Black Liberation - George Jackson and Political Violence (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1960 when George Jackson was eighteen, he was convicted of second-degree robbery for driving the getaway car whilst his friend robbed a petrol station of 70 dollars. For his part in this offence he was sent into the state prison system with a sentence of “one year to life”. Technically, George Jackson was liable to imprisonment for life. In practice it meant that he would serve a minimum of one year and would thereafter appear annually before a parole board who would consider his “fitness to be released”.

The preface of the book Soledad Brothers — The Prison Letters of George Jackson states: “Under this system parole is granted on the basis of the prisoner’s record within the prison, but the prisons themselves are brutal humiliating places where violent racism is commonplace; if a black prisoner resists this degradation he will be penalised and lose parole. Jackson was denied parole year after year. His friend was released in 1963.”

In January 1970 after Jackson had been in prison for ten years, seven-and-a-half of them in solitary confinement, three black prisoners who were at exercise in Soledad Prison and known to be political activists were provoked and shot dead by a prison guard. The guard was exonerated as having committed “justifiable homicide”. Shortly after this was announced, a white guard was thrown to his death from a tier of the prison where Jackson was held. He and two others who came to be known as the “Soledad Brothers” were charged with murder and faced the death penalty.

In August 1970, Jackson's younger brother Jonathan held up a Courthouse and took a judge amongst five hostages under the demand “Free the Soledad Brothers”. In the ensuing violence, both Jonathan and the judge were shot dead. In August 1971, in circumstances which have never been made clear, George Jackson was amongst a group of persons which included prison guards, who were shot dead in prison. Subsequently his co-defendants on the murder charge were acquitted.

This record of violent events which built up over eleven years against the developing political consciousness of its victims exemplifies the crude viciousness of modern American barbarism. These events cut right through the American hypocrisy and its pretensions to be the egalitarian “land of the free". They expose with murderous clarity a system where privilege is maintained by ignorance, hatred and brutality as a conscious instrument of social policy. The prolonged incarceration of George Jackson and his eventual destruction was rooted in the entire fabric and structure of American capitalism. It is both convenient and popular to see his imprisonment and death in isolation from the whole social and economic context, as something unrelated to the general pattern of society. In reality the privileges of the American rich and their monopoly of wealth and power are erected on the squalor of the American poor and where necessary, without hesitation, on the atrocity of a George Jackson’s death.

There are Crimes and Crimes

By any standards, George Jackson was a remarkable individual. He was brought up in the black ghettoes of Chicago and Los Angeles. His family background was not political. His father was a conscientious person, ill-educated himself, struggling hard as an unskilled worker to provide for his family in material surroundings typical of the unrelieved ugliness of those urban slums. This is an atmosphere which produces cynicism as a brittle response to the glaring inequalities of life. These areas after all are the concentration camps for those who are socially and economically rejected, patrolled and held down by armed policemen, and when necessary, the national guard.

More than most, American capitalism glamourizes the ownership of things and accords prestige to personal wealth. At the same time, the opportunities of millions of Americans are restricted by the economic and social conditions of the urban ghetto. In these circumstances, it is difficult for young men to avoid hostile encounters with the police. Like many others, George Jackson was one such young man, and at eighteen, found himself in prison for theft.

The general aim of the state prison regime in America is, through the application of physical and psychological terror, to force the inmates to passively accept their rôle in American society. The aim is to reduce the individual to a state of despair and insignificance. As Jackson himself put it:

This is in keeping with the overall prison conspiracy, i.e. you have no will, you have no choice or control, so be wise — surrender. There’s a sign everywhere your eyes may happen to rest, begging: 'O Lord, help me to accept those things I cannot change.’

With a sentence of “one year to life” for petty theft, the authorities combine two savage pressures. The first is the day-to-day punishment of imprisonment combined with physical assaults and personal humiliation. The second is the blackmail in saying “this year provided you behave, you may be released on parole, or next year” or the year after that, and so on for life.

George Jackson’s crime was not that he complied in the theft of 70 dollars, but that in prison he could not accept the ignominious terms on which the authorities might have released him. For this crime he was imprisoned for eleven years, seven-and-a-half in solitary confinement, and eventually in August 1971, shot to death.

Short of Understanding

In prison, in spite of the limitations of his personal background, Jackson began to read seriously, gradually seeking an explanation for the forces, social and historical, underlying his plight. Eventually, he devoured such left-wing and Marxist literature as he could get hold of. Jackson did not become a Socialist. It is doubtful whether his views would fit neatly into any political category. He became an inspiration to the civil rights movement in America, and also to the Black Power movement. Although there is much that is perceptive in Jackson’s views as expressed in The Prison Letters of George Jackson, his understanding of economic relationships and social and political institutions, fall short of a Socialist understanding. If George Jackson was anything, he was a black nihilist.

Jackson claimed to be opposed to capitalism. “The principal enemy must be isolated and identified as capitalism.” “Our enemy at present is the capitalist system and its supporters.” However, closer analysis would show that in fact what Jackson was opposed to was American-style private enterprise. Jackson sympathized with China and the emerging African states. So he ignored the fact that capitalism is a world mode of production where the means of wealth production are monopolized and controlled either by private owners or a political bureaucratic élite. In world capitalism, although the systems of administration in different states vary, basic economic relationships are essentially the same. This applies to China and the emerging African states. Wage labour is exploited, wealth takes the form of commodities marketed with a view to making profit and capital is accumulated by a minority from the surplus wealth produced by the working class. Moreover, in China and Russia, as much as in America, the capitalist system is held down by a State machine which includes the armed forces and police and prisons.

Jackson considered that political democracy was a fraud. “Of what value is quasi-political control if the capitalists are allowed to hold on to the people’s whole mode of subsistence?” He believed in leadership and elevated violence. “The people who run this country will never let us succeed to power. Everything in history that was of any value was taken by force.”

Futile to Confront

There is no doubt that if in some time of crisis Jackson’s views on leadership and violence became practical action, this would lead to disaster. It would compound crisis with death and violence with no possible hope of getting anywhere towards Socialism. The most that might be achieved on the basis of an immediate worsening of conditions would be that the political controllers might change. Modern history is littered with examples of political power being changed through violent means. But all these examples relate to States where capitalism is undeveloped. Without exception the replacement governments have all embarked on the continued development of capitalism. In the real world where capitalism dominates as a mode of production there would be no other practical alternative. In states where capitalism is more developed, political administration is stabilized either through a state capitalist regime such as Russia, or through political democracy as in Western Europe; in either case the chance of a militant minority confronting or replacing the government through violent means is nil.

The principal facts are these, that in the complex organization of modern industrial States, no government is viable unless it rests upon at least the acquiescence if not the general support of the majority. This would apply to any militant minority attempting to wrest political power. Apart from the difficulty of defeating the existing State machine in open confrontation, they could never hold power because their writ would not run. The only practical test of whether the exercise of political power is possible or not in a developed capitalist State is the degree of acquiescence or support a government can carry.

Apart from this, any movement which is going forward on a basis other than democratic action cannot be a Socialist movement. The equality that Socialists aim for is not only the equality of all men about the means of producing wealth but equality in all the processes of social organization.

Get it Right

The crucial factor which allows the establishment of Socialism is the conscious action of a majority of Socialists. Until there exists a majority of Socialists, only capitalism is possible, regardless of the form of its administration. When that majority is achieved, then it can be assumed that the establishment of Socialism will be politically straightforward.

What Jackson ignored was the regrettable fact that capitalism in America rests upon the political support of the whole population, including the millions of negro voters. His call for violent struggle may well have been an expression of his bitter frustration, but as a useful idea in creating a better world, it was a political irrelevance. It was a mistake stemming from a faulty reading of Marxism for the Black movement to draw inspiration from Chinese state capitalism. Significantly, they are not enthusiastic about Russia, yet there was a time during the earliest phase of the state capitalist revolution when it enjoyed sympathy amongst protestors throughout the world. Just as the capitalist nature of the Russian state has become more obvious year by year, it is inevitable that the same development will take place in China.

The Black Power movement will have to learn that negro workers can only achieve their emancipation along with the emancipation of all mankind.

Pieter Lawrence

Censors at odds (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

In November our front-page article dealt with the Lord Longford report on pornography, and stated our case that all censorship is against the interests of everybody but the ruling class.

David Holbrook, a member of the Longford committee, has produced a new book called The Masks of Hate in which psychiatric examination of some popular present-day writers is used to make an argument for their perniciousness. His targets include the James Bond novels, Iris Murdoch, Harold Pinter and Kingsley Amis.

What is interesting is that Kingsley Amis also contributed a chapter to the Longford Report, advocating censorship as Holbrook does. Among his recommendations was to ban books which are “not unsuitable because of anything : just unsuitable”. Holbrook finds Amis’s writings unsuitable because they are “devaluing human nature” and “present false solutions”. Perhaps a duel with blue pencils at ten paces is imminent.

However, this demonstrates one or two things. First, that what amateur censors really seek is not “social good” but the removal of what they dislike. Second, their failure to realize that governments impose or approve censorship on political grounds, and only to a very minor extent on theoretical (e.g. psychiatric) ones. And third, that proponents of social reform in general terms are unable to foresee its detailed application and outcome. Both Holbrook and Amis believe, of course, that more extensive censorship laws would be used to prevent the working class from seeing their bêtes noires; but The Masks of Hate serves to show that if it happened they might find their own books deemed “just unsuitable”.

Robert Barltrop

The Sexual Politics of Wilhelm Reich (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What has prevented the growth of Socialist consciousness amongst the working class even though the material conditions for the immediate establishment of Socialism have been in existence for at least three-quarters of a century? Why, when Socialism is so obviously in their interest, do workers continue to support and maintain capitalism? Why is the political behaviour of the working class so irrational?

For Wilhelm Reich the answer could be summed up in two words: sexual repression. In his view, the restrictions on sexual activity imposed through the father-dominated family structure produced people dependent on authority and incapable of independent thought and action.

Reich was born in Dobrzynica in Galicia (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1897, the son of German-speaking Jewish parents. As a medical student in Vienna after the first world war he became interested first in the physiology and then in the psychology of sex. He joined the circle around Freud, the psychoanalyst, and became one of his close disciples.

Instinct and Energy

Freud had been teaching since before the turn of the century that most mental illness was caused by “sexual repression” dating from early childhood; and that every human being was born with a “sexual instinct” which had to be tamed before he could become a fit member of society and that in fact this is what, from the psychological point of view, growing up and becoming socialized meant. “Instinct” is a notoriously vague word, but for Freud it was more than just a description of how people do in fact behave; he speculated that it did have a real physical basis in the human body and that sooner or later science would discover the precise chemical formula for “sexual energy”. For Freud was, in principle, a materialist who believed that men’s thoughts, conscious and “unconscious”, could ultimately be explained in terms of some chemical change in the human body. So when Freud spoke of “sexual energy” he meant the word “energy” to be understood literally. For him sexual repression was not just the psychological process of mentally suppressing sexual ideas but was also a real physical process of suppressing or diverting real bodily energy of some sort.

Or so Freud speculated, though nothing resembling any such “sexual energy” has yet been discovered, a fact which must reflect adversely on his theories generally — and also of course on those derived from them such as Reich’s. Reich was particularly interested in this aspect of Freudian psychology and clinically investigated bodily tensions associated with sex. Later, in 1939, he was to claim — without any scientifically acceptable evidence — to have actually discovered what “sexual energy” really was: apparently it wasn’t chemical after all but electrical!

Communist Party

But it is not the years of Reich’s pathetic decline into a charlatan claiming to be able to cure cancer by means of his “orgone box” (he died in 1957 in an American jail) that are of interest to Socialists. For, while working with Freud in the 1920’s, he came to the conclusion that all the Freudian psychoanalysts were doing was to patch up mentally sick individuals and send them back into the society whose sexual code had originally made them sick. He felt that the real solution to the problem of mental illness caused by sexual misery lay in transforming society. To this end in 1928 he joined the Austrian Communist Party. In 1930 he moved to Berlin and joined the German Communist Party (KPD). At the same time he was active in groups which combined sex education and calls for an end to legal restrictions on sex with anti-capitalist agitation. Not surprisingly really, his views on sex were not always to the liking of the leaders of the KPD, partly because they regarded the struggle for sexual reform as a diversion from their struggle for political power and partly because they themselves probably harboured certain prejudices about sex. Eventually in 1932 Reich was expelled.

Reich was not simply a fellow-travelling Communist Party sympathizer but an active member during a period when the Party was violently denouncing the Social Democrats as “social fascists”. He was, and re­mained for some years after his expulsion, a thorough­ going Leninist firmly believing in the need for a “revo­lutionary leadership” to lead the masses in a violent assault on the capitalist State. His criticism of the German Communist Party for its failure to prevent the rise of Hitler, as expressed in the original version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933) and his pam­phlet What is Class Consciousness? amounts to a charge that because of their attitude to sex they left the way clear for Hitler to exploit the sexual misery of the masses for political ends; whereas, says Reich, this is what the KPD should have been doing and would have been doing if they had followed his advice.

To lead the Masses

It is the same with his explanation for the failure of the Russian revolution given in the later versions of The Sexual Revolution. (It is important to realize that Reich changed successive editions of his works in line with his changing views and that the English translation of this work and of The Mass Psychology of Fascism date from 1945 and so were considerably different from the original German versions of 1930 and 1933 respectively). According to Reich, Russia went off the rails because the Bolshevik government had failed to carry out properly the sexual liberation of the Russian people. As a result the Russian masses remained dependent on authority and incapable of democratic self-management so making a dictatorship inevitable.

This argument still accepts Lenin’s view that under capitalism the workers are incapable of reaching a full Socialist consciousness and so have to be led by a vanguard party and that the task of Socialist education of the majority cannot begin until after the seizure of power by the vanguard party. Reich’s criticism was essentially only that the Bolsheviks failed because they had not carried out their own theories properly — with the implication that if they had Russia would not have “degenerated” into the Stalinist dic­tatorship.

But it was Bolshevik theory itself that was wrong not its application. The vast majority of workers will have to become conscious Socialists before their political party (a mass democratic party rather than a vanguard of would-be leaders, of course) wins power. In the absence of such a Socialist majority, any minority which seizes power, no matter how sincerely they may desire Socialism, cannot but become a new ruling class because they would have no alternative but to run, or as in Russia in 1917 to develop, capitalism. The Bolsheviks’ coup was doomed, even before it was carried out, both by the economic backwardness of Russia and by the lack of Socialist consciousness (as opposed to mere mass discontent with the old order) of the Russian workers. It would not have been saved by a more liberal sex policy.

Change of Mind

Reich’s belief that Leninist tactics (which, after all, involve authoritarian leadership) could lead to a free society in which people would be able to manage their affairs without leaders was a glaring contradiction. For how, on his own theory, could people still psychologically dependent on leaders come to establish a society without leaders? When Reich was in the Communist Party and for some years after he clearly thought that after the revolutionary leaders had power it would be up to them to take steps to the masses’ psychological dependence on them by pursuing a liberal sex policy. In other words, the workers were not to emancipate themselves, but were to he emancipated by their leaders. A view quite in accord with Leninism, but equally quite opposed to Marxism. To be fair, Reich later, when in exile in America, came to see this contradiction. It led him to abandon Leninism (which he imagined to be Marxism) as the way to establish a free society. Instead he came to think that before such a society (which he now called “work-democracy” rather than “socialism”) could be established people must have ceased to be psychologically dependent on leaders and have become capable of the democratic self-management of their own affairs. In fact he even argued that, in the absence of this any attempt to establish a free society would lead rather to state capitalism. This is how he characterised Russia in his 1945 Introduction to the Third, English version of The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

“In the strictly Marxist sense, there is not even in Soviet Russia a state socialism but a state capitalism. According to Marx, the social condition ‘capitalism’ does not consist in the existence of individual capitalists, but in the existence of the specific ‘capitalist mode of production’; that is, in the production of exchange values instead of use values, in wage work of the masses and in the production of surplus value, which is appropriated by the state or the private owners, and not by the society of working people. In this strictly Marxist sense, the capitalistic system con­tinues to exist in Russia. And it will continue to exist as long as the masses of people continue to lack respon­sibility and to crave authority.” (His emphasis).

Repression or Indoctrination ?

By this time Reich had become something of a gradualist, believing that the free society he wished to see would come when sufficient individuals had cone to liberate themselves sexually. This is probably why his ideas are so popular in certain circles today: they provide a seemingly satisfactory ideology for the current rebellion within capitalism against out-dated sexual codes. However, these same people — the sexual rebels — find some of his views on sex itself embarrassing. For, as a Freudian, Reich believed that there was a biologically natural form of sexual behaviour, even though distorted by class society. He labelled homosexuality as “unnatural” (though harm­less) and argued that women needed men in order to experience full sexual pleasure — views highly embarrassing to both gay liberation and women’s liberation.

But it is precisely because Freud’s theories posit a fixed “human nature”, at least in relation to sexual behaviour, that Marxists have been doubtful about their validity. Sexual behaviour is but one kind of social behaviour and, as such, socially not biologically deter­mined. So no one form of sexual behaviour can be said to be more “natural” than any other. Ironically then, it is Marx rather than Freud who provides the better argument for sexual tolerance! But then the Socialist tradition, before even Freud was born, championed sexual freedom and “free love”, i.e., a society in which people would be free to have sex without first having to get a licence from the Church or State. The struggle for Socialism has always been, among other things of course, a struggle for a rational attitude to sex and part of Socialist consciousness is being free from prejudices about sex (the inferiority of women, discrimination against homosexuals, etc).

But what about Reich’s, or rather his followers’, explanation for the irrational behaviour of the working class in keeping capitalism going? Is it really because workers are sexually repressed by the father-dominated families they grew up in? Many uncritically accept that it is, but for this to be true so would Freud’s speculations about the existence of some measurable “sexual energy”. The whole theory of sexual repression stands or falls on the existence of such energy, even more for Reich than for Freud since all his psychological theories depend on it. Yet there is no scientifically acceptable evidence whatsoever for the existence of any such thing, only Reich’s experiments which deceived nobody but himself. Sexual restrictions are bad for people’s health but they cannot be blamed also for the lack of Socialist consciousness any more than they can be blamed for the rise of fascism or the failure of the Russian revolution. Nor is there any reason to suppose that their removal would be in any way incompatible with capitalism. The most that can be said for Reich is that he did argue a good case for a rational attitude to sex; most of his book The Sexual Revolution is well worth reading just for this.

The explanation is much simpler: the success of the ruling class in directly (as opposed to indirectly via sexual repression) inculcating their ideas into the minds of the workers through the process of learning. The workers’ acceptance of capitalist political and social ideas, like their other ideas, is learned from other people — their parents, their schoolteachers, their workmates, the press, television — and so derived from society and is not a reflection of the suppression of some biologically natural behaviour as Reich claims. It follows therefore that the struggle against capitalist ideology must be a struggle to spread Socialist ideas as such and not a campaign for sexual reform.

Adam Buick

Where Women's Liberation fails (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of this century women had a life expectation of only about 45 years; women passed their prime in reproduction and the main cause of death in the 25-to-35 age group was childbirth. Now marriages tend to start at a younger age and women are able to exercise some choice over the size of their families. The Pill has not led to a postponement of maternity; in fact the tendency is for babies to be born at the beginning of marriage. This means that a mother may now have some forty years in front of her when the youngest child starts school.

Still, for most girls, getting married and having a family is considered sufficient ambition and this is reflected in their education. Three times more girls than boys leave school at the age of 15, and 75 per cent. of all 18-year-old girls do not receive any higher education or training. Household chores are easier now than they were even twenty years ago, even if we do not have all of the latest labour saving gadgets. Whether housework is menial or not may be open to argument but it is certainly not a lifetime's vocation.

Work and Wages

Unfortunately, most wives cannot take advantage of easier housework and less time involved with infants. Those in the Women’s Liberation movement may decide whether or not married women gain some advantage from taking part in socially productive work, but for most of us the discussion is hardly relevant. For despite the myth that women work outside the home in order just to find companionship, or escape from the boredom of housework, in this consumer-orientated society there is no real choice. How else can the family take a holiday, buy that modern home equipment or simply make ends meet? One might also ask just what the "starlight” shift, popular with mothers of young children, does for companionship in the home.

Selma James is among those who have seen through the notion that women gain some kind of liberation by working outside the home as well as in it. However her suggested demand in her pamphlet Women, the Unions and Work for "wages for housework” seems a little naive. Wages are the price for which workers sell their labour power. That price will be generally sufficient to keep a worker, and his family, at a socially accepted standard. Payment made for housework, like family allowances or free transport, would act as a brake on wages. When a wife first takes a job there may be an improvement in the family living standard but her income soon becomes an integral part of the family budget.

Question of Cash

But when it is only the husband’s income which endeavours to meet the family expenses it is hardly surprising that conflicts arise about just how, or by whom, the money should be spent.

"It is a class thing, really, money is power in a husband-wife relationship where there is only one weekly wage packet”: according to Mr. Nicholas Tindall, of the National Marriage Guidance Council. (The Sun, 16.10.72)

In her pamphlet, Selma James makes a comment about a woman earning enough money "to avoid having to degrade herself by asking her husband for money for tights”, which speaks volumes on the blighting effect that money can have on personal relationships. The decision to supplement the family income, or achieve a degree of financial independence, means joining the majority of working women who are used as "little better than cheap labour, doing low-grade repetitive jobs, with rates of pay to match.” (TV Times)

Women are conditioned and, for the most part, educated for stop-gap jobs —to fill in time until getting married — and yet they form 38 per cent. of the work force. More than half of the women who go out to work are married. Many women accept the idea of getting lower pay than men and in the past few of them have joined unions. Out of 9 million working women only two million are union members.

Complaints about the type of work available to women give the impression that all male work is skilled, creative and interesting; that men do not get involved with their children or ever give help (unpaid) in the home. Of course the constant round of childcare and housework can be frustrating but what do most men, and women, get out of their employment? Only the pay packet (or salary cheque)!

Dissatisfaction with women’s rôle in society has led to some discussion of the shortcomings of the social system itself, but what a pity most members of the Women’s Liberation movement seem prepared to settle for so little. The movement, which began in this country in the late sixties, is broadly based and lacks a coherent policy. Emphasis is placed on the continuous development of ideas supposedly by learning through struggle.

Struggle for what? Despite the use of much revolutionary-styled rhetoric, members of the movement essentially seek equality with men in capitalism. When men and women compete for jobs on equal terms and the Equal Pay Act (1970) is fully implemented, plus, of course, the provision of more nursery education and free contraception, their aims will be achieved.

For women to join in one organisation because they are women is about as logical as the idea that all black people have common cause because they are black. The oppression of different groupings within the working class varies in intensity and in form. It is this variation which tends to mask the common factor which applies to all of the groups: women bringing up children alone, immigrants, the homeless, pensioners, etc., etc.

The Working Class

The common denominator which applies to about 90 per cent. of the population is their alienation from the means of production. The only viable definition of the term “working class” includes all those who, because they possess only their ability to work, must sell their mental and physical energies to an employer in return for money (wages or salary). It makes no difference whether the price for their labour and job-status is high or low. The class which owns the factories, land etc. is at an opposite pole. Its members do not need to compete for jobs. Not even for better-paid jobs in management, administration and the professions. Neither will old age or lack of employment throw them on the Social Security scrapheap.

Justification for an autonomous women’s movement is largely based on giving women’s claims priority over the achievement of Socialism, even where it is the alleged aim.

Marx and Engels both saw that when women took a decisive part in large-scale production, and were only occupied by domestic chores to a minor degree, their emancipation became feasible and that furthermore the foundation was laid for “a higher form of the family and of the relations between the sexes”. They plainly knew that, though the pre-conditions for the emancipation of working-class men and women have been met within capitalism, we cannot in fact be set free without a revolutionary change to Socialism. This revolution the world has yet to see.

True Liberation

What will the position of women be in Socialist society?

When the means for production are the common property of the worldwide community, production for use will have replaced the outmoded system of market production. We will contribute to the well-being of society as free individuals and will, without exception, have free access to those goods and services required to fulfil our own needs. (Wages for housework! Who wants wages?)

Though we cannot know exactly what form the family will take, we can say that the “nuclear” family will no longer be the economic unit of society. Men and women will live together because they mutually wish to do so, the bonds between them and their children being neither legal nor financial. Children will be a social responsibility and even a chance pregnancy will not be cause for alarm.

The working class is already armed I with the only weapon a politically- aware majority will need to abolish capitalism and replace it with Socialism. Whether or not we are in unions, or in employment, we have the vote!

A Single Aim

Women’s Liberation is yet another movement dividing the working class. This time with the absurd notion that female oppression is caused by male domination, while in fact but a special aspect of human oppression under capitalism. Even when the end of capitalism is recognised as the only demand “not co-optable” it is dismissed in favour of a reformist struggle.

The movement is largely anti-capitalist and as such assumes the distortion of everybody’s life and potential today. But such generalities are moral, not political, and though everyone wants liberation for all (men and women) this cannot but be Utopianism unless at this stage, we organise around specific oppressions. (Women’s Estate, by Juliet Mitchell, p. 58)

We in the Socialist Party of Great Britain have but one object because the demand for Socialism is of itself a call to end specific oppressions. The demand for Socialism is of itself a protest against war, against poverty and against the frustration of millions of lives only half lived. But more than that, the demand for Socialism recognizes that we can only solve these problems by ending the social system which causes them.

We will not settle for less.

Pat Deutz

50 Years Ago: On leadership (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The leadership idea has cursed the working class movement from the beginning. At an earlier period those supporting the idea had motives of benevolence, its later supporters have also benevolent motives—but the benevolence is directed towards themselves. They make stepping stones of their followers to reach comfort and security.

★

In France in 1793 Babeuf and his friends sacrificed their fortunes and lives in the attempt to relieve the misery of the mass of oppressed. The method was a sudden attack upon the central seat of power by a courageous and determined minority . . . Babeuf’s intentions were excellent, but his method was rotten at the root. Instead of first getting the mass of the people to understand and desire the new programme, he proposed to force it upon them from without The idea being that the intellectual few knew better what was good for the masses than the masses did themselves. 

★

In 1836, an association of working men was formed in London that blossomed out into the first national movement of wage workers. This association took the name of ‘The London Workingmen’s Association’ and published an address, the concluding words of which put forward a new outlook for the oppressed, telling them to have done with leaders and trust only in themselves:

‘Be assured that the good there is to be must be begun by ourselves’.

Marx has put the case more definitely, as follows:

‘The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working-class itself’.

★

In working out his emancipation, the worker must study the conditions that surround and oppress him. He must look to ‘great principles’ and not to ‘great men’ in the struggles.

From an article “Abandon the Idols” by G. McCIatchie, Socialist Standard, May 1923

Lonelyhearts: A Parody of Living (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

“The sexiest years of our lives” the News of the World called them, reviewing the changes which have occurred in sexual customs and behaviour during the last twenty-five years. “ ‘Today’s teenagers have burst open the sexual cage. They will never be driven back to the old taboos’, says the Sorensen Report on Adolescent Sexuality” — shouts The Sun. Film-stars boasting that they were not legally married to the fathers of their children. Over a million British women “on the Pill”. Stage productions like Hair and Oh, Calcutta! with completely starkers casts. Every pub, almost, with its Go-Go girls and strippers, and Saturday-night “divorced and separated club” dances. Family planning is free for all, screams the poster on the wall — make sure they are really wanted. The Borough of Camden actually pays taxi fares of girls needing advice urgently.

Forty-five years ago Dr. Marie Stopes (authoress of Married Love and pioneer of the first free birth- control clinic for working-class women in Islington, London) had her book suppressed and a six-month prison sentence which, however, she never served. With all this new-found freedom and frankness, discarding absurd Victorian prudery and hypocrisy, we should all be as happy as sandboys, as free as the air, having it away like rabbits without a care in the world.

But what is the truth? We live in the era of the broken marriage. Divorce and separation have reached staggering proportions, leaving behind them a legacy of grief and anguish hard to visualize. Children become “latch-key kids”, some “juvenile delinquents”. The matrimonial courts are snowed-under with cases, and the jails hard-pressed to cope with the 250,000 maintenance allowance defaulters. The weeklies reap a rich harvest running hundreds of adverts by men seeking women, and women the companionship and sociability of men. This writer remembers well buying a copy of Der Abend in Frankfurt, to find more advertisements by lonely men and women seeking partners in Germany, than in England.

These adverts along with Compat, Duet, and “divorced and separated” clubs are a peep under the lid of a seething cauldron. They are the harrowing heart-cry of the victims of a vicious and depraved society, capitalism, which denies many the exercise of those elementary physical functions which even lower animals enjoy instinctively.

A desperately lonely bachelor seeks an attractive lady.

“Surbiton Surrey’ ’is longing to make somebody happy.

A lonely English bachelor seeks lady for friendship and marriage.

And so on, page after page after page. Neither is it true that the advertizers are merely, or even mainly, interested in sex. Many go out of the way to state their social interests: “dancing”, “walking”, “music” — in fact, "Lonely Teacher” declares himself a “genuine socialist”.

Incidentally, nearly all the males advertized by Marriage Bureaux are “nearly” six feet tall, which doesn’t say much for us shorties who can only muster about five feet eight. Some have not only motor-cars and “good positions”; they are “cultivated”, “travelled”, “intelligent” and “humorous”, they own town and country houses, boats and caravans (one even has his own private plane) — and are still unhappy. One widow advertizes “a good home” for the lucky applicant. Such inducements can only arise in a private-property society where possessions are considered the criterion of contentment. Nevertheless one bright spark announces:

A gentleman, 46, tall, indolent, with no material possessions seeks a lady, whose religion is unimportant.

On the other hand:

A Continental lady with small capital would like to met an understanding gentleman for early marriage.

She probably got a flood of replies asking how small is “small”.

How paradoxically absurd that men and women, who are crammed together like sardines in public transport, homes and employment, have to advertize their frustrations. Hundreds of thousands are milling about like the exploding electrons in an atomic pile, crashing into other marriages and threatening their stability in a social chain-reaction.

Compare the unhappy plight of these “intelligent”, “cultivated”, car-driving bachelors and divorcees, forced to advertize their poverty of companionship, with the joyous freedom of the primitive savage, secure in the knowledge that all the women of the opposite Gens were his lawful, rightful wives, while all the men were the husbands of his Genswomen.

. . . the law enabling the strange Papuan, thousands of miles from home to find frequently, from Tribe to Tribe, women who will without resistance guilelessly surrender to him.

(Engels, Origin of the Family p.54) 

One can hardly restrain a smile at the quaint Victorian terminology still used by even such an iconoclastic pioneer as Engels. The idea that women “surrender” to men is exploded even under capitalism nowadays.

The absorption of women into commerce and industry has made them less economically dependent on men as Engels, Bebel and others predicted. This, and the cheap efficient small car instead of the pram, the washing machine in place of the wash-board, central heating and electrical machinery have partially emancipated women from drudgery in the kitchen and submission in the bedroom. Socialism will continue this process by emancipating women completely.

Lewis Henry Morgan’s great merit lay in his realization that our attitudes change with changing economic conditions, and that the family as a form of social organization evolves. Under slavery, male slaves had no sex life (officially, anyway). All female slaves were automatically the Master’s concubines, if required. Under feudalism sex was confined by the Church, for the lower orders, to the marriage partner for life. To the aristocrat the marriage was to land, not a bride. In this way the Hapsburg dynasty gained control over half of Europe. This form of repression inevitably produced prostitution which, however, never flourished then as under capitalism now, where literally everything is on sale for money.

For primitive man the choice was wide and free. Children were the social responsibility of the whole tribe. The absurdly individualistic private possessive relation to their own children of many proletarian mothers today was unknown. With the extension of knowledge and culture comes the advent of individual sex-love, although Engels held that it was impossible before the Middle Ages:

It goes without saying that personal beauty, harmony of inclinations, intimate intercourse, awakened a longing for sexual intercourse, but from such relations to our sex-love is a long way yet.

(Origin of the Family p.92) 

Sexual relations will be decided after a new generation has come to maturity, a breed of men who have never had occasion to buy the surrender of a woman for money, and women who have never had occasion to surrender to any man for any other reason but love. Once such people are in the world they will not give a moment’s thought to what we, today, believe should be their course.

(ibid., p.100)

Relieved of all economic problems, unsatisfactory unions will be dissoluble immediately on the simple decision of one or both parties. Mental compatibility and mutual achievement will gradually supplant physical satiety as the years pass. The individual family of private-property society will be superseded by the great social family of all humanity.

Hail to our sons and daughters! who, learning from the fumbling blunders of their stupid and clumsy parents, will attain a noble happiness we can never know.

Horatio.

Strikes — and General Strikes (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day has been chosen as a day of trade-union protest, arising out of a decision reached at a special Trades Union Congress held on 5th March. Some unions are making it a one-day strike, others are limiting it to shorter walk-outs and others again are merely holding protest meetings, or standing aloof. The strikers may number several millions and the event was widely reported in the press as a TUC General Strike.

In fact it bears hardly any resemblance to the planned and purposeful organizing that a serious General Strike would call for. Its timing alone shows that the General Council of the TUC is well aware of how little effect it will have on the Government, whose wage policy it is designed to change. The resolution carried on 5th March reads:

Congress calls upon the General Council . . .  to invite affiliated unions to join in a day of national protest and stoppages against the wage control policy and increase of food prices.

It also called upon the General Council to organize this “as quickly as possible”.

On 5th March the government’s wage policy (The Counter-Inflation Bill) had not become law; it was still  being debated in Parliament. If they believed in the effectiveness of the day of protest as a means of forcing the Government to drop its policy, the TUC could have organized it without delay. Instead, they waited until after the Bill became law at the end of March and then chose May Day. Had they chosen a date before the Bill was passed their bluff would immediately have been called — because it would have been demonstrated at once that the Government had not been deflected from its intention to enact the new law, any more than the Government was deterred from going on with the Industrial Relations Bill against which the TUC organized a similar day of protest on 12th January 1971.

Compromise

Discretion has been the order of the day for the TUC, and with some reason. In nearly two centuries of trade-union history it is impossible to find a single occasion on which a government and Parliament have been prevented by strike confrontation from passing a law they were set on. The reason for this is a simple one. Governments calculate that their legislation has the backing of a majority of the electorate, or at least will be accepted by them at the next election; and nearly three-quarters of the electorate are not trade-unionists.

While the unions have not been able to use confrontation to prevent laws being passed, they have been able to influence the laws in which they are particularly interested in another way. The workers need trade unions, but so also do the employers: under modern conditions the relatively orderly functioning of industry without organizations with which employers can negotiate pay and conditions is unthinkable. The government and the employers need trade-union law. But so also do the unions, if only to give them access to the courts to protect their £140 million funds. (In the early days and again from 1859 to 1871 this protection did not exist and the unions were at the mercy of those who misappropriated their funds.)

So, on numerous occasions, the unions have been able to “do a deal” with government or opposition, Tory, Liberal or Labour, for relaxations of the laws in return for the offer of trade-union concessions or support at elections. The last occasion was in 1969 with the Wilson government. The bargain then was that the Government, while not dropping their intention to go on with their Industrial Relations Bill, cut out certain clauses offensive to the unions in return for a TUC pledge to deal with “unofficial strikes”; at Wilson’s insistence this was written into the TUC Constitution.

The latest move of this kind is the suggestion by Scanlon of the Engineering Union that if the Government would amend the Industrial Relations Act the way would be open for the TUC to seek agreement with the Government on inflation and wages policy. He expressly disclaimed any intention to challenge Parliament.

More Effective Ways

All of this is a far cry from the idea of a serious General Strike. The purpose of such a strike, as with any other strike, should be to use the stoppage of work to hit the employers financially by stopping the production of wealth and profits. Its method would not be to create chaos by bringing all workers out but to bring out the smallest number that would be effective in the industries where the impact would be greatest. (In the 1926 General Strike the strikers called out to help the miners numbered under 2 million.)

As Marx showed and as experience supports, strikes are most effective when capitalism is expanding, factories are working to capacity and profit prospects are good — for it is at such times that the employers least want to interrupt production and are most likely to make concessions. Indeed, provided that the employers know the threat is a serious one, the concessions may be forthcoming without a strike or with one of very short duration. It was the weakness of the 1926 Strike that government and employers looked at the TUC General Council and decided that the threat was bluff. The same is true of the TUC decision of 5th March, which was so little regarded that it caused hardly a ripple on the Stock Exchange. It would have been very different if the threat had been taken seriously.

The 1926 General Strike has another warning: the absurdity of leaving such matters to the TUC General Council. The TUC General Council (unlike the central body in Denmark, where a General Strike recently took place) is not a trade union, does not engage in the ordinary wage-negotiating functions of a union, and is rather a kind of political organization for the big trade-union supporters of the Labour Party. Action by, say, half a dozen unions, under rank-and-file control, would be the appropriate way.

Careful Decision

The approach of the Socialist Party of Great Britain to strikes has always been based on the facts of capitalism on which our whole principles are framed. Those who control the machinery of government, including the armed forces, dominate society — hence the necessity for a Socialist working class to use the vote to gain that control for the purpose of achieving Socialism. It follows that the employers with their wealth and the backing of the State can always win against strikes if they think the issue important enough. As it was put in the Socialist Standard in April 1919:

   On the economic field the masters are in a far stronger position than the workers and can beat them any time they decide to fight to a finish.

It is for the unions therefore to weigh up carefully at a given time whether the employers will be likely to make concessions in order to prevent production being interrupted. Strikes should not be "on principle” and fought to a finish, but for what in the circumstances appear to be attainable objects.

The "illegality” of strikes is not itself a deciding factor. The unions, in their two hundred years, have often been expressly illegal or outside the law and have often been able to ignore laws which are on the statute book but which employers and the government tacitly allow to be ignored. It is, however, essential for unions when weighing up a situation to decide whether in the particular circumstances the government will actively intervene and decide to carry the fight to a finish against the unions, with their certain defeat.

Edgar Hardcastle 

Beyond the Grants Campaign (1973)

Party News from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The National Union of Students is conducting a campaign to:

• Raise the Student Grant.
• Abolish Discretionary awards.
• Give married women students a full grant. 
• Abolish the parental means test.

Students, most of them members of the working class, should recognize that, like the rest of the workers, they cannot escape the limitations imposed on them by the capitalist system in which we live.

We understand their efforts to prevent a deterioration of their position. However, such action is only defensive. If students don’t look beyond the grants campaign they will find they will have been running fast only to stay on the same spot. As trade unionists have discovered, inflation soon undermines economic gains and the whole struggle has to be gone through again. Moreover, students should understand that education at present is primarily a means of training a labour force for the organization of commodity production in capitalist society. The dominating influence of examinations and the totally undemocratic hierarchical organisation of the university are expressions of this. Education should be a social amenity for the development of individuals’ talents, which it cannot be under capitalism.

So how do we get off the treadmill? 

Some people are advocating throwing the Tories out and electing a Labour government. But what did the last Labour government do? Allowed students’ living standards to decline drastically. Attacked workers’ living standards by means of wage freezes and inflation. 

Changing governments changes nothing.

The only way forward is a revolutionary change to a completely different society:

• World-wide common ownership of resources— not minority class ownership.
• Production to meet human needs — not for private profit.
• Free access to goods and services — not the rationing of a monetary system.
• A free, democratically-run, non-authoritarian, non-compulsory educational system giving equal opportunity for all.

This can only be achieved by the conscious action of the majority of the working class—and that includes most students.

We urge you to join us in the fight to establish world Socialism.

— from a leaflet issued by Socialist students at Aberdeen.

The Meaning of Freedom (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

What is liberation? The words which need most careful use are, usually, those which are thought to be above it. In an essay on George Orwell published in 1948, George Woodcock remarks how Orwell continually talked of brotherhood, justice, decency and so on without ever giving specific meanings: they spoke for themselves. A minute’s thought over the everyday corruptions of those terms will show that they do nothing of the kind. Freedom is another. Assumed to be self-explanatory, it is all things to all men: hope, delusion, inducement, trap. What became of “the Four Freedoms”? Freedom fighters, where are you now?

In fact, freedom by itself is an insignificant word. Its importance comes with its expansion — freedom from what, or to do which. Freedom from may be considerable; its range can cover merciful release from some private burden, to the abolition of a political restraint. Nevertheless, freedom in that sense remains negative and limited to shifting a particular evil. It is, of course, the most popular sense, and the argument is often made that to pile up these removals of restraint (“extending areas of freedom”) must in the end lead to total and therefore positive social liberty.

The Line Drawn

However, the pursuit of the piecemeal does not work like that. The man who has obtained relief from a disability or restriction is simply released into the general slavery of his fellow-men. That is why rulers seldom mind, in the end, giving freedom from: liberation is a means of creating more slaves. The cracker-motto “freedoms” set out by Churchill and Roosevelt in the war were of this kind. Leaving aside that they were part of the sham currency of wartime promises and so unlikely to be taken seriously when the fever was over, it is worth observing that freedom from hunger and insecurity is had, more or less, by people in prison. In the days of mass unemployment, down-and-outs frequently committed minor offences to get regular food and beds for the winter.

Nobody pretends that freedom from privation is worth having on such terms, but the terms accepted in ordinary life are often surprising. The usual paternalistic saying is that society can approve “liberty but not licence”, and it is interesting that “licence” is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “excessive liberty”. What is being said, therefore, is that you may have liberty but not too much. The line of excess is drawn, inevitably, by the ruling class; and the liberty thus prescribed is already restricted to the limits of freedom from. Thus, to suppose that slices of freedom can be gained within capitalism and put together to make a free society is naive in the extreme.

Choice and Responsibility

The context in which "freedom” takes on positive meaning is freedom to. Individually, innumerable extensions might be given: what they add up to socially is freedom to choose. This is the all-embracing denial made by the authoritarianism of a class-divided society. Under it, for the ruled, choice is directly refused or made impossible. One’s station and way of life, loyalties, duties, means of expression are selected and hung on one. A free society is definable as such only in this way; in it, individual choice is sovereign.

All sovereignties have boundaries, however. The alternative point of view, the Stirnerite one which disfavours society itself for inhibiting the ego’s absolute demands, is still practised by a number of anarchists whose cult it is never to answer letters, keep appointments etc., as proof that they are free and spontaneous individuals not responsible to anyone. When the doctrine is stated like that, both its absurdity and its perniciousness are plainly visible: this is not freedom at all, because it depends on mutilating someone else’s freedom. Freedom is relative always to the fact that man exists only as a social creature.

In simple everyday experience, every relationship or contract voluntarily made is a limitation on freedom. A person joining a political group or a recreational organization has “tied” him- or herself by the acceptance of obligations, including the recognition of rules and majority decisions. Much has been written recently about growing numbers of couples who set up their homes and raise families without the formalities of marriage. Those who explain their viewpoint always emphasize that, so far from being rejected, the responsibilities and restraints generally are undertaken more deliberately. The fact that this is some people’s preference is not beside the point: it is the point.

The Way to Go

Freedom, then, means a state in which contracts are entered and obligations accepted, but by one’s conscious choice not a predetermined one. The comparison to be made is between a free society and the authoritarian system where the obligations remain while somebody else imposes the choice. What must be recognized, however, is that the obligations are there in both cases. Indeed, freedom implies responsibility where servitude does not; having the choices imposed and the decisions made for one is tolerable to many people because it is easy. Part of the tyranny of capitalism is to make a virtue of that kind of mental laziness and extol bromides like “liberty not licence” to try and keep responsible thought in check. 

Given comprehension of what freedom is, how is the free society obtained? The lack of freedom is not just a question of holding wrong outlooks. It derives from material conditions as much as from legal and moral restraint. The irony of the old saying that everyone is free to dine at the Savoy has innumerable applications. A poor or ill-educated person is not free to choose his work, or where he will live, or even whom he will mix with. Badly-housed people are restricted sexually, intellectually, and in a dozen other ways. Financial worries, insecurities, hostile circumstances of all kinds are obstructions to freedom.

But it does not follow that reforms of circumstances are the answer. That takes us back to the realm of freedom from, where capitalism's nature is to turn apparent gains into equivalent losses; at this, you can’t win. The creation of a free society can be accomplished only by changing the structure of society. The disabilities and oppressions which are everywhere are aspects and consequences of the basic enslavement by capitalism, the class-ownership of the means of living. To replace them with freedom of choice and make responsibility instead of imposition the keystone of social life, common ownership is the pre-requisite.

Socialist Emancipation

This is the failing-point of the various “liberation” movements which are pressing for attention today. The impulse which leads black people, women, homosexuals and other groups to organize in the face of their special problems is understandable, of course. Nevertheless, the belief that those problems can be solved by legislation, or exchanging rule by Them for rule by Us, can lead nowhere except out of one cage and into another. The fact is that we are all caged by capitalism. The indignation and energy now going into those protests should be used fruitfully in the Socialist movement which works for “the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex”.

Freedom is the natural — and immediate — concomitant of the establishment of Socialism. Nor is any abstract judicial freedom meant. The economic condition of Socialism, production for use, means free access by everyone to the material wealth of society. That is emancipation, and from it arises the freedom to choose the sort of life one wants. That is liberation.

Robert Barltrop

The Enemy on the Left! - Liberation Movements (1973)

The Enemy on the Left! column from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

A regular column dealing with the antics of those who call themselves socialist but in practice do nothing but harm to the cause.

If we are talking of liberation movements, I suppose that the most remarkable success story has been achieved in Africa where in the course of a comparatively few years, something like four-fifths of the coloured population of the continent has been liberated from the rule of the white imperialists. Pretty well without exception, all the countries now ruled by native governments claim to be socialist (which is about as monstrous a misuse of the term as can be imagined). In this the coloured governments differ from the white rulers who still hold sway in the southern part of the continent. But one thing is common to all the dozens of countries in the whole of the vastness that is Africa — from Cairo to the Cape there is not a solitary foot of ground where a single vestige of freedom exists. In every single state, the only place for those who differ from the government is in prison, or the grave.

Black workers and peasants in countries like Kenya and the rest suffered great hardships in the struggle to oust the white rulers. And having achieved what they were conned into thinking was liberation, all they have actually got is an iron dictatorship almost invariably far harsher than the British or French who were supplanted. As as for material conditions, it is worth noting that in the course of a campaign initiated recently by the Guardian to expose the starvation wages being paid by white employers in South Africa about which all good liberal types are so righteously indignant, there appeared one letter in the paper from some courageous type in Kenya (who may or may not have been writing under a pseudonym) which said that the wages in that country were far lower than those which were being so violently (and of course correctly) condemned in South Africa. And this despite the fact that the cost of living was higher in Kenya. Such are the fruits of liberation. And lest any reader of the Guardian should imagine that this letter might be phoney or in some way exceptional, one needs only to recall the atrocious advert by the Nigerian government which appeared in that paper (and which was quoted at length in the Socialist Standard in October 1972) which canvassed potential employers with the promise of rather cheap black labour — sixpence an hour. Needless to say, the hypocrites on the Guardian who accepted the payment for that advert, conducted no crusade against the black government of Nigeria although these wages were but a small fraction of those being paid in South Africa. The reason is simple. Black is beautiful and the trendy lefties cannot get hot under the collar at the vicious regimes which have the advantage of being fashionable — and good for circulation.

When will workers, black or white, learn that the only liberation that counts is from the thrall of capitalism?

L. E. Weidberg

A Prophet of Liberation (1973)

Book Review from the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier; Selected Texts on Work, Love and Passionate Attraction, Translated and edited by Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu. Cape, £3.95

Marx and Engels praised and criticized Fourier. The criticism, inevitably, was that of all the Utopian Socialists of 1800 and thereabouts. As Engels put it in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.

Yet the praise was undeniable too: for Fourier's satire, the "power and charm" of his denunciations of commerce, his view of women's position, and his historical insight.

Of all the Utopians, Fourier most readily wins sympathy today. Saint-Simon's gospel of work may seem too severe. Owen's experiments not free from the suspicion of progressive management; with Fourier, however, the human concern which won that word "charm" is almost irresistible. His answer to the classic question of who would do dirty work under Socialism is memorable. Muck? Filth? Let children do it: they love such things.

The present collection of Fourier's writings draw strongly on material which was not available to Marx and Engels. This is the volume published for the first time in Paris in 1967 under the title Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux (The New Amorous World). It would not have altered their view, but it greatly amplifies the vision of a satisfying society as Fourier saw it. It enables us also to see how far away the Fourierists who founded 19th-century communities were from what was in his mind: straitlaced groups who, as the Introduction remarks, "for tactical as well as personal reasons" ignored his intention of a realm of sexual freedom.

After a financially comfortable upbringing, Fourier was woken to the realities of social life in the years following the French Revolution. Experiences in the Lyon insurrection of 1793 are said to have given him "a lasting horror of political revolution and social turmoil", and the rifeness of profiteering and speculation under the Directory made him a bitter critic of "anarchic" competition. From these points of departure he constructed a series of proposals for the reconstruction of society, leading to the master-plan: a scheme of "natural association" in which the gratification of personal desires and passions would be for human good. By 1819 he had completed, but was never able to publish in entirety, his Grande Traité on society and human nature.

It was essential to Fourier that his idea be put into practice. His conception was of a community called the Phalanx, made up of small "passional" groups. For years he sought a patron to provide the land and the backing; he tried bankers, philanthropists and ambassadors. Though these appeals brought nothing, a small band of disciples formed. He quickly dissociated himself from an attempt at a community in 1833; after his death in 1837 Fourierism became a political fashion for a few years. Fourierist study groups in Russia included Dostoevsky and Alexander Herzen among their members. A number of Fourier communities were set up in America, almost all under-capitalized and incapable of survival for any length of time—the only part-successful one, Brook Farm, was ruined by a fire in 1846.

Fourier's emphasis was on human fulfilment. He saw that capitalism and its commerce were not only degrading and starving millions of people physically, but also deprived them of necessary emotional satisfactions. He was concerned about ending work as slavery—not by inducement to make work attractive, but by letting it be attractive as he was convinced it was to everyone: civilization had perverted it. There was no reason why men should spend all their lives or even all day at one kind of work. In Harmony (Fourier's name for his Utopia) they would do many different things, in pleasant surroundings and among friends and lovers. Economic security would be provided by the "social minimum", a guaranteed income which made the framework for freedom of choice.

Like most Utopians, Fourier advocated a predominantly agricultural life. He did not deny the place of industry, but it had to be secondary; and factories and workshops must be specially luxurious if people were to want to work in them. However, he argued a great increase in agricultural production and a decrease in manufacture: goods would be so excellently made as to need replacing only occasionally, while the Harmonians would consume correspondingly more of the social wealth in food. The fullest expression of pleasure in work would be the appearance of armies of "a million industrial athletes" for huge projects like bridge-building and land reclamation.

But the real destiny of mankind in this new world was the complete liberation of the instincts. The satisfaction of material needs led to organised release from sexual and emotional bondage. As Engels pointed out, Fourier was "the first to declare that in any given society the degree of women's emancipation is the natural measure of the general emancipation". Fourier attacked Christianity's "enslaved monogamy" furiously, for brutalizing sexual relations and for the hypocrisy which turned love into a self-centred activity. He saw sexual love as a central part of community life.

Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring of all works and of the whole of universal attraction.

The proposals for a free sexual life turn out to be elaborately regulated. There is a hierarchy of officials, and a mighty rule-book. The orgies sound like committee-ridden village fêtes, and there are even Courts allotting playful forfeit-type penalties. Fourier insists that the code is voluntary and to facilitate expression, but it rings uneasily of regimentation; the high priests, matrons, pontiffs etc. are plainly sexual bureaucrats in the making. Nevertheless, the vision remains a remarkable one when it is seen in contrast with all that was taken for granted about sex relationships in the bourgeois society of the period.

In one respect particularly Fourier was startlingly ahead of his time. His Utopia involved the liberation of the sexual "deviant":

In Harmony manias will be particularly bizarre and plentiful among the more complex personality types. In civilization on the contrary the complex personalities are those who try hardest to stifle and hide their manias. They do so out of an excessive respect for civilised standards and public opinion and also out of a desire to avoid criticism, of which they already have quite enough. 

Every person's proclivities would be marked on papers he carried, so as to find appropriate partners without difficulty. The "manias" would contribute to society's well-being just as much as normal sexuality. The only line Fourier drew was at activities in which a person was abused, or made an object against his will. Thus, he anticipated by a century and a half the "gay liberation" movement and its logical conclusion—that society must be reorganized first.

This was indeed the great merit which enables us to see Fourier as a forerunner of Socialism. He perceived that the material basis of life was the essential condition to be provided, and this could be done only by creating a new kind of social order. Capitalism's "disgusting civilization" was inimical to every human need:

The results of this system—poverty, oppression, deceit and carnage—are wholly contrary to man's desires and to the goal of nature.

When security, comfort and pleasure in work have been attained, man could then become truly liberated. Sexual relationships would be freed from coercion and necessity, and the gratification of instinct produce social enthusiasm and harmony.

The translation of this vision to class-consciousness and comprehension of political power as the means was, as Engels wrote, simply not possible in Fourier's time. It remained an idea, hopeful of achievement by luck or infection. There is very much, however, which resembles what Socialists today look forward to in the society of the future. The belief in small communities as islands of liberated living still persists, but—as in Fourier's day—a world away from what his mind saw. His view was of a whole society; no group of men is an island.

Robert Barltrop

Out of Step . . . What Is 'Normality' In Capitalism? (1973)

From the May 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

The governor of a large London prison is reputed on good authority to have said that if he were to unlock all the gates most of his prisoners would prefer not to walk out. This was of course a comment not so much on the prison as on the world outside. For one thing a prison accepts, or at any rate contains, attitudes and behaviour which are unlikely to be tolerated elsewhere. Prisoners are classed as among society's deviants; while they are inside they are subject to a social code which is geared to the needs of the prison and to what is required to survive there. Any prisoner who deviates from that code (for example the "grasses" — men who inform on others) act in ways which conform more closely to the requirements of the world outside the walls. 

This typically many-sided example serves as well as any as an introduction to the subject of deviance which in the time of drug use, homosexual reform, Women's Lib and so on is painfully exercising the minds of many workers who would probably feel more secure in unquestioning conformity. There are of course many fields in which deviance can show itself, not all of them connected with crime; madness for example. What they all have in common is an ability to provoke a general rejection of the deviants, which may lead to them being shut away — in prison, mental hospitals — or in them shutting themselves away (which may amount to the same thing) in their own circles of social contact. 

Deviance, the mainstream agrees, is bad — which means that normality is good. It is possible to spend a great deal of time in argument over a definition of normality, tossing about evidence from many fields — anthropology, history, sociology and so on. A psychiatrist may well have a definition substantially different from that of, say, a lawyer. There is no agreement about where normality is to be found — is it in an individual, a family, a community? Can prisoners really be classed as abnormal, when they themselves fit into a community with its own culture and morals? There is clearly more to this question than is to be found in the hysteria of the get-tough-with-criminals lobby. 

One solid fact we can deal with is that normality is socially defined and therefore socially violable. In other words, deviance is not a matter of scientific theory but of social pressures and expectancies; society at any one time decides who are the outsiders, not the other way round. Like any other social factor, the quality of normality — and therefore of deviance — changes in accordance with differing conditions and demands. For example, homosexuality was not so long ago considered one of the most abhorrent and threatening of deviances but now there is the beginning of a reaction against such bigotry. The result has been that there have been same minor changes in the law but, more importantly, there is a greater readiness among homosexuals to declare themselves and to organize in an effort to resist the special type of repression which is applied to them. There are stories that the true extent of homosexuality would be shocking news to Mary Whitehouse; that if it were revealed it would be seen to be common enough to cease to be deviant behaviour and, by sheer weight of popularity, almost to become normality (which would presumably transform our great stud heroes like James Bond into super deviants.) 

It would be useful here to give same attention to the norms — the social expectancies — which are imposed upon us today and which determine who and what is deviant. We must accept that in any social system minimum demands are imposed, which generally have to be met in order to survive. How does this apply to the capitalist society we live under today and what effect does this have upon us as social creatures? 

One of the first things we have impressed upon us is that our place in the economic order is to be employed for our living. As we grow up we are persistently cajoled into thinking about what we will do for a job when we leave school; to regard a top job with a desk and an office and a secretary and a company car as the climax of achievement. Our childhood, which is so crucial to our growth into adults, is cruelly distorted in the drive to turn us out as schooled and disciplined wage slaves, ready to do our part in capitalism's commodity production and to be driven slowly out of our minds in the boredom of an office or the drudgery of a production line. To deviate from these norms — to question the usefulness of wage slavery, to assert that work should be pleasure or nothing — is an offence against normality for which one of the lesser penalties is to be stigmatised as slothful. 

What is Required 

From our economic standing under capitalism we absorb social norms which are partly expressed in our family life and in the relationships between men and women. It is within the family that a significant part of the socializing of the child, adapting it to the requirements of capitalism, takes place, The family has its own expectancies — an invariably monogamous marriage, at its most fabulous a pre-ordained union of boy and girl to complete part of a great romantic jigsaw puzzle and go on to live happily ever after despite the Bomb and slumps and famine and the general rottenness of capitalism. Outside of the poorer magazines it never happens - and even if it did it would not be healthy. 

In marriage the expectancy is that the husband operates to a tolerance and to ambitions a lot higher than those of the wife. At its worst she is allowed the drab, unhistoric tasks at home, perhaps relieved by a teatime chat with another, equally confined, woman, or by a session of bingo, while he is away at heroic, vital deeds in the fierce world of commerce and industry. The family needed by capitalism is private, defensive; it denies free human contact and obstructs full living. And with all this, the family today is extremely fragile, with inadequate safety nets to catch those under whose weight the bough breaks. Yet so powerful is the conditioning of family dependence that to rebel against it may need to be an act of heroism — and capitalism can exact a high price for such courage.

These norms converge into the political expectancies of capitalism — the massive confidence trick by which millions of workers are persuaded that property society is normal and must go on for ever because it is based upon an eternal morality. Thus they continually opt for their own exploitation and repression, trusting in their leaders as wise, courageous men who will guide them through all their troubles to a safe and comfortable grave. They react derisively towards political deviants who insist that capitalism is no more than an historical phase, that it fails to meet the needs of its peoples, that leaders are an obstacle to our progress. Socialists are stigmatised, like any other deviants; we are dubbed agitators, cranks, impossibilists and we would not have it any other way. 

The concentrated personification of capitalism's norms is the smart young executive in his new town house, keeping a prudent eye on his stake in unit trusts, watching for the right moment to trade in his Ford for the latest model, paying all his bills, mowing the lawn whenever it is time and generally behaving as if he were only part-alive. This person can be seen in advertisments, in statistical returns and in some popular stories and plays. He may even, somewhere, exist for real. It is a relief to turn our attention to the deviant. 

Deviant from the Norm 

It is the lot of deviants to be rejected, which may conceal the fact that they are reacting in a way which is basically healthy, as a protest against intolerable conditions. The response to their protest is often anything but healthy, of which more later. For example a child who refuses to go to school may be tucked away under the deviant label, as "school-phobic". Yet it is often the case that such children are fearful not so much of what may happen to them at school as of what is actually happening to them at home. Nobody labels the family as "child-phobic", Drug addicts are often trying to block off the bleakness of capitalism yet they are dealt with as if they are the sickness in themselves. Many criminals are like those men who would prefer to stay in prison — capitalism offers them little in terms of concern, acceptance, esteem. Many of them bear the marks of a lifetime of social rejection, which has been intensified as they have kicked against it. At the end they are isolates, with little ability to form a relationship with even one human being, let alone with enough to enable them to win a place in the ranks of capitalism's wage slaves.

This is a process which has been expressed in a theory of primary and secondary deviance, which suggests that a first deviant act may provoke a response liable to produce another such act. A logical extension of this is that the agencies which set out to oppose deviance and to impose norms have the end effect of stimulating deviance. From this point of view the police, say, are seen as doing more, in a broad social sense, to promote crime than to contain it. At the same' time, by labelling a deviant as such society may be setting up the preconditions for repeat deviance — for example to stigmatize a person as mentally sick may induce fear in him and about him which can be expressed in disturbed behaviour — which reinforce the original labelling and so on. 

Can Society Care? 

The point at which this process might conveniently be said to start is often determined by the prejudices of stereotyping, by which one aspect of behaviour is presumed to determine another. Men with shoulder length hair, for example, are presumed to be on drugs; negroes all to live in ghetto conditions. There are elements of defensiveness in such labelling; anyone who feels the need to prove that he is not on drugs need only keep his hair short, and "while" people can wear their skin colour as if it were a badge guaranteeing civilized living. But another way, the normal actually needs its deviants, not just as the opposite side of a relationship but for the norm's protection, to define its position and to assert its acceptability. Deviance is insecurity and society at large can feel safer when it is reacting against it. By stigmatizing and shutting away its criminals and its mental patients society can take comfort from the fact that they are out of the way — and even call it treatment. 

An important point about capitalism is that its norms do not coincide with majority interests. Normality as far as capitalism goes is set and defined to assert and protect the superior standing and the privileges of the dominant, property-owning minority. It follows from this that it is virtually impossible to conform to the expectancies of capitalism; most people at some time have stolen, or slacked on the job, or breached the sexual assumption of the capitalist family. Capitalism's deviants are in the majority, which is evidence of the system's basic inability to organize itself to the advantage of its people. 

What, then, of the alternative society? Socialism will have its norms and so, it must be agreed, also its deviants. But those norms will be acceptable in that they will be laid down by the interests of the majority. Human beings will respond to the incentives of a co-operative, socially supportive system; even under capitalism, with the drive all the other way, deviants make pathetic attempts at winning acceptance. Socialism will be a society which will care. Anyone who then remembers the banished miseries of capitalism may end up by asking: where have all the deviants gone? 

Ivan