Learning for survival (1994)

From the September 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists tend to emphasize the humanitarian aspects of Socialism. Given that the problems people face are gross and immediate and that they are an endemic part of capitalism, this is not unreasonable. We quote the millions of deaths every year from hunger and its diseases, we spell out the facts of poverty and unemployment, slums and homelessness and the rape of the environment and we try to put into words the horror of unending war and violence that is an ever-present feature of capitalism.

Like other workers, socialists live within the system; we experience these problems but, of course, we are not in a position to quantify them. Ironically, the measures of these appalling miseries that we do use to support our contention that capitalism is a blight on humanity are almost always drawn from the agencies of capitalism itself.

What is not quantified, and cannot be measured (except, perhaps, in terms of crime and other forms of socially-alienated behaviour), is the complex conception of isolation, of not belonging, of being of little or no consequence within society, of not achieving, accepting society’s definition of failure, being socially, physically or financially inadequate. These are among the problems and inevitable uncertainties that, in a competitive world, feed anger, frustration and despair and, against the heightened profile of the “success" culture, increasingly transmute these emotions into forms of depravity that the great majority of people find confusing and frightening.

You do not have to be a psychologist to appreciate that it is these capitalist inputs that cause the myriad conflicts and divisions that categorize people, minimize expectation and induce loneliness and fear. What passes for education, rather than being concerned with the development of knowledge and personality in the individual, to allow him or her a meaningful role in society, is, certainly for the working class, a fear-ridden process of training designed to equip the recipient to sell a major portion of his or her life to an employer (another human being or group of human beings) simply in order to live. The price of failure can be grim and permanent.

Two facts stand out in relation to this usurpation of young lives into the relentless, pressurized process of training that presently masquerades as education. The first is that many of the alleged “educational” facets peculiar to most of capitalism’s specialized functions have little or no value outside the marketing needs of the present system. Most of the training that underpins the legal profession, accounting, financial management and many other of capitalism’s much-vaunted professions, has no educational value in the true sense of the term; their value is solely in the functions they perform within capitalism and, if that system ended tomorrow, the acquired skills of practitioners in these areas would be redundant.

The second point is that because education is budgeted largely against taxation and taxation is ultimately a charge on capital, it has to be cost-efficient. It is this that dictates most of the practices in the schools and it is this that to a large extent determines success or failure because these qualities are determined by time. For working-class children the school programme is scheduled to take place within a given period of years. Wisdom gained after term, after exams or assessments or following the end of schooling doesn’t earn a diploma.

The whole process, rather than being one that integrates the young as caring members of society, is an intensive survival course that engenders the primacy of self. This concept is, of course, in line with the flawed notions of “individualism” that capitalism promotes as an alibi for the ghastly social plunder of the many by the few — within which framework the great majority of individuals have their lives demeaned and circumscribed by the alien interests of those who live on the fruits of their labour. The idea of self is an essential prerequisite of a world of property values.

While these values are unlikely to achieve any great measure of realization or satisfaction for the great mass of people who have no stake in ownership outside that of a few personal effects and, perhaps, a mortgage, they are of use to capitalism because they are the foundation stone of working-class acceptance of that system. The whole structure of capitalism is based on the belief, inculcated from childhood and reinforced in the school system, that every man and woman has the right to accumulate individual wealth even though such wealth is the product of the labour of others. The numerous religions accept this, the educational system generally embodies it in academic studies and, of course, the achievement of wealth, however unscrupulously gained, is a passport to influence, power and esteem.

Such is the credit side, for capitalists. For capitalism, on the other hand, this ruthless conception of self is a basic cause of many problems, not simply among those scrambling for profit but among the masses of frustrated individuals who are wholly or partially denied the realization of even their modest hopes or who are alienated by the denial of hope itself. This frustration, this denial, and the anger, fear and lack of concern it breeds for other individuals is the source of most antisocial behaviour, of crime, aggression and jealousy as well as much of the neurosis affecting society today.

Socialists see the individual truly liberated when human personal attainment is fully separated from the task of procuring the material means of living. In Socialism individuals would act in voluntary co-operation to produce all the goods and services required to provide each individual with the material means of a full life. The cost-factor that plays such an essential part in determining “education”, training, working and planning in capitalist society would disappear, along with the old social relations.

Certainly Socialism will solve the economic problems of society but, in order to appreciate how it will radically change the role of the individual in society, we would contrast the role of the individual in a Socialist society with the cost-efficient wage-slave that is an essential requirement of capitalism.

Socialism will measure efficiency in terms of human happiness. Every single person will have a claim on society for the provision of his or her material needs. Education, in whatever form it takes, will be a process aimed at developing skills and abilities in line with the individual preferences of each person —and, for those who require it, it would be an ongoing process rather than a crammed apprenticeship for work. Primarily, the emphasis will be on the individual but rather than the competitive selfishness which capitalism must inculcate in the individual as survival training for a world that pits student against student, worker against worker and human against human. the student in Socialism will live and study in an ambience of social cooperation. The logic of that co-operation will be evident in every facet of life and it would be no exaggeration to say that many of the anti-social products of our cost-effective grading and assessment system of today would be regarded, in Socialism, as abnormalities that required help.

Of course, our current systems of education have evolved with the present economic system and just as they would be immediately abolished in a socialist world because of their anti-social, even anti-human, nature, so, too, would the values and concerns of socialist education be alien and harmful to capitalism. Imagine an educational establishment turning out individuals today who see their role as actively co-operating with their fellows in the pursuit of the interests of society as a whole. They would quickly be chewed up in the competition and conflict of capitalism, the educational system would have failed them by failing to make them selfish, contending fighters for survival. Imagine the more general application of such a system: capitalism's workforce would refuse to compete with one another; refuse to partake in the exploitation of their fellows; there would be few police and the judiciary would become socially inquisitive. And, of course, who would make munitions and do capitalism’s killing?

As we said at the outset, Socialists usually emphasize the material problems of capitalism and, perhaps, one of the reasons for this is that we feel poverty, world hunger, slums, unemployment etc., are more visual than the mental enslavement of our class. But that mental enslavement is a terrible reality, a reality designed by the political pundits of capitalism and serviced by its system of “education” and conditioning.

Richard Montague

No Words, No ears (1995)

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

People these days walk down the street talking to themselves. Some are in the business of earning a living. Others are off their heads. The distinction is a fine one.

The mobile phone is surely the quintessential image of a society in which nobody talks to anyone, but needs to pass messages to everyone. As humans we walk down our street with heads lowered in ease we are approached by a neighbourly smile—a sure sign of madness in the contemporary capitalist conurbation. As labour-power commodities, going about our business of making rich pigs falter, we talk endlessly into little pocket-sized machines which wire us up invisibly to our slave cages.

On a morning train between Liverpool Street and Cambridge I suddenly had a horrible vision, worsened by the fact that my eyes were open and what I thought I saw was real. More people (or “customers” as we must now known them) were talking to their phones than to each other. A little boy talked to his tired mother, asking why trees were green, but she told him to shut up and then bribed him with a Mars bar. Having attempted without success to talk to the man opposite (something along the lines of “It’s a lousy bloody day, isn’t it? What parasitical crook are you off to make profits for?”) I watched him press his magic buttons, activate the compulsory nasal tones of the travelling twat in middle management, and proceed to talk gobbledcgook all the way to Harlow about sales figures and the need to beef up quality control. Upon arrival in Cambridge he opened an attache ease and very carefully, one-by-one, opened and closed each of his files, glancing only once and with the contempt of a busy man at the novel which was my anachronistic connection to someone else’s mind.

Now, there can be bad novels (such as every one ever written by Jeffrey Archer) and there can be good uses for mobile phone (such as calling 0171-622 3811 in one of those emergencies which we all have when someone asks a tricky question about the break-up of feudalism and you need to get a back-issue of the Socialist Standard in a big rush). But, these points accepted, can it not be said that books and reading are signs that we are human, and capable of consciously realising our own humanity, whereas the mobile phone, with its alienated purpose of allowing commerce to be intrusively articulated everywhere from the cricket stand to the honeymoon suite, is a sign that the profit system is robbing us of the very’ character of our uniqueness as a species: the ability to communicate thoughtfully? Have you ever heard a mobile-phone-user reciting beautiful verse or treating a friend to a song via the mysterious innards of the cordless leash? No. they are too busy nodding verbally to every want and whim of the boss. They connect to a ventriloquist, but never quite realise what that makes them.

Then there are the head machines, purchased cheaply to ensure that the mind in transit is always blocked out by a thumping beat. Take a Walkman and be sure that your mind will never wander. Did Marx ever think that convincing wage-slaves of the need for freeing themselves would involve having first to teach them how to lip-read? On the train from Cambridge back to Liverpool Street where another man in another grey suit and grey face talks greyly into the greyness of another conversation with the commerce that now runs through the air like a plague, another woman with another small boy (not the one who wondered about the trees, for this mother has put a dummy into her boy's mouth, as if preparing him for future life) has her cheap earphones overflowing into the jabbering atmosphere. Listening into your neighbour's conversation these days offers a choice between sales curves and drum machines.

Back in Liverpool Street, a sort of unofficial border zone between the City of London and the East End, I head eastwards to buy a salt beef sandwich (on rye, plenty of mustard) with a sweet-and-sour cucumber. Walking past a doorway there is a woman declaring vociferously to herself that the messiah has come down to earth and is currently living in a bedsit in Brick Lane. Passers-by ignore her or stop to sneer. I stop to ask her whether the messiah would care to enter a public debate at a location of his choosing—the cost of the hall and the collection would be shared. But she persists in ranting to herself and my curiosity is overwhelmed by hunger.

One-way communication is a waste of time. No, worse, it is anti-human. Be they evangelising to themselves, plotting sales or listening to machine-made drum beats, they are so far from communicating as to be speaking the language of the deranged—the new universal language of capitalism. 

Steve Coleman

On the Scrap Heap (1960)

From the October 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is stale news now that a year ago this month, the Tories managed to win the general election. This was their third consecutive victory and, with an increased majority, was almost unprecedented in British politics. It would also be stale news to list the promises which they and the other parties made in their bid for power, but one thing seems certain. The electorate swallowed Mr. MacMillan’s impertinent assertion and agreed with him that they were indeed having it better than ever before. The Prime Minister’s words have not yet begun to stick in the throats of his supporters; except maybe for some millions of old folk. Many of these no doubt gave their vote to the Tories and are still living on their pensions and Mr. MacMillan’s promises of better things tomorrow or the day after. 

“A share in the rising prosperity of our country . . ." What a delightfully vague and empty phrase that is. Most old folk will remain pretty much the same as they were before those words were uttered—alone, unwanted, and very poor. B. E. Shenfield, quoting official sources in his book Social Policies for Old Age, points out that about a quarter of the pensioners in Britain today are so impoverished that they are eligible for National Assistance. So much for the “share.” A microscope would be needed to find it.

Frailties of old age are sooner or later the lot of all of us who manage to live long enough, and no one will deny that the task of caring for the aged calls for a skill and devotion second to none. Geriatrics, a branch of medicine dealing with care of old persons, has not been established more than about sixty years and the hard and unstinting efforts of the pioneers such as Dr. Nascher in Vienna and Dr. Warren in this country, are only in recent times becoming generally known. Some idea of the enormity of the work facing medical staffs is given by Dr. Kenneth Hazell when he says that 85 per cent. of the 56,000 chronic hospital cases are persons 65 years of age or over. (See Social and Medical Problems of the Elderly).

But when this has been said, there remains the inescapable fact that the deterioration associated with growing old is accentuated and the work of doctors severely hampered by poverty. Here, for example, are some of Dr. Hazell’s own impressions gained after visiting countless old people in their homes. His words do not make pretty reading, and to many of us they will have a familiar ring. Somewhere we have heard them all before—and we shall hear them again in the future.

All too often, he says, the houses visited were in the back alleys of city slum areas, built many years ago and “entirely lacking in architectural beauty.” They were usually of the “two down and two up ” type with outside lavatory, no bathroom, and merely a cold water tap in the scullery. It is the pitiful lot of many poor souls to be confined literally for years in these damp and cheerless hovels where even a short illness can prove fatal, not just because you are old, but equally because successful treatment is hindered by such dreadful conditions. Typical is the case of one man of 81, living alone in a cold damp bungalow, whose slight chill developed into severe bronchitis within two days, and who was saved only by timely removal to hospital.

Trying to make do on next to nothing, it is little wonder that many suffer from severe malnutrition. W. Hobson and J. Pemberton have published the results of a study conducted in Sheffield and have stated that some old patients weigh as little as 4½ stone on admission to hospital. It is in the big cities, they tell us, where cases such as these are most common, and along with Dr. Hazell. they remind us that starvation and deficiency diseases are certainly not things of the past, although overwhelmingly it is the poor who suffer from them.

One of the many bitter ironies of Capitalism is that our isolation grows as we get older. One would have thought it well nigh impossible to be alone and unwanted among a rapidly expanding population, but the horrible truth has to be faced that in Britain today about a million single old persons are living alone. Because of this, they often remain without care or attention of any kind, even after sustaining an injury or becoming otherwise ill. One of the worst cases in recent times was that of a man who lay dead in a house for several weeks before anyone thought fit to investigate. When the police eventually broke in, they discovered that his wife had been with him all the time, but in the words of the coroner, she was too old, ill and mentally deranged to realise what had happened.

Such sad tales are not isolated cases. The whole story of working class old age is indeed a dismal one, but the blame for it cannot be laid at the door of any one government or party. The best that any of them can do is no more than to skim the surface. They cannot make any essential alteration to the position of this growing minority of near-destitutes. Various parties have tried to deal with the matter over the past fifty years or so, starting with the Liberal Government's pension scheme in 1908. The next few years saw various changes and extensions, and in 1946 the Labour Government's National Insurance Act, which increased pensions to 26s., was supported by Tories and Liberals alike. Since then, further increases have taken place, yet in 1960 the problem presses as heavily as ever.

Trevor H. Howell, M.R.C.P., has written an illuminating book on old age, called Our Advancing Years. At the end of his second chapter, he says: “We have now come to a time when old age alone is no longer a cause of acute poverty." But old age never has been a cause of poverty, acute or otherwise, and pensioners are not poor because they are old but because they are old workers. This is at the heart of their plight. Aged capitalists have no need of pensions, national assistance or any of the hundred and one charities which feature in our private properly society.

For they are the owners of the private property and it is the lack of ownership by the majority which makes and keeps us poor. Old age merely accentuates this—what one could call the ultimate in a state of poverty which has been with us throughout our working lives, characterised by the struggle to make both ends meet and with the mockery of pensions to remind us that we have lost the battle after all.

An alleviation of our poverty we may get from a pension, the abolition of our poverty, never. Poverty is with us all the time and in this so-called affluent society it is still true that about 10 per cent. of the population own about 90 per cent. of the accumulated wealth. The rest of us have a pretty limited access to the means of life through our wage packets, and with the approach of old age, even these cease. Capitalist society is not really very interested in the old ones, and for an obvious reason. It is simply no longer profitable to employ them

In face of such an uncomfortable truth the reformers can do precious little, for they work within the framework of the very setup which has created the tragedy of old age. In fact, it has been alleged that the advent of the welfare state has seen a sharpening of the problem. In recent times one charitable organisation has even been obliged to leave ill old men on street doorsteps in an attempt to get them into hospital.

There is surely an urgent need for working people to reach an understanding of their position in the capitalist scheme of things and to appreciate the need for the removal of a system which insults us with pensions and countless other futilities, and which is quite incapable of really satisfying human needs. It is capitalism which turns what could be a period of reasonable contentment into a time of loneliness and despair. The Socialist answer is worthy of serious consideration—by young and old alike.

Eddie Critchfield