Pathfinders: Lions and lionesses (2024)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

High drama last month as the England team lost in the European Championship football final, and the press agonised about ‘heartbreak’ and ‘devastation’ amid photo spreads of downcast faces and slumped shoulders. ‘Everyone was truly gutted’, said one player. Well, perhaps gutted is the wrong word. Gutted is being made redundant, or homeless, or being turned down for an operation, or having to face a Job Centre inquisition or go to a food bank three times a week. These affable young men get paid around £200,000 a week, while their manager earns £5m a year. The poor lambs will no doubt get over their melancholy.

The press were inconsolable though. How much longer does England have to wait for a Euro or World Cup title, they sobbed. It’s been 58 years!

But wait, what about when England won the European Championship in 2022? Don’t the women count? Oh dear, this is awkward. The women’s game is not the same, you see. There are even those who mutter that women don’t really play football, they play at football. Perhaps those critics don’t realise that women’s football used to be hugely popular and drawing crowds of 50,000 until it was summarily banned by the all-male FA in 1921, supposedly for being too unladylike, but really for eating into the FA’s profits. Even today there’s a built-in bias. At a UK average height of 5’3″, women have to play on the same standard pitches with the same goalmouths as average 5’9″ men, meaning that they have to work harder than men to play the same game (tinyurl.com/mrxvxyzw).

As a reminder, England’s women managed to do what its ‘young lions’ couldn’t do in two generations, beating Germany to the title in front of a mixed stadium crowd of 87,000 ecstatic, flag-waving patriotic loonies. Now there’s nothing but silence and collective amnesia. 58 years, wails the press. The women ‘lionesses’ who held up the trophy to that deafening applause must view all this in bafflement. “Er, hello… hello?”

But seriously, some women have bigger things to worry about than equality on the pitch, like getting a post-footy kicking from violent spouses. A 2013 Women’s Aid survey showed a rise of 38 percent in domestic violence incidents when England lost a major game. And, tragic but true, they’re not even safe when the match goes the other way. A 2022 report from the Warwick Business School notes a 47 percent increase in domestic violence whenever England wins a World Cup or Euro match.

The Independent quotes one woman: ‘So now I don’t follow any football, my fiancé is not into football and if I’m being honest I don’t think I ever would have got with somebody who had a big interest in football because it’s just left me scarred and for me it was just filled with fear, and fear of what mood he was going to come home in, and just walking on eggshells.’ To underline the message, Women’s Aid took the Baddiel and Skinner Three Lions song tag ‘Football’s coming home’ and turned it into the darkly sinister ‘He’s coming home’.

Women aren’t the only ones who need fear the outcome of football matches. Many sports fans, watching the England side’s successful five-out-of-five spot kicks against Switzerland in the quarter-final penalty shootout, will have remembered the sickening racism following the failure of three players (all of them black) to score in a similar shootout against Italy in 2021. The three players endured hideous online abuse that resulted in a police investigation and 11 arrests. Tory politicians including the Home Secretary Priti Patel duly weighed in with official condemnation, after having previously scoffed at the England team ‘taking the knee’ in support of Black Lives Matter, describing the action as wokism and ‘gesture politics’. Justifiably incensed, footballer Tyrone Mings scored a sizzling counter-strike on Twitter: ‘You don’t get to stoke the fire at the beginning of the tournament by labelling our anti-racism message as ‘Gesture Politics’ and then pretend to be disgusted when the very thing we’re campaigning against, happens’.

And indeed it did happen. A study by a number of universities showed a 30 percent rise in racial hate crimes in London in the weeks following that match. The researchers were interested to know if such ‘trigger events’ caused increased incidents generally, or in a more uneven and localised way. In fact the increases were seen most in boroughs already known for such violence: ‘This supports the assumption that trigger events do not have a homogenous effect on societies, but rather reinforce existing attitudes.’ Well no surprise there. Guns only shoot people if they’re already loaded. One scrap of positive news is that the reverse might have some effect too: ‘The Egyptian-born, Muslim striker “Mo” Salah joined Liverpool FC in 2017, which, according to a different study, led to a significant decrease in Islamophobic violence and attitudes in the city’ (tinyurl.com/y248y54t).

People who follow sport but not politics might believe the one has nothing to do with the other. But sport is political, and politics is often sport. Many stayed up late, or indeed all night, to watch the 4 July general election results come in, as the micro-dramas including the toppling of ‘big beasts’ made for compulsive viewing. Arguably Britain’s first-pass-the-post electoral system is better understood as a championship sporting event than as any serious and legitimate exercise in democracy. And just like a sport, everyone knows it makes no real difference who wins. Monday morning, it’s back to the same old slog.

And that slog is capitalism, the enslavement of the vast majority by a tiny bunch of super-rich crooks. There’s a way to beat that rigged game, but only if the world’s disempowered workers stop growling at each other, and start working as a team with a serious common goal. Let the lions and lionesses come together. Their roar would shake the world.

Paddy Shannon

Life and Times: The legal drama (2022)

The Life and Times column from the July 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

There’s a trendy bar in my area which displays greetings and various other comments on its front hoarding so that they can be read by everyone going past. They sometimes cause a bit of a stir and a recent one certainly did. Large block capital letters said ‘AMBER IS IN DEPP SHIT’. It was a reference of course to the celebrity legal case in the US between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. Most people will have cast it out of their minds by now, but the reactions it provoked show just how indicative matters like this are of the interests and priorities of many ordinary people in the kind of society we live in.

Nasty

Polls taken at the time suggested that many Americans were more interested in this legal drama than the war in Ukraine or what was being called a potentially historic ruling on abortion expected from the US Supreme Court. Each twist and turn of the trial, televised and livestreamed, was watched by millions of people, and many turned to social media, mainly to express support for Depp and vilify Heard. Heard declared that, apart from intense mockery, she faced hundreds of daily death threats, while on the TikTok platform the hashtag #justiceforjohnnydepp got around 19 billion views.

Locally to me, after the sign in the trendy bar was discussed on my local community Facebook page, the page was flooded with further comments. So many in fact that, after just an hour, the page administrator turned off further comments on the grounds that it was ‘getting nasty’.

In the event, as readers will know, the prediction on the bar sign turned out correct, with Heard ordered to pay Depp some $10M for defamation. As the verdict was announced, screams and chants of ‘Johnny, Johnny, Johnny’ erupted outside the court and Heard announced herself ‘heartbroken’. Yet the verdict was a surprise to many people, given that, in a similar legal process between the same two parties in the UK not long before, the verdict had gone in her favour. In the US court Depp’s legal team was said to have used a common defence tactic in sexual assault and domestic violence cases known as ‘Darvo’, meaning ‘deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender’. This strategy turns the tables on the victim, shifting the conversation away from ‘did the accused commit abuse’ to ‘is the alleged victim believable’. This tactic is said to be often effective in trials involving domestic violence where juries can be persuaded that a female victim is herself guilty. This is said to happen less when the trial is in front of a judge alone, as happened in the UK, rather than with a jury. The judge will apparently better understand the tactic being used and so is less likely to be emotionally affected by the proceedings and more likely to take a sober, objective view of the evidence. Whether or not ‘Darvo’ was used to deliver the wrong verdict, there’s no question that Heard was convicted in the court of public opinion.

Meaningless thrills

What to make of this? A recent book with the subtitle ‘A Manifesto for a Life Beyond Capitalism’ talks about how ‘distraction technologies and the entertainment industry sell us meaningless thrills to patch over the pain’. And this seems an apt characterisation of the spectacle this trail offered to the public. One commentator remarked that the televising of the trial turned it into ‘almost a sports game’. People’s avid immersion in this spectacle does indeed seem reminiscent of the vicarious worshipping of, say, a football team or a tennis player that so many engage in, such worship serving as welcome relief from everyday lives of utter mundanity spent largely in the sale of their energies to an employer. If, in the sport context, the team or the player they support wins, they feel it as a victory for themselves, a form of power uncommon in a life usually experienced as powerless. It’s not hard to see a similar process operating in the act of following a public trial involving celebrities and of supporting one against the other. It provides an interlude of escape from the docility and routine that capitalism, with its worship of paid work, imposes on its subjects.

Alienation

‘This is so intensely gross’ was one of the few comments on that local community Facebook page that this writer was able to empathise with. But at the same time the ‘grossness’ of people’s interest in this event should not be an occasion for condemnation of individuals. It should be seen as a lack of connection by people with the human beings immediately around them produced by the competitive and adversarial nature of the system we all live under. It should also be seen as an expression of the fundamental powerlessness of workers, from which those ‘meaningless thrills’ give some short-lived relief. The alienation from mutual cooperative activity inherent in obsession with celebrities – people they do not know personally and have nothing in common with – is a million miles away from a constructive use of the power and potential we all have to think and create for ourselves and to work usefully and collaboratively with one another.

Of course we do see that power and potential demonstrated in the many communal and collaborative activities that people manage to engage in despite – and in hopeful contrast with – the deadening uniformity the wage and salary system imposes on lives. It is this that will inform human activity in the genuinely democratic society of free access characterised by peaceful cooperation rather than intense competition that we call socialism.

Howard Moss

Capitalism, poverty and child abuse (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poor get the blame

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

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

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

Poverty is violence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carl Pinel

Between the Lines: Male violence (1993)

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

Male violence

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

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

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

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

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

Female equality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dave Perrin

Happy families (1983)

From the March 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

Walked out this morning. I don't believe

what I saw,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clifford Slapper

Educating our sons (2021)

From the May 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In the last few years the abuse of women and girls has been prominent in the news and on social media. From the ‘Me Too’ movement which started in 2016 but gained momentum with the Harvey Weinstein affair, to the highlighted significant increase in domestic violence in the current lockdown, to the Sarah Everard protests where at least one placard read ‘Educate your sons’. Well, it seems our sons have been getting the wrong kind of education.

Soma Sara is a 22-year-old young woman and founder of the Everyone’s Invited website set up in 2020 and where she shared her personal experience of what she describes as ‘rape culture’. In a few days there were over 10,000 posts, testimonies of abuse, harassment and assaults in schools and universities from pupils and ex-pupils. The majority of reports were from girls and young women but a few from boys and young men.

‘Rape culture’ is the normalising and trivialising of sexual violence, from inappropriate sexual language, misogyny and non-consensual touching through to assault and rape. Many of the posts were initially from posh private schools and mainly in London but reports quickly showed the problem to be country wide and equally prevalent in state schools. Heads have been accused of covering up the problem regarded by some as an ‘open secret’, and even some teachers have been accused of sexual harassment.

Most incidents of a more serious nature occur outside of school, at friends’ houses or at parties, and the stories make disturbing reading. Date rape is not an uncommon experience especially in universities. The vast majority of assaults are not reported for various reasons, embarrassment, not wanting to cause trouble, not being believed or simply accepting that these things happen. Inappropriate sexual behaviour towards others has even been observed and reported in primary schools.

How did we get here? Sex sells. It is a cynical and manipulative exploitation of a basic human need. Pre-teens are targeted and sexualised by cosmetic and clothing companies and dumbed down and mirror imaged on social media. The porn industry is a multi-billion-dollar concern and its most violent and degrading content is readily available to young boys on their smart phones. Gone are the seemingly innocuous images of the 1940s pin-up girls and gone are the porn mags on the top shelf of the local newsagents, embarrassingly purchased and packaged in concealing brown paper. Most likely young boys wouldn’t have been able to afford too many and would probably find it harder, with an eagle-eyed parent about, to keep it secret.

Parents who have or have had teenagers know that they are online almost constantly. A 2018 Ofcom report revealed that more than 450,000 children aged 12 to 15 spend between 6 and 8 hours a day online at weekends. A survey commissioned by BBC3 of over 1000 young people aged between 16 and 21 showed that one in four had seen online pornography by the age of 12. Gender differences were clear with one in five of the young women questioned saying they had never seen internet pornography, but only 4 percent of young men saying the same. A common response given in the survey was that young men expect young women to behave like porn stars and that porn also gave young men unrealistic ideas of women’s bodies. Often a young person sees online sexual images by accident or through natural curiosity looks it up for the first time, however, thanks to internet algorithms it’s not long before sexual content will just pop up without initiation and gradually get more explicit and violent as it goes on.

The online world is giving boys some very clear but misleading messages about women, sexual violence, feminism and sexism. Anti-feminist jokes, memes and videos on social media can be extremely unpleasant, and peer pressure from messages from online forums perpetuate dangerous assumptions, such as that women are lying about sexual assaults. The boundary between online and offline becomes increasingly blurred.

How are young men supposed to develop healthy, loving and consensual sexual relationships when women are objectified and abused? Trying to choke a girl while having sex, as described by one young woman on the Everyone’s Invited site, is shockingly not the way to do it. How far removed is a desensitised attitude to abusing women from the explosion in global domestic violence? Pornography on smart phones has been cited as a contributory cause of rape in countries like India, named the rape capital of the world though cultural attitudes towards women and girls are doubtless also responsible. Despite national poverty most young men there have or have access to smart phones where they can share often violent images.

Sex and relationship education is still not compulsory in all schools and plans to introduce it will give faith schools an opt-out. Hopefully it is not – or will not be – restricted to the mechanics of sex and contraception, but will include education on sexual attitudes to the ‘other’ and mutual consent. It would seem something is going horribly wrong. A report into the issue of sexual harassment and violence in schools, and overseen by Conservative MP Maria Miller was published in 2016 by the Women and Equalities Commission, but it appears nothing has been done since. Instead we are continuing to see peer abuse in schools with the authorities either ignoring the problem or trying to cover it up.

These issues reflect a systemic power structure whose hegemony filters down and becomes part of our culture almost as if we invented it ourselves. We live in a violent world and a society where everything is for use or sale including men and women. Instead of co-operation and empathy we have competition and exploitation and women and girls seem to be at the bottom of the pecking order. Gender stereotyping and sexist attitudes can start young, boys being seen as stronger and more technical, girls being the weaker and more caring sex. We’ve all heard the jokes about the mother-in-law and women drivers, and women’s aptitude for housework. It seems harmless but it’s a drip-by-drip reflection of the power men often have over women in capitalist society.

Until all power structures are dismantled both social and economic, until we live in a world as equals, where buying and selling is obsolete and respect for the ‘other’ is universal, these problems will not go away. Men and women have to work together but as long as there is distrust and disrespect between the sexes, as long as there is sexism and fear of the ‘other’, women may not always feel totally included in the struggle for socialism and as women make up over 50 percent of the working class that could mean no socialism for anybody.

Carla D.

Proper Gander: Control And Coercion (2020)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most disturbing consequences of the pandemic has been an increase in domestic abuse. During the first three months of the lockdown, there were over 40,000 enquiries to the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, mostly made by women. In June, the number was almost 80 per cent higher than usual, according to the charity which runs the helpline, Refuge. Working from home and being unable to mix with other households or go to the shops have made it harder for people trapped with an abusive partner or relative to get some distance or escape. And worries about money, health and unemployment have been compounded by the pandemic, and then exacerbate already toxic relationships.

Domestic abuse doesn’t just mean physical violence; it often takes more subtle and calculated forms. Several years ago, legislation was changed to more clearly incorporate this. The Serious Crime Act 2015 included a new offence of controlling or coercive behaviour in intimate or familial relationships. This refers to a pattern of behaviour by the perpetrator which makes their victim fearful or otherwise has a substantial adverse effect on them. Such behaviour would involve manipulating the victim or limiting what they can do, possibly by cutting them off from family and friends, taking over their finances or imposing rules on them. So, controlling and coercive behaviour is a combination of psychological and emotional abuse, sometimes with financial abuse, with or without physical violence.

Coercive and controlling behaviour can be difficult to recognise, both from inside and outside the situation. A recent documentary on BBC3 – Is This Coercive Control? – looked at whether a group of young adults would be able to identify its signs. Over two days, they watch and discuss a specially made drama about the relationship between two twentysomethings. Rachel gets fired from her office job and moves in with Alex, her boyfriend of a few months. She fails to find other work and gets increasingly in debt and withdrawn. Alex pushes on her his expectations about what she ‘should’ wear and how she ‘should’ keep the flat tidy. The plot then jumps to a courtroom, with each getting interrogated about their now-disintegrated relationship. The show’s presenter, journalist Ellie Flynn, asks the group of volunteers about their interpretations of how Rachel and Alex relate to each other, and particularly if they believe that any behaviour in the scenario constitutes a crime. All the volunteers see that Alex’s actions are unacceptable, while nearly three quarters don’t think that they’re illegal. In the drama, Alex escapes prosecution because of a lack of evidence that he has been abusive. Emotional and psychological abuse is hard to prove, and realistically enough, the court in the drama doesn’t get the full picture. It’s revealed that Alex engineered for Rachel to lose her job and not get another one, while also isolating her from her friend and leaving threatening voicemail messages, clearly coercive and controlling behaviour.

It’s a step in the right direction that domestic abuse is recognised more than it used to be, and many people sincerely try to address the problem. However, the services run to support victims of abuse are sadly unable to help all those in need. There’s never been enough funding available, and this year’s disruptions have added further pressures. According to a survey by charity Safe Lives, three quarters of domestic abuse support services which responded have had to reduce their capacity due to the pandemic, when there is greater need for them.

These services, and the law, have assisted many victims with getting support and, less often, a sense that justice has been served. But they can’t address the deeper causes of domestic abuse. Each situation is different, but they all happen in a society which enables them. Money is such an important aspect of capitalism that it’s bound to impact on how we relate to our partners and families. In the scenario featured in the documentary, Rachel and Alex’s relationship is shaped by money as much as by other factors: when Rachel loses her job she can’t afford to do anything but move in with Alex, and her lack of money gives Alex a way to control her. People who are trapped in a destructive relationship are often trapped partly because they don’t have much financial autonomy. This is one reason why women, who tend to have lower incomes than men, are more often victims of domestic abuse. As our society is based on division, and competition, and exploitation, it encourages us to want power or at least an advantage over others, financially or otherwise. For some people, these tendencies take over and come out in their close relationships, pushing out empathy and affection. Perpetrators have usually been damaged themselves in some way, and in turn go on to damage those they can.

Understanding how capitalist society creates the situations where domestic abuse can happen isn’t enough, though. Really tackling the problem of domestic abuse means addressing its root causes: the social system we live in.

Mike Foster

Rear View: Sick society (2020)

The Rear View Column from the September 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sick society

‘Many Turkish womens’ right groups say the crackdown reflects a wider societal problem. They say many women who are being abused seek — but never receive — proper help. Melek Önder of the We Will Stop Femicide initiative told DW that Turkish police, the government and state officials must do much more to protect women at risk: “There were cases where women who were being violently abused asked for help, but nothing happened,” she says’ (dw.com, 24 July). The crackdown on protests is hardly surprising under the would-be Sultan, Erdoğan. Calling for wife beating to become a priority concern for the police, who prefer not to get involved, and thus give their tacit endorsement, is reformist folly, particularly when there are so many reactionaries such as Ebru Asiltürk, ‘the spokeswoman for womens’ affairs for Turkey’s Islamic conservative Saadet Party.’ She opined recently that ‘…the treaty [Istanbul Convention to tackle violence again women and domestic abuse, as well as promoting gender equality – which Turkey was, ironically, the first country to ratify!] would be like a “bomb” destroying Turkey’s traditional family structure.’ Femicide is indeed an indication of serious, wider social and sexual problems that are not confined to a small minority of deviants or reactionary regimes – Poland is another example – but are typical of a sick society. Neither changes in the law and policing policy, nor more prosecutions against wife beaters offer a cure.

Cultural pain and pleasure

‘The UK’s only centre dedicated to stamping out female genital mutilation is facing closure after the government pulled its funding, putting women at fresh risk of harm. Cash has been quietly withdrawn from the unit – set up by Theresa May, when she vowed to end FGM “within a generation” [likely as effective as Tony Blair’s 1999 pledge to end child poverty] – leaving it struggling to survive…The crisis comes despite hundreds of new victims of FGM being identified every month and just one successful prosecution for the practice, despite laws being on the books for 35 years’ (independent.co.uk, 26 July). Women supporting the status-quo or reactionary cultural/religious practices abound, alas.

Back to the primitive?

There may be some socialists who would like to see the return of the woolly mammoth, but none favour primitive communism over the establishment of a post-capitalist world. ‘ Lotte Alberg, who owns two sex clubs in Amsterdam’s famous red-light district, is relieved to see her staff back at work. Club BonTon and Club LV both reopened this week after four months of lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic’ (pri.org, 6 July). To Alberg and Fuambai Ahmadu, an anthropologist who chose clitoridectomy as an adult, we say the only place for prostitution and FGM in a world freed from the dictates of capital and culture will be at the museum of antiquities. Engels showed that the suppression of women had its origin in the rise of private property. Marx saw sex work as ’only a specific expression of the general prostitution of the labourer’ (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 1844). Rosa Luxemburg and Sylvia Pankhurst shared the socialist vision of Engels and Marx:

 ‘The mass of the proletariat must do more than stake out clearly the aims and direction of the revolution. It must also personally, by its own activity, bring socialism step by step into life’ (Rosa Luxemburg, What Does the Spartacus League Want?, 1918). 

‘Our aim is Communism. Communism is not an affair of party. It is a theory of life and social organisation. It is a life in which property is held in common; in which the community produces, by conscious aim, sufficient to supply the needs of all its members; in which there is no trading, money, wages, or any direct reward for services rendered’ (Sylvia Pankhurst, What is behind the label? A plea for clearness, 1923).

Mother and daughter

The decade leading up to 1914 and the ‘War to End All Wars’ was they heyday of the Suffragette movement under the leadership of Sylvia Pankhurst’s mother, Emmeline. Some readers may be intrigued surprised to learn that we opposed her and the Women’s Social and Political Union she founded in 1903.

Sylvia Pankhurst is better known for her part in the campaign for votes for all women as well as all men (one third of whom were denied the vote before 1918). Her mother, Emmeline, the authoritarian leader of the WSPU, was against this and campaigned instead only for votes for women on the same terms as then applied to men; which would have resulted in enfranchising more property-owners than workers. Opposing that was a no-brainer.

When Sylvia Pankurst wrote the passage above she had come to hold the (mistaken) position that the vote didn’t matter either for men or for women, arguing that communism (or socialism, she used both words to describe the same form of society) could only be achieved by anti-parliamentary action. A few years later, in 1927, Emmeline, who had been a jingoist in the First World War, was adopted as a Conservative Party parliamentary candidate; not surprising for someone who had stood for votes only for rich women.

Socialism can only be achieved with the majority support of women and of men. This point is so important that it forms part of our Declaration of Principles: ‘That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex‘ (emphasis added). This clause along with the other seven dates from the formation of our Party in 1904. Yes, the founding members, all 142 of them from Miss H. Aitken to H. J. Young, were remarkably forward-thinking in their assertion that women’s emancipation could only be achieved as part of the emancipation of all humanity through the establishment of socialism as described above by Sylvia Pankhurst.

Between the Lines: The Duty to be Free? (1989)

The Between the Lines column from the October 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few months ago I watched one of the most saddening documentaries to be shown on TV this year. It was not about starving children or concentration camps or inner-city deprivation. All of those are far more hugely tragic than the theme of this documentary, but this was the most depressing. It was about the coverage by New York TV stations of the sensational public trial of a prosperous lawyer called Joel Steinberg who had systematically degraded and beaten up his partner, Hedda Nussbaum.

When she first met him she was an attractive. talented designer of children's books; as the relationship developed she lost everything—her looks, which were battered out of her; her dignity, which she lost sight of; and her freedom to do or think anything without the permission of the man whom she imagined had superhuman power. The court case came about because Steinberg ended up by beating to death the couple's (illegally) adopted infant daughter. Lisa. He was charged with manslaughter. The question which became a talking-point for the New York TV viewers was. how responsible was Nussbaum for the death of the child? Her defence was that her lover had virtually brainwashed her and that she was physically frightened to disobey him. She claimed that she wanted to stop him beating the child, but knew that if she did she might be killed. She was afraid to leave because she had become totally dependent upon her lover, and he had convinced her that everyone outside of him was conspiring to destroy her. Under his orders, so she testified, she began to smoke cocaine (crack) which she used both to please her partner and to relieve her fear.

The Oprah Winfrey Show (C4, 1 September. 10.30pm) had a studio discussion about the questions posed by the Hedda Nussbaum trial. Battered wives explained how it is that repeated physical violence and personal humiliation knocks out of them the will to defend themselves. They submit to anything, even endangering the safety of their children. Nussbaum's closest friend was on the programme and she argued that there came a point at which Nussbaum could no longer be expected to do anything for herself. The author of a novel about the case also appeared, arguing that everyone, under whatever adverse circumstances, has a responsibility to defend themselves, and. especially, to defend those under their care who are too young to defend themselves. She contended that Nussbaum should have been charged as well as her lover.

For a socialist, the matters of legality are not at issue. It is not for the US state to determine the guilt or innocence of child abusers when they, through their perpetration of poverty and their cultivation of the war machine, are willing to make suffer and to kill millions of children. The question of the state, as usual, is an interference in human affairs. Neither need socialists spend time entering into the finer debates of individual ethics. The fact is that capitalism deprives vast numbers of workers of the chance to make the best decisions about their lives. Are we to force the parents of the 15 million children under the age of five who starved to death last year to repent for their immorality? What else could they do? It was the hopeless cultural rut in which so many people under capitalism find themselves (even economically affluent workers like Steinberg and Nussbaum) which was one of the most depressing things about the documentary and subsequent discussion.

What was more depressing was the wider question raised. Do humans have a duty to free themselves from oppression? In relation to the profit system, is the working class irresponsible for supporting the system? There are two Marxist answers on this: one is to say that capitalism imposes an ideology upon workers which can only be broken out of when the working class is historically ripe for escape from capitalism—until that moment it is foolish to blame the workers for all of the problems from which they suffer. The second answer is to say that humans are always able to muster within themselves a certain amount of intelligent response to their conditions and to fail to reach out for this is irresponsible.

In the month after the BBC's distasteful celebrations of the beginning of the war which killed millions of European workers, we could well think about this whole question. On the one hand, the Nazis were "seduced'' by Hitler and his pernicious ideology; they were victims. Similarly, workers of the Russian Empire were victims of Stalin. But if they were captured ideologically, could they be held responsible for the atrocities committed in their name? Could the worker who voted for Thatcher in 1979 be held responsible for the deaths of the men whose lives were wasted in the Falklands War? And not only those who voted for Thatcher, but those who refused to actively oppose what she stood for by becoming socialists? To say that deluded workers are irresponsible seems to be the same as saying that a baby who burns herself is irresponsible for not knowing better. On the other hand, if there is to be no question of irresponsibility in history. then not only has nobody any right to say that Hedda Nussbaum should have defended her child from her lover's beatings, but also we cannot suggest that workers who think that nuclear bombs make them secure are irresponsible in their support for what might well kill all of us.

One solution to the dilemma presented itself while watching Oprah Winfrey and her guests: some of the women on the programme had been battered and they did get out of the situation they were in. If they did. then resistance becomes a possibility and failure to resist needs to be explained. Similarly with the fight against capitalism and all that it is doing to the workers of the world. If some can escape from the ideology which we were taught since the cradle, then we have a right to expect others to respond historically in the same way.

If we can understand the duty to emancipate ourselves from capitalism, why should we excuse our fellow workers on the grounds that they have been conditioned to accept what we have managed to reject? Is the black South African who has been bought for the armed service of his racist masters to be blamed as an accomplice of racism? Are the teenaged Chinese soldiers who were almost brainwashed into slaughtering other Chinese soldiers irresponsible? Difficult questions—and extremely depressing.

Steve Coleman

Herewego — Where next? (1988)

From the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

 Today the ones who are looking for trouble do not wear scarves. They wear expensive clothes and a nice watch. People think they are all mods and rockers — they are not. The London boys might be wearing about £200 of clothes. Chelsea "fan", Guardian 20 May

As certain types of social violence escalate, the media, politicians and "experts" of all sorts are clamouring to tackle the problem. It is necessary, however, to look at incidents of violence in their wider social setting to discover what causes them and therefore what needs to be changed in order to eradicate destructive behaviour. The conventional social attitude to organised violence is confused. Consider the following announcement:

  Last night two hundred young men engaged in an organised assault. They violently attacked another group of men whom they had never met before.

If, for instance, three young men were singled out as most responsible for causing mayhem and destruction, what would society do to them? It depends. A government spokesperson asked that question would need to know whether the thuggery was committed by “our boys" in the Falklands or "our boys" in Frankfurt. For distinctive violence ordered against an official "enemy" the soldiers receive pious praise, possibly a medal and commiserations for any maiming they may have suffered to body or mind or both. For distinctive violence which the government has not ordered, the louts in the Union Jack boxer shorts who marauded through German cities in June's European football championship received nothing from the authorities back home but grave censure and contempt. Some of these latter thugs, suffering from a surplus of patriotism and a shortage of brain cells, went on the rampage in Germany wearing "ENGLAND ON TOUR 1914, 1939, 1988" T-shirts. The folly of propertyless workers being patriotic is one thing, but even the capitalists who own Britain (the top seven per cent own about 80 per cent of the wealth) were upset by this piece of gratuitous jingoism.

From an aerial view, British society is fraught with violence as part of its ordinary processes. Apart from the development of organised running battles associated with "football hooligans", there is clear evidence to suggest a proliferation of clashes between rival gangs, and between gangs and police, in rural and costal towns. Every year hundreds of children are treated in hospital for serious injuries inflicted on them by adults, often their parents or guardians. Each year thousands of women leave home to seek refuge in hostels from the brutality of a cohabitant. Then there is the Sadism Industry. which operates on two levels: the illegal and the legal. Below the line of legality lurks the trade in "video nasties", where depth of depravity is the gauge of a film's attractiveness. Pathological disturbance is presented as an art form. Above the line there is a prominent genre of films which portray killings, massacres and annihilation as nothing much more than exciting, glamourised drama They are aimed at a wide market for box office or video success.

Overshadowing all this, though, is the gigantic scale of institutional violence and force. The role of the Police Force is, as its name implies, to use force to keep people in line. Were society civilised we would not need to threaten people to make them conform. Over 50,000 men and women are currently caged up in British prisons and the majority are there for offending against property laws. The military are the Youth Training Scheme in Destruction and Delinquency. The services, especially the Army, present themselves as agencies for travel and tourism, an apprenticeship and the opportunity to develop such things as "life skills"; in reality, recruits are swiftly knocked into a routine of hardship, indignity and idiocy. They have to be trained to obey any order without question or thought. Each soldier is to the Army what a bullet is to a gun — ammunition in a murder machine. And since the business of the Army is orchestrated violence, it is scarcely surprising that the outfit produces barbaric perverts of the kind recently prosecuted for over-zealous disciplinary techniques.

Many factors have been cited as the "main cause” of recent outbreaks of thuggery. What is the socialist analysis of these arguments?

Slack schooling and permissive parents?

  Our current education system equips the bottom 80% of the population for nothing better than sitting in betting shops or being soccer hooligans.

Sir Rhodes Boyson (The Barnet Advertiser, 23 June)

With all the compassion and understanding of a nineteenth-century workhouse Governor. Rhodes is prone to encourage acceptance of his views using physical force. As Headmaster of a north London school he was a firm believer in the educational value of "correcting recalcitrance" by beating young people with a wooden stick. His regret about the current operation of the education system is ironic. If he was entirely candid, he might have gone on to say: " . . . the ruling class needs the rising generation of workers to be moulded into regimented, industrious, compliant wage-slaves who won't play up and disrupt the process by which social wealth is appropriated by capitalists. Such disruption requires a larger slice of profits to be spent on paying for a larger, more powerful police force. It is simply more efficient to educate workers into docility." Indoctrinating young members of the working class to assume the role of poverty-trapped wealth producers is a big problem. It becomes much worse when advertising and media imagery everywhere offer lifestyles which are tantalising. unobtainable and, in reality, largely synthetic pleasures of a cash-culture society. The problem becomes aggravated even further by the reduced chance of even becoming a wage-slave in the present economic environment. This is annoying Rhodes Boyson. He continued his remarks with the words

  I'm sure that about one third of those unemployed are quite happy watching TV, doing the garden, sleeping — and getting paid for it by the tax payer. I envy them.

Surely Mrs Thatcher will rebuke her knight for referring to members of the House of Lords in such terms.

The problem of quelling disorder in the profit system is growing. A survey on "Indiscipline and Violence in Schools" was recently conducted by the National Association of Head Teachers. Its findings are based on returns from 1.630 schools and suggest that

  Violence and other forms of disruptive behaviour are steadily increasing in all types of schools throughout the country.

and in the Primary sector

  Nursery-aged children are starting school already imbued with anti-authoritarian habits because of poor parental control.

(Times Educational Supplement, 17 June)

Modern capitalism requires governments to rely, ultimately, on police forces and armies to make it work. Schools, similarly, are authoritarian organisations and frustrated and resentful young people can easily, though misguidedly, respond to coercion with violence. If more children are becoming consciously anti-authoritarian then that is a healthy development. Babies and toddlers need to be guided from the dangers of traffic and electricity sockets but the use of authority to control attitudes is the hallmark of uncivilised society.

Booze and belligerence

 It is clear from the evidence that a mob of hooligans of which you were a part had spent much of the day swilling beer. This kind of conduct must be stopped. It is all too prevalent.

Judge Gerald Butler QC to Millwall "soccer fans", Southwark Crown Court, 27 June

The men addressed by the judge were part of a gang who stampeded through New Cross Gate station to ambush another group of "supporters". They were convicted of affray after many terrified train passengers had fled across live electric railway lines to escape a mob armed with lumps of concrete, planks, knives and bottles. It is popular to regard alcohol as the cause of violence in society. Used in certain circumstances and in certain quantities it will aggravate aggression, give "Dutch courage" and impair the drinker's social conscience. It is pent up tension and frustration which is usually being released, so it is important to ask why society produces these routine stresses and then promotes alcohol as a palliative.

The promotion of alcohol as an anaesthetic to most peoples problem-ridden routines is booming business in the profit-system. Over £120,000,000 was spent on drink adverts on TV alone last year. Most were aimed at young people and although some were banned (like the one for Bulmer's cider which showed cartoon woodpeckers swigging from a bottle with the slogan: "Spend some time out of your tree") shareholders in drinks companies must have been generally quite pleased with the results of the campaigns. The "George the Bear" films for Hofmeister lager were recently voted the most popular commercials among 13-year-olds.

Governments have, from time to time, sought to control the consumption of alcohol by workers. During World War I, the American Congress stopped the manufacture of alcoholic drink to conserve grain. The prohibition lobby grew in strength and the National Prohibition Act (1920) and a constitutional amendment were later passed to forbid completely the manufacture and consumption of any intoxicating drink. The law proved impossible to enforce, fuelling widespread corruption and increasing the power of gangsters and racketeers. It was repealed in 1933. The Licensing Laws in force in Britain until last month were introduced during World War I because it was feared that munitions workers were spending too much time in the pub.

The organisation, Action on Alcohol Abuse claims that drink kills ten times as many people as do drugs and is a far greater cause of illness and social disturbance. There are always plenty of schemes being devised to reduce alcohol abuse — only recently the Home Office Working Group on Young People. Alcohol and Violence produced a list of 50 recommendations — but such exercises are about as useful as asking the Archbishop of Canterbury to pray that things get better. The only way to solve the problem of alcohol-related violence is to remove the cause of it — the grind, strain and unfulfilling nature of people's lives.

Network nightmare

  Children are likely to be particularly disturbed by violence in a setting which closely resembles their own. Thus an accident in which someone who looks like a child's father strikes someone who looks like his mother is probably very disturbing, threatening as it does the child's sense of security in the home.

(Guidelines on TV Violence, BBC 1979. Omitted from current guidelines)

The extent of wife-battering is unknown, largely because the pressures on women to remain in the home and the shame and stigma associated with this type of violence means that reported cases are merely the tip of an iceberg. Television does not cause the problem — it is usually committed by men who have been humiliated and victimised in some way in their passage through the rat race. Embittered by their circumstances and usually in a state of drunken rage, they embark on the one conflict they can "win". This is not the crazed conduct of a few men with congenital brain disorders but a widespread social problem. Children watching it on TV will undeniably be disturbed but trying to keep it secret from them will hardly help to solve the problem

Using killing, torture and destruction as key ingredients of exciting television for young people is bound to produce some unsavoury results. A recent documentary suggested that a young American who watched an average of three hours of TV a day would have seen about 10,000 killings before reaching the age of sixteen. This cannot but desensitise the mind to real trauma and misery left in the wake of a violent death. Every so often violent incidents appear to imitative: a spate of crossbow attacks occurred, for instance, after one was used by Sylvester Stallone in Rambo. Overall, however, television is not the cause of social violence. At the start of this century, hundreds of people were murdered every year in Britain. Violent disorder on the streets was rife — in fact the word "hooligan" was coined in Edwardian times. Hundreds of thousands of workers were slaughtered every year in the First World War and the final death toll ran into millions. This was all before television. The earliest broadcasts were not until 1936 and they were quickly suspended on the outbreak of another world war, this time one which was to wreak destruction on an unprecedented scale.

Madame Medusa

 The crimewave, which has now assumed typhoon proportions, is the direct result of Tory policies and Tory philosophy. The thug with too much money and too little conscience is the monster which has mutated from Margaret Thatcher's open advocacy of selfishness and greed. Crime is contagious and the disease is being spread by Downing Street.

Roy Hattersley, Deputy Leader of Labour Party (Daily Telegraph, 23 June)

It is facile and misleading to attribute violent crime to particular personalities or political parties. Whether the profit system is run by parties like the Conservatives, which is avowedly capitalist, or the Labour Party which is allegedly "for the workers" makes little difference. It will operate the only way it can — by producing wealth for sale and profit and not for human need. It will be a society in which the wealth producers live in relative poverty while the socially parasitic wealth owners live in luxury. It will be a society of wage-slavery for the majority. It will be a society ridden with competitive anxiety and beset with the insecurities of employment and the persistent threat of war. These are symptoms of a social system. They are as irremovable from the profit system as are death and injury from warfare.

If Roy Hattersley really believes that street violence in its current forms is largely the consequence of Thatcher's Tory policies, how does he explain the eruption of exactly the same type of problem in many other countries? Margaret is not Madame Medusa. She espouses a particularly callous doctrine to defend class-divided society but poverty, evictions, strikes, homelessness and militarism have been presided over by every Labour government. If Hattersley travels thirty miles across the water to France, he will see that the wretchedness of capitalism is not something which appeared in a blue hat in May 1979 to plague Britain alone. Hattersley, in fact, knows better than this. He is a careerist politician who, if he ever became Home Secretary, would be the man in charge of the police and prisons.

Capitalists get rich by employing workers. Sir John Sainsbury, for example, owns £1,000,000,000. Garry Weston boasts £1,500,000,000. The person who creates their bank statements must have an extra-durable "O" fitted to their printer. In any event, you do not acquire wealth like that by putting in a lot of overtime. You get it by exploiting a large number of workers — that is, by paying them less than the value of what they produce. You call it Employment and tell members of the wealth producing class that they’re lucky if they can get it. Roy Hattersley, therefore, is in favour of a society where he would put the robbed in gaol and use the police to protect the bounty of the robbers. When speaking of "the crimewave which has now assumed typhoon proportions ”, he may have misread his notes. It is in fact of "tycoon proportions".

Why?

Why do babies starve
When there’s enough food to feed the world?
Why when there’s so many of us
Are there people still alone? 

Why are the missiles called peace keepers
When they’re aimed to kill?
Why is a woman still not safe
When she's in her home?

Tracey Chapman, from her namesake album, 1988.

Capitalism is based on the ownership and control of the earth's resources by a minority class. The owners permit the production of wealth only so far as it can be sold in the market for a profit. At the British Army Equipment Exhibition earlier this year, 386 companies specialising in the production of high tech hooliganism on a Hiroshima scale displayed their wares to visitors from all around the world. True to the "democracy” that the Army will tell you it exists to defend, the public were not admitted. You can imagine the cost of the weapons and the social effort required to produce them from the fact that one company spent £450,000 on the exhibition, including £100,000 on the stand alone. In exhibition week, thousands of people died of malnutrition and hundreds of children went blind through vitamin A deficiency.

Young people are conscripted to fight in wars begun by governments in furtherance of the bosses' interests. Trade routes, strategic regions on the map, areas for market expansion and those rich in mineral deposits are the reasons behind war. No workers' interests are ever at stake in their masters’ struggles.

A society of money, banks and property deeds is a society of handcuffs, prison cells and homeless people. A society of Army exhibitions and young men trained to kill like machines is a society of mindless gang fights and street violence. When a majority decide democratically to put an end to class rule we can consign law and disorder to the history books. As soon as we bring the commercial system to a close, its endemic violence will cease. Only then can we establish real civilisation.

Gary Jay

Running Commentary: Beating the wife (1987)

The Running Commentary column from the January 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beating the wife

It seems that domestic violence or wife beating is to become a priority concern for the Metropolitan Police. Hitherto they have not been noted for their sympathy towards the plight of women who approach them because they are being abused by their husbands. Generally they prefer "not to get involved" in disputes involving domestic violence — tacit endorsement, in fact, of the sanctity of the family and a husband's "right" to do what he likes with "his property" especially when the wife has, in the judgement of the police, contributed to the incident by causing aggravation to her husband through nagging.

Now there are demands for a change in the law to enable the police to bring prosecutions against husbands who beat up their wives. Up till now the woman herself had to prosecute the husband and, understandably, many women were reluctant or even scared to press charges. So is the new attitude on the part of the Met. an indication of a new, more enlightened attitude towards women?

Not if these remarks by Walter Easey, police advisor to the Association of London Labour Authorities, are anything to go by. He said: “It has been a puzzle why there has not been more movement in the past. Wife battering is often an indicator of serious problems with drinking or drugs". In other words it fits into an overall pattern of deviant behaviour which might be of more interest to the police than wife beating. But wife beating is also an indication of serious social and sexual problems that are not confined to a small minority of deviants but are typical of a sick society. And neither changes in the law and policing policy, nor more prosecutions against men who beat up their wives will cure it.

Look at it this way, Sid

As is well known to everyone who cooks on a gas stove, privatisation is now the name of the game. Another might be How to Win The Next Election. For the Tories are obviously hoping that every applicant for shares in concerns like British Gas will believe the publicity which tells them that they can be a capitalist for £150. The Tories hope that this will be enough to so change their ideas about class society that they will stop voting for capitalism to be run by the Labour Party and start voting for it to be run by the Tories.

Of course if the shares' price goes up anyone who has bought them will be able to make some profit by selling them quickly; whatever they make will probably come in handy to pay the next gas bill or to clear up some other debt. That is how the working class live. On the other hand investment — the sinking of capital into an industry, buying land, materials, machinery, buildings, labour power in order to make profit — is the exclusive function of the capitalist class. They monopolise the means of wealth production and distribution and their position allows them to exploit the workers whose labour power they buy.

The workers live by the sale of their labour power and their position is unchanged by temporary and insignificant variations in their income. Having money in the bank, winning a few pounds in the betting shop, selling some shares for more than they cost, all help to stretch the pay packet for a few workers but do not lessen their reliance on it. None of this changes how we get our living, our class position under capitalism, where our economic interests lie. It does not. in other words, remove the need to get up in the morning and go to work, to submit ourselves to the exploitation process.

Meanwhile, it is worth asking one important, but neglected, question. British Gas was a nationalised concern and we have always been told that nationalisation was public ownership — ownership by us. How then can we buy something which we already own? The answer is simple and also neglected. We didn't own it in the first place. Nationalisation. with its claim to give us all a stake in industry, was as much a confidence trick as privatisation is now.

Surely even Sid is not so daft that he can't see that?

Crime going up

Although its practitioners never produce any figures of profit or loss, crime is still, amid the recession, a growth industry. For England and Wales, 1985 was a boom year for crime: more offences were committed than ever before. The figure recorded by the police — 3.6 million offences — was a three per cent rise on 1984.

Some of the biggest increase was in sexual offences, statistics for which are notoriously prey to subjective influences. Rape, for example, went up by 29 per cent but this did not mean that nearly a third more women were being raped in 1985, rather that some changes in police practice resulted in more of the cases which were reported to them being recorded as rape. (What did these "changes" amount to? Presumably some women once came to the police station after being raped only to find the incident regarded as something less horrible).

The same might be said for some of the figures for violence against the person, some people, in some circumstances, would not dream of going to the police after being assaulted whereas other people would; all manner of factors can influence the decision either way.

But whatever allowance we make, however the statistics are weighted, it seems clear that the social disfigurement which is crime continues to flourish. This is happening after more than seven years of a Tory government who assured us. when they came back to power in 1979, that they had the answer to the problem. It was, apparently, a matter of more police — higher pay for them — and tougher punishment for the criminals — short, sharp shocks for the youngsters, longer stretches behind bars for the adults. Well there are more police but they are clearing up proportionately less crime now than when the Tories came to power — 35 per cent in 1985 as against 42 per cent in 1978.

Is there, then, no answer to crime? (we are referring, of course, to the illegal sort, not the offences which the capitalist system constantly commits on the majority of the human race and which are legally sanctioned as essential to this society's stability). Reformers, including those who want hanging and flogging, treat the problem in isolation from the social situation which gives rise to it. This is a society of private property and property is not just possession: it is also the denial of possession to others who, in some circumstances, will try to penetrate that denial through force or subterfuge. Poverty and all it means — stress, hunger, slums, a sub-standard existence — breeds frustration, and relief is often seen in terms of "get-rich-quick". The worker on the factory production line dreams of winning the pools; the criminal of the big, once-for-all, haul.

Whatever the Tories, or any government, may do will not affect the cause of crime. For that we must look a long way beyond the promises, if we are to have a society of harmony, a world safe to be alive in.

Battered wives and battered babies (1980)

From the July 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Family Rescue (formerly Women’s Aid), the independent refuge charity for battered wives, is approached by about 700 women every month in Britain. In the North Wales county of Clywd massive steelworks redundancies have recently coincided with an increase in the incidence of reported cases of wife-beating to 18 per cent of married women. But the extent of domestic violence will never be possible to estimate with any accuracy, since many cases must go unreported. In 1979, though, the NSPCC was involved in 38,078 cases of suspected child-abuse, and statutory enactments relating to the crime of infanticide have by no means become redundant; about two babies are beaten to death every day of the year in this country.

Erin Pizzey, who founded Chiswick Women’s Aid in 1971, is the author of a Penguin special, Scream Quietly Or The Neighbours Will Hear (1974). The book includes details of many of the women who sought refuge in Women’s Aid centres. While emotional shock tactics will not in themselves solve anything, there is good reason for reading the book. The horrific details of individual cases make clear that this is one of the most physically damaging and mentally debilitating social problems produced and fostered by capitalism.

The fact that wife-beating and other domestic violence are often caused by the economic conditions forced upon the working class of the world is made clear by the latest annual report of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children:

“The threat of an economic recession; high unemployment; fears of redundancy; rising prices; diminished support from public funds—all these factors add to family tensions and to the risks to children becoming scapegoats.”

Needless to say, wives can equally well serve as scapegoats. Capitalism is a system in which the vast majority are forced to sell their labour power to enterprises or states, for wages or salaries because that is the only way they can live. The NSPCC report concedes the extent to which this is the cause of social problems; even in the Year of the Child (one of capitalism’s more nauseating black jokes), there were “. . . thousands of cases where children have been reported as being left alone . . . All too often neglect comes because parents have to go to work from sheer necessity” and a recent report by the Study Commission on the Family notes that

“To achieve the same relative living standards which might have been afforded in the 1950s through the efforts of one breadwinner, families of the 1970s increasingly required the employment of two wage-earners.”

Living in cramped homes on low rate food and in sub-standard conditions, the working-class husband and wife face each other and a series of financial problems, ranging from mortgage payments to finding the money for some shoes for the children. When to this is added the strain of capitalist monogamy itself, with its ideal of domestic bliss and harmony to live up to, its hypocritical morality and its barely concealed legalised prostitution, the tension can sometimes reach breaking-point: a baby crying, or a jealous suspicion.

A system of society where the means of life are monopolised by a minority class depends upon the passive or active assent of the majority to this massive theft. It also needs force, both to ensure that no individual steps out of line and, on a much larger scale, when two nations send their working classes to murder each other in an attempt to settle some capitalist dispute over markets or raw materials. So violence is bred by a society which depends upon humiliating, intimidating force as an integral part of its constitution. In war, violence is hailed as the greatest of virtues, provided that it is used against “the enemy”, and this ideology is difficult to erase when the war ends.

Moreover, the social impotence of any member of the working class in relation to the productive machinery he or she helps to operate is very likely to produce a bitter frustration, which can only be relieved by the worker trying to disprove his impotence. The attempt to achieve such control or power may take the form of a clumsy and violent attack made on wife or children. Mere employees, who possess nothing but their own ability to work, form the vast majority in capitalist society and yet have no power or control over production, which is run solely for the profit of the capitalist class. This manifest impotency in society can lead to some workers bullying others. This is the cause of sexually inspired violence between man and wife.

All of these reasons for wife-beating stem from the same root cause: the pressures imposed upon the working class in a capitalist system of society. The Times Higher Education Supplement (4.4.80) reviewing Violence Against Wives: A Case Against The Patriarchy by Rebecca and Russell Dobash, explains that the most frequent source of confrontation, according to the Dobashs’ extensive research, is

“Sexual jealousy (almost always unfounded), followed by disagreements over money, and the husband's expectations regarding the woman’s house-making . . . the majority of attacks take place when the husband is sober, contrary to the popular idea of the drunken husband.”

To comprehend this problem of “sexual jealousy”, account must be taken of the historical development of the monogamous marriage in capitalism.

Since the first appropriation of surplus wealth as property occurred at a time when there was a clear division of labour between hunting meat on the part of the man and gathering vegetable foods and managing the home on the part of the woman, and since this first property fell in the domain of the former, it was men who became the first property owners. Consequently patrilineal descent was required to replace the “Mother-right” which had previously prevailed. “The division of labour within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman.” (Engels, The Origin Of The Family.) If a woman bore a child not fathered by her husband, she would be bestowing his property upon the progeny of another. He, conversely, could bestow his property where he chose. Monogamous marriage arose from the need for men to direct their property to heirs whom they knew they had fathered. It soon becomes clear, though, that it is only the propertied, capitalist class for whom marriage is still based on considerations of inheritance.

One suggestion sometimes made as to why some men beat their wives is that it is a psychological complaint which is taught from father to son through the generations of a family. It may be true that some working-class families have experienced a good deal more domestic violence than others, but to try to explain it away as a sort of congenital, inherited disease is to ignore the objective, external conditions which actually provoke the problem. No such problem occurs in a vacuum; it is a social phenomenon, produced by the way in which society is organised.

Wife-beating

Sometimes it is suggested that the wives actually experience masochistic pleasure from being beaten, and therefore intentionally provoke it. The fact that many of them remain with or return to their husbands is adduced as evidence for this. It is probable that some women have learnt to like such treatment, seeing it as a sex substitute, but there are more substantial reasons for their apparent inertia:

“I have left my husband in desperation five times, but have had to return for my children's sake, as he didn’t take care of them in my absence.” (Pizzey, p. 21.)
“I don't love him any more but it seems that society is forcing me to stay with him” (p. 35).
“I can’t leave the children and it is a job to get a room with children.” (P.48.)
“I really would like a separation, but how do you find a place to live with four children?” (p. 86).
“One has to be a mother, father, breadwinner and housekeeper alongside the continual terror, in my case, of being discovered by my husband and assaulted yet again." (p. 88).

The problem of wife-beating is by no means a new one; it has been prevalent in most previous forms of property society. Until about 150 years ago it was recognised in British law that a man had the right to chastise and confine his wife. He can still rape her without breaking the law. As early as 1395, Margaret Neffeld charged her husband with knifing her and breaking her bones. He claimed before an ecclesiastical court that he had acted solely for the purpose of “reducing her from errors". Judicial separation was refused by the court. It was not until the Matrimonial Causes Act 1878 that magistrate’s courts had the power to grant a separation order with maintenance to a wife whose husband had been convicted of aggravated assault upon her.

“The Dobashs discovered that wife battering, far from being the action of a pathological individual (a theory dear to many), is a mode of behaviour revered, respected and encouraged for centuries. Throughout Western history, there has been legal, political, economic and ideological support for a husband’s authority over his wife, and this includes his using physical force against her.” (The Times H.E.S. 4.4.80.)

The problem threatens co-habitees as much as wives, and from a legal point of view the former can be in an even worse position, Emotional assault, too, can be very disturbing, even if its effects are less tangible. In some countries, wife-beating is still legal, and in Great Britain it is difficult for the woman to obtain “satisfaction” in a judicial process. In any case, whatever laws are made in an attempt to cope with such a problem, both the aggressor and his bruised wife will remain wretched victims of a social system which makes beasts of them.

The motive behind the attitude of social workers is to support and sustain the family ideal. The police are loath to take any action in what they refer to as “domestic matters”. The Family Service Unit, a body established to deal with the “problem family”, said in a 1973 journal: “It is important to differentiate between sporadic ‘battering’, which can be regarded as part of a normal marriage, particularly in certain cultural groups, and more persistent beating”.

So much for relying on charity to mop up after capitalism. Some of the battered women are given ECT—shock treatment or even leucotomies in mental hospitals to “ease the pain”, leaving them with a dull indifference to all that goes on around them. The offending items are cut off from the gaze of society, the deranged mind deflated to indifference. Social workers categorise cases with a cool, clinical calm.

However much Erin Pizzey's suggested reform measures may be well-intentioned, and however much individual battered women appreciate the refuge temporarily offered to them by Family Rescue, the fact is that however many refuge houses are built for its casualties, capitalism will produce enough damaged and degraded people to fill all of them over and over. The only meaningful step to take, is for the men and women of the working class to unite and face up to the way in which they do not come together in affection but are thrown together under intolerable conditions in order to stoke up profits for a leisured minority class into which they were not born.

Clifford Slapper