it is for the imaginary Jordaches of Brookside, but unfortunately for thousands of families in the real world of capitalism, it most certainly is.

Female equality

If any show has demonstrated why feminism on its own is not enough it was BBC2’s “Ladies in Lines". Forty Minutes (4 May 9.50pm).This documentary about a platoon of raw female recruits into the Australian army showed why "equality” under capitalism is not generally much of an equality worth having. In this particular instance it was, to be charitable, equal opportunity to be treated like a lump of shit.

The young women involved, arriving with parents, boyfriends and teddybears were subjected to a daily routine that would not have been entirely out of place in a Stalinist labour camp. A quarter of those who started the basic training with the ritual hair-cropping were unable to compile the course and many who did seemed to spend a fair proportion of their time in the charge room, in tears, or both.

Why these individuals should have chosen to enter the army is a tribute to the strength of the society-wide propaganda which eulogizes the virtues of discipline, aggression and competition—supposedly "male values”—above all others. Indeed, virtually all the young women involved testified to an identity crisis. Although they knew they were really women, they were forced to behave as they imagined men behaved.

All in all it proved to be an unedifying sight. Many of the women eventually proved that they could be like male soldiers. but no one, including the women themselves, were really prepared to suggest why this might be a good thing. Beyond correctly identifying the emptiness of the life offered in civvy street, none seemed able to give a credible reason for their presence as women in the army.

In truth, this was not really their fault, as no such reason exists. How on earth can there be a realistic salvation for women under capitalism through simply acting as maniacally as men have so often being trained to behave? Could female soldiers really be the giant step forward for womankind that was implied? Surely not.

As socialists have always suspected, capitalism's reaction to an inequality is invariably to sink those previously at a more humane level to a more barbaric one. thereby giving the appearance of evening things out a bit. Across the world capitalism’s tendency has been to barbarise those who are most vulnerable to its unyielding propaganda, and the "ladies in lines" were as good an example of this as is possible to get.

Dave Perrin

Material World: Stolen Children (2021)

The Material World column from the August 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention defines genocide to include: ‘…e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’

As early as Australia’s Victorian Aboriginal Protection Act of 1869, legislation allowed the removal of Aboriginal people of mixed descent to force them to assimilate into white society. Up to the 1970s, in Australia, thousands of ‘mixed-race’ children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour, and many were abused. Described as ‘breeding out the colour’, the policy was known as assimilation. In 1997 a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured ‘the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation… the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state’. The report called this ‘genocide’.

The violence against indigenous peoples around the world is truly shocking. It has been a story of stolen lands and of stolen children.

From the nineteenth century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 indigenous children were forced to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools in an effort to assimilate them into Canadian society. And it was justified by the settler-colonialists as humanitarian and for the child’s own good. Far from being protected, indigenous children were regularly victims of abuse. Indigenous children were taken from their families, often by force. They were housed in crowded, state-funded, church-run facilities, where they were abused and forbidden from speaking their languages or participating in any form of cultural practice or activity, and forced to adopt new names and identities. Many of these children were informed that their families had either given them up or had died. To increase the success of removal policies, the authorities would often send the children vast distances from their families and friends.

The system’s purpose: ‘To kill the Indian in the child’. Children in native residential schools were wards of the federal government and consequently came under the responsibility of various religious communities. ‘The use of the word school is a misnomer,’ said Cindy Blackstock, a professor at Montreal’s McGill University and the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. ‘They were prison camps.’ (tinyurl.com/ychmpdxs)

Intimidation and fear were the teaching tools used to ensure children could not practise their customs and traditions, cutting off any bond to their history.

Conditions were consistently horrendous and distressing, leaving emotional scars on most. Thousands of children taken to the ’schools’ died of disease and other causes. We are only now discovering that many were buried in unmarked graves, to be forgotten as easily as they were neglected.

The Canadian Federal government formally apologised for the policy and abuses in 2008 which its Truth and Reconciliation Commission called ‘cultural genocide.’

The churches also apologised for their roles in the abuse. Nearly three-quarters of the 130 residential schools were run by churches. One, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate which ran the Kamloops Indian Residential School from 1890 until 1969, apologised for what it called the cultural and religious ‘imperialism’ that motivated residential schools, the disruption of families and communities that resulted, and instances of physical and sexual abuse that occurred. At the time, it made no mention of the 215 unmarked graves found at the site, and now admit that they are unable to explain their official records of only 50 deceased children. So it appears to any reasonable observer that the true death rates were being covered up.

Indian Boarding Schools had also been established in the United States with the objective of ‘civilising’ Native American children. The current US Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, has directed her department to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of the ‘dark history’ of these institutions.

The Catholic Church, to hide its complicity in the abuse that took place in its institutions, approved of a state law in South Dakota designed to halt survivors from seeking legal retribution from the Catholic authorities, so shielding the Church from any responsibility or accountability (tinyurl.com/y3ccu5fw).

Today, similar policies very much reminiscent of the residential school systems persist but the language is couched in euphemisms. The children are still being ‘taken into care’ for their own ‘welfare’ and ‘protection’.

In 2016, 7 percent of children across Canada were aboriginal, but they accounted for nearly half of all the foster children in the country. In the province of Manitoba, 10,000 of the 11,000 children in care are indigenous and are taken from their homes for reasons such as poverty, bad housing or lack of wholesome food. Capitalist Christian ‘family values’ would rather break up families than fix the problem of deprivation and the underfunding of social services to the indigenous communities.

Even in the UK, we have witnessed the ‘abduction’ of kids due to the prejudice against those deemed different from ‘us’. From 2009 to 2018, the number of Roma children in care in England has risen by 933 percent, a figure disproportionate when compared with other ethnic groups.

Socialists have been accused of standing for uniformity but the advocate of assimilation, intent upon eradicating the lingering traces of pre-capitalist culture, has been and always will be the ruling class, striving for homogenous consumers with a few pockets of indigenous peoples retained as curiosities for the tourist trade. Socialism is not about one-size-fits-all. Communities and cultures will co-exist, in a global cooperative commonwealth that celebrates both diversity and unity

ALJO

Happy families (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

We feel that it is important to differentiate between sporadic "battering" which can be regarded as part of a normal marriage, particularly in certain cultural groups, and more persistent beating.

The Family Service Unit, from whose journal (Winter. 1973) this comment is taken, was set up over thirty years ago. to deal with the “problem family". During that time, the nuclear family has remained the most predominant home unit in society, but has come under increasing strain. The rise of capitalism has tended historically to break up pieces of stability, to fragment life into smaller and smaller atoms. The common lands were broken up under the Enclosures and the extended family was dislocated with the arrival of the factory system. Now the divorce rate has shot up, and there is an increasing number of single parent families and even of single people without children, often living in bedsits. There is a disturbing feeling of isolation, of alienation, especially in the rapidly growing cities where population is concentrated. as the profit machine grinds on its “labour unit costs” like grain in a mill:

Just a cast away, an island lost at sea. . .

I hope that someone gets my message in a bottle. . .

Walked out this morning. I don't believe

what I saw,

A hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore. (Sting, 1979) 

The problem of domestic violence is impossible to quantify because it takes place behind closed doors. For the same reason, its tragedies are numerous and very rarely charted. Scream Quietly or the Neighbours Will Hear by Erin Pizzey was published in 1974 and documented the incidence of wife-beating in London, where she had founded Chiswick Women's Aid in 1971 as a charitable refuge for the victims of violent attacks in the home. She described in horrible detail the cruel treatment suffered by the women who came to her for help. Violence was said often to arise out of arguments over money or some petty jealousy. The pathetic frustration of a worker, bullied at work and taking it out on the women and children he lived with, was shown to be the most common case, with Sunday nights having the highest rate of violence, presumably because of the prospect of starting work Monday morning. The NSPCC deal with tens of thousands of cases of child-abuse each year, and their reports have recently shown an increase in the rate of child-battering, which they ascribe to the recession. Apart from the increased feelings of frustration arising from unemployment, there are now more children being left all day on their own as two people have to work to earn the equivalent of what had once been brought home by one.

Erin Pizzey has now published a further book on this subject, Prone to Violence (co-written with Jeff Shapiro, Hamlyn, £1.75) which develops a theory of violence which was only hinted at in her earlier work. The 1974 book had concentrated on the problems faced by women who tried to get away from men who had been beating them up. She cited many obstacles which they faced, including the difficulty of getting somewhere to stay with children, and the worry of having to leave children with a man who might be violent towards them. She looked at the weak legal position of women in such cases, especially those who were co-habitees rather than wives, and concluded that

For generations the established charities and more recently the State social welfare services have been picking up the pieces after each individual family crisis. They've not asked or looked for the cause of the troubles or done anything to eradicate them (1974, page 90)

so that the end product of the nuclear family is sometimes a periodically crying wreck, defused by ECT at the hands of the “mental health" practitioners, when the antiseptic, family-planned, two-point-five- child model has not stultified as smoothly as it should.

In the new book, on the other hand, a number of particularly violent relationships are documented, and the suggestion is made that there are a number of people who have been conditioned from early childhood to seek violence as their sole means of gaining attention and feeling secure. This difference in analysis lies behind the two separate sets of refuges for battered wives which now exist. The National Federation of Women's Aids was formed by various feminist groups who saw domestic violence as being a problem of violent men attacking women, who wanted to get away as far and as quick as possible from those men. Erin Pizzey’s Women's Aid, now known more appropriately as Family Rescue, sees the problem in broader terms as consisting of the relationships existing between men and women, particularly of the violent kind. In Prone to Violence she has made her clearest statement yet of why she thinks many women go back to men who have beaten them up. A feminist review of the book in the Socialist Workers’ Party Socialist Review has predictably rejected Pizzey’s line of argument, suggesting instead that women went back to their previous assailants because of their weak economic and legal position, or even to get away from Pizzey herself!

Pizzey may seem the more reactionary partner to this dispute, in that she argues that some of the people involved in these relationships do in some way seek violence as a way of establishing themselves, rather than simply being put upon as helpless victims. In fact, however, apart from some reservations mentioned below, hers is potentially the more revolutionary position, since the solution to the problem expressed in this way would involve a total transformation of human relationships. The same irony exists in relation to the Left as a whole. It is often considered very militant to state that the working class is about to overthrow capitalism, if only one reformist leader were not standing in the way. The fact that most workers still accept capitalism and leaders, and that this is what stands in the way of revolution, holds greater potential for change, even if it seems a more bleak outlook.

Out of the seemingly endless conveyor belt of casualties of cramped working-class stress, Erin Pizzey came to the conclusion that the problem ran deeper than one simply of once-off attacker and victim. Often the people being beaten up came from disturbed family backgrounds. She asked why whole families were not taken into care:

By asking such questions, you are shaking the very foundations of a society that has never questioned its basic assumption that the privileged few should control the lives of everyone else. The class structure and social fabric of our society are so organised that any failure to comply with this assumption is met by a rigid and unyielding bureaucratic offensive . . . violent people are very frightened people. (Prone to Violence, pages 51,57).

She suggests that where a new born child is treated violently rather than gently (for example by parents who are themselves violent) it develops a relationship to its own body chemicals which is unbalanced, becoming “addicted” to feeding off its own adrenalin or cortisone (which has the opposite effect of adrenalin, inhibiting the blood flow). She analyses violent relationships as being based on such imbalances, and believes that the chemical manifestations of this can be inherited directly. This medical theory has not been proved or disproved, and at times appears bizarre, even sinister:

We hope to see pharmaceutical companies working to find a whole new spectrum of drugs that could be used to aid the internal work with the emotionally disabled. (Ibid. page 181)

However, much of the social commentary surrounding this is very perceptive. The need is clearly stated for human relationships to be based on a freshly harmonious footing, free from the frustrations and repression of ties of violence. Only in capitalist society, where even human beings have a price on their heads, is the arrival of a new person seen inevitably as an additional financial burden to bear. Two people or, increasingly, one person becomes responsible for the upbringing of that child. It is part of the obscene atomisation of capitalist society that this responsibility is exclusive to one or two people, rather than being social and shared. The stress and violence which often results from financial and emotional limitation, and the role of the closest protectors of the child as providers of its social conditioning, lead to unbalanced character development. This is a social problem of capitalism and the nuclear family, whether or not it manifests itself in the chemical way suggested by Pizzey and Shapiro. In any case, all such social phenomena must have some bodily or chemical manifestation even if Pizzey's theories of adrenalin and cortizone are fallacious.

These books do not have any solution to the problems they document, but by exposing the weaknesses of many claimed “solutions” they suggest a way out of relationships of torment and agony, through the conscious and free organisation of society. Even if some women and men seem to have a tendency to be attracted towards violence because it is the only way they know of asserting themselves, this is not the same as the crude and callous suggestion that someone who has been beaten up wanted it to happen. Nobody wants to suffer the tortures documented in these books. What people want is security and the chance to assert ourselves creatively. In a jungle society of competition and separation this can rarely be achieved directly, and so people resort to desperate means. The result is untold human misery, all of it unnecessary. The answer is for us to organise society rather than letting it organise us.

Clifford Slapper

Catholicism in disgrace (2006)

From the January 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Canada, the United States, Australia and elsewhere, but especially in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church stands in disgrace, following the plethora of revelations about the activities of paedophiles and other types of abusers among its clergy. Obviously the structure of the Church and the often uncanny power its priests and bishops have over a subservient laity must make it a target for paedophiles and sadists. But the real and utterly appalling shame of the Church was its subsequent treatment of the abused and its frenetic efforts to cover up by lies and other deceits the contemptible behaviour of its servants.

Was it purely coincidence that the greatest abuse outside Ireland took place in Canada, the US and Australia, in mainly Irish Catholic areas and under the tutelage of the Irish Christian Brothers and Irish priests? Here we look at the historic role of Catholic priests and of Catholic institutions in Ireland over the centuries and for the source of the awesome power and the cavalier attitude of a now-disgraced Church.

The Roman Catholic Church (and, to a lesser extent, its Christian derivatives) arrogated onto itself the role of arbiter in things appertaining not only to matters of what it called ‘morality’ but to all forms of human behaviour and even juridical practice. Canon Law was the ultimate determinant superior to all other legal forms.

As feudalism yielded to capitalism in Europe and modern nation states were freed from the political hegemony of the so-called Holy Roman Empire, the Popes and their cardinals were forced to concede to widening democratic forms which were historically anathema to Rome. Still, even in countries where Roman Catholicism had been politically and morally overshadowed by various forms of Protestantism, different Popes cautioned against democratic concessions to the people.

According to Pope Leo XIII (Encyclical, Immortale Dei ‘On the Christian Constitution of States’, November 1885) canon law is effectively superior to the civil law, having derived from Jesus Christ through Peter and the apostles to the Church:

“In very truth, Jesus Christ gave his apostles unrestrained authority in sacred matters together with the genuine and most true power of making laws, as also with the duplex right of judging and punishing which flow from that power.”

By then, of course, such nonsense was a fatuous Popish aspiration which was in conflict with the material conditions of life in most of Europe. The power to make and enforce laws and the right and the power to punish in pursuit of such laws was now in the possession of the bourgeoisie and its god was profit.

Ireland

Ireland nestled on the western flank of Europe, its natural development frustrated by its proximity to its powerful neighbour, England. According to legend, Ireland had been Christianised by St Patrick in the fifth century AD but, as in many other places, the Christian proselytizer appeared to have fashioned the new faith to suit the territory, or the native Celtic tribes adjusted it to suit their customs. Druidic Ireland might have accepted the Christian God but it did not give up its Druidic ways nor did it submit to the authority of Rome.

Effectively, the Celtic Christian Church was set within the organisational norms of the clan system. Each clan elected its own bishops and priests, which meant that there were a great number of clan-nominated bishops whose episcopal authority was the writ and the power of the clan.

Eventually in the 12th century Pope Adrian IV in a bull Laudabiliter gave authority to King Henry II of England to invade Ireland and “enlarge the bounds of the Christian faith to the ignorant and rude and to extirpate the roots of vice from the field of the Lord”. In the “Lord’s Field”, as perceived by Rome, the easy moral attitudes and forms of social organisation enjoyed by the Irish were proscribed and as the historian P. Beresford Ellis points out, “The Irish clergy had embraced feudalism (the social system underpinning Roman Catholicism) a system repugnant to the ordinary Irishman long before it was enforced in Ireland”. Whatever the wishes of the Church, the de facto imposition of feudalism in Ireland would take another five torturous centuries.

Outside that area of Leinster, known as “The Pale”, on the eastern side of Ireland, the native Irish clans resisted the incursion of English authority. Initially, within the Pale bishops and abbots, in accordance with the feudal system, became barons under the crown but later Anglo-Norman clerics were rewarded with appointments to Irish livings – inevitably to the chagrin of the native clergy.

In the centuries that followed ownership of land and other forms of property were increasingly denied to the native Irish. But England was still a Catholic country and thus priests and bishops in Ireland, while being denied the more influential positions within the Church, did not suffer any other forms of proscription from the government. Outside the Pale the power of the priest and the Church within the atrophying world of the clans prospered, especially within the province of education.

The war of the two kings

It is argued that it was this ‘prospering’, the strength of the Church and its priests in Ireland, that withstood the force of the Reformation when England became Protestant. Certainly, after the Reformation, and especially after the defeat of the English Catholic Stuart, King James II, in 1691, the Catholic Church and its priests were to suffer legal proscription and vicious persecution. Ironically, James’s defeat in Ireland was at the hands of the Central European powers organised under the terms of the Treaty of Augsburg, and the commander of the victorious forces was William, Prince of Orange, James’s Protestant son-in-law – the famous King Billy, who, despite the subsequent persecution of Presbyterians as well as Catholics by his government is immortalised in the folk memory of Ulster loyalists.

This persecution of Irish Protestantism’s largest denomination as well as Catholics ‘and other dissenters’ was the result of the Establishment of the Episcopalian Church, which made the practice of other religions illegal and subject to severe penalties, including confiscation of property. Later, in 1719 Parliament passed an Act of Toleration granting relief from the Penal Laws to Presbyterians but the Act made no concessions to Catholics. In the years following the formalisation of laws against the Catholic Church and its members some 5,000 Catholics became Anglicans, but the overwhelming majority of the native Irish were mere ‘tenants-at-will’ on smallholdings without either security of tenure or fixity of rents; in fact they were outlaws in the land of their birth.

It was in such conditions that the Catholic Church and its priests, not always speaking with the one voice, gained overwhelming influence over the minds of the people. All forms of agrarian unrest, inevitable under persecution, were roundly condemned by the Church. But the priests were close to the people, their only articulate ally and, almost in spite of the contempt of the hierarchy for the peasantry, their influence over the minds of the people became more telling. The English government was a brutal foreign power visibly persecuting priest and people. Inevitably the Church, in the form of its priests, became the powerful institutional stabilising factor in the bitter lives of an inarticulate, harassed and brutalised people.

Excommunicated IRA members

The Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829 gave formal legal recognition to the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland; by then the power of the Church and its religious fraternities was awesome. It wasn’t only in matters of birth, marriage and death that the power of the church was evident; almost every sort of activity, business, political or sporting had the ubiquitous priest and in the structure and content of education the power of the Church was paramount.

As the Church-supported Irish National Party fell into decay before the burgeoning power of Sinn Fein after 1905, clerical influence was transferred to the latter party though the official organ of Irish Catholicism condemned the Republican Rising of 1916 as ‘an act of brigandage’ and supported the British execution of the rebel leadership. Similarly, during the subsequent guerrilla war (1919-22) the Church condemned the IRA and excommunicated its members, but in the main the old priestly stalwarts were there to lend support and comfort – and, perhaps, save the Church from its own error of judgement.

The guerrilla war ended with a British government-enforced partitioning of Ireland into Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. For the zealots and bigots of Catholicism and Protestantism it seemed a red-letter day, for it lent to each in their respective areas virtually untrammelled political and social influence.

In the north the political agents of the linen lords and the industrial capitalists declared that they had a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people, while the Protestant churches cosied up to a system of sectarian discrimination designed to hurt workers who were Catholics and fool workers who were Protestants into believing that their slums and their miserable life styles made them superior to their even more miserable class brethren.

Surrender

In the south, all the political parties surrendered to the arrogance and deceits of the Catholic Church and its institutions. The minds of the young were given over to priests, nuns and Christian Brothers for an ‘education’ unquestionably based on a morbid, insular Catholicism. As if that was not bad enough, as we now know, in many of the institutions run by Catholic religious orders children were being physically and sexually abused and the Church was tolerating this abuse.

The scandal of the Magdalene laundries, which was highlighted by BBC, ITV and to its credit RTE, demonstrated the quite remarkable power the priests had over an acutely educationally deprived people. The laundries were operated by the Sisters of Mercy (sic!) who brutally exploited slave labour to carry out their function. The slaves were young women who had been abandoned in pregnancy, or who showed promise of behaviour alien to the views of their families. In many cases a priest requested or persuaded a child’s parents to abandon their child to these institutes of brutality and slavery for ‘the good of the child’s soul’. One old woman who had only been released in the late sixties from this dreadful servitude told a television audience how the priest had approached her parents when she was young and advised them that their daughter’s good looks could “present an occasion for sin”.

When a young doctor who in his practice had experienced the ravages of tuberculosis became Minister of Health in the Coalition government of 1948 he promulgated a Bill to give free medical care to expectant mothers and children under the age of five. The Catholic Archbishop of Dublin wrote to the then Taoiseach complaining that such state interference could not be tolerated in a Catholic country. In France, Italy or any other Catholic country such absurd temerity would have been laughed at; in Catholic Ireland both the Bill and its political sponsor were dropped.

But the bishops could not control the airwaves nor could they control Irish capitalism’s demand for widening of the education curriculum. Irish Television still placates the bishops with a silence for the Angelus; it is an acknowledged embarrassment but as in all other countries the value-system and vulgarities of global capitalism’s unitary culture overshadows the morbid doctrines of the Church and sometimes even exposes its institutions for the moral cesspits they are.

Richard Montague

The Dennis O’Neill case (1945)

From the June 1945 issue of the Socialist Standard

Recently the country was outraged by the story of the death of a fourteen-year old boy, Dennis O’Neill, at the hands of a Shropshire farmer.

The facts are widely known. We give the barest outline here.

In the summer of 1918 John and Mabel O’Neill were married in Newport, Monmouthshire. He was 22, she 21. Both had served in France, he was lightweight boxing champion of the South Wales Borderers, she was a nurse. On the dole, the O’Neills had eleven children. One died at birth. They tried to bring up the remaining ten on £2 a week—in one room.

In 1923 O'Neill served one month's imprisonment for neglecting one of his children.

In December, 1939, Inspector Jones summoned the O’Neills before the Newport magistrates for neglect of their four youngest children.

The Inspector (N.S.P.C.C.), said their conditions were “indescribable,” though the children were fairly well nourished. Mrs. O’Neill stated that she often went without food for days that they might eat.

The magistrates fined each parent £3 with the alternative of a month in jail. They could not pay: while they served their sentence, the children were cared for at the Newport Poor Law Hospital.

Coming out of jail, John O'Neill at once joined the Army (December, 1939). While he was away in France, Inspector Jones got an order by the Newport magistrates for the removal of the four youngest children.

The O'Neills were ordered to pay 2s. a week for each child. They often defaulted.

Reginald Gongh, was the son of an agricultural worker who had a very hard life on the land.

In 1942 he was managing a farm in Shropshire. After marrying in 1942, he took Bank Farm (where young Dennis died) on borrowed money. His sole income was his monthly cheque for the sale of milk. Life on the farm was “bleak with poverty."

The Newport Educational Committee paid Gough £1 weekly for Dennis’s upkeep.

The rest of the story is well known. For a socialist the whole business is an epitome in miniature of the evils of the capitalist system. Almost every publication in the country has demanded investigations into the boarding-out system. Paradoxically enough, the Home Office, after years of agitation for the establishment of suitable institutions, issued a circular a year ago urging local authorities not to keep children in institutions, but to send them to foster-parents.

To those who might claim that the O'Neills should have “ known better” than bring eleven children into the world on the dole, we would point out that all the Governmental Authorities from Mr. Churchill downwards (or. up), have insisted on the need for more children—and have adopted a family allowance scheme to get them.

O'Neill could not have been the worst of workers— his boxing prowess shows considerable mental and physical ability. Nevertheless he remained permanently unemployed from 1919 to 1930—the period of “peace.” They could not have been the worst of parents, the wife often went without food to feed her children.

Small wonder that, harassed and persecuted by Inspectors and officials, the O’Neills dumbly and helplessly suffered the removal of their unfortunate children.

Everything that needs to be said has already been indicated by the circumstances of Farmer Gough’s life. Obviously, only a struggling poverty-stricken farmer would be interested in boarding poor town children at £1 weekly in the hope of getting some work out of them. Equally, the rapidly growing, and learning, children would resent having to work—for nothing.

Actually, it amounts to State connivance at juvenile slavery, through the local authorities.

The whole evidence at the trial of Gough for manslaughter, showed this to be the cause of the friction. In a certain sense, Gough has done a service in exposing one of the crying scandals of the age. Thousands of children suffer in misery, unknown and unheard.

Over a hundred years after Dickens’ searing and harrowing exposures of vicious inhumanity to children, “Oliver Twist,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Little Dorrit,” etc., after a century of all sorts of “Waifs and Strays,” “Societies for Protecting Children,” and public philanthropy and charity, we find the treatment of very poor working men’s children very little different to-day from then. O'Neill’s crime, like Gough’s—and young Dennis’s, was that he was poor, in a society dominated by money.

Socialists do not demand the “tightening-up of the boarding-out system,” or “More Inspectors of the Children’s Homes,” or “More Efficient Control,” as repeated ad nauseam in the public press. They organise politically to abolish social system which makes Poverty the worst of crimes.

Horatio.

Hardly child's play (1987)

From the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Of all the traditional victims of electioneering, children are among the most heavily abused. Helplessly reined into their prams, they can do little to avoid the leering smiles, the pats and the kisses of vote-hungry candidates. Children as a symbol of purity and innocence are also understood by people in the advertising industry, who don’t go in for elections but for persuading us to kill off our own standards of judgement. What lies behind this propaganda is the warning that while children are attractive they are also hugely vulnerable. They need the Alliance or the Tories, or the Labour Party to protect them or to ensure that their natural protector — the family — is strong enough to do it. The cynicism is obvious but the wretched irony of it is all too often missed: the appeal of children should guarantee them immunity against being used in these ways.

The facts show that the family as it is at present is far from being a reliable protector of children. There is an enormous mountain of child abuse, most of which goes on in the family. The NSPCC estimate that between 150 and 200 children a year are killed through abuse or neglect by their parents or carers. Another estimate is that child battering is the fourth commonest cause of death in the under-fives. There are no official national figures but the NSPCC believe that in England and Wales in 1985 over 9000 children under 15 were physically abused — not counting the other types of maltreatment such as sexual abuse. Stimulated by the publicity given to recent, particularly nasty, cases such as Jasmine Beckford and Tyra Henry, the number of cases reported to the NSPCC has risen sharply— by 42 per cent between 1984 and 1985. When the people responsible for these assaults are prosecuted the media is convulsed by a grisly hysteria of demands for the harshest possible sentence.

Apart from abuse, there is the matter of extreme poverty, from which, of course, the entire family suffers. Last November the Child Poverty Action Group, which was formed on the assumption that campaigning could get rid of the worst excesses of poverty, celebrated its 21st birthday with the news that one third of Britain’s children live in what is officially deemed to be poverty, or at its margins. Apart from those trying to exist on state benefit, the National Children’s Homes state that in 1984 there were 429,000 children in families where the wages were so low that they qualified for the topping up of Family Income Supplement. Overall, it is not a pretty picture, made up as it is of political deceit, social pressures, market morality and ignorance. To understand the problem a bit better, we might consider a few facts about children themselves.

There is a popular concept about childhood which, like most of capitalism's prejudices. is assumed to be too obviously correct to question. Childhood is supposed to be a separate period in our lives when we are too undeveloped to be able to cope with some of the messier aspects of human life — such as sexual activity — and therefore need to be protected and nurtured by grown-ups. In fact, this ’protection" too often amounts to distortion or deceit or concealment, on the assumption that if the child is to develop smoothly into adulthood he or she must be fed on myths and euphemisms. Much of this revolves around prejudices about the fixed roles reserved for each sex and with discouraging children from seeing their parents for what they are — exploited, degraded and repressed objects of class exploitation. But there is nothing fixed or unchanging about this. Childhood is a social concept which varies according to conditions: the present concepts are typical of modern capitalism and are therefore comparatively recent. A new society, with a different basis, will have different — freer, more humane — ideas on the matter.

When children had to work alongside their parents in order that the family survive there was simply no real chance for them to experience this time which is now called childhood. They were regarded as miniature — usually defective — adults who should be punished if they failed to come up to adult standards. With the Industrial Revolution these attitudes were transferred from rural to urban life. Hordes of agricultural workers were sucked from the countryside into the developing towns with their children who were well accustomed to helping out with very demanding work.

Children answered the industrial employers' need for cheap labour and the demands made on them were as fierce as any adult could expect. In pre-industrial England parental attitudes to children had been, by present standards, severe but they did not extend to systematic deliberate sadism and neglect. Child labour took place in the family where the cruelty which was to be commonplace in the mines and factories was unknown. The pace and rhythm of agricultural work had been dictated naturally but in the factories it was the insistent demands of the machinery — which operated whether the sun was up or down and in all seasons — which dragged children from their beds before dawn and kept them at work for twelve hours or more in the most appalling conditions until at the end of the day they collapsed. too exhausted to wash or undress or even to eat. The savagery wreaked on those poor kids, in order to protect the employers' profits, was a horror story of beatings and torture by brutal overseers. Many of those who survived such assaults were brought down by injury or disease caused by the atmosphere in which they laboured.

The parents might have tried to protect their children and very often they did but this called for considerable courage in a family where it was vital that all available children were bringing in a wage. In any case many of the children were orphans or paupers, transported to the new industrial hell-holes. Who cared, or even noticed, whether they suffered and died?

Naturally, if children were treated like adults it followed that they could be punished like them. In 1800 there were no less than 220 offences which could incur the death penalty. Until 1847 the law made no distinction based on age and so children could be — and were — executed for minor thefts or for taking part in public disturbances. For the most trivial matters — throwing stones, knocking on doors, stealing a few turnips from a field — children were imprisoned for years. They might be confined in the rotten, vermin infested hulks and then transported. Reformists tended to prefer a sound flogging for them, on the grounds that this was a humane salvation from the life of unbroken criminality which a prison sentence would assure them.

This situation began to change with legislation making full-time education compulsory. The motives for this were not entirely charitable for as industrial development refined capitalism's class structure it also needed the lower, exploited class to be schooled in new skills through formal, organised education. There was a clash between the demands of the classroom and those of the fields and the factories but in the end the classroom, as it had to, won. One effect of universal education was to raise obedience to the status of a supreme virtue — obedience to god, to the sovereign, to their parents, their betters, all of which amounted to obedience to the class which would eventually accept them into exploitation. The family was important in the business of instilling obedience which became a sort of cement of family relationships. Children were taught to be quiet, meek, well behaved and to grow up into docile wage slaves.

What has happened to children, then, cannot be described as idyllic, under the benevolence of caring adults. Rather, it has been a story of outrageous repression and cruelty, at times in answer to the most extreme demands of an inhumane social system, to be modified only slowly against entrenched opposition based on the narrowest of class interests. Children are still suffering, in this supposedly advanced and civilised age, still easy prey to their elders' frustrations. Child abuse is widely ascribed to the malevolence of a minority of adults, which may be easy and comfortable as an explanation but which misses the essential background to the problem.

There are certain features to be found often enough in child abuse cases for them to be seen as a syndrome so that, in the reverse direction, if some elements of the syndrome are present it is reasonable to fear that a child is being, or will soon be, maltreated. These elements are nothing to do with supposedly evil human beings; they are rooted in social conditions, in the basic inability of capitalism to work to the benefit of the majority of people. Among the symptoms are: where the mother is very young, especially if she is a single parent whose poverty makes her vulnerable to men who come into her life as predators; where two children are born in quick succession to each other, placing an extra physical, emotional and financial strain on the parents; where the child is suffering from a disability or handicap, which again puts more stress on the parents; where one or other of the parents themselves has a history of being abused; where the family income is especially low, so that life is an unremitting battle for access to the barest essentials. The importance of the last element is illuminated by the fact that rich parents can simply buy their way out of at least some of the others. Smug observers of this problem may sometimes assert that it is not a class matter, referring to the infamous brutality practised in public schools and the emotional cruelty suffered by some children in ruling class families. There is some truth in this but it does not refer to the generalised problem, which was pinpointed in the comment of a National Children's Home support worker in Rochdale:

  Families live in damp, sub-standard housing that they can't afford to heat properly. They survive on the basics and there is no comfort. Sometimes the pressures overwhelm them. (Children Today - 1986).

The family which operates today — and the modern concept of childhood — is rooted in the unique historical and social character of capitalism in response to its needs as a private property, commodity production system. There is much bleating, especially from the clergy and from Tory politicians, about the family's role in socialising children and whether it does this successfully. In any social system adults have a vital part to play in a child's life, but under capitalism socialisation is not a matter of guidance into the ability to have caring, happy and fruitful relationships with others and into being themselves good parents. It means fashioning — or rather distorting — children's innocent impulses into conformity with the crushing fact that they will one day have to earn their living. They will one day have to sell their working abilities and through their exploitation help further to enrich their employers. Seeing employment as essential to the emotional integrity of a child is not something peculiar to Victorian England; this is how it is described by another NCH worker:

  Chronic unemployment arrests the young person's debut into adulthood . . . The growing up process remains uncompleted. They are "limbo" people. (George Keenan — Children Today 1986).

So a child's prospects of maturity are still assessed in terms of his or her ability to pull in a wage. Where does the family fit in? The expectation is that the family will teach the difference between ''right'' and "wrong", which substantially means to respect property rights and to accept the class division of society into the privileged owners and the non-privileged workers. In the 1980s trendy parents may laugh with each other at the haltered Victorian obsession with the obedient child; nowadays, they assure themselves, children are stimulated into thinking and acting for themselves. It is true that modern industrial capitalism has changed the emphases in the way it schools its children. But it has not changed the workers' support — through boom and slump, through war and famine — for capitalism. And how can that be described, if not as mindless, inculcated obedience?

If anything marks out childhood it is because many childish impulses, before adults working on behalf of capitalist society get to work on them, are in conflict with capitalism's morality. Children simply have no grasp of property, or class division; these have to be instilled into them. This shrewdness is what is mis-called childish innocence and it is fair game for politicians and advertising people. When the irony and the cynicism becomes widely enough apparent, we shall have taken a step towards a society which will be the family to us all. The next time you see a child grab hold of something which doesn't belong to it, don't smack it. Think instead.

Ivan