World View: The Blind Lead the Blind (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 16 October, the largest single gathering of black people in history took place in Washington DC. Over 400,000 mainly black males had travelled the length and breadth of the United States to throng the Mall from the Washington Memorial to Capitol Hill at the bequest of Louis Farrakhan, leader of the black separatist organisation The Nation of Islam.

The event had been widely publicised as the “Million Man March" and billed as a "Holy Day of Atonement, Reconciliation and Restoration”. In brief, African-American males—for women, Latinos and Asians had not been invited—were being called upon to apologise to their wives (68 percent of whom are single parents) for the errors of their ways, to reconcile themselves to the "fact" that black males alone are responsible for the drugs and crime that plagues their communities, and to renew their covenant with God and one another.

In his two-and-a-half-hour long speech to the crowd. Farrakhan urged those present to recognise "wrongs done" and to “make amends", to apologise for offending "against the creator", to take "personal responsibility" for their “own circumstances" and to "go home and join some church, mosque or synagogue".

Nowhere did Farrakhan make the link between drug abuse, crime, poverty and capitalism. If anything, his plea for self-atonement and for black men to admit they are their own worst enemies only confounded elsewhere the arguments of white supremacists that black men are sub-human.

Furthermore, his speech suggested that the social ills he elaborated on afflicted only black people, when, in fact, poverty and its manifestations respect no colour in the US, as many white families can be found living a slum existence at the bottom of the social ladder.

Manning Marable, writing about the "Million Man March” for the Guardian, said as much when he pointed out that "the single most important reality of American society in the 90s is the polarisation of classes, the unprecedented rise in income and profits among a small minority of American households, and the expansion of social misery, falling incomes and inequality for the majority” (16 October).

Had Farrakhan made a similar observation, and revealed that between 1980 and 1992, for instance, the real average income for the lowest 25 percent of US families fell from $12,359 to $11.530, and that during the same period the real average income for the 25 percent at the top of the social ladder rose from $78,884 to $91,369, then he would have made a statement that might have convinced a wider audience.

Farrakhan, however, was not out to confront the capitalist system. His Nation of Islam organisation actually advocates a form of “petty capitalism”. What he did do was help re-emphasise some of the prejudices that have helped keep capitalism in the ascendancy. Farrakhan, for example, is a fervent opponent of gay and lesbian rights and condemns demands by black women’s groups for full equality, social empowerment and reproductive rights. A few days prior to his "Holy Day" he even told one TV interviewer that jews were “bloodsuckers" who had exploited blacks and that Judaism was a “gutter religion”.

The "real evil" he sees as "white supremacy”, and it is as a buffer to this that he founded the Nation of Islam, a 1.5 million strong organisation that preaches a gospel of separatism and racial pride. Its ideological essence argues Marable is “black nationalism, the rejection of white institutions and multiracial alliances".

While it is perhaps true that the black American underclass “represents . . . one of the most thoroughly atomised societies that has existed”, as Francis Fukuyama states in his recent work Trust The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, such an obscene grievance will never be challenged by inward-looking solutions such as self-atonement and the establishment of a “nation within a nation", "a domestic colony within the capitalist US" (to borrow Marable's words).

The task for black males in the US is no more to enlist in some black separatist group than it is for black women to "stay at home and pray with the children", as Farrakhan suggested.

Impoverished and oppressed

The fact of the matter is that there are as many impoverished and oppressed white Americans as their black counterparts. And there is more that unites the two as exploited workers, existing as a single class, with the same basic needs and desires, than can ever divide them along racial or cultural lines.

Furthermore, contrary to Farrakhan's ideas, it is a basic socialist principle that human behaviour is determined by the social system people are conditioned to live in. Crime and drug abuse is the individual's response to a life of alienation and inequality and will only disappear when the present social system is overthrown, not when black males join "churches, mosques and synagogues".

That black people are twice as likely as white people to be unemployed in the US, and three times as likely to be on welfare, says far less than Marable’s revelation that in 1993, the top one percent of all income earners in the US had a greater combined net wealth than the bottom 95 percent (New Statesman and Society, 27 October). The latter is indeed a greater indictment on the capitalist system than the former.

John Bissett

Editorial: Media Distractions (2004)

Editorial from the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The vicious competition among the media institutions, of the electronic as well as the print varieties, has led to ugly expressions of journalistic enterprise. No priority is given, in this competition for readership and audiences, to the devastating effects of capitalism on the working class, with serious investigations, analysis and reporting outlining the cause. Instead, following the American example, journalism in Britain has been increasingly devoid of real reportage.  This is a general trend to spiral down our world in almost every area of human activity to a cheap and shoddy impression of its, not too bright, former self.  Talking too much about the real issues facing the working class or about ecological and other problems caused by the profit system would draw too much unwanted attention on the system ideology and accompanying practices of the capitalist world.  Instead whether on the TV, radio or in print, news stories have tended to feature mainly a mixture of crime, tittle-tattle, sex, sleaze and all things fetid, as well as the political posturing of the main political parties in parliament in their pursuits at home and abroad with accompanying comments from toadies in the columns.  Both the BBC and ITN main national news bulletins have become the Sun, Star or Daily Record on wheels.  Now of late we can add asylum seekers and terrorist scare stories to their compilations. Here certainly the capitalist dogma that competition improves the competing organisations’ service and products has been disproved. It is the opposite that happens.  We should not forget that this style of news menu is easy and (dirt) cheap to produce.

Crime (with terrorism) is a major plank in the programmes of the main capitalist political parties. This is despite the fact that it  has been elevated by their media tools to an extent completely out of proportion to the number of individuals taking part in crime.  As well as providing an opportunity to sensationalise the story to excite (and entertain) and attract new readers or viewers, an opportunity is happily taken in conjunction with state authorities to highlight by example the due consequences awaiting anyone that might be tempted astray into crime in the future.  We are of course brought up to detest crime as a violation of the rights of others. Empathy among workers who suffer or are likely to suffer crime is conjoined equally with a hatred for the criminal, which unfortunately generates a variety of punishment cries from the armchair judges.

Child molestation, a charge facing Michael Jackson, has in recent years come into its own as a major news topic, with one newspaper naming past offenders and providing their address, with monstrous consequences for them.  And while the incidents are indeed horrific for the child and parents when proved to be real, the fact remains that a very small proportion of individuals are likely to practice this crime.  Catholic priests are highlighted as one of the main offenders.  This is hardly surprising, with the fact of them being ordered to remain celibate perhaps having some bearing on the behaviour of offending priests, a behaviour which might well have gone on for as long as the Catholic Church itself, and not a recent development, as the media would suggest.

In the capitalist world, famous individuals have enormous influence over their fans or followers, hence the honours systems where this influence is nurtured by a State to reflect the existing ideology in practice.  Although, when a famous individual is off-message then that individual is seen as some kind of threat.  Michael Jackson – pop icon to tens of millions of  humans all over the world – has annoyed authorities and the media with is attitude to mixing with children. It might be of some significance here that he is reportedly connected to a radical black separatist group whose leader, Louis Farrakhan, a hate figure among the British and American establishments, was banned from entering the UK a year or two ago.  Jackson has provided an easy target in that he has form in the eyes of the authorities, media and members of the public for acting out of the ordinary and thus has been nicknamed Whacko Jacko by many. 

The consequences for human society of the daily production of these scare stories and sensationalist reporting is further alienation between humans of all ages. A society that makes adults wary of approaching children while placing children’s mothers on edge is not good for human relations or wellbeing.

Between the Lines: Beyond the hype (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Beyond the hype

It seemed almost impossible to switch on the TV without heating someone talking about Malcolm X. On Monday 1 March Channel 4 showed Seven Songs For Malcolm X: the same night Darcus Howe on Devil's Advocate examined the historical legacy of Malcolm X; on Thursday 4 March Oprah Winfrey interviewed Spike Lee, the director of Malcolm X, the three-and-a-half-hour. $35-million-dollar film; the same night The Late Show had one of its painfully pretentious studio discussions about Malcolm X; on Saturday, 6 March Moving Pictures considered Malcolm X. And the month was only a week old. Thirty-five million dollars evidently is enough to buy a man a place in history.

In all of the discussion one question remained unaddressed: Was Malcolm X a racist? Yes, he was. He was a mob orator who spoke about "the blue-eyed white devil" as "a race of two-legged white dogs". It was Malcolm X who said of whites. "We don't want to integrate with that old pale thing . . . The dog is their closest relative. They got the same kind of hair, the same kind of skin, and the same kind of smell". These views were never retracted, not once disowned. Spike Lee told Oprah Winfrey that in making the film he consulted closely with a man he called “Minister Farrakhan". Ironically. Farrakhan was one of the so-called Muslim Brothers who helped betray Malcolm X to his murderers, but. more importantly, this is the same anti-semitic. fascists black nationalist. Louis Farrakhan. whose speeches and writings have done so much to divert black anger towards hatred and violence.

The white liberal taboo against mentioning racism when it comes from a black rabble-rouser will not be accepted by socialists. Malcolm X was a racist whose main legacy is in the realm of Black Power separatism as preached by Farrakhan and other modern racists; as such he was nothing but an enemy of wage-slaves, both black and white (the labels are themselves racist).

We can recognize the appeal of anti-white racism amongst impoverished wage-slaves who lives were even more stunted than they might be by the prejudices of American racist culture—we recognize it but we are hostile to those who exploit such political appeal, just as we are hostile to the racism of the white supremacists. We recognize also that Malcolm X appeared to change his mind about some of his most venomous views in the last year of his life. But why did he change? Not because he came to reject the religious confusion of Islam or because he accepted class rather than race as the main social division. He changed because he was involved in a sordid leadership battle within The Nation of Islam movement and his one-time fellow leaders were trying to take his house away from him and eventually sought to kill him.

The bullet which murdered Malcolm X came from a gun which he had ideologically loaded. His legacy to black workers today is a force for reaction, not advance. Indeed, whatever criticisms socialists must express in relation to the Christianity of Martin Luther King, there is no doubt that his message of peaceful resistance to oppression and the necessity of gaining democratic opportunities was far more successful and interesting than anything which Malcolm X ever said. The X logos which have been so persistently upon our TV screens might well be seen as the symbols of the politically illiterate. It is to be hoped that Malcolm X's S35-million publicity hype will last no longer than last year's craze for turtles.

Who's being screwed?

Roger Graef’s three-part documentary series, Turning the Screws (C4. 9 pm. finished 4 March) was supposed to be about the lives of prison screws, but very rarely touched on the subject. Its main theme was the battle between the Prison Officers Association, the screws' union, at Wandsworth prison, and the extraordinarily disagreeable prison governor, a man who bore an uncanny resemblance to one of those Nazi POW camp commandants in an old black-and-white film.

The governor was determined to push through new employment conditions which would make life harder for the screws. The POA committee was determined to resist. This was a documentary about the class struggle. And the war-like character of that struggle became all too clear as we saw just how cunningly the two sides pursued the battle.

The ironies were inescapable. Firstly, here were prison guards being seen as militant trade unionists. So much for the left-wing nonsense about police and soldiers and screws being incapable of thinking about their class position. Secondly. as screws who spend much of their time doing some pretty nasty things to their fellow-workers, do we want to offer them our sympathy? Workers in their cells might think differently.

Thirdly, it was evident from the series just how much the life of the screws mirrored that of the inmates. They are both workers stuck in prisons, even though the screws are allowed out for a few hours a day. But most ironically of all. the series depicted with great clarity the economic prison of The Wages System. However well-organized workers are in the battle over wages and conditions (and the trade unionists in the series were no fools), the most that can be achieved is re-arrangement of the terms of exploitation, a re-shuffling of the furniture in the prison cell. Only the abolition of the wages system will bring about real liberation. That is something which the followers of Malcolm X and the militant screws have yet to learn.

Steve Coleman

More promises in Washington (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

With a million more members than the Nation of Islam and with an alleged turnout for their recent “Gap in the Wall” gathering of 800,000, twice the attendance of Louis Farrakhan’s “Million Man March”, many take the Promise Keepers, the US's newest religious sect seriously.

In many ways, the 4 October Promise Keepers' “Gap in the Wall" gathering in the Washington Mall had the hallmarks of Farrakhan's MMM two years previously. The MMM had been largely black and male; the PK gathering was predominantly white and male. The former asked those in attendance to atone for their sins—as did the latter—and both were addressed by speakers spouting religious platitudes.

As in 1995, with Farrakhan, the PK speakers found social problem after problem rooted in the way men relate to their families. Indeed, the initial inspiration behind the formation of the PK was leader Bill McCartney's belief that his unfatherly behaviour was the reason his daughter got pregnant on a one-night-stand.

Again, just as the Nation of Islam has its unelected dictatorship, so too with the PK. One Humanist writer has observed "it is important to note that . . .  there is no democracy in this organisation. A small group of self-elected men in the Vineyard churches control the entire effort, including its theology, finances and personnel" (John M. Swomley, Sep/Oct 1997 issue).

The comparison with Nation of Islam is more poignantly highlighted still when one realises that both groups are homophobic and vehement anti-abortionists, stressing what they see as the important role the family plays in social harmony. For the writer Jewel van der Merwe. there is a more sinister parallel:

". . .  the large mass rallies, the exaltation of emotion over reason, the lack of doctrinal integrity, the taking of oaths, the focus on fatherland and fatherhood, the ecumenical inclusion of aberrant esoteric doctrines, bears a disconcerting similarity to an era which gave rise to one of the most dreadful events in history" (Humanist, Sep/Oct).

The most visible of the above is the subordination of reason to emotion. Just as hundreds of thousands of black Americans were hoodwinked into accepting Farrakhan's logic that they alone were responsible for drug abuse, crime and poverty, so too the Promise Keepers accept arguments where blame for macro problems is delegated down to the individual. The truth that society's ills can more easily be located in a wider social and economic context is never imparted to those who perhaps feel the pangs of alienation most intensely and are more desperate for a quick-fix solution.

That movements such as the Nation of Islam and the PK are very much part of the alienation process is what Noam Chomsky refers to as “a reflection of depoliticisation”. He argues that faced with:

". . . an inability to participate in a meaningful fashion in the political arena . . .  people will find some way of identifying themselves with others, taking part in something. If they don’t have the option of participation in labour unions, political organisations that actually function, they'll find other ways. Religious fundamentalism is a classic example” (Keeping the Rabble in Line—Interviews with David Barsamian, 1994, p.263).

And the US certainly has more than its fair share of fundamentalists. Recent studies reveal the impact the new breed of bible-bashers have: 75 percent of Americans believe in religious miracles: 40 percent that the world was created 6,000 years ago: 30 percent that the future can be interpreted by biblical prophecies with only 9 percent adhering to Darwinian explanations of evolution (quoted in Barsamian).

This is a climate the US power elite is keen to foster. Just as Clinton announced in his 1993 State of the Nation speech that “we can’t renew our country unless . . .  we are willing to join churches”, we can find businessmen making hefty donations to the fundamentalists and politicians adopting policies they know will attract them.

Contemplating the problem, Chomsky agrees that:

". . .  its goal is to make people as stupid and ignorant as possible, and also as passive and obedient as possible, while at the same time making them feel they are somehow moving towards a higher form of participation . . .  It also serves the crucial role of displacing attention from actual power” (quoted in Barsamian).

Although the PK has no dues- paying membership, its hierarchy has drawn up a list of Seven Promises the faithful must keep, inclusive of “honoring Jesus Christ", the pursuit of "vital relationships with other men, understanding that [he] needs brothers to help him keep promises", and the practice of "spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity".

The movement places emphasis on men returning to and embracing the family unit, taking a material and spiritual lead in the family, encouraging other men to come forward to discuss and share their problems—to shoulder the blame for the social breakdown that results from their broken marriages. Their stand on abortion is likewise rooted in their identification of it with violent crime and the rising prison population, as their July 1997 Promise Keepers News observed:

" . . .  the legal undermining of the sanctity of life . . .  represents a rejection of America’s two-century old tenet that mankind is made in God's image and is a repudiation of morality as a factor in court decisions.”

Swomley, in the Humanist, believes "there has never been sanctity of life in the US—not for Native Americans, black slaves, sweatshop workers, child labourers, wartime conscripts, unwanted immigrants and various others”. He contests that “sanctity of life” is not even a "biblical principle", with the bible describing children being killed for the sins of their fathers, adults killed for numerous violations of religious law and God ordering the destruction of thousands.

“Sexual impurity”, "lust”, "pornography”, “filth on the Internet” and so on permeate much PK thinking, but never to the extent that the “abomination” of homosexuality does, even though this is a sin that "God can cure". Bill McCartney’s homophobia borders on the fanatical with statements such as ”a group of people who don’t reproduce . . .  want to be compared to people who do reproduce”.

But social problems are no more the result of one man’s desire for another, a father’s absence from the home or a woman’s right to control her own reproduction than Farrakhan’s view that they are a product of the black male population’s alleged lack of morals.

Social problems arise from the way in which the world is at present organised. It is a world where the maxim “can’t pay, can’t have" permeates all aspects of life, determining individual responses. At root we can’t make lasting and beneficial changes to human behaviour until we change the social and economic system we call capitalism. Until they realise this, the Promise Keepers will only ever be part of the problem, not a key to the solution.

John Bissett