The human nature argument (1993)

Book Review from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the most frequent arguments used against the possibility and viability of socialism is that the ideas and behaviour it requires are against “human nature”. So any book that makes a detailed, well-researched and thoughtful analysis of the whole subject is likely to be useful to socialists. Such a book is Alfie Kohn’s The Brighter Side of Human Nature published in America in 1990. His references to capitalism and socialism are few but he is no apologist for the status quo. He is aware that most of what has been written on human nature has focused on its darker side. So his aim is to present examples of and discuss “altruism and empathy in everyday life” (the book’s subtitle).

Cynical consensus
Described as “an independent scholar, lecturer and journalist”, Kohn previously wrote No Contest: The Case Against Competition (1986). He starts by asking us to consider a curious set of facts about our culture:

  Someone who thinks well of himself is said to have a healthy self-concept and is envied. Someone who thinks well of his country is called a patriot and is applauded. But someone who thinks well of his species is regarded as hopelessly naive and is dismissed.

When you think about it, this set of facts isn't so much curious as characteristic of capitalism. Individual-ism is lauded as superior to social-ism, so that when some individuals cream off the profits while others go short of what they need this is regarded as “natural". Patriotism is the individual expression of nationalism, and the capitalist world is divided into nation-states because it suits leaders to divide and rule. Thinking well of one’s species is what people do when they overcome individualism and nationalism—when, as socialists, they identify with humanity as a whole.

In the following passage it is necessary to read "we" as referring to the current majority viewpoint, not that of the author and not, of course, that of socialists:

  The phrase “human nature” . . . is reserved, as if by some linguistic convention, for what is nasty and negative in our repertoire. We invoke it to explain selfishness rather than service, competition rather than cooperation, egocentricity rather than empathy. On any given day we may witness innumerable gestures of caring, ranging from small acts of kindness to enormous sacrifices, but never do we shrug and say. "Well, what did you expect? Its just human nature to be generous".

Illustration by George Meddemmen

After giving some examples of the ways in which characteristics such as aggression and competition, selfishness and egocentricity are persistently overstated, and their opposites understated, Kohn goes on to present what he describes as a more balanced perspective, "an affirmation of what there is to appreciate about humankind without ignoring the reality that people sometimes act rotten”:

  In response to a stubborn refusal to recognize what is heartening about humans, I am chiefly interested in showing that there is more to us than the negative qualities we have come to identify with human nature. Most of us have heard only half the story. Human beings are selfish and self-centered, looking for any opportunity to take advantage. But human beings are also decent, able to feel others' pain and prepared to try to relieve it. There is good evidence to support the proposition that it is as “natural” to help as it is to hurt, that concern for the well-being of others often cannot be reduced to self-interest, that social structures predicated on human selfishness have no claim to inevitability—or even prudence. In short, the cynical consensus about our species is out of step with the hard data.

The evidence that Kohn presents later in the book is all the more remarkable because it is evidence of how people behave in capitalism, a society that encourages and, indeed, depends for its very existence and continuation upon, a set of beliefs that emphasizes competition, being tough, accepting market forces, looking after yourself, and so on. In other words, people today are shown to behave much more pro-socially than the system urges them to. How much more pro-socially would be likely to behave in a system that emphasized the brighter, rather than the darker, side of human nature.

Pro-social behaviour
In his chapter on pro-social practices, Kohn gives us a number of examples from the literature on the subject. Some of them are findings from artificially contrived "research" situations of which experimental psychologists are unfortunately so fond. But other examples are from the author’s own experience or from studies of everyday life and are thus more credible:

  In my experience, cars do not spin their wheels on the ice for very long before someone stops to offer a push. We disrupt our schedules to visit sick friends, stop to give directions to lost travelers, ask crying people if there is anything we can do to help. According to polls, nearly 90 percent of Americans give money to charitable causes and nearly half take the time to do some sort of volunteer work. In one study, 83 percent of blood donors indicated a willingness to undergo anasthesia and stay overnight in a hospital in order to donate bone marrow to a complete stranger. And if we, like some researchers, choose to expand the idea of pro-social behaviour to include cooperative activities—working with others for mutual benefit, such as in structured collaboration at work—we would find even more evidence of prosocial inclinations. All of this, it should be stressed, is particularly remarkable in the light of the fact that we are socialized in an ethic of competitive individualism.

Kohn spends 15 pages tackling the question of whether aggressive behaviour is part of human nature. He concludes that it isn't. Here are some extracts:

  The frequency with which nations draft their citizens into combat (and invoke stiff penalties for those who resist it) qualifies as powerful evidence against the idea that wars reflect natural human aggressiveness. 

  There is absolutely no evidence from animal behavior or human psychology to suggest that individuals of any species fight because of spontaneous internal stimulation. 

  Like other beliefs about the intrinsic unsavoriness of our species . . . an assumption about aggression can also be explained . . .  in terms of images presented to us by the mass media, and in terms of the powerful interests who are benefited by just such an assumption. 

  The simple assumption that we cannot help being aggressive helps us to continue being aggressive. No circle is more vicious than the one set up by the fallacious assumption that we are unable to control an essentially violent nature.

A lengthy account is given of what a military historian of World War II discovered about the unwillingness of American soldiers to kill enemy troops. After interviews with hundreds of military companies in the central Pacific area and Europe, he found that on average not more than 15 percent of the men had actually fired at the enemy positions or personnel. This reluctance to kill was true not only of novices but also of those who had been through several battles. The historian concluded that the average and normally healthy individual has such resistance towards killing a fellow human that they will not take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.

Illustration by Peter Rigg.

One-sided individualism
Kohn devotes three chapters to altruism, after having introduced the subject earlier in the book. The famous study by Titmuss of blood donors gives perhaps the best example of altruism. When asked why they gave blood, most donors spoke about having either a duty or a desire to help others, or talked about wanting to express gratitude for being in good health or for having received someone else’s blood in the past. Less than two percent said they were hoping to receive some benefit from donating. A further example is given of altruistic behaviour among French civilians in World War II. Residents of a village agreed to hide Jews despite the enormous risks this involved. The helpers did not see themselves as heroic: they typically said that they simply did what had to be done, they answered a call, they made the obvious choice.

Kohn is highly critical of the doctrine of individualism, as expressed from Hobbes to Freud and from Ortega y Gasset (“human life as radical reality is only the life of each person”) to Margaret Thatcher (“there is no such thing as society"). Of psychology he writes “almost every branch, school, speciality, and theory within it is based on individualism”. The separate self as the fundamental level of analysis is one way of making sense of the world. But something is missing from the picture—and that is human relationship.

The belief that concern for self is more real than concern for others results from a very partial view of human behaviour. In the last century Toqueville remarked of the United States "the individual is free . . .  to expand as a standardized individual". Kohn updates this judgment: “Our miserable individuality is screwed to the back of our cars in the form of personalized license plates”.

Part of the “human nature” argument for preserving the status quo is that the worlds work will only get done if people are paid to do it. Of course, the system does get people to work, up to a point. But, as Kohn observes, “People do their best work when they find it fun. not when they are in it for the money”. Rewards actually erode intrinsic interest. Encouraging pro-social behaviour by the use of incentives or other appeals to self-interest doesn’t work very well or works only in the short run:

  When we are rewarded for pro-social behavior, we tend to assume the reward, and not altruism, accounts for our having acted as we did . . . encouragement to think of oneself as a generous person—an appeal not to self-interest but to genuine altruism—seems to be the most reliable way to promote helping and caring over the long haul and in different situations.

Economists and other egoists have long claimed that we make all our decisions on the basis of trying to maximize our individual gains. But people (in the US) regularly do things like contribute to public television and radio stations even though self-interest theory predicts everyone should wait for others to contribute and then watch or listen for free. Actually it is not too difficult to promote behaviour that is in everyone's best interests:

  People will usually cooperate with others in a group so long as they are given an opportunity to feel a sense of belongingness to that group. Allow someone to meet and talk with the others and he or she will subsequently tend to make decisions in the group’s interest rather than trying to take advantage of the others.

Kohn makes the important point that our thinking about what is natural is affected by our economic system (he actually says “may be affected" but that seems too weak). Also there is the power of the self-fulfilling prophecy:

  If we have been socialized to expect a tat for every tit, to keep score silently in relationships so that things are nearly symmetrical (and to feel uncomfortable when they are not), to construe the act of helping as doing a favor that ought to be repaid, then these expectations can create a reality as real as any determined by natural egoism.

However, social anthropologists tell us that in some cultures the emphasis is on gifts rather than exchanged commodities, gifts made with no assurance of anything in return. That is no doubt how it will be in socialist society. After all, even in today's mercenary society we sometimes give help to strangers just because they need helping, not because we expect to get something out of it.

Humanity
In his last chapter “Beyond Altruism" the author has a tantalizing section Where Humanity Begins. He suggests that we need a morality of thought and of feeling, of principle and of care. Throughout the book he emphasizes questions of morality and philosophy, although he is obviously aware of the economic—and to a lesser extent the political—implications of what he writes. Earlier he refers to the need to detoxify "the poisonous We/They structure of nationalism”. But his main message is summed up in one sentence: “Altruism—one self helping another without consideration of personal gain—is both realistic and commendable”.

The last paragraph of a book is often important because it contains the thoughts the author wants to leave us with:

  No imported solution will dissolve our problems of dehumanization and egocentricity, coldness and cruelty. No magical redemption from outside outside of human life will let us break through. The work that has to be done is our work, but we are better equipped for it than we have been led to believe. To move ourselves beyond selfishness, we already have what is required. We already are what is required. We are human and we have each other.

Election Fund: £3847 (1993)

Party News from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

That is the amount standing in our Election Fund at the time of writing, including £2428 raised in the last few months from these appeals.

This is enough to pay the deposit to stand in 3 constituencies as we have in mind. Having achieved this we now need at least the same amount again to pay for publishing hundreds of thousands of election addresses for free distribution by the Post Office.

Contributions (made payable to the “Socialist Party of Great Britain”) should be sent to: Election Fund, The Socialist Party, 52 Clapham High St, London SW4 7UN.

Biology and Behaviour (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is clear that the biological characteristics of human beings have a great effect on the things we can and cannot do. For instance, the fact that we walk upright, can focus on the same object with both eyes, and have an opposable thumb determines various aspects of the way we interact with the world. If we had wings to fly or could breathe in water or survive by eating sand, we would behave and live very differently from the way we actually do. But how much of human behaviour is determined by our biological make-up? Are we the prisoners of our genes and of our animal forebears, or can we learn from experience, adapt to our surroundings and act in a manner that is not purely ordained by our biological inheritance?

Different
A few moments’ reflection probably suggests that human beings are very different from other animals, that we can learn and invent and discover and develop in ways that no non-human can. Language gives the ability to pass on knowledge to the next generation, so that they can build on the expertise of those who have gone before, and do not need to start all over again at solving the problems they encounter. Some other animals have rudimentary languages, or make some elementary use of tools in obtaining food, but none of these is any way as sophisticated as humanity. While human beings are related to other members of the animal kingdom via the workings of evolution, we seem on the face of it to be animals with so many extra powers and abilities that we are quite unlike even our nearest non-human relatives.

Nevertheless, in spite of what common sense appears to tell us, it has often been argued that many aspects of human social behaviour are directly due to our animal inheritance. This implies that such behaviour is innate and unchangeable, and is as much part of being a human as upright gait and binocular vision. If it is claimed that aggression and genocide are an unalterable part of human nature, a challenge is thrown out to the socialist view that a society of harmony and co-operation is not just possible but is the sole answer to working-class problems.

For instance, back in the 1960s, writers such as Robert Ardrey and Konrad Lorenz wrote best-selling books in which they argued that our instincts made us violent, just as the instincts of many animals make them. Human beings have access to far more powerful weapons, thus rendering our ingrained capacity to violence all the more lethal. Ardrey even argued that it was hunting which made proper humans out of our closest ape ancestors; hunting and killing, then, is not just part of being human, it is what made us human in the first place. Socialists pointed out that these accounts were sheer fantasy, not supported by any evidence and totally ignored the fact that so much human behaviour is learned behaviour. Moreover, these views have a clear political role:

  The lie of innate depravity is a weapon in the hands of the capitalist class: it prevents criticism of capitalism, since there is supposed to be no possible alternative. (Socialist Standard, June 1969).

The Ardrey-Lorenz view tends not to be heard in quite such a blatant form today.

However, comparable ideas can be encountered in a more sophisticated form, even among those who take pains to criticize Ardrey’s distortions. A recent example of this is the book The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond (Vintage £6.99). The author presents a synthesis of a great deal of research in anthropology, biology and archaeology, aiming to show how human beings changed from being just another large mammal into a species that has an unprecedented geographical spread and impact on the world, and yet by its pollution and violence may well be responsible for its own destruction. The title refers to the fact that the closest relative to humanity is the chimpanzee, and that we share over 98 percent of our genes with chimps. We are thus the third chimpanzee species (alongside the common chimp and pygmy chimp).

Are We Chimps?
Diamond’s essential technique in explaining human development is a materialist one, in that he argues the need to survive and reproduce drives our various responses to our surroundings. Unfortunately, he has not managed to rid himself of all the influence of biological determinism. While he acknowledges that our uniqueness as a species lies in the cultural traits (language, technology, etc) that rest on our genetic foundations he can still appeal to our genetic inheritance to explain certain aspects of human behaviour. Specifically, he provides an appalling catalogue of historical instances of genocide, and concludes:

  of all our human hallmarks . . . the one that has been derived most straightforwardly from animal precursors is genocide. . . . Chimpanzee behaviour suggests that a major reason for our human hallmark of group living was defence against other human groups, especially once we acquired weapons and a large enough brain to plan ambushes. If this reasoning is correct, then anthropologists’ traditional emphasis’ on “man the hunter” as a driving force of human evolution might be valid after all – with the difference that we ourselves, not mammoths, were our own prey and the predator that forced us into group living.

Let us look at the evidence behind this. It used to be argued that our nearest animal relations were essentially peaceful, and that there was therefore no reason in terms of evolution to consider humanity as innately aggressive. This exact argument can no longer be maintained, though: evidence cited by Diamond, and mentioned by a correspondent in the January Socialist Standard, shows that chimpanzees certainly can act aggressively, and ambush and kill each other. But what follows from this? Very little, since there is no evidence that chimp aggression is built-in to them. Furthermore, it is simply not possible to draw conclusions about human behaviour or human nature from observations about non-humans. One could pick and choose almost any aspect of animal behaviour, and point to it as a precursor of some similar human trait, but clearly this would prove nothing.

Peter Rigg cartoon from the May 1993 Standard.

Adaptable
In any event, the case for innateness of genocidal instincts is non-existent. Only a tiny percentage of human beings have committed acts of genocide, and, as Diamond shows, they need to convince themselves that their victims are “sub-human”, or at least different from themselves, before they can bring themselves to undertake these acts. Moreover, they do so in certain specific conditions, usually when they are under the orders of rulers or leaders who think they see some political or economic gain. If genocide was a part of being human, it would surely be far more prevalent and far easier to people to commit. The whole point, which the biological determinists ignore, is the fact that humans can learn and change our behaviour drastically. Diamond himself points out that New Guineans whose parents lived virtually in the Stone Age now drive cars and fly planes; plainly they have learned to do this, not undergone some sudden genetic modification. No matter how genetically close we are to chimps, our unique ability to modify our behaviour makes all the difference in the world.

In conclusion, it can be said that the combination of our genetic and cultural characteristics makes humanity a superbly adaptable being, well-equipped to deal with the problems that the natural and social worlds throw at us. Not even human ingenuity, however, can make capitalism an acceptable social system. In a socialist society, all our abilities will be exploited (in the good sense) to the full, and claims that humans are born to fight rather than co-operate will be seen as truly laughable.

Paul Bennett

Hunger amidst plenty (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

To say that millions of human beings suffer from hunger because there are too many people is to subscribe to a myth. It is an explanation of a situation which is not based on an examination of the facts. The continued existence of millions of lives endured under the scourge of hunger, malnutrition and starvation is not “natural” or “unavoidable” but is entirely artificial.

The so-called population problem is in reality a poverty problem—a problem of capitalism. Who is not moved at the sight of famine victims depicted on TV screens, newspapers and magazines? The desire to do something about such an appalling situation is natural and worthy. Socialists argue that the first step to be taken in solving the problem of hunger is to recognise that famines are artificial and that the miseries that they bring are unnecessary and avoidable.

There are three dangers to be avoided, however.

First is the danger of believing that charity is any sort of solution. The danger here is that giving money to organisations such as War on Want or Band Aid diverts attention from the real causes of hunger and does nothing to remove them. It also encourages the “it’s all right. I’ve done my bit” attitude which is the basis of political apathy.

The second is getting involved in political action to pressurise governments to give more aid. Charities themselves admit that the scale of world hunger is beyond their means and call on governments to put money into schemes meant to alleviate the suffering of poor people. Those who urge the adoption of this “solution” would do well to remember the words of Tom Clausen (President of the World Bank) who said in 1982 that it was

  not in the business of redistributing wealth from one set of countries to another. It is not the Robin Hood of the international financial set. (Quoted in Anne Buchanan Food, Poverty and Power. 1982. p. 68).

The third danger is that of blaming the victims, blaming the poor for their poverty. This attitude dehumanizes the poor so that they become “hordes”, “floods”, “a cancerous growth" or “a plague of people”. It also, by making the problem seem so enormous, saps the political will to do anything let alone take any meaningful action. In addition it patronises the Third World poor in particular as they are seen as being helpless victims unable to do anything for themselves. The attitude of the neo-Malthusians is to condemn the poorest of the poor to death because, as Paul Erlich has written, “the battle to feed humanity is already lost” (The Population Bomb, 1971, p. 15).

Enough food

World population is about 5,700 million. That figure is set to reach 6,000 million by the year 2000. Estimates of the number of hungry vary. According to the US President’s Science Advisory Council 450 to 500 million people are hungry. The World Bank's estimate (using different criteria) is 730 million without enough to eat to enable them to have an active working life: of these 730 million 340 million have diets insufficient to prevent serious risk to health and they suffer arrested mental development and have stunted growth.

The question then arises could the hungry' be fed?

Current world food production is in the region of 3,800 million metric tons. Half of that by weight is grain. Equitably distributed it would give each man, woman and child on the planet 5lbs of food per day. United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation statistics show that this food represents 2709 calorics per head per day and 71 grammes of protein per head per day (United Nations Statistical Yearbook, 37th edition, 1993. Table 24, p. 17). Nutritionists calculate that on average human beings need between 1800 and 2500 calories a day (for energy) and 45 to 50 grammes of protein (for body growth and repair).

The amount of food currently being produced would adequately feed the expected world population for the year 2100.

In the mid 1980s the US Department of Agriculture made some calculations based on actual nutritional needs and estimated that the 67 poorest countries (those with the lowest income per head of population) required 25.8 million metric tons of food to meet their needs. The FAO estimated needs to be 20 million metric tons. The 1984-5 global cereal carry-over was 294 million metric tons, not counting the butter, beef, milk powder, etc kept in storage because the market could not absorb the supplies. (It cost £1,570 million per year for the UK alone to keep it off the market).

These figures do not take into account the fertile land withdrawn from production in an attempt to keep up prices and maintain profit. The agricultural economist Colin Clark calculated in the early 1970s that world resources of agricultural land could feed 47,000 million people at maximum standards (Population and Land Use, 2nd edition, p. 153).

In the face of this overwhelming abundance why do millions of our fellow humans continue to starve? The situation is clearly intolerable.

Cartoon by Peter Rigg from the May 1993 Standard.

Not produced for need

What needs to be done first is to recognise something so obvious that it might be thought not worthy of restatement and that is this: food is not produced primarily to satisfy human need, but to be sold on the market so as to realise a profit. No profit, no production. Because the market only recognises effective demand (i.e. demand backed by the ability to pay) people starve within sight of food. The economist Keith Griffin (President of Magdalen College, Oxford) pul the problem this way:

  The fundamental cause of hunger is the poverty of specific groups of people, not a general shortage of food. In simple terms, what distinguishes the poor from others is that they do not have sufficient purchasing power or effective demand to enable them to acquire enough to cat. The problem is the relationship of particular group of people to food, not food itself. (World Hunger and the World Economy, 1987, p. 18).

That academic assessment is backed by the findings of aid charities in the field. War on Want’s Don Thomson has stated:

  Experienced disaster and officials now admit . . . that they know of hardly any famine in living memory where there has been an outright shortage of food locally. They found instead that the victims did not have the means to buy. (New Scientist, 7 November 1974).

In a world of buying and selling a bumper crop of food cannot be guaranteed to feed the hungry. Take for example the situation in Mozambique where up to 4 million people were facing starvation largely because the country's agricultural production had been wrecked by years of civil war. In 1987 neighbouring Zimbabwe had a 2.8 million ton “maize mountain”. A stack of white maize three storeys high stood alongside the railway linking Zimbabwe and Mozambique 55 miles away. The food would have met Mozambique’s needs for several years but as Pat Henderson. chief executive of the Zimbabwe Commercial Grain Producers Association said at the time:

  It's not only a human problem, it's a financial problem. We cannot give our maize away (Observer, 15 February 1987).

Henderson was right. It is commercial madness to give free access to food in a money economy. The human problem of hunger cannot be solved within the framework of production for profit.

The challenge that faces humanity is that of organising things on a different basis. Class ownership of the world’s resources must be replaced by common ownership. This will be done when the majority of the world's population—we who own no productive resources other than our ability to work—organise to take democratic political action to dispossess the profit-seekers who currently own those resources.

Gwynn Thomas

Between the Lines: Return to EastEnders (1993)

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

Return to EastEnders

The piece in this column in the March issue on the BBC’s EastEnders provoked a mixed response from readers. Michelle Howard, of London, protested:

  I wish to comment on Steve Coleman’s review of the TV series EastEnders in which he describes the characters as, amongst other things, “unlovable, mindless lowlives” and “working class trash”.
 Using the “self-fulfilling prophecy" theory, he argues that viewers “internalize these ‘negative’ images as portrayed in EastEnders" and actually become “detestable specimens of the worst in humanity".
  I meet many, many people who are similar in personality and character to some of the “EastEnders” and, far from being the scum of the earth, are warm likeable and intelligent human beings. They may not be University-educated but that does not make them stupid. The essence of EastEnders is surely about human relationships and the kind of problems that can arise in everyday living.
 Whilst I feel that the programme romanticizes working-class life in the sense that we see a community where isolation is impossible and mutual support in abundance, I feel that it has handled a number of topical issues in a very sensitive and educational way (Cathy’s rape, Mark's HIV).
  I have shown the review to four friends (all Marxists) and they also find it patronizing. Can we have an explanation?

Joe Kenyon of Barnsley, on the other hand, asked if he can reproduce it in the newsletter he prepares for the Claimants and Unemployed Workers Union:

  The Between the Lines article by Steve Coleman was very, very apt and most interesting. It echoed my constant criticism of the East Enders. Indeed in our house we often refer to the EastEnders as "What a Rotten Lot". We sing it along with the signature tune. I was wondering if Steve Coleman would let me use it, with a few more expletives added, in a future newsletter which I am preparing (Of course you can use it—anyone can— but don't forget to say where it came from—Editors).

Please send in more letters like these: the TV column seeks to arouse heated debate. Needless to say. whether or not you are a socialist is not determined by your view of EastEnders: being a socialist means an active commitment to the establishment of a global society where resources are owned in common, controlled democratically and there is production solely for use. Whether you think that the Mitchell Brothers or Pat Butcher are “warm, likeable and intelligent human beings” is secondary.

It is secondary, but not irrelevant to how you see the world. Most novels published in the last century either ignored reference to the working class, lest the presence of the majority disturb the prettified imagery of the free and wealthy “characters” or it depicted workers as being somewhat slow-witted, untrustworthy and mob-like. In many respects the soap opera is the much more popular contemporary successor to the novel. We know that soaps have a huge influence upon viewers by offering a picture of reality to serve as an image of what living in this society is really like.

Some American soaps repeated the old novelists’ pattern of completely ignoring the working class. For example, Dallas relegated the wage slaves to voiceless Mexican servants, while the "real characters” (mainly oil millionaires, billionnaires and their lovers) dominated the action. In Britain there has been more of a tendency to try to depict the workers in soap operas. Now, there is no doubt much about workers in EastEnders which you would find amongst any group of workers in any area.

If Michelle Howard really knows people like that and really likes them, good for her. The present writer would rather sit in a cold bath with copy of the telephone directory than have to spend a social evening with a bunch of any three of the detestable characters of Albert Square.

The assumption of the people who produce EastEnders is that the working class are, as Joe Kenyon amusingly suggests, a pretty rotten lot. In the idealised world of Albert Square there is a mean mindedness to life; nobody ever does anyone much of a favour unless there's something in it for them: every expression of affection can usually be expected to conceal dishonesty and corruption; in discussions, the politics of the fascistic gut feeling is rarely far beneath the surface.

That is a very patronising image of the working class. It is one which leaves this viewer feeling that there is no coincidence in the fact that workers who read, workers who play musical instruments for pleasure, workers who attend serious political meetings and workers who care and share with one another are so conspicuously missing from EastEnders. It is as if the programme producers are of the view that mere prolies would never do those sort of things.

So. the argument with EastEnders is about what reality is actually like—and what was argued in this column two months ago was (a) that workers are not as one-dimensionally brutish as EastEnders shows them to be, and (b) the depiction of our class in this way on their media is no coincidence, but a political choice, even if an unintended one.

Any more views?

Steve Coleman

Sting in the Tail: A dog’s life (1993)

The Sting in the Tail column from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

A dog’s life

Points of View (BBC1, 26 March) dealt with a TV story about an unemployed man and his family in Barrow who were struggling to survive on state benefits. After paying the bills they were left with about £20 to feed themselves.

The man had said that they couldn't afford to feed their pet dog so it might have to be put down. The viewer reaction to this was amazing. The BBC was inundated with letters from people who offered to send food for the mutt or even provide an allowance to feed it!

“Tragically”, said Anne Robinson the presenter, no one offered the man a job. Of course the real tragedy is that people are prepared to accept a society which, even though it can provide an abundance of food, still condemns other people to feed themselves on the princely sum of £20 a week.

It’s official

After the fiasco of last October's Black Wednesday, chancellor Norman Lamont appointed seven of Britain's most notable economists, ranging from monetarist diehard to Keynesian blowhard, to give the government the benefit of their collective wisdom on the economy.

The press quickly dubbed them “the seven wise men" and they had their first get-together in February. Now one of them, Professor Tim Congdon, has given his verdict on the other six:

  It turned out that none of the other members of the panel had any clear notion of how the quantity of money affects economic activity and the price level (Guardian, 9 March).

The Prof waded into his fellow panellists and, according to the Guardian, concluded that “they did not have a clue about how the economy really worked".

Socialists are forever pointing out how little the bourgeois economists know about the capitalist system they so admire, but could we have put it more brutally than has one of their own number?

The money go-round

The budget's reduction of tax credit on company dividends could mean that 70 percent of shareholders can look forward to smaller dividends. This immediately caused share prices to fall by £5 billion while government fixed-interest bonds suddenly became more popular with investors.

Switching funds around to get that little bit extra is something investors, especially the big institutions such as pension funds, must constantly do. During the Gulf War vast numbers of shares were sold to buy gold, the old stand-by in troubled times, but when the war ended investors “sold huge quantities of gold yesterday to raise the cash needed to buy into the booming stock market" (Guardian, 18 January 1992).

When interest rates were sky-high in the early 1990s investors moved funds into bank deposits which were bringing them 15 percent, but once rates fell then those deposits were switched back into shares and this has helped raise share prices to record levels.

And so it goes on, with capital moving endlessly between shares, gold, banks, bonds, etc, and back again in the restless search for the highest possible return.

Happy Endings

Charles Dickens was forced by public opinion to change the ending of Great Expectations. Many years later Hollywood film makers learned the same lesson. Never mind the plot's progression, give 'em a happy ending. People like happy endings? How about this scenario then?

For almost 400 years the working class have been exploited. Our parents, grandparents, great grandparents and even worse our daughters and sons have lived in chains. Frightened and poor we have done as we were bid.

But change comes. The working class grows up. It learns of its great potential power. It organises and it abolishes the wages system. It brings about a new system of society based on common ownership.

Hey, Steven Spielberg, we'll give you the film rights for nothing!

Just in case

ICI has won the contract to re-cycle or destroy US Army surplus explosives held in one of the world's biggest munition dumps.

This is a real big deal. This INAAP—Indiana Army Ammunition Plant—is an 11,000 acre site containing 1,400 buildings. 1S5 miles of roads and 80 miles of railroad track.

It is always good to see the end of arms build-ups, but alas the story is not one of undiminished joy. According to the Independent on Sunday (21 March):

   The company gets to use a state-of-the-art. well maintained factory. In return, it will employ local people and keep the production lines warm—just in case the previous occupant needs to make a sudden return.

With memories of Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf, the US Army are merely putting INAAP in the back burner for future use.

Rejoice?

Mrs Thatcher's famous Downing Street remark at the end of the Falkland Islands conflict of “rejoice” seems even more inappropriate with the news that Scotland Yard are to investigate the claim that British soldiers shot Argentine prisoners.

Commenting on this, the Independent (27 March) reported:

  Investigations of war crimes perpetrated by the victors in a conflict are rare. “The victors can usually shut this kind of thing up", said a Ministry of Defence official. It was the publication in 1991 of Lance-Corporal Vincent Bromley's book, Excursion In Hell, with its account of the shooting of Argentine prisoners by British soldiers, that made these alleged crimes an exception.

Socialists are opposed to all capitalism's wars. To us they are all crimes. We will do our rejoicing when we get rid of capitalism.

Letter: "The money, price and profit system" (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors.

I notice that in all your literature. meetings and indoor lectures you loosely use the term "capitalism" as though people already know what capitalism is.

Most people today do not think of living under capitalism. They think of the system as a money, price, wage, salary and profit system—simply as they are engaged in things associated with buying and selling.

To most people I have met capitalism is just a word—it could be a name of a race horse. In the March issue of the Socialist Standard the frontispiece states “Crime—no solution within capitalism". This should read “Crime—no solution within the money, price and profit system (what is known as capitalism)".

When you phrase it like this you are telling people at the outset what capitalism is (i.e. a system of buying, selling, wages, etc) and classes.

D. Brooks 

London W9

Hope you liked "profit system" on the front page of the April issue—Editors.

Morality and hunger (1993)

Book Review from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

International Justice and the Third World. Ed. Robin Attfield and Barry Wilkins. Routledge. 1992.

This is a collection of essays by moral philosophers on the apparent dilemma raised by the plight of the Third World: have the people of the developed capitalist parts of the world a moral duty to cut back on their personal consumption in order to prevent starvation in the Third World? Does wealth have to be taken from Paul to feed Peter?

Archbishops and Greens answer “yes", but some of the contributors to this book show that the dilemma does not exist as the world could produce enough food for everybody. “For the foreseeable future", writes Kai Nielsen, “we have plenty of available fertile land and the agricultural potential adequately to feed a very much larger world population than we actually have. Less than half of the available fertile land of the world is being used for any type of food production". This means that starvation in the Third World could be eliminated without having to reduce the standard of living of workers in the First World.

This, however, requires a change of economic system, to one variously described by the best contributors as “an economic system whose underlying rationale was production to meet human needs and which was controlled democratically" (Kai Nielsen), which achieves “emancipation from the world market" through the "global common ownership" of “planetary resources” (Andrew Collier), a global “participatory-democratic control of production to serve collective human good" (Geoffrey Hunt).

The other contributors have less interesting things to say.

Adam Buick

50 Years Ago: Contemptible Communist Propaganda Methods (1993)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another illustration of Communist malice and irresponsibility is afforded by a letter received by our West Ham Branch from the West Ham Branch of the Communist Party. It arose out of a challenge to debate.

Here is the letter, a typical piece of Communist scurrility:—

The Communist Party has NO dealings with murderers, liars, renegades, or assassins.
  The S. P. G. B., which associates itself with followers of Trotsky, the friend of Hess, has always followed a policy which would mean disaster for the British working class. They have consistently poured vile slanders on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, told filthy lies about the Red Army, the Soviet people and its leaders, gloated over the assassination of Kirov and other Soviet leaders, applauded the wrecking activities of Trotskyist saboteurs in the Soviet Union. They have worked to split the British working class, and are in short agents of Fascism in Great Britain.
 The C. P. G. B. refuses with disgust to deal with such renegades. We treat them as vipers, to be destroyed.
C. P. G. B West Ham Branch, J Barker, Secretary.

Needless to say. none of the charges in the letter are true or have even a semblance of basis in fact.

From a statement by the Executive Committee, Socialist Standard, May 1943.

Here we go again? (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In the mid-1970s workers had to be put up with double digit price rises and falling real wages. Is this coming back?

Among those with the least understanding of the capitalist system are invariably those who are appointed to “manage” it. This looks like being amply demonstrated in the coming months as the present Conservative government resorts to the ill-conceived trick of capitalist politicians of currency inflation. True, inflation of the currency in Britain has been accruing since the onset of the Second World War or thereabouts. but it looks likely to be given an added impetus.

With a Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PBSR) projected to run to around £50 billion, or over 3 percent of GNP (Sunday Times, 21 March), the government is looking for ways of financing its massive debt. The normal way to do this is for the government to sell gilts and bonds to private investors and institutions like pension funds. However, with such a huge government debt, which is currently consuming £17.5 billion in net interest payments, the government is wary of crowding out investment from the slump-ravaged private sector of industry. In the March budget Chancellor Lamont nodded in the direction of the obvious option of tax increases to wipe out some of the debt, but has made provision to finance it in another way—by printing money to pay for some of it.

Massive government debt

In the budget Lamont announced that the Treasury had dropped its “full funding" rule whereby all government debt in a financial year had to be fully funded by sales of bonds and gilts to investors. Now the government can resort to the practice of financing part of the PSBR through sales of 90-day Treasury Bills to the banks.

In this situation what is likely to happen is that a point will arise when the government is selling Treasury Bills to the banks at a time when the cash reserves of the banks are depleted and they don't have the liquid assets available to buy all the Bills the government wants to sell to finance its deficit. The Bank of England, as the bankers’ bank and the lender of the last resort, will in these circumstances passively make more currency available to them. They are then effectively in a position to buy the Treasury Bills offered for sale, and can thereby lend to the government. It is in this way that the Bank of England tends to make available enough cash for the banking system to be always able to lend the government the amount it requires. Through this rather roundabout manner an excess issue of notes helps to finance part of government borrowing and, ultimately, government expenditure.

Governments have previously gone in for this tactic and there is every indication that the Tories may do the same again. In the mid-70s in an earlier slump the Labour government under Wilson and Healey financed part of its budget deficit and helped to increase its expenditure in this way. During the financial year 1974-5 it inflated the currency by a post-war record of 17 percent, amounting to about £700 million worth. This additional £700m financed almost half its additional real expenditure for the year.

Rising prices

The temptation for the present Conservative administration is just as great. Re-elected with the mission of reducing the amount of tax taken out of capitalist profit, and with limits to the extent of genuine government borrowing, the printing presses may yet seem like an attractive option. There is an important additional reason for this in that the present government—like all the other post-war governments before them—do not realise that expanding the note issue beyond that amount warranted by increases in production and trade will cause price rises. The fact is that prices have risen wherever and whenever currency has been issued in excess; the note issue has risen from £450 million before the war to about £16,000 million now while the price level has increased almost thirty- fold.

Instead the government has continued to blame price rises on a multitude of erroneous factors including wage rises (when wages are themselves prices) and low interest rates (when interest rales are prices too). The government has also recently reverted to its previous idea that inflation is caused by increases in the level of bank deposits in the economy. In this theory bank deposits are viewed as money, and when deposits increase this is seen as having the same effect as an excess note issue.

However, this theory ignores several important factors, principally that when there is an excess note issue this causes an artificial bloating of monetary demand in the economy as a whole. Prices then rise in response to buyers offering larger amounts of money in the same way that, say, prices of accommodation and other things rise in holiday resorts during the summer season when holidaymakers arrive in large numbers. With an increase in bank deposits nothing of the sort happens. There is no artificial bloating of demand since bank deposits add nothing additional to it, being monetary transfers of demand rather than a spurious injection of it as with excess currency. So when the government resorts to blaming price rises on increasing bank deposits. as it surely will if prices take off once more, it will be again demonstrating its own ignorance of the subject.

None of this gives justification to the view of Chancellor Lamont that the government has defeated inflation. Since governments don't understand the causes of inflation and are periodically influenced by factors which make large-scale inflation look attractive, price rises are again likely to become centre-stage politically in the coming months.

Dave Perrin

Gunmen, get lost! (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was the Saturday after St Patrick’s Day and roars went up in homes and pubs as Ireland thrashed England at rugby: the joyful, harmless chorus of the underdog. On that same afternoon there was another roar: the now familiar cry of anguish and confusion as workers doing their weekend shopping—this time in Warrington—became the victims of a carefully planted bomb. One of those shoppers, out with his father to buy a present for Mothers Day, was a little boy of less than four years of age. He was murdered—another "war victory” for the IRA. Another boy, aged twelve, out shopping for Everton football shorts, was so facially disfigured by the blast that his parents had to identify him by his watch. He died days later.

We live in a society that makes quite a habit of murdering children. Over two hundred have been killed as victims of the warfare in Ireland over the last quarter of a century. The youngest was six months old. The unspeakable thuggery of the paramilitaries—of both sides, regardless of religious or ideological labels: all of their gods are wanted for murder—is a shadow of the legally sanctioned bombings of children. in Vietnam, in Libya, in Iraq, in Afghanistan.

Those who bring violence on to our streets in the name of liberating us— liberating anybody—are our most profound enemies. Only the most dogmatically programmed Leninist, still clinging to the belief that those who blow up defenceless children arc heroic fighters for colonial liberation, and the most detached and ignorant Irish American Catholics, with their rosary in one hand and their contributory cheque to the NORAID murder machine in the other, can condone, defend or apologise for what has been done. And then, with the imaginative intelligence of lemmings, competing with their IRA rivals to commit ethical suicide, the UFF joined in within a week of the Warrington atrocity to murder five new victims, one of them a young man of only seventeen.

“Enough is too much”

Sitting in a Dublin cinema on a rainy afternoon watching the Oscar-winning film The Crying Game was an electrifying experience. The film itself (which must have one of the least predictable twists of any film ever; one which probably detracts from the poignancy of the unambiguous attack on terrorist violence) shows vividly the cold and callous and futile world of IRA violence. (In this it contrasts well with the pathetically idealised Sinn Fein innocence depicted in the American film Patriot Games.) But that afternoon the film was not the main event.

I had just come from a meeting at Trinity College Dublin (there were several of them in the week after Warrington) where person after person, representing many organisations and none, had voiced their contempt for the perpetrators—all of them—of the kind of hate-filled murder campaigns which small, undemocratic gangs have dared to initiate in their names. The overwhelming sentiment in Dublin during the days following Warrington was that violent action was pointless and reprehensible. On one page of one day’s edition of the Irish Times (26 March) the letters and editorial blasted responses to the bombs, which were significant not for their uniqueness but for the extent to which they were reflected by everyone I spoke to in Dublin. Wrote John Sullivan:

Last Saturday, while Ireland cheered on 15 heroes in green, a four-year old child was blown apart in the name of Irish freedom. No excuse, no "accident of war", no apportionment of blame for alleged unheeded warnings can hide the IRA’s murderous intent. It is incumbent upon ordinary Irish people everywhere, who reject the realisation of national aspirations through violence, to protest . . . against those in our community who offer even the most tacit support to any terrorist organisation.

"As a mother of a small boy I am writing to express my disgust and contempt at the murder in Warrington of a three-year old boy by the IRA” began the letter from Allison Collier. "Both killing sides are interchangeable—most of all in their politics of devastation and fear", declared the editorial. In every bar there was spontaneous rage. (It says much for a culture that the killing of children incites such feeling). Over 30,000 people signed a peace petition at Trinity College. When Susan McHugh, a Dublin housewife, called in to a TV phone-in programme to say that "enough is enough" and "ordinary people" must stand up and be counted against the violence she was surely voicing the view of the majority.

The four days which intervened between McHugh’s call and Sunday afternoon were filled with an energy it was impossible to miss. A demonstration was called to be held at 3pm in O’Connell Street (the widest central street in any European capital city). Political leaders were banned from taking the platform; they had done nothing to end the killings so far and their speeches would not be welcome at an event which belonged to the people. At one meeting I expressed the view that no nation and no government was worthy of the support of the wealth-producing majority; we had no countries to die for, only a world to live once it is our own. Several people cheered—it was a cheering atmosphere— but it was obvious that more than favoured sentiments would need to enter the minds of the millions before the death of nation and statehood could become a reality.

Peace rally

The O’Connell demonstration, held with noted irony outside the GPO which was the scene of the Easter Rising of 1916, was one of the most moving events that this writer can recall. Tears flowed openly and with no shame. The presence of thousands of people straining to unleash pent-up passions for human brother- and sister-hood might be dismissed by the cynics as empty moral gesturing, but to this socialist it was comforting proof that humans are happier striving for peace than conspiring for violence.

One recalls the ghastly and tasteless Falklands victory parade through London: certainly there was feeling there, but it was the contrived, regimented unmelodious patriotic phoney-feeling which is as fragile as the wooden sticks on which schoolboys were told to wave Union Jack idiot-symbols. The Dublin Peace Rally was workers showing that guns are not part of our nature.

Of course, little really changed. Still the paramilitary chiefs pursue the total-blindness policy of an eye for an eye; still those leaders are now mainly racketeers, living in personal luxury thanks to protection rackets and robberies carried out for the pointless “cause” by impoverished ghetto- dwellers; still there will be those who will try to argue tortuously that the murder of someone on "the other side” is somehow less of an atrocity than violence against their own. It is easy for those with good memories to think back to the Peace People in the 1970s who, after a short-lived peaceful campaign against sectarianism, withdrew into obscurity for reasons that are still a matter for historical interpretation. It is at least possible that this time the momentum will be kept up—the widespread desire for peacefulness and hatred of the murdering few might just be uncrushable.

Speakers from various religious denominations addressed the rally. For a socialist this was hard to take—the only consolation being that it is better to hear them imploring listeners to love their neighbours as themselves than their more typical business of blessing bombs which have state approval. It was good to see The Dubliners, whose repertoire of occasionally nationalist songs has left a sour taste in the mouth of many a socialist music-lover, stand up and denounce the murderers. It was pleasing to see that Sinead O'Connor made it to the rally and preceded her song by saying, in marked contrast to the God Squad, that we should not wait until we die to reach "The Kingdom of Heaven”, for it was within all of us to bring it about down here on Earth now. From someone who had advocated the abolition of the money system the meaning, if not the words, made much sense.

I was not the only one who left the mass rally after three hours of almost non-stop heavy rain with a sense of elation. That afternoon several thousands of us had played the crying game and realised that we could do more than weep; we could make peace our practical objective. But there will be no peace while the economic and political motives for killing are implanted within the very social order which dominates our lives. Peaceful capitalism is like non-combative mugging. Capitalism or peace—it must be one or the other.

Steve Coleman

Towards three million again (1993)

Editorial from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

May Day 1993 and what is the main problem facing the organised Trade Union movement? Unemployment, job insecurity and their effect on wage levels. Just as it always has been on a regularly recurring basis.

Unemployment is now heading for 3 million again, as it did ten years ago. But this time we are not seeing marches and demonstrations demanding “the right to work”. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.

Most people know quite well that there is no such thing as a “right to work”, and so not much point in demanding it. If an employer can make a profit out of employing us (or thinks he can) then we can get a job. But if companies start making losses, they put us on short time or make us redundant, or even close down altogether. “Rights” don’t come into it for workers. The employers own the factory or the shop or the office. If they decide to close down, that is their right—the right of ownership.

Because we have no control over the work we do, most jobs are pretty unsatisfying, or even dirty or dangerous. It is not the work we want—it’s the money, the price our employers pay to hire us. Without money we can’t live. We can’t buy the things we need to keep ourselves and our families. Most people have to go to work to get money, whether they are shopfloor workers, office workers, teachers or managers. Some don’t have to—those who own the workplace. They live off the profits—unearned income.

The present economic system is based on capital being accumulated and invested for the purpose of making profits. Unemployment never falls to zero, but periodically it rises alarmingly. Slumps are inevitable and necessary every so often. Business booms until too much capital is chasing limited profit, and then collapses. Large firms make losses. Small firms go bankrupt. Governments are powerless to prevent it. Economists fail to explain it.

Economists are paid by governments to find cures for slumps—but they always fail. Just as governments always fail when they promise to cure poverty, bad housing, crime and unemployment. All these things are part of the essential nature of capitalism. They are a direct consequence of a small section of the population owning, or controlling through the state, all the land, mines, transport, factories, offices and other places of work, and employing the great majority of us only when there is profit to be made.

Capitalism has played its part in developing technology (at great cost in human life and misery). But it is now a barrier to progress and full production to meet needs. In fact it distorts technology, as in nuclear weapons—a threat that is still spreading as more and more states (the latest being North Korea and South Africa) join the nuclear club.

Unemployment occurs because the system of employment exists. Millions of us are tied up in it. We may feel powerless, but we are not. We do all the work in society, throughout the world. We run it from top to bottom—for the employers. When they say production must stop, it stops.

What we must do is take over and run industry for people, not profit—for welfare, not warfare. We must organise together to take democratic political action to dispossess the employers. Then booms and slumps will stop. Then their nation-states and frontiers and wars will fall into disuse. We shall run industry and agriculture and transport for everyone, democratically. This is socialism. It is the only future worth working for.

Harry was a Bolshie (1993)

Book Review from the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Keeping My Head. By Harry Wicks. Socialist Platform £5.95

Subtitled "The Memoirs of a British Bolshevik" this is a posthumous autobiography, based on tape recordings, of a pioneer British Trotskyist who died in 1989 covering the period 1920-46. At first sight not a title likely to appeal to Socialists like ourselves who fought the influence of Bolshevism on British workers since day one, but no one can write an account of working-class politics in this period without mentioning the Socialist Party.

Wicks grew up in the Battersea area of London which was in a sense the birthplace of the Socialist Party, as he himself explains:

Another pre-1914 organisation with influence on Socialist thought in Battersea, particularly in the building trade unions, was the Socialist Party of Great Britain. It was the Battersea branch of the SDF which had become the springboard for the attack on the Hyndman leadership that resulted in the SPGB being formed. From 1904-05 Sydney Hall in York Road became the centre of their activity and propaganda. It was from amongst the bricklayers that several powerful and erudite speakers and bricklayers came to the fore. The Irish bricklayer, Jack Fitzgerald, was one outstanding example . . . but there were others too, bricklayers and impressive SPGBers (Sloan, Cadman, Fenn and others). I believe each of them, in their day, taught their craft at the Ferndale School of Building, then sited in Brixton. Here. they pioneered or upheld extremely high standards of craftsmanship.

Wicks recalls attending an SPGB class on Marx's Capital in 1922, but was never attracted to join. He recounts how he was shocked at being told by an SPGBer at the time of the 1922 General Election that he would be writing "socialism" across his ballot paper and not voting for the Communist Party member Saklatvala who was standing as the official Labour candidate. Wicks had been canvassing for Saklatvala (who was elected), but was told "you are wasting your time and energy, young man, Socialism, not reforms, is what is necessary".

Technically Wicks was a founding member of the Communist Party, at the age of 15, through being a member of the Battersea Herald League which was represented at the founding conference of that party in 1920. In 1927 he was sent for three year's training at the Lenin International School in Moscow. In his account of this period he remarks on the corruption of many of the officials from aboard of the Communist International who lived in the Lux Hotel and enjoyed a life of luxury compared with the lot of the Russian workers.

On his return from Russia he became more and more dissatisfied with the line of the British CP and was eventually expelled with a group of others in 1932 for trotskyism. Naturally, Wicks came across the SPGB in his existence as a trotskyist too. He has recounted how, at a meeting organised by the Communist Party in Conway Hall to justify the trial and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1936, he was able to answer from the platform thanks to protests from the floor including from SPGBers.

The Socialist Party debated with some of the trotskyist groups Wicks mentions (even then they were divided into at least four competing sects): against Raj Hansa for the "Bolshevik-Leninists" in December 1936 and against CLR James, of the "Marxist Group" in January 1938 (James was later to be one of the first Trotskyists to realise that Russia was state-capitalist and maybe this debate helped sow doubts in his mind about the official Trotskyist position that Russia was still some sort of "workers state" however degenerate).

Unfortunately what was said at these debates was not recorded in the Socialist Standard but we can be sure that the Socialist Party speakers denounced the idea of the workers needing to be led by some elite vanguard to get socialism and saw the way to socialism as being through a majority of socialist-minded workers organising democratically and politically without leaders.

Adam Buick

Roots of gay oppression (1993)

From the May 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Homosexuality—sexual relations between, or attraction to, members of the same sex—has existed from the beginning of human history. In Ancient Greece the love of men was "integral both to the concept and the practice of Greek maleness" according to Rosalind Miles in her recent book The Rites of Man. Already in 1917 in his The Origin and Development of the Moral Idea Westermarck had stated that homosexuality probably occurred among every race of mankind.

Although homosexual love was considered commonplace, natural and pleasurable in the ancient world, homosexuals became increasingly ostracised, ridiculed and persecuted in the modern world. The development of Christianity, Judaism and Islam as international powers, able to wield influence over a wide range of human affairs led to homosexuality being outlawed.

An early condemnation of homosexuality occurs in the Book of Leviticus in the Old Testament of the Bible. Homosexuals are condemned to death along with adulterers and those committing bestiality. But Christians have been notorious at changing the rules and deciding which parts of the Bible are to be slavishly followed and which parts are ignored. Usury is condemned in the Bible but, with the rise of capitalism, banking is now a respectable profession. Polygamy was accepted in biblical times but is now strictly illegal in many countries and punishable by imprisonment.

The term "bugger" derives from "bougre" used to describe the supporters of the Bogomil heresy in Bulgaria in the tenth century. The Albingensias in Southern France in 1208 were also known as "bourges" or "bougeron". It was in fact from about the twelfth century onwards that homosexuality came to be perceived as a vice and harsh punishments were meted out. The rich and powerful, however, escaped the prohibition that applied to other homosexuals. Richard I ("The Lionheart") had a passionate affair with King Phillip of France which was carried on quite openly.

In Britain an ecclesiastical law of 1290 ordered "sodomites" to be buried alive, but this sentence seems to have been never carried out. The few who were convicted by the Church courts were hanged by the secular authorities. King Henry VIII introduced hanging as the secular punishment for sodomy in 1533 to remove the power of the Catholic Church that he was in the process of breaking away from.  But this move was politically rather than morally motivated and there were few prosecutions for sodomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Sexual relations between men were considered a commonplace method of getting sexual pleasure. Local authorities were more concerned to prevent the birth of bastards who might well have to be supported by the parish and a blind eye was turned to homosexual behaviour despite its illegality.

Persecution

From about the 1700 attitudes to homosexuality hardened again. Homosexuals responded by setting up "molly houses", back rooms in private houses or taverns where heterosexual relationships were mimicked and mocked. According to R. Davenport Hines in his Sex, Death and Punishment, "mock marriages and pregnancy rituals were performed with mock lying-ins and the "pregnant" man being delivered of a doll or a Cheshire cheese.

Homosexuals were depicted as effeminate, partly in retaliation for the "molly house" rituals, partly because transvestites were thought to be homosexuals and partly as a result of social labelling and stereotyping.

As early as 1728 men solicited in London for the sole purpose of blackmailing those who responded to their advances. Police spies and agent provocateurs were used in England for the first time to trap homosexuals. Lord Jowitt claimed that at least 95 percent of blackmail cases which he knew about when Attorney General in 1929-32 involved fears of prosecution for homosexual behaviour.

Oscar Wilde is undoubtedly the best known homosexual to be prosecuted in the late Victorian era. He received two years hard labour in 1895. According to N. Greig in his introduction to Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings "it was the act of treason of taking working-class boys to upper-class clubs which sealed his fate".

In this century the persecution of homosexuals has continued. In 1942 at Abergavenny 18 men received gaol sentences of between 10 months and 12 years. Thirteen of the men received a total of 57 years imprisonment. In 1955, alone, 1065 men were imprisoned for homosexual offences. And in 1951 a campaign against homosexuals in government services started after the homosexual Guy Burgess and the bisexual Donald Maclean absconded to Russia after it was revealed that they had spied for the Russian government for years.

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards homosexuality was seen in some quarters as a medical condition and homosexuals were treated with drugs, hypnotism, psychotherapy and aversion therapy. However, the American Psychiatric Association has now voted to delete homosexuality from its official list of pathologies.

Most teenagers seem to be aware of their homosexuality between 12-14 years of age. Yet such is the social pressure to conform that 61 percent of lesbians and a quarter of male homosexuals had their first sexual experience with a member of the opposite sex (J. M. Stafford, Homosexuality and Education, 1988). The London Gay Teenage Group found, from a sample of over 400 homosexual teenagers, that over half had been verbally abused, a fifth had been beaten up, one in ten had been thrown out of home and many others sent to a doctor or psychiatrist. Suicide had been attempted by one-fifth of them because of intolerable social pressure.

Lesbians had been spared legal persecution but have been subjected to the same prejudices and discrimination as male homosexuals. At times lesbianism has been ignored as if it did not exist, or its existence denied. Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness was banned as obscene in 1928 although there is nothing lewd or erotic in the book. Its lesbian theme was considered sufficient reason for it to be outlawed.

In 1967 homosexual relations, between consenting males over 21 years, in private ceased to be a criminal offence in this country. But prejudice cannot be legislated out of existence and hard-won reforms can always be attacked or withdrawn. The 1988 Halsbury clause of the Local Government Act has made it illegal for local authorities to give financial or other assistance to homosexual groups.

Capitalism thrives on scapegoats because they absorb the blame for the poverty, stress and insecurity that the system cause and divert the pressure for change into other channels.

Socialists hold that sexual activity between consenting adults which gives please to the participants and does not harm anybody should be entirely their own affair. Discrimination is wrong and pressure groups are right to want to change it but we must tackle cause and not effects. Pressure groups fragment the strength of the working class which should be united to bring about the overthrow of the capitalist system. Partial reforms have allowed a resurgence of homophobia to be whipped up over AIDS. And economic stress will make minority groups vulnerable to attack in the future. The overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by socialism is the only way of preventing this from happening.

Carl Pinel