Letter: Sexual preferences and socialism (1986)

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

Sexual preferences and socialism

Dear Editors.

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

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

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

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

"UNHAPPY SOCIALIST”

Reply:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Editors.

The Queer side. (1915)

From the November 1915 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have been frequently met with the taunt that they are going to “break up the home” (for firewood?), “destroy the sacredness of the family hearth,” “invade the innermost secrecies of the family life,” etc., etc. How this desperate invasion was going to occur our opponents (in their usual clear-headed way) were not quite sure ; but somehow or other the State (metaphysical muddle heads must have Gods, you know) was going to walk in through the door (without knocking) and tear children from their parents and wives from their husbands to make them economically independent of each other, thus destroying the calm security (!) and harmony (!!) of the family circle. (Sometimes we are told that pa comes home blind drunk and beats his wife—but I forget, that is when another thesis has to be proved.)

This view receives the pious support of wealthy men doubtless from the knowledge that the economic independence of working women will mean the end of their present paradise, in which they enjoy (like their prototypes, the beasts) the almost unlimited satisfaction of their sexual appetites. An examination of the true facts of the case, however, shows the hollow hypocrisy of the plea.

The average working-class family of the past century and a half has been composed of wage-workers— from the child of 8 or 10 who sells papers and delivers milk, to the father and mother who work in the factories, sometimes alternately—the one through the day and the other through the night.

The number of females who have appeared upon the labour market has grown year by year. Every year sees fresh branches of industry open to women, and the ties of the family are insen­sibly loosened, to be eventually torn asunder, not by the growth of Socialism, but, by the iron hand of modern industrial conditions.

Women are more submissive, more long-suffering, and more economical wage-slaves than men, and are therefore introduced wherever possible by our philanthropic and tender-hearted masters. In the early development of machinery the workman saw in the machine his mortal enemy, and the smashing of the machine instead of the smashing of the system was the order of the day, as witness the historic Luddite Riots. Now that the greater number of the workers have become operators of machinery, their antipathy to the “iron man” has died, although quietly and insidiously the machine is rendering unnecessary larger and larger proportions of workers in every department of capitalism. Now that women are replacing men in their various spheres the enmity of the men is directed toward the women instead of against the system that breeds such conflicting tendencies.

Another asset of the present war to the capitalist class has been the opportunity offered to experiment in the introduction of women into departments of work which they were hitherto supposed to be physically incapable of performing. The following extract from the “Daily Mail” (16.9.15) will illustrate the point:

“The great movement among women toward filling up gaps in labour is shown in all classes of work ; but nowhere more strikingly than in the big munitions iron works. That woman’s work in this new sphere is satisfactory is acknowledged by works managers and foremen. Asked if a motor cylinder would offer greater difficulty than a shell to bore one of these men said, ‘Hardly any.’ ‘A woman, then, could go in for ordinary industrial steel working, lathe work, screw-cutting, and the like, just as well as a man ?’ ‘Certainly, for the general run of work.’ ”

A quotation from the same paper of another date (10.9.15), dealing with the interim report of the committee appointed by the British Association is also enlightening :

“In some cases the experience gained during the war had shown that certain jobs could be more efficiently done by women than by men.

The great increase of women’s employment could hardly fail to have permanent results, and it might be anticipated that after the war the proportion of women in industry would be greater than before and the competition of men and women would increase.”

Now what about the sacred family circle ? The wave of female labour is to be converted into a torrent, and the war-worn warriors who return from the battle-fields (poor crippled, broken wrecks) will find a labour-market choked with women competitors, the standard of living lowered, and the general conditions of the workers worse than before the war commenced. A splendid reward for all your hardship and sacrifice, ye poor deluded, fellow-workers.

Of course, the “family hearth” ghost is easily laid by the worker who reflects on his present penurious and work-weary condition ; and the prospect of that mythical sacredness being violated under Socialism has no terrors for him. I may suggest, however, that the love which is born of economic necessity can neither be so deep nor so lasting as that which exists between those who are economically independent of each other and who seek each other’s company and affection purely from mutual esteem.

The Socialist, in promoting the common-ownership and democratic control of all that nature, ingenuity, and human energy can produce—in suggesting the equitable distribution of the burdens as well as the pleasures of life—is also giving the opportunity for human affection to develope to its highest and purest form.

—————-

Whilst turning out an old drawer the writer came upon the following quotation from “Lloyd’s Weekly” (31.3.12). It is worth treasuring.

“Arrangements are being made at Lyons to celebrate next year the centenary of the birth of the inventor of the sewing machine, Barthélemy Thimonnier, who died in 1857 an abject poverty.—Reuter.”

The above fate has been the reward of the majority of the brilliant thinkers who, applying their brains to the various spheres of production, have assisted largely in the rapid evolution of modern industry, in which those wonderful machines and processes operate to enslave the ignorant masses.

For the present the wealthy shareholders of the Singer Sewing Machine Company and their international fellow capitalists reap the fruits of the inventor’s teeming brain. But when the worker awakens and hails the dawn of freedom with open clear eyes, those same mighty brains and marvellous machine will be converted into a means to lighten labour and increase the sum total of human happiness.

In the days that are to come, fellow workers, remember the annals of your class. Remember the bloody massacres of your fellows upon the industrial and political battlefields. Remember the sweating and the destruction of child life, and the violation of womanhood. Remember !—and proceed unswervingly upon your course. Do not be deterred from prosecuting the war of your class by the sentimental humbugs who regard the destruction of vermin as a crime against “God’s creatures,” and are for ever trying to divert the attention of the workers from the main issue—their emancipation from wage-slavery.

The war between the exploiting and exploited classes can only end with the extinction of one or the other. The “war that will end war” is the war waged by the down-trodden, masses against their task-masters ; and victory will signify the abolition for ever of privilege, private property, and its accompanying oppressions. The place for all working men who would play a man’s part in the struggle of their class is under the red banner of Socialism, sounding the tocsin of the Revolution. There they will ally themselves with comrades worthy of their aid.

Gilmac.

Caught In The Act: Politics and Sex (1992)

The Caught In The Act Column from the March 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and Sex

Where were you when you heard the earth-shattering news of Paddy Ashdown’s affair with his secretary? If you can't remember where you were, do you care that you can't? Do you care about Ashdown's affair? Or about all the others which politicians are said to be continually involving themselves in? Well, it's perfectly healthy, from the point of view of a rational attitude to politics, that you shouldn’t care, except that this should not blind you to some illuminating aspects of the matter.

To begin with, Ashdown's dramatic confession enabled him to pose as the kind of clean-cut, honourable person to be expected of an ex-officer in Her Majesty's Royal Marine Commandos who, as we all know, are a fine bunch of men who would never stoop to anything mean or underhand. The truth is rather less clear-cut. Ashdown owned up, after an unusually determined effort to stifle the news, only when he knew the game was up. If it could have been managed, he would probably have continued with the deception. What worried him was not the deception, or the effect of it on his family or his ex-secretary, but the possible damage to his political career.

Media

Then there was the indignation, so supportive of Ashdown, aroused by the activities of the media — in particular of the "popular" newspapers who rampaged on the ruthless intrusiveness which is almost instinctive to them. It was not a pretty sight but then neither is a politician exposed as a hypocrite. For news is what sells the papers and. however we look at it, Ashdown's private life — like that of any other political leader — is news. As a supporter of capitalism and its commodity economy he can hardly complain when he is inconvenienced because the sellers of one particular commodity jazz up their product with details of his sex life to make it more saleable, more competitive.

In any ease the media interest was that much more excited by the fact that they had uncovered a scandal involving the leader of a party which presents itself as morally superior to the others, as an alternative to the muck-raking, back-biting and blackmailing which is the very stuff of politics. A lot of Ashdown’s embarrassment was due to the exposure of him as really no different, no belter, than the others. Of course it would have been worse for him if the publicity had cost his party a lot of votes. But the anti-media campaign which instantly counter-attacked when the news broke seemed to have had the opposite effect and Ashdown's position as leader of the Lib Dems looks safe. At least, for the immediate future — which means until the general election results are in.

So how far should the media intrude into the private, family life of politicians? On this there is a large balloon of hypocrisy which needs to be pricked. Social attitudes being what they are — distorted by capitalism's property-based relationships — it is to the advantage of a politician to be married. Having a husband or a wife prevents awkward, vote-threatening, questions about any deviancy from what is defined as sexual normality. Constituency selection committees arc favourably impressed by a candidate who presents as someone with a stable marriage and two or three bright, well-groomed children. It is the image they are interested in, before the reality — the sort of image which can guarantee a sugary photograph of the candidate at home with the family which looks good on an election address. As often becomes apparent, reality can be rather less united. If politicians set themselves up in this way, using their family in order to win support, they cannot complain if the family — its stability and their loyalty to it — becomes an issue. So if there is a hint that all at home is less than idyllically happy it is not unfair for that to be used to expose the politician as a hypocrite who tries to persuade the voters to give their family the loyalty which they themselves don't give it.

Votes

What really concerns politicians in these situations — what really concerned Ashdown and his party — was what effect the news would have on the voters. For the Liberals, the memory of Jeremy Thorpe is too close and too damaging for them to take another scandal lightly. The effect of the exposure on the people concerned — in spite of the mock concern for Ashdown's wife takes a very low priority compared to the party’s preoccupation with what the voters may think. For capitalism's politics is not about consistent principles but about taking advantage, however and whenever it is on offer, and about stifling, as far as possible, any disadvantages. It is about ruthlessness before caring, about cynicism before sustainable standards.

To take this point a little further, it was reported that the exposure of Ashdown's affair brought a rush of support for the Lib/Dems. Could this mean that, as we approach a general election which threatens to be historically dirty and irrelevant. John Major and Neil Kinnock will try to attact the voters by bringing out some skeletons from their own cupboards — or, if none exist, manufacturing them? The mind, in an exceedingly unpleasant way, boggles.

Economy

More real than the Ashdown affair is the economy — or rather the current recession — which is likely to be a dominant issue in the election. Is the recession really the result of a deliberate policy by the Tory government? Could a Labour government cure it or should this be left to Major's crew, who say they are about to cure it anyway? In the Commons recently John Major, under pressure from Kinnock's argument that the recession is all the fault of the Tories, shouted that many other industrial countries are going through a slump at present. The Tories can hardly be blamed for that, can they?

Well no, they can't. But what they can be blamed for is the pretence, when it suits them, that there is something separate and unique about the recession in Britain so that it can be "cured" by some clever fiscal juggling by Norman Lamont or whoever happens to be Chancellor of the Exchequer. In fact Lamont has rapidly climbed to fame as a persistent exponent of false promises and quickly discredited economic forecasts. If the Tories refuse to accept the blame for the slump, on the grounds that it is a world wide problem, they can't claim the credit when, as world conditions change, the slump recedes to be followed by a boom.

But, of course, they will claim that credit; Lamont claims it now. even as all the economic indicators say there is no sign of an end to the slump. Because, as we said about Paddy Ashdown, politics is not about consistency of principles. And come to think of it, a few years back there was a flurry of scandal about Lamont and a disappointed woman . . .

Ivan

Press, privacy and profit (1992)

Cartoon by Peter Rigg.

From the September 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

When David Mellor’s affair with the unemployed actress suddenly ceased to interest the newspapers it left room on the front pages for such trivial matters as the world economic recession, the fighting in Bosnia, the famine in Africa which threatens to kill three million people, the crisis in the Gulf, the riots in British cities . . . But of course there was more to it than a bit of prurient excitement about a Minister and a woman; for one thing, did Mellor and de Sancha merely drop out of the headlines or were they pushed?

The affair happened when Mellor’s marriage was in difficulty—although it was not clear which came first and whether one caused the other. In any event the Minister might have got away with it— like so many other prominent politicians—had he not revealed in a bugged telephone conversation that after a night with de Sancha he was too exhausted to write a couple of speeches. Some people might have thought that she had done us a favour but to the People newspaper the prospect of thousands of desperate voters being deprived of listening to Mellor was too much. In the national interest, they decided, they must act; we simply can’t have the country run by a lot of weary and wordless Ministers. However it may damage Mellor and the government—and of course with absolutely no regard to whether it increased the paper’s sales—all must be revealed.

Privacy

And revealed it was, in all the detail customary to what is politely known as the “tabloid”—or, in the best of circles, the “compact”—press. To say that this area of the media operates on double standards would be to understate the arithmetic of how they operate. It is commonplace for them to denounce on one page an example of sexual excess— thunderously scourging some alleged sexual offender as a “beast"—while on another page they excite sexual tensions with pictures of a scantily clothed woman whose condition is explained in a succession of soggily provocative puns. This seeming contradiction survives and flourishes through the admitted skills of the newspapers’ wordsmiths. to devalue the whole thing as an innocent joke. This trick is pulled with the help of a specialised vocabulary, in which sexual intercourse becomes “bonking” and, for example, the ex-boss of Burtons is not just another customer of an expensive prostitute but “five times a night Halpern”. That type of vocabulary not only pushes up the sales of papers like the Sun and the Star but gets the readers chuckling, in the bus queues and the works canteens. at the discomfiture of the subjects of the reports.

This situation is so traditional in the press that there has been a long-running battle about whether reporters have an unrestricted right to invade a person’s privacy. Most recently this was scrutinised by the Calcutt Committee, which concluded that the press should be left for a probationary period to mend its ways voluntarily rather than be subjected to any legal restrictions. It is just possible that one of the motives behind the People publishing Mellor’s affair was to re-open the debate over privacy in such a way as to establish their right to intrude, at whatever cost to the victims, whenever they judged it would boost their sales.

The depths

The depths to which newspapers will sink in this quest are as yet unplumbed. Here is how the father of Julie Ward, who was murdered in the Masai Mara in 1988, reacted to the breathtakingly dishonest reporting of the murder by the Sunday Mirror:

David Barritt is a freelance reporter. Tony Frost was the deputy editor. Eve Pollard was editor and Robert Maxwell the publisher. I loathe them all . . . if I could have got my hands round Maxwells or Pollard's necks that morning I would have choked the life out of them.

In 1982 the loudly trumpeted patriotism of the Sun did not prevent it concocting an interview with Marcia McKay— whose husband had been killed in the Falklands war— which had never taken place. In 1989 Peter Bottomley, who was then Transport Minister, was smeared in a Mail On Sunday headline: “Minister in Sex Case Row”—an implied accusation for which the newspaper was later forced to apologise and pay substantial damages. And in 1990 two reporters from the Sunday Sport—which is hardly a newspaper—entered the hospital room where the actor Gordon Kaye lay seriously injured to take photographs of him and attempt to interview him. This kind of hard-nosed and callous intrusion is another tradition; according to Ray Snoddy, who is media correspondent of the Financial Times, “in the old days, dressing up as a doctor to get a hospital interview was just one of the tricks of the trade”.

Mellor’s attitude to all this might kindly be described as ambivalent, although some might prefer the opinion of one Tory backbencher that he had “made an ass of himself’. As a politician who has always been acutely aware of the need to keep himself in the public eye, Mellor did not know whether to plead to be left alone or to set up a series of photo opportunities. So, just to be safe, he did both.

The family

Of course there was the little problem that he was a member of Thatcher’s government when it suddenly began to espouse its peculiar version of “Victorian values”, which included a reverence for the sanctity of monogamous marriage. He was one of the Ministers instructed by Thatcher to go away during a parliamentary holiday and “think about the family”—because the Tories had decided that the supposed stability and protectiveness of the nuclear family was a vote winner. Finally there is the fact that Mellor, like other politicians, has used his family to appeal for votes, as if a conscientious and caring father could be trusted to run capitalism more humanely than one who has an affair with an out of work actress.

The People could hardly have believed its luck when it got the offer of the tapes which exposed Mellor’s hypocrisy. At a time when the newspapers were under a lot of pressure to clean up their act—to stop their reporters dressing up as doctors, to stop concocting and printing stories—Mellor had made his views clear. In a Hard News programme in December 1989 he posed as a fearless defender of truth and probity, saying that he was “almost embarrassed to live in the same society" as the people responsible for press invasion of privacy and for the ghoulish reporting of tragedies like Hillsborough. He moved right into the bull’s-eye in the sights of the press when Major put him in charge of the new ministry responsible for the press.

On the day after the story of his affair broke, Mellor announced that he was reviving the Calcutt investigation, which clearly implied that the press had failed its period on probation and might now expect the laws on trespass and intrusive technology to be tightened. The press responded to this by squealing that any such laws would be used to protect the government of the day, which would have been more impressive if the press itself did not use such disreputable methods to push its own political opinions. For example the support which the Murdoch papers give the Tory government is consistently and hysterically based on distortions of reality.

Hypocrisy

But just as the debate—if that is the word for it—was heating up the Mellor affair suddenly dropped out of sight. Anyone who was disappointed at not getting their daily ration of revelations about de Sancha sucking someone’s toes may ponder that this may have happened because a deal was struck between the government and the press: no more exposure of the Minister’s indiscretions in exchange for a promise not to impose any further restrictions on the press? If such an agreement would be a prime example of hypocrisy on both sides—well, that is what the whole matter was all about.

In a Commons debate in 1989 the Tory MP Julian Critchley said “the truth is that as standards drop circulation figures rise. Such newspapers lie in search of profit". It is all very well—and very convenient—for an MP to condemn some of the nastier effects of the profit system but this is done only by ignoring the fact that those effects are inseparable from the basis of the system, which they accept and support. Capitalism produces its wealth—including newspapers—for sale and profit and its morality is fashioned by that. If truth reticently stated sold newspapers the Sun would be as staid as the "quality" press. As it is, what pushes up circulation into the millions are lurid concoctions about private lives, a distortion of human sexuality, gruesome horror stories, pointless intrusions into grief, . . . None of that is a pretty sight but capitalism and its profit motive, and what that does to human beings, are not pretty either.

The Mellor affair was not pretty, nor was the way the press exposed him for the canting humbug he is; nor was the way the government and his fellow politicians responded. And while we are on the subject neither is this society pretty, with its seething problems beside which the wretched Mellor and his woman friend are reduced to the historical non-entities they are.

Ivan

The Matter with Marriage (1956)

From the May 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Forty-five years ago, only one marriage in 500 ended in divorce in this country. In 1954, 6.7 per cent.—nearly one in 15—went that way. The figure has risen inexorably, and the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, which has just published its report, was set up in 1951 to enquire into the situation "having in mine the need to promote and maintain healthy and happy married life.”

The trend is, in fact, world-wide. Britain’s divorce rate is lower than those of France. Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Highest of all is the U.S.A.. and the lowest figures, as would be expected, are for countries with large Catholic populations to whom divorce is forbidden: Canada. Belgium and Scotland. In addition, there is a steady smaller number of decrees of nullity and judicial separation. Most divorce petitions are granted: of 28,347, which were filed in Britain in 1954. only 1,094 failed to obtain decrees nisi.

Divorce had no legal existence a century ago. Before and after the Reformation, ecclesiastical courts dealt with matrimonial affairs and granted separations in exceptional cases, but there was no means of dissolving a marriage. In the 18th and early 19th centuries it could be done by Private Act of Parliament; a procedure referred to by the Royal Commission of 1850 as “ open . . . to anyone who was rich enough to pay for it.” The first legislation allowing for the dissolution of marriage was the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. It permitted a husband to apply for divorce because of his wife’s adultery; women were given no such facilities until 1923. And—despite another Royal Commission’s recommendations—adultery remained virtually the sole ground for divorce until 1937, when desertion, insanity and cruelty were added.

The principle on which the current divorce law is founded is termed by the Commission “the doctrine of the matrimonial offence”; that is, the viewing of certain acts as being wholly incompatible with the accepted basis of a marriage. The alternative principle, urged by a number of people, is that of “breakdown of marriage,” and any substantial alteration to the divorce law would mean introducing this. The Commission was not in favour of it, and its report is therefore disappointing to would-be reformers; apart from some minor recommendations, it provides simply a survey.

The Commission's explanations of the spread of divorce are familiar ones. They include housing difficulties, the emancipation of women, the loss of moral standards, the complexity of modern life and, most strongly emphasized of all, failure to take the responsibilities of marriage seriously. The remedies, in their view, are educating and encouraging the individual “to do his duty by the community” and increasing the facilities for “marriage guidance.” In the entire Report, which is longer than most books, there is not a word concerning the real place of the family as an economic unit of society, and the real reasons why its disintegration has become a social problem.

The Commission says: 

“The Western world has recognized that it is in the best interests of all concerned —the community, the parties to a marriage and their children—that marriage should be monogamous and that it should last for life. That may be so (though the fact that nearly half a million people in the Western world are obtaining divorces every year suggests that some of the Western world does not recognize it); in any case, it is not saying much. Society never recognized that marriage should be monogamous and life-lasting until it was monogamous. The fundamental, important point is that monogamy is one form of marriage; there have been others, each in accord with a different stage of human development, each with its own moral code showing clearly that it, too, has been “ in the best interests of all concerned.”

The monogamous family as it is ideally conceived belongs really to the Middle Ages, bound by tenure and tradition to its land or occupation. It was economically indissoluble—the reason why, on the surface, it was legally so. As an institution, it was carried op into industrialism. The status of the worker here was different, however: instead of being bound to his land, his village or his craft, he was now a "free” labourer. Thus, the family had remained but without its former economic ties: it had become dissoluble.

In fact, relatively few divorces were obtained by working people in the 19th century. For one thing, they were expensive! for another, the severely localized character of 19th-century industry made masses of workers dependent upon one town and one factory almost as feudal serfs had been on their land. Even until quite recent times, entire families worked in particular mills—“their own”—in the cotton and woollen towns. Men grew up, met their wives and later sent their children to work in the same mill, and when that mill closed down they were unemployed until it was opened again.

The family has disintegrated simply because its economic function has changed; so, consequently, has traditional sexual morality. Morality is the code of behaviour which a society produces to safeguard its institutions, and when the institutions decline, so does the morality. Sexual morality has always aimed at keeping the family intact, and its lack of observance today is effect, not cause. The people to whom it remains vital are those whose status requires the careful maintenance of family life.

It is easy to quote figures and overlook that each one represents a person. Thirty thousand divorces (a year’s yield in England) means 30,000 histories of unhappiness, and that is a horrifying thought. The Royal Commission speaks of “the complexity of modern life” which “multiplies the potential causes of disagreement and the possibilities of friction between husband and wife.” It is not a Commission’s, nor this article’s function to give “human stories”; nevertheless, it is worth reflecting a moment on the things which society can do (that is what “the complexity of modern life” means) to two people who started full of fondness and desperately good intentions.

The individual failings and misfortunes which, in the Commission’s view, cause unsuccessful marriages, are in reality facets of larger problems. The lack of adequate housing, the search for financial security at all costs, the refusal to have children—all are aspects of poverty. Harmony has a hard time in two rooms; equally, it lacks scope in a house with a high rent, instalments to pay, and a host of demands made by a society which “recognizes that marriage should be monogamous and that it should last for life.” The Commission considers that much of the increase in divorce is because “many people can now get a divorce who could not get one before.” That does not really improve the picture: it suggests, in fact, that there are many more unhappy marriages among people who, because of pride, respectability or religious belief (among many more reasons) still can’t get one.

One other aspect of present-day marriage needs to be mentioned: the commercialism which pervades it as everything else in our world. The Royal Commission would have been nearer the point if they had mentioned the sale of canned illusions about marriage instead of complaining that people are too light-hearted about it. The modern young woman has been taught she hasn't a hope without the right perfume and the right foundation; the modern young man knows he must express himself in endearments from the film card-indexes; they both know that they need a contemporary bedroom suite, and they may not have the lolly of Miss Kelly and the Prince but they love each other just as much.

The problems involved are not ones which can be solved by amendments to existing legislation; the important thing is the social condition which leads to 30,000 divorces a year. Once, the monogamous family was a secure, unquestioned institution; changing economic conditions have taken its stability away and commercialized what is left, and the result is a lot of unhappiness for ordinary people who mostly never know what went wrong. The answer to this, as to all the other problems of the present day, is to establish a social basis on. which neither the misery of poverty-stricken or ill-suited marriages nor the purposeless muck-raking of divorce suits can be founded.

The Royal Commission’s function has been to consider what may be done to keep marriage going as an institution of property. Their assumptions about it were, as they say, “implicit in our terms of reference" that is, they did the work they were told to do, and thus are unable to suggest a solution to the problems raised. See marriage as one institution among the property relationships of present-day society, and it becomes a different matter. The obvious and rational solution then is to do away with all those relationships—that is, with the Capitalist system itself—so that human happiness and not gain will be the sole motive of social organization.

What can be said about relations between men and women in such a society is, as Engels says in “The Origin of the Family" (read it), “ limited for the most part to what will disappear.” Not much needs to be said, in any case: only that they will want each other as men and women, and not as housekeepers (which is only too true) or as dream-substitutes (which turns out disappointingly) or as highly-paid employees (which is what some of the better-to-do make of their wives and then are astonished when they behave as such).

Robert Barltrop

Letter: Surrogate motherhood (1985)

Letter to the Editors from the April 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

May I, through your journal, make a few observations on the subject of surrogate motherhood?

No sooner had a mother given birth with the intention of selling the child for a pre-arranged fee, than the deeply embedded sense of "morality" so prominent a feature of many of our parliamentary representatives has been disturbed. Kenneth Clarke has chosen to speak for all of us with his expression of "general distaste" at the notion of paying an agency to arrange such services, and Sir Bernard Braine is applying pressure to outlaw commercial surrogate motherhood.

How shocking it must be to these champions of capitalism to conceive of people who would buy and sell human life in the market place! Is it not logical under capitalism that a member of the working class might seek to widen the scope of that one commodity she has at her disposal — the ability to sell her labour? And is it so surprising that an agency is in existence to market the product of that labour effectively and profitably? Are these not merely superb examples of entrepreneurial initiative and keen business acumen, qualities so beloved and so actively encouraged by our Prime Minister?

Tony Dobson

London SE6

Reply:

We well understand your suspicions regarding the sincerity of the utterances of those champions of free enterprise who see in surrogate childbearing, with or without payment, some kind of threat to their control over established double standards and imposed pseudo ethics and morality. This aspect has obviously engaged their attention to the exclusion of extolling the virtues of entrepreneurial initiative — their normal response when profit is made out of emotions. From their cynical standpoint, there has to be a concept of “the values of the traditional nuclear family": they are compelled to uphold the myth of "the sanctity of motherhood" and to try to separate this role from the normal workings of the market economy.

These staunch and vociferous defenders of "the civilising effect of natural maternal/filial bonding" within the social and economic structure they dominate, are also saying a good deal about their determination to maintain the male-dominant role within this arrangement There is also, of course, an anxiety to retain control over all aspects of fertilisation and childbearing and to keep women in a subservient position: "We will protect you, we know best”.

We are entitled to suspect their motives and sincerity and to view with some cynicism the well publicised outcry against the women and agencies involved. Firstly, because the double standards ensure that in the "developed world" (but not in the Third World) most working-class women and their children are protected against unauthorised, unregulated exploitation so as to leave the way clear for authorised, regulated exploitation within the economic and social slot assigned to them; namely, as profit- or gun- fodder. If any reader doubts the existence of this double standard, just consider the lengths to which governments will go to pay women to have more children to serve the employers and the state when the reservoir of wage-slaves looks like getting too low, when the birth-rate falls below the level of projected needs. In one sense, all these mothers are acting as surrogates for the "motherland purchaser". In state capitalist Russia, the "purchaser" even awards medals as well as cash payments to such “hero-childbearers". France similarly had a low birth-rate panic and upped the maternity and child allowance to an unprecedented high rate as an inducement. In state capitalist China, on the other hand, the state's requirements are such that couples are restricted to only one child and financially penalised and socially ostracised should they dare to have more. Enforced sterilisation and vasectomies allegedly perpetrated in India say less about the sanctity of motherhood and more about the inability of capitalism to provide for even the basic needs.

Secondly, while such cynical manipulation goes on, the guardians of the western world's morals indulge in their ethical acrobatics ("we must consider the best interests of the child") and ignore the sufferings of thousands of children who are still covertly sold into slavery and child-sex markets and the thousands more overtly sold into low-pay or no-pay sweatshops, agricultural labour camps and the like, all in the name of commerce, and where investment documents have unwritten clauses — "no questions asked". Declaiming the dignity of "natural motherhood and the family", they are able at the same time to ignore the indignity of the abject poverty of parents with little choice but to suppress their protective impulse and let their children go.

Compared with the incalculable number of "normal" everyday obscenities, affronts and batterings endured by workers and their families everywhere ("Hospital facilities for new-born sick babies totally inadequate . . . Doctors alarmed by low funding and low priority for post-natal care', reports Department of Health " Daily Mirror, 22 February) and with the constant pressures on workers trying to maintain decent living standards against all odds ("Surrogate mother agrees to hand over baby for cash to furnish home"), this particular woman's actions and the destiny of her baby are the least pressing of the problems which need to be addressed by the working class. The predictable response to this event obscured the real issue and the ultimate responsibility we all share for permitting such a sick, pain-racked, money-dominated system to continue. Adept though capitalism is at distorting and perverting humanitarian and socially beneficial responses, truth will out — and each exposure of its real nature serves to number its days.

Editors

By The Way. (1920)

The By The Way Column from the April 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the days of long ago we were accustomed to hear that "Socialism would break up the family life," but with the world war raging it soon became manifest that the sending of working men to participate in the masters' quarrel was a more potent factor for achieving that object. While the men of England were "crushing the German military menace" and making the world safe for democracy and "our women" later results would seem to show that there are Huns in other places than Germany. A study of the Press would soon clinch the point.

With the Bolshevik rebellion in Russia the antis here soon got to work and a new cry was taken up by them. For the benefit of those folk who put their thinking out to be done for them, like they do their dirty linen, the story was told and re-told of how the Bolsheviks "nationalised" their women, and other lying statements were made in order to throw dust in the eyes of the working people here. Yet at the same time in Christian England we speak of "public women" and on contents bills of local newspapers the line "The Social Evil" meets our eye week after week. Verily our masters are a gang of hypocrites.

Now we read of an astounding proposition emanating from the land of "our gallant ally," France. I will quote the announcement in full. Here it is:

   "A daring proposal for increasing the birth-rate in France is made in the "Paris Medical,"  by M. Paul Carnot, Professor of Therapeutics at the Faculty of Medicine at Paris University. He says that if the birthrate in France is not considerably increased in a few years France's losses of 2,000,000 men in the war will have been quadrupled.
   Discussing the methods by which maternity could be made a remunerative career for women, he asks whether society should not confide the mission of increasing the population to a large number of "volunteers of maternity," the community bearing the expense of rearing children and giving bonuses in respect of healthy offspring. " —"Daily News," March 26th, 1920.

Doubtless the master class have it in mind that, in order to maintain their system, wage-slaves and an armed force are necessary, and though the war just terminated was to be the last war, signs are not wanting that those who uttered such puerile twaddle so short a while ago were gravely in error or deliberately "kidding" the simple ones. Hence the necessity for preparedness for future eventualities thus the need for "volunteers of maternity." What will the antis say now ?

#    #    #    #

We have all heard at some time or other that if we were careful, industrious, thrifty, god-fearing, and abstained from Bacchanalian orgies the ladder was clear and easy of access for every one of us to climb to fame and wealth. Have we not heard of this man and that who started life in humble surroundings and, by practising the virtues enumerated above, ultimately became what our false teachers call "self made men" ? Most workers now realise that to be born in the ranks of the working class means being doomed to remain there until the end of their days.

For the benefit of those who accept the dictum that we all have an equal opportunity of rising to the pinnacle portrayed by these misleaders, the following taken from the Inland Revenue Department and quoted in an article in "Reynolds's Newspaper" (28.3.20.) should afford some enlightenment:

(1) 340,000 persons added £2,846,000,000 to their fortunes.
(2) 280 persons added an average of £700,000 to their fortunes (total wealth) between the outbreak of war and June 30th, 1919.
(3) 200 persons added an average increase of £330,000 each to their fortunes.
(4) 564 added an average of £230,000 each to their fortunes.
(5) The remaining 44,500,000 being all those who were worth less than £5,000 on June 30, 1919, added £1,334,000,000 to their fortunes. Just less than one-half of the increase of wealth belonging to the favoured half-million.

No, the road to affluence and power is not through grinding toil.

#    #    #    #

The oneness of the international master class has just recently been illustrated. How beautifully humane they are in their treatment of their slaves. From a report dealing with the revolt on the part of the German workers take the following extract:

  "Fighting continues in most of the thickly populated areas, and has been particularly severe in the Rhineland and at Leipzig, where the workers shot down a military aeroplane after bombs had been dropped on the city.—-"Daily News," March 20th, 1920.

It matters not what part of the capitalist world one looks at to observe the fact that whenever a revolt on the part of the workers takes place it is always met with the armed forces of capitalist society. When will the workers learn the lesson from the past and understand their position in society, then organise to overthrow the system that robs them of the fruit of their labours. "Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains, you have a world to win !"

#    #    #    #

On more than one occasion lately Mr. Lloyd George has told those who read his speeches that there is growing up in this country a movement which means to put an end to the capitalist system. To counteract this movement he desires a fusion of the different political parties he thinks that by this method he can give an extended lease of life to his capitalist paymasters. The puny efforts of this political mountebank are only to be likened to Mrs. Partington endeavouring with her broom to stay the incoming tide.

Strange, is it not, that this individual who was so loud in his condemnation of capitalist society from 1906 to 1910 should now be so keen in endeavouring to maintain that system, which he said at Swansea on October 1st, 1908, "No one can really honestly defend."

#    #    #    #

Perhaps in view of the foregoing paragraph a few extracts from that speech would not be amiss, Indeed, it may be helpful to those who as yet only see as through a glass darkly. In that speech Lld. George himself states part of the indictment against capitalism and furnishes the Socialist with ammunition to help him in storming the capitalist citadel. Let me quote:

  "There are 43 millions of people in this country. They are not here of their own choice. Whether they are here by accident or by the direct decree of Providence, at any rate they have had no control or voice in the selection of the land of their birth. If hundreds and thousands of them either starved, or were on the brink of starvation, we must not blame Providence for this misfortune. There are abundant material resources in this country to feed, clothe, and shelter them all—yea, and if properly husbanded and managed to do the same for many millions more."

Speaking of the callous indifference of the capitalist class he says :

  "We are still confronted with the more gigantic task of dealing with the rest—the sick, the infirm, the unemployed, the widows, and the orphans. No country can lay any real claim to civilisation that allows them to starve. Starvation is a punishment that society has ceased to inflict for centuries on its worst criminals, and at its most barbarous stage humanity never starved the children of the criminal.
   But what happens to-day. . . A workman breaks down in his prime, and permanently loses his power of earning a livelihood. . . . Why should he be allowed to starve and his children to die of hunger in this land of superabundant plenty ?"

Another quotation from the same source taken from the right honourable gentleman's speech at Newcastle, on October 9th, 1909, is particularly appropriate at this juncture. In fact, were he to refresh his memory once again and give utterance to his former speeches, one could imagine the cry of "Bolshevik" escaping from the lips of his patriotic supporters. In the speech referred to he asked a series of questions, as follows:

  "Who ordained that a few should have the land of Britain as a perquisite ? Who made ten thousand people owners of the soil, and the rest of us trespassers in the land of our birth ? Who is it who is responsible for the scheme of things whereby one man is engaged through life in grinding labour to win a bare and precarious existence for himself . . . and another man who does not toil receives every hour of the day, every hour of the night, whilst he slumbers, more than his poor neighbour receives in a whole year of toil ? " (Extracts from "Better Times," by D. Ld. George.)

Now this was the position of the workers fourteen years ago when Lld. George and the Liberal Party came into office — then he was going to lead us to the "fields of waving corn." At that period he stated — "If at the end of an average term of office it were found that a Liberal Parliament had done nothing to cope seriously with the social condition of the people, to remove the national degradation of slums and wide-spread poverty and destitution in a land glittering with wealth. . . then would a real cry arise in this land for a new party."

Fourteen months ago the same gentleman, having won the war, came along with his Coalition Party and his "New World"' stunt. A gain he glibly talked about a "land fit for heroes," and his reform-mongering panacea for all our social ills. Surely the time has arrived when he should be judged by the test he himself laid down fourteen years ago. Let the workers themselves ask and answer the question —Has Lloyd George and his Governments done anything to cope seriously with the social condition of the people, the poverty and destitution? Then, I think, they will bring in a verdict that capitalism has been found guilty, and that the next thing to do is to pronounce sentence of death and usher in the Socialist Commonwealth.

#    #    #    #

It is extremely interesting to read the pronouncements of the men of God. Just recently Cardinal Bourne, in his Lenten pastoral, declared, according to the "Illustrated Sunday Herald" (15.2.1920), that "through the terrible scourge of the war God has wrought a real improvement in His People. Evils such as prodigal expenditure and unrestrained luxury were the outcome of the unreasoning restlessness which has always followed a terrible conflict. But deeper down one saw a more genuine desire in all classes to see justice done to those who in the past had been exposed to poverty, pauperism, and desolate old age."

Really the follower of the lowly Nazarene must have had his rose-coloured spectacles on to observe the things he portrays. Where, might I ask, is the "real improvement to be found? True we have read of the millionaire who has found "real improvement," and who exclaimed "What is the use of having a war if you do not make anything out of it ?" But generally speaking, from a working-class point of view, no improvement is discernible.

As to the statement that "deeper down one saw a more genuine desire to see justice done to those who had been exposed to poverty, pauperism, and desolate old age," that, to put it mildly, is a terminological inexactitude. The bitter struggle which ensues when these people endeavour to obtain an increase of wages or pension to keep pace with the ever-increasing cost of living gives the lie direct to these Holy Joes who prate about "genuine desires."

#    #    #    #

In the days long ago when I used to attend Divine Worship one heard a great deal about the gospel of Christ being a gospel of peace and goodwill towards men. Maybe this was a good stunt for Sunday, intended to be put away in the drawer with the Sunday clothes. During the war period we are all aware that notwithstanding the lip-service given to this glorious gospel of "peace" by the ambassadors of Christ, they were, in the main, whole-hearted supporters of war to the bitter end, aye, to the last drop of somebody else's blood. Even now that our masters have arranged a kind of patched-up peace they want to be preparing for the next war. Witness the following :

  "At the morning and evening services at the Waltham Abbey Baptist Church yesterday the congregations passed resolutions declaring that the closing of the Royal Gunpowder Factory would have a disastrous effect upon the town and neighbourhood, and calling upon the Prime Minister to intervene to save the factory and thus avert the spread of unemployment. "—"Daily News," March 1st, 1920.

Here you have the glories of Christianity and capitalism. On Sunday you have the local tin-Bethelites forgathering ostensibly for worship and preparation for the "next world," but the uncertainty of an existence in this apparently troubles them more. They have their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance. What damned hypocrisy!

#    #    #    #

At one time we heard a lot about the lofty ideals of the Allies—that they did not enter the war for self-aggrandisement or gain; no, simply to crush Prussian militarism and make the world safe for democracy. How successful they have been even an individual with one eye can perceive. From time to time quite a number of little differences have arisen among these would-be saviours of the universe over the division of the spoils. Take this as a recent example:

  "In shipping circles the decision of the Supreme Council with regard to the allocation of German tonnage among the Allies is being awaited with some anxiety. The council is to deal with the thorny question this week. France is going to fight against the plan that each Ally should be allowed to retain all the ships captured or interned in that Ally's ports during the war. Under this plan America would retain 50 per cent. more German tonnage than she lost. France would suffer in comparison, but so would this country, although much bitter French criticism is directed against us. France, it is asserted, will decline to hand back the 250,000 tons allocated provisionally for her use, in addition to her final share in the restricted pool, so that an amicable solution seems difficult of attainment. "— "Reynolds's," March 21st, 1920.

Another interesting piece of information was vouchsafed to us by the daily Press a few days ago. It concerns the question of "our mandate'' for Mesopotamia, and it runs thus :

  "Mr. Lloyd George has stated that the reason why we are extending our frontiers to include the distant province of Mosul is that ‘Mosul is a country with great possibilities. It has rich oil deposits.’"— "Daily News," March 29th, 1920.

Of course we are not told who are going to work these rich oil-fields or who will receive the dividends arising therefrom. But it is perfectly obvious that all the benefits to be derived therefrom will accrue to Lloyd George's paymasters, the capitalists. Working men laid down their lives to make this secure for their masters.

#    #    #    #

While we are exhorted to work, and work harder, to increase production, I note that a "vote as a grant-in-aid of the mission of the Prince of Wales to Australia and New Zealand is fixed so as not to exceed £20,000." A holiday for the parasites of society while the only useful class toils on to maintain them in luxury. When will the workers awake and end the system which robs them of the fruits of their toil ? 

The Scout

Capitalist Morality and Cheap Labour (1904)

From the September 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is has been sometimes alleged by ignorant or interested persons that Socialism would promote immorality, and particularly that it would “break up the family !” Certain admissions made by the learned upholders of Capitalism at the recent meeting of the Economic Section of the British Association throw a really brilliant light upon the canting hypocrisy of these contentions. The fact is Capitalism promotes and forces what is termed “immorality” upon large sections of the people, and breaks up the family –even destroying the most natural and common human affections.

Mrs. Bosanquet (author of ”The Strength of the People“) has had the impudence more than once to attack, without comprehending, Socialist science. In the course of a paper read by her at this meeting, she asserted that—

  “The disintegration of family life in town resulted in an alarming increase of unstable families, who quickly lost due sense of home affections and responsibilities, and did not earn so much where families were stable.”

So here is a plain admission from a defender more of capitalistic robbery of the workers, that CAPITALISM destroys the family. How anxious this goody-goody capitalist is to preserve the family! And notice what good capitalist reason she has for it! The sting of this quotation is, scorpion-like, in the tail: stable families earn less than unstable disintegrated families. So the capitalist professes anxiety to preserve the family—in the hope of cheaper labour!

Another speaker asserted that “where family life is preserved, morality is very high.” And he continued :

  “Our infant mortality is now greater than in India and Japan, and the employment of married women in factories is an appreciable cause.”

What a condemnation of the infamous capitalist system. The employment of married women in factories certainly tends to break up the family, and this capitalist advocate admits that it is responsible for the wholesale slaughter of innocent infants. But the labour of married women is cheap, and men, women, and children alike must be sacrificed in order that Capital— “that monster without a heart “—may be satisfied. Only by the Social Revolution can this system be ended. Palliation is impossible and absurd. Leave it to capitalists to cant about morality, which they neither understand nor care for, and to tinker with the effects of their villainous system. It is for the wording-class to organise for its complete overthrow.

H. J. Hawkins.

Sting in the Tail: Tory morality (1994)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Tory morality

You would think that any political party which has had so many of its leading lights’ extra-marital activities exposed in the media would think twice about presenting themselves as the guardians of the nation’s morals.

But not the Tories. Having blamed the one-parent family and especially the absent fathers for the decline in "family values", they had to gaze in horror as one more government minister, Tim Yeo, is exposed for his part in creating yet another one-parent family. Yeo’s brazen defence was that his case was different because he is paying towards the child’s upkeep!

So its OK to contribute to this so- called decline in family values so long as you pay for the privilege, and when it comes down to it, money is always what Tory morality, philosophy, and all the rest of that guff, is all about.

Common practice

We’ve heard plenty about gerrymandering in the past in Ulster and more recently in Westminster, but it’s been happening in Scotland too. This piece by "Backbencher" appeared in the Glaswegian (27 January):

GERRYMANDERING IS NOT JUST A
 TORY PLOY

Labour were quick to call it "gerrymandering". But their councillors, up and down the land, appear rather restrained in condemning the peculiar council house sales policy of Westminster City Council.

Not surprising. After all, in the post-war years, Labour activists quickly figured out their own vote-creation formula.

They built new council houses in their 'marginal" wards to strengthen the political control.

Indeed, this explains why some pockets of new homes were created not where Glasgow families actually wanted to live.

But where ambitious local politicians needed extra votes.

Little earners

The Tories’ latest desperate attempt to explain their failure to run British capitalism smoothly has been to blame the parents for almost all of society’s ills. Increased crime? Drug abuse? Poor educational standards? All down to the lack of parental control!

But this pathetic excuse is not exclusive to the British government. BBC’s Newsround Extra (14 January) told how children in Colombia, some only ten years old, are working down coal mines in horrendous conditions. There are shafts with wooden pit-props which frequently collapse, dust-laden air, and access so restricted that even a child can barely squeeze through. Indeed, this was one of the reasons mine-owners gave for employing the children.

A local official justified the government's inaction by claiming that the children did a Lord Lucan whenever rare inspections were made, and added that the blame for this child-labour lay with — guess who? — the parents for allowing their children to go down the mines.

These children, they earn about £10 weekly, are often their families’ sole source of income and, come to think of it, could be held up by the Tories as a shining example to British children.

He’s a scream

That comical Keynesian, Professor J.K. Galbraith, has been wowing his British audiences once again. In his Cardiff gig he was supposedly setting-out conditions for what he called "the good society" (Guardian, 26 January) but this was just a front for his usual laugh-a-minute routine.

And what a routine! The good society, he gagged, would put an end to poverty, unemployment, bad health and poor housing. Then he joked that there would be a "more equitable distribution of income" while "positive government intervention" could end recessions. Hilarious stuff!

For a finale he slayed ’em with "I want to see demilitarisation" plus "an effective curb on the arms trade", and all of this to be achieved within (wait for it) the capitalist system. Stoppit, Prof, you’re killing us!

So maybe it is the same old material, but the Prof knows exactly what his audience wants to hear, and on this form his Vegas debut can’t be far away.

Sheer murder

Anyone who thinks that socialists use over-emotive language in claiming that capitalism murders workers, might like to consider a report which appeared on Scottish Television News (18 January) revealing how the asbestos industry was responsible for the deaths of many workers employed in shipbuilding on Clydeside by deliberately suppressing information about the deadly effect of its product.

According to the report this information became available fifty years ago when experiments carried out in laboratories in America showed how white mice were exposed to asbestos dust with terrifying results. 81.8 percent of mice inhaling long-fibre asbestos develop lung cancer, a figure sixteen times that of other dusts.

Because the consequences of inhaling asbestos dust don’t appear for perhaps twenty years, the industry was able to protest its innocence for a generation. Not only do dead men tell no tales, but even better from the insurers’ point of view, they make no claims for compensation either.

Learning to hate

Did you watch the movie of South Pacific on 9 January? In among all the big hit songs was this little gem:

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear
you’ve got to be taught from year to year
it's got to be drummed in your dear little ear
you’ve got to be carefully taught 

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
of people whose eyes are oddly made
and people whose skin is a different shade
you've got to be carefully taught 

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late
before you are six or seven or eight
to hate all the people your relatives hate
you’ve got to be carefully taught

This song probably explains how racist ideas are learned and not inborn more clearly than all of the speeches and writings on the subject ever could.

Booking his place

This is what Patrick Minford, Professor of Economics at Liverpool University, had to say on Channel Four’s High Interest: Loadsamoney on 16 January:

  "There’s no doubt that in the last decade and a half when we have liberalised this economy and pushed it more towards the free market end of the capitalist system, the distribution of wealth and income has become much more unequal and of course that’s exactly what one "would hope would happen because the whole point of the capitalist economy is that it should throw up enormous inequalities in order to motivate effort and entrepreneurship. It’s now extremely respectable to he a successful entrepreneur. You get invited to the best dinner parties and people pay you the respect that you are due, and that is the visible change in our culture which I think is a tremendously good thing."

If that doesn’t earn this lickspittle his own invitation to "the best dinner parties" then nothing will.

Running Commentary : Poland - The Iron Heel (1982)

The Running Commentary column from the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poland: the iron heel

Jaruzelski, the Polish military dictator, has pushed through his Iron Heel Act. Rubber-stamped by the subservient pseudo- Parliament. the Sejm, it made illegal not only Solidarity but all forms of trade union organisation.

This Bismarckian act of repression, backed by the infamous thugs of ZOMO and other security forces, will not solve Poland’s desperate economic crisis, any more than the sacking of several economic ministers will help feed the hungry.

Sympathy for Polish workers is widespread. ranging from the far left to the Foreign Office statement:

The policy of the Polish government is one of confrontation rather than reconciliation. (Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1982)

We go further. The hardships experienced by Polish workers have been extreme. In peace-time Europe there is famine. Capitalism in chaos can — and does — kill. Poland is but one extreme example of this.

In 1981 plant closures and unemployment indicated the continuing decline of the economy. With the economy. the morale of the ruling Party collapsed. The bankrupt Party saw the workers' movement as a political threat. Jaruzelski’s actions in first suspending, and now banning. Solidarity were a reaction to a the movement's assumption of a wider role — "both a trade union and a wider social movement" (Solidarity Programme Resolution. Autumn 1981).

We cannot endorse the demand for a “new social contract" based on cooperation between workers and management in the "national interest". Yet Solidarity was the workers' only defence against the severe erosion of their wagcs and pitiful standard of living.

The class struggle cannot be legislated out of existence. Although this attempt to establish an independent trade union and political movement may have been crushed, we know that there will be others in the future.

We hope that such attempts will benefit from the lesson of the failure of Solidarity — that ultimately every class struggle is a political one.


Court in the act

Magistrates are called (in court, at any rate) Your Worships and their legal advisers are known as Your Learned Clerk and the whole procedure is carried along on a tidal wave of bowing and scraping and forelock-touching, so why they should want any help from On High must be a mystery.

However, there it is. The court in Coventry recently decided that each day's proceedings will open with a ten-minute prayer meeting in which everyone, including the defendants, will be asked to join.

Now this will present some obvious problems because there will be people praying for different things all at the same time which will be very difficult for god who has to hear all and see all and know all.

The police, for example, will be saying a few words in favour of the person in the dock getting the heaviest possible sentence because that is the righteous way of dealing with offenders against the law. But the offenders will be praying to be let off lightly or, if they are pleading not guilty, for the magistrates to believe a perhaps unlikely version of the events.

The magistrates will probably be asking god for some interesting cases, for the court reporter to make a careful note of all their witty asides and to get them in the local rag, for the court to run long enough for them to claim a whole day’s attendance allowance and for lunch time to come around quickly.

But of course it is not all farcical. Courts exist as part of the coercive machinery which enforces the rights and minority privileges of property society. Their job is to assert the fact that there is a class of people in capitalism who own the means of life and whose position must be protected with punishment for anyone who threatens it with breaches of property laws.

Religion is also a prop of this divisive, repressive social system. It teaches the non-owners, the non-privileged, to accept their lot and meekly to consent to their own exploitation. It stands up for the symbols of privilege and repression like the royal family and supports the nastiest aspects of the conflicts of capitalism, like its wars.

So it is entirely appropriate that the two factors — coercive state machine and lick-spittling religion — should come together in such open and unequivocal support for capitalism. In Coventry, the view from the dock could not be clearer.

Adman cometh

Travellers who have booked with British Airways may be having second thoughts since that airline announced that its advertising was being taken over by Saatchi and Saatchi, who masterminded the Tory election campaign in 1979 with the implied promise that unemployment would disappear when Thatcher got to Number Ten. With that record behind them, the new ad agency had better not try any slogans like “We’ll Take More Care of You" or all the passengers will be hastily booking to go by sea.

That famous phrase was followed by the patriotic "Fly The Flag”, which was probably intended to cash in on the Concorde boom which never came. Now more, similar, rubbish is promised; Saatchi and Saatchi have hired one of the advertising industry's (sic) wonder boys just to write the new slogans to persuade people to fly British Airways.

This wonder boy — Geoffrey Seymour — is still in his thirties but is well wise to the cut-throat ways of the advertising world. Seymour’s trade is to spend lengthy periods of time fashioning a few words of dramatic, enduring impact which will result in one product selling more than any others — even if the others are better.

He has already had a lot of success (for such it is called) at this. Products like Hovis bread, Heineken lager and Hamlet cigars are said to have sold better after Seymour's fertile mind had been at work (for such it is called).

Success has come in other ways; Seymour has actually won prizes for his slogans and, probably more to the point, he now gets something like £100,000 a year from the advertising world as reward; This may cause anger and bitterness among, say, Health Service workers who are doing a vital human job and have to struggle to defend an already meagre living standard. But there is another aspect to be considered. We live under a social system which produces its wealth for sale, winch means that the market is all-important.

So salespeople, advertising executives and the like have a very important place in this society. They don’t actually produce anything, their work does not make human life one jot easier or happier; a sane social system will have absolutely no use for what are called their talents. Their gargantuan rewards could happen only under a society in which all values are distorted and crazy, in which profit comes a long, long way ahead of people.

Family party

Margaret Thatcher, it is reported, sent her key ministers and advisers off on their holidays during the parliamentary recess with the instruction to Think About The Family. But protective parents need not worry; it is unlikely that the Prime Minister intended Geoffrey Howe to reflect on the effects of poverty on family relationships, or Norman Tebbitt to write a paper on the degrading frustrations in both employment and unemployment.

What Thatcher wanted from the Tory thinkers was some ideas on how to exploit electorally the concept of the family as a cosy, protective element in social stability. This may be shrewder than it at first appears. The present phase of property society encourages everyone to strive for an ideal in their personal relationships, based on the assumption that the human family must be a private, monogamous, exclusive unit.

 

In fact the style of family — whether monogamous or polygamous, whether nuclear or extended, whether patriarchal or matriarchal — can and does vary according to the basic social arrangements in force at the time. There is no evidence that the contemporary family is ideal, or beneficial, or that it will endure.

What is clear is that the present day family conforms with capitalism, with a social system based on the private ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution and the consequent production of wealth as commodities. This form of family places no obstacles in the way of the organised, widespread wage slavery or the savage conflicts of capitalism. The restraints it imposes are on human freedoms — sexual, social and moral. Its privacy is only extended where a market can be created, where each family unit has its own private home having its own car. washing machine, TV .   .  .  .

A sane society will have a very different family. If the repressions, neuroses and exclusions of the capitalist family are so comforting to those who endure them as to be an electoral asset to some capitalist party, then that is apt comment on this system’s distortion of human relationships.