Letters: So that’s why . . . (2008)

Letters to the Editors from the July 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

So that’s why …

Dear Editors, 

Under the heading “Working classes ‘have lower IQs'” the BBC reported on 22 May:

“Working class people have lower IQs than those from wealthy backgrounds and should not expect to win places at top universities,” an academic has claimed. Newcastle University’s Bruce Charlton said fewer working class students at elite universities was the “natural outcome” of class IQ differences. The reader in evolutionary psychiatry questioned drives to get more poorer students into top universities”. (Link)

So that’s why I’m a bit thick and should know my place.Or does it say something about the validity of IQ testing or the disadvantage of just being poor and the limitations to knowledge opportunity? Or does it say something about a ‘science’ that justifies the status quo or about what is ‘science’ in this field of biological determinism which justifies the fundamental ‘rightness’ of our social organisation based on a hierarchy where those with the highest IQs take their natural place?

Obviously university is not the place for me if this is the type of thinking that goes on there. I’m the better for it. I wish I hadn’t been born stupid but apparently it’s quite natural. I should respect my betters with their superior intellect. I’m not a prisoner of my genes but of my limited intelligence. I know my place! 

Stuart Gibson, 

Bournemouth

MP’s pay 

Dear Editors,

 The ongoing row over MP’s pay and allowances obscures that those elected to Parliament will always receive a remuneration far superior to the average income of their constituents regardless of what punitive measures are taken to masquerade it as greater equability.

 Contrary to the conventional wisdom, MP’s aren’t elected to the House of Commons to represent their constituents in the running of the country’s best economic and social interests. They are elected to assist in the running of capitalism’s best interests and whatever personal style they choose to deal with the problems they encounter at their surgeries (all of which inevitably have their genesis in the traumas of the system), what they do and say will always be dictated by this factor.

 Now that the underlying rottenness of the system is becoming more evident in the form of banks running dry, home repossessions, and global stagflation even the most opportunist of MP’s particularly if they’ve used New Labour as a political career platform are placed in a dilemma in how to explain the economic crisis to their anxious electors particularly if those electors actually voted for them personally.

 Consequently the whole purpose of such excessive remuneration packages they receive is to act as an inducement to ensure that all of them, particularly if associated with the left, act in the highest traditions of parliamentary etiquette and bi-partisan propriety so that none, apart from the odd maverick who can easily be marginalised, dares to challenge the wisdom in Parliament that there isn’t an alternative to capitalism and the global chaos it causes when there quite clearly is!

 This issue has all been comprehensively laid bare by New Labour’s electoral drubbings in recent local elections and the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. Tory leader David Cameron was ironically ‘right’ when he said afterwards the results heralded the end of New Labour but not for the reason he infers. After ten years of an economy tied to the US dollar and credit, voters actually rejected the neoliberal economic policies New Labour had stolen from the Tories so that in effect politics, like the housing market has plummeted into a type of ‘negative equity’ where voters reject Tory policies by New Labour yet vote in official Tory candidates on the other.

 Such apathy will persist as long as MP’s are paid in a way that buys them off to defend or play down the woes of the system, regardless of what their previous political leanings were. 

Nick Vinehill, 

Snettisham, Norfolk

Would you credit it? 

Dear Editors, 

In your reply to my last letter (Socialist Standard, May 2008), you deny that banks create money by lending. This flies in the face of the facts … see any book on economics! How else do you explain the huge increase in the money supply over recent decades?

 Yes, they do have to balance their books – so when they make a loan they account the money put into the borrower’s account as a liability, and balance their books by entering the debt taken on as an asset. If the loan is not repaid, and has to be ‘written off’, then their books do not balance – hence their present woes.

 You really ought to study the system. The fiction that they only lend money deposited with them is promoted to confuse the general public about this matter.

(At the end of the last World War, the government still did create almost half of our money – the notes and coins – and spent it into circulation; but with the decline in use of these, it now only provides about 3%, the rest being created by banks and other ‘financial institutions’.)

Brian Leslie (by email) 

Reply: 

We have been studying the system for over 100 years and it is because of this that we know that banks are financial intermediaries who channel and distribute purchasing power rather than ‘create’ it. The idea that they can create vast multiples of credit from a given deposit base is a total fiction – it is theoretically incorrect and empirically unsupportable.

 It was a view that gained credence because of the 1931 MacMillan Committee Report into Finance and Industry that was written in large part by John Maynard Keynes. You may be interested to know that a significant minority of the Committee at the time opposed the view promoted by Keynes and several of those who went along with it did not understand or realise the implications of what they had signed up to – and we know this because some of our members at the time (including a member of the Editorial Committee of this magazine) were in correspondence with them about it.

 Interestingly, in his most renowned work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) Keynes effectively abandoned the view he had promoted on the MacMillan Committee just a few years previously, stating that “the notion that the creation of credit by the banking system allows investment to take place to which ‘no genuine saving’ corresponds can only be the result of isolating one of the consequences of the increased bank-credit to the exclusion of others”.

 Indeed, what the simplistic model used in the Report had assumed was that banks kept a certain ‘cash ratio’ back for customers to access as a proportion of whatever is deposited with the bank (10 percent was assumed at the time though these days this would be far less). They then assumed that the whole of a new deposit by a customer could be held in cash to underpin the creation of credit nine times its value (i.e. operating with a 10 percent cash reserve an initial £1,000 deposit would enable the creation of £9,000 worth of credit). Bizarrely, it also then assumed that this cash was never called upon in practice. In other words, for the model to hold, they correctly assumed that banks kept cash in reserve for customer use, but then assumed that nobody ever withdrew any of it!

 Very few economics textbooks today repeat this nonsense. Instead, they typically promote the version put forward by Paul Samuelson among others which explicitly rejects the approach used by the MacMillan Committee in favour of a multi-bank model. However, this model does not demonstrate anything more than that currency circulates around the banking system and can be used more than once in the process of customers’ creating bank deposits – as opposed to banks somehow creating multiples of credit from these deposits (the July 1990 Socialist Standard dealt with this particular model in more detail).

 If banks could create vast multiples of credit from their deposit base then the recent problems of Northern Rock and others would never have occurred. In reality, their problems arose precisely because they wished to lend out more than had been deposited with them and to do this they had to borrow ‘short’ on the money markets to finance their long-term loans and mortgages. When inter-bank lending rates hit the roof, the game was up – and the Bank of England and the Treasury did not just tell them to go away and create some more multiples of credit from their deposits.

 Traditionally, banks have covered most of their loans through the generation of deposits by customers; Northern Rock was unique in that in its dash for growth it allowed its ratio of deposits to loans to go down to under a quarter, an unprecedented level in UK banking history (it was around £24 billion in deposits set against around £113 billion in loans and other assets at the time of its major crisis). The difference was not made up through ‘credit creation’ but simply by borrowing on the money markets at the prevailing inter-bank rates of interest, as can be seen from an examination of its balance sheet.

 Similarly, the current £12 billion discounted ‘rights issue’ of new shares by the Royal Bank of Scotland is an attempt to shore up its asset base partly because of losses it has made on investment vehicles tied to the US sub-prime mortgage crisis. So again, much to the chagrin of their shareholders, there is no easy way out of this crisis for banks by attracting some more deposits and then creating vast multiples of credit from them to magically cover their losses.

Editors

Love, Ideas and Historical Materialism — and a different view of Professor Eysenck (1973)

From the June 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent has taken up a quotation from Frederick Engels in last month’s Socialist Standard, asking if it is really true that romantic love is a product of history and not an all-too-natural propensity of human beings. “Why on earth should sex-love be related to the mode of production and economic relationships?” says the writer, and cites a poet of the ancient world — “Let us live and let us love” — to support the point.

What is questioned is the basic statement of historical materialism. In  the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx wrote:

The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

The Communist Manifesto is similarly explicit:

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? 

Engels reaffirmed in his old age, writing to H. Starkenburg:

Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development.

The problem for our correspondent, and many others, is how far this is meant to be taken. The development of political and legal forms in direct response to changing class structures throughout history is clear enough. So are the shapes taken by the major institutions of society: technics, commerce, nation-states — and, inevitably, ideas related directly to them, including ethical and religious “reflexes of the real world” as well as political ones. Art forms, too. But is it true that human relationships and qualities, and truths which appear to exist beyond social organization, must be included in Marx’s description of man as the “assemble of social relations”? Can we take seriously Engels’s assertion (in a letter to Marx) that "the atom itself is nothing more than a Relation”?

Construction and Reality

Indeed it is true, and we must. There is a single qualification to be made: the materialist conception of history is of course a generalization, so are its particular applications. In homely illustration, this means that statements like “Not a speck of dust anywhere” and “No apples on the trees this year” are not invalidated by someone’s finding a speck of dust or the odd apple. Similarly, historical materialism cannot be expected to explain all the minutiae of social life or else be adjudged incompetent. Engels himself gave reasons in a letter to Conrad Schmidt:

In other words, the unity of conception and appearance manifests itself as essentially an infinite process, and that is what it is, in this case as in all others. Did feudalism ever correspond to its concept? . . . Or are the concepts which prevail in the natural sciences fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end.

(Selected Correspondence, pp.529-30) 

Historical materialism sees man as “not only a social animal, but an animal which can develop into an individual only in society”, in Marx’s words. Hence, his activities and ideas are part of society too. The language in which we think, the conventions and motives which direct thought, are social constructions. These are taken for granted as if they had existences of their own, yet they are all consequences of the basic human activity of production: the manner of satisfying man’s needs. The same applies to ideas. Two simple examples can be given. First, the idea of exchange which cannot arise except in societies where production surplus to elementary physical needs has been achieved; second, the idea of opportunity which can exist only where access is limited and one man’s meat is another man’s fancy.

Knowledge and Intelligence

The multiplication of these instances leads to the fact that property societies are class-divided societies. Some own the means of living, some do not. Those who own, in whatever form of society, are its ruling class and the dominant ideas of that society are theirs. The outstanding examples are, of course, religious and moral concepts presented as eternal values. However, it only begins there. Knowledge and measurable facts exist not in an objective world from which they must at all times influence society, but in fact exist at all — or are brought into existence — only insofar as they are useful to society.

Thus, the mathematical and scientific knowledge of the Mediterranean civilizations was lost and had no existence at all from the end of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of capitalism: unrequired and (if this concept too had existed in mediaeval Europe) obsolete. The loss and rediscovery may be put down to historical chance — but, as Marx says in one of his letters to Kugelmann:

These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of development and are compensated for, again, by other accidents.

As well as being buried and dug up again, knowledge may be devised. The word need not imply a lying conspiracy. Ruling needs in a society can give rise to a conceptual answer. The concept is accepted as a fact: x in an equation presented as a real number instead of an expedient device.

In the past fifty years State education — and in turn, what is thought about ability and equality — has been dominated by the idea of quantitative intelligence. It began with the work of Galton, between 1869 and 1886, on hereditary factors in “man’s natural abilities”, and was applied immediately to school- children and students. Prior to that time, indeed, the word intelligence commonly meant “information” (a meaning it retains in military usage, and the two had better not be confused there). Today every school-child is labelled with his or her intelligence quotient; over 150 means being in “the top 2 per cent.”, and Mensa is the society of the crème de la crème.

Invention at Work

Yet the history of this varying personal endowment synchronizes with that of popular education. Its theory and the methods of testing were produced between 1904 and 1922, and their application has been to the continued process of selecting children and workers. But while intelligence is measured daily, nobody — significantly — has defined it. Spearman, the theorist of the I.Q., called it "a word with so many meanings that finally it has none”. And the fact is that intelligence is not a reality but a concept, a system of measurement for the ruling class to sort sheep from goats regarding the skills and organization of modern capitalism. To be good at what they need is to have high intelligence; to show different abilities is, as well as irrelevant, low-grade. Those concerned over Professor Eysenck (one way or the other) should try considering him in this light for a change.

What is knowledge? The essential facts of one set of circumstances are not merely useless in another; they would be denied. In the present age self-description begins with one’s name and date of birth. Basic information as they are, they did not exist as such before 1837 when Registration started. Names existed, of course, but as variables — an approximate rendering served the purposes of most of society. Births and deaths were not recorded at all; the only dates known were for baptism and burial, and the first might take place at any time or not at all. The important point is not that facts were unrecorded, but that they were not facts at all; except for purposes of succession which concerned few, nobody recognized their existence. Knowledge was declared into existence by law, for administrative purposes.

Marx and Engels pointed out repeatedly that effects become causes in society:

. . . once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes.

(Engels to Mehring: Selected Correspondence, p.512)

As with intelligence, a concept taken for physical fact can produce physical responses. An interesting example from contemporary social life is that of adolescence, which began as one of the four Roman legal divisions of life-span. In English law there are two main periods only — infancy, i.e. under 18, and adulthood, with a mixture of legal rights and obligations under various headings in infancy. This statutory division reflects the practical one which existed virtually up to modern times: people were children, then they were men and women. The idea of an interim phase having taken root from developments in society, physical and psychological symptoms followed; and in recent years, with adolescence a profitable social mania, it has been discovered to start even earlier than was thought before.

Man's Nature can be Free

Human relations, then, are inevitably shaped by the form of society. It is not the view of historical materialism, however, that we are but clay in the hands of our own economic organization. Apart from the continual effect-to-cause flow — man makes history, as Marx always insisted — there are what are described in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 as man’s “species powers”. These are his drives and needs, the use of his senses. Related to the framework established by production and social activity, “man’s species powers express the kind of life which man, as distinct from all other beings, carries on inside this framework” (B. Oilman: Alienation).

Is Engel’s claim justified—"Before the middle ages we cannot speak of individual sex-love”? In fact Engels gives the necessary explanations in The Origin of the Family. He compares sexual love in our sense, where the emotions are involved in an exclusive relationship, with the arranged marriages of antiquity. But the keyword is not “love”, but “individual”. By “individual” Engels means the “free citizen”, the knight, or the guild member. In The Communist Manifesto the term is made explicit:

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property.

Indeed, Engels like our correspondent refers to lovers in ancient literature (Daphnis and Chloe, etc.). Either, he says, they were slaves and therefore outside the state, or the objects of male affection were foreigners or hetairai and likewise outside official society: “that sort of thing only happened in romance — or among the oppressed classes, who did not count”.

How much does all this matter? If the bondage of capitalism is to be ended and a human society realized, there must be comprehension of how the fetters are made. The alternative is the view stigmatized by Marx and Engels as sterile in its limitation to “the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical phantasy”. Engels spelled out how consciousness, derived from society, can change society:

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends . . . Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.

(Anti-Duhring, p.128) 

Robert Barltrop

Letters: What is our IQ? (1977)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is our IQ? 

The article “Question of Intelligence” (December 1976) has been brought to my attention. It arises from the announcement in the Sunday Times that Professor Cyril Burt had “published false data and invented crucial facts to support his controversial theory that intelligence is largely inherited”. It quotes a reference to Burt in a pamphlet by Harold Walsby, SPGB—Utopian or Scientific, published by the Social Science Association in 1949, and says: “The ‘evidence’ Walsby thought conclusive was emotion wrapped up as science, and whoever used it to illuminate ‘the psychology of the workers’ would now be in the dark.”

The evidence to which Walsby refers is “the actual statistical-psychological investigations by Prof Burt, Thompson, Cattel and many others . . .” This evidence, as a whole, has not been invalidated, and the work of the other investigators stands as firmly as before.

I must draw attention to something else in the article likely to mislead people not familiar with Walsby’s work. It mentions the view “that a large proportion of the population were constitutionally incapable of learning much or running their own lives”, and says “Typical examples of this appeared in writings by Harold Walsby”. I challenge you to provide even one example of Walsby saying this. The implication is that Walsby regarded the working class as being mentally inferior. He did not.

Walsby held that the majority of people, workers and capitalists alike, would reject the Socialist case. The SPGB holds that the majority of the workers will accept it— if not, what is the point of presenting it to them? Since 1904 the evidence has been consistently in Walsby’s favour. According to the SPGB the material conditions are ripe for Socialism and the workers are capable of understanding Socialism. But we don’t get Socialism. Harold Walsby’s theory explains how it comes about that the overwhelming majority of those who have heard the Socialist case have rejected it in the past, persist in rejecting it, and will continue to reject it in the future. Also—and this is a harder task—Walsby’s theory explains how it is that a tiny minority comes to accept the Socialist case.

Geo. W. Walford 

London N1

Reply:

Your letter presents not arguments but heads-I-win-tails-you-lose propositions. You say (a) that the evidence used by Walsby from Burt and others "has not been invalidated”, and (b) Walsby never held that view anyway.

It is quite incorrect that “the work of the other investigators stands as firmly as before”. If this were so, Professor H. J. Eysenck (one of Burt’s supporters) would not have said in The Times of 8th Nov. 1976 :

  Perhaps it is time that society devoted more money to this important area . . . The issue is an important one, and should be taken beyond the range of simple argument and assertion.

L. J. Kamin, Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, called this plea “grotesque”.

The relationship between Burt’s work and that of other investigators seems to be a matter of widely differing opinion. According to the Sunday Times of 28th Nov., 1976, in 1973 Eysenck spoke of the “outstanding quality” of Burt’s work, but after the discrediting of Burt said his data were “useless”. Sir P. B. Medawar (The Times, 3rd Nov. 1976) contended that “the expression ‘innate intelligence’ should now be dropped from the language”. This was supported by Professor C. B. Hindley; and Professor J. Tizard said (The Times 25th Oct.) that the Burt case “would have the same effect on that branch of science as the finding that the Piltdown Skull was a forgery had on palaeontology”.

Regarding Walsby’s own views, a review of the Social Science Association pamphlet Science, Politics and the Masses by Richard Tatham appeared in the New Leader on 14th April 1945. The reviewer was F. A. Ridley. The pamphlet set forth the conclusions of Harold Walsby. Under the heading “Can the Masses Think?” the article said it was “clearly against the democratic assumption on the question of a rational approach to the masses”, and “the masses have usually only been used as pawns on title political chess-board by ruling — or would-be ruling — classes”.

Elsewhere Harold Walsby was quoted as saying "Anyone who understands the public knows that they like trash.” (Sunday Chronicle, 11th April 1954). If Ridley’s statements misrepresented Walsby’s views, did he repudiate them? If these and the statements in SPGB—Utopian or Scientific do not say the working class is mentally inferior, what the devil are they supposed to mean?

Finally, we are unaware what basis can exist for a prediction that the majority of workers will always reject the Socialist case. You say it has been rejected by “the overwhelming majority” of those who have heard it. But the overwhelming majority of the working class have not heard it, and more often than not it is heard under disadvantageous conditions. Walsby’s theory consists of trying to persuade us that these obstacles are of no consequence. You should try it. 

Editors.

Things to come

I would be grateful if you could clarify two points arising from one of your meetings which I recently attended.

1. What are the grounds of your conviction that when the capitalist system collapses a Marxist society is bound to take its place?
2. I cannot see why it would be presumptuous to produce a blueprint of the new society. Surely an examination of the practical problems involved must be undertaken firstly in order to prove that the system could be successful, and secondly to demonstrate to a sceptical electorate that there is a viable alternative to the present system.

S. Bettaney

Edgware

Reply:

Your first point is based on a misconception. Contrary to the vapid wafflings of other parties, both long ago and now, we have always held that capitalism will not collapse. The working class cannot sit back and wait for that to happen: they must organize consciously to get rid of capitalism and put Socialism in its place.

On your second point, we are unable to give you a blue-print for several reasons. You will appreciate that Socialism was feasible in 1904 when the SPGB was founded. Had the working class been ready then, the new society would have been established in an era of horse traffic when the burning question was “who will sweep the crossings?” Clearly the blue-print will look different in the age of jet engines and atomic power. Unless you can tell us when the workers—this means you!—will join us, how can we know what marvels will have emerged? As you say, there are practical problems.

Suppose that a would-be manufacturer tried to convince others in, say, the year 1600 that capitalism would be a good idea. Can you imagine the mind-boggling notions of banking, insurance, capital gains and all the multitudinous problems suggested by a society aiming to produce goods for sale instead of for use? The practical problems of Socialism would seem simple by comparison. If you have particular problems in mind, please let us know.

Editors.

More impact please

Socialism as the SPGB defines it has never been a motivating force in British working-class politics. From the formulation of the party in 1904 to the present day, it has made no movement in British politics worth talking about, because the working-class of Britain have never taken the SPGB’s case against capitalism as being the best way to get rid of capitalism, and the establishment of Socialism. The workers today still vote Labour, Liberal, and Scottish Nationalist. And in the economic field all the worker’s main drives are centred on work, full employment and the right to work.

If according to the doctrine of historical materialism capitalism produces the material and economic condition which turns the workers into Socialists there has been no real evidence for holding this point of view since Marx’s publication of The Communist Manifesto of 1848. Whether Socialism is inevitable or not is not a major question for Socialists. The major question for Socialists is: Why has not Socialism ever had even the slightest impact on the working class of Great Britain? Can the SPGB answer that one?

Ian Campbell 

Dundee

Reply:

It would be a wonderful thing if the material and economic conditions of capitalism did indeed “turn the workers into socialists”, for Socialism would then have been established long ago. Men turn themselves into Socialists, however, by developing their concept of what society should be, while material conditions supply the background and stimulus for this change.

History shows us that before there can be a fundamental change in society there is a long period during which the ideas and attitudes necessary for the change are fully developed. The establishment of Socialism will also require this maturity of ideas, although with the means of communication available today we can expect the development period to be much shorter. You say Socialist ideas have had no impact: but labour and social-democratic parties adopted (and so perverted) the word Socialism because it is attractive to large numbers of workers. Many of these parties have access to far greater resources to be used for propaganda purposes than does the SPGB.

In the meantime the workers still vote, as you say, for the Labour, Liberal and Scottish Nationalist parties. However, their propaganda often wears thin; the “anti” vote (“I’ll vote for this lot because the other lot are even worse”) is a recurrent common feature. The parties supporting capitalism, whether they label themselves Socialist or not, lose their credibility because at the end of the day they cannot produce results. When the working class sees the futility of capitalism, the SPGB will be there to be used by them for the establishment of Socialism.

Incidentally, we are pleased to see that the Socialist case has had sufficient impact on your own thinking to prompt you to write to us.

Editors.

Parties and profits

I subscribe to the Socialist Standard and, in the main, I find your articles to be both lucid and irrefragable. However, there are several points which in my opinion require elucidation.

Firstly, on more than one occasion you have asseverated that the Labour Party represents one section of the capitalist class whilst the Conservative Party represents another. Please identify these two sections of the capitalist class.

Secondly, in your answer to Robin Cox’s letter (March 1977) you pointed out that although consumer expenditure increased by 80 per cent between 1970 and 1975, the Index of Production rose by 0.6 in the same period. Could it not be that a part, at least, of the extra consumer expenditure was on imported goods not included in the Index of Production statistics, and that had British goods been more competitive there would have been an increase in the Index of Production?

Thirdly, as you adhere to Marx’s version of the Labour Theory of Value, can you explain how it is that retail organizations make profits if goods are sold at their value? Is it by exploiting their own employees?

P. S. Maloney

London N13

Reply:

1. In the first half of the 19th century there was a clear-cut division of representation—the landed interests by the Tories and the industrial capitalists by the Liberals. Now that 85 per cent of the electors are working-class and British capitalism’s problems have become more complex, the lines are blurred and shifting capitalist interests are being served by Tory and Labour.

In the first place, the parties have to win elections by making the kinds of promises on social reforms, prices, wages, unemployment, housing etc. that will appeal to a mass electorate; so that in this field there is little to choose between the programmes of the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties. But as governments they have to deal with capitalism’s problems as they arise. Each party, having received representations from the CBI, TUC, farmers, retailers, self-employed etc., and after consulting its economic advisers, formulates its taxation and other policies. These are bound to help some sections of the capitalist class and damage others, and sections of the capitalist class give their support to one or other party accordingly: as when the Labour Party (like the Liberals) was standing for free trade and the Tories protectionist.

The same sort of division arose over entry into the European Economic Community because at the beginning of consideration of the question, majority Labour Party opinion was against it. At one time the Labour Party backed the small firms against the big ones; a Labour Party spokesman said that they “preferred a large number of small capitalists to a small number of large ones". But when the Labour government came to office in 1964, they adopted the policy of encouraging company mergers through the Industrial Reorganization Corporation.

In 1945 the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties were agreed on adopting inflation as a policy (to prevent unemployment as they supposed). In the 1970s increasing numbers of capitalists were turning against it, leading to a swing against inflation in the Tory Party but with, so far, the Labour Party and its TUC backers basically unchanged in their attitudes. Those capitalists who still favour inflation will look to the Labour Party.

The parties have traditional commitments and “images”. For example the Labour Party’s fervent commitment to nationalization while the Tories and Liberals have adopted it only when circumstances required it in the interest of the dominant section of the capitalist class; and the Labour Party’s commitment to the trade unions who supply its funds. But in practice the urgent need to try to solve capitalism’s problems forces governments to act, if necessary, in opposition to the views of their own members. At the 1970 general election the Labour, Tory and Liberal parties were all pledged to legislation to control trade unions; though, as it turned out, opposition was so great that the Labour “In Place of Strife” was dropped and the Tory Industrial Relations Act repealed. And it was a Tory minister in a coalition government, in 1915, who first introduced rent restriction.

Also, policies change with circumstances, and from time to time the capitalist class find their interests being served by the Labour Party — as for example, when it appears that unpopular policies can be put over more easily by Labour than by the Tories. (Several Tory newspapers favour keeping the Callaghan government in office until the third stage of the Social Contract has been negotiated with the TUC).

Government intervention in industry and nationalization present striking examples. The Tory government, against its declared policy on “lame ducks”, was forced to nationalize Rolls Royce. And with much of industry in financial difficulties, many shipbuilding and other companies welcomed nationalization or government aid accompanied by the government becoming a shareholder. (But it is a Labour government which is selling part of its holding in British Petroleum.) In a similar situation in Italy a year or two back it was reported that companies “were queueing up to be taken over”.

An article published in Management Today (December 1976) dealt with the Labour governments Industrial Reorganization Corporation. It was set up for the purpose of encouraging companies to combine and thus increase efficiency, the government providing advice and finance. The writers, who worked on IRC, say:

What surprised us most while at the IRC, however, was the willingness of private sector individual companies to discuss their problems with a government organization and to seek its help and assistance. It appears to be quite wrong to take the view that in the UK private sector capitalists are opposed to government help. Whatever they may say, in practice their opposition does not exist.

(The IRC was scrapped by the Tories, its work having been largely completed.)

When the present depression passes and it again becomes easy to make profits, the Labour Party’s leaning towards nationalization and government intervention in industry will lose the attraction it has at present for “lame duck” companies. The Tory traditional attitude may find favour again with that section of the capitalist class.

(To be continued) 

R. W. Clayton (London SW7): Part of your letter was dealt with some months ago under another name. As regards the remainder, if you care to offer an argument in support of your statements we will consider it.

Editors.

Myths of ‘race' exposed (1978)

From the December 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Union of Teachers (Hamilton House, Mabledon Place, London WC1 9BD) have just brought out an excellent short pamphlet Race, Education, Intelligence which debunks some of the popular myths about so-called race and about IQ tests. To illustrate its worth we can do no better than quote its conclusion, which brings out many of the points we ourselves have made in the two pamphlets we have published on the same subject. The Racial Problem (1948) and The Problem of Racism (1966): 

1. "In biological terms the concept of race’ is meaningless for human populations.
2. More than 94 per cent of all genetic differences between individuals that have been studied occur between individuals of the same ‘race’, not between ‘races’.
3. Intelligence tests may help predict children’s school performance but they say nothing about any fixed ‘biological potential’ of the individual.
4. It is not meaningful or possible to divide a child’s performance into ‘genetic’ or ‘environmental’ components.
5. The determinants of ‘civilisation’ and the development of different human societies should be sought in social, economic and historical factors, not in biology.”

Proper Gander: Quizzing the Whizzkids (2013)

The Proper Gander column from the July 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Could you talk in sentences when you were only eight months old? Or perhaps you had written four novels by the age of ten? If not, then you wouldn’t have fitted in with the brainy bairns appearing on Channel 4’s Child Genius, two of whom boast these achievements.

The show follows some of the seven to eleven year-olds who have qualified for Mensa’s ‘child genius of the year’ competition. Of course, these clever-clog kids didn’t get this far by themselves. Eight year-old Josh’s mother makes him play chess for fifty hours a week so he can be a grand master before he reaches thirteen. And little Longyin’s father has put together a strict timetable of sport and studies in half-hour instalments, including ‘controlled failure situations’ to motivate his son to succeed. The less pushy parents seem slightly bewildered and drained by their offsprings’ abilities and never-ending energy.

At the competition, maths and logic questions are fired at each whizzkid while they stand at a podium, watched tensely by the cameras, their parents and the other contestants. The pressure gets to some of the miniature masterminds, raising questions about what effects the label ‘IQ in the top 0.1% of the population’ has on people so young. For example, many of the children face difficulties in relating to others because of their intellect.

Most of the child geniuses (genii?) come from families wealthy enough to afford extras like the weekly private tuition with a chess master which Josh enjoys. And good luck to them; of course parents should encourage their spawns’ strengths. But this gets you wondering why few of the competing prodigies have emerged from more humble backgrounds. As a rule, the less money you have, the fewer opportunities you get. So, the contest isn’t really just testing innate abilities. It’s also a competition between families and how much they can afford to invest in their kids. Regardless of their IQs, will the children think about their good fortune in this way?

Mike Foster

Pathfinders: The Mismanagement of Measuring (2016)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2016 issue of the Socialist Standard

See what you think of this recent statement by a genetics researcher, commenting on the long-running political war over IQ testing: “The left-wing view is that everyone’s born the same and you can make everyone achieve the same way. From genetics research, we’ve shown that’s not true” (Link).

Chances are you’ll first bridle at the phrase ‘the left-wing view’, this being the sort of careless and sweeping precursor to some equally careless right-wing prejudice. Then you’ll try to recall if you’ve ever heard anyone, regardless of political orientation, come up with the fundamentalist view that ‘everyone’s born the same’. You’ll probably decide that you haven’t, because in your experience nobody really buys this ‘blank slate’ argument. Your conclusion? That the above statement is a pretty vacuous straw man argument which reflects badly on its owner and indeed invites some suspicion over the ‘genetics research’ being thus promoted.

Research into human intelligence, what it is and how to measure it has made great strides since the days of the craniologists and their tape measures, but the debate is as plagued now as it was then by political bias, and by the tendency of both sides to dig trenches and fire heavy caricatures at each other. The ‘left’ trench had a big hitter in the form of palaeontologist Stephen Jay Gould, who launched a flamethrower with his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, which set out to savage the ‘genetic determinists’ and their class-based obsession with rankings, reification and hierarchies. But opponents responded angrily that Gould had missed the point by attacking largely out-of-date research and methodologies and ignoring new research, and that ultimately his argument assumed what he set out to prove. Richard Dawkins, with whom Gould had a famous spat over the question of ‘adaptations’ in evolutionary theory, would likely agree that Gould was not above caricaturising the views of his opponents for the sake of a good polemic. But Gould was also the subject of savage caricature, notably by the philosopher of science Daniel Dennett, known by certain wags as Dawkins’ bulldog.

Complex and heated as the arguments are, the basics of the IQ question are simple enough. Modern computing power combined with big data and meta-analyses (discipline-wide reviews of all relevant studies), together with a torrent of new knowledge from MRI scans of the working brain, present a forceful case that genetics has a clear role in human intelligence, almost regardless of how you care to define that word. To put it bluntly, everyone can’t be Einstein, even given all the opportunities in the world.

On the other side of the scale sits the ponderous and imponderable combined weight of social, environmental and other factors. Nobody argues that these don’t exist, but nobody knows how to control for these factors in testing, so no scientific test can realistically be pronounced conclusive or even fair. To be sure, studies of twins, raised separately yet exhibiting identical IQ scores, mannerisms or other habits, are powerful genetic evidence that lead some researchers to claim that the genetic component of intelligence is anything up to 70 percent. But while these twin studies seem to remove much of the common environmental background noise, nobody can say what other factors might have been introduced instead. You can’t control for coincidence. If you meet and talk to 10 random people at a bus stop, the chances are you’ll share certain behavioural, emotional or intellectual tics with at least some of them. Thus the interpretations based on twin studies may look strong without necessarily being so.

The well-known Flynn Effect, named for the observation that IQ scores have increased on average by three points per decade for a century, also throws a hefty spanner in the genetic works. If IQ really is genetic, how can it keep getting better at a rate far in excess of the glacial pace of natural evolution? James Flynn himself thinks he has the answer, in short that people are drawn to environments that suit their genes, thus creating intellectual feedback loops that amplify their genetic differences (New Scientist 30 July) This is similar to Dawkins’ idea of the extended phenotype, which sees not just your physical body as a uniquely identifiable genome, but extends the idea to include your house, shoes and career choices too.

What do socialists say? Obviously, that we don’t know any better than scientists, and await their further research with interest. We are committed to the view that humans should be able to live in an equitable world in which they can give to the community what they are able and willing to give, whatever the practical limitations on that may be, while at the same time being entitled to receive whatever it is that they need, with similar provisos, and crucially, without the one in any sense entailing the other.

But we might also say that capitalist society is a terrible test bed on which to study intelligence or any other human quality because being in no sense a ‘fair’ system it can therefore in no sense deliver a fair test. Riddled with bias and rigged by the rich, it can never be the definitive authority on who we are as humans or what we’re really capable of.

The real ‘mismeasure of man’ that blights the human condition is not some reductionist mission to isolate, count, measure and label every atom of what it means to be a sentient human. It is the fact that all this science is done in the interest of the plundering of our bodies and minds and abilities by the rich elite. The ugliness behind the façade isn’t the feuding partisanship of the technical arguments, it’s the fact that the rich elite who ultimately bankroll the debate don’t look upon us, the vast majority of humanity, as people or even as workers, they look on us as a natural resource, a money-generating human ‘ore’ with the magical ability to mine itself and refine itself and then grade and polish and put itself to use for life until it wears out and discards itself, but not before helpfully providing its own replacement. The IQ debate isn’t really about science, it’s about quality control on the capitalist production line, and that’s why socialists should refuse to get drawn into it, either on the nature or the nurture side.

In socialism, in most normal circumstances where risk to others is low or zero, the real arbiter of a person’s ability should, like that person’s needs and that person’s interests, be that same person and nobody else. Whether objective estimations of IQ continue to be seen as valid or relevant may be a moot point. After all, it was people with such objective expertise who told Einstein he would never amount to anything.

Paddy Shannon

Intelligence is not understanding (1980)

From the September 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is a child born with a certain level of intelligence or is it acquired, through upbringing and education? Or perhaps some of both? Arguments over this question are common, and they indicate the extent to which the concept of “intelligence" has been accepted as a reality.

The more deeply we dig, however, the clearer it becomes that “intelligence” is a fairly recent construction, rather than any objective mental characteristic or ability which has been discovered. It becomes clear, also, that this construction or invention of intelligence plays an increasingly large part in the control and running of modern capitalism.

Through the widespread use of intelligence tests and a complex examinations structure young workers are selected, streamed and paced through their education, training and jobs. Moreover, the idea of “intelligence" has become the core of an ideology which contends that every child actually has equality of opportunity; that the “best” will rise to the top; and that these deserve to be paid the highest salaries and given the greatest admiration. It is an ideology that (like the growing cult of sport) encourages intensified competition and the acceptance of a hierarchy throughout the working class in all capitalist countries.

"To Ford a degree signifies proven intellectual capabilities. We train graduates from a wide variety of disciplines to become some of the most professional and achievement orientated managers in British industry, and our management training is recognised as one of the most fertile breeding grounds for top management professionals.
The quality of these managers has helped Ford to emerge and remain as one of the most successful companies in Britain . . .

(Graduate Opportunities 1979)

In this advertisement, the Ford Motor Company was trying to buy trained intelligence like the commodity it is, but at the same time to present the illusion that to dedicate all your enthusiasm, loyalty and hard work to the rat-race of increasing Ford’s profits at the expense of competitors is a fulfilling, satisfying life. These managers are to become the top-paid workers who control and pressurise workers lower down the hierarchy to produce more, better, faster, cheaper.

Here, in these watchwords of capitalist production, is one clue to definition of “intelligence”. In the introduction to Check Your Own I.Q. by Professor H. J. Eysenck, he says (p. 15), “When we analyse performance on intelligence tests in some detail, we find that there is one outstanding characteristic which more than any other determines success or failure. This characteristic is mental speed.” And then he shows where he stands in the “nature/ nurture” argument by finishing the paragraph, “This all-pervasive mental speed, I would say, is the fundamental, inherited basis for intellectual differences between people.” Then he goes on to point out that the effects of mental speed are modified by personality factors such as persistence and care in checking answers. He also draws attention to the fact that practice can make a considerable difference to the scores people achieve; and, because he regards it as an impossibility to keep intelligence tests totally secret, advocates the alternative policy of making them as widely known and used as possible.

Eysenck makes the crucial point about intelligence testing, however, in response to criticisms about the partiality of tests:

To obtain a reasonable measure, therefore, we must have a certain homogeneity of motivation, background training, set, experience and knowledge: no intelligence test is universally valid but applies only to a given sub-set of the population. Know Your Own I. Q., as well as the present book, was intended for literate, English-reading people, between the ages of eighteen and fifty or sixty, with above average IQs and a corresponding minimum degree of schooling.

As he develops his argument it becomes obvious that the way intelligence tests are designed discriminates in favour of those adults and children who come from families which are already relatively successful and ambitious in competitive capitalist society and who have accepted the values set up for them by their rulers. Intelligence tests do not merely test: they also incessantly validate and reinforce those values. They serve as an instrument of social stability and a means of social control.

There was an upsurge of mental testing of all sorts in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Britain, Europe and America, and it is not difficult to see why. In the sixty years between 1851 and 1911 the population of Great Britain doubled to 18 million; agricultural workers declined from 2 million to 1.5 million, while workers in mining and manufacture doubled to 8.5 million, and workers in services, commerce, transport and communications trebled to 8.3 millions. With such a reproduction of labour power, capitalism badly needed techniques and systems for sorting and grading this labour power. With such an increase in the size of the working class, the capitalist class looked anxiously for a means of social control. Intelligence testing, integrated with the school system, provided an answer to both. In America, H. H. Goddard wrote (Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence, Princeton University Press, 1920, p. 97), “The disturbing fear is that the masses—the seventy or even eighty-six million—will take matters into their own hands."

In an address delivered to the Fifth Conference on Educational Policies at the New York Teachers College entitled ‘How may we improve the selection, training and life work of leaders?’ (Columbia University Press, 1939, p. 32) Edward L. Thorndike said, “It is the great good fortune of mankind that there is a substantial correlation between intelligence and morality, including goodwill towards one’s fellows. Consequently our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves.” To psychologists like Goddard and Thorndike, Carnegie and Rockefeller gave a continuous stream of money for research and development of tests and school text books. In this way they were able to supplement, and eventually influence, the policies of national and local government in the USA.

This development of a hierarchy of intelligence in all the industrialised capitalist nations is sometimes misleadingly called a meritocracy. Apart from the fact that equating mental speed with merit is cynical even by capitalist standards, the word implies that the people with this sort of merit rule society, which is simply untrue. Intelligence tests and examination ladders are for workers. Capitalists neither want nor need them; and it is they who rule. They do not even need “intelligence” because they can buy it without difficulty, together with enthusiasm, loyalty and hard work. Indeed, it is ironic that it has been members of the working class, in the middle and higher income brackets, who have been most assiduous in developing and consolidating the intelligence hierarchy in order to enhance their own prestige and fend off competition. Nevertheless, by allowing virtually all the work to be done for them, the capitalist class has given up any pretence at performing a useful function in society. They rule only through their ownership of capital and the fact that the working class continues to operate society according to their laws and in their interests. 

“Intelligent” workers do not understand this any better than “unintelligent” workers. As the slump develops, they will be just as bewildered when they are thrown out of a job as the man on the factory floor. When the next war comes, they will have more sophisticated rationalisations for going to fight their masters’ battles, but they will die just the same.

Intelligence is not understanding; it is not common sense; it is not awareness; and above all it is not class consciousness. These are the mental abilities the working class must develop if they are to do away with slumps, wars and all the other idiocies of capitalism. Intelligence, defined, selected and trained as it is at present, is a hindrance rather than a help.

Ron Cook

Socialism Means: An End to Racist Nonsense (1973)

From the July 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Modern racist attitudes are entirely the product of capitalist society. They are generated by capitalism through the social and economic relationships which exist toward the means of production. These relationships (whether or not the State is involved) are private-property ones, i.e. employer to employees, landlord to tenant, buyer to seller, rich and poor.

Any attempt to rationalize racist attitudes, or to surround them with an aura of scientific justification, is ludicrous. These are no examples anywhere that can be shown where any group of people, along racial or national lines, is more or less capable of assimilating ideas or interpreting information and performing social functions than any other. Different stages of history and different systems of society vary widely in the kinds of ideas and social functions relevant to them. If we call these things intelligence, then man’s intelligence is entirely social.

All human beings are genetically similar, and what variations there are—such as in aptitude, strength, endurance, creativity and so on—exist within every group and in no way lend support to ideas of innate superiority or inferiority.

The proof of this, of course, is society itself. Inherited characteristics can only be seen in action through society. Whatever social group or so-called race one takes against which prejudice is held, whether it be blacks, Jews, Irish, Poles, Pakistanis or Japanese, every shade and level of ability and accomplishment exists within each of them. That there are some exceptionally “gifted” or talented people is obvious, hut no one group has a monopoly of such people. On a planet inhabited by some 3,000 million people, there is no possible starting-point for the development of a so-called super-race. Neither could such an abhorrent abomination ever be desirable.

In any schoolroom of working-class children, regardless of colour, there are the “bright” ones who get higher marks and the “less bright” ones who get lower marks. All of the standards set and the measurements used are derived from the needs of capitalism, and ultimately aimed at slotting people into those private-property relationships. Modern educationists and sociologists look for social or economic factors to explain why some children are relatively backward. The size of class, home background, parental encouragement, amount of sleep, nutrition, number in family, and family income. It is conditions outside the individual social conditions, the sum total of which constitute the social environment, which mould and influence the people involved in them.

We are not taking the mechanistic view that man is poured into a social mould which predetermines him and from which there is no escape. It is because man’s consciousness develops through society that he becomes aware of his environment and tries to change it: in fact he is constantly changing various aspects of it and being constantly modified himself as a result.

Social attitudes, habits and institutions which flourish in one form of society do not fit into another. Indeed, many ideas from early capitalism would not fit into modern capitalism. Scores of examples could be taken from medical science or physics and from the spheres of social thought which correspond to the different periods.

Just as the racist looks at the African tribesman and concludes “we are superior”, it is relevant to ask if the British, French or German working class of the early industrial era were inferior to their modem successors. Were ancient Britons inferior to the Romans, or the pioneers of locomotion backward because they did not start with the Golden Arrow?

We would argue that the opportunities for the development of ideas are socially created, and restricted by the general level of development of the means of production at a given time. Capitalism imposes further restrictions concerned with investment of capital and the profitable disposal of goods in world markets.

As Socialists, we condemn racist ideas. They are stumbling-blocks to working-class understanding of Socialism. This above all is why we find such attitudes pernicious and repugnant, Racists are invariably ignorant and irrational. They seek only the most crude and superficial explanation of social problems. They need a whipping-boy, a scapegoat. The Jew to blame for money grabbing and financial swindling. The black man to blame for housing squalor or unemployment. If they can find in the black man a convenient outlet upon whom to vent their frustrations and resentments, they need look no further.

In a recent television programme, in what was supposed to be a debate on racism in Britain, representatives of the National Front and the Monday Club expressed alarm at the development of a multi-racial community and the loss of what they called “national identity”. For the working class national identity has always meant decaying slums, congested insecure living, poverty and, very often, dole-queues and wars. National identity is a cunning political device by means of which the working class, who own no country, are kidded to identify with their exploiters the capitalists, who own virtually everything.

One has only to look at those festering cess-pits of capitalist culture where racist ideologies have had legal sanction and/or mass support, to see the depth of inhuman depravity masquerading as race supremacy. The worst examples being Nazi Germany, South Africa and the United States. The records of the first two countries are perhaps more familiar than the last. Would any white suprematist today like to defend the record of the United States where some 5,000 negroes were lynched during the hundred years up to 1961? Many of them were burned alive. Some had the defiant courage to sing while the mob perpetrated their grisly deeds. The violence and hatred which now erupts in the form of the black-power movement can only be understood against the background of a long history of racism—which, in turn, can only be understood as the product of the most appalling poverty and ignorance: a product of capitalism.

It is a typical contradiction of capitalism that its private-property relationships produce racism, and yet commodity production and the profit motive find racism an encumbrance. The capitalist class (black and white) is interested in maximizing profits. Whether the wealth they accumulate derives from the exploitation of black or white wage-slaves is a matter of indifference to them. In the long run, capitalism finds it unprofitable to have a potential labour force of many millions which cannot be fully exploited because it is black. What capitalism encourages in one situation, it actively seeks to prevent in another. This is true of racism in America, and similar signs are beginning to emerge in South Africa.

Capitalism in creating “a world in its own image” also creates a world-wide working class with common interests. This common interest cuts right across questions of colour, language, and place-of-birth. It prompts all workers to understand the world they live in and to take enlightened action to banish the major social problems, by changing society.

The whole of humanity and the entire earth are the only limits to society. Capitalism divides because the means of production are owned by a few. Socialism will embrace all mankind because the earth will be owned in common. Only thus can racism and all its ugly manifestations be finally conquered.

Harry Baldwin

We are not inferior (1991)

From the November 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent death of William Shockley, the American physicist and Nobel prize-winner, has removed from the scene a particularly unpleasant racist. Together with Arthur Jensen, Richard Hernstein, Hans Eysenck and others he argued that working class people and black people were innately intellectually inferior. At one time, and until fairly recently, this was the dominant view but is now largely discredited. But this has not prevented its protagonists from fighting a rearguard battle and denouncing their opponents as "dogmatic egalitarians” and even as "socialist utopians".

According to Jensen social scientists and educators have been indoctrinated to ignore genetics while Hernstein begins his argument for the biological basis of class society by a denunciation of Marxist theory and the socialist alternative. The theorists of the French and American Revolutions are not spared either, with Eysenck taking issue with the egalitarianism of Rousseau and Jefferson, and Hernstein attacking the American Declaration of Independence as well as the Communist Manifesto.

Trying to measure so-called innate intelligence goes back to Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, who wrote a book in 1869 called Hereditary Genius. Galton misapplied Darwin's theory of biological evolution to the evolution of human society and its division into higher and lower classes (as well as to what he considered to be superior and inferior races) and went on record as stating that the eminent families of Great Britain had been selected in the struggle for the survival of the fittest in society because of their biologically superior traits.

Galton's intellectual descendants today have some equally bizarre views. Jensen concentrates on the differences between the average IQ Test scores for Blacks and Whites. Hernstein stresses the different scores obtained by upper and "middle class" children on the one hand and "working class” children on the other. Both attempt to explain these differences in IQ scores on biological, instead of sociological or environmental, grounds.

These theories of the innate inferiority of some group are all based on the view that "intelligence" is innate and fixed. Each of us is supposed to be born with a given amount of intelligence which stays the same throughout our lives; our minds can develop but only up to a certain point, and that point is fixed at birth, or rather at conception. Each person is seen as possessing a given level of intellectual ability and it is this that prevents some from going as far as others.

These theories had practical consequences since until comparatively recently they predominated. The selection of children at 11 under the 1944 Education Act in Britain for one of three kinds of education, for instance, was largely based on the faked IQ findings of Sir Cyril Burt. To this day Eysenck, Hernstein and the others argue that the level of intelligence that pupils will or will not reach has already been basically determined once and for all by their genes, and that schools should therefore be adjusted to sorting out and selecting the "bright" from the "dull" as determined by nature.

This totally ignores the fact that thinking can be taught. In the past thinking, in the sense of formal reasoning, was taught by a more or less spontaneously developed and unconscious method; which led to the belief that thinking either happened or it didn't. Today, however, it is clear that intellectual development is not a fatal process in which the basic learning faculties become more or less fixed by the age of six or seven. It is possible to facilitate the development of intellectual skills in everyone.

IQ Tests don't measure "innate intelligence"; they merely measure the ability of individuals to answer the questions and solve the problems set in IQ Tests. If individuals from some groups do better on average from those in other groups, this is merely a measure either of the different groups’ opportunity to learn to do the tests or of their different attitudes to the sort of things that are being tested.

Michael Ghebre