Proper Gander: Class struggle (2026)

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

Silent classrooms with students reading line-by-line in unison, wary that any wrong action will lead to a swift reprimand probably isn’t what we imagine secondary schools to be like. However, this approach has been taken in recent years, as Richard Bilton reports in Britain’s Strictest Schools for BBC1’s Panorama. The Athena Learning Trust runs six secondary schools in Devon and Cornwall with 6,500 pupils in total. On its website are syrupy phrases like ‘High support and high ownership are at the heart of our ethos. At Athena, we are resolute in our pursuit of support, kindness, and integrity’. Such words sound particularly hollow to the students, parents and ex-teachers who are concerned about its tough stance on discipline.

As the documentary tells us, Athena Learning Trust has a ‘two strikes’ policy for when its students break the rules: a warning for the first breach and then being sent to detention for the second, called ‘reflection’. Breaking the rules while in reflection leads to ‘suspension’: being barred from the school short-term. Such approaches are familiar, but in Athena schools, looking out of the window can be an infraction. One of the students tearfully explains the ‘321 focus’ catchphrase, heard dozens of times daily, which is a (clumsy) acronym for ‘face and observe the teacher in clearly upright silent attention’. There are strict expectations not just about students’ attention, but also for punctuality and their uniforms being ‘perfect’. We’re told that children with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) are more likely to behave in ways which challenge the rules, although Government Adviser on behaviour in schools in England Tom Bennett says people with conditions such as ADHD need a ‘calm, safe, dignified environment’ and that tight discipline supports this.

Having a lot of regulations to breach has meant that a lot of punishments have been issued. The programme states that Athena’s Ilfracombe school has around 1,000 suspensions a year, almost five times higher than the average across England. One of the parents interviewed for the documentary describes how his daughter got into a cycle of going from reflection to suspension repeatedly, therefore missing out on what was being taught in the classroom. He and others attended a drop-in session to voice concerns, arranged by Panorama’s producers, which Bilton says attracted more people than anticipated. Those interviewed for the programme aren’t short of adjectives to describe Athena’s regime: ‘authoritarian’, ‘cruel’, ‘dystopian’, ‘robotic’, ‘abusive’, ‘almost militarian’ and ‘a bit like a dictatorship’. Athena’s management didn’t agree to be interviewed and instead issued a statement.

Athena is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom and handicrafts, both appropriate to schooling. She’s also associated with warfare, perhaps reflecting her namesake’s regimented methods. Schools with reputations for lax standards of behaviour and low exam results were taken over by Athena because it was acknowledged that changes were needed. The stringent policies covering discipline were introduced because the demographic of ‘white underprivileged people near the coast’ is hardest to teach, Independent Councillor James Ball says he was told by Athena staff.

Bilton asks whether Athena’s approach has been beneficial. Its schools mostly have good outcomes from Ofsted assessments and exam results have improved. But according to former Athena teacher Robin Johnson, the children have a ‘joyless education’, and students say they find the ethos ‘depressing’. As another ex-teacher says, when children have come to hate school, this ‘can’t be good, no matter what their GCSE results are’. Some parents have decided to educate their children at home instead.

This summer, hundreds of people attended public meetings protesting against the schools’ practices, and ‘parent power won’, says Bilton. Athena Learning Trust is being disbanded, as we’re told towards the end of the programme, its footage having been recorded before this was announced. CEO Ben Parnell has resigned and the Department For Education will monitor Athena to implement changes until its schools are transferred to other trusts.

Athena has operated in the academy system, as a not-for-profit charitable trust. While organisations which run academy schools are still funded and regulated by the government, they aren’t overseen by the local council, and so they can be run in different ways to state schools. More than 80% percent of secondary schools in England are academies, with other frameworks in the rest of Britain. One criticism of trusts which manage multiple academies (like Athena) is that decisions are made in some centralised head office distant from the schools, and therefore don’t fully consider local concerns. They are likely to take into account the interests of any financial backers, which could include businesses, other educational establishments, faith groups or voluntary groups. While the academy system isn’t a ‘privatisation’ of education, it has made schooling more corporate in how it is structured.

This system is an attempt to make education run within the constraints of capitalist society. While Athena’s methods may have been extreme, they were a response to the difficulties of the circumstances the schools found themselves in. One consideration not explored by the documentary is the number of students in each class. Large class sizes are a result of schools not being able to afford the staff or the room to have more classes which have fewer people. Smaller class sizes would mean that more time could be spent with each student, personalising their learning and reducing the likelihood of distracting behaviour. But as resources are rationed by money, large classes are the norm and discipline becomes a more pragmatic option. This doesn’t excuse Athena for the harm its approach caused to some of its students, although in a way it teaches them what to expect once they leave school for wider society which also stifles learning with unaccountable rules and the threat of punishment.

Mike Foster

The changing world of children (1977)

From the December 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thirteen million of the population of Britain are under 15 years old. When Socialism is established, that quarter of the population will cease to be financial dependants and will be owners of the means of living like everyone else. Questions about education and upbringing in Socialism frequently assume that children are still to be at the disposal of adults and will have arrangements made for them. It may not be like that.

The idea of childhood itself has altered repeatedly in different social phases. “Infancy”, which now refers to very young children, formerly meant the entire pre-adult period of life; the word is still used with this meaning in law. Adolescence was a legal division in ancient Rome, covering the period from puberty (14 for males, 12 for females) to the male majority at 25. Only in the 20th century, however, has it come to mean a physical and psychological development between childhood and adulthood. In the Middle Ages and the early capitalist era such a stage was virtually unrecognized: they were children, then they were adults.

Thus, in Tudor times upper-class boys matriculated and were sent away to universities at thirteen or fourteen. The law permitted the marriage of boys at fourteen and girls at twelve. Shakespeare’s Juliet was thirteen, and a character says early in the play: “Younger than she are happy mothers made.” Children of what are now called tender years were flogged; the Verney Memoirs has a letter expressing concern for a delicate three-year-old—“Let me beg of you and his mother that nobody whip him but Mr. Parrye”. In the working class, Defoe noted with approval in the early 18th century that children of four and five all over Britain earned their livings.

Childhood is a physiological condition, but its duration and what is expected of it are social decisions. The question “What is man?” needs a rider: “What is child?”

Work and School

The first moves to control child labour in factories, and thereby create a new conception of childhood, were made by “enlightened” members of the capitalist class during the Napoleonic Wars. One of them was Sir Robert Peel, the father of the Tory Prime Minister. G. M. Trevelyan in his English Social History indicates the nature of this enlightenment: “No doubt the good Sir Robert, who himself employed 15,000 hands, was in part anxious to restrain the unfair competition of his more unscrupulous rivals.”

At the same time, economists argued the need to withhold children from work and send them to school. Adam Smith put forward a scheme for parish schools which would provide the basis of economic activity and progress. Ricardo and Malthus both favoured education as a means of inculcating habits which would lead to family limitation, and therefore an increase in economic well-being. An anonymous pamphlet of 1856 called The Education of the Masses, Can it be Accomplished? talked more specifically of making labour-power “a much better and more trustworthy article than has hitherto been furnished”. In introducing the Elementary Education Act of 1870 W. E. Forster said: “Upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our national prosperity.”

Childhood was defined by developed capitalism as from birth to twelve, then fourteen and after; during this time the value of labour-power would be formed and the child purposefully conditioned. Adolescence appeared as the period between that childhood and marriage, which was now delayed several years. Alongside these changes, the spread of scientific ideas and of modern popular culture installed fresh images of childhood. The decline of the social importance of the family in this century has weakened former prejudices and sanctions; in general, children today are better cared for and less restricted than ever before. Yet, as with the majority of society, the result is frustration because means and conditions are absent.

Moulding

The often-quoted claim of a Jesuit that a child raised by him up to seven years old would be his for life has been responsible for a lot of muddled thinking about upbringing and its effects. Much of what small children learn is the acquiring by imitation of social techniques. Getting food, conversation, movement, etc., are absorbed almost unwittingly from the circles in which they live. “They are very often ignorant of the possibilities of any other sort of behaviour; and the process of learning is probably as nearly effortless as any which can be studied.” (C. M. Fleming, The Social Psychology of Education.)

Responses are also learned this way: how to win admiration and to get one’s own way. This leads to the identification of learning in children with “socialization”, or conditioning them to perform as those in charge desire—the modern version of the Jesuit theory. Fortunately, it does not work. To connect the upbringing of children with the class struggle may seem far-fetched, but this is the operative factor. While their “nature” as children is laid down by and to suit the needs of capitalism, it conflicts with the notions of self- and group-interest formed in a working-class environment. The size of the gap is shown by the numerous attempts at supplementary conditioning made through youth organizations—which in turn fail, for the same reason.

Earnest radicals have often tried to oppose the “socialization” of capitalism with alternative theories of upbringing and youth organizations which try to impose a different point of view. In the nineteen- twenties and -thirties a “Left Scout Movement” was attempted called first Kibbo Kift and then the Woodcraft Folk. The founder of the latter organization, Leslie Paul, wrote later: “Despite the socialist dressing we gave to everything, and believed we believed in, every kind of future reform or revolution paled beside our concern for the content of the actual life we were living at that moment.” (Angry Young Man, 1951.) That is precisely it. For children, the proposed indoctrination is a disposable surface item; the activity, learning by doing, is what adds to the development of reasoning powers.

Games people play

Children learn rôles. Childhood itself is a rôle; if it is deemed to continue to, say, fourteen or fifteen a boy or girl will act younger at that age than if he or she is named an adolescent or an adult. The rôles are what society expects and therefore makes known to children, and their carrying-out is part of social technique.

In the last thirty years the male and female rdles practised and accepted throughout capitalism have altered. The long hair inaugurated by pop groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stone., at the beginning of the nineteen-sixties was a sign of rejection of established masculine looks, while girls took to male trousers. Established ideas of distinct characteristic behaviour of the sexes have blurred; women make sexual demands on men, instead of the opposite. When co-education in state schools was spreading in the ’fifties it was often said to have the effect of making boys womanish, but that is no longer heard.

Previously there was no problem. Boys were conditioned from their earliest consciousness to be virile (“Be a big boy, now’’) and girls feminine. The classic toy for girls, held to be a demonstration in itself that the differences in behaviour were inborn, was a doll. However, in the last ten years one of the most popular boys’ toys has been the “action man’’, which is simply a male doll with changeable clothes. Insofar as children learn male and female rôles from what they see round them—mother doing housework and cooking, father going out to his job—the difference remains. But it is also clear that this is not destiny but a social arrangement; and the old version of it cannot be inculcated in the future.

Besides observation and instruction, children learn by play. This fact was taken up by educationalists a generation ago in "the play way”, trying to adapt play to be a means of conditioning. On the other side, before the 1914-18 war an American named Stanley Hall produced the “recapitulation” theory of play; it argued that children re-enacted the stages of man’s development—gathering, hunting, tribal wars, even (in “swapping”) the growth of commerce. Play ranges from simple imitation to the acting of fantasies, and the need for it is not confined to children. Social convention and the work-ethic say that it should be, with the result that adult occupations such as acting and professional sports are commonly regarded as evading work. Living in capitalism, we see man estranged from himself.

Something new

Again in common with adults, children need stability and affection. In memoirs of the Oneida Community (My Father's House, published in 1937) Pierrepont Noyes related how the elders of the community censured the showing of affection on the grounds that it denoted possessiveness; and the stress this put on the persons he knew. Individuals who are handicapped in this way can and do have problems ot relationships with the rest of society, which often emerge as delinquency.

However, underlying individual relationships is the structure of society as a whole. The parent-child relationship expresses material circumstances, laws and social concepts that arise from or are linked with wage-labour and capital. The protectiveness of parents is a mixture of affection with the knowledge that in the capitalist world the pursuit of a natural impulse, or a misjudgement, can be punished in the all-important material sense. This in itself makes the child a subject instead of an individual; the parent says "Do as you’re told, or it will be the worse for you” because that is how a class society operates.

Certainly, in any society children must learn. Rather than ask how it will be arranged in Socialism, it can be pointed out that capitalism prevents them learning now. Children will learn through their own activity, play and curiosity; the “problem” of literacy in capitalist society is for governments to try to instil it while keeping the social factors which obstruct it. The best-known of “progressive” educationists, A. S. Neill, insisted that children learn when and because they want to, but Neill was unable to operate his principles within the general education system of capitalism.

We look forward to the emergence of socialist man, the fulfilment of the capacities which are stifled and distorted in capitalist society. Socialist child should not be overlooked; equally, he and she will be an altogether different creature.

Robert Barltrop

Private lives (1977)

From the October 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent in Greater Manchester asks a series of questions beginning: ‘‘What is the socialist view of the regulation and control (if any) of sexual activity within a Socialist society? Please deal individually with the questions of marriage, divorce and its family consequences, the age of consent, homosexuality (male and female), rape.” Further questions are who would have the say in the bringing-up of children, and would children be ‘‘disciplined” as now to make them conform; on individual rights to privacy, quietness, etc.; and finally, whether Socialism would not need some enforcement machinery for these matters.

They all represent aspects of the individual’s relationship to the community—but putting it that way distorts things at the outset. The basic social relationships are created by the structure of society itself. A complex of subsidiary relationships grows within them, with ideas attached. Yet these ideas in turn react on society; they produce endless changes of detail, and also the desire for new relationships which can only be obtained by developing society further. Thus, the socialist view is not that we shall have common ownership and then try to improve existing relationships. It is that with the end of class society, the relationships and attitudes which are parts of it also end, and entirely new ones grow up on the basis of common ownership.

The social pattern of sexual activity has changed from one society to another: for an account of it, read Engels’s The Origin of the Family. Within the “pairing” marriage changes have taken place. The “extended” family which included all close relatives has given way to the “nuclear” family of one couple and its children, and the social importance of this in turn has declined. The reasons are simply economic: division of labour makes the experience and life-style of one generation alien to the next. Along with this goes the separation of sexual pleasure from reproduction, which is by no means a modern idea but has been scientifically perfected in the 20th century.

What will happen in Socialism is that people will live together without having to seek a licence and part if and when they want to. A good many attempt this today, within the limits of convenience and approval allowed by capitalism. Those limits are removed when property society is abolished: social relations of equality and freedom make personal ones possible.

It is the question of parting that causes concern, of course — the “family consequences”. The paramount factor among them is one which will be absent from Socialist society: money, unending worries over it, the need for it to keep a family housed, clothed and fed. In capitalist society the break-up of a marriage almost invariably causes hardship in those terms, and divorce and separation proceedings are chiefly about financial provisions to support the individuals who are “dependent” under the existing family system. But this takes us back to the foundation of the relationship. When it involves material dependence it clearly is not an equal partnership, and it isn’t surprising that resentment is common.

Other consequences cannot be separated from material ones. Children (like adults) want stability and affection, and in present-day society those things are associated with a conventional home-life. There is no reason why they should not be had, fully, in different arrangements. This is not a case of one regime replacing another, but of being able to make choices which capitalism does not allow. Socialism will be a responsible society precisely because it means freedom to choose. Class-based, authoritarian society gives no such freedom; the choices are imposed, and the individual has to be exhorted into responsibility towards them. When they are made personally or communally, with knowledge and without coercion, true responsibility is felt and exercised.

Not much joy

Sex is both a natural impulse and a supreme pleasure. What sort of world is it whose “regulation of sexual activity” denies satisfaction to large numbers of people, and persuades many more that it is intrinsically shameful? In recent years emphasis has been laid on frankness about sex. Whatever the merits of this, it has produced —inevitably, in capitalism—the commercial exploitation of desires which society does not let be fulfilled. It is impossible to have the best from this area of life without decent material conditions. Privacy, hot water, warmth and some degree of comfort, and not being worried or tired, are the minimum requirements; simple as they sound, they add up to a standard of housing and general well-being which the majority of working people cannot get.

Change this, and there is no need to argue for a right to privacy. Our correspondent links it with “a place of one’s own”, and asks if that does not presuppose private property; but owner-occupiers generally are no better off than council-house tenants in this respect. Of course sexual satisfaction (and the enjoyment of life in many other respects) is heavily obstructed by living between cardboard-thin walls through which the neighbours or the children can hear every word and creak. The privacy problem is a matter of bricks-and-mortar environment, the result of a class-divided society and production for profit. Houses built for use instead of money will embody different assumptions.

There is another aspect of this. Privacy, like its opposite, is not supposed to be a permanent situation; lonely people would say they get too much of it. It is a field for the choice which capitalism refuses, except to the privileged minority. There are times when any of us needs to be alone and undisturbed, other times when company and noise are desired. It is a striking indictment of our society that relatively few can choose like that, and a great many lead thoroughly miserable lives because they are condemned to one position or the other.

The age of consent, homosexuality and rape are run together inappropriately by our correspondent, presumably because they all appear as “problems” to do with sex. The first is a matter of social custom which varies from country to country, and its legal force is bound up with the definition of persons below their majority as “minors” or “infants”. Would such a rule be necessary in Socialism, with the same ostensible purpose of protecting the immature? It does not “protect” them now from sexual experience if they have it in mind. But maturity has cultural as well as physical components: sexual pressure on little girls of nine comes not from hormones but from big business (watch the TV advertisements). The sex drive makes itself known sharply at puberty, but the situation in society as a whole determines the direction it takes. It will be the absence of exploitation that shapes conduct in Socialism, not the absence of laws.

Homosexuality is an offence against social custom (its legalization “in private between consenting adults” has not stopped day-after-day prosecutions of homosexuals who cannot arrange the needed privacy). There is no space here for such questions as whether it is a genetic or an environmental phenomenon; but if we accept that it is constitutional in some people and will therefore exist in Socialism, the only remark to make is that it will be regarded as nobody’s concern except those involved. It is worth recalling the scheme of the early socialist Fourier to cater for sexual variations, which he thought Socialism would accommodate cheerfully: each person with a “mania” would carry a card naming it, to facilitate finding partners.

Rape falls into a different category, because it is an act of delinquency with a sexual content. As delinquency, its roots are similar to those of other forms; it is a deliberately injurious reaction against society in general. The particular expression of the reaction shows what has been learned from society, and in that connection the novelist Jacky Gillott wrote recently in a women’s magazine that rape was “just a surface marker indicating a vast and tangled undergrowth of mythologies, resentments and ignorance that still persisted beneath the unspoken—and often unconscious—views men and women have of one another” (Cosmopolitan, September 1977).

Because Socialism will not have the resentment-breeding divisions which cause delinquency, or an “undergrowth of mythologies” obscuring relationships, we believe it will be free of ugly marks like rape. However, it must be made clear that socialists do not imagine everybody will be automatically made “good” once common ownership is established; or, alternatively, that any individual may do his own thing to the detriment of others. Socialism means a democratic organization of society in which the wishes of the majority prevail. Of course there will be problems; but in that sort of society we shall be able to deal with them as capitalism cannot.

Growing up

Last, about the upbringing of children. Our correspondent asks what is “the socialist psychology” in this matter. We haven’t one; possibly, when we are nearer to establishing Socialism, it will appear. The important thing, however, is not just possessing the insights but being able to put them into practice. A chronic frustration for teachers of all age-groups today is to be clearly aware of what needs to be done and to know also that it is impossible in the present system. As regards obtaining conformity by force, the dominant ideas of an age are, as Marx said, those of its ruling class; force is the method of class rule, reflected in (and so re-created through) its everyday conduct. Socialists do not need that.

Who will make the decisions about children—well, who makes them now? The working class have to accept the dominance of the state education system (the wealthy in general get rid of handling their children, first to nannies and then to schools away from home). Certainly, in any social system children have to learn basic skills required by society and for themselves; under capitalism, because its education is geared to the value of labour-power, the outcome for a high proportion is abysmal and recalls Mr. Weller’s question “vether it’s worth goin’ through so much to learn so little”. We do not envisage a sane society trying to impose a single mode of upbringing and learning for all children—that is the capitalist sausage-machine. The “decisions” are choices, which children and parents and their associates will make in different ways at different times.

Robert Barltrop

Faith, poverty and lies (1993)

From the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Religion has an irrational,
 non-materialist ideology 
which can result in
unrestrained barbarism. In 
the battle over birth
 control women workers are
in the front line and are 
suffering appallingly

During a recent visit to the United States, the Pope encountered considerable criticism of his views on "natural methods of birth control" and the rights of women to termination of pregnancy. Gallup polls conducted before his arrival such as in USA Today/RCC concluded that 75 percent would sooner follow their own consciences than accept papal doctrines. Another poll indicated that 83 percent of Catholics aged 18-25 years "believe they can disagree with Church teaching yet remain good Catholics". ("Catholics for Free Choice/KRC Research and Consulting", Lancet, 21 August). Other views expressed have been more critical. Frances Kissling, president of a movement called Catholics for Free Choice concludes that Pope John Paul is "lost in the pelvic zone as he increasingly insists on fidelity to his restrictive views on sex and reproduction".

The Catholic Church seeks to maintain and recruit followers based on strongly-held precepts or dogma. The purpose of the Pope's travels abroad is to reinforce these, including the Church’s views on contraception and termination of pregnancy.

Far from taking account of the views expressed in opinion polls by his adherents he is at present working on an encyclical entitled "Veritatis Splendor" which is said to be more extensive than the "Humanae vitae" put out 25 years ago. Leaked versions of the forthcoming encyclical do not indicate any compromise by the Pope on these issues. He is also working on yet another encyclical concerned about "questions of life" which will be concerned with questions of sexual morality.

Encyclicals are meant to be binding and obeyed. This may have been the ease in mediaeval times when the Catholic Church had total control of all information and ideas and their availability to the subject population but it is certainly not the case today.

The harsh reality of the world's problems and the futility of applying these outmoded concepts is brought home forcibly by A.A.Verkuyl, a gynaecologist working in Zimbabwe:

"In large areas of the world, health care is provided by the RCC and the Church’s powerful position prevents effective access to reliable contraception. In Rwanda one-third of the health facilities are administered by the RCC. The bishops refuse to discuss the possibility of promoting condoms for contraception or even for Aids prevention purposes while 40 percent of the under-five population are malnourished, the population doubles every I9years, and HIV prevalence in urban areas is more than 20 percent.As in sub Saharan Africa, so in tat in America and the Philippines " (Lancet, 21 August).

The author describes instances of what the Church's attitude results in:

"Take Maria. She is a girl of 17 living in abject poverty in one of the enormous third world cities. No running water or sanitation. Maria looks after her siblings while her mother can just scavenge enough to prevent starvation. Her only chance of escape is to marry someone with a good job. If she finds a candidate, he will most likely blackmail her into having sex before marriage. She assents out of fear of losing him. There are dozens of other girls who see him as an escape vehicle from terminal poverty, and thus he acts as a transport medium for gonorrhoea, syphilis, and HIV between them. The end result is that his girl friends experience infertility, ectopic pregnancies, backstreet abortions, and Aids. If they ever give birth, the baby may die of Aids or congenital syphilis, or become an orphan. Maria refuses to have an abortion. To provide for her child and herself she has to give sexual favours to a dozen men. Five years later she dies of Aids without dignity. Her son is a street urchin."

Another case deals with a recently-qualified nurse:

"she is happy to get a job in a remote RCC hospital even though her husband is obliged to stay in town and look for work. At Christmas her husband visits her . . . there are no condoms in the hospital. At the end of her 6 months’ probation the nuns in charge of the hospital will make here have a pregnancy test. If it is positive she will not get the job. Six weeks before the urine test she misses her period. A traditional doctor in a nearby village tries to help. She dies of a perforated uterus."

The Muslims are no less reactionary than the RCC in these matters. They consider a child to be a gift from Allah. Verkuyl quotes the case of a 12-year-old girl:

"Her father is a staunch Muslim, thinks that education is not important for girls. She had had her menarche so a marriage is arranged. She never had sex education and has no idea about antenatal care and what is supposed to happen during delivery. Her mother cannot tell her; she died during her eleventh pregnancy. After three days' labour at home she is encouraged with hot irons on her hack to push harder. In the end a dead baby is born. Three months later she is able to walk more or less normally and is rejected by her husband because the huge hole in her bladder causes her to smell and leak. Her family do not want her back. So much for 'natural methods ’."

The lifetime risk of death from pregnancy is greater than one in twenty-five in Zaire and in Muslim northern Nigeria whilst the risk in western Europe is one in 25,000 Both religions are united in their outmoded view that women should not have a say in deciding how many children they have.

Commenting on the argument that family planning is unnatural the author writes that:

"These arguments would not be used by somebody who flies in an aeroplane all over the globe and has a natural tumour removed by unnatural surgery under unnatural general anaesthesia."

On a recent visit to Brazil the Pope pursued the same authoritarian line that he has elsewhere. The murder of the street urchins in Rio recently emphasizes the consequences of these policies in Latin America."Almost two million Brazilian girls aged between 9 and 17 are prostitutes, an inquiry has been told in Brasilia" (Daily Telegraph, 24 August).

The Roman Catholic Church and the Islamic leaders have millions of followers. But how obedient are they to the outmoded view's of these religions that deny any fundamental right to women and take no account of the economic problems facing ordinary workers or agrarian workers anywhere? The vast majority of Catholics do not practice natural methods as defined by the Church. J. Poole writing in the Lancet in 1992, in an article entitled "Time for the Vatican to Bend" commented:

"It is hard to see how Western European and American Catholics, 80 percent of whom have themselves rejected the teaching of Humanae vitae, can vote to deny effective family-planning to the women of the poor nations of the world." In other words the Pope and the Muslim leaders are out of touch with the views of their own followers and fail to realize that they cannot turn the clock back as far as the development of human ideas are involved, which finally are shaped by the everyday material problems people have to face world-wide.

So what is the significance of the Pope’s visits abroad and the above comments from people grappling with the everyday problems of living and in many eases literally barely surviving? It is clearly incontrovertible evidence that chinks are appearing between these leaders and their followers as the views fail to have any application to the consequences of modern capitalism.

To the Socialist, religion or any concept based on the supernatural is a means of keeping the masses subservient to a given class-divided society. It is a barrier to social progress and can only exist where there is a minority owning the means of production and the bulk of the wealth produced. People who believe in a life hereafter are more likely to tolerate adverse conditions here on this planet.

Marx had no doubts about this. He wrote:

"It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of men, is a demand for their real happiness. The call to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition which requires illusions." (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, 1843).

When the resources of the world are owned and shared by those that produce them, then the palliative needs satisfied in some cases by religion will disappear.

Terry Lawlor

Jottings. (1909)

The Jottings Column from the August 1909 issue of the Socialist Standard

Owing to the agreement between the L. & N.W. and Midland railway companies, there results a reduction in the wages bill where that agreement is in operation.

* * *

We are often told by the advocates of railway nationalisation that the shorter hours of labour which would result from State ownership would mean an increase of workers employed. The details of the agreement between the above named companies have been issued as a White Paper, and certain statements therein disagree with the pro-nationalisers’ contentions.

* * *

The Midland Company ran to Rugby over a branch line and the L. & N.W. ran to Leicester over a branch line. The L. & N.W. now work the Rugby section and the Midland the Leicester section. The result is a considerable reduction in the number of working hours. The employees now work but 3½ or four days per week. If this is the result of but a sectional inter-working, what would be the result upon employment of a State effort at organising traffic ?

* * *

It must not be forgotten that “nationalisation” presupposes the capitalist State still existent, the dividend mongers still in power, and a proletariat still unable, because of its lack of class-consciousness, to assume control of ALL the industries in the interest of the community. Now, as “nationalisation” of industries is carried out, necessarily, by and in the interest of the exploiting class, it would certainly involve a greater displacement of labour and a smaller wages bill, which in turn would mean decreased purchasing power on the part of the workers in most branches of industry. Of course, if the “nationalisers” can show that the exploiting class will pay a double or treble wages bill to that now paid for the same traffic receipts, then my contention falls to the ground.

* * *

I fear we Socialists will have to admit the truth of our opponents contention that “Socialism will abolish the home.” It were folly to deny that we mean to abolish such homes as are described below.

* * *

“At a Huddersfield inquest yesterday on a baby that was said to have been suffocated, it was stated that the child’s father and mother and three children all slept in one bed in a one-roomed house. Natural causes was the verdict.” Manchester Guardian, 13.7.09.

* * *

Natural causes, indeed ! To say so is to say that the conditions are natural. 0f course; the capitalist-minded jury could return no other verdict. To say that the death was “unnatural” at once lays a charge at someone’s door. The question then arising, followed to the solution, turns the inquest into an inquest on the capitalist system. It is better to resort to the old lie “natural causes.”

JAYBEE.

Blogger's Note:

My educated guess is that 'JAYBEE.' was the pen-name for Manchester Branch's Jim Brough, who had written other Jottings columns under his own name.

Running Commentary: Clerics’ confusion (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the August 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Clerics’ confusion

Are we all god 's children, or are some of us — women — rather more distant relations of his — nieces perhaps? Are we all made in his immaculate image or are those of us in the female sex less capable than those of the male gender?

The Church of England, which purports to instruct us in morality and keeping our place as docile wage slaves in the capitalist order of things, is having difficulty in deciding whether to allow women the same opportunity to be ordained as men. The recent vote of the Synod, to refer the issue to a panel of 53 bishops, was not so much a decision as a deferment, in the hope that the slickest religious brains in the church can use the next six months or so to cook up a face-saving compromise.

This is all rather curious. The church has been operating for centuries as a bunch of intellectual storm-troopers (although latterly rather more like a company in Dad's Army) for class society. Do they think they might perform better, on behalf of the ruling class, if women were allowed to dress up in those silly clothes, perform the same meaningless rituals and preach to us about the rewards waiting in heaven for all who do their duty for capitalism?

On the other hand, why should any of them oppose women priests? (Graham Leonard, the Bishop of London, hinted broadly that he would leave the church if women are to be ordained. Not exactly a grievous loss to us if he did). Other churches have female priests, as does the Anglican church in some other countries. They don't seem to have any problems in doing the church's work of putting across the baseless, reactionary nonsense of religion.

This brings us to the most important question, of why women should want an equal right to become priests, especially if this means first being insulted by people like Graham Leonard. Of course, it's all part of the drive for sexual equality, for proving that women can do any job as efficiently as men. So far the jobs where this has been proved have included the armed forces (in some states there are female combat troops); the police (watch Hill Street Blues of a Saturday night to see how a girl can handle a truncheon); the prison service (there are now female governors of male prisons in Britain, making sure the prisoners are firmly locked away and punished appropriately); and of course there's the Prime Ministership . . .

Perhaps there are some women libbers who think it is a worthwhile result for their long campaign, that they can now do the same dirty work for capitalism as men. In fact, there are worthier aims to campaign for. Like a society free, not just of sexual inequality and repression but also of the religious hypocrisy which has helped to keep us all — and especially women — enslaved for too long.

Health service priorities

Another recent demonstration of the perverse priorities in capitalism is the statement by Norman Fowler, the Social Services secretary, that he has authorised health authorities to pay managers bonuses of up to £3.960 for making cuts in health service expenditure — cuts that are likely to entail the closure of hospitals.

Health service managers who don't mind acting as the government’s hatchet people can expect an extra £ 1.660 a year if they are general managers (five per cent on top of their annual salary of £33.200); for district managers £3,160 (ten per cent of their maximum of £31.600); and for unit managers. who run individual hospitals, an extra £3.960. or up to 15 per cent of the maximum salary of £26.400.

One of the ways in which the government seeks to justify its programme of hospital closures is through the cosy euphemism of "community care". This is the name given to the plan to remove many long-term sick, disabled and mentally ill from hospitals to be "cared for" in the community. Most people would accept that being looked after by loving friends, family or neighbours backed up by appropriate medical, nursing and social work support is preferable to incarceration in impersonal hospital wards. Unfortunately the reality of "community care" is often very different. Many long-stay hospital patients have remained in hospital precisely because they don't have family or friends willing or able to care for them; social services and community medical provision are already over-stretched and are unable to provide the support that would make "community care" a reality; there are insufficient resources being put into sheltered housing, group homes and day centres. The result is that the reality of "community care" for many people is a lonely, near-destitute existence in a depressing hostel; or homelessness or. for some, relapse into illness and a return to hospital.

Health service managers are being offered bribes to close hospitals, not because they are no longer needed but because meeting the needs of those who make up waiting list statistics is too expensive. Neither are hospitals being closed because "community care" is a more humane alternative. They are being closed because it is a cheaper alternative.

Policing pupils

Over the last few months the government has done its best to try to divert attention away from uncomfortable, but real, issues such as the continuing suffering caused by apartheid in South Africa, the failure of economic policies to stem the rise in unemployment, questions being asked about the nuclear power industry after the Chernobyl nuclear accident, and so on. Instead we have had our attention focused on a series of pseudo-issues which can be "solved" easily. Litter in the streets: solution — call in capitalist entrepreneur Richard Branson to start a "Clean-Up Britain" campaign. Hippy peace convoys in the New Forest: mobilise an army of police at five in the morning to break up and disperse the camp. Sexual promiscuity among the young: introduce an amendment to the Education Bill to require teachers to stress moral values and family life in sex education classes.

This amendment to the Education Bill attracted considerable media attention and yet at the same time another two amendments were being tacked on to the Bill which, although they attracted less comment, are perhaps more insidious. They will require school governors to pay attention to the view of Chief Officers of the police when making decisions about school curricula and head teachers to take account of Chief Officers' views when organising lessons.

Are the police going to use their newly-acquired influence to ensure that children are taught about road safety, or the necessity of having lights on their bicycles, or what to do if they witness an accident7 So far the evidence suggests that this is not what the police have in mind. The 1983 report from the schools inspectors suggested that the value (to the police) of closer liaison between the police and schools would be that of "intelligence-gathering":

Police forces generally attach considerable importance to the advantages to be gained through unofficial contact with schools. Home-beat officers “drop in" at school during break for a chat with pupils or teachers . . . Most schools welcome and encourage this informal contact and may ask home-beat officers or juvenile bureau officers to have an unofficial "word" with pupils, or their parents, about whom they feel anxious in relation to criminal activity.

Of course there's an official term for this informal, unofficial contact between police and schools — "multi-agency policing". In practice this means that as many different people as possible are co-opted to do the dirty work of the police and inform on their neighbours and fellow workers through neighbourhood watch schemes and the involvement of social workers. Now it seems that the police, having got their foot in the door of school, are going to be allowed some input into the curriculum too.

Most teachers who attempt to talk about the morality of family life in sex education lessons will simply be laughed down by sophisticated teenagers who have their own moral code. But it's much harder to laugh down a police officer who enters the classroom to glean information through chats with pupils or teachers, or a Chief Constable who insists on his right to vet the curriculum.

Blogger's Note:

Though this Running Commentary column is unsigned, there's a strong chance it was written by Janie Percy-Smith. During this period, she was on the Standard editorial committee and was one of the journal's most prolific writers, and the 'Clerics' confusion' piece indicates that the author is female.

Letter: Socialists 'shying away'? (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists 'shying away'?

Dear Editors,

In May’s Socialist Standard Jonathan Clay writes that "evil” has social roots, rather than being some theologically explicable external force ("Dunblane—a Question of Evil?"). Let’s take "evil" as meaning acts of gross inhumanity, and let’s accept this as a sound argument. As capitalism becomes more effective in undermining our essential humanity as states and companies are increasingly free of restraint on their use of our lives for their purposes, then it seems that random acts of "evil" by individuals become more common.

This makes perfect sense to me, and finds an echo in Erich Fromm’s study of "evil"— Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. In this superb work, Fromm reasons that commercial and corporate life produces certain character types who have a tendency towards sadism as a solution to the draining away of meaning and human contact from their lives. It is a commonplace in psychology that such tendencies are more likely to be actively expressed if the person is subjected to pressure, and who can deny that modern capitalism produces an abundance of stress and pressure on everyone subjected to it?

I wonder, however whether Clay's picture might be incomplete in a vital areas of inquiry. There is a sense of omission here for me which feels important, and which is shared, to do Clay credit, by Fromm’s approach. The omission concerns our incomprehension of how antisocial pathology is actually formed in an individual character. Clay put it this way:

"The formation of an individual is on extremely complex, open-ended process which, even will all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped."

Is this so, I wonder? We as Socialists certainly feel that we can arrive at, at least, an "adequate” grasp of social mechanisms, in spite of their complexity and opacity. The fact is that there is a body of work available now which shines a good deal of light into the hitherto dark region of enquiry encompassed by the word "evil’’.

John Bowlby’s work on attachment and loss, in which he built upon insights gained through a study of hospitalised children, has given birth to whole field of investigation called Attachment Theory, which is proving fruitful in the understanding of antisocial behaviour and even acts of gross savagery. For example. it shows that violent rage stems from a disrupted attachment in infancy or early childhood, from a breakdown in a carer’s ability to provide a "secure base" for the child, for whatever reason, we are not talking about judgements here, but about explanations.

Experiments carried out by Ainsworth. Mary Main and others show that even among under-five's it is possible to prove a connection between the quality of attunement and boundary setting provided by a parent for an infant, and that infant's behaviour in an observed play setting. The better the connection the parents are able to offer the child, the more the child will play sociably and as an equal with its peers, whereas infants of parents who are neglectful will be disruptive and perhaps bullying. For an excellent overview, expanding and in my view deepening Fromm’s masterpiece, anyone interested might read Felicity De Zulueta's From Pain to Violence—The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness (Whurr 1993).

Socialists tend to shy away from such work. They fear that it implies the abandonment of societal explanations for personal ones. We think what we hear is—"society isn’t sick— you are!" We are suspicious because we think such thinking is simply the blaming of the powerless for the abuse of the powerful. the shackling of working-class mothers with the responsibility for all the ills of the world.

This is not so. The understanding of the origins of pathology is not the same thing as judging. Under capitalism in many ways adequate parenting can become almost impossible.

Of course suspicion is healthy here. I’m not arguing for the shifting of responsibility from capitalists onto hard-pressed parents, but let us not turn our backs on new thinking which casts light on, not only gross crimes, but also the psychological mechanisms which help to produce our assent for abuse and exploitation.

I want to look at Jonathan Clay’s description of reality under capitalism for a moment He talks of: "Fragmentation, powerlessness. alienation, anxiety and despair, in a world which is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control."

This accurate description of how capitalist society can feel is also a beautiful and harrowing evocation of how it must feel to be a helpless neglected child. Such a child, as an adult, may well feel driven to inflict those unbearable emotions on others now less powerful than himself. Such logic does not excuse his behaviour, but it may well explain it.

All of the foregoing is not intended to blame the powerless or shift the spotlight off capitalist society, but with gaining a better understanding of abuse power, which is, surely, the essence of capitalism. Abusive power masquerading as its opposite.

Clay quotes Camus, saying “Children will still die unjustly, even in a perfect society." Well, maybe we as Socialists have more to offer in illuminating this problem than Jonathan Clay thinks, at least if we can be more open to, and less afraid of. the more intimate "people sciences". To paraphrase him— "Do we really want to understand less?"

Peter Rigg, 

Nelson, Lancs

Holding the baby (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist class own the means and instruments for producing society’s needs. The working class must sell their ability to work to the capitalist class for wages which are often not sufficient to keep them according to the conventional standard of living. Many working-class women—unmarried mothers, widowed and deserted mothers, mothers whose husbands are disabled or whose husbands haven’t a large enough wage to support the family, are forced to take a job to augment their income and send their children to day nurseries.

Remarking on such cases, the “Economist” (April 4th, 1953), wrote :—

"The cost per head of keeping a child in a day nursery varies from thirty-five shillings a week to five pounds, according to staffing ratios and amenities. The average wage of adult working women is just under four pounds ten shillings a week. As a matter of plain arithmetic, this means that full cost of the productive services of a working woman who sends her children to a day nursery may easily be both her actual wage, paid by the employer, and an equal amount paid through the local authority that looks after her children. Where several children must be cared for, the full cost may be several times the value of the product—a wildly uneconomical transaction. Where nursery costs are highest it would pay, hands down, to give the mother of two or more children, her full market wage, plus a substantial bonus, simply to mind her babies at home. That normally gratuitous job turns out, when actually priced on the market, to be more valuable than most other occupations open to those doing it."

"This hard headed arithmetical conclusion does not translate easily into practical policy. Not even the wildest speculations of welfare Utopians have included a universal payment to mothers of the market value of their work as child-minders. There might be a case for making such payments, as an alternative to the provision of day nurseries, only to those women who would suffer special hardships if they could not go out to work—to widowed or deserted or unmarried mothers, or to wives of disabled husbands. But an economic payment to such people would make them better off than many normal wives dependent on a breadwinner’s earnings.

"The problem must in fact continue to be fudged rather than solved."

No doubt this appears a very ridiculous situation to the “Economist,” the capitalist class and those who think like them—in terms of exchange value and profit and loss. But the capitalist class are not likely to endorse the obvious solution. Free the working class from the need to sell their labour power to live—a job that can only be done by the workers themselves—by making the means and instrument of production the common property of all.

J.T.

More about children and crime (1950)

From the June 1950 issue of the Socialist Standard

Over the past few months, popular newspapers have been giving a great deal of space to articles on crime, juvenile delinquency and more especially to crimes of violence. Some newspapers in fact, have been accused of giving “cosh cases” prominence in order to canalise public opinion in such a way as to make people demand the return of flogging. Although it is not the purpose of this article to either justify or oppose flogging, it is interesting to note that even so-called “experts” are divided as to whether this form of punishment is a deterrent. It is even more interesting, however, to read these “expert” opinions on the cause and cure of crime.

The Daily Express (April 25th, 1950) displayed on page 3 the following headline:—

“Glittering Toys Blamed for Theft” 

and reported the Mayor of Acton, Mr. A. E. Mitchell, when addressing a conference on juvenile crime at the Middlesex Guildhall, as saying:—

“Multiple stores are responsible for much of the petty thieving today. Glittering toys in easy reach are great temptation to children. . . . The Stores should co-operate by putting them out of reach.”

We may well ask Mr. Mitchell what sort of a world it is that can produce glittering toys in superabundance merely to lie in windows and on shelves out of reach. Is it so surprising that children unable to buy them, will take them?

What then of the older child? The child who is old enough to know that the taking of toys is forbidden and old enough to know that toys are not to play with, but only things at which to look and covet; the child who wants to amuse himself, who has no playroom, playground, or nearby woods in which to roam?

At the same conference Mr. A. T. Pike, Chairman of the Highgate Juvenile Court has something to say of this very child. He asks:—

“What causes children to trample down allotments, ill-treat old ladies, and do things of that kind?”

and then answers:—

“It is downright wickedness!”

It is evident that Mr. Pike has a remarkable insight and is aptly fitted to deal with the cases that come before him. No doubt he is a source of inspiration and guidance to those children whose misfortune it is to visit his Court. His suggestion for the cure, however, is one which is no less brilliant than his analysis of the cause, and must have been the result of painstaking research.

He says:—

“The sooner we get back to old-fashioned terms and remedies the better.”

We may also ask Mr. Pike what he expects in a world where Commando thugs and Dick Barton are the heroes, where violence, atom bombs and mass murder are the order of the day. Is it not to be expected that some children will react accordingly, emulate their heroes and become little toughs.

In speaking to the Annual Conference of probation officers at Cheltenham, Sir Hartley Shawcross seemed to be getting on the right track when he said, (Sunday Observer, 23/4/50):—

“In these days of economic uncertainty and, still more, of the fear and threat of war, many of us are tempted to a get-rich-quick attitude. . . . 'Let us live while we are alive; let us get what we can while we can.' Too often that is the modern philosophy ”

He goes on to say: —

“The basic factor is that the suppression of crime by adults consists primarily in preventing juvenile crime. Not only are virtually all habitual offenders people who committed their first offences when children; no less than a third of those convicted of indictable offences are children under seventeen. . . . The number of criminals to each 100,000 of the population is greater at the age of sixteen than at any other age. What an indictment of us! We may not be able to do much about those who have established themselves in a life of crime, except to keep them out of mischief. But we must stop the rot at the beginning."

If Sir Hartley Shawcross appears to be on the right track in his earlier remarks as to the cause, we are sadly disappointed later on, when he says of the cure: —

“I wish we could build up . . .  a uniformed youth organisation in the social services of the nation. Young people love uniforms.”

Then, to forestall any accusation of suggesting the building of a “Hitler Jugend,” he says:—

“That was the secret of the “Hitler Youth” a damnable organisation. But that love of uniforms and of the idea that they are doing something important can be developed for good ends, as well as base ones.”

It is difficult to see exactly where Sir Hartley’s youth organisation would differ from the “Hitler Youth” in either means or ends, but no doubt, being an “ expert ” he must be right when he asserts that there is a difference.

He goes on to say: —

“Just fancy, if you could enrol those over school leaving age in a junior section of the special constabulary, you might divert a lot of the spirit of adventure into stopping crime instead of creating it."

Just fancy, if only children would grow up with a spirit of adventure, law-abiding enough to be honest and conscientious workers in peacetime and ruthless enough to be cold and efficient killers in war. Unfortunately for Sir Hartley and his whole tribe of “experts” he can't have it both ways, and all the psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, child guidance clinics and other “specialists” can rack their brains and hold conferences from now until the cows come home but until the economic system that causes crime is fundamentally changed, they might just as well knock their heads against the wall.

It may be argued, of course, that all children do not react in the same way to the same conditions, but let us compare the country child with the slum child. It is generally accepted that there is less “delinquency” among the former as compared with the latter. But the former has many more facilities for occupying his spare time in a “ law-abiding ” manner—open spaces, trees to climb, and the thousand and one things the country can offer—but the slum child, hemmed in with brick walls, in most cases unwanted in the house all day because of lack of space, has to play in the streets and in finding an outlet for his energies often resorts to destructive behaviour.

What conclusions are to be drawn then? The workers the world over produce those very toys and all the other goods that they and their children want. The development of science in production has proceeded far enough for all their demands to be satisfied providing the world were run in a sane manner. As things are however most people are unable to buy everything they want and are, in fact, often unable to obtain all the basic necessities of life. Some therefore take what appears to be the easy way out and resort to what is known as “dishonest ways” of obtaining those things. The number who succeed in this way and stay unapprehended is probably small. Those who do succeed most likely spend their time wondering how long it will be before they are caught. There is one way in which robbery can be successfully carried out and yet at the same time be legal. This is what is generally known as robbing the workers of the fruits of their labour, and to do this only one condition is required—that of being an employer or capitalist. As, however, this is impossible for most of us, we are back where we started. The solution to the problem, however, does exist.

Seeing then, that the mass of the people produce those goods they need, why can’t they have them? This is what our comrades in America probably call the sixty-four dollar question.

The Socialist solution is one that would remove crime, poverty and slums in one fell swoop. We hold that all the evils of the modern world including war, are a result of that very way in which the world’s wealth is produced and distributed, and of the fact that approximately one-tenth of the people own nine-tenths of that wealth. We do not call for the equal distribution of that wealth, but for the abolition of private or State ownership of the means of life and the making of production and distribution and making them the common property of every man, woman and child on the earth. Everybody who is able will work to produce the things that we need and everybody will have equal access to those things.

We argue that the need to “cosh” a man on the head for his watch or his wallet would no longer exist because watches would be freely available to all who needed them, and money would be a thing of the past. Even today, who would bother to steal water from another man’s tap? Nobody dreams of doing so because water is freely available to everybody.

Under Socialism the same condition would apply to all our needs—they would be freely available to all.

Those who prattle about “human nature” being the cause of crime and making Socialism impossible, should be reminded of a few facts. According to the calculations of scientists like Gordon Child and Julian Huxley, man has probably existed on this planet for a period of at least 500,000 years. Of that period the greater part was lived in primitive communism, where money was unknown, where such property as existed was commonly owned and where the distribution of the wealth produced was in accordance with the needs of the community. A fine example is given by De Poncins in his book “Kabloona.” During his stay among the Eskimo untouched by civilisation he was amazed to find that in spite of the severity of the climate and the consequent scarcity of the means of life, stealing was unknown and that there was no word for stealing in the Eskimo language. He found, in fact, that in this condition of rude communism crime was virtually iron-existent.

Let those who talk so glibly about “human nature,” appear in the dock and plead like the German War Criminals that “human nature” is the cause of their crimes. The court that passes sentence will be no more lenient and the rope that hangs them will be no less deadly.

In conclusion; when the working class decides to solve its own problems instead of leaving it to the “experts,” society will no longer need prisons, nor indeed will it need “experts” on the cause and cure of crime.

S. J. Burton.

Education, politics and language (2009)

From the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today’s education system is presented as preparation for a ‘career’ ignoring the political conditioning it also involves.

Our species is unique in terms of the length of our childhood. Most believe this to be so because of the advantages of learning which can be passed on culturally. In the natural environment as opposed to the cultural human one, we would not progress very far if we had to learn through personal experience how to create the technological world in which we live.

Vital in this process is an efficient way in which to communicate the lessons of the past – language. As a child grows it exhibits a skill for language that still amazes those who study and analyse the process. Capitalism depends on an authoritarian social structure that seeks to justify and protect the minority who currently have social power. It is not surprising to socialists, then, that these values are also communicated within the process of the ‘education’ of the young. Together with the more obvious forms of coercion: continual testing to destroy communal feelings by presenting others as competition; enforcement of uniformity in appearance to suppress individuality; living by the clock to impose the illusion of the normality of life as a wage slave; the presentation of ‘careers’ such as in the military or banking as being acceptable rather than lives celebrating murder or the exploitation of their fellow man – there is also a far more powerful and subversive use of language that this article will seek to illustrate.

Before continuing this analysis we must mention the other type of education that exists within capitalist societies – what, in this country are called public schools. They possess, unsurprisingly, a very different ethos than that described above. For the children of the elite who are not taught at home, these institutions exist to prepare their pupils for university where they learn the techniques needed for the City, Westminster, Inns of Court or any of the other institutions dedicated to the suppression and exploitation of the majority class. That this is self-evident to socialists but is seen as an expression of envy and class ‘hatred’ by the Establishment and even by many members of the working class itself is testament to the power of education and its social values (on both sides).

To the powerful, of course, a socialist education is political manipulation based on propaganda. That to many the education system is seen as preparation for a ‘career’ rather than political conditioning is evidence of the subversion of the very language used to describe the world. In an effort to present the current social structure the language used presents it as the only possible world and any alternative as either naïve or dangerous fantasy. Why else would it be considered reasonable to debate the existence of a supernatural entity that created the universe (God) but ridiculous to explore the possibility of a stateless and moneyless rational society?

Speaking of money – a great way to start an analysis of the subversion of language in this society. How many times have we heard that money can give us ‘independence’ and ‘choice’? For instance it is said that it gives us the ability to travel. Apparently we don’t need the labour and talent that produces cars, boats, trains and planes. What need do we have of shoes, food, clothes and maps to get to our destination? The idea that money can create these things is one of the great illusions implicit within our language.

All the coloured paper and shiny coins in the world will not get you across water unless someone builds you a boat – and not just someone but hundreds and even thousands are involved in producing the possibility of travel. Money represents an involuntary contract that involves an interdependence of, sometimes, global labour – the complete opposite of ‘independence’. And how many times have you heard it said that King Henry built this castle and Lord Muck built that stately home? No designers, masons, architects or carpenters were apparently involved. For many it is money that creates our world and not the interdependent labour of us all. What is this if not a political subversion of language?

Perhaps the ultimate triumph of this kind of linguistic perversion is the contemporary view of what constitutes ‘politics’ itself. We are told that we live in a ‘democracy’ in which we are free to choose what kind of society we live in. But the most important of all political decisions – what the community produces – is never subjected to any kind of democratic process. Instead the city brokers merely decide which commodities will deliver the greatest or most reliable profits. In other words these decisions are made by a tiny elite minority in the interests of an even smaller minority. In capitalist society the only ‘choice’ voters have is who will decide how taxes are distributed to create and maintain the state infrastructure – armies, police, road, rail, law, health and social security system and, of course, the education system.

Even this choice is only ‘given’ to the people once every five years between two political parties with no important differences in ideology. And this is political democracy? Apart from its obvious farcical and unjust nature it makes politics so boring. It’s not just cynicism that turns people off from this ‘media politics’ it is that it’s been sucked dry of meaning and now only represents platitudes and repetitious clichés. But this is the way our rulers like it. Their media continues to produce meaningless garbage about political celebrities (leaders) and evil foreigners or unions, knowing that while their readers are obsessed with such trivia nothing will ever change. This is the primary aim of our education system – the inculcation of language without political meaning.

 

For over one hundred years the task of the socialist party has been to counter the propaganda of the status quo. Not just in ideological terms but in trying to restore meaning to political language. Even our opponents have to admit that the meaning they give to words like socialism, democracy, human nature, economics, history and politics itself is very different from ours.

Although socialists grow weary of redefining the very language of politics for every individual new to our perspective it is quite possible that when we find we do not have to do so, then change is close. For although the ruling class seek to own the language as they own everything else, the needs of a highly technical means of production necessitate a higher and more flexible education system. Their wealth may give them power but it cannot give them intelligence or talent – for that they need us.

It may be that the days of a narrow education to fit the needs of a narrow division of labour are past. More of us are not able to tolerate the public school, university ‘experts’ pontificating on politics any more. They must take responsibility for the dire state of the world. The majority are taking possession of knowledge and do not need politicians, priests, doctors, scientists, prime ministers or any other type of ‘leader’ to make political decisions on our behalf.

Wez.

50 Years Ago: Children and Empire (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The special correspondent of the Daily News, reporting the speech of Dr. Vaughan Cornish, President of the Geographical Section of the British Association, writes:—

‘In his opinion, if you are to do your duty to the Empire you must have at least four children. He made it clear that you should not invite children into the world for their own pleasure and amusement, but should enlist them as it were, in an army for home defence.

‘In his view, it appeared, children were merely potential soldiers.

'In order to have strategic security in this island’, he insisted, ‘we must be able to meet the air force of a European combination as well as to carry out our traditional plan of dispatching a powerful expeditionary force for the support of a friendly power. This active defence requires a large population.’

(Daily News 14.9.1923).

Imagine urging us to increase our families so that our children may provide food for guns! And the monuments to the ‘glorious dead’ are still being covered with wreaths though their dependants cannot find the necessary covering to shelter them from the inclement weather.

(From an unsigned editorial Produce More — Children in the Socialist Standard, October 1923).

Schooled for capitalism (1991)

From the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

Different people expect different things from schools. Margaret Thatcher is on record as saying that education should prepare children for the world of work, while the radical educationist A. S. Neill (head of Summerhill) thought that education should be a preparation for life. These views may seem poles apart, but both coincide in seeing education as a preparation for something else. Neill’s position is especially odd. as it implies that education is not part of life. Surely education—the process of learning—is an integral part of our daily lives. It takes place outside school as much as in it, and doesn’t stop when we leave school for a job or the dole queue.

Discipline

Education now consumes about one-sixth of central and local government spending, but government's role in education only came about for reasons clearly related to the historical development of capitalism. The first state intervention in education in England was the quaintly-named Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802; this was an ineffective attempt to get factory-owners to provide some basic instruction for their younger apprentices, who had been forced into factory work by the Industrial Revolution. The reasons given for educating workers in the early nineteenth century were to teach thrift and good housekeeping (and so reduce the expense of poor relief), and to combat the rise in crime by teaching order and discipline. Most factory jobs needed few or no skills, so education was not seen as necessary for production.

In the course of the century, however, technical progress led to a greater demand for skilled and educated labour. Both state and church schools provided basic instruction (mainly in religion and the three other R’s), but formal schooling was still a small part of most people's lives. In 1851, an inquiry found that the average school attendance was just two years. In 1865 an investigation of children between the ages of 3 and 12 in Manchester showed that over half were neither attending school nor in employment. It was partly to control the potential for crime and disorder resulting from this idle mass that elementary education for all was introduced by the 1870 Elementary Education Act. which set the school leaving age at 12.

Pigeon-holing

But there were powerful economic arguments too. as Britain encountered competition from other capitalist countries, such as Germany, where a fairly sophisticated education system already existed. William Forster, the architect of the 1870 Act, claimed that “upon the speedy provision of elementary education depends our industrial prosperity". Similar arguments were used in the present century to motivate the expansion of secondary schools and the provision of teaching in technical subjects. A 1931 government report coined the word “numeracy” to indicate mathematical capabilities alongside the traditional literacy.

It was the Education Act of 1944 which instituted the system of primary and secondary education for all. Its proposal to raise the leaving age from 15 to 16 was not achieved till 1972, however. The Act enshrined a division of children into three types, each destined for a different kind of secondary school. Those who could follow a proper argument were earmarked for grammar school, those whose aptitude was more for applied science were suitable for technical school, while those who were supposedly happier with concrete things rather than ideas could hope for no more than a secondary modern school.

Such ludicrous pigeon-holing prompted the switch-over to comprehensive schools. It was often claimed that these were intended to give children equal opportunity to succeed, but of course there was another side to it. In 1964 Harold Wilson, soon to become Prime Minister, stated; "We simply cannot as a nation afford to neglect the educational development of a single boy or girl". Nowadays, too, the Labour Party seems to see education as the guarantor of efficiency and competitiveness, and hence as the saviour of British capitalism.

Education has clearly been viewed by politicians, and the capitalists whose interests they represent, as an instrument to serve their own ends. As production became ever more complex, the need for an educated workforce came to be the main motivation; so schools really do exist to prepare children for the world of work—for wage slavery. Ever-present, too, is the need for a disciplined workforce; whatever else schoolchildren may or may not learn, they are taught to do as they're told, to know their place and to knuckle under to authority. And who shall say that schools are not still means to keep potential troublemakers off the street, and to teach young workers how to manage on a pittance? Even the division of children into different ability groups is perpetuated by the continued use of streaming.

Book learning

William Morris in News from Nowhere depicted a society where the word "school" is unknown. People learn throughout their lives, picking up skills as they want to. We shouldn’t treat them as gospel, but Morris’s speculations are an interesting approach to what education might be like in socialism. With the ending of class society and production for profit, education will no longer serve the ends of providing an obedient and half-trained workforce. It will not be a preparation for anything, but will be an essential part of everyone’s existence.

The unnatural division into education of children on the one hand and of adults on the other will cease. Learning of practical skills can be done face-to-face—the idea of teaching such skills impersonally through books is, Morris thought, a rather odd one. Whether there will be separate institutions recognisable as schools is not for us to say now. But certainly there will be no examination tyranny, no blind faith in paper qualifications, no condemning of so many as “failures”.

We cannot know precisely what education will be like in socialism, but it will undoubtedly be a far cry from the production line-like schools of capitalism.

Paul Bennett