How we perceive work (2024)

From the March 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The ancient Chinese philosopher, Confucius is reputed to have once said ‘Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.’ Though there is considerable doubt that he ever said such a thing, it is quite an apt expression. It neatly encapsulates a fairly widely held view of work as a something that, for the most part, we do not love and an activity that we would not choose to engage in unless compelled to do so.

In similar vein, the anarchist Bob Black begins his 1985 essay, The Abolition of Work, with the rousing statement ‘No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world.’ Black, like Confucius, is obviously equating work here with coerced labour – waged employment – and counter-poses to this the idea of ‘play’ by which he means free creative activity.

It’s a question of semantics really but, clearly, you don’t need to define ‘work’ as coercive per se; you can distinguish between cases where this is true and cases where it is not – where the latter might very well also entail ‘free creative activity’. Dictionaries to some extent reflect this ambiguity. Thus, we find in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, ‘working’ being defined as ‘to perform work or fulfil duties regularly for wages or salary’ but ‘work’ as applying to ‘any purposeful activity whether remunerative or not’ or even ‘something produced by the exercise of creative talent or expenditure of creative effort : artistic production.’

Disutility

Adam Smith started out from the basic premise that human beings were inherently lazy. Work was really a form of self-sacrifice rather than of self-expression. As he put it, ‘What everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.’ That also articulates, in a nutshell, his labour theory of value. The worker´s reward for sacrificing ‘his tranquillity, his freedom, and his happiness’ was his wage.

Smith´s negative attitude towards work was mirrored in the writings of others such as the Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham opined that our love of ease stemmed from our aversion to labour. Labour was painful and human beings had a natural disposition to avoid pain and seek pleasure – or, in this instance, leisure.

Neoclassical economists, like Jevons and Alfred Marshall in the late 19th century, built on Bentham’s utilitarian arguments but substituted the more technical sounding term, ‘disutility’, for ‘pain’. To ensure that work gets done, without which society would collapse, requires ‘compensating’ workers with a wage for the disutility their work entails.

This idea of ‘compensation’ was not new – in fact, it goes back to antiquity but was then more commonly associated with some form of redress for harm or negligence caused. The specific sense used here – the payment of wages or salaries for doing work – became more common only when the experience of wage labour itself became more commonplace with the rise of capitalism.

Of course, the notion that work is, by its very nature, a disutility is little more than a transparently self-serving sleight of hand that seeks to justify the existence of a system of wage labour – and by extension, capitalism – as being indispensable to the performance of work upon which our collective survival depends. Wage labour may be a disutility, but it does not follow at all that work, as such, needs to be.

Though Marx adapted Smith´s labour theory of value to fit his own narrative, he was quite scathing about Smith´s equating of work with toil:

‘In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou labour! was Jehovah’s curse on Adam. And this is labour for Smith, a curse. “Tranquillity” appears as the adequate state, as identical with “freedom” and “happiness”. It seems quite far from Smith’s mind that the individual, “in his normal state of health, strength, activity, skill, facility”, also needs a normal portion of work, and of the suspension of tranquillity. Certainly, labour obtains its measure from the outside, through the aim to be attained and the obstacles to be overcome in attaining it. But Smith has no inkling whatever that the overcoming of obstacles is in itself a liberating activity – and that, further, the external aims become stripped of the semblance of merely external natural urgencies and become posited as aims which the individual himself posits – hence as self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labour. He is right, of course, that, in its historic forms as slave-labour, serf-labour, and wage-labour, labour always appears as repulsive, always as external forced labour; and not-labour , by contrast, as “freedom and happiness”’(Grundrisse, Chapter 12).

Free creative activity

If there is a disinclination to work on the part of the great majority there is nothing ‘natural’ about it. It is simply a gut reaction to the particular form that work takes in a society that is fundamentally orientated to serve the interests of the few who don’t need to work and not the many who do.

Of course, in these circumstances people will be disposed to view work negatively. That´s perfectly understandable. It is always going to be difficult to overcome this ingrained prejudice when the basic relationship between employers and employees is essentially a coercive one and when that key institution of a capitalist economy – the business firm – is itself a fundamentally authoritarian arrangement.

Who particularly enjoys being bossed around and economically forced into engaging in an activity that is not primarily done for their benefit, anyway?

But what of work after the abolition of the wages system in a post-capitalist society? Could it become the free creative activity that Black envisaged? A transformation of work into free creative activity would, in a sense, abolish the very concept of a ‘working day’ by effectively eliminating the distinction between what we call ‘leisure’ and what we call ‘work’.

Work would still be work, not quite leisure, in that case, even if the difference between them – for example in terms of the sense of fulfilment and pleasure each activity afforded the individual – would narrow considerably. The difference perhaps might be that work is something more purposeful or linked to the satisfaction of other needs, than is true of leisure.

Robin Cox

No royal road (1978)

Book Review from the October 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Social Change and Scientific Organization — The Royal Institution 1799-1844 Morris Berman. Heinemann.

The SPGB has always held the view that science is not an independent or self developing force which can be blamed for the problems that arise in society. On the contrary, science develops the way it does because it serves some particular interest, in modern society that interest is the profit of the capitalist class.

The above book is a study of the motives behind the establishment of the Royal Institution and its development as an organisation for serving capitalism. Despite the author’s misunderstanding of the nature of socialism and capitalism, notably the belief that the former has been established in some countries, he illustrates well the motives for the development of science, in the early nineteenth century. Whereas for most of the eighteenth century scientific institutions, like the Royal Society, were mainly concerned with amateur speculative pursuits, leaving practical techniques to individual innovators, by the end of the century some 'improving landlords’ sought to exploit the expanding market for agricultural produce through enclosures and the introduction of new methods.

But the problem for them was that this only led to an increase in the propertyless, who were forced to resort to the Poor Rate for subsistence. This Poor Rate was paid by the local landlords. Various ideas were dreamed up to try and eliminate this problem of the poor, which was a restriction on the landlords. But the Royal Institution was formed as part of an attempt to overcome the problem through the organised use of science. Scientific principles were to be used to prepare more economic food recipes for the poor, suggest how to build cheaper cottages, establish workhouses and soup kitchens, and also to educate the lower class to live more cheaply.

The development of this Benthamite use of science was frustrated by the differing interests of various capitalists and landlords. The industrial capitalists feared that the widespread use of their techniques and inventions would undermine the profitability of their products, and thus opposed the Royal Institution. Few joined it in its early years. The landlords wanted to use science to increase the yield of their lands, rather than to assist the poor, and with the fears of popular unrest growing the idea of a scientific education for the propertyless was soon dropped.

The outcome of this was that in its early years the science of the Royal Institution was directed to the interests of the landlords, and it was seen and described as a “society of husbandry”.

But it was also concerned with the study of minerals for mining, the tanning of hides, and other concerns which could benefit the landlords. Scientists of the Royal Institution, such as Humphrey Davy, inventor of the miner’s lamp, who was originally an amateur scientist in the eighteenth century tradition, soon found their scientific investigations being directed along paths consistent with particular class interests. However, the dominance of landlords in the Royal Institution did not last, as the changing social structure thrown up by the industrial revolution led to conflicts with other groups. The group of capitalists, merchants, and nabobs who wanted to exploit the resources and workers in the Eastern Colonies came into conflict with the landlords in the Royal Institution over whether the substance catechu should be developed for use in tanning leather (the landlords’ interest) or for adulterating tea so that it could be sold cheaply to the working class (the Colonial interest). In 1805 the Colonial group of capitalists broke away to form their own scientific organisation, the London Institution, with the aim of developing the type of science which served their particular interest.

By the 1840s control of the Royal Institution had slipped from the landlords’ grasp. After some administrative reforms the organisation became increasingly involved with serving the wider interests of capitalism. One way this was done was by supplying the ruling class with ‘scientific experts' to act for the government in their enquiries into some of the disasters created by capitalism. Such a disaster happened at Haswell Colliery in 1844 when a gas explosion killed 95 men and boys. It was Faraday, the founder of the science of electro-magnetism who conducted the scientific investigation. His report was used to give respectability to the coroner’s verdict of ‘no fault’ (accident) because it was supposedly based upon a scientific study, even though the scientific knowledge of mining at that time was negligible. The cause was put down to gas building up and the ignorance of the miners. The report contained an elaborate scheme for getting rid of the gas (which even the owners recognised as useless) and also called for scientific education of the miners. The reality of the situation was somewhat different. On the one hand, the introduction of Davy’s lamp did not make mining safer because it made the working of deeper and more dangerous seams profitable for the mine owners. On the other, the mine owners had the practice of working ‘rich’ seams and leaving the less profitable ones to waste. This often led to the sporadic release of gas from the abandoned seams into the worked mine, increasing the chances of an explosion.

The Royal Institution assisted in putting science at the service of capitalism both by helping to find ways of increasing the surplus value for the ruling class, and also in becoming a part of the ruling class ideology which sanctions the profit motive. The situation today is not fundamentally different.

MD

Aspects of Marxism – Some Critics Criticised (1956)

From the April 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Critics of Marx rarely agree as to actually what they disagree about in respect of his doctrines. Take for example two recent critics J. Plamenatz, Fellow of Nuffield College and R. N. Carew Hunt. J. Plamenatz in his book German Marxism and Russian Communism, does not even grant historical materialism the status of an hypothesis let alone a theory of social development, (pp 172/3.) Although unmindful of this he tells us later, “historical materialism is an hypothesis much better forgotten while those who support it have nothing more to say in its favour than what the Marxists have said.”

On the other hand R. N. Carew Hunt in his work The Theory and Practise of Communism says (p. 42), “The economic factor for all social institutions and particularly for their historical development has exercised a profound influence and all modern writers are indebted to him (Marx) even if they do not know it.” He adds, “any return to pre-Marxist social theory is impossible.”

There is also a difference of emphasis in their respective evaluation of Marxian economics. Thus J. Plamenatz (p.113), same book, says “Marx’s analysis of Capitalism, though seldom free from obscurity sometimes illogical and often mistaken is nevertheless impressive,” on the other hand, R. N. Carew Hunt in The Theory and Practise of Communism (p. 61), quotes with apparent approval Keynes’s dictum, “Capital is an obsolete text book . . . not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world.”

So among critics of Marx, “yer pays yer money and yer takes yer choice,” a choice so wide and varied as to constitute an embarrassment rather than an exercise of the critical faculties. Thus for the price of one book you may gather that Marx was a mental, even if mistaken, giant. Another book may present him as a sort of intellectual pigmy—on stilts. You can also learn that he was a kind of humanitarian watchdog or from an opposite angle that he is the “big bad wolf” of the class struggle concept. He has even been called the father of sociology, a title which R. N. Carew Hunt says he well deserves. On the other hand he has been regarded by many acid critics, of whom J. Plamenatz might be included, as a victim of Hegelian dyspepsia which kept repeating all through his writings. If the reader has perused a number of books criticising Marx and is a little confused and dissatisfied then he can try asking the publishers for his money back or take to reading Marx himself. What a pity Marx could not, in reply to “What did Marx really mean, by the critics” have penned “What do the critics really mean by Marx.”

After this, one might be faintly surprised to learn that R. N. Carew Hunt regards Capital as a very great book and one of the most important ever written (p. 62). As to why it is a great book the author is vagueness itself. Mr. Carew Hunt cannot, however, praise without faint damns. Marx, it seemed, on his intellectual voyage did not quite know where he was going, consequently he lost his bearings and by accident discovered something. Just like Columbus who, having lost his route to India, chanced upon the New World. Mr. Carew Hunt also offers a curious clue as to why he thinks Capital is a very great book. He quotes Mr. Edmund Wilson to the effect that the principles of “capital” “are derived solely from the laws of human selfishness which are as unfailing as the laws of gravitation.”

This is nonsense. How could Marx hold that man in changing the world change themselves and yet believe at the same time in a fixed pattern of human behaviour based on laws of human selfishness expressed as self interest? Indeed for Marx individual motives whether selfish or otherwise, are too complex and obscure even for the individual himself to adequately understand; too fluctuating and tending to cancel each other out, to offer a reliable index to social change. Only the resultant effect of the behaviour of individuals under given objective conditions can be studied and correlated with key factors of the social environment in order to reveal the historical significance of human activity. Even to say that individuals have an interest in self-preservation does not mean a biological adaption to “Nature red in tooth and claw” or a series of sudden impulses and desires actuated by urgent immediacy. Like other interests, self-preservation operates through a complex, socially mediated environment. While it may serve to make individuals highly responsive to social pressures and changes it cannot explain the historically specific activities and interests of men. The key to understanding such activities and interests is not to be located in fixations like self-preservation or self interest but in the social structure and class character of the society in which men live.

The concept of self interest as a social dynamic belongs not to Marx but Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism which sought to give a corporate expression for private interests and pleasure in the maxim of “The greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Such a view served, however, as an apology for Capitalist society because it disregarded the fact that Capitalism was a system based on exploitation and chose to believe that there was some common utility to which all human interests and welfare could be equated and that the existing social relations are the most advantageous and commonly useful to all.

Utilitarianism may be said to be the official social theory of bourgeois society. Its content is essentially anti-social. Its view is an atomistic one. While individuals may jostle with each other in the mutually advantageous hurly-burly of every day life they nevertheless remain self-sufficient units, indivisible and impenetrable. As Marx pointed out, on this theory the egotistic individual is the abstract ideal of bourgeois society. It was John Stuart Mill who gave Utilitarianism an extra coat of humanitarian gloss. While the Fabians with one or two characteristic touches incorporated it into their political philosophy. It has also passed into current economic culture where, according to certain marginal productivity economists, a “natural law” tends to give capital what capital creates, and to labour what labour creates. So every unit of production, we are assured, exploits every other unit and à la Bentham a good time is had by all.

Such a theory of individualism fails to see the unbreakable social links which bind man to man. Just as it failed to see that it was the complex myriad interrelationships of the division of labour which gave individuals their status and privilege, and not their own unaided merit. Marx himself did not deny the role of the individual in society. What he denied was the alleged “rights of individuals” as expressed in a social philosophy. He revealed that Capitalism was a society which brought about a social alienation but. less than any other man, would he have attributed this to some inflexible behaviour, in the form of self-interest as universal and pervasive as the law of gravitation. Indeed, it was Marx’s peculiar contribution to our intellectual inheritance to reveal this alienation as the outcome of the separation of the vast majority from their instruments of production, and the conversion of their productive energies into a commodity. The anti-social consequences of Capitalist society, where the law of value constitutes the real planning authority, has its font, not in the hearts and minds of men, but in the character of the social organisation in which they live.

For Marx the future of man pointed, not to a mythical harmony established by the competitive free play of self interest, but to the social control of all those agencies necessary for man’s well being. Class divided society, Marx thought, impoverished the real content of individuality, only Socialised humanity, he believed, would change the form and enrich the nature of human personality and make it a social value accessible to all. Nor, as is alleged, do Marxists explain specific ideas as facile rationalisations of an underlying motive of self interest. It recognises ideas as powerful agencies through which men conduct their social struggles, and in which they often sincerely believe. Marxists do not underestimate the role of ideas in history. They refuse, however, to accept ideas at their face value. Ideas, they contend, can only be significantly understood by revealing their integral connection with men’s interests and needs. That is why historical ideas cannot be severed from material interests. Historical materialism thus explains, better than any other theory, why in the course of history some ideas have succeeded and others failed. Why some have been accepted and others rejected. For Marxists, ideas are not powers within themselves; they only become effective as instruments of social change when they are tied to powerful historic class needs. Behind the conflict of social ideals there is always a conflict of group economic interests.

Men have many interests, none of which can be isolated from each other, but if we want to know which interest has predominated in the course of history, then analysis shows it is class economic interests which have been crucial in modifying or revolutionising the social situation.

History, Marxists claim, is not the story of individuals with fixed pattern behaviours, but the record of the economic conflict of social classes and, with it, the rise of some and decline of others. Because an individual cannot think or act on his own behalf it is only in and through these social classes that his social outlook, traditions, and allegiances, are moulded. From this it follows that a dominant social group will systematise its ideas and attitudes in seeking to preserve the social situation which serves their needs. Just as other groups in accordance with their aims and interests will seek to modify, or radically alter, existing conditions. Each ruling group proclaims, however, that it speaks, not for itself but on behalf of the community.

Social classes have no reference to an abstract economic man pursuing the path of self interest, but grew out of the development of socially organised production If the investigation of history starts with men’s needs it can be shown that these needs are socially produced and therefore socially mediated. From these needs there develops the sub-division of labour which in turn brings about different and various vocational activities and productive functions. It is from this historical productive structure that individuals acquired status and privilege, which crystallised into social classes.

Because human history is social history the motives of the single “self” are never determining factors in social development. Since the passing of primitive society history has been class history and the behaviour of individuals, class conditioned. Moreover, men are born into a set of class relations independent of their individual wills, i.e., as master or slave, lord or serf, Capitalist or wage worker, which limit their scope and action. The scope and action of members of a class are even more significantly limited by the overall and constant pressure of their existing needs resulting from economic conditions, the outcome of which results in a common pi and activity. Because the common economic activity which members of a class engage in produces an aggregate effect, it does not follow that such activity is reducible to the individual behaviour of members of that class. The motives actuating an individual might not be primarily economic, but his consideration and conduct are moulded by the interests of the group to which he belongs, and without whose support little could be effected. Class interests and the opposition between class interests centre around the ownership of the productive resources.

Because variations in individual motives are compensated for in any large aggregate activity, it produces a net effect different from the anticipated end result of each individual action. By correlating this average behaviour with crucial factors in a given social environment we are able to give a significant account of the society in which we live.

Marx never sought to make the individual the sole responsible agent for the society of which he is a part. This did not prevent him from protesting against the anti-social consequences of the class ownership of the productive resources and the anti-social nature of the class behaviour associated with it. While he never held the Rousseau belief which saw man as an essentially noble animal he never wavered from the view that the vast majority were capable of transforming the dehumanised character of extant society into something truly human. Far from believing in an invariant pattern of human behaviour, he proclaimed, “all history is a modification of human nature.” Mr. Carew Hunt’s attempt to foist on Marx the notion of an abstract economic man is laughable. He is typical of a long line of critics who have not read Marx so much as to have read what others have read into him.

Ted Wilmott

Beggar’s belief (1999)

From the January 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Capitalism creates a mass of people who are permanently unemployed and then has to devise means to control them.

In 1728 John Gay wrote The Beggar’s Opera for the London stage. It was an attack on the corruption of Robert Walpole’s government of private men and on the self-interested motivations that were now to drive society. It featured a central character called Mr. Peachum, a turn-key (gaoler), who aided, organised and fenced for the criminal fraternity of London (representing the cut-throat selfishness of Walpole’s ministers) and then turned them in to the authorities when they were no longer profitable to him.

It is not surprising that such a play should appear with the arrival of capitalism within society, with its emphasis on mercenary personal gain replacing any notion of loyalty or community. It is also not surprising that a prison was the chosen setting, nor that the law was seen as a corrupt tool in the hands of a selfish few. What is surprising, is how durable this image from the dawn of Modernity has turned out to be.

The prison was a common feature of 18th century writing, because it was emerging as a new and devastating weapon in the class war. Under feudalism the population could be controlled by fear, by selected spectacular public executions, to keep the whole thing running. Emergent industrial capitalism, however, needed a disciplined workforce, ready to clock on and work like machines, and obey. For industrial capitalism, gory punishments and executions were wasteful, and did not create sufficient internal discipline. Other methods were required.

Thus, with the advance of capitalism, we see less and less reliance on execution as a means of social control, and more and more on the rise of the prison. It is telling that the prominent liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham advanced, for his idea of a Utilitarian Utopia, the Panopticon, a prison/workhouse/school, wherein from a central tower an observer could see into all the individual cells, without being seen themself. The idea was that the uncertainty of not being detected would prevent the inhabitants from stepping out of line, and thus there would be no offences. This was a fantasy of the factory, perfectly compliant workers, in their place, and knowing their own duty and work. It is also an image from which capitalism has never been able to escape, because it is precisely that discipline that it needs to function. This applies not just in the workplace, but in the whole of society.

Surplus population

The big problem for capitalism is that it contains the seeds for its own discord, so whenever social discipline breaks down prison is deployed to try and patch things up. The prison remains as a solid reminder of the anti-social nature of capitalism.

Capitalism creates such social breakdown because its creates a “surplus population”. Capitalism can, to keep up the compulsion on the workers to work, only fully maintain those workers who succeed in selling their labour power. Some of the rest are maintained at a lower level as an “industrial reserve army” to be used in the event of production expanding. Beyond them is a stagnant pool of the permanently unemployed who are regarded as “unemployable”. In recent years, as economic growth has slowed and the introduction of labour-saving methods continued, the size of this pool has grown. As far as the capitalist is concerned these workers, since they are on no use to them, can go hang (quite literally in the past).

Thus Noam Chomsky has spoken of “a kind of superfluous population there’s no point in educating because there’s nothing to do with them. You put them in prison because we’re a civilized people and you don’t send death squads out to murder them” (interview with David Barsamian, 1971).

The facts for America bear this out. In California education budgets have been slashed, and prison officers earn 30 percent more than lecturers, with a massive increase in the use of prisons. In that state alone over 130,000 people were held in prison in 1995, and it was still rising then. California has allocated $3.2 billion extra to its prison budget since 1992. Nor is California alone, and nor is it the worst. In 1993 California had 607 prisoners per 100,000 population, Texas had 700, and Georgia had 730. The combined totals of the three most populated European states (France, UK, Germany) only reached 84 per 100,000 head of population in the same year. In 1997 in the USA the figure was 645.

In 1995 5.4 million Americans were within the prison system (that includes remand, on parole, in prison, etc.), which works out as about 5 percent of the adult male population. The prison system has been deployed, to great effect, both to ameliorate the unemployment statistics (all those prisoners don’t show up) and to control the “socially excluded”. Within the vast network of controls, the US poor are being restrained and disciplined. This is on top of the increasing number of restraints being imposed by the American “welfare” system.

In recent years in Britain, both under the Tories and Labour, the prison population has began to shoot up as our masters, realising the bankrupt nature of their policies, and the stagnant nature of modern capitalism, decided to copy the US model. According to Home Office Statistics for 1997, there were 61,114 people in prison in the UK, 5,833 more than the previous year, and increase of 11 percent. The prison population has increased by 37 percent since 1993 (when it was 44,570), and it is clear that it is the greater use of custodial sentences that has caused that increase. The number of prisoners per 100,000 head of population has also increased to 111 (120 in England and Wales, 119, in Scotland and 95 in Northern Ireland), second only to Portugal in Europe.

What’s more is the increasing use of private prisons, selling them to a whole bunch of Peachums, to make a profit from locking up the poor (Gay is still with us). The massive amount of spending on prisons is going to create a demand to keep the prisons full (which will be complemented by police arrest quotas), to justify the payments and swell the security firms’ profits. As the system gets more and more expanded, more firms are being allowed a slice of the prison cake. In August this year, two months after the 1000th convict was tagged for home detention (a cheap and easy modern equivalent of the Panopticon, to enable the government to extend prison control even further), the government announced the winning firms that had tendered to administer these schemes.

The Curfew Orders which necessitate tagging are a way of subtly increasing the effect of prison, and controlling the numerous “petty offenders” for whom prison is too expensive and wasteful and option

More discipline

In April, the government announced that it was going to extend its “Welfare to Work” scheme to some lucky young prisoners, to help them find work (and thus buck the 76 percent recidivism rate for young offenders). This linking (apart from being a naked attempt to try and use their “captive audience” to increase the success figure for the New Deal) demonstrates the intrinsic values of the New Con, that it is a device by which the government is trying to control the surplus population, and allocate them to work, whenever they can find it for them. Already they are embarking on making it mandatory for single mothers to attend their initial New Deal interviews. Increasingly more and more strings are attached to “welfare”. Inspectors can call round at recipients homes and look round for signs of co-habitation, with a de-facto search warrant, under threat of extra-judicial punishment (removal of benefits).

Prison is also a device by which to promote and re-enforce racial division in society (as if creating a “criminal class” isn’t divisive enough). In Britain 1.5 percent of the British male population are Caribbean, however a staggering 10.4 percent of the British male prison population are likewise Caribbean. Of the female prison population, 12.9 percent were Caribbean, while only 1.8 percent of the general female population are.

The racism aspect is worsened when one considers that some 2,720 immigrants are held in “Detention Centres” as what the Home Office euphemistically calls “non-Criminal Prisoners”, part of the government’s attempts to prevent immigrants entering the country.

Also prison was used extensively for fine defaulters, of whom some 6,300 found their way to gaol, helping victimise the poor of society even more.

It is worth remembering, that throughout the Thatcher Years, police pay awards were significantly above other public sector pay awards (such as nurses and teachers), as the government fought to secure the loyalty of the police force. The result of this can be seen in the difference between the police involvement in the Miners’ Strike (with an illegal national police force being established, and the miners’ freedom of movement restricted) and recent events in Australia, where the police refused to intervene in the dockers’ dispute telling the government straight that they should fight their own battles. Also, increasingly, local councils are reliant on Close Circuit Television Cameras (with ever increasing sophistication) to keep an eye on us and ensure we are behaving (that damned panoptic eye again). We are not judged to be responsible enough to go about our own lives.

Other attacks on basic liberties abound, police stop and search powers are increased, the right to silence is removed, the right to trial by jury is decreased, freedom of movement is restricted. The change of government has made no difference. Increasingly the state is trying to shape and control our lives through bureaucracy or through the police.

The only solution open to capitalism now, faced with social decay and chaos, is to criminalise the “surplus population”, to lock them up, to take control of them and increase discipline throughout society. Capitalism’s only solutions are brutal and barbaric, and in 1997 70 inmates of prisons killed themselves.

Socialism offers to end the social conditions that cause that breakdown and necessitate enforced discipline, offering instead self-worth, and freedom of association in production, a strong inclusive social identity. The prison is not a symbol of capitalism. Capitalism is a prison, and it is imperative for us to try and break out of it.

Pik Smeet

Pathfinders: Killer Apps (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Killer Apps
People in capitalism have funny notions of ethics. Take the recent US retaliatory bombing of Syrian sites following Assad’s alleged use of chemical bombs in Douma. The Syrian government has been bombing, strafing and massacring its own population for the past seven years with scarcely a raised eyebrow from Western powers. But let him once resort to an ‘illegal’ weapon of war and the civilised world goes into a moral hissy fit. In a similar vein, a group of scientists have announced they are boycotting work at a South Korean university which they say will lead to autonomous battlefield robots able to identify and kill people without any human oversight (BBC Online, 5 April). The university denies it of course, but even so there’s a strange logic to all this. Rich states already have weaponised drones that can destroy at long distance, controlled by drone ‘pilots’ operating thousands of miles from the scene and able to see just grainy lo-res satellite images of what they’re aiming at. Do they make mistakes, and blow up residential blocks inside of missile silos, or wedding parties instead of terrorist cells? Yes, of course they do. As technology has steadily increased the distance between warring sides, to the point where the no-man’s-land in between is the size of a continent, the ability of the remote operators to make the right tactical decision based on good, on-the-ground information has suffered accordingly. The logical next step is to take humans out of the equation altogether and let artificial intelligence make the decisions. After all it’s not going to make much difference to you whether you’re blown up by some red-eyed half-asleep drone operator in Nevada or by a bright shiny AI program on someone’s iPhone. Either way it’s nothing personal. If capitalism is determined to kill you, it will at least try to do it efficiently. For socialists, there are no ‘moral’ ways of killing, and to take sides in some bogus ethical debate about legitimate and illegitimate weapons is simply to collude in the social acceptance of the truly monstrous. Either you’re against all capitalist war, or you’re not. Trying to take a middle position in no-man’s-land is just artificial unintelligence.

Faceclock and the Binopticon
Recently it was reported that Chinese face-recognition AI software had successfully scanned 60,000 people at a pop concert and picked out one individual who was wanted by the authorities. Nobody was more amazed by this technological feat than the fugitive himself, who protested that ‘If I’d known, I wouldn’t have come (to the concert)!’ Chinese police are now also trialling face recog sunglasses, and the long eyeball of the law is even being used to identify jaywalkers and toilet roll thieves (Hong Kong Free Press, 19 June 2017). Ali Baba, the Asian Amazon, are heavily investing in face recog while Facebook plans to roll it out across Europe despite CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently being carpeted by the US Congress for selling user data. No doubt they will call it Faceclock.

We are living in an era where surveillance is more sophisticated than ever, and it is coming at us from two warring directions, from the state, and from the private sector via retail and social media. Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century imagined a kind of transparent glass prison, the Panopticon, where all inmates could be watched, without their knowing it, by just one guard. What we are dealing with now is the Binopticon, and we are increasingly pinned securely in its stereo vision without the possibility of manoeuvre or escape. Many people are not worried by this and indeed appreciate the benefits of surveillance by the state (less chance of being mugged in the street, more terrorists watched) and by retail and media (conveniently filtering out products and ideas you don’t want to see). Capitalist media pundits make hay over the ‘threat’ to democracy, but this misses a larger point. The Binopticon is presently out of focus as the two ‘lenses’ fight for data supremacy. What happens when state and private sector inevitably overcome their spat and learn to operate ‘in phase’? Then the question arises: who needs democracy at all? The whole idea of ‘government by consent’ breaks down if individual workers can be watched, tracked, brainwashed and micromanaged 24 hours a day. People tend to make the unwarranted assumption that history is progressive and that democratic forms are built into the DNA of liberal capitalism. But that could be a foolish delusion. Capitalism could function perfectly well without any democracy at all, once surveillance technology is perfected. If you don’t want to spend the rest of your life in a glass prison, better start throwing some stones while there’s still time.

Slow boats and fast bucks
The news that the global shipping industry has agreed for the first time to cut its carbon emissions will come as a surprise to anyone who didn’t realise that shipping, like aviation, has never been part of any climate agreement and thus not discussed at Kyoto, Rio or the Paris accord. Capitalism is a global profit system but when it comes to picking up the environmental tab for those profits the transnational distribution system has so far escaped responsibility, despite shipping being, in carbon footprint terms, the world’s sixth largest country (BBC Online, 13 April). Now the International Maritime Organisation has agreed to a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 relative to 2008 levels, despite opposition from the US, Brazil and Saudi Arabia. The deal may spur new marine technology, or even see a partial return to the days of sail.

Container shipping has revolutionised world markets and is responsible for 80 percent of the world’s trade by volume and 70 percent by value (2016 Safety & Shipping Review). Though worker fatalities have fallen in recent years, to around 1,000 a year, shipping remains one of the world’s most dangerous activities. Given this, you might assume that firms don’t ship goods unnecessarily, however it is a fairly common experience to buy an item online, on the assumption that it was available locally or at least nationally, only to find weeks later that it has been shipped all the way from China or Korea. Many online marketplaces don’t bother to give you this information, probably because many people would choose not to buy long-distance in this way. In socialism the aim of production and distribution would be to localise as much as possible, to reduce complexity, resource and energy costs, and of course human exposure to risk. In capitalism none of this matters next to the overriding question of what will make the most money.

Paddy Shannon

Prisons are iniquitous (1980)

Illustration by George Meddemmen.

From the December 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

If we are to believe the present analysis of prison conditions in this country we would be led to the conclusion that a crisis has come about. For example Peter Jenkins, in an article in the Guardian (21 May 1980) stated that:

the crisis in the prisons goes deeper than the overpopulation of rotting Victorian gaols. The Prison Service has lost its purpose and imprisonment itself a good deal of its previous moral rationalisation and the result is that there is no longer any means of justifying prison conditions in Britain; they are, quite simply, uncivilised and inhumane.

Jenkins seems to suggest that the prison system could once have been defended on a moral and rational basis but that somehow something has gone adrift. What can be emphasised is that prison conditions are appalling and that those people who are the victims of those conditions, especially if serving life sentences, do, according to Home Office Research Study 51 Life Sentence Prisoners, become increasingly introverted, obsessed with the past and institutionalised. Mental breakdown is not uncommon nor is the use of drugs as a means of keeping the prison population calm.

Imprisonment has existed as a form of punishment since the thirteenth century but it is not until the eighteenth that we begin to find prisons which approximate to the present-day set-up. Before the eighteenth century prisons had been used for keeping people who were awaiting trial or a place where someone could be housed while awaiting his punishment. There were also debtors prisons. With the decline of transportation, due to the refusal of colonies to be the dumping ground for British offenders, we see the development of penal establishments. Between 1840 and 1860 sixty new prisons were built to supplement local gaols. These local gaols had been run for private profit, although supposedly under the control of the local authority. New prisons were of single cell design and this was to become the pattern. Single-cellular confinement had been introduced because it was felt to be a stricter form of punishment. In 1823 a parliamentary committee allowed candles to be used in all cells and also called for educational opportunities. Jeremy Bentham had also argued for education in prisons and had spoken of a need for prisons to be like schools in which offenders could be instructed in useful branches of basic learning. He had also argued that offenders should be taught some basic trade whereby they could earn their livelihood on release. Elizabeth Fry, working at Newgate from 1916, had attempted to provide some form of employment and religious instruction for women, although only for those who were temperate, clean and capable of decent conversation. She had also provided schooling for the children of inmates.

In 1865 cellular confinement was made the rule after the style of Pentonville built in 1842. The Caernarvon Committee urged that conditions should be made terrible for the inmate and proposed ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’. Education which had taken place in Pentonville and Millbank was stopped. From 1877 prisons came under the authority of the Home Secretary and made subject to public finance. Hard labour and solitary confinement were continued.

In 1898 the remission of sentences was introduced. Some corporal punishment was abolished as were the treadmill and the crank. In 1907 the Probation of Offenders Act was passed and 1908 saw the Prevention of Crime Act which introduced borstal training for the 16-21 age group. Borstal training included formal education and gymnastics. Juvenile courts were introduced in 1908 and these dealt with offenders under the age of 16. In 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act was introduced which made an attempt to cut down the number of offenders in prison who were psychologically disturbed. The Criminal Administration Act (1914) attempted to reduce the number of debtors in prison by allowing time for fines to be paid. This policy has been continued by the Money Payments Act (1935) and the Criminal Justices Act (1967). The 1948 Criminal Justice Act cut out penal servitude, hard labour and corporal punishment and also introduced Detention Centres and Attendance Centres.

As can be seen the major intention of most of the acts of the twentieth century has been to cut down the number of offenders within the prison system. There has also been a growing emphasis on the need for reform, training and treatment of convicted prisoners to instil in them the will to lead "a good and useful life” on discharge.

At this point it is perhaps as well to ask who are the offenders and what crimes have they committed. This is best judged by reference to the type of offence recorded by the police in England and Wales as shown in the table below:

What should be emphasised is that the majority of prisoners serve short-term sentences. Although attempts have been made to cut down the numbers of prisoners who are debtors, yet there is a sizeable prison population made up of those who have defaulted in payment of fines and those who have failed to comply with money orders.

Since the period 1964-66, in which there was a series of dramatic escapes, prisoners have been categorised in accordance with security. The guidelines were laid down by the Mountbatten Report (1966). Category A prisoners are said to be those whose escape would be highly dangerous to the public, police or state security while category B represents those who need less secure conditions but to whom escape must be made difficult.

Category C includes those who are not to be trusted in open conditions but who do not have the ability or resources to make a determined escape attempt. Finally category D represents those who can be trusted in open prisons.

Education is now common in prisons and a Home Office Policy Statement on Education in Prisons (1969) argued that:

the purpose of education in prisons is really the same as its purpose outside, namely, to help a person to have some understanding of himself, of his fellow men and of the world in which he lives and works; to acquire a skill, trade, or profession, and to pursue it successfully; to use time in ways which arc useful, acceptable and satisfying; and generally to illumine his personality.

In that sense the purpose of education is social indoctrination but again if that is the purpose of prison education then the failure rate is enormous. Much of the prison population is made up of people who are unable to cope with modern industrial life and to them prison represents a form of relief. What must be emphasised is that the crimes that are committed are related to the way in which society is structured. Laws are not based on some eternal moral code of behaviour but exist as an apparatus whereby the structure of society is maintained. Within contemporary capitalist society the basis upon which that structure is built is a consequence of the economic relations that exist within society. This is the point that Engels argued in Anti-Duhring:

the economic structure of society always forms the real basis, from which, in the last analysis, the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions as well as the religious, philosophical and other ideas of a given historical period is to be explained.

 The law preserves the rights of private property and for this reason the vast majority of crimes are crimes against property. Ultimately the function of the law is the preservation of the class ownership of the means of production and distribution and, by necessity, this includes all products associated with that production. To say that the prison system has lost its moral rationale is to misunderstand the conditions that have given rise to the system.

The prison represents a form of coercion. Its purpose is to affect human behaviour. For the most part prisoners are those who have broken the property laws and rights of capitalism and they are punished as a warning to others who might also feel inclined to reject those laws. By the same token the punishment of the offender is also expected to involve some form of socialisation so that the offender will return to society as a ‘reformed character’ ready to embrace the property laws against which he had previously acted. What those property laws signify is a means by which the vast majority of the population are denied access to the potential that society is capable of producing. To say of the prison system that it treats the offenders badly is to miss the point. The existence of the prison system is a constant reminder to the working class of its subservient role within society. The prison is a weapon for the maintenance of the iniquitous system of social relations of capitalism, in which the majority are denied access to the wealth they themselves have created.

Philip Bentley

Noam Chomsky - Rights and Lefties (1995)

From the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists aren't the only people pointing out that it is useless pleading with governments to end the problems which are endemic to capitalism. Noam Chomsky reiterated this during a recent talk - pity his audience didn't appreciate his point!

There was something vaguely comical about the atmosphere in the Central Hall, Westminster on the bright June evening when Prof Noam Chomsky was to deliver his talk on the theme "HUman Rights in the New World Order". All the fashionable stewards wore black T-shirts with the following imperative in small white lower-case letters: "defend diversity". There were scores of people dressed in this uniform.

Chomsky's address was part of a Human Rights convention which had been sponsored by the Observer and the legal campaign group Liberty. This event was attended by a wide range of left-wing lawyers, radical journalists, professional campaigners, and post-post-modern pundits. Most of the famous names were there to lead seminars or workshops.

Noam Chomsky, often dubbed as the world's greatest philosopher, is a man who is steadfastly opposed to icons of any description, to human sheep following political shepherds. He even opposed the superb documentary about the book he c-wrote with Edward S. Herman (Manufacturing Consent) on the grounds that it personalised grand political issues. It was therefore incredible to witness the degree of personal adulation bestowed on this man by many of the people there. The man in front of me kept taking photographs of Chomsky during the talk. At the end of the talk hundreds of people tried to get the philosopher's autograph.

We do not underestimate the immeasurable contribution that Noam Chomsky has made, and is making, to radically change the world, but to treat him as a saviour is to misunderstand his arguments. Chomsky was on his feet for two hours. He gave a coruscatingly good analysis of modern capitalism. and showed how the origins of sustained human rights violations can all be traced back to struggles over property rights, land rights, rights of trade and so forth. It was, therefore, utterly dispiriting for socialists in the audience (and probably for Chomsky himself) when his blisteringly articulate condemnation of capitalism drew nothing but fairly dull questions from the audience. Each of the few questions seemed to come from various left-wing, reformist activists, and betrayed an apparent incomprehension of what had been said in the talk.

Chomsky's arguments

Chomsky began by pointing out that in capitalism "politics takes place in the shadow cast by big business". He concentrated on American foreign policy showing how, for example, such policy in Haiti was formed and reformed in accordance with the interests of the super-rich both there and in America. The ordinary population of Haiti was treated as a dispensable element in the process of making a few people very rich. The American government like countries with which it does business to be "stable". The stricter the government, the better. A strong military government is fine, a fascist regime will do nicely. No trade unions to interrupt the wealth-creating process, and a large armed police presence all the time will produce just the sort of disciplined order and reliable "economic miracle" that American investors would be prepared to rely upon.

With fastidious detail, and supporting his every proposition with demonstrably accurate data (often adducing facts and figures released by the American government itself), Chomsky showed how "liberals" like Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton had condoned mass murder, torture, and savagery by the deals they did, in Brazil and Colombia respectively. "If the Nuremberg laws were applied," as Chomsky commented on another occasion, "then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

He then gave a frighteningly grim picture of life today for many Americans. The recession has produced armies of politicians and "experts" who favour social policies of "tough love". This means being cruel to be kind. Taking away the nanny state in order to teach people the virtues of self-dependence. No free school, no free medicine. Win in the rat race or curl up and die. "Tough love is what they call it for a good reason," said Chomsky, "because the rich love it and it's tough on everybody else." The irony is, as he pointed out, that these policies were put forward in the name of "family values" and yet their direct and clearly predictable result has been to assist in the destruction of that institution in America. Fathers who have been conditioned to see themselves as breadwinners have no employment, mothers work long, part-time sessions, and children are supervised by television sets. Fathers get drunk and depressed, wives work themselves into a torpor, and the kids end up as unsocialised, illiterate delinquents. And all this in the cause of promoting God and the family.

Why should workers be afforded the luxury of employment contracts and their associated legal rights? Ask the new economists. We should all become part of a more "flexible economy". Chomsky explained the rationale for this: "the bosses want you anxious as hell when your head touches the pillow each night, worrying whether you'll be at work the day after tomorrow, as there's nothing quite like that worry to get you worrying like mad".

Chomsky's opposition to the wages-system is always clearly put: "I don't think that many people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive", as he once put it. Many of his ideas appear succinctly in a book which is a commentary on the documentary Manufacturing Consent. The book is Noam Chomsky and the Media edited by Mark Achbar (Black Rose Books, Montreal/London) and the "rent" quotation is on page 215. Again, consider his views on the need for government:

"presupposing that there have to be states is like saying, what kind of feudal system should we have that would be the best one? What kind of slavery would be the best kind?" (p. 208)

At the meeting Chomsky revealed two telling figures from a recent opinion poll in the United States. He noted that 82 per cent of the respondents thought that most politicians were in politics for their own gain, and that 83 per cent of respondents thought that "the current economic system is inherently unfair". It could hardly have been plainer that Chomsky's identification of the reasons for human rights violations was the essential nature of capitalism. It was not an unacceptable face of capitalism, something that needs adjusting with a legal instrument, it was the system itself.

Yet, after two hours of quietly, cogently, and often hilariously, showing that the social system was necessarily slanted against human rights, campaigners stood up at the end of the talk and asked for Chomsky's blessing for a variety of foredoomed crusades. Chomsky had argued that the problem of human rights abuse was just a necessary consequence of having a system run by bankers not by philanthropists or moral philosophers, yet the reformers wanted him to approve of huge human efforts to plead with governments to act more kindly.

To his great credit, Chomsky seemed to treat legal interference with capitalism as an unreliable solution to the problems of human rights violations. Although he spoke for two hours he only came to the matter of law in the final sixty seconds of his talk. He picked up a piece of card and referred to some specific questions involving legal strategies which he had been invited to address by the organisers, said, in effect, that they weren't very important in the context of capitalism, and concluded his opening remarks. Those lawyers who had been manning the expensively-decorated recruiting stall of the Law Society (the solicitors' trade union) in the foyer before the talk must have felt rather let down.

The first questioner, from the audience of 2,000,  introduced himself as a spokesperson for the "Luton Peoples' Collective". He said that some people in Britain had been victimised by the police for illegal drug use. Was this branch of human rights designed to intimidate all deviants from conventional behaviour into conforming to capitalism? Having travelled 3,000 miles to talk about human rights in a world suffering from such enormous problems as starvation somewhere in the world), carnage, ethnic cleansing, forced female circumcision, and the catalogue of crimes exposed by Amnesty International, Chomsky was visibly disappointed with the first question. But the questions did not improve.

The second questioner asked whether Chomsky favoured the London-based campaign to stop the Cuban government buying certain sorts of missiles? A possibly rather gutted Chomsky patiently explained to Private Eye's Dave Spart that, as had been pointed out in the talk, there was no convincing evidence that governments could be persuaded by moralists to run capitalism in accordance with anything but the principles of accounting. And so the questions continued. I wanted to ask Chomsky to comment on the sort of society he wanted to see at the end of the "long road" he had said we would have to travel before becoming civilised; and how we should travel there. Alas, despite 20 minutes of impersonating a flagless semaphorist, I was still not chosen by the steward to ask a question. Perhaps I should been wearing a T-shirt bearing a single demand from capitalism as its slogan.

Many people on the left in politics have an unwarrantedly optimistic view of what can be achieved by using the law to tame and control commerce. The law cannot do that. As a socialist I do not support the campaign for human rights, for two reasons.

First, the whole idea of getting down on your knees and asking someone or something for your "rights" is undiginified. It presupposes that the giver or rights (he, she, they, or it) is superior to the supplicant. I am a human being and I don't want a society where I have to depend upon John Major, the Lord Chancellor, Bill Clinton or the chief judge in Strasbourg to finish a plate of lobster and then tell me whether I have the right to breathe, work, be free, protest, or anything else. Rights are for the meek.

They are also for the unrealistic. The second objection to rights is that history has shown them to be nothing but instantly disposable guarantees. The American constitution in 1776 declared that "all men are born free", yet slavery was still an institution for almost another century, swiftly followed by universal wage-slavery. The left's hapless "right to work" campaign fizzled out in the 1980s when it became apparent to even the most bigoted SWP member that capitalism does not and can never guarantee such rights. Go to any country in the world which boasts a constitution guaranteeing the right to life and you will find the bodies or the statistics to debunk the paper right.

Jeremy Bentham, the nineteenth-century reformer, and the man who wrote that "property and law are born together and die together", had a clear understanding of legal rights. He said that they were "nonsense" and that the idea of basic human rights was "nonsense upon stilts". There's no point in calling them rights if getting them enforced is only a pious hope. A call for rights is a plea to a recognised superior. Let's forget "rights", and get up off our knees.

Gary Jay