Review: The Problem of Race Culture. (1908)

Book Review from the April 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

[“The Bar of Isis : the Law of the Mother.” By Frances Swiney. The Open Road Publishing Co. 6d. Nett.]

The subject discussed in this well-printed brochure of 50 pages is one that is beginning to have more attention paid to it than formerly, although not more perhaps than it deserves. Isis, the wife and the sister of Osiris, the God of the Egyptians, became later the patron Goddess of women, and the Bar of Isis represents the sanctity of the prospective mother from all approaches of the male. The argument of the book is that the husband must learn to be sexually abstemious, for on his continence depends, to a very large extent, the health and constitutional vigour of the offspring. Many of the ailments of children are alleged to be attributable to the incontinence of the father during the period of gestation. Medical evidence is quoted in favour of this position, yet Dr. Allinson lays down a different position, and he is probably one of the best known writers on this subject. Apart from certain personal factors, he says nothing in favour of complete abstinence on the part of the husband and no injury to the offspring is suggested as the result of indulgence during the prohibited period.

But all that apart. We are not particularly concerned with questions of that nature. The important part of the book to us, is where it is argued that race deterioration and degeneracy are attributable to the violation of the Bar of Isis ; for whether such violation does or does not adversely affect the child, it seems abundantly clear that such pre-natal factors are as dust in the balance against material factors of a post-natal character, such as food, clothing and shelter. As with our author, so with the Eugenist. Indeed, their objects seem to be the same, viz., a short cut to the solution of the social problem; the one through heredity, the other through an improvement in pre-natal environment. Both positions fail by ignoring the material conditions with which the Socialist primarily deals. The offspring of genius, developed under ideal conditions of pre-natal development, would still need to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, etc. The words of Max Nordau in this connexion carry considerable weight owing to their obvious truth :

“Marry Hercules with Juno, and Apollo with Venus, and put them in slums—their children will be stunted in growth, rickety and consumptive. On the other hand, take the miserable slum-dwellers out of their noxious surroundings, house, feed, clothe them well, give them plenty of light, air, and leisure, and their grand-children, perhaps already their children, will reproduce the type of the fine, tall Saxons and Danes of whom they are the offspring.”

There is no way of taking the slum-dweller out of his noxious surroundings except by abolishing the poverty that sent and keeps him there. As William Morris said, while you have poor people you will have people poorly housed; and the same thing applies to feeding, clothing, etc. Socialism alone can abolish poverty by abolishing private ownership of the means of living which allows the workers to be expropriated of the wealth they produce, yielding them only as wages the cost of their subsistence.

Were it not for the overshadowing fear of the Editor’s blue pencil, I could show, from the pronouncements of the Eugenists themselves, that the improvement of the environment is essential to the improvement of the race. Eugenics is, for the present, mainly negative. It consists, in the words of Dr. C. W. Saleeby, in the denial of the supreme privilege of parentage to those suffering from congenital defects of mind or body. On the other hand it seeks to encourage the fecundity of superior types. This then is the Eugenic aim, the discouragement of the unfit and the encouragement of the fit to perpetuate the species. There is a difficulty in the fact that the lower type is naturally the more fertile. Dr. J. L. Tayler, in a long paper on Individuology, in discussing this subject, differentiates the prevailing types as mainly paleogenie and neogenic, which we, being under no obligation to use unnecessarily long words, may call the low type and the high type. He shows that the low type persists owing to the existence of the material environment adapted to it; and it would seem, therefore, that the more effective method of discouraging the continuance of the low type lies, not in artificial and oppressive sterilisation, but simply in improving the environment, thus automatically discouraging the low type by forcing it upward in an endeavour to adapt itself to a higher environment. The potentially high types who acquire the characteristics of the lower through “noxious surroundings” would be enabled to develop ; the low types would cease to flourish in an environment unsuited to them; while each individual of whatever type could adequately develop the best that it had the fortune to inherit.

This cannot be done under the conditions of modern society. The thirteen millions of people in this country “on the verge of hunger ;” the 30 percent, of the people of London who live on or below the poverty line ; the million or more of the inhabitants of London who live under “overcrowded” conditions, are all hopelessly handicapped in their development, and it is to these conditions we must turn our hand before we can even be sure of the other facts in the question. Socialism will apply the solution to all these problems, in the first and most important place, by removing the economic hindrance to a full and adequate satisfaction of the material requirements. In the second place by removing the property restrictions which hinder the operation of what in biology is known as sexual selection, and allowing freedom of choice between the individuals, irrespective of the all-pervading influence of economic considerations. And in the third place by removing that economic necessity of obedience to the breadwinner which will probably explain to the author of the book we set out to notice the main causes of the violation of the Bar of Isis.

Dick Kent

Population and Social Progress (1942)

From the June 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Fashions in social theory are as changeable as fashions in clothes. During peace-time industrial depressions, when unemployment is rife, the advocates of birth control come into favour with their theory that unemployment is due to an excessive population; but when war is the order of the day the urgent demand for man-power and the fear that other nations are becoming numerically stronger and therefore more formidable as military powers gives a chance to those who preach the need for more children. And just as clothes are fashioned to suit the taste, occupation and purses of different groups of people so also with population theories, as witness the unmarried of both sexes who urge the poor to have large families, the wealthy parasites who brazenly support the argument that large families are the cause of poverty and the Eugenists who want the rich to be fruitful and multiply and the poor to curtail their devastating torrent of children. In 1913 Mr. Allan G. Roper, B.A., in his “Ancient Eugenics,” could write of the “reckless propagation” of the “lower classes,” but now the Government and numerous propaganda bodies are considering family allowances and other devices to encourage a more reckless spirit among working-class husbands and wives in order to stop the threatened decline of the population.

There has been much inquiry into the remedy for the problem and much into the cause of the decline, but most of it is marred by an inability to recognise fully the nature of the capitalist system of society in which we live. The inquiry starts with the fact that since 1870 the birth rate has declined from 34 per 1,000 to 15 per 1,000; only partly offset by a decline of the death-rate per 1,000 from 21 to 13. For many weeks all sorts of learned and other persons have written to the Times offering to explain why this has happened. Among the varied suggestions are the following : The spread of knowledge about birth-control methods, the increased employment of women in factories and offices, the growth of unemployment, the failure to provide adequate housing accommodation at low rents, the decline of religion, the fear of war, and lastly, the new milling processes which in the seventies popularised white bread and consequently robbed the population of the elements in wholemeal flour which made for greater fertility—we are told that this alleged deficiency will be counteracted by the new national loaf.

The reader can examine these claims in the light of his or her own experience and knowledge. One thing, however, that is undeniable, is that many working class men and women looking at their life and prospects under capitalism are reluctant to have as large families as their parents and grandparents. Economic insecurity and war play their part in this attitude and also the recognition that young children stand in the way of activities outside the home, whether recreations and amusements, or taking part in organised activities, including those of political parties. For women of the working class it is difficult if not impossible to have the care of young children and at the same time to take an intelligent interest and share in the work of a political party. Another factor of course is that the parents feel that if they are to give their children “a better chance in the world” than they had it is necessary to limit the number, and it is to this feeling that the advocates of family allowances make their strongest appeal. They argue that wages are inadequate for the maintenance of a family, therefore an additional 5s. a week given in respect of each child would raise the standard of living and encourage larger families. Let us examine a typical statement of the case, that contained in a leaflet, “Family Allowances and the Labour Movement,” issued by the Family Allowances Labour Group.

Their statement is “that wages are in many cases too low to support more than one or two children; that therefore the greatest source of poverty in this country is the possession of young children.” Put in that form it appears plausible enough. Ask a worker if he would be better off if he were relieved of the cost of supporting his children he would naturally reply yes ! Meaning, of course, that he would be better off provided that his wages remained unchanged and he received children’s allowances in addition. But the same argument could be used, and has been used, about other items of working class expenditure. There are those who have maintained for years that the greatest cause of working class poverty is high rents, so they advocated rent restriction or subsidised State housing. What has been the result ? Wages have adjusted themselves to changes in rents. In spite of the rent restriction acts during the past 28 years, working class poverty has not been materially lessened. In Vienna and other cities where rents were much reduced it was established by independent inquiry that wages followed suit. Agricultural labourers have very low rents, 3s. or 4s. a week, but their wages were also the lowest of any industry, and now that their wages have been raised to 60s. at once a movement is on foot to charge “economic” rents.

What about food ? Would not the worker be better off with free food? Mr. Fred Montague, M.P., opposes family allowances and states a case for an alternative proposal, that of spending a like sum of money in providing free milk and bread (Manchester Guardian, May 13th, 1942). Here again the workers’ problem would not be fundamentally different from what it is now. They would still have to struggle to maintain a given level of wages, with the certainty that such a cheapening of the cost of living would encourage a tendency for wages to fall. Are domestic servants, agricultural labourers and others who get board and lodging as part of wages better off than other workers who do not ?

We need not dispute that family allowances, or free food, or low rents, would probably be a gain to some sections of the workers on very small wages. And for a time to all workers with dependent children. But it would still leave the workers in the position of having to struggle unceasingly to maintain their standards, still faced with the permanent insecurity that is their lot under capitalism.

The basic argument of the above mentioned Family Allowance Group is false. The greatest source of poverty is not the possession of young children. Are there not hundreds of thousands of single men and women and childless families in dire poverty ? Are all our surtax payers celibate ? Were agricultural labourers on their pre-war average wage of 34s. only poor through having young children ? Will not the mass of the workers still be poor if they get family allowances and even if they were able to keep up the level of wages as well ? The source of poverty is the capitalist system which simultaneously prevents the maximum production of articles needed by the workers, entails enormous waste, and endows the propertied class with a large part of the wealth produced. The cure for this is Socialism, not family allowances or subsidised food or rents.

Socialism also offers the only cure for the problem of a declining population by removing poverty, economic insecurity, and the fear of war. It will also dispose of the problem which worries the eugenists. When Mr. Roper and others say that their problem is “the diminishing numbers of the upper classes and the rapid multiplication of the lower,” they overlook the fact that that problem too will disappear when there is no longer an upper and a lower class, a capitalist class and a working class. In their minds, of course, is an assumption that there is some innate, inherited, superior quality in the “upper classes,” but the truth is, as has been well said, that there is nothing wrong with the poor except their poverty. Indeed, if the eugenists take to heart one lesson of this war, the way in which things have been bungled by a considerable proportion of our ruling class civil and military notabilities, even they must now wonder whether the “upper class” are superior in anything but their wealth.

Edgar Hardcastle

A Look Round. (1925)

From the June 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

These birth controllers! 

When we read that “it is from among the population of ‘can’t works,’ and ‘won’t works,’ and ‘ca-cannys’ that we are chiefly recruiting our population,” we anticipate the superior person with the chemist shop economy :—

  “Ignorant people and paid agitators talk of “change of system,” when what we really need is “change of individuals”—health, strength, character, these will allow us in future to increase slowly, but for the moment we need a drastic operation to stop the cancer of poverty which is slowly degenerating our fine nation.”— (Bessie Drysdale, New Generation, March.)

Not understanding what it implies, the birth controller thinks it ignorant to talk and organise for a “change of system.” To suggest a change of “individuals” while retaining a system that enslaves and degrades the masses, is as meaningless as the Christian talk of “Change of Heart.” Apparently the writer is ignorant of the fact that even in the days of chattel slavery human labour power produced considerably more than was needed to maintain the producers. The machinery and applied science of to-day has laid the foundation of a society in which (when capitalist ownership is abolished) all could enjoy luxury with a minimum of effort. Did the workers’ conditions improve after the great slaughter of 1914-18? Have the Malthusian advocates never heard of wheat burnt as fuel, or fish given away as manure in order to inflate market prices? Don’t they know that capitalist statisticians admit that an idle few take nine-tenths of the wealth the workers produce to-day? The Socialist seeks through the self-interest of the workers to change the system because that system is run in the interest of those who are parasites on the social organism. If urging the producers of wealth to gain the comfort for themselves that they make possible for others is an ignorant proposal, then the sooner the workers become ignoramuses the better.

* * *

If Marx had only been English.

Experience has taught us that our opponents’ claim to be able to show the fallacies of Socialist principles never materialises in written or oral debate. It is easy to impute to Socialists a travesty of Marx’s teaching. When equal opportunity to state their case is allowed to those whose principles are based on such teaching, those scientifically based principles win easily. This fact was given emphasis in a recent debate with one of our comrades at Leyton. Despite our opponents’ claim to be able to show Marx’s Labour theory of value unsound, his efforts merely resulted in a lengthy discourse upon the nationality and exile of Marx, coupled with a number of puerile contradictions. The former cheap sneer relies upon that virus of Nationalism. A clerical gent, whose intellectual offerings in an anti-Socialist journal are on a level with the flat earth theory, has also something to say on the matter. Let it speak :—

  “England is no land to change her generous ideals for the enslaving and destructive principles of a German Jew who rewarded her kindness to him in his exile with an unquenchable hatred.—(Prebendary Gough, New Voice, Mar.)

Think of some of the generous ideals capitalism generates for the workers—wars, poverty, prostitution, filthy slums, and the hopeful outlook of the scrap heap. How sad it would be to abandon such ideals for the constructive proposals embodied in the life-work of Marx. That work is summarised in our principles. Their application would abolish the cause of such anomalies by the establishment of the Co-operative Commonwealth.

* * *

Capitalism's incentive.

What solicitude our opponents profess to have for the future welfare of the people with talents. Under Socialism, they tell us, ability would decline owing to lack of incentive. An interesting sidelight on the treatment meted out to-day to those who show any ability above the average is contained in the following. Out of a list of pensions (15) granted during the year ending March 31st, 1924, under the provisions of the Civil List Act, 1910, totalling £1,190, we quote the following average cases :—

  “Mr. William Poel, in recognition of his services in connection with the advancement of dramatic production, £100. Miss Charlotte Mew in recognition of the merit of her poetic works, £15. Mr. Robert Dunlop in recognition of his services to historical study, £15. Dr. Alice Lee, D.Sc., in recognition of her services to the cause of scientific research, £10.”— (Whittakers, 1925.)

What silent commentary upon present-day incentive ! Scarcely a week passes but we read of enormous sums changing hands in the buying and selling of the dolls of the wealthy drones. A glaring headline informs us that it cost “£30,000 to dress a Venus— 2 fur coats £12/100,” etc. (“Star,” 13/3/25). For the labours of those who render some useful service to posterity—an amount truly indicative of our masters’ canting pretence for the welfare of ability. Socialism would encourage excellence in every branch of human activity. Freed from the uncertainty of the future, and with the best conditions prevailing for all, those who may excel will not be relegated to obscurity on a capitalist pittance. They will merit something infinitely greater, the approbation and respect of the whole of society, whose interests will be their own.

W. E. MacHaffie

What is the Future of Civilisation? (1925)

Book Reviews from the May 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Study of “Daedalus” and “Tantalus.”

These are the names of two mythological beings who flourished in the ripe imagination of the Greeks. They are also the respective names of two stimulating little essays, the one by Prof. J. B. S. Haldane and the other by Prof. F. C. S. Schiller. It is impossible adequately to review and attempt to answer the two sets of views in a paper this size, but it may not be unprofitable to consider them a little.

Daedalus is sub-titled “Science and the Future,” and though only cautiously optimistic is by far the more stimulating. The rate at which science is progressing is emphasised by the mention that H. G. Wells in 1902 (“Anticipations”) thought it possible that by 1950 there would be heavier than air flying machines capable of practical use in war. Prof. Haldane undertakes to make no prophecies in his paper “rasher than the above.” In that spirit then, he predicts that future developments in transport and communication are only limited by the velocity of light. Progress of this kind is limited by supplies of human and mechanical power. He considers it possible that capitalism itself may demand that the control of certain key industries be handed over completely to the workers therein, so that sporadic strikes may be eliminated. This argument is interestingly developed, and he turns to mechanical power. What will replace coal and oil? Prof. Haldane’s opinion is that four hundred years hence England will be covered with rows of metallic windmills working electric motors. During windy weather the surplus power will be conserved by using it for the electrolytic decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen. The gases would be liquefied and stored in vacuum jacketed reservoirs. In times of calm the re-combination of these gases in explosion motors would furnish electrical energy once more. So much for power.

He next foresees that immense possibilities await the chemist. At present we rely upon plants for our food, even when we take it at second or third hand from animals or their products. Prof. Haldane considers that less than 120 years will see a completely satisfactory diet, produced by chemistry alone. Agriculture will thus cease as an industry. “Synthetic food will substitute the flower garden and the factory for the dunghill and the slaughterhouse, and make the city at last self-sufficient.”

Prof. Haldane gives the eugenist but short shrift. The eugenic official he describes as a compound of the policeman, the priest and the procurer, and his prophecy as proceeding from a type of mind as lacking in originality as in knowledge of human nature. His own prophecy certainly lacks nothing of originality and consists in what he describes as “ectogenesis.” The first ectogenetic child is to be born in 1951, and apart from the stage of an ovum will dispense with the necessity of a mother. The period of gestation will be spent in a serum or medium, but the more intimate details are left, perhaps wisely and necessarily, to the future. In 1968 France is producing 60,000 children a year by this method, and 150 years hence less than 30 per cent. of children are to be born of woman. Mother Nature must look to her laurels.

One must read in the book how the sands of the desert, instead of growing cold as the ballad singer has assumed, are to be made fruitful, and the deep blue sea to become a permanent beautiful purple. It is not as nonsensical as it may appear. We think it probable Prof. Haldane would not disclaim the label of Socialist, but fear he would not feel at home in the S.P.G.B. The reason will appear presently. It is refreshing to note that he includes Marx with the great figures in world history. He warns the conservative that he has little to fear from the man whose passions play second fiddle to his reason. He is to beware of him in whom reason has become the greatest of his passions. These, the doubters, are the wreckers of effete civilisation. It may take another world-war or two to convert the majority, but the next world-war has at least one satisfactory element. In the last one the most rabid patriots were well behind the front line. In the next, no one will be behind the front line.

He sums up by saying, science is as yet in its infancy, and we can foretell little of the future save that the thing that has not been is the thing that shall be; that no beliefs, no values, no institutions are safe. He reiterates that not one of the practical advances he has predicted is not already foreshadowed by recent scientific work. 

Briefly the outlook appears gloomy and threatening in the immediate future whilst the dull majority is learning its lesson, but the first gleams of a scientific dawn are discernible about 25 years hence.

Prof. Schiller pooh-poohs the gloom. Mankind has always known enough to wreck itself, but chance or providence has enabled it to avoid destruction. What is needed is just a little clear thinking and plain speaking. His first fact is that mankind ceased to evolve biologically about 30,000 years ago. This raises two further questions; how did it happen and what caused it? And secondly why has he progressed in other respects ; knowledge, power and culture. His answer to the first is that man ceased to develop biologically when he developed social habits. Singly nature weeded out all but the giants. Socially the herd protected its weaklings. His answer to the second is that social institutions like language and writing, have dictated social progress by preserving experience and knowledge independent of the death of the individual. Prof. Schiller develops his thesis very cogently, and opines that modern man (with a slight reservation) is slightly inferior to his own ancestors and markedly inferior to the great races of antiquity (like the Greeks) in their hey-day. Morally, we learn, modern man is substantially identical with his palaeolithic ancestors. This is not the end of our tale of woe. In one particular he is in agreement with Prof. Haldane. The latter says that ectogenesis will save civilisation from collapsing from the greater fertility of its less desirable members (page 66). Prof. Schiller occupies about nine pages in developing the same line of thought, i.e., that the “best” elements in civilisation are sterilising themselves through restricting their families whilst the continued growth of population is mainly due to the unrestrained breeding of casual labourers and the feeble-minded. Dean Inge has said something similar, but then he is only a follower of the Casual Labourer of Nazareth. (Capital letters make a difference, don’t they?). All men, professors, or otherwise, have their blind spot, and it is curious though understandable that these two should be so similarly afflicted. It is still more curious and less understandable that men whose obvious pride is clear-cut English and lucid thought should commit themselves to such tawdry, fustian expressions as “desirable,” or “best” as scientific descriptions of definite categories. Desirable for what? Best for what? What a begging of questions ! What rubbish ! Pardon this unprofessorlike language, but we have a shrewd suspicion that we are classed with the undesirables. The Freudians would say we suffer from an “inferiority complex.” We are not of the “best.” The felicity of attending Oxford or Cambridge has been denied us. We have been too busy working for the men whose sons the learned professors are teaching. It is only too obvious that their “desirables” and “bests” are those who have achieved wealth and position in our modern capitalist civilisation ; those who have attained “success,” those who have specialised in the exploitation of their fellows. Whom is it otherwise? Who are the “best”? Who are the “desirables”? And who are the “worst” and the “undesirables?” Professor Schiller permits himself the “shrewd suspicion that certain types, say the feeble-minded, the sickly, the insane, are undesirable, and that …. certain other types, say the intelligent, healthy and energetic, are inherently superior to the former.” This occurs so late in the book as to look like an afterthought. He has therefore no time to inquire whether the causes of the first three conditions are discoverable or remediable. When he says, “no good can come of coddling and cultivating them,” we can almost visualise him idly planning a lethal chamber on the margin of his manuscript. Prof. Schiller is a eugenist and eugenics implies the sterilisation or extinction of those below a certain standard. And who is to set the standard and who enforce it? Would it be universally enforced? We mean, would the Duke of Northumberland, or Westminster, or Lord Banbury, be subject to the same impartial treatment as the village idiot? We venture to doubt it.

We welcome the excursions of thinkers such as Professors Haldane and Schiller into the world of real men but they often seem to have one objectionable quality. Their cloistered seclusion among the sons of the rich seems to have imparted an air of aloofness to their views. They appear to overlook the fact that the little world in which they live, move and have their being is not the real world at all. Their pupils and their friends are by no means the “best” or the “desirable.” Numerically a handful, they are in the strictly scientific sense parasitic. If they were to vanish from the planet, production would go on unperturbed. Those destined for industrial pursuits as they might term them are solely concerned with acquiring skill in the intensive exploitation of labour. The ladders by which they or their fathers climbed to eminence are carefully withdrawn, lest a better man follow and push them down. The real world consists of the toiling millions who compose the vast bulk of human society. Without them there would be no society in a civilised sense at all. They are human society. They may be inarticulate, slow of thought and unimaginative, but we are of them. They are bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh. We can see undesirables being created every day. We can see our best being starved, stunted, exploited, and robbed always. We can see our geniuses denied opportunity or swindled out of their reward constantly. And we can discern the causes of it all. Society, a social product, is being run for the benefit of a select few. They safeguard their hold on the powers of production by also controlling the armed forces. Society, however, is greater than they, and their perpetual problem is how to get rid of the enormous wealth produced by modern machinery without stopping the machine. The body politic is increasingly liable to the illness called slump, and the slump is increasingly due to over-production. And now, more and more are coming to see that there is something wrong with a society that condemns the bulk of its members to poverty, a poverty which is intensified with every increase in the production of wealth.

Of course there is something wrong. The wealth producing machinery of society is owned and controlled by a few. Their sole concern is not the benefit of society as such but their own individual benefit. The productive forces have outgrown this petty, personal restriction, and the Socialist says the time has come when they should be owned, by society as a corporate organism. Humanly speaking we cannot expect the capitalists to view this prospect with any enthusiasm or to co-operate in its achievement. Fortunately they are numerically negligible and solely depend upon the workers consistently and persistently handing them the keys of power every election day. Their trust has been justified so far, but we propose a change. We propose that at a future election the workers send to Parliament delegates pledged and instructed to take control of the armed forces of the nation, and to then legislatively convert the whole productive machinery of society from private to social ownership. This requires organisation. The beginnings of that organisation exist in the Socialist Party of Great Britain.  Join it.

W. T. Hopley

50 Years Ago: On Eliminating The Unfit (1973)

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

You will remember the immortal lines of Edward Lear :

“They went to sea in a sieve they did ;
In a sieve they went to sea.”

And then, after extravagant and variegated adventures, in the last verse he informed us:

‘‘In forty years they all came back,
“In forty years or more.”

I mention this to introduce you to the great thought that has struck Professor Arthur Thomson! He thinks we should all go into the sieve again; and, unlike kindly Edward Lear, he doesn’t want us all to come back. 

#    #    #    #

The readers of “John O’ London’s Weekly’’ for March 17th were informed, under the large heading, “Mankind Must Be Sifted,’’ of the pickle we are in.

  'There is too little sifting. If ten biologists were asked what feature in modern civilisation gave them most anxiety . . . we are inclined to think all would agree in placing first the relative slackness of selective processes working in the direction of progressive evolution.'

Now to his remedies, his sieves :

  'The multiplication of the radically undesirable must be checked.  . . . selection which takes the form of insisting on efficiency requirements. The more of this the better when the requirements are reasonable, and when they tend to make life more difficult for unreliable types whose multiplication is not in the interests of the race.'

#    #    #    #

Notice how the changes are rung on desirable and undesirable. By whom and for whom? Why is the question never once raised as to who and what are the defectives; whence they come or how they arise. I have seen it stated by another of the professorial fraternity that in spite of all hereditary taint 99 per cent. are born perfect. What happens after birth?

#    #    #    #

The employing class as a whole never says, “Low wages mean stunted men, starved women and defective children." It never says, “Long hours and intense toil mean premature age, empty lives and high accident rates for the toilers.” But they do mean so. For every defective born there is a hundred made by capitalism. For the defective born there is a hope of cure; for the defective made there is none—except Socialism. 

(From an article "Any More For The Sieve?" by W. T. Hopley in the Socialist Standard, April 1923.)

Harold Shipman (2004)

Harold Shipman

From the February 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

His murders are said by many to be inexplicable, while amateur psychologists have put them down to grief over his mother’s death. But what’s most likely to lie behind Harold Shipman’s assuming of medical power over “who lived and who died”? Well, what stands out from the Shipman story is the way he saw himself as superior to others, which resulted in him feeling at liberty to either treat or terminate.

He left grammar school as part of an elite within society and went on to university. He set up his own one-man surgery because he couldn’t abide working with others in a group practice. He targeted the working class poor and elderly (rather than higher-income so-called “middle class” patients) for being a miserable burden on his valuable time (relief from which he sought by stealing and self-injecting pethidine), as well as a drain on the NHS (which his professionally- and hard-earned taxes helped pay for). He looked relatives of those he murdered in the eye and gave bogus explanations without feeling any remorse. He is said to have enjoyed the role of “master of ceremonies” following a death and presented himself as “omniscient”. He constantly denied having ever done wrong, doubtless because in his own mind, he hadn’t. And finally, there was his behaviour in jail (“annoying, arrogant and difficult”), which resulted in him being locked up each evening an hour and a half earlier than other inmates, losing his prison cell TV, and having his pocket money reduced from £12.50 to £3. For a man who saw himself as better than most, this would have been intolerable.

So, what is it that makes people see themselves as better than others, and confers a hierarchical ranking in society? It’s capitalism, the word that appeared nowhere in the media following Shipman’s death, and won’t appear anywhere in “Dame” Janet Smith’s reports into his murders which numbered around 200 to 400.

Shipman can be seen as an extreme example of a working man – a “professional” – who came to develop an intense loathing of people because of capitalism and its money mechanism. Thousands of GPs have become bitter over heavy workloads, underfunded surgeries and pay, and wanting to apportion blame, have also felt resentment towards the poorest patients, as Shipman did. Such feelings are generated when doctors accept the capitalist way of living, even unenthusiastically. But most pressurised GPs usually find other ways than a lethal morphine injection to get rid of human ‘burdens’.

This anger and resentment is due to the steady decline of the NHS, which in turn is down to a desire by successive governments to cut state funding and introduce market forces and privatisation wherever possible.

That the thought processes of medical practitioners can be so perverted by capitalism that they go along with murdering ‘inferior’ people seen as burdens is by no means new. It happened to thousands under Adolf Hitler’s euthanasia programme. Over a four-year period up to 1943, mentally ill patients of all ages were selected and taken by the bus-load to “killing hospitals” to be disposed of by lethal injection or starvation “for their own good” by doctors and nurses.

Capitalism, having created the monster that was Shipman, also played a part in his own death. Modifying all prisons to remove or cover ligature points, like window bars, from which prisoners might hang themselves, has never happened because of the financial cost to capitalism.

Shipman’s suicide isn’t something that many will regret, though not having abolished the system that produced him, should be. As are the suicides of many others imprisoned – many merely poor and deprived, driven to shoplift some food or clothing they couldn’t afford, or unable to pay a bill.

Max Hess

Pathfinders: The New Untouchables (2012)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists will greet with mixed feelings the news that a milestone in genome sequencing has been reached, enabling anyone to have their entire genome sequenced in one day for just £650 (Independent, 11 January). This task, until recently a hundred-million dollar enterprise involving tens of years and hundreds of scientists, can now be knocked off on a wet Wednesday by a single bored boffin using a machine the size of a microwave oven. In a year or two perhaps, the same feat will be achieved in ten minutes by licking the end of your smart phone.

That this is a testament to the awesome acceleration of science is undeniable. The benefits for the future management or prevention of diseases through individual designer treatments are also undeniable. Humanity’s drive to know itself, to know its essential nature is irresistible, the stuff of legends. There ought to be no down side. But this is capitalism we’re talking about. Information about your body and health prospects can be used against you as well as for you, and the fact that this information will be of interest to insurers and employers is not merely a probability but a racing certainty. As in the film Gattaca (1997), your life and career choices could well be determined and circumscribed by what’s in your genes.

Genome-profiling could be written into contracts everywhere from pre-school to pre-nuptial agreements. It could become the hot new style accessory, the ‘new black’, better than the sports car or the Rolex, better than the implants or the permatan.  Eyes won’t meet anymore across crowded bars, or pheromones traverse the stilly air, nor will courage have to be summoned for the first hesitant approach. Instead, iPhones will poll each other automatically, protocols will synchronise, alerting you to genetically suitable breeding partners according to matched genomic probabilities. Before you’ve even exchanged glances, your hardware will have exchanged financial histories, bought the first round of drinks and booked the dinner table. While nature remains red in claw, human nature will become blue in tooth.

Disability groups, accustomed anyway to being ‘second-class citizens’, have every right to worry about all this. From being chronically under-employed, they may soon become regarded as unemployable, a highly disquieting condition in a social system that only values ‘productive’ workers and which in the past has thought nothing of liquidating ‘unproductive’ ones. But this technology will have the effect of ‘disabling’ many more people than those currently bearing the label. The definition of ‘disability’ will also be extended forward in time to include anyone who is likely to develop a disabling disease in the future, creating a large subset of sell-by-date workers whom employers will not want to bother investing in, whom state institutions like health and education will neglect, whom mating partners will avoid, and whom insurers won’t touch with a barge pole.

Would this subset, driven by lack of opportunity and perhaps a cold sense of fatalism, turn in desperation to insurrection or to crime? Would they be categorised as a social problem at birth? Could two such individuals, the new genetic ‘untouchables’, be charged with criminal negligence if one got the other pregnant? Hard upon the arrival of the genomic ID card would follow the inevitable question of controlled breeding, forced sterilisation, and euthanasia. Capitalism’s quest for maximum return for minimum outlay could give rise to a new fascism in which only the genetically ‘perfect’ have any chance to succeed, or even survive. Eugenics, the dirty word of the Nazi era, could make a comeback.

Given what happened in Nazi Germany, people forget that the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century was not initially seen as some right-wing state-backed war on the underdog, but a forward-thinking, progressive and humane project based on good science. The Fabians supported it, as did Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Darwin’s own son, in fact virtually all of the ‘right-thinking’ intellectuals. Who would not want a purer gene pool, they thought? What justification could there be for allowing pain and disease to proliferate? Wasn’t eugenics in the best interests of the whole human race?

The theory wasn’t entirely watertight even in its own terms. It had already been shown by 1915 that genetic mutation could jump heritability lines and that heritability was not a closed system but was subject to outside interference. Nowadays a lot more is known about horizontal gene transfer through viral drift. This won’t stop the modern eugenicists, however, since engineering can build by design what crude artificial selection cannot sculpt by elimination. Even if a mutation crops up in a previously ‘pure’ strain it can be engineered back out again. In theory, anyway. In practice, the codebook is open, but nobody knows what the letters mean, and we can only guess by inference when a letter changes. Even if they could read the code, geneticists may never untangle the complex webs of phenotypic effects influenced by one genetic ‘word’, nor identify all the genetic elements necessary to create one – and only one – effect. This unfathomable complexity – pleiotropy – yawns like an abyss between the engineers and their brave new world, but the bridges are being constructed.

There will of course be cries of moral outrage, appeals to civil liberties, and demands for ethical oversight. Capitalism will pay lip-service to these insofar as it has to, but its logic compels it to find out whatever can be found out about the ‘worth’ of each worker, each human tool, and stock its toolbox accordingly.

The argument that it won’t put in its toolbox is the one about putting all your eggs in one basket. Evolution is even more blind and capricious than capitalism. The last thing any thinking species ought to do, if it wants to survive, is confine itself to one tight genetic niche and thereby maximise its vulnerability. That’s the way to become beautiful – and extinct. Genetic diversity doesn’t lead to a shallow and polluted gene pool, as our elitist, narrow-minded and anally-retentive forebears conceived of it. It leads to the best possible defence against extinction in the event of future diseases. Even if one leaves aside every possible moral argument about the ‘right to life’ of all humans, the simple threat of evolutionary extinction alone ought to be enough to annihilate this silly notion of eugenics once and for all. Let all humanity prosper, and bugger the chromosomes.

It’s something of an indictment of capitalism that one even has to make this utilitarian argument in the first place. Moral outrage ought to be enough. But it isn’t, because capitalism has no brain, no heart, and no foresight. As long as the money rolls in, let the heads roll as they may.

Paddy Shannon

Any More For The Sieve? (1923)

From the April 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

You will remember the immortal lines of Edward Lear :

“They went to sea in a sieve they did ;
In a sieve they went to sea.”

And then, after extravagant and variegated adventures, in the last verse he informed us :

‘‘In forty years they all came back,
“In forty years or more.”

I mention this to introduce you to the great thought that has struck Professor Arthur Thomson! He thinks we should all go into the sieve again; and, unlike kindly Edward Lear, he doesn’t want us all to come back.

We welcome the appearance in popular journalism of the man of science. It is good and fitting that those who have been enabled to withdraw from the cut and thrust of commercial life and pursue the search for knowledge exclusively should repay their debt to society in this way. It is to be feared, however, that with the standard of popular journalism fairly low, the scientific contributor is apt to follow suit. But to return to the sieve. The readers of “John O’ London’s Weekly’’ for March 17th were informed, under the large heading, “Mankind Must Be Sifted,’’ of the pickle we are in.

  “There is too little sifting. If ten biologists were asked what feature in modern civilisation gave them most anxiety . . . we are inclined to think all would agree in placing first the relative slackness of selective processes working in the direction of progressive evolution.”

Professor Thomson apparently does not agree with Viscount Grey, who in a recent lecture said that the great question which transcended all others in importance at the present time was the relationship between Capital and Labour. But that is merely by the way. Each to his taste, as it were. He summarises in an able and popular way the successive conquests of poor, puny man over rugged, titanic, barbaric Nature.

  ‘‘These were ages of stern sifting; they lasted long, and they had good results. Man was lifted to good purpose.”

But Professor Thomson almost deplores the fact that in the contest, microbe versus man, it is the microbe which is increasingly taking the count. There are some diseases, he tells us, that weed out the weaker and leave the stronger surviving.

  “But this is a rapidly dwindling process, for the progress of hygiene and preventive medicine tends to eliminate the eliminators; and if we devise methods for saving useful lives, . . .  we have to use them for saving weakly lives as well.”

How sad! How Professor Thomson must have cursed his article of the previous week, wherein he praised the work of Jenner and his conquest of smallpox. That’s the worst of this journalism business; your stuff’s in print before you have time to think. However, at the time of going to press, pending the publication of a further article on a new dilemma of civilisation, there seems to be a case for the scrapping of our sewage system and the return of the cesspool. Let Nature do the sifting. The weakest to the wall, that’s Nature’s way. There are sections of mankind who, so other professors have told us, do give Nature a chance with the sieve. Babies not up to market size are exposed to the vultures, or thrown to the crocodiles. Elderly people who feel the strain of living getting too much for them have their brains beaten out with clubs by their sons. The natives of India treat as sacred the poisonous reptiles which wipe out a few thousand of them every year. They decline to resist the claim of the bubonic plague germ to a place in the sun.

I fear I am doing Professor Thomson an injustice. He sees the other horn of the dilemma. Space precludes quoting in full, but he says :

  "Now, the throwing off of the yoke of Natural Selection without substituting for it any processes of sifting that can pretend to be adequately testing or consistent or well thought out means for man a difficult dilemma and a great danger . . .  the growing solidarity or integration of society makes it easier for the inferior, or defective, or undesirable slacker, to continue to live and multiply. ”

Now to his remedies, his sieves :

  "(1) The multiplication of the radically undesirable must be checked. (2) . . . re-education of public opinion in the lines of the old-fashioned eugenic ideals of pride of race and pride in having a vigorous family. (3) . . . selection which takes the form of insisting on efficiency requirements. The more of this the better when the requirements are reasonable, and when they tend to make life more difficult for unreliable types whose multiplication is not in the interests of the race. (4) . . . To put an end—so gradually that the process is not cruel—to the less desirable occupations. (5) Perhaps the sifting may come sooner than we think, and in an undesirable form.”

He does not mean warfare, for, as he says, war thins rather than sifts, and works in the wrong direction by removing the bravest and best. He concludes rather nebulously by saying :

  “Perhaps it is safer to say that man must more resolutely seek to discover rational and social modes of selection to take the place of Natural Selection, whose rule Is almost over—What is needed is a progressive evolution of sieves."

Nebulous certainly seems the aptest adjective. Notice how the changes are rung on desirable and undesirable. By whom and for whom? Why is the question never once raised as to who and what are the defectives; whence they come or how they arise. I have seen it stated by another of the professorial fraternity that in spite of all hereditary taint 99 per cent. are born perfect. When one thinks of the lives led by millions of workers, this figure is surprisingly low. What happens after birth the war recruiting strikingly revealed, for to get an army of any size, the deaf, the half-blind, the half-witted, and the epileptic were roped in by the hundred. Reflect upon the thousands of dentists, tearing out the teeth of the nation; upon the thousands of oculists attending to our eyes; the battalions of doctors waxing fat on our unhealthiness; our huge and overcrowded hospitals, asylums, yes, and prisons; and then ask, is it sieves we want? Many “enlightened" employers have found that garden cities, well ventilated factories, fatigue reducing methods, staff athletic clubs, canteens, etc., result in higher efficiency, reduced sickness and greater contentment. They have found that the manufacture of defectives does not pay in their particular business. In scores of other businesses it does not matter. Any lapse through the non-operation of these factors is speedily remedied through the Labour Exchange. The employing class as a whole never says, “Low wages mean stunted men, starved women and defective children." It never says, “Long hours and intense toil mean premature age, empty lives and high accident rates for the toilers.” But they do mean so. For every defective born there is a hundred made by capitalism. For the defective born there is a hope of cure; for the defective made there is none—except Socialism. Professor Thomson would chuck him in the sieve. The Socialist would render the sieve unnecessary by ceasing the manufacture of defectives. The scientific professor is concerned with effects, the Socialist with causes. Judge you between us.

W. T. Hopley

Love, Marriage and Divorce In Russia (1948)

From the May 1948 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the radical movement of the last hundred years or so the “woman question” has loomed large. In fact, amongst the self-styled “intellectuals” the enthusiasm for the emancipation of love from property fetters appeared to rival the enthusiasm for the emancipation of labour. Consequently, after the revolution in Russia had been accomplished and groups of “advanced” people abroad had swallowed the delusion that Socialism had been achieved in one country, it was accepted that woman in Russia had been freed from the shackles property had fastened upon her, and free relations between the sexes had at last become the social custom. Early reports gave some colour to this view. The Soviet Union was held up to admiring gaze as a model of sanity in sex relationship and we were regaled with stories of the love life of bright young women, married and unmarried, who had enjoyed the felicity of numerous husbands to the satisfaction and happiness of all concerned. Knowledge of birth control methods was widespread, abortion was permitted and, at the worst, the State cared for children, so that women were relieved of their worst burdens. It may be noted in passing that the benevolence of the State sprang from motives that had nothing to do with helping women to engage in untrammelled love affairs. Labour was urgently needed for industrial operations and women who were free from the burden of children provided a part of this labour.

Inspired by the false dawn in Russia an American biologist decided that the appropriate time had come to give the world at large views that he had long restricted to a privileged few, which contained his vision of humanity freed from evolutionary influences that were leading the human race to disaster. The book he wrote on the subject was entitled “Out of the Night” (published by Gollancz in 1936) and the biologist was H. J. Muller. He was professor of Zoology, University of Texas; Member, National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A.; and, finally, Foreign Member, Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. In his preface to the book Professor Muller writes, in connection with the views on eugenics he is putting forward:—

   “In the meantime, our airy imaginings concerning the future possibilities of co-operative activity on a grand scale are brought down to earth and given substance when we turn to the great and solid actualities of collective achievement which are becoming increasingly evident in that one section of the world—the Soviet Union—in which the fundamental changes in the economic basis have already been established. More intimate familiarity with these developments at the time of writing would have rendered available a mass of material pertinent to our subject. There the march of progress proceeds apace, while elsewhere discouragement and decadence admittedly deepen. This central fact of the present-day social world at once substantiates, and belittles our theorising. (P. 8.)

As we shall see, it is a pity that the learned professor did not leave his visions for a while and familiarise himself with the real foundations of Soviet Russia. However, let us first of all summarise the nature of his visions.

The professor advocates a form of eugenic procedure which, he claims, will ensure the improvement of the human race to such an extent that the next few centuries will concentrate within them biological improvement and terrestrial control equivalent to the progress achieved in the thousands of years between the amoeba and modern man. For example, he envisages a time when, on the basis of recent progress in biological investigation and experiment, the human egg-cell will be impregnated and germinate into the embryo and the child outside the human body; thus banishing from love relations the biological function of procreation. He looks forward to the time, now within the realms of possibility, when male cultures and female egg-cells will be stored and labelled, to be mixed later on principles that will ensure the procreation of only the best physical and mental types. This final fruition of biological genius he leaves, however, to the distant future. In the meantime he alleges that there are some things that can be done and he looks to Russia, the Mecca of his hopes, to initiate the first steps because, as he puts it, they can only be satisfactorily begun in a community from which private property has been banished. He argues that female insemination by artificial methods has now been advanced to a stage where woman can choose the father of her children without needing the intervention of sex relations. He argues that it is only a short biological step forward to be able to ensure the storage of male cultures for an indefinite period. The advantage of this would be that while it is impossible to determine during the lifetime of a prominent man whether or not he was of a superior type the lapse of, say, twenty-five years after his death should be sufficient to settle this problem and his culture would be available for insemination. Lest the reader has a vision of enormous storage spaces it is only fair to give the professor's estimate of what it might amount to. He assures us that if all the heritable characteristics (all that grows into legs, bodies, heart, lungs, eyes, brains, and so forth) of the whole of the next generation of mankind were gathered into a heap it would be about the size of an aspirin tablet. So that solves that worry! In a wild burst of ecstacy he asks:

   “How fortunate we should be had such a method been in existence in time to have enabled us to secure living cultures of some of our departed great! How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitions, taboos and sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or Darwin! Is it not obvious that restraint, rather than compulsion, would be called for? " (P. 152.)

Well! the writer can imagine a lot of women that would not be enamoured with the project. After all it is they, and not the professor, who would have to undergo the pains of childbirth after insemination.

Still, we are not at the moment concerned with a discussion of the professor’s visions of the future. What we are concerned with is the false estimate that he, in common with others of his type, has made of the present shape of things in Russia.

Since Professor Muller’s book appeared a drastic change has been apparent in the attitude of Russia’s rulers to sex relations. This change has been bound up with the growth of Russia into a first-class industrial and military power based upon the following of methods previously adopted by Western powers to secure dominance. The wealth of Russian privileged groups has reached such a pitch that an English communist has had to write a pamphlet in defence of Russian millionaires. In this pamphlet (“Soviet Millionaires” by R. Bishop) mention is made of the change in the Soviet law of inheritance in 1945 aimed at securing priority to the children of the testator in the distribution of his property (page 11). The inference from this is obvious and partly explains the recent tightening up of divorce regulations. But there are other reasons as well, and of equal importance.

In the general tightening up of regulations concerning marriage and divorce the use of birth control methods has been restricted, abortion has become a crime, and divorce has been so hedged around by restrictions that it is almost impossible for any but the wealthy to obtain release from the marriage tie. In 1944 decorations were offered to women for the bearing of large families, but the limitations on divorce and the other methods aimed at increasing the birth-rate suggest that the answer of women to this empty flattery has not produced the desired result. Why does Russia so urgently need an increase in the birth-rate? To increase the measure of happiness of the people? No! The reasons are as sordid as those that inpired the Nazi regime and all modern states.. Russia needs children as exploitable material for her industries and as cannon fodder in future wars. Hence the sex relations are controlled and directed for these purposes and to secure the inheritance of property within a certain circle. Thus, in this sphere of human relationships the Russian regime is back behind its starting point. The accumulation of wealth in the hands of individuals has necessitated decrees securing the right of inheritance and this., in turn, demands that the parentage of children shall be put beyond the bounds of reasonable doubt. In other words, the property development that brought into existence the monogamic family is exerting its influence with increasing force in Russia to-day.

Thus the delusion that Russia was the Mecca of freedom in sex relations has vanished along with the immediate hopes of Professor Muller. But the imposition of restrictions has not yet finished.

The Manchester Guardian for April 9th contains the report of a lecture to a large audience in Russia on “Love, Marriage and the Family in Socialist Society ” by Professor Kolbanovsky. The lecture shows how drastically the Russian attitude has changed. The report is from Moscow and is by Alexander Werth. The following extracts need little comment:—

   “A special reason for this great interest in the lecture was that some drastic new marriage and family legislation is now being considered by a special Government committee . . .  The Soviet divorce laws were greatly stiffened in 1944, but he indicated that they would be stiffened still further. Without ‘prophecying' what the new laws would be, he spoke very harshly of the disastrous effect on a child's mind of his parent’s divorce, adding that 'for living parents to create semi-orphans is an act of criminal baseness.' "

     "In Soviet society to-day there were still many deplorable survivals of the capitalist way of thinking and acting. Also, some vulgar and unworthy ideas on 'free-love’ which flourished in the early days of the revolution—and which Lenin wholeheartedly condemned—had not yet been quite eradicated. Such revolting practices were unworthy of Soviet society.”

 .  .  .

“It was true, he said, that some marriages broke up owing to monotony and boredom. ‘Variety’ should, therefore, be provided by the wife herself. It was important, for instance, that the wife should develop and grow intellectually, that man and wife should have new interests, that these interests should be closely linked with those of the country and community; that they should also take a common interest in the upbringing of their children. . . .  As for the 'free-love' theories, the lecturer recalled that there were indeed some 'Marxist' theorists in the past who claimed that the family was a bourgeois institution, and that the State should take charge of the children. No! said the lecturer. Socialism rejected this 'stud farm' principle; nor was the family a 'property unit,' as in bourgeois society, but it was a vital 'social unit,' and, under Socialism, the monogamous family had a better chance than under any other system. Woman would be more and more freed of all drudgery and petty worries, her mental interest in her husband would increase, and that was a guarantee for a lasting association."

 .  .  .

   "Another peculiarity of Soviet society was, he said, that all conditions were being, and would continue to be, created for having an unlimited number of children ; the economic reasons for birth control would be eliminated.”

It will be noticed that it is the women who are to have the pains and the responsibilities and the subjection. They are to keep their husbands interested and to have large families. In other words, they are to be the slaves of the monogamic family. One is tempted to echo the phrase of the dustman in one of Shaw’s plays: "Bourgeois morality. Pah!"

Gilmac

Pathfinders: Trans-Human Socialism (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the August 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

Here’s an early notification for the ‘Perfect Body Conference’, in case you’re swinging by Linköping in Sweden between October 9 and 16 and have a consuming interest in ‘transhumanism’ issues. The blurb describes it thus: "Enhancement, paraphrased as the improvement of desired characteristics, means to apply a certain focus on abilities, capacities and quality of life. These categories can be viewed and defined from different value-driven perspectives which are based upon certain viewpoints on what constitutes “normality”’.

Thinking of giving it a miss? Well, shame, because the transhumanism debate could turn out to be one of socialism’s hottest topics, after the grubby internal politics of capitalism has been consigned to the archives. At stake is the question of what ‘human’ means, now that technology promises the potential of almost unlimited physical and intellectual enhancements, up to and including immortality. At one level, you might think, what is there to debate? Who would wheeze around in an old banger of a body if they could breeze around in a macho Maserati or a female Ferrari? Why be ein dummkopf if you could be Einstein? Why put up with breakdown illnesses and debilitating corrosion if they can be engineered away, leaving you Kwik and Fit? Why die, for heaven’s sake?

The debate is raging before the technology has even developed, which is no bad thing, and much of it mirrors current consumerist paradigms, with the libertarian ‘devil-take-the-hindmost’ transhumanists at one extreme and, glaring at them from the liberal pole, the bleeding-hearts who worry (correctly) that any future Smart Toolkit for beauty, brains and longevity will only be sold in Harrods and not in Halfords. But these are only the two most obvious and energy-lite arguments, and neither penetrate far into the complexities of the issue. Others do, however, and Wikipedia provides an invaluable and entertaining list of these, including the Playing God argument, the Gattaca argument, the Frankenstein, the Eugenics Wars and the Terminator arguments. These criticisms all form points on a gradient between outright infeasibility (the Futurehype argument) and downright undesirability (Terminator). Even supposing such things become possible, hasn’t contempt for our commodified bodies already got us into enough trouble, it is argued, and won’t the rich just use the technology to make life even more miserable for the poor and oppressed, either by speciating humanity into a neo-Nazi Brave New World or by inadvertently creating a new race of uber-human which wipes us all out?

From a socialist perspective, a debate can be said to have real ‘legs’ if it can be extended beyond the context of capitalism and still have meaning in a socialist society. From this point of view, most of these arguments presuppose capitalist hierarchical principles and would not survive into socialism. Will the technology fail to serve all humanity and instead reflect and extend today’s social divisions and class barriers? Yes, probably. What else would you expect? The smart money is on immortal elites backed up by armies of supersoldiers – another reason to get socialism soon, before our working class descendants have the capability of independent thinking bred right out of them. Meanwhile disabled people, in the face of the transhumanist ideal of ‘perfectibility’, are looking nervously back over their shoulders at the eugenics movement of the 1930s and its macabre culmination in the Nazi death-camps. For them, as for other groups historically classified as ‘Other’, ‘transhuman’ carries an extra chill undertone, like the phrase ‘defect-free’ or perhaps ‘unJewish’.

But that is today’s debate, within the context of capitalism. The fear of being marginalised and oppressed by modifications to the definition of ‘Normal’ could not conceivably be exported into a society which has abolished the class basis of oppression. Nor would people, in a society without systems of social preferment, need to be paranoid about genetically engineered social elites. Where it gets interesting is when transhumanism invites one to ask even more fundamental questions which even socialism would struggle with. What exactly is a human, and what level of enhancement, if any, ought to be considered ‘enough’?

Socialist society, let it be remembered, is inclusive in its nature, which means that people are not to be judged or excluded on the basis of how pretty, young or smart they are. But what if it embraces the technology to make everyone ‘perfect’, and if so, who decides what ‘perfect’ is, and what would this say about social and biological diversity? And what of death, that ultimate motivator and engine of evolution? Would the achievement of immortality create a socialist society of incomparable cultural and technical sophistication or, conversely, a dispiriting world of torpid, plastic-faced Barbie dolls who can’t see the point of opening a book? Would the quest for perfection ultimately allow humans to conquer the stars, or make us so niche-specific that we became unable to adapt to future environmental upheavals, thus triggering our own extinction? Even given such imponderables, could any species, no matter how intelligent, ever resist the lure of this Pandora’s Box?

When the time comes to formulate the political agenda of socialist society, transhumanism will surely be right up there, because it calls into question everything that humans think they know about being human.

Is War Past its Sell-by Date?
Socialists would be the first to agree that, since war is not in our genes, it is not inevitable, and that it is therefore possible to conceive of a society without it. New Scientist thinks so too (4 July). Indeed, they point to the context-specific nature of war among primates and prehistoric human cultures to show that war is simply one behavioural strategy adopted under certain environmental or social conditions. In fact, they argue, “warfare is on the wane worldwide” due to better social conditions, so that most wars now are small-scale insurgencies: ‘the remnants of war’. Passing quickly over the question whether 4 million deaths in the Congo, for example, can be described as ‘small-scale’, we further learn that individual violence also follows the trend. According to Steven Pinker “Homicide rates in modern Europe, for example, are more than 10 times lower than they were in the Middle Ages” (although one wonders how Pinker can confidently assert this, in the absence of comprehensive records from Ye medieval Olde Bille).

And so we are brought to the inevitable Big Question: could capitalism abolish war? At this point New Scientist finally reins in the optimism and offers some caveats:

“Major obstacles to peace include the lack of tolerance inherent in religious fundamentalism, which not only triggers conflicts but often contributes to the suppression of women; global warming, which will produce ecological crises that may spark social unrest and violence; overpopulation, particularly when it produces a surplus of unmarried, unemployed young men, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”

From a socialist perspective, they’ve left out the biggest obstacle of all, the war-engendering nature of property-owning capitalism itself. This omission seems all the more mysterious given their opening premise: that all the available evidence suggests that agriculture and land-ownership were responsible for warfare in the first place. Could it be that they are shirking the historical materialist conclusion that is staring them in the face, because the implication is too uncomfortable? Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.

Or perhaps it’s naïve to expect scientists always to be scientific. One Harvard researcher offers the quaint idea that “since women are less prone to violence then men” their promotion into government ought to reduce the likelihood of future wars. You don’t need a Harvard degree to smell the logical rat there.

Paddy Shannon