Running Commentary: Death throes? (1985)

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

Death throes?

As the killings in South Africa continue, the question must be — is this apartheid's last spasm of life?

Prime Minister Botha is faced with a massive problem. On the one hand the system of racial discrimination which his government is pledged to maintain and to develop into the establishment of separate states for blacks and whites is clearly in conflict with the demands of South Africa's expanding capitalist economy. A recent report by a quasi-governmental body condemned apartheid as obsolete and warned of the need for the government to act positively in the matter in the near future. According to some reports. Botha himself is aware that this is true.

This reality is slowly being accepted among even sections of the Afrikaaner population, which is a developing section of the capitalist class, impatient with the obstacles which apartheid must place in the way of profitability. Concessions have already been made and more must follow soon; in particular the government may recognise the need for an authentic negotiator for the Africans.

But the very concession of reforms, such as the recognition of black trade unions, the abolition of the ban on inter-racial marriage and sex and the plans to give South African citizenship to the blacks, can itself be a weakening factor for the government. This is all too obvious to some National Party supporters, who view Botha's attempted appeasement of the protest movement with angry contempt and who may turn their support to even more extreme racist policies in an effort to stem the tide of reform. So Botha is trying to ride a tiger — the ferocious animal of racist bigotry which his party whipped into action in the first place.

The situation now is that, paradoxically, many South African capitalists have political views described as to the "left" of the government. For the South African white workers. this is a time for decisions which their bigotry promises to make extremely painful for them. If or perhaps it should be when the black movement wins, a new sort of reality will emerge which in many ways will be as difficult as the present. There will be yet another rising capitalist state in Africa where the ruling class is dominantly black. The workers, whatever their skin colour, will have exchanged one set of exploiters for another.

Vultures

As if they had not suffered enough already, the survivors of the Manchester airport disaster were immediately subjected to the additional stress of the vulture-like attention of eminent persons such as Prince Charles (trying to prove that the royal family are a useful, caring influence in society); Margaret Thatcher (trying to win. or perhaps recover, some votes); and Manchester's Chief Constable James Anderton (of whom the less said the better).

These migrants were soon followed by another species, also seeking to prey on the victims' distress, as lawyers descended on Manchester and set up shop in the hope of handling claims against the airlines. From Philadelphia came Jim Pearce, countered by Manchester's own Rodger Pannone. Generous Malcolm Mason put an advertisement in a Sheffield newspaper inviting reverse-charge calls from anyone willing to let his New York firm handle their claims for damages. Naturally, the lawyers asserted that they were all acting in the victims' best interests; money, they reason, does not bring back the dead but it does an awful lot to soothe the grief of the bereaved. In the form of commission on a successful law suit, it also injects a healthy blush into a balance sheet.

But these were not the only vultures involved in this tragedy. Holiday charter aircraft are crammed with passengers; if this were not so, the operators say, the business would not be profitable — and the trade is savagely competitive. The extra seats mean narrower aisles in the aircraft, which means a more difficult, slower exit in an emergency.

British Airways (the World's Favourite Airline, say Saatchi and Saatchi) have taken the matter further than this. They have blocked some of the exits on some of their aircraft to make way for more seats. Then there is the matter of the materials used in the seating, which in most cases is little better than deadly in a fire. There is a flame-retardant covering available but this at present costs quite a bit more than the present stuff, which brings the airlines up against the demands of profit again.

Finally, the aircraft themselves are worked to their limits, to schedules designed to extract the maximum of profit from them. Servicing intervals must be crammed into these demands. Even after the disaster at Manchester, a representative of the Federal Aviation Administration announced that checks on the suspect engines would have to . . coincide with airline maintenance and flying schedules".

It might be some consolation to the people who died in the fire, and to their families and friends, to know that they died to keep a schedule, to protect the profits of the airlines and the holiday operators. The drive for profit allows no peace for human beings, alive or dead.

On the rampage

It is by now an established routine that after each inner-city riot, such as that last month in Handsworth, the experts run amok brandishing their theories, explanations and remedies.

Some Labour politicians attribute the riots to the effects of unemployment and therefore, by implication, to Thatcher's policies. The left wing put the blame onto heavy-handed police techniques and argue that the remedy is a democratically accountable police force, ignoring the fact that the police are already accountable to the class whose interests they exist to protect — the capitalists.

Blacks are certain that it is all caused by racial discrimination and offer the policy of "smashing" racism, which usually means substituting one type of repression for another, with little to choose between them. The police — and most Tories — insist that the riots are matters of simple criminality, of the perverse drive of a minority to disrupt what is called civilised life. Their remedy, pronounced with varying degrees of ghoulish thrill, is harsher punishment and more of it.

All of these are agreed on one thing. There must be An Enquiry To Get To The Bottom Of It. When the Enquiry has reported and all the experts have read the report we shall be able to re-organise things so that it never happens again.

It is all as if history never happened, as if Handsworth has not already suffered a riot, as if St. Pauls, Brixton, Toxteth are places where peace has reigned undisturbed. Is it really necessary to go through all this agony, just to get a visit from a cabinet minister and the promise of a few new buildings, a few square yards of grassland, a few trees planted?

The flaw which is shared by all the arguments of the "experts" is that they are based on a superficial view of society and its problems. All of them presume that a social system based on the class ownership of the means of life is logical, efficient and pretty well eternal. This might be all very well except that this system must throw up social ailments which will come to some very nasty crises.

Capitalism separates the majority of people from access to the means of life except as employees, workers for a wage. It denies them access to wealth except as buyers; however much we need it we can't get hold of anything without in some way paying for it.

One result of this is that the majority of people are in a state of alienation — from their employment, from their environment, from their human prospects. This alienation is at its most acute where poverty is deepest, in the grimmer places of working-class life such as inner city areas whose grime, slums and apathy are material expressions of frustration.

Capitalism cannot be a society of harmony.

Blogger's Note:

The November 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard carried an article by Ron Cook on the recent riots in Handsworth and, also, his memories of growing up in Handsworth in the 1930s.

Mayhem in Middlesbrough (2026)

From the October 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent horrifying car crash on the A66, which took seven lives, has shone a light on the community in Middlesbrough and its conditions. Five young men and boys and two police officers lost their lives, when the young men – in a car with cloned plates – tried to avoid police pursuit by going the wrong way on a dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. The two officers had not been involved in the chase, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After the smash, it became clear that wider criminality had been involved, with the police swooping down and arresting 12 people on various organised-crime charges. Another car had been rammed into the house of the father one of the boys, and there is a suggestion that they took to the roads in response to this.

The immediate response was one of outpouring of sympathy for the dead officers. A suggestion by local MP, Anna Turley, that all of the victims be remembered was met with politicised rage. The right-wing hate machine of X (formerly Twitter) began by making suggestions that the five were from a traveller community, then quickly pivoted to calling them underclass scum when it turned out that they did not belong to any ethnic minority.

Instead, calls for the police or the army to be sent in to sort them out and remove them from the community became the agreed line (the machinery of social media bots and trolls is a swarm learning system that tries various tacks until if finds something that works and gets traction and responses). This line then fed into the response to the families of the five beginning to commemorate their loss. They held ‘balloon releases’ to remember their lost loved ones. The fact that the grieving families were themselves innocent of killing the policemen was lost in the vituperation of those who demanded a form of damnatio memoriae for the five.

When their funerals were held, the case became a national controversy, as local schools closed because of the perceived risks to the children from the disruption they may cause. Young men on quadbikes and motorbikes formed part of the funeral corteges. At one of the funerals, a sort of Viking send off of burnt stolen cars was arranged. Some of the friends of the five maintained that the police had killed them.

In the 1990s, it was commonplace to find burnt out cars on school playing fields in Middlesbrough. The twockers, as they were called, sometimes avoided charges of theft by giving back the cars they ‘took without owners consent’ (the origin of the word twoc). Burning them destroyed the evidence of who had taken the car for a joyride. Any large carpark around Teesside could become a venue for handbreak turns and reckless driving. The young men who did that then are the spiritual (if not biological) fathers of those who died on the A66.

Middlesbrough is a community in visible decline. Linthorpe Road, once an arterial row of useful shops has become a long stretch of fast-food outlets: the larger department stores have closed down. The industries upon which the area was built – steel and shipbuilding – have disappeared. Whilst it retains a lot of brownfield space recovered from its industrial past, which is useful for building new industries, any new activities are far from labour-intensive.

It is a feature of the wages system that whilst some are subjected to arduous toil, others, necessarily, are condemned to idleness. A reserve army of labour is required for several reasons. The reserve provides recruits to work when necessary and holds down wages. The threat of being thrown on the scrapheap serves as a visible reminder of what can happen to anyone who challenges the rule of capital. It can also serve as a source of political shock troops.

The more enterprising and energetic of the long-term unemployed can show an entrepreneurial flair by turning to crime, and finding means of getting hold of money that doesn’t involve themselves becoming employees. There is a plausible case that the young men in the car had themselves been ‘groomed’ into criminality. We’re a long way from getting to the bottom of what exactly happened.

The knock-on effects of long-term decline are a spiral of lack of incentive to educate or get educated, much less to try and integrate into a society that seems hell-bent on controlling people it sees more as a problem than as fellow citizens. It’s not a wonder that many of the young men see the police as a hostile force. The neglect begins early, and the children’s services on Teesside are overstretched and dealing with multi-generational neglect.

It shouldn’t be overlooked that there was serious anti-immigrant rioting in Middlesbrough, and there will be an overlap between that and the current wave of disorder. The people without access to the high-skilled jobs market, left behind by the current system and in an insular community, will have been easily incited to campaign about in-comers.

The objective effect of last year’s disorder and that around the funerals will be as if there has been a form of collective bargaining by riot, the public authorities will try to buy social peace, while at the same time putting more resources into policing. Far-right opposition will rail against giving anything to those who cannot even be seen to be useful to the labour market ‘surplus population’, while there is little prospect of attracting any new industry that could absorb (or make it worth training) the available labour pool.

Technological advances on a global scale means that an area built on mass industry has had to reassess its identity and the way in which it organises itself. Instead of writing off whole areas and the individuals within it, we can end the wages system and enable free co-operation instead of idleness characterised by police and criminal organisations.

Pik Smeet

 

 

Blogger's Note: 

Readers might be interested in the Socialist Standard article, Dreaming spires and screaming tyres, by Iain Jamieson, that dates from December 1991, which touches upon some of the same issues raised in Pik Smeet's article.

More Satanic Verses (1995)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the September 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hell is Camden Town as the sunsets. Drunks stagger towards gutters which are home; the children of the hypodermic needle inject some bought and deadly fake happiness; the old ones who chatter to themselves speak of “bastards” who tried to push them off the bus and bomb shelters where the roof leaked; the girls on the game pursue what only something as monstrous as capitalism could boast of as the “oldest profession”, selling submission for the price of fast-food; a man with a metal stick limps nowhere in particular and curses blacks, as if they all made him lame; a Dickensian figure whose arse is literally hanging out of his trousers sings “There’ll Always Be An England” and holds out his dirt-caked hand for pennies that will not come; kids lie in doorways in sleeping bags which should be used for jolly camping trips, but are now the substitute for home for thousands in a country which has more empty houses than homeless people; and the police shoot past in cars with Nazi-like sirens, now to collect their kebab and then to intervene in a fight between two wage slaves who enjoyed their evening’s release from misery so much that they tried to kick each other’s brains out over a penalty decision in a football match.

Graffiti on the wall says “Wogs Out”, “Cath Loves Jason”, (who is probably the Jason who will always be separated by a thick glass TV screen) and “Don’t Pay The Poll Tax” (as if the Council Tax is somehow' a merciful release from oppression). Now here is it scrawled “Dante Woz Here”, but it feels like there could not have been a much better inspiration for his vision of Hell than the streets which we have become used to. Perhaps that is the one thing worse then eternal damnation: not knowing that you’re in hell.

Camden Town is not unique. It just happens that this writer is there frequently, witnessing the destitution of the people of this late-twentieth-century abyss and the impossibility to pass by without the inner sense of wanting to vomit, as if the malignant sore was within rather than all around. Visiting Easterhouse in Glasgow or Handsworth in Birmingham or Toxteth in Liverpool or St Pauls in Bristol or the South Bronx of New York the same gaping pits of urban hell scream out, echoing in their impotent rage the high boasts of the market which will provide life for anyone at a price—and will strip you layer-by-layer of living dignity if you are short of the price.

The hell which was Auschwitz or Dachau is the most pregnant image of brutality available to our modern senses. Nothing compares with the total awfulness of systematic, industrial genocide. Visiting Dachau, the overwhelming memory is not the gas chambers or the starkly sadistic regulations on the wall or the infertile land all around the camp where plant life simply will not grow; it is the hill overlooking Dachau camp where houses stand and stood as workers were being tortured and exterminated. Somebody was looking on. Perhaps they walked the dog or told the children not to run too close to the wire. Maybe they too just vomited within, refusing to lift a finger because it was someone else confined to hell for now .

But the most moving scenes from the camps—for this writer at least—were the photographs of liberation. We do not know what those who survived were thinking. But we know what they were entitled historically to think: Why, oh why, did you not come sooner?

Be clear, this is not about saving other people—although wishing to unlock the doors of hell is no act to be ashamed of. But the platitudes of moralising salvation can be left to others who make a business from it, sitting in their golden Vatican palace and archbishops' mansions weeping crocodile tears for the poor “who will always be with us” as Christ was so eager to remind us.

Why abolish hell on earth? Because it is near me and its stink can't be avoided. Because its flames are unpredictable and catch passers-by who imagined they were safe. Because most people reading this are only an insecure job and a few pounds in the bank away from the gutter. Because Dickens, when his family lost its money, was confined to the hell of Camden Town and after a century of energetic reforming the ragged wretches of its streets would still be recognised by him. Perhaps because it is impossible to be a complete human while others are being dehumanised before us. To live on the hill overlooking the death camp of our own times—which we don’t call death camps because only the future recognises the indifference to such miseries which are so conveniently and euphemistically hidden from the moment of the present tense—is to be a collaborator in something so awful that one must either ignore it or destroy it, putting in its place something which seems decent.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Life’s a riot (2001)

Editorial from the August 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the summers of 1981 and 1985 inner-city areas across Britain erupted in an orgy of violence and destruction as mass rioting returned for the first time in decades. In St Paul’s in Bristol, in Brixton, Toxteth, Moss Side and Handsworth, dispossessed and frustrated black and white youths looted shops, attacked the police and burnt down buildings in a sequence of events that shook the Thatcher government. Home Secretary William Whitelaw toured the battle-strewn streets like the Queen Mother during the blitz, only even less popular than she’d been. Michael Heseltine was despatched by Thatcher to Liverpool (when the two of them were still on speaking terms) to sort out a regeneration package for the city and for the riot-torn Upper Parliament Street area. It was a mini-renunciation of her free-market idealism – and was brought about by the sort of pragmatic attempt to buy off social discontent more typically associated with reformers of the centre-left.

The far left at the time – somewhat stronger in those days and certainly taken more seriously than now – liked to call the riots ‘uprisings’. It was wishful thinking of the type they are specialists in, as the disturbances in question did not have quite that sort of focussed, political dimension to them. They were in fact the directionless expression of frustration and bewilderment at rising mass unemployment, inner-city poverty and the type of crushing boredom associated with social decay rather than the stirrings of a potential revolutionary vanguard.

Fifteen, twenty years later, and the riots are back. In truth, of course, they never entirely went away. As violent crime has risen so has serious disorder in towns and cities across Britain. What is most noticeable about the most recent spate of riots though is the numbers of youths involved and the magnitude of the destruction caused. It is the sheer scale of events in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and elsewhere that immediately leads to direct comparisons with the riots of the eighties.

There is another obvious comparison with the riots of the past too: “race”. In 1981 and 1985 the majority of those taking part in the disturbances were black youths from inner-city areas with large black populations. The rioters were not first generation blacks, but second and third generation, born and brought up in the UK but even more powerless and disenfranchised from mainstream social, economic and political life than the bulk of the rest of the working class. Theirs was a rebellion against the police who harassed and intimidated them and implicitly against a culture that still insisted on seeing them as outsiders.

This time around the rioters have been second and third generation UK Asians feeling the same sort of social exclusion and powerlessness felt by black youths in Britain before them and typically residing in some of the most deprived council wards in the country. Their rebelliousness has been given an added dimension by the intimidating presence of fascist and racist organisations – particularly the British National Party – in towns and cities where they are most heavily concentrated. If there was relatively little involvement by far-right groups in the riots of twenty years ago, the same could certainly not be said this time, with the provocative and violent activities of fascist gangs being the catalyst for some of the most serious events, most notably in Burnley and Bradford.

In Burnley it was alleged by elements of the white working class that Asian areas in the town had received preferential treatment from the local council and other agencies responsible for handing out regeneration monies. In Bradford local white youths complained that Asians were treated with “kid gloves” by the police, for fear the police be labelled as racists.

Viewpoints such as these are rarely the product of genuinely held grievances. Asians in Burnley live in the same type of slums by and large as many white workers do in the town; and in Bradford claims of harassment by the police are far more likely to be made by Asian youths than white youths. Instead, these ideas are in essence the product of a situation where the existing poor fear being made even poorer through the close presence of even more of their number. If the ‘new poor’ in question have a different colour, different religion and different culture from the majority, the suspicion and distrust is all the easier to justify.

One thing is certain: whatever the precise causes, the rioting that has been taking place is unlikely to get either the Asian or white youths involved very far (unless a police cell for the night is the extent of their ambitions). If New Labour do what Thatcher did and throw a little money in the direction of the affected areas as a token gesture, that will be something (as it was in Liverpool); but the laws of the market dictate that just as one hand gives so the other takes away – probably in the form of lost investment and business shut downs (again as happened in Liverpool).

Tony Benn has said that rioting is the oldest form of social protest and in that he may well be right. But there is no point in white and Asian youths protesting about the other’s allegedly preferential treatment and conducting running battles in front of the TV crews each evening. Any meaningful action has to be democratic and organised and based on the recognition that white and Asian youths have far more in common than they have that divides them. They would both do well to recognise that as the poor and excluded they are kept poor because the rich are rich. For it is only then that they can formulate actions based on where there interests truthfully lie – and in fundamental opposition to those who have really gained from keeping them in their subject, inferior position all along.

Between the Lines: Primitive . . . (1989)

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

Primitive . . .

Marx wrote about the increasing misery of the working class. By this he did not mean, as some who have tried to refute him have suggested, that wages would fall lower and lower, material conditions ever more harsh. Marx was right: the quality of living under capitalism becomes ever-more impoverished.

Country File (C4) provides a pleasant diversion on the bleakest of urban Sunday lunchtimes. It has features on farming and conservation and the world of animals: it reminds the viewer that, stuck with the noise and dirt of an artificial city, there is an environment beyond which is richer in what is natural and more in harmony with the senses. On 8 January it had a report about a growing social problem: rural violence committed by young frustrated workers in small country towns and villages — the children of the land whose daddies do not own the fields and whose futures are in the cities, where there is more chance of jobs. Others involved in recent acts of rural criminality are farm labourers whose jobs have been made more tedious by mechanisation and who are often paid below-poverty wages for making landowners rich. A police officer from Avon and Somerset spoke of how Saturday-night gangs were terrorising villages and vandalising beauty spots. There have even been reports in the press of the senseless slaughter of farm animals for fun.

No doubt there were irritated viewers in Devon or Yorkshire who switched on expecting to see how big turnips can be and how green fields can look in the right light. Such people would do well to ponder that life is becoming increasingly empty for vast numbers of young workers, squashed as they are between the obscenities of the bomb and the social mind of a world which is civilised only to degree that it offers hope when there is a likely profit attached.

The following evening World In Action (ITV, 8.30 pm) reported the results of a nationwide survey which revealed that women were more afraid of violent assault in the streets than death from cancer, being killed on the roads or nuclear war. Ninety per cent feared being attacked if they went out at night. Sixty-seven per cent said that they never go out at night alone. What an indictment of a so-called civilised society it is that the majority of women — the majority of the population — are too frightened to go out alone in the evening. This is the social-pay-off of the competitive society. The streets become a jungle where anyone with money, however old, frightened or disabled, is prey to the muggers. Women workers are right to be scared. Street assaults are frequent: more dangerous weapons are now used by the muggers (in imitation of our rulers who also like to sophisticate their murder instruments regularly); and most of us live in badly lit environments, which assist the fast-money attackers. The thief thieves because it is an easy way to make money. Ethics do not enter into it; he is a reflection of the economic motives of the more successful robbers in the City, whose activities are strictly legal.

It is not just that women are likely to be attacked, but that they feel threatened. Every walk in the dark streets feels like preparation for an attack. Young men are eight times more likely to be mugged than women, but this is a deceptive statistic: women are less likely to be mugged because so many are forced to seek refuge in their homes every night. They are under curfew. There is no way that a society which scares its inhabitants to that extent can ever be worthy of the description of “civilisation". The simple-minded blame the muggers, as if knife-carrying kids have chosen such a way of life as an alternative to the gentlemen's club. Socialists blame the profit system.

. . . and civilised

The same people that the profit system twists into muggers could, in different material circumstances, behave like the people of the Baka tribe, shown in three programmes by Channel Four called Baka — People Of The Rainforest. Modern society sneers at such primitive social relationships. The programmes allowed us to glimpse into the moneyless, wageless, stateless world of one of the few extant pre-property societies. Of course, the Baka are productively unsophisticated and have to work harder than they would need to do had they access to labour-saving technology. They are still innocently religious, regarding Nature as something above them and largely beyond control. It would be foolishly romantic — although very tempting — to depict primitive communism as The Way We Should Live. But what if we took all of the machinery of production which exists in modern Britain (where women are afraid to walk city streets and rural areas are echoing to the sound of furious working-class frustration) and combined it with the human relations of classless equality which characterise primitive communities? That is the prospect which world socialism holds before us now. We could have a society where people co-operate to produce the best that there can be to satisfy the needs of all; instead we have a society shown to us in a documentary by Clive James called Postcard From Chicago (11 January, BBC1, 9.30 pm) in which we were introduced to the gangs which inhabit the city's slum areas. These gangs — The People and The Folk — do not merely shout abuse at each other. They shoot — to kill.

Gang warfare, born of urban poverty, is a game that ends in murder. Often the killers and killed are in their mid-teens. Now. James is one of those "witty" types who likes to enchant the half-witted with empty aphorisms. It's seductive viewing, but a lot of tripe is squeezed into the maxims. For example, in watching workers making hamburgers in Chicago (note: you will always see James watching people work) he stated that “Marx had it all wrong”. There is no alienation; these descendants of Polish immigrants feel close to their work and are grateful to be close to food — unlike in Poland where they would have to queue for it. This self-evident rubbish is supposed to pass for serious social commentary. By the same reasoning. Rolls Royce car producers are not alienated from the luxury cars they produce — even though they may travel home from work in a second-hand Cortina. Clive James is, in fact, a virulent anti-socialist. That he is witty and entertaining makes him an all the more potent one.

Is Britain free?

Panorama (BBC1, 9.25 pm. 9 January) was all about the diminishing freedom which many of us perceive in Britain at the moment. The government, in the name of freedom, has made numerous moves to curtail trade union and civil freedoms which workers fought hard to win. But even without the much-discussed Thatcherite assault, a society without free access to goods and services can never be free. That conception of freedom was not once mentioned in the programme. It is as if the fullest extent of “freedom" can only ever mean a loosening of the chains. I fell asleep after ten minutes of the great debate about whether Britain is unfree, woke up to see Willie Whitelaw sounding silly and switched over to Minder (ITV), where one can see a far more vivid picture of phoney freedom and increasing misery under the capitalist social system.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

For some reason the February 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard misnamed 'Baka — People Of The Rainforest' as 'Baka — Children Of The Rain Forest'. I'm not sure what happened there. In 2012 the writer/director of the original documentary, Phil Agland, wrote and directed a follow up documentary entitled, 'Baka: A Cry from the Rainforest'. It can be viewed at the following link.

Between the Lines: Our people (1987)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Our people

It's good to see television which shows what life is like for us working people. Not Coronation Street dummy workers, but real workers talking for themselves about real life. Such TV is all too rare, but Yorkshire TV's On The Manor (Monday. 3 August. 8.30 pm. ITV) showed how to do it. The documentary was about The Manor estate, a mile and a half from Sheffield city centre. Sixty per cent of the estate's inhabitants are below the official poverty line; 75 per cent have no car; only one per cent "own" their homes. The programme showed (with the use of excerpts from a government propaganda film made in the 1940s, claiming that towns belonged to the people and would be developed to make life happier for them) that all that has really happened with the building of new council estates has been the replacement of new slums for old. As Barry Pennington, who lives on the estate, said. The Manor is a prison of poverty: people can’t escape because they lack the money to do so.

Inhabitants of the estate make weekly visits to an open-air market where second-hand clothes and shoes can be bought: three blouses for a pound. Ann Matthews from the estate defined poverty as "people not looking their best, not living in the best conditions". She is right. The poverty of life for the workers shown in this documentary, just like thousands of workers in other towns and cities, is a deprivation not only of what people need in order to survive without extreme suffering, but a denial of access to the extreme comfort which all of us could enjoy. On The Manor workers have boosted their confidence by forming a tenants' association and learning to resist those who supervise their poverty. Such resistance is necessary and educative but it is not going to break down the walls of the prison of poverty. Only the struggle for a socialist society will succeed in doing that.

Naughty people

Capitalism, the most ethically bankrupt and socially obscene system of living in the history of humanity, loves to depict itself as a moral society. The Cook Report (Wednesdays. 8.30pm BBC1) is all about showing that crime does not pay — or that, when it does, the criminals will not escape the public gaze. The idea of the programme — which is very compelling viewing — is that the fearless reporter, Roger Cook, accompanied by a camera team, confronts wrong-doers and urges them to bare their wicked souls to the honest viewers. One week he was on the Costa del Sol in Spain being hit by umbrellas owned by dodgy East End characters wanted by the police in Britain; the next he was exposing the sick traders in child pornography. It is all righteous stuff and perhaps it even puts some fear into people who have put fear into others. But — and this is the but which makes The Cook Report an essentially superficial and phoney exercise — Cook's exposes are only of those who have illegally exploited, molested or lied to others. The legalised criminals are not up for exposure.

When is Roger Cook going to do a programme in the offices of M15. asking them a few of the questions which our masters seem to be rather touchy about us wanting to think about? But then, MI5 vets all employees for the BBC, doesn't it? What about going into the churches to look at some of the corruption there? Cook may well derive some satisfaction from exposing the child-pom producers (who are usually seriously disturbed people and certainly small-fry when it comes to child molestation) but there would be plenty of mileage in an expose on the routine repression of children by the education system. Following East End gangsters to Spain made exciting viewing, especially when one of them punched Cook straight in the gob but when are we to see the next programme on the robbers who have become Stock Exchange millionaires by paying workers less than the value of what we produce? When is Cook going to stop picking at the scabs and start shining the light on the cancer itself? Now maybe some good investigative journalist could infiltrate The Cook Report Office and show us just how stories are chosen to be followed up — and how they’re dropped.

Trendy people

This column has in the past complained about the patronising nature of the presentation of rock music on TV. Well, it's only of interest to proles, and young ones at that — probably uneducated and unemployed — so we'll make it pretty basic, say the producers. Of later matters have become worse; Network 7, the new Channel 4 programme for the 18-25 market, seems to be directed at viewers with serious brain damage. Features on why Tony Blackburn fell in love with his wife and why Tony Blackburn divorced his wife and other issues of profound importance to people inhabiting a world which could go up in smoke at any time is insulting drivel. Trendy, illiterate, artistically uncouth, socially shallow rubbish like Network 7 and No Limits are a reflection of the cultural degeneration of a system which was fit for the dustbin of history long before the kids watching these programmes were born.

Steve Coleman

Cry from the Bronx (1987)

TV Review from the September 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Watching The Bronx: A Cry For Help (C4. 27 July) you could be forgiven for thinking you were seeing bombed cities during world war two. We were shown a landscape of rubble and rubbish; we were told of rats the size of cats, the lack of basic amenities like water and heating, the high rents and landlords who would do nothing for their tenants; and we were told of the spread of poverty from a few streets to many.

Meanwhile what were the politicians doing about the conditions in the South Bronx? Making promises of course! Jimmy Carter promised 56 million dollars in aid. It did not materialise. Ronald Reagan told the people of South Bronx that he could not do anything unless elected as president. He was elected but did nothing. In fact doing nothing seemed like a deliberate policy: a New York City official hoped that the people would move away so that the whole area could be bulldozed. The capitalist system runs for the minority and if you're poor you're meant to be thankful for what you've got — even if it's akin to a bomb site.

The Bronx: A Cry For Help showed a side of the "Land of the Free" that is seldom seen — the degrading poverty that exists alongside the extreme wealth of the few.

Brendan Cummings

Little John has a major idea (1993)

From the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

The good news is that John Major (a British Prime Minister) has at long last come up with a big idea. The bad news is that it is an extremely stupid idea.

In the course of capitalist history the attempt to explain why some people behave anti-socially has given rise to more than a few barmy theories. For the early Christians, undisturbed by any scientific thoughts, the explanation was simple: God made all men (for which include women) sinners. We were born to be anti-social. Only those who repented by conforming to the Church and the property morality it propounded would be saved. Hundreds of years ago the churches ran the prisons; the Inquisition was not characterised by the New Testament injunction to “turn the other cheek”.

As theology became increasingly discredited in the light of science, the rise of pseudo-biological explanations of anti-social behaviour emerged. To the Social Darwinists it was all clear: human violence was part and parcel of the beast-like struggle for survival to which humans were biologically destined.

Pseudo-science

At the end of the last century the biological blind alley of Social Darwinism laid the path for an equally diversionary side-road: the new pseudo-science of criminology. Cesare Lombroso, the father of this bogus science, attempted to explain how it was that some people were criminals and others not. It was all very simple: criminality was a consequence of physiological make-up. As Lombroso put it:

  The criminal by nature has a feeble cranial capacity, a heavy and developed jaw. projecting eye ridges, an abnormal and asymmetrical cranium . . . projecting ears, frequently a crooked or flat nose . . . Their moral degeneration corresponds with their physical, . . . The criminal by nature is lazy, debauched, cowardly, not susceptible to remorse, without foresight . . . his hand-writing is peculiar . . . his slang is widely diffused . . . The general persistence of an inferior race type.

In the USA pseudo-scientists are still at it. For example, at the time of the LA riots a number of commentators turned to the nonsensical book, Violence and the Brain, written by two “professors" called Mark and Erwin and arguing that rioters are people with dysfunctional brains. (Funny that Reagan and Quayle never made it to the riot, isn’t it?) Another book, by Wilson and Herrnstein called Crime and Human Nature, argues that criminal tendencies are in people’s genes. In short, certain babies are born to be criminals. This leads one to wonder why the police do not use their resources more efficiently by targeting maternity wards and arresting the genetic criminals at birth, thus achieving a maximum crime clear-up rate before the crimes are even committed!

If you think that these ideas are crazy there is a simple reason for it: they are crazy. They are the ridiculous inventions of desperate ideologists who have to explain why it is that property society, with all its alleged advantages for human growth, gives rise to so much violence, disorder and frustrated spite. The fact that over 90 percent of crimes are property-related is embarrassing to a society which pretends that anyone can live well if they try. The truth is that millions of people try very hard and get nowhere; some of them turn to illegal robbery to make money (as opposed to legalised robbery, to obtain profits) or violent acts to give vent to their misery and frustration.

Stupid idea

On the subject of frustration, it is now time to return to the little matter of John Major’s idea. Since his accidental elevation in 1990 Little John has lived in the shadow of the mad priestess of Big Ideas: Margaret Thatcher. Nobody could accuse her of having any lack of big, big ideas. Like Hitler, Stalin and the authors of the Bible, she was full of them—the barmier the better. Thatcher was always opening her mouth and making news. Not so Little John. To most people he is just a wimp and an idiot. And not liking to be seen for what he is. he decided to make a speech which would say something Big.

On 3 February this year Major addressed the Tory Carlton Club. He was on home turf so could be sure of at least polite applause. He decided to speak about the problem of inner-city crime. (A few of the Club members nearly had heart attacks when they thought they heard that he was going to talk about crime in the City—now. there's a subject for a big speech!).

Now, Little John was not taken in by all this talk about born sinners, feeble cranial capacities or criminal genes. These are outdated stupid ideas. So John Major came up with a brand new stupid idea. And the next day it made it on to the top headline of the Independent:

PM BLAMES


SOCIALISM FOR


CRIME

Now that is what you call a really stupid big idea. Here is the key paragraph from the speech:

  Socialism must face up to its failures. It must recognise the harsh truth that it is where, over many years, the state has intervened most heavily, that local communities have been most effectively destroyed.

To begin with, socialism has never been tried, let alone failed. We challenge John Major or his supporters to tell us where common ownership, democratic control or production solely for use has ever existed.

But we expect half-witted Tories not to know what socialism means. More interesting is Major’s assertion that inner-city crime is caused by there being too much state interference. This comes from the head of a government which has expanded the police, put more people into prisons than any other western European country and is currently planning to interfere with the unemployed by making conscript labourers of them. Own goal. John.

Going from bad to worse, Major then proceeded to deny that there is a causal relationship between poverty and crime. It is mere coincidence, we must assume, that so few street muggings are committed by gangs of millionaires. (They are free to do their mugging legitimately.) Alas, Little John has not read the Home Office research document published in 1991 by the civil servants of his own government. It stated that property-related crimes increased in relation to economic hard times. The number of burglaries in Britain went up during the recession of the early 1980s, down during the 1987-8 boom and up again with the slump of the 1990s.

Furthermore, the Independent reported last 13 October that the government was giving careful consideration to its public expenditure cuts for fear that too many cuts will result in an increase in violent crime. So, it seems that Little John is acting on the basis of an explanation of the cause of crime which he now claims not to believe in.

We look forward to the emergence of the next Major Big Idea. What will it be: “PM SAYS THAT O-LEVELS ARE BAD FOR THE INTELLECT?" or “MAJOR PROPOSES NEW DISNEYWORLD ON BEAUTIFUL SHETLAND COASTLINE?"

Steve Coleman

This is life? (2016)

Book Review from the June 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

'This Is London: Life and Death in the World City'. By Ben Judah, Picador. 2016.

This is a sad, insightful and ultimately haunting insider account of life in London by a writer who can really write. It is a picture of what life is truly like for hundreds of thousands of London’s current inhabitants by someone determined to identify their struggles and recount their lives – people who most of us know are there, but perhaps never quite get to know. The Romanian beggars working for gangs to pay off their debts in the subways under Hyde Park Corner, the Mayfair Arab princess out of her mind on skunk most days because her every move is controlled by her father (even remotely via his security team), the itinerant Polish builders of Beckton creating the ‘dig down’ basement flats for the rich in Knightsbridge, the East European and Latin American street walkers of Ilford Lane, ever fearful of the next attack from a punter.

Judah’s opening lines tell us his motivation: ‘I have to see everything for myself. I don’t trust statistics. I don’t trust columnists. I don’t trust self-appointed spokesmen. I have to make up my own mind. This is why I am shivering again, in Victoria Coach station, at 6 am.’

By spending months trying to uncover the ‘other side’ of London to the one the tourists see, he has managed to create a fascinating and compelling book based on his experiences of the street. The facts are clear – as few as 45 percent of Londoners now are ‘white British’ and over a third have been born abroad. But this is not a UKIP manifesto in disguise, it is book that focuses on the lives of real people who are now more genuinely representative of those scraping a living in ‘the world city’ than the occupants of the glossy colour supplements and property magazines. These are the 95 percent of cleaners working for Transport for London who are immigrants, doing the job that others won’t do or can’t. The occupants of Zones 3 and 4 who have been pushed by the global elite out of central London – the traditional first home to UK immigrants – into what were once mainly white working class suburbs full of semis and terraces. This is where multi-occupancy now reigns courtesy of buy-to-let landlords, and life is precarious and often dangerous – the Edmontons and Leytons of this world, the Harlesdens and Neasdens. This is the world of pounds shops, ‘cash converters’, mobile phone un-locking, and pubs now converted into African churches, of betting shops, and fried chicken and kebabs.

You will have sensed this not an uplifting read. Some of the laziest racism, for instance, is to be found among poor, black evangelical Christians in Peckham, ever suspicious of the Asian shopkeepers they think fleece them at every turn. And when you have nothing, materialism and competition can be brutish enough and a descent to drink, drugs and desperate gambling close around the corner.

It is partly because of situations like this that socialists are socialists – not because of some abstract moral pity for those less fortunate, but because the society we live in is based on the need to keep us insecure and fearful, with a descent into the ‘underclass’ or ‘precariat’ all too vivid a misfortune for those who struggle every day in the grandly- named ‘market economy’.

Dave Perrin

Ice Cream Man Cometh (1985)

From the January 1985 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the night of April 16 last, petrol was poured through the letterbox of a top floor flat in Glasgow and then set on fire. The Doyle family was trapped in the blaze and six of its members, aged between 18 months and 50 years, died. Summing up at the end of what became Scotland's worst multiple murder trial, the judge provided the convenient scapegoat for the horrific incident: "No decent person could be other than appalled by such dastardly deeds. Those who set fire to the flat were wicked, depraved. inhuman and evil" (Scotsman, 9 October 1984).

But were these men just wanting to kill without reason? Evidently not, as they had had plenty of opportunities to do so simply with a shotgun and, according to one of the two men accused, the fire was only meant as "a frightener which went too far" (Scotsman, 20 September 1984). Indeed the court, in its hurry to find someone to blame, ignored the fact that people are not in real control of this competitive system: 

There was nothing wrong with competition during the normal dealings in day-to-day business. But when this developed into some kind of feud between rivals in which criminal offences were committed, it was totally unacceptable. The danger of such a matter is that it can escalate out of all proportion.

(Sheriff at Glasgow Sheriff Court, Scotsman, 3 August 1984.)

To find the real reason we have to look beyond that simplistic excuse "human nature" and examine a more dominant factor in determining the everyday actions of people — their everyday environment. All the time, people find that this society denies them access to food, clothing and housing by such things as cash registers, security guards and rent demands. The main concern for most people therefore is how they get money and how much they get — in the case of the two men convicted, they sold ice cream from a Fifti Ices van.

The events finally leading to the six week trial started in the summer of 1982 in the Cartyne and spread to other housing schemes in Glasgow. According to the Guardian, “Trouble began in Garthamlock when an ice cream van operating under the name of Fifti Ices appeared in September last year. It invaded the patch which a rival ice cream company, Marchetti Brothers, had held as a virtual monopoly for years (11 October 1984). This rivalry soon led to a spate of intimidation and violence, including a shotgun being fired at a 15-year-old salesgirl. However. according to the wife of one of the convicted "the people of Garthamlock wanted another van in the area because the Mar- chetti's was . . . overcharging them" (Scotsman 2 August 1984). The couple hired vans on hire-purchase from Fifti Ices and were able to undercut their rivals by selling stolen cigarettes and other goods. The traders get about 10 per cent of the weekly turnover which would rarely be more than £200. the rest going to the companies. Marchetti Brothers, on the other hand, by leasing all their 37 vans on a week-to-week basis only, also ensure that the traders buy all their stocks from them.

According to the Marchetti Brothers' accountant however, the subsequent loss of business from threats, abuse of customers and the “wedge" achieved by their rivals, had moved the company's profitability out of the black and into the red (Scotsman, 4 September 1984). This was obviously a far more serious situation than a few incidents of violence, so the firm put a third man into the battlefield. The unfortunate new employee — Andrew Doyle — was presumably chosen because, as the Glasgow Herald described him. he was "a young man of massive appearance but quiet disposition" (11 October 1984). In court, he was described as . . . not a hassle man. He was just a young boy from a nice family (Glasgow Herald, 7 September 1984). At one point in the war. according to the Herald, "the beleaguered company secretary of the van firm. Marchetti Brothers, asked a colleague What is it going to take to stop these people . . .  a body?"' But these six deaths have only stopped the activities of the men convicted. A social system based on conflict will not be restricted by the charred remains of a few human beings. Even as they were being sentenced, other members of their team were putting further ice cream vans on the road. This is despite the fact that "ever since the fire which killed the Doyles . . . Marchetti Brothers have tried to re-establish themselves in Haghill" (Glasgow Herald, 11 October 1984).

The war, it would seem, must go on. This is not an unfortunate little incident, a sad aberration in an otherwise acceptable society. St Tropez had its own ice cream war fought on the beaches of the Riviera this summer, with French police arresting one man for planting explosives in the sand ("Beaches mined in ice cream war", Guardian, 23 July 1984), and all over the world the same conflicts arise, initiated by the rivalry of a system of society in which access to wealth is controlled by a minority in conflict. rather than by the whole of humanity in co-operation.

But of course those who stand to gain most profit out of these battles are not those who do the fighting. Quite the opposite would seem to be true in this case. The Glasgow Herald considered it "a matter of considerable embarrassment" that the owners of the two rival companies were related through marriage and enjoyed harmonious relations. The fighting and dying then is left for the workers, whether it is Andrew Doyle or the two would-be entrepreneurs whose only mistake would appear to be that they did the job themselves. In fact, while denying in court that he was overheard in a pub offering "an easy £300" for help to "torch" the Doyle house, one said "if I wanted somebody assaulted. I would assault him . . ." (Glasgow Evening Times. 28 September 1984).

All violence under capitalism, from world war to muggings, is for property — be it the land and wealth within borders or the notes in a pensioner's purse. In each instance can be seen the effects of a society based on control and powerlessness; ownership and non-ownership. Capitalist society is no innocent bystander but rather the main determinant of human behaviour.

Brian Gardner