Sting in the Tail: A Sordid Tale (1990)

The Sting in the Tail column from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Sordid Tale

The history of British Labour governments is littered with sordid episodes. One of these was told on ITV's "A Marriage of Inconvenience" on 15 August.

In 1949 Ruth Williams, a white Briton, married Seretse Khama, a tribal chief In the British "Protectorate" of Bechuanaland. The neighbouring South African government, which had just imposed Apartheid, was outraged and demanded that the Labour government refuse to recognise Khama as legitimate chief.

Attlee, the Labour Prime Minister, was determined that Britain must have its own atom bomb but the American government wouldn't provide the necessary know-how.

But America was short of uranium which South Africa had in plenty, so the Labour government made a deal with South Africa to betray Khama in return for uranium which it would then swop for American atom secrets.

Khama was summoned to London to be subjected to threats, attempted bribery and finally banishment from Bechuanaland.

So the government that claimed to oppose Apartheid actually assisted it, while the cynicism and treachery they displayed would have shamed the hardest-hearted Tory.

The re-telling of this episode is a reminder that Labour governments will stop at nothing in their efforts on behalf of British capitalism.

Trotsky's "Marxism"

The 50th anniversary of Trotsky’s murder had his followers lavishing the usual praise on their hero.

In a letter to The Guardian (23 August), David Widgery of the Socialist Workers Party claimed, among other things, that Trotsky had applied Marxist analysis to 20th century events.

We deny this: What Trotsky applied was the bombastic crystal-gazing which had him writing in 1935, for example, that ". . . England is heading for a revolutionary explosion" only months before the Tories won their biggest ever majority.

According to Trotsky the sit-down strikes by French workers in 1936 "revealed the wholehearted readiness of the proletariat to overthrow the capitalist system", that capitalism in 1938 was in its "death agony", etc., etc.

History has proved Trotsky's analyses to be nonsense and his legacy to the working class has been to confuse thousands of them down the years.

Ryzhkov's "Marxism"

In the struggle for power inside the Communist Party of the USSR there appears to be a conflict between those who would immediately go over to a Western-style market economy and those who would have that change enacted more gradually.

Amongst the gradualists is the present Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov. But to illustrate the hypocrisy and deceit of the ruling élite  in the USSR his more gradual approach does not apply to his own personal ownership.

In the youth daily Komsomolskaya Pravada, it has been reported that Ryzhkov has bought his state dacha with one-and-a-half hectares of forest for the ludicrous sum of 47,000 roubles (officially £47,000 but in reality about one tenth that amount judging by the foreign tourist rate.)

With the thought of yet another coal strike in the offing perhaps Mr. Ryzhkov plans to have a good supply of firewood on hand this winter. Another example of "socialist" planning?

Off the Rails

During the enquiry into the Clapham rail disaster, which led to 35 deaths, the Westminster coroner Paul Knapman made a telling point about the cause of the disaster, when questioning the technician who carried out the faulty signalling work.

During questioning of Mr. Hemingway, Mr. Knapman said that he believed that there were four "core reasons" for the disaster — a lack of instruction; a lack of supervision; a lack of testing along the guidelines set out in circular SL-53; and "the general reckless haste, pressure, pressure, pressure" of the re-signalling work

The Independent 11 September

That the pressure was indeed intense is backed up by the information that Hemingway had had only one day off in 13 weeks, that he had no formal training and that the acting testing officer who had to check Hemingway's work had no formal training either.

The "core reason" for the Clapham disaster is of course capitalism. In a sane society based on production for use there would be no need to scrimp on safety measures.

Reformist "Progress"

The Gulf crisis has meant a big set-back for environmentalists in the USA.

Until now their pressure (aided by the low cost of imported oil) has enabled them to block further oil exploration, notably in Alaska and off the Californian coast.

Now the strategists who consider the long-term interests of US capitalism insist that America has become too dependent on imported oil and that more domestic oil production is in "the national interest".

The oil companies are using this situation to turn the tables on their enemy. One of their chief spokesmen stated:

The national security aspects in oil have been completely subordinated in recent years to the environmental concerns. Now the emphasis is coming back to the national security aspect. If there is a conflict between the two, it may no longer be resolved in favour of the environmentalists.

The Guardian 25 August

And the environmentalists' other bogey, the nuclear industry, has seized the opportunity to strenghten its case by pointing out that nuclear plants greatly reduce US dependence on oil imports.

On top of this come allegations that environmentalists are a threat to national security! Congressman Dannemeyer of California says:

The environmentalists party . . . is a greater security threat than Saddam Hussein could ever be.

Now that the "communist" menace has gone, maybe the environmentalists will be the next victims to be labelled "un-American". Stranger things have happened.

Down on the Farm

Riot police lobbing tear gas grenades at angry crowds — lorries hi-jacked — roads blocked by burning debris — a scene from Lebanon, South Africa or Palestine?

No. This is rural France as farmers protest at the import of meat and lamb.

Many of them face ruin as the price of lamb has fallen by 17 per cent, calves by 10 per cent and cows by 7 per cent.

Some "experts" blame the French government for cutting subsidies, some the import of cheap produce from Britain, others blame cheap imports from Eastern Europe. None of them apparently blame the real cause — capitalism with its production for profit. 

The spectacle of children starving — while farmers riot about the ruin that faces them as the meat mountain grows — is just another example of how essential it is that we scrap the out-dated system of society that produces everything for sale despite the desperate needs of the world's hungry.

Workers leave the running of society in the hands of "experts" at their peril.

The cost of lives (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

The relentless pursuit of profit under capitalism produces a wealth of contradictions: coal mines are closed while old people die of cold, food production is curtailed despite widespread starvation, hospitals are closed and ill health in the general population increases in spite of advances in high technology medicine. The provision of health care is distorted by the competing forces within capitalism as social needs are, if catered for at all, secondary and coincidental to the overriding requirement of profitability.

The interests within the health care system are: the workers trying to obtain improved medical services "free at the point of use"; the government trying to "privatise" medicine and reduce state provision of health care, the insurance companies who are gaining increasing numbers of subscribers to private insurance schemes as the National Health Service deteriorates; the companies who supply drugs, equipment, provisions. construction and services and are parasitical on the health service; private medicine with fees for consultation and surgery.

Although bringing health care under state provision with the development of the National Health Service appeared to represent a gain for the working class it is, in fact, a victory for ruling class expediency and has developed, and continues to be shaped, according to the needs of capital. There is no doubt that new discoveries, technological improvements and modern drugs have eased the misery of many serious diseases. However, it would be wrong to assume that the use of sophisticated techniques automatically confers benefits on patients. Illich (Limits to Medicine, 1976) claims that coronary care units are no more effective than normal medical wards but require three times as much equipment and five times the number of staff to run them. Garner (The NHS: Your Money or Your Life, 1979) cites research which supports this claim and points out that patients nursed in coronary care units have a higher mortality rate than those nursed at home.

Ineffective or even harmful treatments may continue to be used because they are profitable or allow control, prestige and power by vested professional interests. The misleading publicity (or advertising) which accompanies technological medicine and discouragement of information and knowledge outside professional circles may lead to a "demand" for dubious medical treatments by the general public who mistakenly believe that miracle cures have been found without being aware of potentially dangerous complications or side-effects. The damage that commercialised medicine can cause has been pointed out by Eyer:

  . . . when doctors went on strike in Los Angeles County in 1976. limiting elective surgery for the most part, the death rate fell by about 15 per cent and rose well above its previous level when the doctors resumed practice. before returning to normal. This means at least one out of every six deaths in Los Angeles is due to the overdevelopment of medicine.

(J. B. McKinlay (Ed.): Issues in the Political Economy of Health Care, 1984.) 

Although excessive medical and surgical intervention is a feature of private health care, under-provision of facilities is common when its supply is less profitable. Professor Stewart Cameron of Guy's Hospital. London claims that 2,000 sufferers from renal failure may be dying unnecessarily each year in Britain because of insufficient renal dialysis machines (Medicine in Society, 1984).

The considerable variation in the provision of health care facilities has been summed up by Julian Tudor Hart (Lancet, 1, 405. 1971) as the Inverse Care Law. in which he states: ". . . the availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the population served. This operates more completely where medical care is most exposed to market forces and less so where it is reduced." Wales typifies the Inverse Care Law with some 10.000 deaths from coronary artery disease each year and 25,000 men of working age suffering from angina, but with a dearth of cardiologists compared with regions in England (Medicine in Society, 1982). This contrasts markedly with private medicine as the fashionable London clinics accepted patients from the continent for coronary by-pass surgery until it was realised that patients receiving drug treatments made similar progress. It is true that a minority of people with coronary heart disease benefit from by-pass surgery providing they are properly assessed and identified. Also the much simpler and safer procedure of supplying cardiac pacemakers could save lives in Wales if they had the resources.

Heart transplants make dramatic news but there is little evidence that, on average, they prolong life expectancy. The deaths of heart transplant patients get very little reporting by the media, distorting the benefits, or lack of them, of technological changes. Nevertheless, in spite of all the evidence that technological advances need to be approached much more cautiously and with considerably more evaluation, there seems to be more specialisation and technological expansion than ever before. Garner has pointed out that doctors in the United States carried out twice as many operations on a group of Federal employees when paid a fee-for-service than doctors paid a flat salary by another insurance scheme. Similarly, the number of hysterectomies performed in Saskatchewan increased by 72 per cent after the introduction of national health insurance which reimbursed the doctor. Apart from the obvious profit motive, the restriction of skills to a professional elite concentrates power, prestige and more money into fewer hands. Mitchell (What is to be Done About Illness and Health?, 1984) claims: "We tend to assume that historically paid physicians opposed the herbalists and lay healers because their methods were ineffective or dangerous. Yet there is considerable evidence that it was because these methods did work that they were threatened".

Widgery (Health in Danger, 1979) has questioned the "medical prestige mongering" of advanced medicine: "In Buenos Aires doctors are playing about with cardiac surgical units costing tens of thousands of dollars while new-born babies die in the precincts of the hospital for lack of decent milk". He also questioned some of the cardiac resuscitation procedures:

 . . . while every effort can and should be devoted to monitoring and reviving patients in units equipped for intensive care, the kind of indiscriminate, ineffective invasion we carried out, which we wholeheartedly conceived as solely for the patient's good, was in fact depriving the dying of the last shred of dignity in order to give us a little practice and a little false prestige. None of this is to argue that we should abandon or relent our development of medical science, but we need to sharpen its focus, take more seriously its implications and applications. We need to ask honestly, every time whether its net result enhances the doctor's prestige or the patient's well-being, for these are by no means the same thing.

Under capitalism medical care assumes its most profitable form and there is usually more money to be made from curing a complaint than preventing it. In under-developed countries the resources consumed by curative medicine in the prestige hospitals of the major cities have been at the expense of preventive services in the rural areas. ("The Politics of Health in Tanzania", Development and Change 4 (1) 39. 1972) has put the contradiction of high technology medicine co-existing with poor primary services in Tanzania in perspective:

  . . . a man has hookworm anaemia (common in Tanzania). He has been ill for years; eventually he has to stop work altogether. He is admitted to hospital. He needs laboratory tests, skilled medical and nursing attention, drug treatment and a blood transfusion. After a time he improves, and he eventually goes back to work. At home, he catches hookworm again; the whole process is repeated. If his village had used pit latrines none of this would have happened.

Poverty remains the main cause of a considerable amount of ill health. Millions of children die each year from malnutrition and infection in the Third World. Even in the more affluent countries workers have higher mortality rates than the rich as a result of working in stressful, polluted, alienating environments and living in poor housing conditions. And within countries such as Britain relative poverty is still quite widespread. Thus a socially deprived area such as Rochdale has an infant mortality rate 2½ times greater than the national average.

In advanced, industrialised countries preventive services also have a low priority because they are less profitable. Yet governments are anxious to shift the burden of costs away from the state and back to the consumer. As Crawford states:

  The emphasis on individual responsibility for health mystifies the social production of disease and undermines demands for rights and entitlements to medical care. Beneath the rhetoric about the costs of medical care and the obligation of the individual to remain healthy lies a political programme to shift the burden of costs back to labour and consumers and to paralyse regulatory efforts undertaken to control environmental and occupational hazards. (J. B. McKinlay. op. cit.)

As it is uneconomical to safeguard workers' health during unemployment because a reserve army of labour is available, drastic cuts have been made in the health and social services. But substantial increases in military expenditure, aid to private industry, the police force, and tax advantages for the wealthy reflect capitalism's priorities.

Carl Pinel

Vocational exploitation (1985)

From the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nurses often cherish an illusion of "professionalism" despite the fact that they are subordinate to medical staff, are poorly paid, work shifts, weekends and public holidays (for which they receive lower rates of enhanced pay than most other workers), have poor working conditions in the majority of cases, and engage in stressful, demanding work within the rigid discipline of a status-conscious, hierarchical organisation.

Nursing qualifications are protected by law and it is a punishable offence to make a false claim to be a trained nurse. But there are two levels of qualified nurses. Registered nurses have qualifications which enable them to aspire to higher positions while enrolled nurses are unable to gain promotion beyond senior enrolled nurse grade. Doyal has pointed out that overseas nurses coming to Britain to train are encouraged to qualify as enrolled nurses only to find that their qualifications are not recognised in their own countries. She states:

  Nurses born overseas are over-represented in hospitals dealing with mental illness, mental handicap and geriatrics, and very few indeed are to be found in the "prestige" teaching hospitals. Overseas nurses are, therefore, clearly used to compensate for the shortage of British recruits into notoriously underpaid and often unpleasant work. Their role as a “reserve army" has recently been demonstrated with particular clarity by the fact that because of high levels of unemployment among British nurses, overseas nurses are increasingly being refused a renewal of their work permits.

Nursing auxiliaries, although forming a substantial part of the work force, are untrained and unable to call themselves nurses.

The nurses' professional organisation, the Royal College of Nursing, tends to be dominated by senior nurses and excludes nursing auxiliaries from membership. Indeed, prior to 1960 male nurses and enrolled nurses were also excluded. The RCN, in an attempt to maintain professional exclusiveness, has asked for nursing auxiliaries to be omitted from pay negotiations. The conservatism, elitism, avowal not to strike under any circumstances and tendency to concentrate on pay campaigns in favour of nursing administrators, have helped successive governments to divide the workforce and made their task of keeping wages low that much easier. Although in recent years the RCN has adopted a slightly more radical stance (possibly to avoid losing members to the trade unions representing nurses — NUPE. COHSE and NALGO) it remains a reactionary, divisive force.

A profession can be defined as an occupation requiring advanced education and nursing can reasonably be considered as such. However, the subordinate role of nursing has been demonstrated by the case of Derek Owen, a former staff nurse at Walsgrave Hospital. Coventry, who refused to participate in administering electroconvulsive treatment to a 76 year-old woman and was sacked. At the employment tribunal hearing Justice Popple well stated: “. . . it's not the nurse who decides what treatment a patient would benefit from, but the doctor" (Nursing Times, 1984). Iliffe deals bluntly with the much vaunted professionalism in nursing:

  When nursing is restricted to mopping-up vomit, emptying bedpans and washing the bed-bound, it is only a special example of the caring role allotted to women, and nurses are therefore allotted the same autonomy as women generally. Nursing "professionalism", therefore, aims at acquiring trade secrets (more politely called professional skills and knowledge) to give some nurses more autonomy, status and money. The evolution of special skills and knowledge necessitates a special education, with access to it restricted to ensure that the market is not overloaded with tradesmen.

The appeal to professionalism is also used as an unsubtle form of blackmail to coerce nurses into docile conformism. The fact that trained nurses risk losing their qualifications through taking effective industrial action assists considerably in maintaining a compliant labour force.

When carrying out dirty work some form of protective clothing needs to be worn, but nurses insist on calling their overalls "uniforms" and wear useless frilly hats, perpetuating their domestic servant/hand maiden image. When their uniforms were compared with ". . . a plumber who insists on wearing a puce boiler suit, a purple beret, and his City and Guilds Certificate pinned to his chest!" (Pinel) there were horrified letters of protest in the nursing press. It is easy to dismiss the different coloured "uniforms" as a harmless, outdated tradition, but its perpetuation is designed to reinforce the rigid hierarchical structure and promote status consciousness. Servile, unquestioning workers accustomed to knowing their place within the organisation, dressed in a "uniform" designed for Victorian domestic servants, are easier to control.

Unlike other shift workers, nurses talk of their "duties"—a euphemism which disguises public holiday, weekend and night work often far in excess of shift workers in factories. It is only in the last twenty years that nurses have been able to receive extra pay for working unsocial hours and even now, in spite of being gradually increased over the years, nurses receive only time and one-third for Saturday, "unsocial hours' and night work and time and two-thirds for Sunday and public holiday work. These rates lag well behind those paid in industry or. indeed, the rates paid to hospital ancillary staff.

With 10.000 nurses and midwives without jobs, a large pool of unemployed labour to fill nursing auxiliary vacancies, reduced demand for labour as hospitals are closed as a result of cutting resources to the health service and the weakness of trade unions during a recession have emboldened the government to try to abolish enhanced rates of pay for unsocial hours. Such a move, if successful, would cut the nurses' standard of living and reverse twenty years of struggle to achieve pay conditions comparable with industrial workers.

Many hospitals were built in the Victorian era and are still in use today. Poor Law infirmaries, former workhouses and prison-like asylums still serve as district general hospitals, geriatric hospitals and psychiatric hospitals. With the cut-back in health service expenditure those hospitals that have survived closure have been patched up in a haphazard and piecemeal manner. The old buildings were never intended for modern nursing and condemn nurses and patients alike to substandard conditions. Very few buildings have been constructed to replace old hospitals. In the first seventeen years of the National Health Service only one new hospital was built. But as Widgery points out;

  . . . the size and location of the finished new hospitals often worsens rather than improves the national distribution of medical resources. The Royal Free in Hampstead is situated in the most affluent and healthy part of North London, while hospital facilities in the Northwest London industrial belt and in East London are being closed.

Such closures oblige nurses to move or travel long distances to work.

Residential accommodation for nurses has been the subject of several campaigns to secure improvements. However, the government intends to sell off two thirds of the nurses' homes (presumably that which is most profitable to speculators) and retain only a minimum stock of housing. Nurses, at the mercy of private landlords, would find their living standards declining further:

  Resident nurses are frequently subjected to a number of petty restrictions which would not be tolerated by private tenants elsewhere, and must represent one of the most pernicious forms of "tied cottage" arrangements in existence today (Pinel).

The lodging charges for resident nurses were due to increase by 5 per cent from 1 April 1985 although the government has announced that nurses' wages must not rise by more than 3 per cent.

Nurse managers have opted out of nursing practice to "police" other nurses. They accept extra remuneration (or bribes) to enforce discipline, increase exploitation and punish their fellow workers, although as workers themselves they are dependent on the posts they hold for their livelihood. Male nurses, although making up less than 10 per cent of the nursing labour force, occupy one-third of the senior administrative posts, reflecting the sexist divisions of the broader society while the dearth of immigrants in senior posts is part of a deliberate policy for, as a Lanarkshire Health Board Memorandum stated: "No alien (Mauritian. Filipino. Chinese) person is to be promoted without the sanction of the Home Office" (Nursing Mirror, 1980).

During an industrial recession there is a surplus of labour and it is not so profitable to spend money conserving the workers' health. Cuts in the health services and hospital closures have, therefore, weakened the bargaining power of nurses. But the divisive "professional" stance of nurses, their failure to recognise their class interests and to understand the exploitative role of capitalism have depressed the conditions of Britain's 350.000 nurses and assisted successive governments in under-funding the health service.

Carl Pinel

References

Doyal, L. with Pennell. I. The Political Economy of Health. Pluto Press. 1979. p.206.

Iliffe. S. The NHS: a Picture of Health? Lawrence and Wishart, 1983. p. 147. 

Nursing Mirror. News item. 151 (20) 4. 

Nursing Times. News item. 80 (43) 5.

Pinel. C. "Are uniforms necessary?" Nursing Mirror. 14 November 1974, p.41.

Pinel. C. "'Us' and 'them' at work". Nursing Mirror. 158 (10) 9.

Widgery. D. Health in Danger. Macmillan Press. 1979. pp. 52-53.

Hippies: An Abortion of Socialist Understanding (1969)

From the December 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Everybody seems to think I’m lazy. I don’t mind – I think they’re crazy. Running everywhere at such a speed. Till they find there’s no need . . .

Ever since the explosion of “Flower Power” in Summer 67, the world’s working-class has been aware of the Hippy movement, or as it is now more frequently called, “The Underground”. Attitudes to the hippies have varied from amused fascination to angry revulsion.  Many people have grown more hostile to them over the past two years, as their emphasis on such harmless-sounding words as “Love” and “Beautiful People” has declined, and their tendency to smoke pot has become more widely publicised.

In Britain the occupation of 144 Piccadilly confirmed the hippies’ bad reputation—though the occupiers were not typical of the Underground by any means. TV news announcers put on their frowns for this item, were careful to identify the occupation with soccer hooliganism (both were “violence to property”), and equally careful to avoid dragging in irrelevant details like the fact of empty houses alongside homeless people.

A wave of horror swept the country at the realisation that there were people who not only wore long hair (and obviously smelt foul, as anyone could see by looking at their TV screens), but actually believed they had a right to live without working. In one television programme, David Frost, Hughie Green and Robert Maxwell—those highly productive labourers who toil so usefully to justify their existence—led an attack on the hippies for their conscientious objection to work. When Richard Neville (editor of the Underground magazine Oz) suggested that the idea of work as a duty hadn’t a very ancient historical pedigree, that work in the modern world was “really a form of slavery,” and that with today’s productive techniques there could easily be more than enough wealth for everyone, he was devastated by Frost’s crisply intelligent retorts: “Very high‑flown I’m sure” and “I really am an old fuddy-duddy you know.”

Hippy characteristics

The hippy phenomenon is a movement, a set of attitudes, a subculture or a nuisance, according to your point of view. It consists of several hundred thousand people, drawn mostly from the working class, in the advanced regions of Capitalism. It is vaguely defined, fuzzy-edged—no one can draw up a hippy manifesto; no one can specify who is a hippy and who isn’t. It differs from country to country: in America, for example, there are relatively fewer semi-hippies or weekend hippies than in Britain, for the simple reason that long hair is a much greater obstacle to getting a job in the States than in Europe. All the same, we can list some of the features which distinguish hippies from what they call “straight” society.

First, there is age—or rather, youth. Hippies are predominantly under-thirties. Second, they have an unorthodox pattern of drugs consumption—mostly pot, with occasional recourse to acid (“pot” is now common parlance for cannabis (marihuana), and acid for lysergic acid (LSD)) and minor use of amphetamines and other pills. Or as “straight” society (gaily swilling down immense quantities of alcohol, nicotine, barbiturates, aspirin, etc.) usually puts it: “Hippies take drugs.” Whatever may be the medical properties of the hippies’ chosen stimulants, they do have the important social property that their use is, for the time being, prohibited by the State.

Third, hippies possess a typical style of appearance: long hair, casual-to-scruffy clothes, beads, etc. And fourth, like all minority groups they have their own language: “mind-blowing” (stimulating to the point of powerful hallucination); “hang-up” (unfortunate disturbance of tranquillity); “fuzz” (policemen), and so forth. It is a measure of the commercial cashing-in on hippies that virtually all of their jargon is very widely-known through its dissemination in pop music. Most of it was borrowed from other sources, not coined, by the hippies.

Fifth, hippies are preoccupied with certain forms of art, for example beat music accompanied by displays of coloured, flashing lights. Sixth, they aim at an inversion of the values of “straight” society. They embrace spontaneity rather than self-control; childlikeness rather than sophistication; love rather than power; “dropping-out” rather than careerism; “doing your own thing” rather than imposed uniformity; admiration for the destitute rather than for “affluence”; disorder rather than method—and of course, Indians rather than cowboys. Seventh, hippies often show a greater than average susceptibility to superstition. They are generally against established “organised religion,” but fall for all sorts of religious and mystical clap-trap which have an exotic flavour ; astrology, transcendental meditation, palmistry, sunspots, or Krishna-consciousness.

Lastly, many hippies advocate a revolutionary change in society, though both the manner of achieving this, and the nature of their proposed new system, (sometimes described as “tribal” or “communitarian”) are extremely vague. An example of this vagueness was the slogan advanced in one Underground paper: “Alternative Society Now!”—its urgent tone somewhat cancelled out by the woolliness of its descriptive content, which could scarcely be less informative. At least many hippies are clear that the major social evils of today are all bound up together, and can be removed only by a total social change. Both of the important politically-oriented offshoots of the hippy movement, the Diggers and the Yippies, make specifically Socialist proposals, such as the abolition of wages and of money. In our opinion, both these groups are doomed to futility because of their methods, but they do constitute an advance on the previously fashionable assortments of youthful radicals. This groping towards Socialist understanding is particularly impressive when set against the temporary direction of trendy Leftism in the US: flirting with black racism, romantic idolising of Guevara and similar state-capitalist prophets, or the demagoguery and vanguardism the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

Causes of hippies

The Socialist argument that the majority of workers must arrive at a clear understanding of Socialism before they can get it, that a Revolution in ideas must precede the Revolution in politics and economics, is often sneered at by those who say that the mass of the population (except, for some reason, the extraordinary people who make this statement) are brainwashed robots, puppets manipulated by TV, and the press.

But Capitalism is not a conspiracy. It cannot be controlled by set of individuals, not even the Capitalist class.  Current ideas provide a support for capitalism (though the “mass media” are only a part of their reinforcement), yet Capitalism is dynamic, constantly advancing and frequently unpredictable in detail. The very ideas which defend capitalism have to be adjusted or replaced, to fit new conditions. Workers must be trained, not only to do their jobs, but also to be versatile, because their jobs are changing all the time, and also to make radical criticisms of the way capitalism is run, because otherwise inefficient and unprofitable blunders would result. As the Communist Manifesto put it:

  The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production . . . All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trains of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned . . .

Today, traditional ideas about work, leisure and “the purpose of life” are under attack, and in retreat. Capitalism has killed God stone dead, and is stamping on the twitching corpse. Capitalism extends the juicy carrot of the “Leisure Society”—a golden age of short working-hours and automated abundance, which is ever imminent yet never arrives. Capitalism holds aloft an image of glamour, high-powered pleasure, rest and freedom—whilst the worker’s mind and body are reduced ever more thoroughly to instruments of accumulation. From the belief that work is a grim duty, consumption its reward, capitalism is shifting emphasis to the view that consumption is a duty, work something to be made rewarding.

It is in this context of irresistible change that confused vortices of rebellion like hippyism must be seen. The hippy movement has been centred in California—the most technically advanced region of the world, the window on the future. That is not an accident: it is just what Socialists and historical materialists have predicted. The embryo of Socialist ideas is constantly gestating in the womb of advanced capitalism: the foetus is aborted repeatedly, but the fertility of working‑class consciousness cannot be lost, and the insemination of Socialist organisation must grow more copious. The hippy movement is one of those abortions.

Hippies are a product of the youth cult, the commercialisation of young people and the “generation gap.” But this gap is not only a construct of the publicity men: the new generation does live and think differently from its elders. Many of the things our fathers and mothers were grateful for (and that is a measure of the servile depths to which the working-class has sunk), we take for granted. Young people in the advanced countries have never been brought to heel by a major slump, nor by a war at home.  Their standard of consumption has generally risen steadily throughout their lives, and they confidently expect it to go on doing so indefinitely. Given this outlook, mere technical progress and fatter wage packets lose their capacity to impress. Young workers are more likely to ask “What’s it all for, this endless treadmill? When do we start to live?”

The rapid dissemination of hippyism throughout the advanced world is a consequence of the similarity of conditions in these counties, plus the globe-shrinking communications network: any fad, fashion, doctrine or cult, once it has popped up in one nation is almost instantly mirrored in all. This buttresses our case that the notion of a Socialist revolution in a single country is ludicrous.

The hippies’ deliberate irrationality, and their earlier Love worship, are a protest against “straight” reasonableness and logic. (In fact the very term “straight,” like the archaic “square” reveals this). Capitalism manifests very thorough rationality in the service of inactive irrationality—scientific means to insane ends. Those who don’t understand capitalism’s structure often find its “logic” oppressive, and retreat into gooey, mindless sentimentality. This is a very common modern theme, exemplified in things like Godard’s early films, such as Alphaville.

Mysticism is favoured by a reaction against modern institutional Christianity, seen as a cover for the “straight” virtues of ambition and conformity, and mysticism links up with drug-induced hallucinations which provide escape from an aimless and insecure reality. It is romantically pretty, a source of poetry, in attempt to give back to life a lost “depth,” and in its imported forms it has the flavour of more primitive societies in which alternatives to the score-card mentality of “straight” achievement compulsion can be found.

The hippy movement is now virtually finished. Certain aspects—the dress, the jargon, the music—are steadily incorporated into a much broader and less rebellious area of commercial youth culture. “The Underground”, always a term with a more political slant, becomes infiltrated by Leftist reformists and insurrectionaries. It is to be hoped they will learn something from the Underground, for they have little to teach it. (1) A feeling of community, and a common set of values, will persist among those who smoke pot (and therefore dislike policemen), but this becomes vaguer as the habit spreads. The really important question of future movements, perhaps partly hippy-derived, perhaps bigger, perhaps more explicitly antagonistic to the economic system.

Criticism of hippies

A few young workers, whose anti-Capitalist tendencies were initially stirred by the Underground have progressed in their understanding to the point of embracing revolutionary Socialism, and joining the Socialist Party of Great Britain.  But much more could have been accomplished if there had existed a bigger Socialist movement with the resources to put its case more loudly. As it is, a potentially fruitful upsurge of critical and anti-authoritarian idea has in the main been diverted into reformism, anarchism and mysticism.

The hippies’ emphasis on a style instead of a programme, whilst in many ways endearing, and possessing an obvious advantage for propaganda, is a grave obstacle to their progress in understanding. Distinctions of dress, hairstyle and musical taste are, after all, fairly trivial—and many hippies come dangerously close to regarding them as fetishes. Flickering lights, a psychedelic design, a whiff of incense, a Clapton guitar phrase—such things can be combined into a powerfully unified appeal to all the senses, yet Capitalist society has no difficulty in prostituting this as it prostitutes all art and all enjoyment. Whereupon the market, having squeezed the Underground dry, moves on to the next short-lived modish fad. As Wilde put it, the trouble being very modern is that you become old-fashioned very quickly.

With the first, naive realisation that a new society is necessary, three elementary errors are committed in turn. First, it is supposed that the adoption of attitudes appropriate to the desired society will bring it closer—hence the “Love” phase. This is quickly seen to be largely unsuccessful, since the conditions of the present system generate completely opposed attitudes. To the extent that it is successful it merely helps to reconcile people to the existing state of affairs. The next stage is to go beyond mere attitudes, to try and act as though the new society were already here. This is like trying to get out of a prison by ignoring the bars, and equally futile. After this, attempts are at last made to overhaul the system, but only piecemeal, by changing bits at a time.  However the nature of the bits is mainly determined by the nature of the whole, not vice versa—as student militants are among the most recent to discover. Thus, what started out as something really radical, and in its implications revolutionary, has been shepherded back into the fold of orthodox reformist politics. Only clarity of thought, and courage in the face of the jeers about “sectarianism” which are always hurled at revolutionaries, can break out of this vicious circle.

Now the Underground veers between two courses of action: assaults on Capitalism and attempted withdrawal from it: respectively symbolised by the occupation of 144 Piccadilly, and the move to Saint Patrick’s Isle. But Capitalism will not fall before sporadic demonstrations and happenings, however defiant or amusing these may be.  Neither will it let anyone drop out.

It may be argued in defence of the Underground that this is the age of exploration rather than of Principles, and that there is much value in looseness, informality, and even incoherence. But exploration is worthwhile only if it leads to discovery, looseness if it leads to firmness, informality if it leads to definable formal organisation, and incoherence if out of it emerges a new coherence. The Underground is incapable of making these advances because, though often expert at dramatising its criticism of “straight” society, it seems quite incapable of criticising itself.

Hippies then, are only the symptoms of a sick society: Socialists the cure. Yet to those workers infuriated by the hippy way of life, we say: Don’t look for scapegoats. A few “spongers” are nothing compared to the vast wastage of Capitalism: the arms/space race, built-in shoddiness, the unnecessary monetary system, the “sponging” of the owners of industry. To blame hippies (students, immigrants, unofficial strikers) for your troubles is to lose sight of the actual cause—which is precisely what your masters the capitalists want. Anyway, the view that people ought to work to “earn” their subsistence is out-of-date in a world which could easily provide more than enough for everybody, with a tiny fraction of the work done today. Everything should be free; all work should be voluntary—that is Socialism.

To hippies themselves, we say: Pulling faces at Capitalism is not enough. Even talking about “tribal” alternatives is not enough. An uncompromising stand on Socialist Principles is required before we can start to bring about the new moneyless world society.

David Ramsay Steele

………………..

(1) One of these Bolshevik reactionaries, D. Widgery, recently remonstrated with the Underground, via the columns of International Times (Oct. 10):  “IT would still be publishing its twee pop-star interviews two months after workers’ soviets were declared on Merseyside and Clydeside.”  Widgery’s delusional system is so fantastic that he imagines an administrative apparatus which was a symptom of Russian backwardness half a century ago has some relevance to the working-class problems in the 1970s!  Notice how his two chosen regions are centres for manual workers, that proportionately declining  section (soon to be a minority) of the working class – a section which the Bolsheviks invest with unlimited Romantic potential.  Compared to the fairytale world of the Bolsheviks, Tolkien’s fables are scientific sociology, twee pop-star interviews the last word in revolutionary politics!

The New Narodniki (1968)

From the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

On June 15 a “Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation” was founded by students representing groups all over England. As might be expected at a meeting in which trotskyists (of various hues) were prominent the air was thick with such words as mobilise, orientate, perspective, programmatic, transitional and, of course, vanguard. The programme adopted in fact declared:

"Revolutionary students can play a vanguard role by detonating a wider social conflict in which the working-class becomes decisive. Students must seek to ally themselves with working-class struggles: they have also shown that they may anticipate and instigate them.”

So yet another group has appeared to liberate the working class ignoring the long-established Socialist principle that the workers must free themselves.

In Russia in the second half of the 19th century many privileged young men and women decided to “go to the people”, by working and living among the peasants whom they believed to be a revolutionary force. They were thus known as Populists or Narodniks. A similar theme dominated the meeting: only the workers could overthrow capitalism, so students should go to them by leafleting, and perhaps working, in, the factories. As one (Widgery) put it “the talk about the new Narodniki going to the factories is right”. A small minority, from the South Coast, were still in favour of “working within the Labour Party” (as they all were two years ago), but their views were not well-received.

Prominent were members of the alleged “International Socialism” Group. Also, frequently to be seen hovering in the background was Pat Jordan, the trotskyist who runs the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign. The anarchists and another trotskyist group (the SLL) did not seem to be present.

The RSSF programme commits it to Student Power, Anti-Capitalist Alliance with Workers and Struggle Against Imperialism. These aims are to be achieved by so-called direct action (that is, occupying college buildings, fighting the police, preventing exams taking place, shouting down speakers). As one (Fishman) frankly put it: they are out to “seize the leadership of students as a group”.

At a meeting the previous evening a member of the Socialist Party was prevented from continuing his speech after he had criticised talk about “parliamentary rubbish” and support for the nationalist and state capitalist Vietcong. For his troubles he was called a “fascist” (“Against fascists there is only one weapon: physical force", one LSE student leader, Harman, has written). This is perhaps the shape of things to come for any who dare to stand up to this self-appointed vanguard.

Between the Lines: Utopias and First Tuesday (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the June 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Myopic Visionaries

Somewhere in the basement of Channel Four there is an office in which is to be found a team of timewasters whose lifelong project is to make lengthy documentaries about "socialism" or "Marxism". Over the years the C4 audience has been subjected to numerous programmes of this kind. We wait excitedly, expecting a serious analysis of the subjects so seductively advertised in the titles — and with regularity we are left feeling frustrated, cheated and wondering when the case for socialism would at least be mentioned in passing.

Utopias (C4, 10.45 pm, 1 May) was a classical production of the basement timewasters. The programme lasted for over an hour. It was clearly produced with enormous technical care, using props and recordings of speakers which looked like they were going to serve as a backdrop for something more than superficial. The title was intriguing. Socialists are often called utopians, and here was a programme offering eight "socialists" the chance to discuss their visions of what socialism means. Within the first few minutes that sinking feeling began: the declaration was made that this would not be a programme about definitions. Which meant, more precisely, that it would be a programme in which anyone who felt like it could call themselves socialists without being under the least pressure to explain themselves.

Then the visions commenced. Eight miserable bloody visions of capitalism run better than it is now, with the occasional reference to such limited dreams as being elements of socialism. Jack Jones, the first lofty dreamer, who as head of the TGWU advocated the so-called Social Contract whereby trade unions would agree to take lower wages in order to assist a Labour government to manage the capitalist economy, offered the vision of "fair pensions" and an incomes policy as his taste of utopia. Then came a "socialist" economist who talked a bit about the need for morality and the impossibility of doing away with market forces altogether; followed by some ex-strikers from Silentnight who had set up a furniture-making co-operative business and saw this little dot on the market map as their own piece of socialism in practice; Sheila Rowbotham's utopia had been and gone. It was the GLC, and if that was utopia, then Birmingham's a tropical holiday resort.

Rarely has so much valuable TV time been wasted upon such vague and limited visions of what could be. Here was a chance for a socialist to really show what life could be like in a world set free from the bondage of the profit system. A world of abundant resources in which people could give according to their abilities and have free access to the goods and services that they desire. This would have been something to make them sit up, make them now that there is something more that we could have if only capitalism was not here.

Instead of that we are offered neither socialism nor utopia, but the stale reformist outlooks of capitalism's tame leftwing. As is often the case, the worst contribution of the evening was provided by the SWP. David Widgery, who is an SWP Leninist, a GP and a very pleasant fellow, trotted out the usual line that workers must organise to get reforms out of capitalism. As he put it, "In these times, to be a revolutionary means to try to hang on to reforms". So, the total destruction of the capitalist system is to be postponed a while; there are prescription charges to be fought over. We can only hope that the men in the basement (or wherever they are) take a long time before producing their next intellectual tease.

The Practitioners of Genocide

First Tuesday (ITV, 10.40 pm, 2 May) contrasted strikingly with Utopias. It did not claim to deal with any grand intellectual theme; its subject was the My Lai massacre carried out by the US army twenty years ago. It was the most forceful and moving documentary to be shown on British TV for a long time. It should be seen by anybody who has illusions about the glory of war.

The documentary concentrated upon the way that military training brutalised a group of American workers, whose average age was twenty, into Nazi-like sadistic thugs. One of the few surviors in My Lai was interviewed. Like most villagers, her entire family had been killed in the massacre: "The more I think about it, the more I want to cry" she said, two decades after the atrocity had been committed. She had been thrown into a ditch with scores of dead villagers piled in on top of her. She explained how the soldiers had indiscriminately shot old men and women and infants and babies, how they had raped the women and done worse to young girls, how they had tortured the villagers and then lined them up in rows to be shot. Nearly every one of them was murdered in what the US press called the 'Pinkville' massacre.

The interviews with the screwed up soldiers who are still around to tell the tale demonstrated just how much both killer and killed are the brutalised victims of war. To be sure, the uniformed murderers survive, but with what memories? Psychologically, these men were wrecked; Vietnam had taken their minds and left them badly injured. One black ex-GI sat shaking and twitching. He is on major tranquilisers. He cries a lot. He looks over and over again at press cuttings of the massacre. He recalls, self-torturingly, how he personally shot dead about twenty-five villagers. including several little children. He sits next to a photo of his own son who was murdered in a street attack — and he explains that this must have happened as a punishment for his action in Vietnam.

But, as the documentary clearly showed, these men did not decide to go to Vietnam and slaughter innocent people. They did not act upon a whim. They were driven into a frenzy of violent hatred against the unknown enemy as part of their preparation for the job of being good soldiers.

The documentary ended with pictures of the modern US army being trained, explaining that what is happening to the soldiers is not different from the brutalising process which had turned those of twenty years ago into the practitioners of genocide. No doubt there will be some who will have seen this powerful documentary and concluded that this only demonstrates the awfulness of human nature. That would be a false conclusion; these soldiers were not born thugs, it was the system which required them to be that way. It is capitalism which makes killers out of decent men and women. These men should not feel self-guilt about what they have done, but angry about what they were made to become.

Steve Coleman