Running Commentary: Plenty (1986)

The Running Commentary column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Plenty

Just as the news came in of yet another desperate famine in Africa, it was reported that the EEC are about to try to reduce their 1,360,000 tonne butter mountain by selling the stuff, at 3p a pound, as food for calves. EEC officials argue that this is the best way to dispose of the butter — best because it is cheaper than stockpiling it.

You did not need to be exceptionally perceptive to work out that what is being suggested is that the butter, after being kept in store for some time, be fed back to the animals who produced it in the first place.

There is nothing unreasonable or illogical about this. It fits in perfectly well with the assumptions and needs of commodity production — the turning out of wealth for sale on the market so as to yield a profit for the class who own the means of life. In this system the market — not human needs — decides when there is a shortage or a surplus. That the EEC is grappling with the problem of mountains and lakes of stuff which could feed human beings does not mean that everyone in the world is properly fed. It simply means that the market has more than it can profitably deal with, which is a very different matter.

It is by no means uncommon for food to be stockpiled or, if the market demands it, destroyed while there is an urgent human need for it. Sometimes — like the butter — it is returned where it came from. Vegetables are ploughed into the earth or fish thrown back into the sea. A neat, circular solution you might think — just what all those highly trained experts and economists are paid to think up. Until you look at the pictures of those people starving; the children only hours away from death staring out from shrunken, fly-swarming eyes, the emaciated adults squatting in their final apathy.

Then you know that something is wrong, that somewhere there is an obvious answer which is being evaded. And you are right. But think about it a bit more and ask yourself, who is doing the evading?

Cut price ignorance

Anyone who is thinking about buying a few shares in newly privatised concerns like British Gas, Jaguar and the National Freight Corporation had better brace themselves to receive a letter from Norman Tebbit. The Tory Party chairman, presumably believing that the most impoverished of workers can be kidded that owning some shares makes them a capitalist, will be trying to scare them with bogeyman stories about Labour snatching their dividends to give to lazy dole-queue scroungers.

If you think this smacks of desperation, what about the other scheme at Tory HQ. to attract new recruits by offering them a clutch of cut-price offers? Sign on the blue dotted line and you'll be eligible for a cheap subscription rate to the Countdown discount organisation; the chance to buy gift hampers; membership of a wine society; copies of Jeffrey Archer's books, personally signed by the world's greatest living writer (it is not clear whether this is intended to persuade people into the Tory Party or the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Of course Labour supporters are having a great time poking fun at all this, on the lines that the Tory Party which was once a marriage bureau is now a mail order company. Well, nobody can argue with that but they should remember that all capitalist parties use a variety of tricks and inducements to get workers to join them.

You can join the Labour Party, for example. by simply signing a form brandished at you by some canvasser on your doorstep. A few minutes later, if you were getting a lot of attention from canvassers, you could join the Conservative Party in the same way. Your opinions need not come into it; the capitalist parties are interested in your support — your vote, your money, your membership.

It is difficult to understand, or to empathise with, workers who fall for this, who allow their intelligence to be insulted in this way and who regard so lightly their political power to transform society.

Capitalism's problems can be solved only by a social revolution. That needs mass consciousness. leading to a deliberate act by the world working class. That is fundamentally different from the sordid grubbing for votes which absorbs so much of the energy of the likes of the Labour and Tory Parties. The question is — how long will the workers allow themselves to be seduced away from their historic role by tawdry offers of cheap wine, food and political thrills? How long will they abandon their revolutionary function for a mess of Jeffrey Archer?

Kick off

Every schoolchild brought up on Henry Newbolt's foolish poem about playing the game knows that the British are great ones for courtesy and sporting behaviour. It is something to do with character building on the playing fields of Eton, and the historic mission of the British Empire to bring civilisation to the lesser breeds without the law.

The snag is that most of the people of this country did not go to Eton, or to any school like it. Their character was built in the sort of neighbourhoods and schools which Newbolt did not care much to write about. They get their living in ways which essentially deprive them of the satisfaction of a sense of affinity with what they must devote most of their waking hours to.

This alienation extends beyond the workplace. into every part of our lives. In a world which is owned and controlled by "them", what does it matter if the saplings which were planted to give a little relief to the eyes amid a wasteland of concrete are tom up? Or if the street lamps which are there to make the pavements safer to walk along are smashed? Or if the ugly slabs of building which they call home are defaced with spray- can graffiti?

It also permeates what might be called their leisure time activities, when for a brief time they may forget their lowly status in society and the aridity of their social prospects. Where better to do this than on the terraces at some football game, with its excitement, glamour and its aura of quick riches?

British followers of the game are famous, not for their sporting attitudes but for such activities as running riot (although not as wildly as the media would have it) in one of the plushest of those floating duty-free supermarkets which ply between this country and the Continent.

This sort of behaviour has now reached the status of a ritual without which no self-respecting football (and soon, perhaps, cricket) match is complete The responses, too, are ritualistic, spurred on by headline-hungry journalists. The popular assumption, for which evidence is conspicuously lacking, is that sterner punishment and more vicious judicial violence are the only measures which can be trusted to bear in on the minds of the riotous football fans.

The people who call for hooligans to be beaten into servility forget those times when worse than yobbishness against foreign workers is officially encouraged — when, for example, the habit of Ghurka soldiers in the Falklands to kill any Argentinians who surrendered to them was gloatingly reported as good, clean, military fun.

It is capitalism which alienates us all — a social system of privilege and repression which is maintained with ritualistic support from the working class: "I vote Labour because my father always did '; "My husband's a Conservative and I can't go against him. can I?"

All this viciousness and self-destruction is protected in swathes of cynicism, from the beginning of our lives until the end. That is why schoolchildren are still being encouraged to absorb patriotic ravings like Newbolt's. Play up. and play the game? Ugh.

So They Say: Menu: Air Pie — (1974)

The So They Say Column from the September 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Menu: Air Pie —

Popular romantic writers have a stock of words and phrases for instant effect on their suggestible readers: tender, moonlight, yearning, heavenly vision, and so on. Similarly, Labour politicians rely on a small vocabulary designed to make their followers salivate like Pavlov’s dogs — “fair shares”, "equal opportunity”, “make the rich pay”, etc.

On 8th August Denis Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the Labour Government’s plans for wealth and gift taxes. The proposed starting level for the wealth tax is £100,000. To the press, Healey “admitted . . . that the main reason for the taxes was to create a greater atmosphere of social justice in Britain” (Guardian). On television, asked specifically what benefit the working class would get, he said poorer-paid workers would feel better if they knew money was being taken from the rich.

Pavlov’s dogs, dribbling in response to stimuli, failed to notice that the bell ringing was not preliminary to but instead of dinner.

— and an Empty Cup

The real response should have come from the rich, if Healey was attacking them so violently. Hear how they complained:

No one in the City jumped from 20th storey windows, fled the country or even squealed very loudly yesterday on publication of the Government’s Green Paper thinking on a wealth tax. It has singularly little effect on share dealings on the Stock Exchange . . . About the harshest comments on the paper were that it was 'a time-consuming irrelevance’, by the Association of Chambers of Commerce.

But not only do they not mind. The view expressed to The Guardian's business editor was that

the City would not mind a wealth tax if it enabled the Labour or any other Government ‘to institute a meaningful wages policy’.

It is accepted both in the City and by many business men that the wealth tax proposal could be a psychological advantage to the Government in persuading trade unions to accept a nil growth, or even a cut, in living standards over the next year or so.

What Can't Happen Here ?

The history of the “Watergate scandal” and its consequences leading to Nixon’s downfall from the US presidency was a showpiece of hypocrisy — Nixon’s, his accusers’, and the righteous commentators’. Could such a thing happen in Britain? The New Law Journal on 2nd August had some interesting comments.

Watergate ought to provide the necessary impetus to the Government to get on with the task of rewriting

the Official Secrets legislation as recommended by the Franks Commission without further prevarication.

While retaining the strictest security over those matters which are matters of national security, there is an urgent need to remove ‘confidential’ and ‘secret’ classifications from all material which allows officialdom to maintain a cosy secrecy over matters which may merely embarrass, or be inconvenient to, slipshod or inefficient officials.

Which is saying, delicately, that the difference between America and Britain is not over what is likely to happen but over what is likely to be found out. Incidentally, there is a curious word misuse in the extract quoted. “Prevaricate” means go astray, transgress, be equivocal, deceive. The word for putting things off, which is what they mean, is “procrastinate”. A Freudian error?

Pass, Friend

Nixon’s successor, President Ford, is reported to be looked-on favourably by the Chinese government. They are pleased that he insists on military spending as a top priority, because of “their desire to see the strategic balance between the super Powers maintained in America’s favour to inhibit Soviet expansionism” (Guardian, 10th August).

The Chinese view is the one all capitalist statesmen must take — looking for advantage for their own trade and strategy, and never mind from whom. The report says:

Peking . . . will probably only devote a few delayed lines to Nixon’s departure. But the late President was, in any case, much less the architect of the new China policy than was Dr. Kissinger, and the latter’s presence on Mr. Ford’s Administration will certainly be welcome in Peking.

Blowing the Gaff

Fascists in Italy have been in the news with acts of terrorism. One would assume the Communists to be up in arms to extinguish fascism; and one would be wrong.

A State subsidy for all Italian political parties began operating in July; the Communists’ share is £7 millions. A veteran leader described the subsidizing of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano as “horrendous and ignoble, so bestial as to fill one with horror”. He was attacked by the party newspaper and his fellow leaders. Only the fascist movement was “horrendous” — but not the subsidy. The Guardian, 13th July, said :

Signor. Pajetta, and the Communists in general, also are opposed to Senator Terracini’s proposal that Parliament should vote for the disbanding of the MSI. The Communist line is that it can be defeated through the ballot box. Privately, they may also realize that a Fascist enemy is politically good to have around.

Plenty Amidst Poverty

There is a physical training game called "O’Grady’', in which the trainees have to do the opposite of what they hear. It must be like that in Communist countries, where equality and the expropriation of the expropriators are articles of faith — while inequality grows and the expropriators’ cigars get bigger.

The Observer had an item on 14th July headed HUNGARY'S PROPERTY BOOM. It was about the rise in house prices in Hungary following legislation to regularize the private ownership of property:

There has recently been a widespread move to acquire houses in the country, not only by the Communist élite, but also on a wide scale by the new managerial class.

Everything above the upper limit is classified as ‘luxury’. But such properties will not be confiscated, as they were when the Communists first took over.

Instead, the owners of ‘luxury’ residences will have to pay a special tax. This is levied on houses and apartments worth more than £20,000 at between ½ per cent and 1 per cent, depending on the number of rooms, and on holiday villas of the same value at between 1 per cent and 1½ per cent.

Getting Dark, Down Under

Our July issue had an article on conditions in Australia, where workers from Britain often go in the mistaken hope of shedding their problems. The unemployment figures released there on 12th August show 93,585 out of work, i.e. 1.90 per cent. of the estimated labour force. Vacancies fell by 21.3 per cent., from July, against the normal trend at this time of the year. The Parliamentary Opposition has predicted 100,000 unemployed by December, with inflation at 20 per cent.

The Guardian correspondent in Canberra wrote on 12th August that

the estimate could prove conservative. The Cabinet seems to have swung solidly against the Treasury argument for further deflationary action in the September 17 budget, for fear of union reaction against unemployment and the need to get voluntary wage and price restraints working.

United Fans Queue Here

The football season has begun; and its weekly accompaniment of numerous arrests and convictions as rabbles of "supporters” smash up everything and everybody they meet in the towns they are visiting.

When the epidemic was starting in 1969 the Notting Hill Anarchist Group issued a leaflet which really should not be left unnoticed. Extracts (our italics) as follows:

Football crowds have always been rough and managed to enjoy themselves. It’s part of the game. Things only turn really unpleasant when a large number of blue uniforms appear on the scene.

After alleging that the directors of football clubs pay the police to arrest “standing” spectators so that expensive seats can be put in the space they now occupy, the leaflet ends:

It’s good to know this anyway, and to get things straight in your own mind about what’s happening, but it’s not worth fighting it on your own . . But if you do get arrested, or anybody you know does, try and send somebody along to see us and we’ll see what we can do to help. The people who are giving out these leaflets will be standing in the same places after the game is over.

This inane truckling to (and half-incitement of) hooligans is supposed to represent a serious outlook on society. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Robert Barltrop

Simon the Sociobiologist (2008)

From the August 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Editorial: A dangerous world (2002)

Editorial from the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

On all sorts of levels, capitalism is a society that breeds violence and danger on a daily basis. The last month has been as good an illustration of this as any. In addition to the twenty-odd full-scale wars that have been raging across the planet, the news has been filled with all sorts of other violent phenomenon. Rioting in Belfast. Rampaging soccer hooligans on the streets of Moscow. Suicide bombers in the Middle East. More terrorists on aeroplanes. Not to mention the simmering nuclear tension between Pakistan and India.

Capitalism is so violent many people take it for granted. And it is so ingrained in some, like the soccer thugs, that controlled violence is even an outlet – a release – for them. But how has this situation come about?

Many contend that it is “human nature” to be violent and that the violence we see daily within capitalism is merely a reflection of our own inevitably darker side. In fact this is probably the popular view, fuelled by the excesses of the popular press, who push this interpretation at every turn.

But if it is human nature to be violent, then there is very little that can be done about it apart from locking people up, shooting them or putting them in the electric chair. If violence is a genetic trait amongst humans that finds expression in everything from wars to street muggings, then there is no point reasoning with the perpetrators. Violent offenders just can’t help it – it’s “in their genes”.

Not that any of this stops proponents of this view from advocating retributive justice, like the cabbie drivers of lore, yelling “it’s the only language they understand” to anyone who’ll listen. But if violence is only human nature (i.e. natural to all humans) then what good does retributive justice do, perhaps apart from satisfying the equal blood lust of those otherwise railing against the perpetrators of violence? Presumably– from the editor of the Daily Mail to the Home Secretary himself—they must all have the same naturally violent tendencies.

That is the odd thing though. The advocates of violence as the only response to violence have a marked tendency to see themselves as absolved of the precise failings of “human nature” they identify in others. And this is as good a clue as any that what we are dealing with is not “human nature” at all.

If the kind of violence we see around us was natural, then it would tend to be exhibited by all people and in all societies – but it hasn’t been. For instance, it certainly didn’t happen in early tribal societies of primitive communism, a few examples of which still exist in Africa, Australasia and South America. Even people in modern capitalism (very often the kind of people railing against “human nature”, ironically enough) see earlier periods in capitalism itself as having been more tolerant, less violent and more community-spirited than they are today. All of which does tend to suggest than the overriding factor in all this is not the natural urges that homo sapiens are supposed to have, but the influences on us from babyhood of our social environment.

People who grow up in veritable war-zones (whether it be the Middle East or the concrete jungles of the inner-cities of the sink council housing estates) learn to live on their wits in a 24-hour a day battle for survival – a battle for survival where almost anything goes. They are not somehow “pre-programmed” to behave that way from conception and there is no evidence to suggest it. What they are, pre-eminently, is a product of their circumstances.

A recognition of this doesn’t make the lot of the victim of violent crime – or of outright warfare – any better. But it certainly is a precondition for changing things for the better.

No problem is ever solved by just dealing with its effects. This applies just as much to international terrorism as it does to soccer hooliganism. The fight against such things in modern capitalism is a good illustration of this as these “fights” become just another “war” to be perennially fought, but never won.

Recurring problems can only ever be dealt with satisfactorily by addressing their causes. But that is why the beneficiaries of the current way we organise society in the ruling class are happy to rant about human nature and the war against its supposed effects while the problems get ever worse and not better. The alternative is to recognise that competitive, violent, “individualistic” cultures breed competitive, violent and “individualistic” people who will be competitive as a means of attaining wealth and status, violent in the pursuit of this (“by whatever means necessary”) and individualistic in refusing to accept the view – let alone the “authority’ – of others. Capitalism has bred precisely such a culture and there is no turning back the clock or bucking the system.

The only available conclusion is an unpalatable one for the ruling class, because it is the one identified by socialists. And it’s that the only way to end violence in society is to end the violent society that breeds it.

When the "Lions" Roar (1998)

'Propah Nawty'

TV Review from the July 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the last couple of weeks it has been difficult to miss the World Cup, even if it has been possible to miss the football aspect of it. This is because most of the news and current affairs coverage has had nothing intrinsically to do with the game of soccer at all; rather it has been about some of the people who watch it-the England soccer hooligans.

Wednesday Night Live, an ITV series of debates hosted by Nicky Campbell and Mary Nightingale, led the field. What made it interesting was that, as is usual with these sort of sensationalist “debate” shows, a potentially combustible mix had been cobbled together by way of a studio audience. In this instance the audience included both former and still practising hooligans, including some recently returned from the Battle of Marseilles.

Chief among the former (or should it be “retired”?) hooligans was a character called Dougie Brimson, a former Watford-supporting thug who has co-authored a series of books about soccer violence with his equally bizarre brother, Eddy. When Mary Nightingale asked Brimson whether he had any regrets about his hooligan activities he professed none, arguing that “it just happened”.While adding that he wasn’t particularly proud of what he had done either, he obviously had in the back of his mind all the money he had been able to make out of it. Indeed, the Brimson brothers have been nothing if not prolific, with the pen as much as the boot. In the last two years they have had no less than four books published, each one selling tens of thousands of copies. No wonder they have no regrets.

The Brimsons epitomise the way the popular media approaches problems like soccer violence, and it was entirely fitting that one of them should have been on this programme. Their forte has been to claim to abhor soccer violence, and to have the solution to it, while at the same time making money from recounting all its glorious and gory details. Their books are replete with descriptions of major “offs” and battles between Britain’s rival soccer gangs (known, interestingly, as “firms”), they explain how the soccer gangs are organised and how they operate, and one even contains a list of the most fearsome and prolific gangs, from the likes of West Ham’s notorious Inter-City Firm (ICF) to Bolton’s prosaically named Mongoose Cuckoo Boys and Bradford’s equally bizarre The Ointment.

Murder, she wrote

The approach of the Brimsons, replicated in this debate to an extent, has now become dominant. No longer confined to those authors who profess repugnance at death and murder while making millions out of retelling all the details, it has now well and truly infected the news media at all levels. Both BBC and ITV news programmes showed the violence perpetrated by English soccer fans in France at length. On Wednesday Night Live it was left to Michael Knighton, football “entrepreneur”, to make the point that much of the film shown on British TV had been carefully edited to create a certain story, portray the desired image and reinforce the chosen moral of the day all at one stroke in a style the tabloids can barely hope to keep up with.

For make no mistake about it, while pious TV journalists get all sanctimonious about the Sun and the Star, television is where most people now get their information, and this was a story the news networks were determined to ram down everybody’s throat.

This is not to say that such scenes of violence should be censored, of course—just that the popular news media makes no serious attempt to understand this problem, what causes it and why it is likely to occur time after time as it has in the past. The television approach is essentially no different to that of the tabloids —“tut, tut, isn’t it a disgrace? Look-here’s another picture, with lots of blood this time too.”

Given the ruling morality in the capitalist world it is difficult to know how many people can have a serious difficulty with soccer violence anyhow, and it is surely a subconscious recognition of this which is the basis for so much of the media coverage. How can people who support murder and mayhem in the Gulf or the Falklands seriously take exception to the antics of England’s other “invaders”, the organised soccer firms? Certainly not if they were only “defending themselves”, they can’t, as so many—including Tory MP Alan Clark—claimed they were in France.

Wednesday Night Live had a handful of Paras in the audience who said they were disgusted by the soccer thugs, who made them ashamed to be “British”. They were so convinced of the dichotomy between state-sponsored violence and soccer violence that they suggested that “national service” actually represented the cure for the entire problem. Unfortunately, Dougie Brimson intervened to point out that several of those arrested in “the first wave” at Marseilles were in the forces and that he himself had been in the RAF for years, serving in both the Falklands and the Gulf.

The real problem was only fleetingly referred to, once by a psychologist and once by Mary Nightingale, who made the startling point that in the end it all seemed to boil down to nationalism of one form or another. And that, of course, is the undoubted truth. Next time the news media cares to laud “our boys” as they come back from a glorious victory over devious and untrustworthy foreigners they may care to spare a thought for the poor old English soccer hooligan who they purport to despise in the cynical ratings war. The regiments and the “firms”, after all, believe in the very same nationalism, have the self-same conceptions of honour, brotherhood and loyalty, and, in more than a few instances, are actually made up of one and the same people.

Dave Perrin

Order on the terraces (1989)

From the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

It may seem amazing that a government that speaks so much of freedom as the present Thatcher administration does should in practice be so authoritarian and restrictive. Amazing that is to anyone not acquainted with traditional government doublespeak. The 1987 Conservative Party General Election Manifesto declared that the election mattered more for our freedom than “any election since the Second World War".

Most people would like to have more freedom whether it be money in our pockets or just fewer signs around saying "keep off the grass", and of course, this is where the politicians' rhetoric comes in. But on a practical level keeping the wage slaves in line when there is so much to complain about requires control and discipline. As a result a vast state machine has developed with the aim of maintaining "law and order" and ensuring social stability. The armed forces, police. Special Branch. MI5 and others exist to back up the legal system which protects property from 'anti-social' behaviour such as theft or criminal damage.

The ID Card Scheme

Sometimes though threats to order and stability arise which cannot be readily dealt with and require special attention. The present Government has decided that football is currently in need of some of this attention — hence the ID Card Scheme. The Football Spectators Bill, if unamended, proposes that entrance to all Football League matches and Cup matches will be restricted to holders of identity cards. The ID cards will carry a photograph and the name of the team supported by the holder and they will only be able to be obtained in person with proof of identity. Any holder of a card who is convicted of a "football related offence" will immediately have the card withdrawn for a period of two to five years. The supervisory body for the scheme, the Football Membership Authority. will also have the power to impose a ban on membership even if no football related offence has been committed.

The ID card scheme is therefore designed to keep known “troublemakers" away from matches, hopefully leading to a massive drop in violence. However, it ignores a number of important things. Foremost among these is the fact that most of the violence does not occur in the grounds anyway — it takes place outside the grounds and in the town and city centres. Rigid segregation of fans and the use of closed-circuit television has reduced violence in the grounds to low levels while organised gangs of young thugs battle it out outside. As an increasing number of hooligans don't even bother entering the grounds in any case there is absolutely no way that the proposed Membership Scheme could do what the government wants it to do — stamp out football related violence.

What is more, banning fans from grounds has not stopped them from traveling to matches in the past. The present writer has been witness to a number of instances where away supporters have been banned from a ground but have been admitted in large numbers on the advice of the police for fear of the trouble they may cause outside if they are not let in. Who is to say that those who have their membership cards taken off them will not continue to travel to matches to provoke trouble?

Daft Reform

Indeed, it is likely that the ID card scheme may end up causing more trouble than it prevents. At the moment it has been estimated that it takes three seconds for a paying supporter to pass through the turnstile. However, when the ID card scheme is introduced it is likely that the checking of the card will mean that it will take eight seconds to pass through the turnstile. If a thousand people pass through it will take them five thousand seconds longer than at present — in other words nearly one and a half hours (When Saturday Comes, No. 23)! If this is not likely to lead to crushes and crowd violence it is difficult to imagine what will. Indeed, this difficulty was partially noted in the Minister of Sport's Working Party's Report on Football — Membership Schemes, where although it was argued that photographs on the ID cards were essential, "there would be unacceptable delays if turnstile operators were asked to check photographs as well''

The Football Spectators Bill is arguably the daftest reform to be proposed by any of the Thatcher governments, and there have been many contenders for that particular title. It is so ill thought-out that it has been opposed by clubs, supporters and police alike. Outside of the Cabinet and the dewy-eyed Tory backbenchers eager for promotion at the word of Mrs T.. it has been almost universally condemned.

The reason for this condemnation has ranged from the restrictions that fans feel are being placed on them, the unworkability of the scheme which has concerned the police and the financial aspect which has worried the clubs. It will not only be costly to instal computers and the electronic card readers but as the entire scheme is likely to prevent casual supporters from attending matches it will adversely affect attendances. This will in turn affect income, and the majority of clubs who already run at a financial loss may have their very existence called into question. On a commercial level individual football clubs don't so much compete amongst themselves but compete as a whole against other sports and entertainments which have in recent years become increasingly popular at football’s expense. Discouragement of the casual supporter is the last thing that the football clubs want.

The Other Hooligans

A large part of the problem is that the government sees hooliganism that has attached itself to football as a mere aberration within society as a whole, and therefore as something which can be reformed out of existence. However, in the extremely unlikely event that the ID card scheme eradicated football violence hooliganism would only move more noticeably than it already has done to other sports such as cricket and rugby league. For although football matches provide a particular outlet for hooligan behaviour, they are not the cause of it. Capitalist society both breeds violence and sanctions its use. "Legitimate" violence such as the Falklands War or the police beating people up during the Miners' Strike is seen as entirely necessary and acceptable whereas soccer violence is something totally different which cannot be tolerated. It even used to be argued that a reintroduction of National Service would provide discipline for the hooligans and channel their aggression. The absurdity of this was shown during the 1988 European Championships in West Germany when a large proportion of the English fans arrested were in fact members of the armed forces stationed there.

Hooliganism is a product of a society which values aggression, competition and violence above peace and co-operation. It is only when this aggression gets out of hand and threatens stability that it becomes a real concern. What better example is there of the sort of ruthless competition extolled by Thatcher and Colin Moynihan. the Minister for Sport, than the frightening activities of the football mobs vying for the position of "top dogs” every Saturday?

The ID card scheme is as pathetic as it is hypocritical. The Government is not interested in the freedom of working class people and is prepared to restrict the limited freedoms and liberties that we have in a sad attempt to solve a problem which the system that it upholds so clearly threw up in the first place.

Perhaps in the light of increasing drunkenness and late-night violence we can expect the self-proclaimed lovers of freedom in Westminster to issue us with ID cards to enter pubs in future (complete of course with a photograph and the name of your local). The queues to get past the electronic card reader on New Year's Eve don't bear thinking about.

Dave Perrin

Running Commentary: Sporting life (1985)

The Running Commentary column from the May 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Sporting life

Now that she has single-handedly seen off General Galtieri and Arthur Scargill, the President of Grantham Town Football Club has turned her attention to that section of British football followers whose activities are famous. at grounds in this country and abroad, for so artistically blurring the distinction between sport and war.

The Labour Party are uneasy at this development, for there may be some solid votes in this, if Thatcher can convince the workers that she is the Iron Lady who not only made the Falklands safe for British Coalite and the coal fields safe for the NCB but the football terraces safe for the family outing.

So Labour's response had to be that she was getting it wrong. Football hooligans, they claimed, do not emerge through any inherent wickedness but because Tory Britain offers youth nothing better than the dole queue, slums, disease . . . Frustrations build up and have to be released somewhere; the excitement of a big football game is as likely a place as any for this to happen.

This line might be more convincing if Britain under the Labour Party had not been a place of poverty, unemployment, slums and despair — if there had been no such thing as aimless, neurotic youth when Wilson and Callaghan were at Number Ten and if those had been halcyon days of impeccable behaviour on the football terraces.

But of course it was not like that. Capitalism is always an ugly, depressing, restrictive system whichever party tries to manage it. It must always condemn the majority to lives of exploitation and poverty, a frustrating contrast to those of the workers' economic and social superiors.

Football is more than a sport, more even than big business. For workers who need relief from the drab monotony of poverty it is a hallucinogen, an exciting dream which seduces millions into the delusion that there is an easy, glorious escape from working-class repression. You too, they tell themselves, can be an adored football star, feted and lauded wherever you go.

The so-called football hooligan is at the very centre of this clash between dreams and reality. Like all conflict, this is a painful experience — and the only relief must be through radical change.

Power drive

Ian MacGregor was bought by the Thatcher government to manage the steel and coal industries so that the workers and the unions would be forced up against reality. In each case, reality meant that world capitalism is in a slump, that the markets for commodities like coal and steel are shrinking, that international competition is hotting up and that the immediate response to it all must be closures of plants and redundancies.

Now, perhaps, there will be a job for MacGregor in the British electricity generating industry, which is about to be hit by a determined sales drive from its French counterpart. Over the past decade French capitalism has invested an enormous amount in the construction of nuclear power stations, to provide cheap and plentiful electricity to what was assumed would be expanding French industry. But the market for power is no less anarchic than that for any other commodity; the recession of the 1980s meant that French industry has not come up to the assumptions, which in turn means that there is now a surplus of generating capacity.

At present, this surplus promises to be about equal to the power demands of the whole of Southern England, including London. The French have tried to off-load as much of this as possible onto home industry, offering cut-price deals, and they have also turned their attention to possible markets abroad. Agreements have been signed to feed some power through cables to Spain and Italy and a similar arrangement is being suggested to British industry.

At a time when profits are under such pressure, British capitalists may find the cheap electricity from France an offer they can't refuse, even if it were to expose all that patriotic encouragement they give to British workers as the cynical nonsense it really is. The outcome may be a surplus of British electricity and pressure for the closure of some power stations as "uneconomic", with production concentrated at those plants where worker exploitation is at its most intense.

People who froze during last winter because they could not afford to heat their homes may be puzzled to hear about a "surplus" of electricity and wonder why it can't simply be given away to the needy. There is a simple explanation. Electricity, like all wealth under capitalism, is produced to be sold in a market at a profit. "Surpluses" are not judged on human needs but on what the market can profitably absorb. That was the message which MacGregor drove home to the steel workers and the miners and which is now likely to be driven home to the power industry workers — and, of course, to the people who need the produce but can't afford to buy it.

Neil down

Will Neil Kinnock ever become Prime Minister? There are strategists in the Labour Party who regard his present troublous times as a holding period for him. They assess the electoral advance Labour needs to unseat the Tories as too great to be realistically attainable by the next election. So Kinnock is marking time, building up support and gaining experience for the big effort in the election after next which, say these strategists, will bring a lifetime of Labour government.

Well this might be an explanation of Kinnock's inability to convince the voters that he should be in charge of British capitalism. None of the guises which politicians are required to adopt has fitted him in any way convincingly. There is the guise of the subtle diplomat, or the consensus-builder, or the iron-willed leader. (We all know which one Thatcher has adopted and with what success). Workers demand that their leaders come before them in some such guise, or in several at once.

Then there is the matter of Kinnock's own party, which continues to display all the symptoms of chronic disarray and schism. In a series of re-selection disputes, sitting MPs are under pressure from left-wing activists; one notable example is in Ealing Southall, where there seems to have been a certain amount of juggling with membership lists and in Brent East, where uncharismatic Reg Freeson has been beset by Ken Livingstone, whose parliamentary ambitions were saved by his U-turn over GLC rate capping. We can expect to hear more of these disputes and of others no less odious.

Kinnock's predicament is that he can give only part of his attention to the shrill demands of his party's theorists and activists; his first concern must be to win power, to placate the political ignorance of the working class so that they change capitalism under Thatcher for the same society under Kinnock.

The lessons of experience are too clear and too recent; they affirm that there is no reason, from the point of view of workers' interests, to make such a change. It does not matter one whit, which guise Kinnock adopts nor whether he wears it to Number Ten. It is time the workers turned against these insulting political games and thought about taking over society for themselves, in their own human interests.

Between the Lines: Simon’s war (1985)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

Simon’s war
Most of us experience war only through the medium of television. Too often it is presented as a ninety-minute, small-screen fiction — an appealing and heroic adventure which depicts "Our Boys" kicking hell out of those who dared to affront the Nation. War films glorify killing and condition innocent viewers to imitate the violence they see — but only when the state requires them to. Needless to say, moralising Mary Whitehouse and her crowd of repressed would-be censors are more concerned to ban explicit acts of love from the screen than the filthy portrayal of war. Copulation is regarded as an obscenity, which affects impressionable minds, but legally sanctioned guns and bombs seem not to offend.

All of this comes to mind after watching a repeated QED documentary called Simon's War. In an unpretentious way, it showed the horrors of legalised violence better than many a more politically-motivated documentary might have done. It was the moving story of Simon Weston, a Welsh Guardsman on board the Sir Galahad when it was hit. Forty-six men died, but Simon lived — in a sense. He was not one of the forty-six whom the government (and the loyal Opposition) need have on their consciences. He survived with 46 per cent burns to his body — mainly on his face and hands injuries described as "minor" by the Ministry of Defence when breaking the news to his parents.

The opening-shots showed the patriotic parade of whipped-up lunacy which preceded the pain — flags waving, wives crying, children bewildered. and bands playing. And then off they went to perform their violent duty to the tune of the national anthem. Next scene: the dead and dying being airlifted from the area of slaughter. Cameras beside a stretcher in the military hospital showed the anguish and recorded the screams of pain of the soldier whose injuries they had decided to make a documentary about. The film then followed Simon's struggle to come to terms with the severe physical and emotional injuries which had been inflicted on him. Physically, he has been transformed from a robust, able lad who used to be a good rugby player. Emotionally, he has been stripped of his independence and turned into a hideously deformed person who is frightened of scaring his own nephew. He returns home to Nelson in Wales for a birthday celebration, but is too weak to spend the evening in the social club where he used to be "one of the lads". An old mate comments, after seeing Simon: 'I couldn't say nothing to him. I just felt like throwing up and crying." During the period covered by the programme Simon's girlfriend, who was going to marry him. ceases to be his girlfriend. These are the consequences of war — good old conventional war, remember — which don't always make the columns of the Sun. Towards the end of the programme Simon is seen at a medal-giving parade, standing to attention before the arch-parasites, the Princes Philip and Charles. As they inspect the damage to their subjects there is a voice-over, with Simon summing up his predicament: "It's all part of war really . . . I’m just a working guy who tried to do his job and got injured."

Simon's War should be compulsory viewing for every young worker who is thinking of joining the army. Let them see what it means to survive in a war: let them know what they will be asked to sacrifice in order that a minority may grow richer and stronger; let them hear the cries of pain, which are but echoes of strident nationalist rhetoric. After the Falklands war they called Margaret Thatcher the Iron Lady. But iron doesn't burn; skin does.


Terrace war
In the South Atlantic workers were paid and given medals for behaving like thugs. In Brussels, where the actions of certain so-called football supporters led to thirty-eight deaths, the violence was not ordered by the government and we are therefore expected to be full of condemnation.

Turning on the football only to watch a two-hour riot was a miserable experience. Here were workers wasting their energies in a fool's war between one set of wage slaves and another. The sport experts in the studio, led by Jimmy Hill, became more and more like propagandists for state violence. Hill proposed bringing back national service; the studio team agreed. Terry Venables suggested giving all football hooligans a minimum prison sentence of five years; there was no dissent from his fellow pundits. From the stadium in Brussels, the Ayatollah Bobby Charlton proposed a revival of good old corporal punishment. This is what happens when sports commentators panic and become so frightened by the ugly symptoms of the present system that they have no concern for the cause. The crescendo of repressive propositions coming from the TV set that night showed just how easy it is for fear to give rise to totalitarian solutions. And television allows the cultivation of such collective hysteria to be even more controlled by the state than it was in Europe in the 1930s.


Commodity-talk
Millions of people have been trained to think about what they buy through advertising slogans. They go into the grocer for a packet of "exceedingly good cakes" and some "prolongs active life" for the dog; in the sweet shop they pick up a "helps you work, rest and play" bar and perhaps "Just one Cornetto" — to the approved tune, of course; then on to the travel agent to book two weeks in Benidorm with "Well take more care of you"; down to the garage to pick up the "Vorsprung durch Technik" and fill it up with a few gallons of the petrol which "you can be sure of". It is hardly surprising that a buying and selling society has taught the consumers to go in for commodity-talk. Think of all the language we'll lose in a world of free access: no more mindless slogans and jolly tunes to persuade us to buy shoddy brand A rather than bargain brand B. In a moneyless society I suppose we will have to learn to survive without the ad-men telling us what we want.

Steve Coleman

Herewego — Where next? (1988)

From the August 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slack schooling and permissive parents?

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

Sir Rhodes Boyson (The Barnet Advertiser, 23 June)

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

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

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

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

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

and in the Primary sector

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

(Times Educational Supplement, 17 June)

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

Booze and belligerence

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

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

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

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

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

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

Network nightmare

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

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

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

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

Madame Medusa

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

Tracey Chapman, from her namesake album, 1988.

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

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

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

Gary Jay

Fair game? (1983)

From the October 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

The current football season got off to its traditional start with rampaging "fans” whose activities attracted almost as much space in the press as the actual events on the field. The Observer (28 August 1983) reported one early clash: "The Birmingham fans were staking an early claim for the annual first-day-mindlessness-over- matter award”.

The beginnings were rather different. Football has developed from an informal, local, mass team game in feudal times to a nationally organised sport, with a sophisticated bureaucracy and a financial structure of its own. with armies of officials, players and spectators. In its organised form the game emerged as an acceptable type of violence. From being considered disorderly, even subversive, it came to be thought of as encouraging manliness and gentlemanly virtues. The game's purpose became the formation of character — preparation for the game of life. Many clergymen, influenced by their own public school education, introduced football to the young men in their parishes. They hoped that such a team game would influence working people into becoming “decent”, law-abiding citizens — a satisfactory result for the master class. Along with better physical health, footballers would develop the vagaries of character necessary to the protestant work ethic.

This season could well be make or break for many league clubs. Wage bills have been reduced by drastically cutting playing staffs, forcing many footballers onto the dole and bringing home to them that their type of work is not as glamorous as it might once, in the days when they dreamed of being a First Division hero, have seemed. The struggle for survival is worsened by a conflict between the Football Association, the administration of the game which still clings to the ideals of amateurism, and the owners of the football clubs who have rather different priorities. The FA have always been reluctant to allow club directors to be paid a wage, or to allow players to wear advertising matter on their shirts. The owners argue that sponsorship is part of the more "businesslike" approach the game needs if it is to survive.

Since the sixties both Labour and Conservative governments have encouraged firms to put their money (and, of course, their advertised names) into football and this growth in commercial sponsorship is the latest challenge to amateur attitudes; the Football League has now become the Canon League. Honest and sporting values have to be sacrificed by team managers and players for the sake of commercial values. Directors demand not only prestigious clubs but also prosperous ones. This puts the managers in a difficult spot. They know that to make the paying spectators come through the turnstiles their sides must play exciting, which means attacking, football but they also know that this policy is likely to concede goals. Every manager knows about job insecurity, as a succession of them are thrown out by directors who, like the supporters, are interested first in success.

Unscrupulous methods are used by managers conscious of the axe which hangs over them and which will fall if they fail to please the board. On the field defenders, aware that they will be dropped if they are responsible for too many goals against their team, use cynical fouls on opposing strikers. Players are transferred on a market as managers try desperately to reconcile fielding a winning side with the confines of a limited budget. Spectators join in thinking that they are watching "their" team and that their interests arc bound up with it winning. They jeer and harass opposing players who, if they happen to be black, are followed with loud imitations of ape noises.

Why do such large numbers of workers take so passionate an interest in something which has no real effect on their lives? Football is a fantastic escape from the reality of exploitation; it gives spectators a sense of order and continuity which they cannot find in their workplace. If the team is doing well, a supporter may feel that capitalism is not so bad after all; whatever the pressures during the working week there is always Saturday to look forward to. In his book The Sociology of Sport Harry Edwards claims that watching sport serves to: "Reaffirm the established values and beliefs, defining acceptable means and solutions to central problems in the secular realm of everyday societal life".

This squares with the concept of football as a quasi-religion. The game not only provides hooligans with an outlet for their pent-up feelings; it also gives other followers a sense of identity. After willingly handing over the fruits of their labour to the capitalist class during the week, or being a nobody on the dole, the football spectators, like churchgoers, can have a sense of belonging somewhere. They are not simply one of 25,000 people but a City or a West Ham fan. To label the hooligans as "not real fans", who "give the game a bad name", is to misunderstand; if football is in the place of a religion of modern capitalism then they are its priesthood.

In a profit-dominated society the appreciation of sporting skills is overridden by the desire for the dominance of one side, often at whatever cost is necessary, over the other. After their weekly dose of exploitation workers trek along to their holy shrines to give homage to the teams, hoping they will put their opponents to the sword without mercy. Strong words are spouted about violence on the terraces and about unruly youth, with calls for greater punishment but anti-social behaviour has its roots in the basis of capitalism. Sports goods firms cash in on the market with their pennants and scarves which create artificial bonds between the fans and their chosen team. The football priests robe themselves in the colours of their denomination and, if their side wins, can go back to their exploitation with an easier mind.

And that, for capitalism, is justification enough. For this is a social system which weighs everything, including such concepts as sporting behaviour, in the balance sheet and leaves the fans to walk on, walk on, with only hope in their hearts.

Gareth Thomas

Running Commentary: Foul play (1984)

The Running Commentary column from the September 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

Foul play

This month there will be a vast sigh of relief throughout the land. It will affect thousands of small boys ruining their shoes kicking a ball about school playgrounds. It will come to thousands of people whose working week has stretched like a desert before them with no oasis at the end of it. It will be heard by not a few journalists who will be searching their dictionary for cliches to describe goals, fouls, deficient referees . . .

The sigh of relief will mean that the football season has come round again.

In remoter places it may still be possible to find people who think that professional football is a game and who therefore expect it to be conducted on the basis of something called “sportsmanship”. Sportsmanship entails not throwing the ball away from your opponent after you have put it into touch, it means refusing to kick members of the other team when they approach (whether they have the ball or not), it means suppressing the urge to fist away a certain goal if you are on the goal line in the hope that the other side may miss the inevitable penalty . . .

But professional football can have little time for such niceties for there is a lot of money in the . . . we were going to say game but perhaps business is more accurate. Not that many clubs make a profit on the books — it is more often a matter of wealthy capitalists disbursing some of the proceeds of workers' exploitation in prestige ventures and so helping their other enterprises to be more profitable.

The keen competition in football has led to the enormous transfer fees, now commonly at the £1 million mark, and to the unimaginable pressures which this exerts on the footballer who carries the tag of the price they paid for him onto the field before the expectant thousands, each Saturday.

Little wonder that football stadia are now places of such tension, where it is fairly easy to get involved in a fight, where opposing tribes gather to match their chants and their physical prowess and where myths about all these things abound. There is now, as we all know, a thing called football hooliganism — an offence against popular order which has a special flavour, its own presumptions and battlefields, its own vocabulary of combat. It is also an opportunity for frustrated youth to give vent, by adopting certain uniforms like a shaven head and seeking consolation and security as part of the hooligan tribe.

It is all a part of this, that the National Front should find fertile ground on the terraces. For some years now this odious bunch have confessedly carried their propaganda to the young football “fans”, so that racist abuse against coloured players is now a commonplace and racist slogans share walls in some football-devoted areas with those which support the local team.

This is not a pleasant picture but it is real. Capitalism's priority is the making of profit and in that cause, directly and indirectly, all other things are repressed and distorted. Beside the needs of the balance sheet, what we are encouraged to regard as the better elements of human behaviour must take a back seat. “Sportsmanship” (if there is such a thing and if it is anyway valid or desirable) implies a readiness to concede to an opponent, to play by agreed rules even when it would be easy to break them, above all to keep things in perspective. It would be laughable, to suggest to any top soccer club that they treat such things as their first concern.

Capitalism is a competitive system which distorts all it comes into contact with. The noble aspirations of “sport” have no chance in this situation. A society based on majority interests, in which competition will be unknown and even not understood, will take a very different view of such things; what we call sport may not exist in a co-operating humane system.

Meanwhile, the cruel reality of September 1984 sighs its welcome to the new football season and the distractions it offers, like an opiate, to the suffering, frustrated, aimless people.

Order, order!

His unrelenting left-wingery has been responsible for Dennis Skinner’s reputation as the Beast of. rather than the Honourable Member of Parliament for, Bolsover in the County of Derbyshire. Skinner is an undiscriminating enthusiast for almost every protest movement to cross his path; he is quite capable of attending a rally, on some issue or other, uninvited and then to steal the show with a hyperbolically rousing speech. He views Parliament as a place remotely populated by beings unaware of the reality culture of working class poverty (in which he may have a point). No wonder he entertains, or outrages, regular listeners to the broadcast proceedings of Parliament with his ceaseless barrage of quips and jeers. No wonder he managed recently to get himself suspended from the Commons for suggesting that Margaret Thatcher would try to bribe judges into doing as she wants. This was of course a slur on the judges who, when it suits them, insist that they can operate without any interference or protection from MPs. But even worse it was an attack on the integrity of another Member, and while the Commons will stomach all sorts of things — declarations of war, laws to intensify working class exploitation, archaic rituals to celebrate the dominance of the ruling class — they will not endure any suggestion that they are not all unwaveringly honest and dependable.

Skinner's suspension was quickly followed by that of Martin Flannery, another left winger, for making a similar comment. Any excitement at these outrages was muted by the expectation that left wing MPs are bound to get impatient with the established niceties of Parliament — after all they are there to hustle in the revolution — and so will sometimes get themselves thrown out of the place for a while. There are many precedents for this, for example the much-feared Clydesiders who came roaring down to Parliament in the twenties promising to tear capitalism down with their bare order papers: “When we come back," one of them assured the ecstatic crowd seeing them off at St. Enoch's Station, “this station, this railway, will belong to the people".

That kind of verbal excess was all very well; it was another thing entirely when another of the Clydesiders, James Maxton, accused the Conservatives of being murderers. Maxton complained, in a debate in June 1923, that cutting grants to child welfare centres in Scotland would lead to an increase in the death rates among children: "I call it murder ... a cold, callous, deliberate crime in order to save money . . .” As a notably crusty Tory defended the cuts, Maxton and three other Clydesiders were suspended. There was prolonged uproar in the House; Honourable Members, after all, did not expect their complacency to be disturbed so abruptly. Macdonald, the Labour leader, sat pale with anger at the outrage — not at the suspensions nor the protest nor even the cuts which were depriving the needy children but at the misbehaviour of the Clydesiders who were his supporters and who needed to learn how to behave among their betters.

Well, that was over 60 years ago and almost all the Clydesiders are dead now, with little to remember them by apart from their protests. Capitalism has weathered their disruptions, their impatience, their demands. The railways and the stations, like the rest of the means of wealth production and distribution, do not belong to the people.

None of this may impress Skinner or Flannery but it should have an effect on the workers who give them support. There is no point in going to Parliament with a mandate to administer capitalism and then using the place to protest about the effects of the system. Throughout the modern world parliament is the seat of power, where the coercive state machine is controlled. If workers are to bring about the revolution for socialism they must organise democratically for the capture of such places, to change them from agents of their suppression to those of their emancipation.