The Communications Counter-Revolution (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We face a social crisis of communication. Not only do the means of mass communication not belong to us but they are being used against us.

As global media have developed, enabling words and images to be conveyed to millions of people in a matter of seconds, the words used have become increasingly more sloganised and contrived to delude, the imagery more tranquillising in its banality and stupefying in its detachment from historical context.

As the world becomes a global village, linked by newly accessible technologies from the mobile phone to the Internet, the most powerful use of these technologies has tended to promote the envelopment of mass consciousness by corporate ideology.

As the symbols of constitutional democracy come to dominate the globe, seemingly confirmed by newly-acquired voting powers from Moscow to Soweto to West Lothian, the empowerment of the ballot is insidiously undermined by the neo-feudal absolutism of the press barons and media moguls: the new stratum of the ruling class which controls the dogma of the news agenda. Rupert Murdoch’s News International, to exemplify the point by reference to the biggest and baddest, has global assets of $15 billion and now controls the major newspapers in Britain and Australia, the biggest news broadcast network in the USA and by far the most significant private media organisation in Asia.

As global literacy rates increase, and huge hopes are placed upon the potentiality of science as a method of liberation from disease and diminished opportunities, the lexicon of the communications industry has converged with the language of the manipulative advertising industry which has denuded language of depth or integrity and prostituted speakers and writers in the service of crude market targets.

The consequence of all this is a public which is increasingly bemused by and untrusting of the channels of mass communication; which finds itself the recipient of a monological, one-way conversation, presented as communication; which has come to regard truth as being either the monopoly of a mediating elite or else so relative that nothing can be really true; which has become so soundbitten by political messages delivered to fit the crass measurements of the tabloid headline that enthusiasm for such political babble has become as perverse as commitment to a brand of baked beans or loyalty to a fast-food chain.

For most people the world of politics (for, politics seems indeed to inhabit a separate, remote and misty planet) seems terribly drab and empty and meaningless and alienating and dishonest. Politicians are never useful, except as pawns who might drive away the even more useless. Political activity is seen as an obsession for the disturbed: the rule-bound, the myopic, the ones who get their kicks from power games. Politics is an irritation or a threat, but never a resource of strength or hope.

The language of politics, as it has become compressed to the point of sounding half like gibberish and half like fraud, is not taken very seriously except by those who deal in its currency and have come to realise that it is a code of impotence reflecting the timidity of statecraft before economic powers which operate only in the global language of numbers.

Soundbite culture

Why has the culture of the soundbite arisen? Firstly, because political leaders have come to realise, albeit gradually and with a conspicuous absence of humility, that they can lead nobody nowhere. The market leads; they follow. To dance to the tune of capital entails a minimum of choreographical creativity and to sing to the tune calls less for the oratory of Cicero than the verbal banality of Saatchi or Mandelson.

Secondly, because ideas have become detached from political life. What George Bush called ‘The Vision Thing’ was a recognition of what he lacked, not what he had. The words needed to convey the contemporary political visions of the future, fantasies of myopia as they are, are few and uninspiring. “Gahd Bless America !” “New Labour; New Britain” “One Europe; one people” “The Lady’s Not for Turning” “Things Go Better With Coke”? It is a world led by second-rate advertising copywriters.

When you have nothing to say there is much to be said for saying nothing. But in order for the political mime-show to become audible, for the sake of putting background noise, however disjointed, to the increasingly dominating imagery of the photo-opportunity, something, however brief and pointless, must be uttered.

Thirdly, there is a belief amongst those who produce the media and design the news, that the public is incorrigibly stupid, happy only when offered infantile distractions from reality and capable of taking in only the most simplistic and compressed smidgeon of sound before rubbing our eyes and demanding an appointment with the Page Three girls. The public are regarded as half-baked cretins. The workers are witless and best offered football reports and Royal fairy stories: the tabloid valium for the dispossessed.

And because the news producers worry that our attention spans will collapse under the strain of more than a few minutes of political discussion, they ensure that such unmanageable bites of sustained argument never reach us. In the 1964 General Election — the first in which the major political parties prepared themselves for a TV campaign — the average excerpt from a political speech on the television news was eighty-seven seconds. These days an eighty-seven second excerpt is unheard of. By the 1979 election the median length of speech extracts on the BBC News was 45 seconds and on ITN 25 seconds. In the 1992 election the average length was heard was down to 18 seconds. In the last US presidential campaign no contender was quoted for more than 7 seconds, except during the deadly boring presidential debates in which they recited their pre-rehearsed soundbites with the conviction of a waitress in an American restaurant telling you the day’s specials on the menu.

The problem is not, of course, simply people wants to hear politicians for more than twenty seconds. Fifteen seconds of John Major felt like a lifetime in a cell with him. The media producers are quite right: too much of this makes our heads ache and we run out into the street committing road rage. Faced with such intellectual vacuity and emptiness of vision there is much to be said for the most extreme brevity. The problem is quite simply that the most extreme brevity is fine when you are contrasting Coke with Pepsi or advertising baked beans which don’t make you fart or asking if you prefer Oasis or Blur, but it is inimical to and destructive of the kind of reasoned, scientific judgement required from people who are called upon to make serious democratic choices.

No time for reason

Reason — the capacity to exercise our unique human capacity to organise our thoughts — to remember — to envisage and plan — to think and speak conceptually — to share thought through words — to use words to differentiate the self from the outer world and experience from fantasy —these hugely potent, definingly human, boundlessly creative forces which comprise reason will only wither and die if they are constrained by the inane language and crass imagery which sells jelly babies and New Labour.

To exercise reason takes time. This need for time has always been a problem for the vast majority because, under capitalism it is precisely the theft of our time which leaves us exploited and unfree and weary. So, there is a paradox: to understand why we are weary, unfree and exploited we need the time to contemplate the cause of exploitation and the hope for freedom. For the Leninists and the social-democratic reformists the problem was easily addressed: the nature of life for the majority would never permit the luxury of such reasoned contemplation, so mass socialist consciousness could never occur. The wearied workers must be led or left to rot.

For socialists, who refused to accept that authoritarian logic, the only basis for our claim that workers could and would understand the case for a new way of organising society, was that given the time to think and make sense of experience, understanding would combine with desire to create an enlightened embrace of the socialist alternative. Give people time to think and to speak and to argue and they cannot but see it as we have seen it.

But if time itself is to be sapped away by a culture of hurried messages and commercial jingles, the fascistic anthems of the marketplace, then what hope is there for reason? If language itself, in an Orwellian rape of meaning and sequential logic, becomes not a means to know more but a weapon in the armoury of those who would prefer us to know less, then reason itself falls victim to a vandalising culture which dehumanises those left to dwell in the Brave New World of the Sun and the organisation of mass stupidity. We would be abandoned to a cultural wilderness of endless Happy Hours but no happiness, punch-drunk street parties and feudal funeral processions as repositories for the deeply repressed miseries of the bewildered; elections and referendums with no issues and no discussion. This is the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason.

The threat of a slide to such an historical catastrophe is a menace to the reason which makes us human and to the socialist vision which could enable us to live humanely. And we do face such a threat. That is why we are unmistakably in the midst of a profound crisis of communication. Not only is it the case that the means of communication do not belong to us — in a world where very little that is worth much belongs to most of us that is hardly a revelation. But these channels of communication are being used against us. They are The Enemy Within, which can brand strikers as The Enemy Within and socialists as loonies, utopians and the merely irrelevant. It is as well to know our enemy, for struggle for the tools and language of communication has become in the course of the twentieth century the predominant battle-ground within which the shape of our social future will be contested.

The war waged by the ruling class to silence the majority is not a new one, even though it has too often been neglected by liberal historians who prefer to bathe in the still waters of liberal ideology. The battle to stifle the voices of the working class is a long and bloody one, and in many parts of the world it still goes on leaving the silenced, the maimed, tortured and the butchered corpses in its wake. But in Britain and the so-called capitalist democracies the war against the right of workers to speak has changed. The strategy now is to tolerate ‘free speech’ and then drown it out with the megaphones of distraction and deceit. What we are offered is a democracy in which everyone has a right to be ignored, but only the rich and powerful can insist upon being heard.

Linguistic nihilism

What kind of intellectual climate is it that is allowing the communication of hope and the vivacity of human creativity to become so neglected? The answer lies in the current mood of counter-enlightenment which has come to dominate Western thought. The arid atmosphere of what has come to be known as postmodernism is precisely the environment within which the banalities of the soundbite and the soft-focus lens can triumph over the long-learned lessons of the Age of Reason. With their disdain for rational explanations the postmodernists argue that no cause is more important in producing an effect than any other. There is no rational analysis of history; there are no social systems; there can be nothing which is reducible to the clarity of scientific transparency.

So, within this hopelessly nihilistic chain of postmodernist discourse, everything is as meaningful as it is meaningless; rationality stands on a par with irrationality; no judgement must be prioritised over any other — genocide, death camps, avoidable mass starvation, the torture of political prisoners. These, according to the postmodernists, are all merely fragmented and inexplicable phenomena which operate each in their own separate world of autonomous values. So, if nothing general can be said, language becomes diminished as a civilising force. Words can mean anything or nothing or both. The postmodernists have celebrated the so-called Death of History: the death, in short, of that fundamentally liberating Age of Reason project, to which Marx contributed so greatly, to transform history from a passive force, in which humans are mere puppets, to a creative force in which our comprehension of the process allows us to actively direct the process of social movement. For the postmodernists all of this was ultra-optimism and must now be substituted by an inert, sullen, complacent pact with the present.

This veritable revolt against the Enlightenment derides scientific logic and the quest for the dialectical interrogation of complexity and surrenders abjectly to the lunatic’s logic of the marketplace and its attendant disorders. It gives rise to a notion of politics as being essentially about slogans rather than substance. For, if you really believe that there can be no substantial intervention in the making of history, what else is there to do but stand on the sidelines and pretend that your mandate is to carry out whatever happens to be taking place already?

At its worst, this is the climate in which the dark clouds of fascism can form. But not necessarily fascism in jackboots with Nuremberg rallies. It was hard to ignore a fascistic element within the mass hysteria which followed upon the recent death of a Princess. Such mass manipulation of human feeling and well-organised collective agonising of the repressed is precisely the kind of perverse waste of human emotion and energy made permissible in a society which has come to disdain popular reason.

The politics of reasoned thought requires the capacity to distinguish between the trivial inconsequences of our enemies and the historically vital events out of which history makes us and we can make history. It requires a rejection of the linguistic nihilism of contemporary journalism which asserts like Humpty Dumpty that words can mean whatever a headline-writer wants them to mean. It requires a respect for scientific logic which considers causes and effects rather than diminishing everything to the random agenda of ‘News Just In’.

Capitalism, because it would perish by the force of mass intelligence if enough people thought about it, cannot create an environment conducive to intelligent reflection. Indeed, the more it goes on, the more it will create more elaborate and sophisticated diversions from reasoned thought. And the more socialists will need to warn against those diversions and remind their fellow human beings: Your brain is the greatest weapon you possess; your ability to communicate is your tool of liberation; thinking, speaking and organising democratically and intelligently you are a force that cannot be defeated by the babble of a worn-out social system.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Post-War Fascism (1997)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Post-War Fascism in this country had Raven Thompson (Director of Policy for the British Union of Fascists before the war) as its champion in the debate at Kensington Town Hall on November 10th. This debate was organised by our Ealing branch. Thompson represented the Union for British Freedom, one of the groups aping the Nazis here. This organisation offered to supply stewards to keep the meeting in order, including some to prevent "undesirables" getting into the hall. We naturally refused their offer and told them that our meetings were open to all members of the working-class who wished to attend, and that we did not anticipate any disturbances at a meeting run in our customary democratic manner. Our views were justified. The hall was jammed to capacity with 650 people and about 200 had to be turned away. A large number of those present were passionately opposed to Thompson but they listened patiently while he plodded along with a monotonous and boring recital of the mish-mash of reformist rubbish and dictatorial junk which comprises the stock-in-trade of the present day little Hitlers. Our representative. Turner, had no difficulty in ripping Thompson’s tattered political ideas into even smaller pieces with socialist analysis, and presented our alternative to Fascism and the rest of the political policies which in effect preserve the present social system. Another lesson of the debate is that a sure way of preventing the spread of Fascist doctrines is to get these would-be strong men and dictators on to a public platform and expose them for the exploded political wind-bags which they really are. Those organisations who claim a monopoly of so-called "antifascism" were shown by Turner in the debate to be based on the same reformist twaddle as the Fascists themselves, and they can only oppose with disruption and disorder—tactics which the Fascists welcome and by which they thrive. The audience were orderly throughout and gave about £24 to our funds.

Clifford Groves

(From Party News Briefs, Socialist Standard, December 1947)

Away from it all (1997)

The TV Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the market economy has developed into the globalised and highly productive beast it now is, so the ostensibly "non-productive" industries have grown. Not just money-changing and paper-bashing but the service industries and leisure. Workers in advanced capitalist states like Britain are now more likely to be directly employed in banking than building and in movement of people than mining of commodities. Just as virtually every university in the land has developed a huge department concerned with Business Studies, Marketing and Accountancy, so now no forward-looking university is without its Leisure Management courses. In recognition of this phenomenon, the type of workers who are very often the product of the latter have been the focus of two recent series on BBC 1—Hotel and Holiday Reps.

These fly-on-the-wall documentaries appear to have been an undeniable success for the BBC. The first, set in Liverpool’s exclusive Adelphi Hotel, has proved hugely popular with viewers and the second series about the exploits of a group of holiday representatives abroad has not been far behind. Both series should be watched carefully by any workers seeking excitement and escape from the humdrum and ordinary in the shape of the capitalist "leisure provision” industry.

Anyone who has spent time at Liverpool’s Adelphi is more likely than not to remember it with a degree of affection. Typical of the big city hotels which grew up earlier this century, it has retained an air of grandeur long lost by most of its competitors. Now just slightly frayed at the edges it still carries the reputation of luxury craved by others. It was and remains an hotel of extravagance in a city populated by the downtrodden and wretched, an hotel where the massive and ornate chandeliers in the Tea Room stand in stark and utter contrast to the bare light bulbs and broken windows of some of Britain’s worst slum housing less than 100 yards away.

But the BBC series has not essentially been about the hotel at all—its structure, its nature or its services. It has been about the poor bastards who have to work there. The very first episode, about Grand National day earlier this year when the IRA disrupted the proceedings and thereby inundated the Adelphi with those looking for overnight accommodation, was as good an illustration as is needed of the plight of those who work for Britannia Hotels.

Get a move on

It was on this day that many of its staff worked an eighteen-hour shift—’’all hands to the deck". Customers were charged £100 for the privilege of sleeping on a mattress on the floor in one of the function rooms and the last few genuine hotel rooms to be sold went to the highest bidders for astronomical amounts. Britannia must have made thousands from that one night alone. And the staff’s reward for all this effort, for the hassle encountered from the inevitably disgruntled customers, and for the bullying and intimidation meted out by the management? A £5 bonus, minus tax.

In this way the “new" economy of "new" Britain under "new" Labour reasserts its belief in traditional values. Profits first—wage and salary slaves at the back of the queue and no shoving, thank you very much.

For the holiday reps, thousands of miles away from the supposedly genteel Adelphi, things were not much better. For them the intimidation and exploitation was less obvious but no less real for all that. Just like marketing and advertising firms, travel companies are past masters at disguising reality. To a large extent, that is what they are actually about and how they make their money. It is therefore imperative that their representatives are as anodyne, unemotional and robotically "pleasant” as possible. It is another growing industry where insincerity is raised up to the level of an art form and genuine humanity is discouraged and dispensed with. The company comes first at all times and in all situations, and that translates into profit.

Travel companies like a certain type of employee. They are female, in their early 20s, usually blonde, and must have the innate ability to hold an antiseptic smile at all moments. Any regression from these high standards and the girls are out. It also helps if they can memorise large tracts of meaningless text which they are required to regurgitate to tourists at "welcome” meetings several times a day. They do, of course, have the advantage of doing this in balmy Lanzarote rather than cold and windy Liverpool but in every other respect they are no better off. The lure of a glamorous life abroad is soon put into perspective by the regimentation of their daily existence and £100 per week wages.

In making such apparently cynical comments as these your reviewer has the privilege of first-hand knowledge of both Lanzarote reps and the Liverpool Adelphi staff, but more importantly than either of these, a socialist perspective. Many people watching these programmes on BBC 1 will not have any of these advantages but the testament to both series is that after watching them most are unlikely to think of the leisure industry in quite the same way as they did before. If nothing else, they will at least be better informed about the methodologies of the relatively small group of people who own the tourism industry and of the stultifying existence of many of the workers who make their profits for them. And an awakening of public knowledge about that is certainly no bad thing.

Dave Perrin

Letters to the Editors: Socialist theatre criticism (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

Michael Gill is too kind by half to David Hare's latest commodity, Amy's View (August Socialist Standard). Far from moving any audience to the contemplation of important question as he claims, this piece of West End sentimentality, like much or most of the commercial literature we are subjected to. is very careful to keep any real questions out of the way—to restrict the kind of questions that might be asked. The question Michael Gill finds so powerful— why does the current generation of pop culture producers go for so much violence—is nowhere exposed to anything like a candid answer—for example, that violence is eminently marketable and that commercial culture is driven by the market. The play nowhere suggest that the penchant for violence is anything but a puzzling personal oddity. Like all his kind, Hare wants to place social conflicts purely in the realm of personal relations or the conflict of personal types. This is bourgeois culture's prime strategy for keeping publication discussion within safe limits.

Michael Gill’s approach here seems to be to give a bit of summary of the story, then a little bit of evaluation, followed by some musing on the socialist ideas the work seems to bring to mind for him. What’s needed in the case of the Hare play is some attention to how the work defines the arena of discourse, what it is designed to imply about social reality. I am not calling for either propaganda art or propaganda criticism: but we need commentary, and art. that gets behind or beneath the evasive "fundamental" propositions of facile commercial art like Hare’s, criticism that can break open the misleading framework too often accepted by the bourgeois artist, and allow audiences to propose, or to witness, genuinely meaningful questions—and answers that are not misleading. Work like Ronald Berry's, or, better. Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy are [works] superior to and more honest than market items like Amy’s View. I am asserting that a work of art can lie by the intellectual framework it situates itself in, and I am claiming that the socialist critic's job should include at least a glance at the conception of reality any given work seems to posit, and by example, promote. The artist need not be bound by socialist ideals, but neither should he or she be allowed to get away with bamboozling audiences with shallow “moral" dilemmas that are not even dilemmas.

Tom Jackson, 

Merion Station, 

PA, USA

The end of the State

Dear Editors,

Thank you for your reply (Socialist Standard, September) to my letter about the SPGB’s 1984 Conference resolution on the abolition of the State.

Since writing it. I’ve come across the following passage from the Socialist Standard of October 1937: "The SPGB agrees with Marx and Engels that, ‘with the disappearance of classes, there also disappears the necessity of armed repression or state power’ (Letter to Von Patten, on April l883).The state will, therefore, in due course ‘wither away”.’

Also, the following paragraph appeared in a 1978 SPGB statement on violence: "In the period of changeover, control of the armed forces would be continued for as long as necessary, in the light of conditions then existing. It has never been the Party’s case that simultaneously with gaining control, the armed forces would at once be wholly dismantled. (In Engels’s words, ‘The State is not ‘abolished’. It dies out’)". These statements are at odds with your reply that the traditional socialist view is that "The state will not ‘gradually decline’ after socialism is established, but the end of the state and the beginning of socialism will be simultaneous".

David Rolfe, 

London SWI5

Reply: 

We don't disagree with either of the two statements you quote.

It is a pity, though, that you didn’t make it clear that the first was given to refute a claim that the SPGB held that "the political state" would continue to exist in socialism.

When classes disappear so also disappears the need for the state as a public power of coercion resting ultimately on the ability to use armed force to impose the will of those who control it. As we put it in our reply, “socialism will be a stateless society, which follows from the fact that the state is an instrument of class rule while socialism will be a classless society and so have no place for such an instrument".There is no place in socialism for a state even a declining one.

We never said that "simultaneously with gaining control, the armed forces would at once be wholly dismantled". That would be an imprudent move on the part of a socialist majority which had just won control of the state through democratic means. It might not be evident straightaway that some pro-capitalist recalcitrant minority or some isolated groups of individuals might not to decide to take up arms to resist the democratically-expressed will of the majority to convert the means of production into common ownership under democratic control.

Hopefully this won’t occur, but how can we possibly know at this stage? Only when it was clear that this danger didn’t exist (or had been dealt with) would it be safe for the socialist majority to completely dismantle the state machine. In any event, once socialism had been established (once the means of production had been brought into common ownership) then the state, or what was left of public repressive powers, would be immediately abolished. This is what we meant by saying that "the end of the state and the beginning of socialism are simultaneous"; on the establishment of socialism the state is immediately abolished and does not continue into socialism and then "gradually decline". In fact, it can be said that as long as the state exists then socialism has not yet been established.

It is true that we would not now be so inclined to use the words "wither away" which is one translation of what Engels wrote in German. This suggests some quasi-natural and not necessarily rapid process. It does lend itself to interpretation as meaning “gradual decline”. This was probably Engels's own view but it is a decline he envisaged as taking place in the period between the winning of political power by a socialist majority and the establishment of socialism and not in socialism after it had been established. Engels, just as much as us. repudiated the idea that the state should continue into socialism and only then decline.

Engels and Marx did envisage a more or less lengthy period of transition between capitalism and socialism.This was understandable in the 1870s when the means of production were much less developed than they are now. Our view is that the "period of changeover” between capitalism and socialism can now be very short. All that is required today to bring the means of production into common ownership under democratic control is, on the one hand, a declaration that all property titles over means of production (stocks and shares, etc) are no longer valid and will no longer be enforced by the state and, on the other, the implementation of the precise arrangements for them to be democratically controlled. Such arrangements will have been worked out before the actual winning of political power by a socialist majority and would be able to be put into practice fairly rapidly after it.

This is why we prefer to use. in connection with the end of the state and its repressive organs, terms such as "dismantle”, “abolish” or "dissolve" which suggest an active intervention rather than "wither away”, “die out" and "decline” which can suggest a passive, gradual process.

Editors.

These Foolish Things . . . . (1997)

The Scavenger column from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Capitalism divides

Social differences have grown in Israel over the last 20 years, but in few places are they as visible as at Mevasseret Zion. There are in fact two communities living on top of each other. One is the old village with attractive single-storey houses where the original Jewish immigrants live.The other is a new township of luxury red- roofed villas in which live some of the richest members of Israel’s political and business elite . . . Israel vies with Ireland as one of the most inegalitarian of developed countries. The boom of the 1990s largely benefited the richest 20 percent. In last year’s general election this badly damaged the Israeli Labour party in the poorer towns and cities and helped Benjamin Netanyahu become Prime Minister. (Independent on Sunday, 20 July.)


That’s all right, then

[Gordon] Roddick asked [John Bird] to start the Big Issue, providing the initial funding of half a million, despite a feasibility study predicting that the magazine wouldn’t work. The circulation has grown from 30,000 to more than a million readers. There is now a separate Scottish edition and 10,000 authorised vendors across the country . . .  John Bird has been awarded an MBE for his efforts and also been criticised for making a profit out of homelessness. The Big Issue, the argument goes, is a business. If the massive problem of the homeless was ever solved, there would be no need for the magazine. “Of course I make money from homelessness,’’ he admits. “I believe in enlightened self-interest. I have been good for the Big Issue and homeless people because I’m part of the crisis” (The Herald, 26 July.)


Neat!

Priests have no rights under employment law because they serve God and have no employer on earth, three Court of Appeal judges ruled yesterday.They dismissed an appeal by an Anglican curate, the Rev Dr Alex Coker, against an Employment Appeal Tribunal ruling barring him from taking his case of unfair dismissal before an industrial tribunal . . . The Bishop of Southwark, the Right Rev Roy Williamson, said: “I am delighted but not surprised at the judgement, confirming what we had always understood the law to state—that a curate is not an employee.” (Guardian, 12 July.)


It’s not over

The story of the last 200 years has been one of a struggle between capital and labour. Capital won. It is gradually becoming the most powerful influence on our lives, above that of governments . . . Mr Blair is jogging steadily, another few miles each morning, towards a new political settlement in Britain. This will entrench capitalism, reduce welfare, balance the budget. (Financial Times, 26 July.)


He could be right

“Our survival is only a question of 25, 50 or perhaps 100 years,” the oceanographer [Jacques Cousteau] warns in The Man, the Octopus and the Orchid. “It is absurd and dangerous for those who live in prosperity to think that the world economy is a cycle and that its riches will circulate for ever. Unrenewable resources are being squandered. Waste is building up. Valuable goods are vanishing while rubbish thrives.” M Cousteau, who won multiple honours for his scientific films and books from governments around the globe, attacks politicians, scientists and world leaders with particular venom. “They pocket the cash without looking ahead, writing cheques our descendants will pay for in the centuries to come. With their pesticides and pollution, their toxic discharges and the certainty of mutual destruction . . . the scientific experts have hidden the harsh reality: They will decide whether we live or die.” (Times, 21 June.)

Scavenger

How Exploitation Works (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fall and Rise (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The state of the economy doesn’t only affect the financial aspects of our lines—it strongly influences the mood of society and its politics. As Britain moves away from recession, the social institutions of the past are crumbling. In the first of a two-part article we examine what’s fallen.

Even before the 1980s had ended, the attitudes associated with it were being vilified by the media, government and big business. We had entered the “Caring Nineties”. We became concerned for the environment again, companies outwardly switched their attention to “customer service", and the government supposedly led a crusade for "traditional" morality.

The recession marked a turning point in the parallel histories of the economy and the political climate. After 1945 most advanced nations were in a stage of economic growth as they recovered from the effects of the war. Initially. Britain was in a stronger position than many of its neighbours; in 1948 it accounted for 42 percent of all west European exports. An optimistic economy, together with the continuing wartime trend of centralised planning, led to a consensus between the major parties which supported similar strategies, such as nationalisation and the creation of the welfare state.

When the economic upswing burnt itself out in the early 1970s there was a divergence of opinion on the best way of coping with the inevitable recession— whether to follow a right (less state) or left (more state) direction. To a much lesser extent this repeated the mood of the late 1920s when the slump created extremes in leadership strategy. Arguably, the peak in Britain of the divergence was the election of the Thatcherite government in 1979. But by the early 1990s, individualism and the free market had been blamed for the deepening recession at the same time as state capitalism collapsed in eastern Europe.

More people began to realise neither system was in the best interests of the majority. Defensive measures, such as "back to basics" and publicity of environmental damage, were in vogue among those wielding political and economic power. In hindsight, these could be interpreted as reactions against the changes in society’s outlook. As we move towards the next century we find the emergence of a "centre-right” consensus in mainstream politics, feeding on widespread disenchantment with the institutions of society.

The most obvious institutions in decline are the welfare state and nationalised services. It is common knowledge that the economy can no longer afford to subsidise structures such as the NHS and public transport networks to previous levels. But an institution can be anything which provides a social or moral framework, utilising science, organised religion and political ideology. In the 1990s the ability of all these institutions to maintain stability among those they affect (or affected) is clearly weakening. The recession has played a crucial role in these changes; the uncertainty it created has even impacted on faith in religion and science. In opposite ways, both aim to organise the world into some sort of order. When the uncontrollable economic forces of society are at their cruellest humanity comes to doubt its ability to organise the world at large, as well as itself.

Most importantly, the changing nature of employment in this decade has changed our outlook considerably. Nowadays, few people expect a "job for life" and more come to accept harsh employment (and unemployment) contracts, part-time jobs and temporary work.

In the nineteenth century the amount of labour involved in manufacturing and construction was rising compared to that in agriculture. All our major political ideologies were formed in this time, and therefore focused on the politics of production. The economic laws of society have remained unchanged, but the emphasis at the end of the twentieth century is completely different. There has been a tremendous increase in labour expended in services and white-collar professions (tertiary industries), while employment in industry is in [serious] decline. In 1993 69.8 percent of the employed workforce in Britain were engaged in the tertiary sector. In the year 2000 this figure is expected to rise to 73.7 percent. These trends have been progressing for decades—manufacturing employment has fallen virtually every year since 1971. (Labour Market and Skill Trends, I994/95.)

These trends directly influence a country’s politics. The 1990s has seen the demise of the traditional left/right divide, predated by a sharp decline in trade unionism. In 1981 there were 414 unions, but by 1993 there were only 254. This drop is partly due to mergers, but their overall decline in power is shown by the falling number of working days lost to labour disputes: 280,000 in 1994—the lowest yearly total since records began in 1891. (Social Trends. 1996.)

The Thatcherite government certainly contributed to this decline, but the shifts away from relatively secure employment to "flexible" tertiary employment are uncontrollable, and therefore more profound in the long term. Trade unionism and labour disputes have traditionally been strongest in the production industries. In the tertiary sector the relationship between worker and capital is disguised and the interchangeable roles of customer and worker are exaggerated.The union of the 1990s is less likely to concentrate on dangerous issues like wages or working conditions and more likely to focus on individual harassment or unfair treatment allegations. Even when an old-style protest is large enough to be of wider interest it tends to be ignored. A good example is the striking Liverpool dockers, who have had to survive without assistance from the TUC, the TGWU, the media and, particularly, the Labour Party.

New Labour's move away from trade unionism and its associated baggage was more than a realisation of the only way they could get elected. It was a concession to the changes in Britain’s distribution of employment. As such, they are more advanced than the majority of leftist parties who act as if production industries are like coiled springs held down by the government.

Wide-ranging political theories, particularly those of the left, are unpopular these days. The 1980s is remembered as a time when right-wing money-grabbing was dominant over left-wing state planning and welfare. While the recession supposedly made economic individualism unfashionable, political individualism is all the rage in 1990s Britain.

A MORI poll quoted in the Independent on Sunday (13 April) revealed only one in three young people believed voting in the general election would make a difference to society. This can be interpreted as a lack of faith in democracy itself, parliamentary democracy, the main parties, or more likely, a combination of each. Losing faith in leaders is a progressive step as long as that faith is then channelled into something more constructive. Many of those who aren’t apathetic have turned to direct action campaigns which attempt to work outside any wide democratic framework. The attitudes behind direct action were summed up by celebrity eco-warrior Swampy who when basking in the publicity surrounding his tunnel network said “do you think our vote’s going to give us much of a voice as we’ve got at the moment?" (Big Issue, 21-27 April.)

Many would argue that their lack of faith in existing political and social structures is a stance against the corruption and snobbery within them. But rather than change the institutions, people have tended to reject change and have become apathetic or anarchic.The result is a society which encourages individualism far more than in the "Greedy Eighties". Does anyone still remember the “Caring Nineties”?

Mike Foster

Same the world over (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to Marx and Engels, in their Communist Manifesto, society was developing in such a way that various classes that had existed were losing their historical importance and were being gradually replaced by a polarised class society, where a minority class own the wealth of society and the majority class own nothing but their ability to work.

History has vindicated this analysis, although listening to the Danish news recently, one would never guess this is the case. The reporter said, straight-faced, that class division in Denmark isn’t all that big compared with England. Quite what he meant wasn’t made clear, especially in the light of a report in the financial markets’ newsletter Børsens Nyhedsbrev which published a list of the richest people in Denmark.

The richest man is Arnold Marsk McKinney Møller. His wealth, which has doubled in the space of two years, amounts to 46 billion kroner (£5 billion). Number two in the list is the Lego toy king Kjeld Kristiansen, who has a “paltry” 20 billion kroner. If you want to get into the top fifty you must have wealth amounting to 460 million kroner (£50 million).

In another paper, the scribe wrote that Møller’s wealth was created by generations of hard work. Needless to say the article completely neglected to say whose hard work it was. Just for the sake of comparison, a university student gets 5000kr (£554) in university grants and loans a month. Less inequality? Surely some mistake?

Water, water, everywhere

A Kurdish friend showed me an article from Jyllands Posten (17 May) which was about Turkey’s "Günayadogu Anadolu Projesci" (GAP).

It isn’t just oil that is causing tensions to build in the Middle East, water is as well. The Turkish government initiated its ambitious GAP plan in 1984: the construction of reservoirs and twenty-two dams at a cost of some 370 billion Danish kroner. The idea behind GAP is to provide hydroelectric power and create 1.8 million hectares of arable land.

The dams are to be situated in south-east Turkey on the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, which also happen to feed Syria and Iraq. The major dam built to date is the Ataturk dam on the Euphrates. This has stopped the natural flow of sediments, and has resulted in the impoverishment of Syrian farm land. The amount of rich mud that is deposited when the Euphrates floods isn’t the same as before, and the farmers have had to move. One can only guess at the ecological consequences of the damming.

The PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party, so-called) was a minor nuisance to the Turkish government before GAP became a reality, and (yes, you guessed it) Syria has been only too happy to supply the PKK with weapons. In fact the PKK leader has his address in Damascus. The Syrian rulers are quite clearly using the PKK as pawns in a cynical manner.

What will happen in the future? Turkey lost a big market in the shape of Iraq as a result of UN sanctions in the wake of the Gulf War; Turkey’s rate of inflation is 80 percent per annum; the PKK "war” is using millions; and Syria has put objections to the UN in the hope that the UN will step in and stop the construction. One thing is certain though: just like in 1991 —where the issue was oil, and you can’t even drink that—workers’ lives are being expended for their rulers’ interests.

Graham C. Taylor

More promises in Washington (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

With a million more members than the Nation of Islam and with an alleged turnout for their recent “Gap in the Wall” gathering of 800,000, twice the attendance of Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March”, many take the Promise Keepers, the US's newest religious sect seriously.

In many ways, the 4 October Promise Keepers' “Gap in the Wall" gathering in the Washington Mall had the hallmarks of Farrakhan's MMM two years previously. The MMM had been largely black and male; the PK gathering was predominantly white and male. The former asked those in attendance to atone for their sins—as did the latter—and both were addressed by speakers spouting religious platitudes.

As in 1995, with Farrakhan, the PK speakers found social problem after problem rooted in the way men relate to their families. Indeed, the initial inspiration behind the formation of the PK was leader Bill McCartney's belief that his unfatherly behaviour was the reason his daughter got pregnant on a one-night-stand.

Again, just as the Nation of Islam has its unelected dictatorship, so too with the PK. One Humanist writer has observed "it is important to note that . . .  there is no democracy in this organisation. A small group of self-elected men in the Vineyard churches control the entire effort, including its theology, finances and personnel" (John M. Swomley, Sep/Oct 1997 issue).

The comparison with Nation of Islam is more poignantly highlighted still when one realises that both groups are homophobic and vehement anti-abortionists, stressing what they see as the important role the family plays in social harmony. For the writer Jewel van der Merwe. there is a more sinister parallel:

". . .  the large mass rallies, the exaltation of emotion over reason, the lack of doctrinal integrity, the taking of oaths, the focus on fatherland and fatherhood, the ecumenical inclusion of aberrant esoteric doctrines, bears a disconcerting similarity to an era which gave rise to one of the most dreadful events in history" (Humanist, Sep/Oct).

The most visible of the above is the subordination of reason to emotion. Just as hundreds of thousands of black Americans were hoodwinked into accepting Farrakhan's logic that they alone were responsible for drug abuse, crime and poverty, so too the Promise Keepers accept arguments where blame for macro problems is delegated down to the individual. The truth that society's ills can more easily be located in a wider social and economic context is never imparted to those who perhaps feel the pangs of alienation most intensely and are more desperate for a quick-fix solution.

That movements such as the Nation of Islam and the PK are very much part of the alienation process is what Noam Chomsky refers to as “a reflection of depoliticisation”. He argues that faced with:

". . . an inability to participate in a meaningful fashion in the political arena . . .  people will find some way of identifying themselves with others, taking part in something. If they don’t have the option of participation in labour unions, political organisations that actually function, they'll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic example” (Keeping the Rabble in Line—Interviews with David Barsamian, 1994, p.263).

And the US certainly has more than its fair share of fundamentalists. Recent studies reveal the impact the new breed of bible-bashers have: 75 percent of Americans believe in religious miracles: 40 percent that the world was created 6,000 years ago: 30 percent that the future can be interpreted by biblical prophecies with only 9 percent adhering to Darwinian explanations of evolution (quoted in Barsamian).

This is a climate the US power elite is keen to foster. Just as Clinton announced in his 1993 State of the Nation speech that “we can’t renew our country unless . . .  we are willing to join churches”, we can find businessmen making hefty donations to the fundamentalists and politicians adopting policies they know will attract them.

Contemplating the problem, Chomsky agrees that:

". . .  its goal is to make people as stupid and ignorant as possible, and also as passive and obedient as possible, while at the same time making them feel they are somehow moving towards a higher form of participation . . .  It also serves the crucial role of displacing attention from actual power” (quoted in Barsamian).

Although the PK has no dues- paying membership, its hierarchy has drawn up a list of Seven Promises the faithful must keep, inclusive of “honoring Jesus Christ", the pursuit of "vital relationships with other men, understanding that [he] needs brothers to help him keep promises", and the practice of "spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity".

The movement places emphasis on men returning to and embracing the family unit, taking a material and spiritual lead in the family, encouraging other men to come forward to discuss and share their problems—to shoulder the blame for the social breakdown that results from their broken marriages. Their stand on abortion is likewise rooted in their identification of it with violent crime and the rising prison population, as their July 1997 Promise Keepers News observed:

" . . .  the legal undermining of the sanctity of life . . .  represents a rejection of America’s two-century old tenet that mankind is made in God's image and is a repudiation of morality as a factor in court decisions.”

Swomley, in the Humanist, believes "there has never been sanctity of life in the US—not for Native Americans, black slaves, sweatshop workers, child labourers, wartime conscripts, unwanted immigrants and various others”. He contests that “sanctity of life” is not even a "biblical principle", with the bible describing children being killed for the sins of their fathers, adults killed for numerous violations of religious law and God ordering the destruction of thousands.

“Sexual impurity”, "lust”, "pornography”, “filth on the Internet” and so on permeate much PK thinking, but never to the extent that the “abomination” of homosexuality does, even though this is a sin that "God can cure". Bill McCartney’s homophobia borders on the fanatical with statements such as ”a group of people who don’t reproduce . . .  want to be compared to people who do reproduce”.

But social problems are no more the result of one man’s desire for another, a father’s absence from the home or a woman’s right to control her own reproduction than Farrakhan’s view that they are a product of the black male population’s alleged lack of morals.

Social problems arise from the way in which the world is at present organised. It is a world where the maxim “can’t pay, can’t have" permeates all aspects of life, determining individual responses. At root we can’t make lasting and beneficial changes to human behaviour until we change the social and economic system we call capitalism. Until they realise this, the Promise Keepers will only ever be part of the problem, not a key to the solution.

John Bissett

Greasy Pole: Labour's Traumatic Victory (1997)

The Greasy Pole column from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

The next time we have a general election, would the voters please make sure they do not give the winning party such an overwhelming majority. We ask this out of concern for the sad plight of so many Labour MPs who, now that the early euphoric days after their victory have subsided into history, are miserably finding that they are not, after all, engaged in a happy crusade to Tony Blair’s New Britain. In fact a deadly ailment has invaded the government benches, striking down its victims with symptoms of confusion, depression and doubt, when once they knew only joy and certainty. This new sickness is known as Landslide Syndrome and it is caused by the huge majority given to Tony Blair’s party on 1 May.

Some of those MPs could hardly believe they had won; others that they had won with such majorities. They looked set for a decade in power. Everything seemed on course for a joyous, uninterrupted journey into widespread prosperity. Then along came a clutch of occupational psychologists to warn that they were experiencing the first stage of a “mental health roller-coaster”; the others would be disbelief and confusion—before recovery (although how that will come about, when Blairs government provides persistent evidence of its panicky inability to control capitalism, is something of a mystery).

Scarce seats

But apart from that the very size of Labour’s parliamentary squad has caused some problems. On a mundane level there is the fact that it is difficult for all of them to find seats on a day when the House is full. And anyone who thinks this is too trivial to concern people like our dynamic, cerebral parliamentary leaders should observe how jealously Members like Dennis Skinner and Edward Heath guard their traditional seats. In any case not being able to find somewhere to sit can only emphasise that an MP is not very important; after all the famous and influential are never left to scramble for somewhere to park themselves. In case any of the seatless MPs have missed the point, they have had their superfluity made obvious to them by the Labour whips arranging for batches of them to spend time away from Westminster, among their constituents. Of course this treatment is particularly humiliating for any MP who considers their talent to be such as to demand immediate promotion; being encouraged to show off to a few morose and bewildered party members is not as satisfying as a place on the Front Bench.

Which brings us to another aspect of the Landslide Syndrome—the fact that with so many MPs and limited number of ministerial jobs a lot of ambitious, self-opinionated politicians have been disappointed. This is a serious business; there are many accounts of the anguish, the jealousy, the back-stabbing, the tears, which mark the days when a new prime minister is making up a government. Such misery is bad enough at any time. When the House is swarming with government MPs, which makes the competition that much fiercer it can become desperate enough to wipe out the memory that they campaigned for election allegedly to service the interests of the voters and not their own wretched ambition.

Friendly tycoons

How these cynical twisters keep their hopes alive is their own affair. What is apparent to those who observe their antics is that Labour’s majority allows the government to regard any rebels in the ranks as dispensable, which means that Blair and his jolly band can exert extra pressure to conform—which the ambitious are only too eager to accept. At a meeting of MPs soon after the election Blair dealt with some restiveness by curtly informing them that they were not there to tell the government what to do. One report stated that MPs with beards had been quietly advised that the voters would prefer someone who was clean shaven.

None of this seems to have put the loyalty—if that is the right word—of those MPs under strain. Day-by-day the evidence emerges that not only is New Labour openly, proudly even, committed to trying to run British capitalism but that it does so in a style indistinguishable in even the smallest degree from the Tories. People like Blair and Gordon Brown spend a lot of time reassuring business tycoons of many kinds that they have nothing to fear—and much to gain—from the Labour government. On their part, the business people are eager to reassure Labour of their support, with their public statements and their not-so-public donations. The arrogance and dishonesty which went into the government’s handling of the affair of Bernie Ecclestone and the tobacco ads on Formula One cars must have left the ministers of Major’s government breathless with admiration.

Choices

All of this has been served up to us on a bed of sophistry and euphemism.We hear, for example, about the government taking "hard choices”— which does not mean deciding whether to give back Ecclestone’s millions but which way of attacking workers’ living standards is likely to lose the least votes. We are told that, on our behalf, the government is prepared to “think the unthinkable”— which does not mean taking a look at the basis of capitalist society and why it inexorably operates to the damage of human beings but how to chip away at some of the more traditional working-class defences against the most appalling poverty.

This is pretty traditional stuff for the Labour Party—the policy followed by the governments of Attlee, Wilson, Callaghan. Except that they used other words, other false prescriptions. New Labour is not really new; it just has a different style of deception in its presentation. The very term Landslide Syndrome is part of this. It is an impressively medical phrase, which is always useful to disguise a reality—in this case the onset of cynicism and confusion as the MPs contemplate a barren, futile future.

Ivan

A Eurogamble for the casino economy (1997)

Editorial from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It seemed that Chancellor Brown had come up with the perfect fudge: Britain will not join the Euro Single Currency for at least the duration of this parliament and then only if it is “viable”. Whilst the government attained the luxury of “waiting and seeing” the Tories could continue to tear themselves apart.

The logical corollary of such a policy has meant the government telling the capitalists to prepare for eventual EMU entry, which apparently will occur “when the time is right”. The party battle lines are now clearly drawn. The question is: will the Euro be New Labour's undoing?

The Euro is the EU's answer to a world becoming increasingly divided into regional trade blocs and spheres of influence. The idea is that a strong EU will give European capital its best chance of competing against the USA and Japan.That this bloc is likely to be dominated by Germany is a gamble some supporters of British capitalism are prepared to take.

Of course, many commentators talk of globalization and the efforts of the World Trade Organisation to reduce trade barriers but this only masks the fact that global capitalism is having a hard time of it. Yes, the world economy is globalized by virtue of the unprecedented capital flows flying around the world. But herein lies the problem. The vast bulk of these capital flows concern mainly unproductive “investment” in equities, government bonds and in currency speculation. Hence the recent situation of stock markets starting to crash around the world in order to “correct” what has been a massive overvaluation in comparison to real growth in the productive economy. The Euro is no solution to this.

With the capitalist class in Britain seemingly divided on the Single Currency and broader public opinion, sceptical to say the least, it currently seems that it would be a brave move for the government to advocate membership of something which is more of a political gamble than an economic panacea.

For the productive majority—the working class— whatever we are paid in we will still be exploited. With or without the Euro, capitalism will still mean economic crises, austerity and financial insecurity for the majority.

Anti-strike record (1997)

Book Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

British Trade Unions 1945-1995. by Chris Wrigley (Manchester University Press. £12.99)

This textbook, aimed at students, is essentially a collection of extracts from trade union, government and Labour and Conservative party documents of the time.

After the war and up until at least the end of the 1960s there was more or less full employment in Britain. This seller's market for labour power put the unions in a good bargaining position, but under the Attlee post-war Labour government the unions' leaders chose not to take advantage of this. In fact strikes were illegal under this government which is supposed to have done so much for the working class.

When after 1951 workers, especially at shopfloor level, began to exploit the situation, governments threw their weight behind employers by adopting "pay pauses" and "wage restraint”. At the same time the media launched a campaign against shop stewards as well as in the film I'm All Right Jack with Peter Sellers playing the villain's role.

In the 60s and 70s the Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments were just as bad as the Macmillan and Heath Tory governments. Wilson imposed a legally-binding wage freeze in 1966 and planned to bring in anti-strike legislation as outlined in In Place of Strife. Heath brought in the notorious Industrial Relations Act under which 5 dockers were sent to jail (and released in the face of mass demonstrations).

Then came Thatcher. Eight separate pieces of anti-strike legislation were introduced over the period 1980-1995—which the present Labour government has no intention of repealing—but this was kicking the unions when they were already down: by 1979 the postwar boom was over and. with unemployment at over one million and rising, the seller's market for labour power had disappeared.

All this is documented in this book but outside of any theoretical framework. There is no understanding that, while employers generally welcome unions as stable and more or less representative partners with whom to negotiate over the price and conditions of the sale of labour power, because wage-labour is the source of their profits they don't want things to go too far and that it is the government's role to help ensure that this does not happen.

Adam Buick

English republic (1997)

Book Review from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Inventing a Republic: The political culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649-1653. by Sean Kelsey. (Manchester University Press, 1997)

The defenders of the status quo will always try and kid us that nothing much ever changes. Britain, it is said, has never undergone drastic change and has for example an unbroken history of monarchy. Yet the facts of history are otherwise. Over a century before the French revolution. England underwent a bloody civil war which ended with the execution of the king. This revolution removed bureaucratic impediments to the development of capitalism and from 1649 to 1660 England was a republic.

This book is a defence of the "Rump" parliament of 1649-1653 against charges that it was inefficient and corrupt. The Rump was dissolved by Oliver Cromwell, claims Kelsey, "largely in order to prevent the successful transition to an electorally mandated free state in which the commander-in-chief of the armed forces would remain little more than an important employee of the state, albeit the most important one." That may have been so. but there were other factors at work. At Putney, in 1647, Cromwell corrected the Levellers who demanded votes for soldiers, saying that they had not fought for that, but for the limitation of the royal prerogative, the right to parliamentary government and "freedom of trading to get money to get estates by". That being so, it would have made an interesting start to an investigation, but Kelsey does not pursue it. For a more balanced and realistic explanation of the causes and consequences of the English civil war readers are referred to the writings of Christopher Hill.

Lew Higgins

Obituary: Andrew Thomson (1997)

Obituary from the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is with great sadness that Glasgow branch report the death of Andrew Thomson.

Andrew joined the Party in 1944. He was a vehicle builder in the Springburn railway workshops. Around that time there were five or six Party members working there; indeed at one time they used to hold outdoor public meetings during their lunch break.

Andy was one of those members who are the backbone of nay branch. At many branch meetings when an outdoor meeting in Glasgow or Edinburgh was reported and the literature sales seemed high, some member would say by way of explanation, “Oh, aye. The pamphlet sales were good, but that was because Andy was selling them.” His straightforward, open approach to enquirers or even opponents of socialism was disarming and powerful. The socialist movement is built on the decent, reliable and honest virtues of workers like Andy Thomson.

The branch extends its deepest sympathy to his wife Emily, herself a member. Her loss must be heartbreaking. Glasgow branch have had many members with great abilities as speakers, debaters, literature sellers and organisers. It is doubtful if we have ever had a member that inspired such real affection as we all felt towards Andy. He was in many respects one of the best of us and the loss of his cheerful, comradely presence will be felt by all of us who had the privilege to know him as a comrade and a friend.

GLASGOW BRANCH

The power of unreason (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why has irrationality become so powerful an urge at this stage of capitalist development?

Where I live there’s been a noticeable growth of charity shops in town, a more reliable sign of the times, we suppose, than what the politicians tell us. One shop is selling Billy Graham tapes for 30p. My mate buys one (to record over). Then:

“So you like Billy Graham?" His eyes are on full beam.

“Er ... he’s all right like ... I mean, yeah." Nervously my mate coughs, transfixed by those eyes, unable to escape, unable to admit the real reason he’s buying a cheap tape.

“He’s wonderful, you know. I found Jesus through him. We all did. Do you believe in our Lord Jesus?”

"Well er ... no, not exactly ...” 

“You will when you’ve heard that. Here, have a leaflet. Take another. Jesus loves you."

He laughs confidently, as do the rest of the staff. Billy has changed all their lives. My mate backs his way out of the shop, making ingratiating noises. The stare never leaves him. Hugely discomfited, like a bird after a near- miss with a tarantula.Why is irrational faith so hypnotic? Why do religious people always cause such acute embarrassment while remaining immune to it themselves? Why is Unreason such a powerful force? A picture emerges: the Christian as ideological terminator, Cliff Richard with an Uzi. You can’t stop them, you can’t argue with them. You just better run.

Speaking of Terminators, I’ve been reading about "technofear" in the weekend rag. Lots of guff about humans turning into machines. Are machines taking over? Is it science fiction or fact? Readawlabahtit!!! What bollocks. If they did, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to operate a system of artificial shortage, would they? If humans learned a thing or two about reason and logic it would be a bloody good thing in my view. In fact, if the world was run by a pinball machine I shouldn’t think anybody would be any the wiser.

Of course technofear exists. Everyone is terrified these computers are going to do us out of gainful employment. Eventually this might well be the case. So-called "expert systems" are a serious attempt to replicate all the diagnostic and prescriptive abilities of a human expert, without his or her irritating tendency to take weekends off, get ill, go on strike or die. Programmers in the trade are expressing considerable surprise at the unenthusiastic response of the human experts whose brains they wish to pick. Some experts have displayed open hostility to the new technology. Next it’ll be sabotage. The programmers are bemused by ail this lack of co-operation. Why don’t these people want to have their expertise enshrined on disk? Why won’t they let us build machines to replace them? They scratch their heads and mutter words like “Luddite” to each other

This is a sorry case of what happens to some people when they overspecialise, I reckon. The programmers have forgotten the plot. Somewhere behind the loops of an algorithm Planet Earth recedes further and further form their view. Finally the light at the end of their tunnel vision goes out.

Capitalism is logical! (erm ...)

But is it just a case of a few techies doing us all out of a job? I think there’s more to this technofear than that. I think people are afraid of science and reason because they are the gods of the modern age and just look what a mess the modern age is in. In this society, people are increasingly afraid of the internal logic of the system. Because it leads to more pollution, closed wards, less freedom and less security. But this is logic built on sand. If there are wars, it is logical to build weapons. Capitalism proceeds therefore to build weapons. It follows its own logical architecture. It never questions its own foundations, however. War is not logical, but nobody has noticed. It is also possible to build a perfectly logical case that people should starve, if you accept the premise that it is all right for individuals to own food that other people need. That is what our society is faced with. Humans are starving. Capitalism is following the correct logical route. So it must be logic that has brought about this disaster. People are frightened of reason itself because they know from experience that reason levels cities and reason breaks hearts and reason always has really convincing reasons for it all.

In the circumstances, reason begins to look like the poisoned chalice. Religion—a state of benign Unreason—profits from this.There is a powerful sense that Chaos would have been better than the "Order" our logic has created. It is better to believe without evidence, because the evidence points to terror.

Or maybe our culture is at bottom genuinely frightened of logic. Anticipating that we will lose our title of Most Intelligent Species to the incipient binary hordes, we fall back on that ragged and bullet-riddled flag of distinction, the human “spirit”. Not having the faintest idea what a “spirit” is exactly, we only know that machines haven’t got one, so at least we can still crow about being special. We then blithely make a fetish of our own ability to think irrationally, as if this was somehow what made us great in the first place. Besides, illogic is more appealing to our prejudices, given that logic can often take you where you don’t want to go.

And isn’t this irrational flag-waving spirit-soaked species just painfully aware of what a disaster their society is? Doesn’t every newspaper broadcast endless proof of that? Like a supremely bad planetary manager, aren't we convinced that at any moment someone or something is going to come along and give us the sack, and that we deserve it? Underneath it all, everybody knows what a rational intelligence would do about the absolute capitalist system, but nobody wants to admit it.

So why is irrationality so powerful an urge? Perhaps it is nothing but our emotional swell, our hearts beating against our minds, that other force in us which is young as a child and older than all reasoning. The human race is still in the dark and in the dark ages, struggling with its shaky mastery over the planet, an unaccomplished student in the school of thought which it has built for itself. It is now at a desperate stage where it begins to suspect that its skill and cleverness have carried it too far, over the edge and into the abyss. It turns its fear and rage on the rationality that brought it to the very ledge where it now teeters. It’s as if, to recall the myth of Prometheus, we have decided that Prometheus was wrong and Zeus was right. Science has betrayed us, cries a voice in our heads, we should have remained ignorant! So the gift of Prometheus is flung back in his face by people tired of being scorched.

And yet socialists get tired of such knee-jerk anti-rationality. Unreason burned science at the stake for stating the obvious again and again. Nowadays, unable to summon up on demand an auto-da-fe to broil our uncomfortable knowledge, we seem to have buried our heads in “individualism" and telly soaps to avoid thinking at all. Rooted to the spot, like rabbit before the headlights or my mate before the Christian, we stare uncomprehendingly at the chaos bearing down on us, and blame ourselves for its design and manufacture.

We have just missed the whole point of knowledge, that’s all. When Prometheus gave us the fire of reason he neglected to mention that we should never allow it to become the private property of a few “specialists". Private ownership of knowledge is like private ownership of food—it is the conversion of a tool into a weapon, and now that the world is empty of tools and stuffed with weapons we cannot be surprised at people’s wholesale retreat into never-never land, where the bad guys (supposedly) can’t get them. In the world of capitalism, illogic is for many the logical response.

Paddy Shannon