Remembering What? (2018)

From the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Every year about this time we get bombarded with exhortations to remember. This year, the centenary of the end of the war that didn’t end all wars, it is going to be worse. People who have no compunction in reporting cold callers to the police turn up on your doorstep asking for a donation in return for a piece of red paper on a green bit of plastic; people who confront you on tube stations asking for money with the word ‘poppy’ are smiled upon, whereas those poor bastards who sit silently with a sign asking for some money to find a place to stay or something to eat are seen as social pariahs. Everywhere we are reminded of the supreme sacrifice for our freedom made by people who will not grow old as we grow old with an exhortation to remember. If you don’t remember in the way expected, you are somehow disloyal or contributing to the demise of civilisation.

For a socialist, I have been to quite a few Remembrance Day parades. As children growing up in the sixties there was not much to do of a Tuesday evening and the Cubs and Scouts seemed like a good option – it was definitely preferable to the more militaristic Boys Brigade. One of the downsides was that we had to attend a Remembrance Day service each year. I remember a two-minute silence which they broadcast from the Cenotaph, but I don’t recall any attempt to understand the causes of what we were commemorating or to see things from the perspective of the Germans – the pantomime villains in the Victor comics that we read.

Fast forward a further thirty years, a period encompassing the involvement in wars in Serbia, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. I went to another Remembrance Day parade. This was also due to the invidious influence of Baden Powell’s organisation. We had, despite misgivings about the duty to God and the Queen stuff, agreed to our son’s requests to join his local Cub group. Again, one of the downsides is that he is expected to attend the local Remembrance Sunday parade each year. I hoped it would not be too bad. The 200 or so from the village in which we live who joined the carnage that was the First World War comprised the majority of the fit and able-bodied men. Of these 42 were killed – for some reason about a third of these are not listed on the war memorial. More recently there had been regular reports of valiant British troops dying in Afghanistan (every one a saint) that might at least provoke the youngsters to think critically about War.

Fat chance. I had a bad feeling on arriving at the Village Green, when I saw that the Boys Brigade Band were present. There was an assorted group of men dressed in greatcoats, wearing assorted medal ribbons, saluting each other, and discussing their ‘service’ experiences – or however many Fritzes or Arabs they had offed. I guessed that most had been involved in the Second World War or Korea, although there were clearly some from later conflicts. These past servants of the monarch filed in behind the youth organisations, treated like Gods. I think that Harry and I were the only ones without a poppy.

Not much chance of the band playing ‘Give Peace a Chance’ or ‘I don’t want to join the Army’. Unsurprisingly the youngsters went off down the round to ‘Men of Harlech’, ‘Blaydon Races’, ‘The Dambusters’ and ‘The Great Escape’ (or ‘the Great Round Up’ as the German comic Henning Wehn describes it). Watching them disappear down the road to the Church gave me a vague feeling that this was how regimental bands lead the cannon fodder to meet the cannon.

Anyhow, the service. Surely we would get something based on thou shalt not kill, even if it did not go so far as thinking about whether it is right to covet thy neighbour’s oil. Not much chance from a vicar imbued with a sense of patriotism from his role as a chaplain in the Napoleonic War recreation society. Having said that, it could have been worse. There was some attempt to think about the horrors faced, as the Vicar had got hold of a couple of pieces of shrapnel from the Neuve Chappelle battlefield and passed them round. I cannot imagine how horrible it must have been to have a shell explode above you and for great red hot chunks of metal like that to be flying at you. Unfortunately this was seen very much from the British and Commonwealth perspective and the overall tone of the event was that the British, and whoever was fortunate enough to be their allies at the time, were and still are a non-ending force for good in the world, assisted of course by God. The songs were worse.

It was therefore not surprising that there was no acknowledgement that ‘we’ were equally predisposed to chucking shrapnel as the Germans, despite the fact that it was not possible to tell whether the shrapnel had been made by Krupps or by the factories of one of the hard-faced men who did rather well out of the First World War. Equally there was no attempt to acknowledge that people other than ‘our’ troops had suffered in the various conflicts in which the UK has been involved in the seventy years of peace since VJ Day. The whole thing ended when they read out the names of the glorious dead – or at least those who made the war memorial – and we were required to file past the war memorial and lay our poppies on it. Bit embarrassing that one, but I managed to fade away with Harry whilst the old men in greatcoats continued to talk about those they had offed.

So that was that. I won’t be back. In recent years we have acquired a library of songs by Leon Rosselson and Robb Johnson which gives a selection of material to play at loud volume at midday British Summer Time on the second Sunday in November each year. Leon Rosselson’s back catalogue includes a song entitled ‘Remembrance Day’ in which the coarse and ill-bred voice of the fallen and the dead interrupts a service at the Cenotaph with the observation that ‘We do not want your two minutes silence you can stuff it up your arse’. But what is wrong with remembering the unnecessary deaths of anything up to 150 million people in the twentieth century, not forgetting those who have died before or since. It is clear to most people that war’s war and it’s nasty and it brutalises those who participate in it – even if they are not killed or injured. Interestingly, there is evidence of psychological problems faced by those sitting behind desks in Arizona or Nevada, or possibly Barford St John, chucking missiles into Afghan villages and wedding celebrations.

In some ways the losses are so vast as to be impersonal – 35,000 killed on the First Day of the Somme and 11,000 at D-Day. However, each one is a tragedy and has a ripple effect on friends and family across many generations. We went to a church in Malvern recently in which memorials commemorates the loss of three subalterns from the same family in the First World War with the fourth and final one shot by the IRA as retaliation for some mindless act of brutality by the Black and Tans. I can only imagine what that family went through.

On a personal level, one of my greatest fears is that my son will be forced into the forces, and one of my more vivid memories of recent years is the relief on the faces of the parents of one of his friends that their son had flunked his A levels and would not be following his father to Sandhurst but would have to use his undoubted talents and charisma doing something useful, teaching children instead.

You could probably point to some instances in which the working class would probably have suffered more if the outcome of particular conflicts had gone the other way – for example would the SPGB exist today if Hitler had been victorious, and it is arguable that overthrow of Milosovich prevented further genocide in Bosnia. Conversely, would the working class have suffered less overall if the outcome of the Spanish Civil War had been different.

These are interesting historical debates but irrelevant to the socialist cause, which sees war as an inevitable by-product of the capitalist system. Having come from a shortish line of ‘conchies’ and Party members, I have never felt like taking the shilling and am pleased that I am probably now too old to face the undoubted pressure that people faced to do a century or so ago. I don’t pretend that I can relate to the men in greatcoats and do not know how I would fare in the face of real danger – actually I do but I don’t want to say.

There would perhaps be nothing much wrong with either remembering the losses or working to mitigate the horrendous effects that war can have on those who fight it, if remembering the losses and the suffering was accompanied by a genuine commitment that they would not be repeated (even if it fell short of a real understanding of how the system generates conflict).

The work that Help for Heroes does in supporting those suffering from traumas of war is limited to British service personnel and qualified by the strapline exhorting people to contribute on the basis that they would be ‘part of the force for good’. The assumption of the remembrance process is that our boys are the honourable and truthful defenders of truth and justice against barbaric hordes who want to murder us all in our beds. If war ever was fair, it has become increasingly unfair as killing technology has evolved – it is difficult to see how people subject to predator drone attacks could see otherwise. Those who fight against the British do not see things in quite the same way.

So that is about that. We are fundamentally a social species and killing strangers is unnatural and unsettling. War is unnatural as people in war try to kill people who they do not know and who they might well like if they got to know them. The Sunday Times (7 November 2004) reported that the last surviving Tommy, Harry Patch, had gone back to Ypres to shake the hand of Charles Kuentz, Germany’s only surviving veteran from the war, commenting that

  ‘It was emotional. He is 107. We’ve had 87 years to think what war is. To me, it’s a licence to go out and murder. Why should the British government call me up and take me out to a battlefield to shoot a man I never knew, whose language I couldn’t speak? All those lives lost for a war finished over a table. Now what is the sense in that?’

The pressure to remember as a means to condoning future involvement in conflicts will be more this year, the centenary of peace in 1918. It is depressing that the working class will continue to accept this. I spent some time thinking of a pithy end to all this, but could do no better than an extract from the August 1919 Socialist Standard discussing the Versailles treaty, namely that the causes of war will remain whilst competition between capitalist groups for routes, markets and control of raw material exists:

  ‘Clearer than ever before stands out the great fact that there is no hope for real peace in the world until these various sections of workers recognise the common fundamental character of their slavery and set to work to remove it, thus ending the enslavement of the human race by the establishment of socialism.’

Critch

British rope trick (1983)

From the August 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although it struck panic into the abolitionists, the recent debate and free vote on the issue of capital punishment was part of an established tradition; every new parliament tries to discuss and decide the matter in its first session. The new Home Secretary Leon Brittan quickly declared his intention of arranging a debate — some said in order to avoid the pressure to reintroduce hanging from the enthusiasts at the Tory conference in the autumn and which some new Conservative MPs might find difficult to resist. There was also a nasty rumour that those same MPs might want to get into favour with Margaret Thatcher, who favours capital punishment, but our elected representatives would never behave in such a craven, dishonest way, would they? At any event, the hangers are not likely to have a better chance to restore the gallows to British gaols.

The exact origins of capital punishment — the putting to death by the state of people who in particular ways transgress its laws — are hard to discover. The earliest recorded example was the “blood for blood” law of BC2343, whereas the ancient Greeks were the first to use courts to try suspected murderers in BC1178. In Britain social conformity was sometimes enforced by drowning dissenters in quagmires (which even the Tories don’t seem yet to favour) but regulated capital punishment did not appear until the time of the Romans.

Throughout British history the number of crimes which might result in being put to death has varied widely. Ethelbert I of Kent, on the grounds that killing men deprived him of an army, abolished capital punishment (women were considered dispensable and so were drowned if they fell foul of the law). William I banned executions as he considered that mutilation was a more effective penalty. William Rufus reintroduced the death penalty to protect the royal deer from unauthorised hunters and from then the number of capital crimes grew steadily: by the fifteenth century virtually every prison contained a gallows and public executions were an accepted form of popular entertainment (P.N. Walker, Punishment, An Illustrated History, David and Charles, 1972).

By the early nineteenth century the number of capital offences had risen to 220 and offenders could be strung up for such heinous crimes as causing damage to Westminster Bridge, appearing disguised on a public road and shooting rabbits (C. Duff, A Handbook on Hanging, Journeyman Press, 1981). The response to this was that juries commonly refused to convict; with law and order in such disrepute, the Tory government of the time were forced to decapitalise many offences. The same motives were behind the decision to abolish public hangings in 1868, as it was felt that the deterrent value of such a ritual was dwarfed by the risk to public order as crowds at a public hanging could often be induced to riot.

As the nineteenth century wore on the number of capital offences fell steadily from its all-time peak of 220 to four in 1861, where it remained until the twentieth century. There was a persistent campaign for abolition, until in 1956 the House of Commons passed Labour MP Sidney Silverman’s Bill which would have ended capital punishment. The Bill was rejected by the Lords, leading to the compromise of the 1957 Homicide Act which made a distinction between capital and non-capital murders, in much the same way as some MPs now want to reintroduce hanging for some types of murder. However, differential sentences caused many anomalies, which led to the death penalty being finally abolished in 1965, a situation which survived with none of the major capitalist parties being prepared to risk making a manifesto declaration on the issue.

There can be no doubt that an execution is a hideous ritual; the governor of San Quentin Prison, in California, describes a hanging thus:

   The day before an execution the prisoner goes through a harrowing experience of being weighed, measured the length of drop to ensure breaking of the neck, size of the neck, body measurements etc.
    When the trap springs he dangles at the end of the rope. There are times when the neck has not been broken and the prisoner strangles to death. His eyes pop almost out of his head, his tongue swells and protrudes from his mouth. . . The prisoner remains dangling from the end of the rope for from eight to fourteen minutes before the doctor pronounces him dead. (Guardian 4 July 1983).

This barbarity is the result of nine hundred years of improvements in the techniques of hanging, from its origins as a form of execution designed to be extremely painful and degrading for the lower orders (noblemen enjoyed the dubious privilege of a private beheading, considered to be a more honourable way to die). Hanging is now justified as the most humane possible method of execution (Gowers Commission, Conclusion, paras 62-3) and various reasons are given to support the view that its return would civilise society.

The first is that a person who is unlawfully killed must be avenged. This “eye for an eye” concept of justice does not mean, however, that everyone who kills will be executed; a serviceman is a hero if he kills in uniform in the Falklands but a vicious thug if he does it in civilian clothes in Britain. There will be no calls at the Tory conference for the execution of Margaret Thatcher in revenge for her part in sending British workers to kill, and to be killed, in the South Atlantic. The food producers who destroy vast quantities of produce to preserve their profits while millions are dying of starvation will not be strung up. In capitalist society killing in pursuit of profit is an accepted norm and the people who perpetrate it enjoy a great deal of social esteem.

Execution for revenge is a backwards-orientated punishment; it cannot benefit the original victim in any way, even if it gives some ghoulish thrill of satisfaction to some survivors. There is another drawback to this irreversible act of revenge: since hanging was abolished in 1965 six men have been pardoned after being found guilty of what at one time would have been capital crimes (Guardian 4 July 1983). Of course there is always the chance of rehabilitation after death and the admission that it was all a terrible mistake; as in the famous case of Timothy Evans, the remains may be moved to consecrated ground, presumably on the argument that in some way this makes full amends.

The most popular argument for the death penalty is that it acts as a deterrent. (This is even popular with many criminals: the Guardian of 7 July published a letter from a lifer in Parkhurst arguing the deterrent case.) In fact, of course, every execution shows that the deterrent has failed. The belief stretches back as far as 1810 when Lord Ellenborough declared that removing the death penalty for stealing five shillings would lead to an epidemic of crime (C. Duff, op cit). The invalidity of the deterrent argument is illustrated by the facts, which speak inconveniently for the hysterical hangers. Over 80 per cent of murders are spontaneous (Patterns of Murder, Vigil of the Observer) and would not have been prevented by a fear of the consequences. European homicide figures around the time that the death penalty was abolished show that in no country was the ending of execution followed by a rise in homicide (Duff op cit).

Some elements of the pro-hanging lobby say they would be satisfied with a return to the post-1957 situation, which they argue would reverse what they see as a frightening rise in violent crime and "terrorism". In fact the rise in murder in connection with crimes for gain was established while it was still a capital offence and slowed down in the 1970s when it was not (Guardian 4 July 1983). It is also false to suggest that the death penalty would deter “political murderers” like the IRA (who kill British troops rather than vice versa). This argument takes no account of the hunger strikes of 1981; if “terrorists" are prepared to starve themselves to death for a political point and martyrdom it is hardly likely that a British rope, and even greater martyrdom, will be a deterrent.

What then would be the effect of a return to capital punishment? Enough meticulously organised killing to satisfy the most blood-lusting. One estimate (published in the Guardian. 4 July 1983) was that it would mean an average of one execution a week, or over one a month if the post-1957 situation were to obtain. There is no evidence to suggest that it would have any effect on the murder rate, for a murder — or indeed any crime — is not an isolated event caused by some failing or evil in its perpetrator. To understand a criminal act — or rather an act defined as criminal by the law — it is necessary to see it in relation to the social system which allows a secure and abundant life to a small minority of people and condemns the majority to a life of sub-standard housing, food and services and to unfulfilling jobs or unemployment. The working class generally see their inevitable frustrations as the faults of their neighbours or workmates or families or some other religious, racial or political group. It is no surprise that since the turn of the century Royal Commissions have viewed murder as mainly an incident in some miserable lives rather than as the preserve of the “criminal classes" (Patterns of Murder, op cit).

Neither the reintroduction of capital punishment, nor its continued absence from the options available to courts, will lead to a murder-free society. Crime has roots in the social relationships of this system and will pass when this society is ended. The argument about hanging is imbued with, and distorted by, a morass of emotion. In its proper context, we should see that in innumerable ways, all the time, capitalism kills; it is a social system unfit for human habitation.

John Critchfield

Elephants' graveyard (1983)

From the June 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between 1970 and 1982, according to the magazine Onyx (Vol. 16, p. 225), the number of African elephants declined sharply. Reliable counts in a large number of different regions showed a fall of between 80 and 95 per cent. The conclusion from this is that unless action is taken — for example to prevent the poaching of elephants — this attractive animal will soon be extinct. The African elephant’s plight is not, of course, unique; many forms of wild life are under threat and there are numerous organisations which campaign on behalf of the various endangered species.

There are similarities between the situation of the modern elephant and that of the pleistocene megafauna which were prominent in most parts of the world about two million years ago. Their disappearance came about largely as a result of their conflict with human beings, who were fairly efficient hunters. Consequently the megafauna became extinct in Eurasia over 10,000 years ago; in Australasia this happened within the last thousand years and in North America within the last 500 years (P. S. Martin, Prehistoric Overkill, Yale, 1967). The reason for this is fairly simply; the very size of the large mammals, which had once been an advantage for their self-defence, became a liability when hunting had advanced sufficiently to make size of no value against a well armed hunter. Furthermore, the vast amounts of food which an elephant needs to keep going (in Frankfurt Zoo elephants are fed nearly 185lb. of fodder each day) put the megafauna in competition with human beings for what were then scarce resources. The effects of hunting large mammals is accentuated by the fact that they take a comparatively long time to reproduce themselves.

The decline of the megafauna's modern counterpart, the African elephant, coincided with the rise of capitalism. It was competition among the rising capitalist nations for the raw materials and the markets of the continent which first brought the unfortunate elephant into contact with “civilisation” — which in the elephant’s case meant a group of well armed hunters. The first example of this was in South Africa, where hunters could make vast profits (between 1500 and 2000 per cent) on the sale of ivory to the Dutch East India Company. By the 1830s the huntsmen — mainly Boers — had virtually wiped out all the Cape Colony elephants and then they moved north with devastating effect, massacring great hordes of elephants. Had enforceable Game Laws not been passed in the 1890s, the African elephant would probably have become extinct by the first world war.

It was the system of production for profit which both nearly wiped out the African elephant and saved it. Tusks were produced — that is, elephants were shot — for the profits from the ivory but the elephant was relieved from the murderous pressure when it became useful not just as a source of ivory. In the Belgian Congo the elephant was domesticated and used in agriculture and forestry. The opening of the many game parks allowed elephants to become a tourist attraction; the liquidation of the elephant no longer made good economic sense. There were other ways of making a profit from the animal, than shooting it.

This process, in which capitalism has driven a species into near-extinction and then preserved it, has not been confined to the elephant. The white rhinoceros was nearly hunted out of existence for its horn (which was believed to be marketable as an aphrodisiac) but again has been saved through its popularity with the paying tourists. The ostrich was almost obliterated because of a demand for its skin but has been saved by the fact that it is more profitable to turn out ostrich products in ostrich farms. Consequently wild ostriches have no further attraction for the hunter and are largely left alone by them. There are many similar examples.

But this stay of extinction may only be temporary, conditional on the species remaining valuable when it is alive. And this has been the fate of the African elephant, which is now again under threat and whose numbers have declined sharply. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is the ivory trade; ivory is still in demand as a valuable commodity. One dealer estimates that it is usually worth over £40 a kilogramme. The exact number of elephants slaughtered for their ivory is uncertain; Dr. Douglas Hamilton has said that between 100,000 and 400,000 were killed for their ivory in 1976, an estimate disputed by Ian Parker who believes that fewer than 55,000 elephants in fact died for their tusks (Onyx. Vol 16, pp 235-8). Of these deaths Parker estimates that only 20 per cent were killed “legally” (by government-licensed hunters or in management culling programmes). The remainder were illegally poached and exported to their market quite openly as, according to Parker, export licenses for poached ivory are quite easy to obtain by bribery and other means. Illegal ivory is of course quite indistinguishable from that which is allowed to be shot. The world’s major ivory importers are Hong Kong, India and Japan, where the ivory is carved, polished and sold, bringing in huge profits to the hunters, dealers and the sellers of the finished products.

The second major reason for the recent decline of the African elephants is their size. Because of the need for large amounts of food, the creatures are constantly on the move. Each family group will range over a set area to feed itself and the size of these ranges varies between 25 and 1,200 square miles (I. Hamilton, Among the Elephants, 1975, pp 231-3 ). But these ranges have been put under great pressure through agricultural development; consequently the elephants have been virtually confined to the National Parks and any outside these boundaries are liable to be shot as a danger to the crops.

The shooting of elephants to protect crops must not be seen, however, as a conflict between the elephants and human beings for scarce resources; it is the result of a clash between the elephants’ need for food and the interests of the crop growers. The crops are not produced to satisfy human needs but to realise a profit for the people who have invested in their growth. It was the demands of the crop owners which led to more effective boundaries of the National Parks (which are themselves drawn in an attempt to maximise profitability) and the drastic reduction in the elephant ranges. This reduction has meant that there is insufficient spare land for the elephant population which, according to Ian Parker, is a more important factor in the recent decline of the elephant than the ivory trade (Onyx, Vol 16, p 238).

So the numbers of the African elephant have declined rapidly because a live elephant is generally regarded as less valuable than a dead one. In face of this over-riding consideration in a capitalist society, the various wildlife protection societies are impotent. The African elephant can only survive, in a social system in which a minority of people own the means of life, if that minority believe that its survival is in their interests. In the 3rd century BC, Ptolemy II tried to prevent elephant hunting tribes from pursuing their prey because their killings were detrimental to his military strategy, which involved the use of elephants. Since then, there have been several attempts by the ruling class to boost the elephant population, the latest of which is the National Parks.

Should we bother about the fate of any one species of wildlife? How vital is the demise of a million or so elephants compared to that of the 30 million people who die each year of starvation or the threat of an all-destructive nuclear war which will make the human race an extremely rare species? Well the decline of the African elephant illustrates important points about the nature of capitalism and of socialism.

The first of these is the essential callousness of a social system in which production is for profit. In this all things, including the elephant, exist through a calculation which puts a price on their life and on their death — an equation which currently operates against the elephant and so hastens its demise, in much the same way as human beings may be written off or maintained on very low levels of “benefit” when they are no longer productive.

Secondly, what of future society? Will socialism allow free development of all forms of wildlife, whatever the consequences for the human race? Would it encourage the locust and the tsetse fly to thrive? When the means of production are communally owned there will be a totally different mode of wealth production, with different motives; commodities will be replaced by free access to use values. Free of the distortions of property society, the people of socialism will be able to assess comprehensively the totality, and the true balance, of the relationship between wildlife and the human race. If there should be a situation — a natural disaster, perhaps — which forces one into competition with the other for scarce resources then socialist society may well take the decision, democratically, that there is no alternative to an humane cull. It may even decide to obliterate some species.

That would be a regrettable, but unavoidable, step to take but it would be taken in the interests of humanity, unlike the motivation under capitalism for the slaughter which clubs the seal pup bloodily on the ice, which has the elephant die in slow agony from gunshot wounds and all in the name of profit.

John Critichfield

Mancunian monument (1984)

The Place Where I Live Series from the February 1984 issue of the Socialist Standard

The traditional music-hall vision of Manchester, as a perpetually rainy city where the skyline is dominated by cotton mill chimneys and heavy neo-gothic architecture, is becoming less true as the larger mills of Ancoats are one by one being demolished. The city centre, however, retains its nineteenth century aspect, as the buildings raised to house the financial side of the cotton trade are now occupied by banks and estate agents. One exception to this, a building which keeps to its original use, is the Town Hall in Albert Square, a huge gothic edifice constructed primarily to house the machinery of local government but also as a monument to Mancunian capitalism's wealth and power.

The source of this wealth and power was the cotton industry, which settled in South East Lancashire in the eighteenth century, in a climate ideal for processing cotton. By 1850 the industry had become centralised in Lancashire and was functionally divided between the northern weaving area and the richer southern spinning districts. Manchester's role in this was twofold, as a fine spinning town and as the major market for yarn and piece goods. Because the cotton industry at this time depended heavily on its export trade the Mancunian capitalists shed their eighteenth century mercantilist preferences in favour of laissez faire and the Anti-Corn Law League, to such effect that a famous building — the Free Trade Hall — was dedicated to their fervent economic gospel.

In 1780, Manchester's population was 40,000, a figure which increased by over 100,000 during the next fifty years (A. Briggs, Victorian Cities, 1975, Chapter 3). This development brought with it enormous squalor, which impressed even some contemporary apologists for capitalism but which the local government, feudal in style, was unable to ease, even supposing it had shown any will to do so. Fear of proletarian radicalism and a desire for local autonomy led to the local capitalists incorporating Manchester as a borough in 1838, a move supported by the Whig national government which saw municipal boroughs as a safeguard against chartism.

The new elite successfully defeated chartism but the squalor which is a natural accompaniment to capitalism festered on. A severe slump in the early 1860s (wrongly attributed to the American Civil War) exposed the local authorities' inability to cope with such typical problems of capitalism. They were successful, however, in blaming this onto a lack of office space in the then Town Hall in King Street and thus it was decided to build a new town hall, on the grounds that this would enable a more effective administration of Manchester's wedge of British capitalism.

The second Manchester Town Hall was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, whose plan was chosen principally for the amount of office space it allowed. The original estimated cost of £250,000 was over-spent at least four-fold in the nine years that it took to construct the edifice, as the borough decided that their new administrative centre should also be a monument to themselves and to the glory of industrial capitalism which they personified. Proudly, they allowed Waterhouse to add many decorative extras.

The local dignitaries decided that it would be fitting to open so impressive a pile only with a spectacular ceremony spread over three days in September 1877. They at first hoped that Queen Victoria would perform the opening rites but she refused, either as a result of pressure from her Tory ministers at Westminster, who disliked "liberal" Manchester or because if her own antipathy towards the then mayor, Abel Heywood, who had been a chartist. (At the time the press largely favoured the first reason but it is obvious from contemporary broadsheets and recollections of the event that Victoria's non-appearance was the result of her opposition to chartism. In 1877, as today, the press were ready to suppress a story which could damage the royal figureheads of capitalism.)

A most depressing aspect of the opening ceremonies was the role of the working class. On the first two days they assumed the part of onlookers, cheering their masters who were being honoured in the ceremonies. Finally, on the third day they clamoured impatiently to be allowed to participate in a trade societies' procession, rigidly controlled by the bourgeoisie, and so were able to offer their slaves' contribution to the lauding of their masters and of the system which condemned them to squalor.

This happened in spite of a general air of industrial unrest. Mancunian joiners had been on strike for four months before the Town Hall opening and a wage cut imposed on the spinners in Bolton had precipitated a strike by 10,000 of them. Thus, many of those who gave homage to the bourgeoisie on those days were in direct and open dispute with them over their very lives.

It was also known how vastly expensive the new building was (only the police force had more spent on it during the 1870s). It was also common knowledge that deep and widespread deprivation existed in the city, especially in Ancoats and Ardwick. Yet there was little uneasiness expressed at the all-too-obvious contrast between opulence and squalor, even among the working class crowded into the slums and herded each day to their exploitation in the mills.

This—to any class-conscious person—illogical behaviour was the norm as the late nineteenth century saw a great rise in what is known as civic culture — the attempt by a local elite to smother class awareness with provincial loyalties — the success of which may be measured by the fact that the working class are often so eager to honour their exploiters.

Nowadays, provincial or civi loyalties still make good copy for the media, which exhorts to attend the Manchester Show, to cheer for City or United or to get concerned with the latest real-life drama among the cast of Coronation Street. In the same way, national loyalties are promoted through pictures of the Prince and Princess of Wales on the ski slopes or by assuming that we will all cheer our local "hero" from the Falklands. The intention of all this is to create a false identity between employers and employed, helped on with mixtures of local and national chauvinism. In Manchester, as elsewhere, the working class co-operate in their own deception, which may enable them to temporarily forget such acute social problems as poverty, nowadays often harshened by unemployment; currently 16 per cent of the population of the North West, and 20 per cent of adult males there, are out of work (Employment Gazette, 1983). It may also help blot out the dreadful housing conditions in the horrific Hulme Crescents, in the crumbling Fort Berwick or one of the many decaying and vandalised estates. The popular ignoring of such symptoms of capitalism's inability to provide properly for its people is an obstacle to workers seeing through the falsehoods of capitalist ideology to the true cause of their problems.

The process of smothering class consciousness with local or national chauvinism has been going on for a long time now. It has been very successful and has become smooth and sophisticated in its operation but can only last as long as the working class fail to question their relationship with their exploiting class local, civic, national and world wide.

John Critchfield