Proper Gander: Manipulated by the Monoform (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mass media is a ‘systematically organised, one-way path from the producer to the spectator. Constantly. Constantly. And that is not communication. We should try and find some other word for it. And it’s certainly manipulation’, according to film-maker and theorist Peter Watkins, who has died at the age of 90. His words come from a 2001 video interview following the release of his film La Commune, through which he aimed to use the medium of film-making to communicate, rather than just present one interpretation. The film re-enacts the Paris Commune of 1871 and was made in a less hierarchical, more democratic way than found in the mass media’s usual output, by having non-professional actors improvising scenes and shown discussing the views of both their characters and themselves.

La Commune was the last film Watkins made, after which he honed his theories about how the media industry functions for his 2004 book The Media Crisis. His films, in one way or another, focus on conflict between states and between classes. Their subject matter includes nuclear war (The War Game, The Journey), oppression of political activists (Punishment Park, Evening Land) and historical flashpoints (Culloden, La Commune). His two productions of the late 1960s, Privilege and The Gladiators, share the theme of the elite using the media to divert and channel working class dissent. These films employ a setting of the near-future to examine this, while his theories about film-making investigate how this happens in real life.

Watkins argued that the mass audio-visual media (MAVM) industry moulds the reactions of its audience through the style and arrangement of its products. He called the prevailing template for films and programmes the ‘Monoform’. This is defined as ‘a formatted and repetitive TV language form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure’ (Notes on the Media Crisis, Peter Watkins, 2010). This is a familiar description of dramas and documentaries with predictably linear plots, scenes too short to explore details and mood-accentuating soundtracks. This style is particularly noticeable in the common practice of documentaries starting with a quick summary of the programme to come, reducing what could be a complex subject into a couple of minutes (before then reducing the subject into only forty-or-so minutes for the rest of the duration). Watkins continues ‘Because of its extreme rapidity (especially the version developed over the past 20 years [ie, from circa 1990]), the Monoform gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning […]. It is organised to create pre-determined responses, which means that before the audience sees any Monoform film or television programme, its producers already know how they (the audience) will react – or at least such is the intention’ (ibid). In emphasising how the format or approach adopted by film-makers can be used to push an agenda, Watkins is echoing Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said ‘the medium is the message’ in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. As the MAVM is owned by corporations, their films and programmes are intended to reinforce acceptance of the social framework of which the MAVM is a part, as well as make a profit for their shareholders. The Monoform followed by the MAVM’s products reinforces this acceptance by discouraging critical thinking about that social framework. Here, Watkins’ views have similarities with those of Frankfurt School luminary Herbert Marcuse, who described how capitalism utilises the mass media as a means of social control, including by stifling anti-capitalist thought.

A film or programme’s style, music and editing support the priorities of the media industry even if its content appears to criticise society. Watkins says ‘The fact that many filmmakers and media intellectuals believe that a radical subject or a powerful theme in themselves create an ‘alternative’ cinema is another paradox. In most cases it is only the content that could be considered alternative: a radical theme per se does not challenge the over-riding problem of hierarchical form, process and structure. In fact, it only confuses the issue, and is a prime reason why critical thinking on the role of the MAVM has not developed beyond a limited point’ (ibid). This may explain why films and TV programmes haven’t prompted truly radical political action, even when they often depict capitalism’s failings.

Another way that programme-making is shaped by its capitalist context is what Watkins called ‘the universal clock’. This refers to how television shows are made in uniform lengths to allow time for adverts within and between them on a fixed schedule. The prerogatives of the marketing industry are important enough to limit the running times of programmes, chiefly those on traditional broadcast channels. YouTube has its own norms for how advertising affects content, with commercials intruding upon videos mid-sentence, and vloggers interrupting their spiel to promote their sponsors, both in a crass way which makes the scheduling of TV commercial breaks almost seem polite in comparison.

Watkins gave a cogent, class-conscious account of how the media industry’s role in capitalist society impacts on the nature of its products. Films and TV programmes project the hierarchical structure of capitalism through the way they are edited and paced, regardless of their content. The template followed by MAVM output is intended to present a one-sided view, reinforcing acceptance of the status quo and discouraging critical discussion among the audience. In his own films, such as La Commune, Watkins tried to counter these tendencies through his collaborative, improvisational methods, with the consequence that his work became unattractive to major studios, distributors and broadcasters. His marginalisation, to some extent, proves his theories right. He has left us with not only a set of challenging, passionate films but also a valuable contribution to explaining how capitalism’s media industry has to operate, by manipulating us, its consumers.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Further reading on Peter Watkins from the Socialist Standard archives

• Oct 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 1
• Nov 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 2
• Jul 1966: Review of The War Game
• Oct 1980: Review of The War Game

Letter: Sexual preferences and socialism (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sexual preferences and socialism

Dear Editors.

I would like to congratulate Haringey District Council for deciding to promote a "homosexual and lesbian awareness" programme in the schools they are in charge of.

I am 19, gay, and when at school, it was a dirty word, known as being gay. This is because I lived in a 1920s Tory area of St. Anne's near Blackpool, where you are outcast if you are anything but middle class, own a house, two cars, have two children at private school and vote Conservative.

People like that don't realise times have changed, and that people today should be able to have confidence in their sexual orientation, and be able to be open in their sexual preferences.

All I can hope for is that Labour win the next election, so that these shackles can be broken, and gay people can be fairly treated in confidence.

"UNHAPPY SOCIALIST”

Reply:

The continuation of the profit-system depends on the uncritical social conformity of the majority. Great pains are taken, from an early stage in our lives, to discipline us into being "normal" and to treat abnormality with suspicion and often with contempt. As "Unhappy Socialist" observes, the sort of normal aspirations which we are conditioned to accept involve getting a house and a family and settling down, frequently to a routine of grin-and-bear it. This is largely a very modest and unimaginative way to have to endure your life but even this modest goal presents serious financial and domestic problems for most people who bite the boring bait.

The main type of normality which workers are encouraged to adopt is that which makes them good wage-slaves. Unquestioning obedience to authority, dull resignation to a class-divided society, a view of human nature as inherently selfish and the requirement to see present society as the final stage of historical development, are all part of the mental make-up of a "normal" person. Normality. though, is a permeating precept. As a result, all sorts of unorthodox people are herded together by conventional wisdom (conditioned ignorance) and branded as abnormal. Even if their ideas or conduct do not directly attack the class system, they are labelled with disapproval with varying degrees of contempt from "eccentric" to "subversive". Some groups may not threaten the existing structure of normality in a way that could be seen as dangerous to capitalism's basic needs but they are despised because they refuse to be bound by convention. Some of the vehement tirades against the itinerant hippies recently chased by the authorities from one county to another were examples of this. Some infringements of normality may not endanger the class system, but from the viewpoint of the ruling class (whose ideas are in n the main put by the mass media) assaults on conventional conduct are to be strongly discouraged.

Human beings are capable of enjoying a wide range of sexual behaviour. But the variety of sexual expression which is subtly promoted by the way we are socially conditioned is that which results in Mr Normal marrying Mrs Normal and. after working hard for someone else, settling down to produce two little normallettes who will be encouraged to grow up and repeat the same pattern of behaviour. The only social environment in which human sexual experience will be likely to develop freely, unconstrained by prejudice and poverty, is a genuinely classless society: socialism. Because of the prevalent and routine frustrations of everyday life for workers under capitalism and the limited creative pleasures open to most people, sex has become a rather frenetic and obsessional preoccupation with many people. The sexual part of our behaviour might well be less frenzied or important in a more imaginatively creative world. It will more certainly be beyond the realms of taboo and insecurity which it often occupies today. In any event, for as long as the majority permit the continuation of a social system which causes most people to live in poverty and insecurity, there will be the risk that one or other minority groups will become a victimised scapegoat for social problems.

The Labour Party stands only to continue to run the profit system. If it attained power as the government. it would do as it has done in its eight previous administrations and preside over chaos, poverty and discontent. As with any type of government. it would need to foster a certain sort of normality and however "progressive" its legislation. the problems of class-society would continue to arise. History demonstrates that "enlightened governments" which profess to make life comfortable for workers often, when their policies have failed to deliver the goods (as is necessarily the case), leave a trail of bitterly reactionary attitudes in their wake. Perhaps Neil Kinnock was perversely trying to avoid such a future problem by actually aiming to get power over workers on the very basis of having such views when he recently said:

I'm a father, and no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of enlightenment. 1 know damn well that, put to the test. I'm what people would call a reactionary (Everywoman, August 1986)

We shall not enjoy a properly liberated society while we are trapped in the social system which consigns the majority to lives of impoverishment, "normality" and alienation Instead of hoping for yet another Labour government to run capitalism, we urge our correspondent to become a socialist and act for a democratic society.

Editors.

Thoughts on art and artists (2025)

From the June 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the market system, art is often a commodity like any other. Art, as a skill, expression of an idea, attempt to move others, or simply a means to create beauty for its own sake, is in constant friction with commercial values.

On the one hand, art happens all the time outside of the market system. It is often not sold. Millions take part in creating tapestry or in knitting for gift-giving, in painting or making music as a hobby, in acting in local drama productions where payment will be minimal or totally absent, and so on. Thus, art seems almost a central characteristic of the human animal, even when money is not involved.

Likely, much art created by homo sapiens has been lost, which is understandable given it was created with natural substances that could decompose without trace. However, art from about forty to sixty thousand years ago has been found, such as Venus figurines worn as necklaces; Lion Man, the first figurine with animal features; the Borneo cave paintings depicting cattle, cupules (or cup-like indentations in rocks) which anthropologists have suggested may have served in a game or been used like musical instruments; and beautiful ostrich eggshell engravings, to name just a few of many other key discoveries. Humans from the earliest days possessed aesthetic sensibility, and may have worked to produce items that were intrinsically beautiful, or which possessed magical or other symbolic value. These were made by humans who lived in freedom, before the rise of states, exchange, and private property, and whose creative talents were developed in tandem with the development of tools and language.

Today, much art serves the needs of power and commerce. Students in art and design today will typically not be spending their lives beautifying our world, but rather living as workers to develop the design of packaging, posters, graphics, signage, fashion, animation, makeup, interiors, textiles, websites, and industrial goods, among other applications. Art today is therefore a prized skill that millions study for the purpose of serving industry. One could imagine many of these in use in even a classless society, but this also means that today’s art expresses the ideas, needs, and values of the rich. Our entire culture is based on appealing to the spending habits of the working class, or of the elite, to realise profits for the owning class. Most of what you see, touch, and use in your human world has been designed with money in mind. To that extent, our culture is creatively shaped by the needs of money itself. This is not simply a world designed according to techno-industrial development, rather it is a world designed by the needs of impersonal profit-making. We, flesh and blood humans of passion, emotion, aesthetic sense, and inspiration, live in a world in which art is distorted to serve the coldness of buying and selling.

Art is the expression of life, and you as a blue- or white-collar worker as well have been designed by our culture to live a particular one serving the unique needs of the owners. You have been moulded like so much plastic, thanks in fact to your neuroplasticity, into shapes that will feel excited by all the rubbish that the capitalist class sees fit to sell you. You have been designed as a worker who can fit into a corporate culture for five days of the week; you have been forged to consume commodities rather than live a true, authentic life of freedom and creativity. Despite such programming, it is in your nature to seek out and enjoy beautiful music, colourful paintings in the museum, and objects whose sleek, tainted, smooth, and sexy designs you covet. Meaning has been reduced to consumption. Not just that, but the artists involved have themselves been turned into machines whose creative spirits serve the capitalists in the attractive display of their goods.

In pop music, just as an example, the need to sell often leads to crass conventionality for no other reason but the hope of selling. Thus, after the first hits of Merseybeat, a hundred bands from around the world reproduced the identical style, especially with major labels courting anybody who could sound like the Beatles or Gerry and the Pacemakers. The same was true with almost any popular musical style: the rock’n’roll blues revivalists, folk-rock, psychedelia, hard rock, singer-songwriter, prog, metal, punk, dance, post-rock, and the list goes on. Many of these styles involved incredibly talented musicians, but they also inspired a generation of mediocre copyists. This was all due to a culture based on monetary values which distorted musical talent as it distorts everything to its image.

The music papers and radio stations also distorted talent by endlessly hyping one bad band after another as the greatest, latest, thing. Musicians are often evaluated by both the media and consumers according to how much they sell or to meaningless features of their personalities or lifestyles. While some famous bands were indisputably great, many famous acts remain indisputably have-beens. But even within the world of music, styles are themselves commodified, with fans devoted to classical competing with rock enthusiasts, who must then compete with followers of jazz, and so on. The reality is that all styles contain both a minority of the brilliant and a majority of the less inspired or inspiring. Many of the musicians were themselves aware of this, sampling the best of every genre even while the media were busy putting them into a box.

Conformity replaces individuality, artists who simply want to create what their heart dictates, although most artists who make no money probably don’t care about the marketplace and just continue according to their creative desire. It is often argued that capitalist competition was required to inspire the greats, however the reality is more likely the opposite, that many great artists failed to see the light of day, that competition generated commonness as much in art as in all commodities, that excessive resources were spent promoting rubbish, but that even the character of the art, for instance endless love songs about how much you want or need someone, was determined by what was viewed as sellable, as opposed to having reinforced originality and brilliance. Standards remain poor, everything produced is just ‘good enough’ for the masses.

Art in the service of commerce exists primarily to take your cash. It is impossible to even imagine what our world could look like without this distortion of our aesthetic sense serving the needs of the rich. Our cities serve the appearance and necessity of power, although they remain exciting places in which to live. There is just as much likelihood that a democratic society would have created futuristic cities far ahead of today’s capabilities that are limited by cost, than that it would have decentralised our living spaces so that we reside much closer to the living world. When the needs of human beings and the natural world come first, art will express freedom, community, nature, the universe, and those existential concerns that remain after the endless problems of a money society have been resolved.

Freed from today’s slavery in which we are required to serve the master class for most of our lives, perhaps more time will be spent in creativity. Perhaps even work will become more creative. Organisation will become more creative. How people may live together to establish the greatest joy will become a central creative venture. Art, in such a world, would not be expressed only in the artefacts or designs produced by artists, although those would also presumably continue to be valued, but art may be redefined as the creative life itself, as William Morris, Oscar Wilde, and many others have speculated.

In such a world, art will hold hands with science, and everyone’s life will be a form of art.

Dr. Who

The Law and Homosexuality (1966)

From the May 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the election out of the way, Wolfenden ― or rather his famous report ― may get back into the news again. This document, presented to Parliament in September 1957 after more than three years of painstaking work, called forth at that time a mixed public response of support and violent opposition. The government of the time fairly quickly implemented the committee’s main recommendations on prostitution (incidentally with a resultant increase in call-girls and a more highly organised poncing system), but did not make any move concerning the law on male homosexuality.

Public opinion was against any change, said Home Secretary R. A. Butler in the Commons debate of November 26th, 1958, as if capitalist politicians are not capable of trying to ignore public opinion when they think it will serve their purposes to do so. It is just conceivable that homosexuality could have become an election issue in 1959 but the greater likelihood is that for one reason or another the majority of the government did not favour change, and so the matter was dropped. However, one effect of Wolfenden since then has been to bring this controversial question more into the forum of public discussion ― press, radio and TV ― which has continued on and off ever since.

In May last year, Lord Arran managed to get a second reading in the Lords for his Bill to make private homosexual acts between consenting male adults no longer a criminal offence. But a similar measure introduced into the Commons a fortnight later by Labour MP Leo Abse was defeated, the opposition to it having been led by that self styled guardian of our moral welfare and champion of intolerance Sir Cyril Osborne, Tory MP for Louth. However, not long before the election, a Bill on the same lines was sponsored by the Tory Humphrey Berkeley and managed to survive a second reading.

It seems in fact that parliamentary opinion is turning in favour of changing a law which has not had the intended effect and has, by the very nature of its provisions, proved just about unworkable. And after all, there is nothing which brings capitalist legality into contempt more than an unworkable law. As the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner, said on the matter:

“As a lawyer, I am prejudiced because I do not like law which cannot be enforced and we cannot ever enforce laws about what people do by consent in private. Those who are caught are the unlucky few.” (Guardian 13.5.65.)

The present set up had its origins in 1885, when during the committee stage of the Criminal Law (Amendment) Bill, The Liberal MP Labouchère moved his notorious clause creating the new offence between males, whether or not adult, consenting or in private, and by a stroke of the Parliamentary pen, made the lot of the male homosexual less tolerable than it had been for many years. Labouchère’s clause was passed without debate, and became section 11 of the new Act, providing punishments which were savage even by Capitalism’s standards. The maximum penalties still range from a £5 fine for “Bye Law indecencies” to life imprisonment for buggery.

No wonder that furtiveness and secrecy entered the homosexuals life in greater measure ― and there was a still uglier aspect rearing its head. In the storm of controversy that followed the publication of the new regulations, one judge called them “the blackmailer’s charter”, a name which has stuck and which seems to have been justified by subsequent events. Moreover, the dubious conduct of the police in securing some of their convictions has been a source of fierce contention among lawyers ever since. Only in May last year, Montgomery Hyde was citing recent examples of this in a series of articles in The People.

Not always the same attitude towards homosexuality has prevailed. Aymer Roberts says: “As we turn the pages of history we discern alternately the acceptance and admiration of homosexuality and then later its attempted suppression” (Forbidden Freedom). In feudal Britain, there were times when, along with fornication and adultery, sexual inversion was punishable by the most painful death. Indeed, as late as the seventeenth century, Lord Castlehaven was beheaded for it on Tower Hill. Such was the fear expressed through Christian dogma and supported by the church, of any practice which was thought to be a threat to the marriage institution.

The number of male homosexuals in Britain is not precisely known; estimates have varied between 500,000 and one million. But whatever the number, there is no doubt that for many the strain of trying to live within a set of general social rules ― not just the law ― which aim at their rejection, is very great. As Dr. Eustace Chesser has pointed out:

“The sense of guilt and nervous strain felt by many homosexuals today is due largely to social disapproval . . . Public opinion can be as punitive as the law.” (Live and Let Live.)

So the homosexual, it seems, has a difference which rapidly becomes a social handicap, but he is forced to wage a long and not altogether successful battle for society’s acceptance. Hence the mental conflicts, the nervous breakdowns, and sometimes the suicides.

Probably that is why the condition has been thought of as an illness ― two separate states have been confused and placed under one heading, but Wolfenden has rejected such a view, as have many leading medicos. According to Dr. Neustattor for instance, “It is not an illness or a disease . . . but simply a variation.” (Albany Trust Winter Talks, 1962-63). So if it can’t be called an illness, it is hardly a question of “curing” it neither has punishment stamped it out. Hence the proposal once more to bring English law into line with that of other countries, and as far as adults are concerned anyway, leave them well alone.

Nor should we forget that times have changed considerably since Labouchère’s days. It is not without significance that the reformers are anxious to convince people of the usefulness ― potential or otherwise ― of the homosexual to capitalist industry.

“It should not be beyond our capabilities to devise some method of control which will enable each homosexual to lead … a more useful life, and this in the final analysis must be a benefit to the whole community. (Albany Trust Winter Talks. 1962-63.)”

“A substantial minority of men in every class of society, being made free from fear of the criminal law, would be better able to play a constructive part in the life of the community. (Pamphlet by The Homosexual Law Reform Society.)

And of course, this is one of the salient propaganda features of the movement for reform of the law. The reformers want to fit the homosexual into existing society without additional stigma; they do not aim at a basic change in society itself.

The same criticism can be made of all such movements, wherever they are. In his book ‘The Homosexual Revolution’, R. E. L. Masters says that the homosexuals in U.S.A. have managed to start official organisations to voice their grievances and demands for law reform, the main associations being Daughters of Bilitas for women, and The Mattachine Society for men. He alleges that the problems of blackmail, police persecution and harassment, etc., are much greater there than in Britain, which may be the reason for the rise of these more vociferous protective clubs. He gives a list of “the movement’s” demands, which apart from the fact that some people might think them too sweeping, are all aimed at making the homosexual acceptable as a citizen of capitalist society. The very first of these is a plea that “the homosexual, male or female, should be permitted like any other citizen, to serve his or her country as a member of any branch of its armed forces.” (The present U.S. law forbids this.) A doubtful privilege indeed ― losing your life on a battlefield as a result of the very struggles you have waged to make it worth ― living.

When the law is eventually changed, then, a minority will be released from the shadow of vindictive penalties (although only in one provision of Wolfenden is this so; his proposal for the under twenty-ones is that the penalties be retained and in some cases even increased), but this will not be the end of the homosexual’s problems. Apart from the backlog of fear, ignorance and prejudice which will impinge on his life still, the legal change will at most be an offer to absorb him, so to speak, more easily into the present set up. Which will mean, if he is a worker (and most homosexuals certainly are), that the grey day-to-day existence and struggles to make a living will still be there.

Eddie Critchfield

Are you being driven mad? (1981)

From the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

One in twelve males and one in eight females in Britain will spend some part of their lives in a psychiatric hospital. Most women between thirty and sixty are regularly prescribed tranquillisers by their family doctor. Since its introduction in the 1930s, ECT (electric shock treatment or electroconvulsive therapy) has been used on thousands of people. There is a widespread use of neurosurgery and other therapy methods, and admissions to psychiatric hospitals are increasing as daily life in our society becomes more tense and frenzied.

“Madness” is very often behaviour which conflicts with conventional ideas of normality or proper thinking. We all think as an involuntary activity, in ways which are specifically human and which differentiate us from our older animal relations. To think is to reflect m the brain the material reality of the environment: il is a relationship between matter and matter. The way in which we relate to our material surroundings determines how our thoughts are to be classified by other people. In primitive society people believed that they were in touch with another world when dreaming. In the Middle Ages people who rejected Christian morality were tortured as lunatics who were possessed by the devil. "Sanity” can be interpreted as a readiness to accept common experiences in conformity with common ideas; "insanity" can be dissent from the social conditioning process.

Mediaeval society had certain ideas about how women should behave. Those women who did not fit in with those ideas were often persecuted as witches. Sprenger and Kramer's hook on how to spot a witch, The Malleus Maleficarum, written m I486, was the downfall of many a woman who suffered from epilepsy. the symptoms of which were listed in the book as the classical characteristics of a witch. In 1515 five hundred unfortunate women were killed for witchcraft in Geneva in the space of three months. In the eighteenth century the "mad" were confined to institutions where they were chained up. beaten, humiliated and put on public display. The diaries of many a nineteenth century nobleman contain reports of Sunday afternoon outings to the lunatic asylum to be entertained by the misfortunes of the deranged.

Most British mental hospitals were built to fit m with nineteenth century ideas about mental health: these days the chains have gone, but the humiliation of the confined has not. Many inmates in modern asylums were first put there for moral or criminal transgressions An unmarried servant girl at the turn of the century who bore a child would face such moral outrage that she would become depressed and, instead of receiving sympathy from those around her, would be locked up in an asylum. Soldiers who could not take the conditions of war, homosexuals who cracked up trying to repress their feelings for the sake of acceptability, poor children who saw nothing wrong with stealing from the rich, men who broke under the monotony or responsibility of their jobs, wives who were left on their own by husbands who grew tired of them, girls who could not conform to the advertisers' modes of anatomical excellence —all of these may be found m any psychiatric hospital. They are not sick just sick of what society is.

Conventional mental disorders are experienced by almost everyone at some time. Depression is a perfectly natural response to a lifestyle in which we are taught to have expectations, but are denied the opportunity to fulfil them. If we are depressed because we are not allowed to do what is technically feasible but socially forbidden, we are simply reacting to a seemingly insoluble social dilemma. Socially produced ills are what cause such depression: people formulate their own reasons to be miserable. Another common mental illness is paranoia: the feeling that there is some force beyond you which is trying to dominate or oppress you. Most of us have felt vulnerable, threatened, unwanted or inadequate at some time. But are we ill because we have these feelings? In a society based on the hypocrisy, artificiality and authoritarianism of the sort that is an integral part of the buying and selling system, are those who are in the inferior social class wrong to have a feeling that we are being oppressed?

It would be very nice for our bosses if every worker who complained that he is oppressed could be classified as a nutcase, but responding to the oppression which surrounds us is not paranoia. In a society which locks people up for taking what they have produced (stealing from work), for refusing lo kill (in many countries military service is still compulsory) or for attacking the government (as is the fate of dissidents in the Russian Empire and South Africa), it is the ignorance of oppression which betrays the greater mental contusion. Then there is schizophrenia which most psychiatrists define as a state of mental fragmentation: it is a condition in which part of the mind accepts reality as it is, while the other part entertains delusions. These so-called delusions are sometimes treated by neurosurgery, the aim of which is to modify the patient's thinking so that the brain responds to all events in a standard way. A case of schizophrenia is cited by Morton Schatzman in his book, Radical Therapist:

Recently, a young man in the NATO military forces, with a position in a chain of command to push a nuclear-missile "button”, decided to refuse to obey orders related to his job. He told his superiors that they should not command any man to do such a job. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and was hospitalised.

Mental problems are caused by the relationship between the human mind which is rational — and a mystifying social environment — which is irrational. If we misunderstand the world around us we are entitled to feel depressed and threatened and deluded. When one considers just how crazy the present system of organising human affairs is, mental non-conformity is to be strongly advised. What is often called “madness" is a rational response to such problems as war, poverty and insecurity. In The Inner World of Mental Illness, so-called psychiatric disorders are characterised as

. . . opposed to a normality which is intimately related to the major value orientations of western society. It may be asserted therefore that abnormality (psychosis) involves negative relationship to prevailing social normative prescriptions . . . In the jargon of the moment we may call this "alienation”.

The mental health pressure group. PROMPT, has stated that one of its roles  is

. . . to demonstrate that what currently passes as "mental health" is often the measure of the person’s exploitability by those who own (or otherwise control) the means of production and distribution of that which is necessary to sustain life; and to show that a person called “mentally ill” is often someone strongly reacting against their exploitation.

In state capitalist Russia dissidents who try to criticise the bogus socialism are often locked away from the public on the grounds that they are mad. Once locked away, many of them are driven to actual mental derangement by excessive isolation and the use of drugs. Once diagnosed as being insane the dissenter loses whatever credibility he may have once had. Bukovsky and Gluzman, in their Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents, points out that

Dissidents, as a rule, have enough legal grounding so as not to make mistakes during their investigation and trial, but when confronted by a qualified psychiatrist with a directive from above to have them declared non-accountable, they have found themselves absolutely powerless.

The other capitalist states use similar methods. British television, for instance, is quite expert at branding social dissenters in such a way as to lead acquiescent workers to reject what they are saying very often before they have even said it. Most socialists will have been called a crank or a lunatic at some time for having spoken about a world without money. Of course, men like the Duke of Edinburgh who dress up in military uniforms and talk about how safe nuclear weapons are, are considered to be perfectly sane and worthy of public respect.

The battle for socialism is the battle against the conventional ideas of our age. Socialists ask questions. We ask why it is that there are people who produce all of the wealth of society and yet live in poverty and people who are idle who live in luxury. Why do grown men and women cry when they run out of money in the middle of the week and they have a family to feed. Why are children sent to school to be conditioned? Why are otherwise rational men and women occasionally seen to address the sky and ask for help? Why must we live in constant fear of being killed by bombs that none of us want? Why are our fellow human beings dying of starvation by the minute while food rots? Why slums? Why palaces? Why unemployment? Either it is all normal and those of us who reject it are 'insane,' or else we are sane and it is mad.

Socialists aim to bring the ideas held by the majority of people in line with their experiences. This is the role of any scientist who is serious about his work. But instead of endeavouring to examine social reality, government scientists tend be employed to perpetuate the current form of reality. This is particularly true of modern psychiatry which is more concerned with the treatment of symptoms than with examining their cause. Indeed, if psychiatrists were to study causation they would be put to the impossible task of either giving up their occupations and trying to change society or continue their jobs in the knowledge that what they are doing is futile and often counter-productive.

If a man lives his life in chains and responds by kicking out at those around him, the psychiatrist’s solution of binding his legs or dulling his brain so that he is too weak to kick is less reasonable than the socialist solution of destroying the chains. However, under capitalism — the social system which prevails throughout the world today — the freedom of the parasites at the top can only he secured by the social constriction of the vast majority. So, reasonable a proposition as it may he to smash the chains which presently confine us, they who pay the psychiatrists are paying to ensure that symptoms are treated while the problem remains.

But surely if we, the majority class in society, are the victims of this system, we should be destroying the chains ourselves? Indeed we should but it is an unfortunate fact that a majority of that majority class have become accustomed to the confinement of life under capitalism and nothing would disturb them more than the prospect of social freedom. How is it that capitalism has spared its victims from such dangerous thoughts of non-conformity? We can begin by rejecting the most popular explanation: that human beings come into the world with ideas already implanted in their brains. This is the argument of the apologist for capitalist normality, who is anxious to inform us that we have "forgotten about human nature”. (As if the moment he reminds us we are going to stop being socialists!)

In fact, ideas are not inherent, but are acquired by convention. Our language is a learned code. Our concepts of right and wrong are products of historical change. Learning is the essence of our conformity. We learn to accept things as they are in three ways: firstly, by the overt agencies of thought control, such as schools, universities, newspapers, television, radio, parental guidance, and religion, secondly, by experience of the system which one comes to accept as natural phenomenon; thirdly, at an early age our feelings of freedom and human creativity are repressed to fit in with conventional social relationships. Rejection of these conditioning. processes is often labelled as insanity.

For instance, if a child takes no notice of the social norms imposed by its parents and teachers it will be persuaded, bribed, locked up, beaten — but if these things fail and the child does not step into line it may be labelled as disturbed, insane or subnormal. This label will have profound effects upon the future economic and personal prospects of the non-conformist. People who reject the 'naturalness' of their social environment are easily dismissed as fantasists or utopians. It in within the terms of sanity to complain that the rent is too high, but it is a case for psychiatric concern if one demands decent living conditions for everyone. Many innovative scientists, who have challenged conventional hypotheses, have been dismissed as lunatics. The non-repressed individual is virtually unknown in our society, but if you try to live in an unrepressed manner you are likely to end up either being isolated in squalor or confined to an institution. How many of us could honestly say that we would live as we are living now if we were really free?

In The Manufacture of Madness Thomas Szasz says that psychiatry

. . . is harmful to the so-called mental patient. This is not because it is liable to abuse, but rather because harming people categorised as insane is its essential function. Institutional psychiatry is, as it were, designed to protect and uplift the group (the state) by persecuting and degrading the individual as insane or ill.

He goes on to point out that there is no basic difference between modern ideas of madness and those of mediaeval society. Despite the so-called liberalism of the modem state

. . . there are still the disadvantaged, the disaffected, and the people who thought and criticised too much. The non-con formist, the objector, all who deny or refuse to affirm society's dominant values, are still the enemies of society.

This view is confirmed by an article in The New Scientist (21/6/79) in which it was reported that in South Africa, Germany and Japan

. . . doctors unabashedly carry out psychosurgery to make “patients" more obedient and supposedly as a “cure" for homosexuality.

It should be pointed out that many patients have died as result of needless psychosurgery. It should also be pointed out that many of those being presently held in such top security mental hospitals as Rampton are undergoing corrective treatment involving drugs and ECT, as well as brain surgery, simply because they have refused to obey the social norms. The terrible thing is that the more such people claim that they are being abused, the more the psychiatrists who are supposed to be treating them accuse them of being mentally ill. It is not only in Russia that offenders against the status quo are sentenced to insanity.

Dissent is safest when it is engaged in en masse. The purpose of the Socialist Party is to be an instrument for mass opposition to the capitalist system as a way of living. If you stand out against it alone your friends, family and workmates will try to dismiss your non-conformity as eccentricity or utopianism. The more of us there are, the harder it becomes for the Normals to ignore us with a nervous laugh. We, the overwhelming majority of the human race, have no weapon which is more effective than our capacity for critical thought. Ideas coupled with political solidarity will penetrate every single aspect of the social edifice which seems so unbreakable to the lone dissenter. If we are bitter and vociferous and impatient it is only because the system which aims to control us has driven us to it. Now let us be mad and sane enough to learn to control the system.

Steve Coleman

Mental Health — a brief Critique by a Mental Hospital Worker (1973)

From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you are feeling the strains of life, if you are beginning to feel you cannot cope, or if you become aware that you see existence differently from other people, then watch out as you may find yourself in the clutches of a psychiatrist. Such characteristics may be considered symptoms of mental illness and, whereas you are free to accept or reject the advice of a doctor if you suffer from a physical illness, this right may be removed from you in the case of a disease of the “mind.” Although the 1959 Mental Health Act made treatment for mental illness on a voluntary basis possible, there are still over 10,000 individuals in Britain compulsorily detained in mental hospitals against their will. Beware unruly, aggressive behaviour as, if you are apprehended by the police, Section 29 gives leeway for you to be detained for 72 hours in mental hospital on the order of a mental health worker, temporarily overcoming the necessity of court action. Whether a short-term or long-term stay, the “care” of the individual in hospital involves the removal of control of life from that person; during that time existence will be regulated and regimented by hospital staff.

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that what is being dealt with are “faulty brains” and that the “mental” person must immediately be guided totally by others before they cause damage to themselves or the public. However, we must look at the assumptions underlying this approach to insanity, the dangers to every individual in society arising from these assumptions, and also the power that medics have over the destiny of so many lives as a result.

Social Definition . . .

What is meant by “insanity?” The general model used is the medical one. The individual is said to be sick, with a disease of the brain. As a consequence the term "mental health” has been coined and this in turn results in a whole set of reactions towards the insane man or woman (such as sending them to a doctor who specializes in brains, putting them into hospital, and treating them with drugs or surgery) which are not necessarily correct.

This approach is often completely presumptuous, probably arising from the growth of psychiatry through the roots of medicine rather than psychology. Although “mental” behaviour may be an obvious result of brain malformation or brain damage (in which case the behaviour tends to be of a specific type), in a vast proportion of cases of disturbance, no physiological/structural abnormalities are to be found in the disturbed person. Classification of individuals as suffering from a particular mental syndrome is based almost completely on the individual’s behaviour, including responses to other people, the ideas expressed, the ability to hold down a job, and the patterning of results on “intelligence” tests. In other words, the definition of insanity is based on comparing individuals’ behaviour with the behaviour shown by the general population. So it is a social definition and cannot be the objective phenomenon that is claimed, but is subject to the prejudices and ideologies of the professionals involved in the field of mental health.

If the insane individual is the one who deviates from the normal what is meant by “normal” must be considered, as there is a great range of behaviour shown by members of society. Normality is behaviour that is generally tolerated throughout society, and the normal person is the one who has managed to survive in society with an acceptable balance between the development of his potentialities (including personality, intellectual and physical traits) and the conditioning by which his abilities are directed into socially acceptable functions (including such behaviour as being able to chat in the local).

. . . and Social Judgement

If, like Laing, you view the normal as sick (but see Socialist Standard, August 1972), what criteria have you for dealing with deviants from the “normally abnormal?” Bourgeois psychology indicates time and time again that present-day society is not one that permits individuals to fulfil their potentialities but one that inhibits people’s full development. Work by John Holt and Paul Goodman shows this process at work in the school setting where children’s creativity, inquisitiveness and desire to learn is progressively stilted as they become socialized to a regime that thwarts originality and praises tactics where “correct” answers arc provided without any understanding. This in turn reflects a wider conditioning where the “correct answer” is conformity to the requisites of capitalism; individuality means individuality within strict limits; to stretch beyond these is to become insane or criminal.

This is not attempting to exalt those in mental hospital, for their existence is often a miserable one. But questioning the very nature of normality and the conceptual — and practical — approach to abnormality exposes not only the inadequacies of the care for the “insane”, but also reveals a danger to every one of us. In Russia intellectuals are confined in mental hospitals and people are quick to condemn this. Yet this is only an extreme form of the attitude of those in the West: those who do not “fit in” must be locked away. Where are the boundary lines between the mad and the sane? Are you sure you belong to the population considered normal?

Let us consider those unfortunate individuals who find themselves in mental hospital. Removed from a bewildering world of insurmountable problems they may feel happier in the protected environment of the hospital where life is organized for them, where they only have to obey the staff. Alternatively, they may be further confused by their removal from a world they know to this strange environment. Whichever the case, evidence indicates that the longer the time the individual remains in “care”, the less chance there is of them leaving. For institutionalization works itself upon the inmates who, devoid of opportunities to run their own lives, learn behaviour that is inappropriate for the outside world and so become greater misfits. Goffman gives a good analysis of this process in Asylums and indicates how the inmate can be reduced to an obedient moron who is quiet and always follows the rules. From my own personal experience, when working in a mental subnormality hospital (in many ways identical to a psychiatric hospital), it was blatantly obvious that the person who attempted to assert himself in any way suffered great social recriminations and punishments with withdrawal of privileges. This type of individual, probably with the characteristics to survive better than other patients, is unlikely to be allowed out of the hospital by those in authority as they consider such behaviour to be “bad” — and so the hospital becomes a prison.

What's it all About ?

People “outside” show little interest in the mental hospital and, possibly due to this, doctors are left free to give E.C.T., drugs and brain surgery despite very inadequate knowledge of the consequences of these actions. The patient has no means of self-protection, and this is an uncaring society — which is possibly why many people are in mental hospitals anyway.

The problems are many and knowledge very limited. Certainly those individuals suffering from “mental syndromes” require support, care and understanding from the community in order to learn how to cope with life rather than to be rejected and locked away. But one cannot help being sceptical about this being possible in a society where most people are in some way “mentally sick”, which places so many pressures upon everyone that time is too precious to concentrate on helping “social inadequates”, and where everyone has a multitude of their own problems.

Judy

A tie to the job (2000)

From the August 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The morning rush hour often yields a flurry of colours as men rushing to work sport undulating ties on their mad dash to be by their masters by the allotted time.

Tied to the ruling class

For the capitalist class, the tie is the very symbol of elegance and power, echoing Oscar Wilde’s sentiments that “a well-tied tie is the first serious step in life” (Wilde joked this at a time when very few workers actually wore ties at all). Indeed, the tie was suitably born soaked in blood. The word “cravat” comes from “Croat”, the nationality of the soldiers who won Turkey (previously in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) for Louis XIV of France, and who marched victoriously into Paris adorned in colourful silk handkerchiefs tied around their necks. The French King soon copied this style and began a similar fashion among the European aristocravats, pun intended. Indeed, Louis XIV called an entire regiment the Royal Cravattes.

In the stiff world of power, English gentlemen were soon wearing cravats so high and tight that they could not even turn their own necks around. Clothes have always been a symbol of the wearer’s status in society, and this fetishism of commodities as embodiment of social superiority was perfectly exemplified by the cravat. Indeed, LeBlanc, a Frenchman who spent his life instructing the elite how to tie a cravat properly, remarked that “the grossest insult that can be offered to a man comme il faut is to seize him by the cravat; in this place blood only can wash out the stain upon the honor of either party.” The official name of the common way in which most men tie their ties today, the Windsor technique, is named after the Duke of Windsor himself.

Ties which both hang flaccidly from the neck to the groin like a penis and also point to it are the very symbol of the phallus, which is so envied by other men and women not for its actual qualities as much as the social meaning attributed to the gender of its owner. The tie is thus a symbol of the domination of men over women, and of power in general.

To those of us who wear it to work (and I am one of them) the tie is a burden, another rule to follow in a workplace dominated by rules and regulations. It represents the very essence of discomfort, as it applies light pressure to the very tube we all require to breathe, reminding us of our life sentence to capital by tie hanging, of how much our lives are owned and controlled by the elite, and how much our very life force is maintained because of our servitude to another class. Wearing a tie, we simply don’t feel free, just as we don’t look free, donning an article required of many workers regardless of their individualities or creative abilities. The very essence of conformity.

Ties come in all colours, symbolizing the endless shades of commodities on the marketplace. Just as we workers identify ourselves by what soap opera we watch, what car we drive, what shade of left or right we adhere to, so our many-coloured and patterned ties mirror these false identities and choices. They maintain a sense of choice and free will (Mickey Mouse tie versus striped tie versus plain coloured tie) in a world in which workers have virtually none other than in such a meaningless domain as that of choosing between this or that object of consumption. They feel like the object of our individuality even while being mass-produced and inevitably laying bare our bondage to the job.

With my tie as chain around my neck I often imagine myself to be the chained factory farm cow, being prepared for the slaughter, raised only as a commodity for sale on the market from birth to death. Indeed, the dress “code” itself, like all codes, symbolizes the world of apparition, what the Situationists termed Spectacle, beneath which lurks the real meaning of our servitude.

I do not “wear it proudly.” It reminds me of a life of slavery. With my tie on, like the factory farm cow, I dream of greener pastures where I too can graze in freedom. I fantasize of a world in which all the paraphernalia of the capitalist system are gone—money, wages, buying and selling, bosses, nation states, meaningless objects of consumption and, yes, ties too – and people will relate to each other directly, without the mediation, status and conformity of the dress code.

In such a world, the feeling of freedom and ease is likely to reflect in our attire, and as the artificial division between “their time” (work) and “our time” is gone, so will the division between “work clothes” and “play clothes” as well. Whether we will all wear something more akin to pajamas or athletic clothes or close to nothing only history can tell, but it is clear from the tie that it acts in the same relation as ideology, maintaining while at the same time obscuring the deeper relations of minority ownership and power.

The very word “tie” speaks to both our actual economic ties to the ruling class as well as to the feeling of being tied to it. I look forward to a time when I will be appreciated for the mind above the coloured collar, and when clothes are admired for their uniqueness, their comfort, and the manner in which they express the freedom of human society.

Kaz.

Who is the odd person out? (1981)

From the January 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Normality is the most widespread social disease of our age. By definition, it affects the lives of most ordinary people. All of the forces of modern capitalist propaganda try to persuade you that normality is to be strived for and that the abnormal are to be scorned, derided, even locked away. But who lays down the norms that constitute normality? Whose interests do these norms serve? Is there a case for the abnormal?

To be normal is to be socially acceptable. The process of normalisation begins at birth, with family life inculcating into the newly-arrived human the standards of private property society. From the start, the child is part of a social unit based upon independent possessions and competitive survival. Aiding the conditioning process from the age of five to sixteen will be the school, where the lessons of “normal social behaviour” are really driven home. The propaganda of the education-indoctrination system is reinforced by the media, which gives the developing adult a distorted picture of the world it lives in, and the Church, which lays down the norms of Right And Wrong. By late teens the new creature has probably been normalised, is “right-thinking” and “realistic”; has no time for “crackpots” or “utopians”; has both feet on the ground, has “human nature” in perspective, has that most precious of all requirements — common sense, which Albert Einstein defined as “those prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen”. In short, our fully conditioned human is a social bigot: challenge those prejudices about what ought to be and you are labelled “abnormal”.

We are all the victims of “normalisation” to some extent, even though some may have escaped the worst excesses of such propaganda. But we are not all victims of the same type of normalisation. This is because we live in a society where what is expected of us is determined by our relationship to the means of wealth production and distribution, for under capitalism the norms of social behaviour depend upon which of the two main classes one is a member of.

If you happen to be born into a family whose forefathers had plundered the land of the peasantry or whose bank account is healthy thanks to investment in the labour of others, then the process of conditioning which prepares you for a life of social parasitism is rather different from that of the working class child. The former will be given the undivided attention of a nanny during the early years; the latter will be lucky to get into an overcrowded, understaffed nursery school; the young capitalist will be sent to a school set in spacious grounds with Latin mottos on the walls to be prepared for a future of social uselessness; the young worker will go to the local comprehensive school to pick up something other than Latin mottos and be taught to be a wage slave.

The different social ambitions of members of the two classes indicate their acceptance of their opposing roles in society. The young capitalist can hope to enjoy the widest possible experiences during the course of life through possession of the money that enables access to the best. The worker is persuaded that it is morally and economically proper to accept the second best. At first, young workers have naive ambitions to fully contribute their talents to society: they want to be famous singers, dancers, footballers or boxers. By the time they reach the fifth form the “unrealistic” notions of actually being “someone” are repressed: they have come to accept wage slavery as their inevitable lot and all they can hope is that their job will not be too far down the social ladder. In times of crisis, it is the desire to be employed at all which constitutes working class ambition.

The belief that capitalism is normal involves an acceptance of occurrences which are objectively horrific. War is “normal” and soldiers are given medals for committing acts of terror and killing; anyone who indulges illegally in that which soldiers are trained for must be locked away as a “danger to society”. The legalised robbery which is the capitalists’ accumulation of surplus value by paying their employees less than the value of what they produce is “normal”; but let a hungry man steal some food from a supermarket and he will be having his next meal in a police cell for his “abnormality”. It is “normal” for “respectable” people to claim to believe in the mythology of the Bible, but should a worker claim to have heard voices coming from the sky, or seen seas parting down the middle, and they will be sent to a psychiatrist. Normality is about feeling an identity with areas of land that you do not own, conforming to roles that you do not want to play, repressing your feelings of goodwill towards others because it is not competitive to express them, being respectful to people you can’t stand the sight of because they are bosses or teachers or officials.

Under capitalism even dissent has been normalised. Because it is impossible for any member of a society to opt out, the only way to avoid the pressures of living is to try somehow to become oblivious to them. Suicide is the ultimate escape, but for millions a less drastic measure is the bottle, the needle or the tranquilliser. Capitalists make huge profits by providing illusory escape routes for dissatisfied workers.

And then there are the tricksters who run ‘confidence courses’ for shy people, “shyness courses” for confident people and guru-worshipping courses for people who would rather be sheep. These deviations from normality are accommodated within capitalism on the grounds that depressed, discontented, alienated people comprise a profitable market for the latest escapist rip-off.

Beyond the false assumption that you can escape from the pressures of normality is an awareness that the nature of the pressures is political. Once it is realised that the madhouse called capitalism is only sustained by the consent of the majority — albeit a passive consent in which conscious approval plays very little part-then it follows that saying “no” to certain traditions, beliefs, habits, taboos, rituals and character roles actually becomes liberating. When we consider the exciting possibility of creating a new reality out of the material conditions of modem society, then we are on the path which logically can lead to an understanding of socialism. To the “normal”, social revolution is a matter for suspicion and fear; for those who see that normality is simply the embodiment of those social prejudices which are the ruling ideas of capitalism, social revolution is seen to be the next step forward.

But such political dissent, however radical its pose and revolutionary its phraseology, is frequently accommodated within the system, rather than presenting a challenge to it. To most workers, the parties and groups of the Left wing present a challenge to the status quo. Most workers oppose the Left because of two illusory beliefs: firstly, that the status quo (capitalism) is in their interests, and secondly, that the Left is really opposed to capitalism. In fact, the Left is simply the radical wing of capitalism and those workers who join organisations like the Socialist Workers’ Party or the International Marxist Group, far from challenging the system, are channelling their discontent into what are essentially reform movements that the system can well accommodate.

In what ways do the parties of the Left serve as a means of diverting workers from real opposition to social norms? Firstly, they hold the view that class society will always exist (even though some may pay occasional lip service to the idea of a classless society). Accepting class division as an inevitability, the Left can only see the political task of the working class in terms of begging to, and wrestling with, the master class. The Left conform to the working class in its most pathetic political pose: as willing subordinates in the class struggle who can see no further than “demanding” (pleading for) a few more pence in the wage packet and a few more welfare reforms (government charity) to help the poor whom the Left believe will always be with us. Secondly, the Left aid the propaganda of capitalism by insisting that “normal” people need leaders to do their thinking for them.

Thirdly, the Left dismiss as “utopianism” any propaganda designed to show what socialism really means. Tell a Tory and an SWPer that socialists want a world without money and they will both laugh for the same reasons. The radicalism of the Left is as narrow as its acceptance of the norms of capitalism allows it to be. Similarly, there are feminists who have never begun to give thought to a society in which workers are truly liberated, squatters whose imaginations have never contemplated the possibility of a society where everyone will automatically have in the best houses that can be produced, “Right to Work” merchants who would laugh if they were told of a social set-up without employment. Because they accept capitalism, their dissent is sterile.

Given a society where the means of living are commonly owned and democratically controlled, why should humans act in the socially insane manner which passes for normality today? Why should they wish to form armies in order to slaughter one another when there is no more private property to fight over? Why would people refuse to contribute to society according to their abilities when they could freely take from the common store according to their needs? Why should children starve while food rots, tramps be in the gutter while palaces stand empty, people die of socially caused diseases which are too unprofitable to defeat? In capitalism these and countless other social crimes happen every day because the majority of people consent to the continuation of a social system that puts profits before needs.

Socialists propose a material change in social relationships to the means of wealth production from that of private or state ownership to common ownership. Unlike most advocates of a future social order. The Socialist Party does not have a blueprint for a model society which conforms to our prejudices. All that we can presently say for sure about the nature of socialism is that it will not have the historic characteristics of capitalism—classes, property, exchange, buying, selling, the state. Socialism will be democratic: once an informed majority has made a decision it will be carried out as a matter of principle. Nothing in socialism will be forbidden because it hasn’t been done before or is “abnormal”.

It follows from this that conservatism, whether of the Right or the Left, is the great enemy of all socialists. Beliefs that hold back necessary change must be criticised and exposed. The Marxist motto is “doubt everything”, even that which appears to be sacred. For it is only by being the most vigorous critics of all that serves capitalism that we can work to establish a society in which men and women will one day look back and conclude that the fools were those who were “normal” and it was the revolutionaries with their heads in the clouds who were sane.

Steve Coleman

Organisation Man (1960)

Book Review from the December 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Are you fond of literature and music? Would you put your wife and children before your work? Do you feel unhappy about the way society is organised?

Yes? Then it’s unlikely you’ve the makings of a good Organisation Man—one of the fast-expanding army of junior and middle managements men in American Big Business.

William H. Whyte, an American journalist with an interest in sociology, puts him under the microscope in The Organization Man, published by Penguin Books in a 3s. 6d. edition. He reveals a picture of co-operation with conformity.

The typical O.M., a college graduate with a strong technical bias, sinks his individual identity into the group. He thinks, talks and acts like the collective. “Don't question or query things, accept them; be technically efficient, co-operate with the Company, and you’ll be looked after” is the philosophy peddled by his “benevolent” boss.

At work, he trains as a “dedicated” specialist in a team of “ dedicated ” specialists, toes the Company line, and wins promotion through personality tests—"Do yon agree foreigners are dirtier than Americans”?—designed to determine his ability to integrate himself in the Organisation.

At home, a mortgaged-to-the-hilt house in a “model” suburb, he and his wife participate actively in local affairs and just about make ends meet on a perpetual overdraft.

Whyte is worried about the O.M.’s loss of individuality; he calls it “a surrender to dehumanised values.” He’s worried, too, about the growing emphasis on specialisation at the expense of a broad, liberal education.

But both factors are not peculiar to American capitalism, or, for that matter, to Big Business.

First, unorthodox thought which questions the social system has never been popular with capitalists anywhere, be they large or small. And today the bigger capitalists in Western Europe, as well as America, strive to sidetrack criticism of the system among their executives with the carrot of Company cars, expense accounts, special allowances and top-hat pension schemes.

Second, scientific and technological skills are of vital importance to the advanced industrial nations in their cut-throat competitive struggles. A knowledge of higher mathematics produces more profits than a knowledge of Greek mythology.

Whyte urges the O.M. to fight back, but “not selfishly or stupidly,” and certainly not with the aim of changing society. Like every reformer, he has no real quarrel with capitalism which breeds conformity and an education system shackled to the profit motive.

He has yet to understand that only in a society liberated from the profit motive can man develop his individuality and knowledge to serve the common good.

Peter Jenner

Message for school leavers (1981)

From the July 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

What do you feel about the school year which is just ending? “Stand up . . . Sit down. . . Do up your tie . . . Don’t run in the corridors . . . ". Did you find it daft to traipse into School Assembly to sing hymns to the skies and then file out into a history lesson to be told about how superstitious they were in the Middle Ages? Were you bored by having to learn the French for ‘My house is small' and ‘My pockets are empty’?

It is while you are at school that you are supposed to learn how to behave when you ‘grow up’. You are being prepared for a certain lifestyle which awaits you when you leave. If you can get a job when you leave school, your boss will want you to be obedient to him. He will expect you not to challenge what he says. At school they will try and teach you to obey a whole set of rules and not to dare question why the rules were made. They want to get you in the habit of obedience so that you will not be likely to start asking awkward questions later on in life.

At school you must wear the correct uniform, the same as all of the other pupils. In this way you are conditioned to see yourself as someone who is no different from all the other pupils. Together, you are just one large unit of people, you must look the same, behave the same and have the same general ideas as everyone else. They are trying to mould you into just another brick in the wall.

Outside of school the usual punishment for people who break the law is deprivation of liberty. You are put in prison. If you have no spare money but take food from a shop anyway, because you are hungry, you can be locked in a cell like an animal. Schools try to train us to accept the idea of being deprived of liberty for breaking rules, by punishing rule-breakers with ‘detentions’.

Almost the whole of school life is spent being made to do things you don’t really want to do. Eventually, if you are not strong-willed enough to resist, the process will grind you down. Then you will have been well prepared to spend the rest of your days swimming with the tide, and accepting all sorts of problems without any stroppy opposition, because — like the teachers say — “that’s just the way things are”.

At a first glance there are certain aspects of life which seem absurd or terrible, but which most people never make a fuss about. In order that these strange things can carry on without coming under attack, people have to be taught to look at the problems in a very distorted way, and most of the teaching is done in schools.

From time to time wars break out and we arc told we must go and slaughter millions of The Enemy, the French, the Germans, the Russians, whoever they happen to be. If Britain declared war on Russia tomorrow it would not be because British people had fallen out with Russian people. We do not know Russian people, most of us can’t even speak their language. In fact, wars are really fought over the arguments of a few wealthy and powerful people, but it us who have to bear the brunt of all the killing and destruction. Yet, most people are leaving school believing that in the event of a war it would be right to go and murder the enemy of ‘Britain’.

Again, we are living in a world where a small minority are able to enjoy great wealth while the majority of us are generally hard up. It is obvious that we could produce enough for everyone to have what he or she wants, but we are told we only get what we deserve. How did the very wealthy people get what they’ve got? If you start asking questions like this in school you will probably be sneered at as a “communist” and if you persist in asking unsuitable questions you may be branded a “disruptive element”.

This may have been your last year at school and finding someone to buy your abilities for a wage or salary might not be easy, as there are over 2½ million people looking for jobs. Thatcher can’t solve the unemployment problem, she doesn’t even seem particularly bothered. But neither could a Labour government. In fact, the last Labour government was thrown out of office in 1979 after the number of unemployed had risen to over 1½ million while it had power. The problem is that so long as we all agree to run Industry for a profit, then no boss will want to employ us in a time of ‘economic crisis’ if he can’t actually sell his goods to make a profit.

If the school has done its job properly you will ditch your uniform when you leave only to clothe yourself with another uniform: the invisible uniform of the School of Social Conformity. This uniform is handy because it can be worn quite comfortably over even the most bizarre of the latest rebel fashions, and will slip nicely over political badges like ‘I Didn’t Vote Tory’ and ‘Save the Whale’. The School of Social Conformity has many mottos including “Rich and Poor, Forward Together”, “Let’s Follow Leaders” and “Rely on Reforms”.

If you have refused to swallow the teachings of the school you may decide to simply disobey some of the present laws but this is not a solution to the problems you face and you run the risk of ending up behind bars. On the other hand you may decide, as Socialists have done, that the only way for us to get a society fit to live in, is to get a majority to change the whole set-up. You might be going back to school next September to be put on the anvil once again for the hammer to try and knock you into the right shape. How much you resist is up to you, and remember, they cannot stop you from thinking questioningly about anything they teach you. If you have got awkward questions, they cannot stop you finding out the answers for yourself.

Gary Jay