Sting in the Tail: Pious words, harsh reality (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Pious words, harsh reality

The National Poverty Hearing, organised by the ecumenical Church Action On Poverty, was attended by MP’s, business representatives, charities, voluntary organisations and church leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Basil Hume, Archbishop of Westminster.

They all agreed that "something must be done”. Of course, nothing will be done by such pious gatherings. The words of the Archbishop of Canterbury amply illustrates this:

  “I believe in the enterprise society and wealth creation. Without wealth creation you cannot create jobs and if you haven 't got jobs you've got poverty. I believe in a stakeholder society. We must all participate in it" (Herald, 20 March).

The “enterprise” and “stakeholder” society are just weasel words for the capitalist system of society. A system that condemns millions to live in poverty while the Archbishop lives in a palace and is driven to and from such gatherings in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce.

Is it any wonder that he “believes” in this system?

That American Dream fades

Pat Buchanan, defeated far-right runner in the race to be Republican candidate in the US presidential election, attracted support from angry American workers by attacking “big capitalism”.

He did this by pointing to such business giants as IBM, AT & T, Boeing, etc., who are drastically “downsizing” their workforces while awarding huge sums to executives for ruthlessly wielding the axe.

Of course, the sackings weren’t down to “corporate greed” as Buchanan made out. They are simply part of the cost cutting necessary' to increase profits in order to keep investors happy and finance the re-investment required to meet ever-increasing competition.

Most American workers have been brought up believing that capitalism would provide them with security and steadily rising incomes. Now, ever-growing numbers of them have seen their jobs vanish or their real incomes fall, and even harder times arc predicted.

The conditions for demagogues like Buchanan have never been more promising.

Engels and Gould

It has become popular in academic circles to dismiss the materialist view of history of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. It is refreshing therefore to read Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould.

In discussing Engels’s The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Gould praises Engels for “his trenchant political analysis of why Western Science was so hung up on the a priori assertion of cerebral primacy.”

Engels showed how the class divisions in society—firstly in Ancient Greece based on slavery and latterly capitalism based on wage slavery—put the primacy of human progress on the idea rather than the action. To the ruling class would go the praise, to the wealth producers the scorn.

Gould, Professor of Geology' and Zoology at Harvard University, concludes his essay with these words:

  "If we took Engels's message to heart and recognised our belief in the inherent superiority of pure research for what it is—namely social prejudice—then we might forge amongst scientists the union between theory and practice that a world teetering dangerously near the brink so desperately needs."

Good news for some

When the headlines proclaim that some company has sacked thousands of workers it appears that the news is received by universal gloom. Leader writers pontificate about “economic disaster”, opposition politicians claim “something must be done” and priests and ministers of all persuasions wring their hands in despair and preach about the “iniquities of an uncaring society”.

The news is not received in some circles in the same gloomy fashion. Some positively beam with pleasure at the prospect of more workers thrown on the scrap heap. For instance in the Business Section of the Observer (17 March) we read:

  "Downsizing has entered the corporate culture as well as the dictionary and a company’s financial virility is now measured by the Stock Market in terms of its most recent redundancy announcement.
    When Lloyd's Bank merged with TSB last October, analysts predicted up to 20,000 job losses. Its shares leapt almost 5 per cent. That reaction is typical. ”

Communist "liberators"

The buzz these days is that British capitalism must take as its model the dynamic, free-market Asian economies such as Hong Kong.

But how does all this dynamism affect the workers there? According to Lee Cheuk-yan, head of the colony’s Confederation of Trade Unionists:

"Hong Kong has become a prosperous country, but the benefits are not yet being shared with ordinary workers ” (Guardian, 8 March).

Workers have little or no protection against employers who can veto any government proposals which they think would lessen their stranglehold on the labour market.

Surely all this will change when “communist” China takes over in 1997? Lee Cheuk-yan’s view on this is very forthright:

   "Things will be much worse then. The Chinese Communist Party can't wait to get into bed with the big capitalists. "

The Scargill Labour Party (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Socialists have a certain amount of respect for Arthur Scargill's decision to leave the Labour Party because of its now openly and avowedly capitalist aims, but we can only wonder why he has started a new party, the aims of which amount to nothing more than futile attempts to reform capitalism into a system supposedly organised in the interests of the working class — particularly as Scargill himself is on record admitting that this can't be done.

This month sees the launch of a new political party, the Socialist Labour Party, the first leftwing breakaway from Labour at national level since the old ILP disaffiliated itself in 1932. Behind it is Arthur Scargill, President of the rump NUM and possibly the best known trade union leader in Britain today.

What finally led him to tear up his Labour Party membership card and launch a new party was Labour’s decision last year to amend its constitution by replacing Clause 4 with a new aim which committed it to support “the enterprise of the market”, “the rigour of competition” and “a thriving private sector”. We can well understand his repugnance at having to walk around with a card in his pocket with such views printed on it.

Although in a later statement of his reasons for quitting labour Scargill appeared to go further and accept the view put forward by people like ourselves that Labour never was socialist, it is clear that he thinks that Clause 4 did commit labour to socialism at least on paper.

Clause 4, however, was never a definition of socialism. What it was - and was meant to be by the labour leaders of the time who drew it up — was a commitment to nationalisation, or state capitalism, to be achieved “for the workers” by the actions of the Parliamentary labour Party. It was a rejection not of capitalism as such, but only of one institutional form of capitalism (private enterprise) in favour of another (state enterprise). Production was to continue to be for the market and workers were to continue to work for wages, only this was to take place under the direction of the state.

Common ownership is indeed the key defining feature of socialism but common ownership by all the people under their democratic control, with production not for the market but directly to satisfy people’s needs. State ownership is something quite different. The state does not represent the people. As an instrument of political control standing above the rest of society it represents the ruling class. Under capitalism it is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeois class” (Marx), “the ideal collective capitalist” (Engels).

When the state takes over an industry it does so, not on behalf of the people, but on behalf of the capitalist class as a class and runs it for their collective benefit. The whole history of the nationalised industries in Britain is confirmation of this (as Scargill should know from his experience of the former Coal Board). Nationalisation is neither socialism nor a step towards it. It is state capitalism.

Scargill and the SLP have not learned this lesson, but in readopting Clause 4 repeat the mistake of confusing state capitalism with socialism. In fact, the revised version which has been incorporated into the SLP’s constitution is more explicitly state-capitalist than the original version. That the wages system, which is the basis of capitalism, is not to be abolished is specifically spelt out this time, with references to “employment” and “employees”. Specifically spelt out too is the fact that financial institutions such as pension funds will continue to exist, so making it clear that a money economy and the market arc to continue too.

Chasing the impossible
The SLP is also committed to the discredited view which Labour once held that the effects of capitalism can be overcome by state intervention if sufficiently resolute and far-reaching. Hence Scargill’s claim that a “British government” could abolish unemployment “even within a capitalist society”. This is a fantastic statement from someone who has on occasions given evidence of some knowledge of Marxian economics (after all, it was Marx who showed how an “industrial reserve army of labour” made up of fluctuating numbers of unemployed workers was necessary, and so inevitable, under capitalism). It is, however, an accurate statement of what all those who campaign for “the right to work”, “full employment”, “a 4- day working week with no loss of pay” and the like implicitly believe, even if in the case of the SWP and other trotskyists they are not so honest as Scargill as to say so openly.

It’s all wishful thinking. Let’s suppose for a moment that a “British government” decreed a 4-day working week without loss of pay; in other words, that employers should pay people who now work five (or even six) days a week the same as for working four.

This would represent a massive increase in their labour costs. The money to pay for this would have to come out of their profits. No doubt some firms would be able to do this on a short-term basis, but many would not and would have to declare themselves bankrupt, so increasing the number of unemployed again. And in the longer term the massively reduced profits of those firms that did survive the immediate impact would undermine their competitiveness and so their survival too.

With the rate of profit so low capitalists wouldn’t invest in them. Nor would enough profits be made to invest in up-to-date machinery and productive methods, so that British-made goods would lose out both on export markets and in the home market. The result would sooner or later be—sooner rather than later, in fact—a massive economic slump. Scargill's recipe for reducing unemployment would have failed and have led to the opposite: a massive increase in unemployment.

Unemployment is not the only problem that Scargill and the SLP believe can be solved “even within a capitalist society”. Although the SLP was not officially launched till this month it put up a candidate in the by-election in February in the South Yorkshire constituency of Hemsworth. In getting 5.4 percent of the vote, saving its deposit and finishing ahead of the Green Party they didn’t do too badly for a new party. However, the programme on which they contested the election was pathetic, consisting of a list of attractive but quite unrealistic demands to be implemented under capitalism.

Higher pensions, a free health service, a massive house-building programme, more spending on education and social services, these would be very costly. Although unlike a 4-day week without loss of pay this burden would not fall so obviously and so directly on profits, it would do so indirectly via taxes. To pay for them Scargill's “British government” would have to raise taxes, which would ultimately fall on property and profits. So the result would be the same as with his recipe for abolishing unemployment: a fall in profits retained by businesses resulting in bankruptcies for some and a wounding loss of competitiveness for others—and ending in a slump.

The fact is that you can’t buck the capitalist system. If you choose to work within it—as the Labour Party has always done and as Scargill has the honesty to say his new SLP will be doing—then you have to accept that profits have to be made and that profit-making has to be given priority over meeting people’s needs. Unemployment, poverty in old age, bad housing, inadequate health care, etc, etc, etc cannot be solved within the capitalist system, not even by the most ruthless of left wing governments. Only the establishment of a socialist society of common ownership and democratic control with production solely for use can provide the framework for solving these problems.

No alternative under capitalism

At the moment capitalism cannot even sustain the reforms it was able to afford at an earlier period. Since the postwar boom came to and end in the first half of the 1970s, there have been no beneficial reforms—no improvements in housing, pensions, health care, social services or state benefits. Quite the reverse. Pre-existing reforms have been whittled away and firings have got worse in all these fields. Nor is there any prospect of them getting any better; all the signs are that they will continue to get worse.

The reason for this is the world economic crisis that capitalism entered into after the long post-war boom came to an end and which it has still not escaped from. This has meant increased competition on world markets, which has forced all governments whatever their political complexion—the Labour governments in Australia and New Zealand were just as “Thatcherite” as the mad woman herself in Britain—to give priority to trying to ensure the competitiveness of businesses operating from within their frontiers. To do this they have had to reduce the amount of money they tax away from profits to finance their spending including on reforms.

When Thatcher kept shouting “TINA”—’There Is No Alternative”—to cutting back on spending on reforms, she was right (though to be accurate she should have said “TINAUC”—’There Is No Alternative Under Capitalism”). There was, and there still is, no alternative to doing this within the present context of capitalism.

The Labour Party, under Blair and Smith before him, now' fully accepts this and has reshaped its policies accordingly. Leftwing labourites refuse to face this reality but still imagine that capitalism today can offer social reforms. The only difference between them and Scargill is that they believe in staying in the Labour Party as an irrelevant minority while he believes in setting up a new party to campaign for the sort of reforms the Labour Party used to specialise in.

We in the Socialist Party draw a different conclusion. The fact that capitalism at the present time is unable to offer any reforms, and is unlikely to be able to in the foreseeable future, reinforces our view that what Socialists should be campaigning for is socialism and nothing but. Quite apart from the fact that support gained on the basis of proposing reforms to capitalism is not a solid basis on which to build up a socialist party, what’s the point of campaigning for reforms if there’s no chance of getting them?

The widespread rejection of the Labour Party by radically-minded people docs provide the basis for the growth of a genuine socialist party on sound principles, but Scargill’s SLP does not fill the bill. It has nothing to offer except the failed old policy of state intervention and state control to try to make things better for people. Despite the repeated demonstrations this century that this reformist policy does not work, the new SLP wants to have another go, flying in the face of the inescapable conclusion that capitalism just cannot be made to work in the interests of the majority.

Certainly, the SLP says it wants to replace capitalism with a socialist society but this turns out to be, not real socialism, but the state capitalism that nationalisation represents. This is the past. We’ve seen it and it doesn’t work.

Adam Buick

YOU WERE RIGHT ABOUT LABOUR, ADMITS SCARGILL

“New Labour's constitution has not only abandoned socialism but embraced capitalism and the free market. In other words, Labour ceased any pretence of being a socialist party.

Many on the left argue that it was never socialist, that it was at best social-democratic and that people like me were deluding ourselves in thinking we could campaign for socialism effectively within it. I now accept that argument and believe that New Labour can no longer be a ‘home’ to socialists. The changes go beyond the constitution. On all fundamental issues that affect our lives and our society, New Labour has adopted policies that cannot be supported by those who call themselves socialists” (Guardian, 15 January).

Unemployment can
 be abolished within
 capitalism, claims 
Scargill

“On unemployment, New Labour has abandoned a commitment to full employment, with its leader saying yesterday that he could not guarantee that New Labour could eradicate unemployment.

“In reality, a British government could do exactly that, even within a capitalist society—by introducing a four-day working week with no loss of pay, banning all non-essential overtime and introducing voluntary retirement on full pay at the age of 55” (Guardian, 15 January).

Dunblane — a question of evil? (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is impossible to imagine the horror that confronted those first on the scene of the Dunblane tragedy; little children lying dead along with their school teacher, with many more children injured. Difficult though it may be in such circumstances, it is surely necessary to look for what motivated Thomas Hamilton beyond the simplistic notion that he was merely 'evil'.

The violent death of a child is always a terrible thing; there is something particularly appalling, obscene, about it. The younger the child the worse it seems, the more upsetting, sickening, infuriating, even frightening. The difficulty comprehending such an action is what frightens, the murder of a young child plumbing the depths of depraved behaviour and inevitably raising an anguished "why?". A great many people are probably unable to answer this any more satisfyingly than the hospital chaplain, interviewed on television after the massacre in Dunblane, who said that people have free will and there is no other answer than that. Many other people will blame evil itself, using the terms as a metaphysical category, something more than a concept, something that acts, something that is a cause rather than effect. Socialists find both explanations unsatisfactory, but many of us will grope as blindly as anybody in the face of such horror, all words paling into insignificance as we try to imagine the absolute desolation of the bereaved, or the fear of the victims.

Such events always prompt reflections on the subject of evil. The Guardian (16 March) published a particularly thoughtful and interesting article on which it raised the question of evil as a question that is particularly disturbing for liberal ideology, an ideology to which the author, Henry Porter, obviously subscribes:

  "It seems almost implicit that what took hold of that school was a terrible extraneous force, and the only word we have for it is Ron Taylor’s [the headmaster of Dunblane Primary School] word— evil. That should satisfy us, but it goes against every liberal's instincts to acknowledge evil as a dynamic in human affairs. "

Evil as an explanation goes against “liberal instincts” because it suggests the impossibility of eradicating the problems that beset humanity by reforming them away. This is a political point, a philosophical point and an ethical or moral point. Evil as a metaphysical force is pre-Enlightenment; it is a religious concept that challenges everything that the liberal heirs to the Enlightenment believe. It is a concept that underwrites a certain reactionary defeatism; it is essentially conservative and it stands behind the belief that we should, in John Major’s phrase, “understand less and condemn more”. This phrase “understand less” can be read in more than one way, and still be revealing if we want to understand the political and social dynamics of this metaphysical concept of evil. Let’s put it this way: simply, do we really want to understand less? Is it good enough for the survivors and the bereaved in Dunblane, or for victims of apparently senseless violence at any time or in any place, past or future, to understand less? Continued mystification is never a satisfactory answer, is never any answer at all, and will never do anything to prevent such horrors happening again.

Let’s look again at the above quote from the Guardian. Evil is a “terrible extraneous force”, a “dynamic in human affairs”. Docs the word “evil” really necessarily imply these things? It may be a social dynamic in that people are prompted to react in certain ways, but the idea that it is a cause of death or that it is something that acts independently of everything else is, as stated, an essentially theological view. That is the real “dynamic” of metaphysical evil; it cuts off any possibility of understanding, it abdicates responsibility and at the same time denies the possibility of dealing with violence in any other way than with punitive and draconian judicial measures—which will finally have little or no effect in any case. Irrational and tragic acts of random violence continue to occur.

Liberals at a loss

Liberalism, on the other hand, cannot understand such irrational violence because it is blind to the idea that “nurture” extends beyond the private family. The formation of an individual is an extremely complex open-ended process which, even after that individual’s death, and even with all possible information about that individual at our disposal, can never be adequately grasped or “summed up”. We might never know what tiny, apparently insignificant detail of a person’s life provides the spur to violence. There are two things we do know, though. One is that the individual remains responsible for his or her actions; we should never be prepared to allow an individual to abdicate their own responsibility for what they do, except perhaps in cases of absolute and total madness. The second thing that we also know on the other hand is that the individual is formed in relation to the world in which they live, that “nurture” involves the whole of society and in so far as we are part of society we all bear some responsibility for what occurs within it.

It can be said that evil exists, in that evil acts occur, but is does not at all follows that evil exists as an independent metaphysical force. Those who hold religious viewpoints often state that religion is necessary for “knowing the difference between right anti wrong”, implying that the irreligious are in some way necessarily morally deficient. Those of us who reject the ideology of religion may find that questions of ethics and morality are often more complex than religions like to admit, and we may have some difficulty with “moral absolutes”; but socialism certainly has a very strong ethical dimension, and disbelief in higher supernatural powers of authority is often more severe in terms of ethical imperatives than religion. We have no recourse to concepts of grace or salvation. As Jean-Paul Sartre once put it (quoted in Adieux by Simone dc Beauvoir), without God “all evil is in itself irreparable” This leaves us with the necessary responsibility for understanding the sources of evil acts and attempting to deal with them.

We live in a capitalist “liberal democracy”; this is another reason why liberals find events such as Thomas Hamilton’s actions in Dunblane difficult to understand. After all of the liberal social reform of the last hundred years or so here was a man who, while obviously deeply disturbed, was also not strictly insane, and who committed such a terrible act of violence against the least powerful members of his community. Liberalism can find no answer for—is incapable of understanding—such an act in a liberal society. This tragedy issued a challenge to liberalism because unless liberal capitalism is at fault then there must be some force of evil that compelled Hamilton to murder. Liberalism finds both options unacceptable.

Individuals and society 
If we turn our attention to the little we know of Thomas Hamilton himself, we find that he conforms almost exactly to the classic profile of the mass murderer. He was a loner; he was paranoid, with the constant feeling that he was being persecuted; his relationship to children was such that, if he was not a paedophile, it at least involved the need to dominate and exercise power over them. He was desperate, in the strongest sense of the word; he was obviously in despair (the murder of children followed by suicide can only be accompanied by the kind of contempt for life that springs from despair). It does not require any leap of imagination to sec that all of these factors are linked to the failures of liberal capitalism, with its inevitable social fragmentation, alienation, powerlessness for the majority and feelings of anxiety or even despair that many feel at being apparently thrown into a world that is chaotic beyond all our attempts at control.

There was obviously more to it than this, and we shall never know exactly what additional factors drove Hamilton past a general dissatisfaction or unease into, first, the need to deny his own powerlessness by exercising an exploitative power over children, and finally the terrible and, yes, evil act of mass murder. But can anybody seriously believe that these events would definitely have occurred anyway, without the alienation, social fragmentation and chaos that are endemic in capitalist societies? In the final analysis, it must be recognised that there are no truly “evil” people in the sense of having been born that way—there is no metaphysical force of evil, there are only evil acts, and their genesis can be traced to the relationship between the individual and his or her society. Individuals are always responsible for their actions, but at the same time any crime, large or small, unless committed through an insanity that can be traced to a biological cause, is also an indictment of the society in which it is committed.

We cannot say that there would be no terrible tragedies in a socialist society. Albert Camus was exactly right when he wrote in The Rebel (a text that is otherwise in many ways philosophically questionable and politically confused) the following:

"children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world. ”

One point, though, is that if such sufferings can be reduced, if only arithmetically, then we should obviously do so—but the reform of capitalism is incapable of this. The social problems that are necessarily implicated in evil acts such as occurred at Dunblane are the inevitable by-products of capitalism. The only solution that will reduce such problems to an appreciable extent is the revolutionary solution, which is to say the empowerment of ordinary people, the democratisation of society, the abolition of exploitation and oppression.

Jonathan Clay

The madness of John Bull (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The roast beef of Old England is a central component of the myths that go to build the image of John Bull, the phlegmatic, bulldog character, the epitome of British ‘virtues'.

This sturdy icon of strength and resilience owes it all to eating beef, unlike Pop-Eye who did it more economically on spinach. That these ideas were first promoted at a time when the average Englishman saw beef about once a year, and the penalty for poaching the lord's deer was hanging or transportation; that when meat did become accessible to the industrial working class on a regular basis it was more likely to be the frozen Argentinean variety, and that now the most popular meals for eating out are most likely to be an ‘Indian’ or a 'Chinese' is by the way. It is a myth that has done good service to the British ruling class in creating a nationalist consciousness.

British beef has now suffered a severe knock due to increased concerns about BSE. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy or "Mad Cow Disease’.

This disease has been prevalent in Britain for a number of years, but not really endemic Not too much concern was shown by the authorities because it was not believed to be ‘species transferable', i.e. that humans could get it from eating cattle meat. It is similar to a disease present in sheep called "Scrapie", which has been known for some two hundred years but no-one has contracted dementia from eating sheep. Cattle have been grazed for years on grass infected with Scrapie and seemed unaffected.

All that changed when in the unceasing drive to reduce costs of production imposed by the economic laws of capitalism, someone came up with the bright idea of feeding animal protein to cattle for the purpose of fattening them more quickly. Scientists warned the government of the risks of transmitting disease—bearing pathogens to stock and thence to humans, but the Ministry of Agriculture chose to ignore these findings and rejecting a tight licensing scheme, allowed the meat industry to determine its own standards.

Some five years later there were alarming reports of cases of Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease (CJD) in humans, attributed to eating beef. It was considered at that time that only the brain and spinal cord was suspect, but opinion is now coming round to the idea that other parts might be too. It now seems that the disease producing pathogens can cross the species barrier, and this raised horrific potentialities. CJD is an intense form of dementia invariably culminating in death in three months to a year.

This is a major crisis for British capitalism, striking on several levels—economic, credibility of Ministers and government, mythology, the soundness of British agriculture, and the future of McDonalds.

While the government at first under-reacted they are now probably over-reacting with the talk of killing of at least four million cattle. However, they see this as the only way to restore the most important item, confidence, so that they can go on selling British beef and continue to make profits. The immensity of the task of killing four million cattle in sheer logistic terms is horrendous, quite apart from the further pollution the incineration will cause. Since the infective agent now thought to be a prion— a form of protein—is highly resistant to destruction, including by heat it is by no means certain that incineration will be sufficiently effective.

Of course the principal reason why the government is taking drastic action is not because of fears for the health of the British public. It is because of their fears for the health of the British export trade and the huge sums of money involved. When Germany banned British beef two years ago it was condemned as arrogant German nationalism. When the whole of Europe joined in and the facts could hardly be denied, something had to be done or at least it had to look as though something was being done.

It will be instructive to see how long the present crisis lasts and whether they will be able to wriggle out of it. But don't think that contamination of food is confined to beef. Food has been contaminated, adulterated and manipulated since the early days of capitalism and the situation continues today.

The working class can draw two lessons from this sorry spectacle. First, that any trust given to either political leader or to business is totally misplaced. In the running of the capitalist system only one criterion can count the need to make a profit What other reason could there possibly be for feeding processed sheep meat and chicken droppings to vegetarian cows?

The other lesson is that capitalism in the midst of its seeming indestructibility is in fact very vulnerable. At any time a crisis of this nature, a Chernobyl, an oil slick, a stock market panic can cause big problems to the poor idiots who by to make it run smoothly. And whoever else suffers in the process, workers always suffer too.

Cyril Evans

Greasy Pole: On the Scaffold (1996)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

A general election is rather like an execution; as it approaches it concentrates wonderfully the minds of those who fear their end is nigh. Survival becomes the all-absorbing, all-dominant preoccupation of their thoughts. How can they most effectively plead their case for a last minute reprieve? How can they persuade the people who will pass judgment on them to commute the penalty to a life sentence as the Member for one of the more obstinately safe constituencies? If this can be arranged the grateful Member will uncomplainingly suffer years of attendance at constituency committee meetings, fund-raising drives, summer fayres and even surgeries when they have to devote their Saturdays to listening to voters’ complaints about housing or crime or medical services or whatever.

All of this is in the cause of winning— or at least holding on to—votes. To do this it will probably be necessary to be involved in all kinds of otherwise repellent activities. Shopping centres will have to be invaded to that unsuspecting customers, whose only concern is to spend some of their income on something which a recent TV ad has convinced them is indispensable to their continued existence as exploited workers, can be startled into revealing their opinions on issues like the common currency or heavier sentences for criminals or whether MPs should be allowed to make so much on the side. Pretty girls will be cuddled, defenceless babies will be kissed, so that the photographers accompanying this spontaneous demonstration can get some newsworthy pictures.

Questions of policy

Occasionally there will be a pressing, unavoidable need to deal with questions about policy, about where one party stands compared to the others. The replies to some of these questions will have been supplied, in readily-digestible form, in a candidate’s handbook or other material from headquarters. It is as well to get these right because it won't do to acquire a reputation as a maverick before you have even got to Westminster. Of course, the important thing is to stress that there are vast, unbridgeable political chasms between your party and the rest. If you have done your homework diligently you will have committed to memory some examples of how inefficient or unprincipled the other parties are, what impotent flops they have as leaders. It will even be possible to indicate that their honesty is in doubt and to wonder about the sanity of anyone who could possibly vote for them. (This has to be done with some delicacy; it is never wise to imply that the voters are mad, even if they do consistently support a social system which operates like a madhouse.)

If this is to be done successfully it is vital to avoid any diversions into political history or any proper comparisons of the respective parties’ policies. For example, the Conservatives came to power in 1979 saying they were committed to a policy of monetarism. The voters were encouraged to believe that a Thatcher government would allow free reign to market forces, which would involve a retrenchment of nationalisation and state influence or regulation in industrial and commercial matters. The assumption was that if the market was allowed to operate freely in all fields there would be a demand for only the best of the goods and services on offer and the rest would wither away and die. "Everything," as one of Thatcher’s people put it, "should be freed, so that people can do exactly what they want to do."

Continuity

Of course since then a few million people have found they are not free to do exactly what they want to do. People who survive on state benefit when they are unemployed, people whose homes have been taken over by the building society, people who see their children being schooled by desperately over-stressed teachers in crumbling buildings don’t feel that this is happening to them by their own free choice. But for the moment the point is that the ideas put forward by the Tories at the 1979 election were not new or exclusive to them. In truth, it was the outgoing Labour government which began the process and, particularly in view of how the Labour Party has developed since then, it is a matter of speculation about how far they would have carried it on had they been in power.

It was described by Robert Blake, the historian of the Conservative Party, in an interview in August 1989:

  "One should never forget that Callaghan and Healey between them were changing economic and social policy quite markedly. In suited both sides subsequently to play this down. Margaret Thatcher doesn't want to be beholden to them, and they, of course, do not want it implied that they were doing these things earlier. There's more continuity than one might appreciate between Callaghan’s administration after the IMF and all that happened in 1976, and Margaret Thatcher's administration than either side wishes to admit’’(Thatcher’s England. John Ranelagh).

Choices

The fact is that the parties who compete for power over capitalism change each other, in the sense that they are ready to absorb and adapt policies which they all see as successful. That was the history of the Conservative Party after l945,when Wooltoon and Butler went some way to refashion their appeal to the working class. It has been the history of the Labour Party since 1979, with their drive for change becoming more determined and blatant as they perceive themselves getting closer to power. That is why we now have the New Labour Party, openly competing for what Blair calls the middle ground, with ideas on the economy, trade unions, crime and market forces which are all but indistinguishable from the Tories.

At the election the minds of the candidates will be concentrated in persuading us that they represent a choice when all they offer is minor deflections to the mainstream of running capitalism. But it doesn’t have to be like this; we don’t have to be that class who volunteers for our own execution.

Ivan

The Insecurity Council (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is it irony, or just plain coincidence, that the world’s top five arms suppliers (USA, Britain, France, China and Russia) just happen to be the five permanent members of the UN Security Council? Indeed, does this fact not make a mockery of any pretensions they have of providing the world with "security"?

Just how secure the world really is can be judged by the further fact that there have been over 300 conflicts since the establishment the UN Security Council after World War Two, and that 30 still rage and that more are threatened. 

During the years 1990 to 1993 inclusive, a period when the world should have been enjoying the fruits of the “peace dividend", the five members managed to sell the developing world alone $45,568 million-worth of weapons.

If anything, the "peace dividend" was a huge joke, for arms sales are as much a part of global capitalism's set-up now as they ever were—a fact highlighted by the arms build-up in south-eastAsia. Between 1992 and 1995, Taiwan placed order for 150 F-J6s from the US. six La Fayette frigates and 60 Mirage 2000s from France. Malaysia purchased 18 MiG 29s, eight F-16s and 12 British Hawk fighters. Determined not to be left out of the arms build-up Singapore ordered 18 F-16s. Thailand ordered 16 of the same and Britain sold 24 Hawks to Indonesia. With the smell of profit wafting about the South China Sea, the Chinese bought a licence to produce Su 27 interceptors from Russia for $2 billion, on condition they would not be used against Russia. The ink was hardly dry on the agreement when Vietnam put in an order for 6 new Chinese Su 27s.

Hardly surprising, then, that the International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm has discovered that 25 percent of all weapons exports end up in south-east Asia—the vast bulk provided by the five permanent members of the Security Council. We’re talking mega-bucks here. Defence spending by just seven south Asian countries (Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand) grew from $49 billion in 1983 to $85 billion in 1993. As 1995 closed, the figure had rocketed to $ 130 billion.

No doubt this means a slap on the back and drinks ail round for those ministers responsible for such arms deals—an achievement Mrs Thatcher was wont to refer to as "batting for Britain".

February found Michael Rifkind, the Foreign Secretary, trying to hit a six in the former Yugoslavia. With the UN preparing to lift an arms embargo under the Dayton peace accord, and with the Scott Report still making headline news back home, Rifkind was prostrating himself in front of the Slovenian prime minister, Janez Drnovsck, in Ljubljana, trying to redirect an Israel-bound defence contract to Britain—a contract worth £35 million. Rifkind’s justification was that as a prospective NATO member, Slovenia should have British-made equipment that could meet alliance “standards".

A month later and corks were popping at GEC as they prepared to finalise a £5 billion arms deal to supply the United Arab Emirates with a "super-intelligent" weapons system. Two days later, on 20 March, the Guardian reported that Britain, France and the US were submitting final proposals for a deal worth $5 billion to provide the UAE with 80 state-of-the-art fighters. Some statistician had even whipped out his pocket calculator and worked out that the deal was costing the UAE $120,000 to defend each “square kilometre of semi-arid desert”.

That same day, recovering from the deafening rattle of sabres from across the Formosa Straits, Taiwan announced that it wanted to buy $4.8 billion-worth of new US weaponry. Thus a member of the Security Council was prepared to arm a country, not even a member of the UN, against a fellow Security Council member.

The idea of "security”, it would seem, is anathema to everything that capitalism is geared towards—profit.

Perhaps then, the "Insecurity Council” would be a more fitting title for the UN's five most important members, as “peace" is merely preparation for war under capitalism. Fifty million killed in wars since the foundation of the UN are testament to this.

John Bissett

50 Years Ago: Workers’ Control?? (1996)

The 50 Years Ago column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Trade Disputes Act is to go. Hurrah! The workers have wrenched from the Capitalists one of then vilest weapons. Just a minute, there’s a catch in this Here it is, in the words of Sir Hartley Shawcross. Opening the debate for the Government in the House of Commons on February 12th, he pointed out that: “ . . . In any case the pre-1927 law gave ample powers for dealing with strikes."

Speaking of the proposal to allow Civil Servants to belong to Trade Unions to which outside workers belong and to be affiliated to the T.U.C. he said:

  "I take this opportunity of making it quite clear that thus Government, as an employer, would feel itself completely free to take disciplinary action when any strike situation which might develop demanded it "

That's nor all—this “workers’ Government" has a duty to perform—duty to whom? Could it be to the Employers? 

 "But that is not to say that it is not the duty of the Government to deal with any strike that may arise. That is a duty the present Government will loyally discharge." (Our italics) 

Now we know Thanks for those kind words, Comrade Sir Hartley

(All quotations from News Chronicle, 13/2/46.)

(From Socialist Standard, May 1946)

Society, Ideas & Nature (1996)

From the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although most people these days would admit to being concerned about the state of the planet we live on it is remarkable how little the destructive tendencies of the profit system are blamed for causing environmental damage. Yet it should be impossible for us to ignore the fact that our relationship to our environment, and the effect we have on it, is governed entirely by the kind of society we live in.

In contrast to idealist theories of history, historical materialism holds that the development of ideas is mainly explicable in terms of the prevailing “mode of production”. This should not be seen as “economic determinism”; it does not mean ideas simply spring from economic conditions like mushrooms from a compost heap. Indeed, at any point in time one will probably find an array of ideas on any subject. What causes some of these to take root and spread while others are passed over or allowed to wither on the vine? According to historical materialism, a key factor, but by no means the only factor, in this social selection of ideas is the economic one. Thus, the precise origins of an idea is less important than its utility for society and its mode of production in particular.

But what is a “mode of production”? This has two aspects—the “forces of production”, and the “relations of production” as constituted by the form of ownership of the means of living. With the emergence of private property and the state several thousand years ago these relations became differentiated into antagonistic class relationships. As ownership of the means of living became concentrated in the hands of a small minority, this minority began to live off the labour of others, using the state as its means of coercion. The particular form this economic exploitation took allows us to distinguish one mode of production from another. Thus, in the relatively short history of private property society we can identify a succession of such modes: chattel slavery', feudalism and capitalism.

According to Marx, the relations of production tend to reflect the level of technological progress. However, as the productive forces develop within a particular mode of production they eventually come into conflict with, are “fettered” by, its relations of production. This conflict expresses itself as an intensification of class struggle between the exploiting class which has a vested interest in maintaining these relations and a new class whose interests lie with the further development of the productive forces (and hence the revolutionary' overthrow of those relations which block that development). The resolution of that conflict occurs when the latter class finally succeeds in capturing the state and using it to usher in the new mode of production.

Every established order tends to project an image of itself as being tunelessly grounded in nature, thereby implying change is “unnatural”. As a social order is defined by its class structure, this projection is bound up with the need for a ruling class to perpetuate the existing relations of production through which it dominates society. Such dominance is hegemonic: it is based on the acquiescence of the exploited majority rather than just crude force. Although the “objective” interests of most people should lead them to change society, they tend to accept the ruling class idea that society cannot, and should not, change. As Marx points out “the class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time its dominant intellectual force” (German Ideology).

Yet despite the enormous power a ruling class wields through its control over the means of disseminating ideas, change is inescapable. In this respect, the development of the productive forces exerts a subversive influence, breaking the mould of long-established ideas. Indeed, insofar as technology mediates our relationship with nature, technological change can alter our perception of “nature” and hence society.

Ideas on nature under feudalism

We can see this in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The dominant metaphor of nature up until the early modem era was an organismic one. Nature was viewed as a living organism. Its manifold parts, including humankind, were held to be fundamentally interdependent and constituting an integrated whole. Such a concept fitted in with tire close organic ties most people had with the land and with the nature of the society in which they lived. Nature was seen in essentially teleological terms; everything was designed for a purpose which supposedly emanated from God. That purpose was to benefit humankind. This anthropocentric view of nature was nevertheless couched in religious terms whereby nature was seen as a “book” through which God’s plan was revealed.

“Physico-theology”, or the religious study of nature, was the means by which one could discover what God had in store for humankind. Since God was seen as a benevolent creator the world he created was essentially good, so to act in a way that conflicted with his design was wrong. Thus the notion that the universe was designed as a Great Chain of Being in which everything was interconnected was not simply an attempt to understand how it functioned; it was a moral statement which had implications not only for the behaviour of human beings towards each other but also for their treatment of nature.

On the other hand, the Christian belief contained in the Book of Genesis that God made man “in his own image” and enjoined him to “subdue the earth” has been interpreted as sanctioning a domineering attitude to nature. A leading exponent of this view is Lynn White who argued in a famous essay that a traditional Christian arrogance towards nature and the driving out of pagan animistic religions is what led to our present ecological crisis. According to him, “since the roots of our trouble are largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious” (The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis).

But this “idealist” interpretation of history does not stand up to scrutiny. There is considerable evidence of environmental destruction on a large scale in the Ancient World pre-dating Christianity which can in fact be linked to the emergence of class-based forms of social organisation.

A more telling argument against White’s thesis is that it does not explain why some aspects in the Christian worldview emphasising harmony with nature became less influential in the early modern era while the theme of dominating nature came to be increasingly asserted. The latter was in fact connected with a marked increase in productive activities such as mining, deforestation and draining marshes which in turn were related to the growth of a capitalist market and scientific progress. The “tension between technological development in the world of action and the controlling organic images in the world of the mind had become too great. The old structures were incompatible with the new activities” (Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, p.2).

Rise of capitalism
The rise of capitalism undermined the old static order of feudalism in which everyone “knew their place” by bringing about increased mobility. Land enclosures and agricultural improvements resulted in the removal of labourers from the land and their transformation into an urban proletariat, no longer in intimate contact with nature’s rhythms. Furthermore, the commodification of labour power went hand-in-hand with commodification of nature itself. As Marx put it, “the mode of perceiving nature under the rule of private property is a real contempt for, and a practical degradation of, nature”.

This change in perception was reinforced by scientific developments. The Copernican revolution in astronomy which shattered the Medieval view that the earth was the centre of the universe, the growing awareness of hitherto unknown biological organisms (many of which did not appear to serve any useful purpose for humankind) in the wake of the Voyages of Discovery and the invention of the microscope, and the dawning realisation that fossils were the remains of now-extinct species, all served to undermine the old anthropocentric view of a world designed by God for the good of humankind. Such developments did not occur in a vacuum but in response to the specific needs of an emerging capitalist economy.

However, organicism was to re-surface in the shape of the Romantic Movement of the 19th century—a philosophical and aesthetic reaction to the depredations of industrial capitalism which sought solace in spiritual communion with nature. This idealisation of nature was dealt a blow by the Darwinian Revolution which represented nature as an arena of struggle in which only the fittest survived—in some respects a mirror image of the competitive ethos of Victorian capitalism—but out of Darwinism was to emerge the science of ecology.

The development of science under capitalism proved to be a double-edged sword. In a remarkable passage Engels noted that for all our claims to have “conquered nature”, it lends to take its revenge on us, thus reminding us that “we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people” but “belong to nature, and exist in its midst”:

  “After the mighty advances of natural science in the present century, we are more and more placed in a position where we can get to know, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences of our most ordinary productive activities. But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but know themselves to be one with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and anti-natural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body" (Dialectics of Nature).

Today, we can once again find evidence of organicism in the modem environmental movement. While this has been viewed as a positive development it does have its negative side: it can lend itself to authoritarian, even fascistic, forms of social organisation. It can also lead to a misplaced and irrational opposition to science for allegedly displacing a sentimental attachment to nature by an objective analysis of it; and its tendency to deify nature, to blame humankind-in-the-abstract for our ecological crisis, rather than the society we live in, can only cripple our ability to tackle that crisis.

Now when our planet is threatened as never before, the need to change society has never been so great. Only by altering our relationship with one another can w'e hope to transform our relationship with nature of which we are an inextricable part.

Robin Cox

Hitler was a vegetarian (1996)

Book Review from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ecofascism: Lessons from the German Experience by Janet Biehl & Peter Staudenmaier
 (AK Press, Edinburgh & San Francisco 1995, 
£5.00)

Since the 1970s the Green movement world-wide has been dominated by anarchist and left-wing tendencies; but this has obscured the movement's more diverse ancestry. In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s there were right-wing expressions of concern for the environment, combining a mystical conception of nature with the myths of race and nation. The epitome of this outlook came with the Nazis, whose whole political ideology can be described as "ecofascist". (It is to be regretted, however, since this term blurs some important distinctions between Italian fascism and German “National Socialism".) Hitler was a vegetarian, opposed to vivisection and loved his dogs. He was an enthusiast for renewable energy sources. Himmler saw to it that the SS had it own supply of organic farm produce. The Nazis introduced the first nature reserve in Europe and began a programme of extensive reforestation.

That was then and this is now. But the resurgence of Nazism shows the futility of supposing that it (and environmental problems) could be reformed out of existence within capitalism. The darling of the left-wing of the German Greens in the 1970s and 1980s used to be Rudolf Bahro; but not any more, for he has revealed himself to be an ecofascist, calling for a new “Green Adolf'. What is important here is that Bahro claims that he is only making explicit what was always in his Green political thought. For instance, he is quoted in the early 1980s, as a leading member of the German Greens, stating that "if we want to build an ecological decentralised Germany, we have to first free German territory” (From Red to Green). Bahro is currently Professor of Social Ecology at Humboldt University in Berlin. Social Ecology is a concept usually associated with the American anarchist Murray Bookchin, and in November 1990 he was invited by Bahro to a seminar on the question: "Is the alternative to ecological destruction freedom from domination or an 'ecological' dictatorship?" Bahro argued that, because there is a "dark side” to human nature, we need a Nazi-style dictatorship to save the environment and ourselves. Bookchin replied that the “dark side" is to be found in the sort of society we live in; whereupon Bahro told him that he would not be invited again.

Any right thinking person (pun intended) should of course be concerned with what's happening to our environment. It really is a scandal. What the existence of ecofascism, shows, however, is that uninformed concern and “doing something” can have disastrous consequences. For this reason, anyone who has read of the Malthusians with the Green movement blaming overpopulation will have been uneasy about where their line of argument is taking them. We need to understand the social and economic causes of environmental degradation before we can take effective political action. This does not have to be difficult, but it can confound a professor.

Lew Higgins

Letter: 'Part of people's experience' (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

I share in every detail your vision of a Socialist society as an end result However, I think there is a problem regarding the route to this goal. The people I’ve had most contact with in the Socialist Party seem to believe the answer lies in education. But they interpret education as being continued and detailed discussion of Marxist Theory and the Socialist Party interpretation of that through its ninety years of publications.

I personally believe that such a theoretical approach can only reach a small percentage of the population. I believe that such an approach will never generate the critical mass required to bring about Socialism.

On the contrary, I believe a more educational approach involves taking on board the work of educationalists like Piaget and Kuhn—people need to experience the concrete before they can come to terms with the theoretical (Piaget); they need to observe and then feel and then sympathise, before they can empathise and individuate ideas into personal belief and commitment (Kuhn).

When I was a younger man, I recognised this to be true during struggles against the education cuts (late 1970s) and the Great Miners' Strike (84-85) and the Ambulance Workers’ Strike (87-88). I’ve worked with initially passive women, who’d never had a political thought since the day they were born, and watched them recognise the brutality of capitalism, and I’ve watched them become politicised, and grow and develop as Socialists, wanting to know more and more as the battle went on.

I believe that this is the road to the growth of socialist ideas—actively fighting the Poll Tax, the Criminal Justice Act, the Tory government, in favour of libraries (I recently stood next to a blue-rinsed old lady holding a banner outside a rural village library, who swore she’d never vote Tory again after fifty years of doing so). I believe that each of these campaigns—though not an end in itself, and though possibly only gaining transient gains—can be used as vehicles for representing the case for socialism. They can be the concrete experience that most people need.

You see at the end of the day all these Socialist Party debates (Which way to a Nuclear-Free Future?, Which way to a Green Future?, etc.) irk me somewhat. They irk me because they create a confrontational situation with groups of people who are our natural allies. There’s no contradiction between, say, CND and the Socialist Party, merely a paradox. CND can be used as a support, a strut, to the Socialist Party platform in the concrete radicalisation and education of the people. The first necessary stage in the development of socialism.

Andy Stephenson, 

Brighton

Reply:

Because socialism can only come about when a majority want it and organise to get it, and because there is clearly not yet a majority desire for socialism. we see the role of socialists today as being primarily educational in the broadest sense, "making Socialists” as William Morris put it.

But we have never imagined that a majority desire for socialism will arise purely as a result of our own educational activities (and certainly not from our classes and lectures in Marxian theory, which are mainly aimed at our members anyway). Our view is that hearing the case for socialism can speed up the process whereby people come to realise that capitalism cannot serve their interests since it always has to put making profits before satisfying needs.

Fortunately, it is capitalism that does most of the work. Because it is based on exploitation and because it puts profits before needs, it inevitably generates discontent, protest and struggle but also the idea of an alternative society based on common ownership and production for use instead of class ownership and production for profit Socialist theory and principles are in fact the distilled experience of past generations of working-class opponents of capitalism. And it is this past experience that we in the Socialist Party see ourselves as trying to transmit to our fellow workers.

The educationalists you mention are concerned with the process of learning from others and, insofar as socialists are engaged in this sort of education work, no doubt there is something we could learn from their methods. But you seem to want to go further and say that we should also get involved in struggles against the effects of capitalism to, as it were, take people through the experience of coming up against the barriers that capitalism places in the way of satisfying people's needs.

We are not against people fighting back against what the ruling class tries to impose on them. In fact we are all in favour workers fighting the bosses at work for better wages and working conditions and for similar bread-and-butter struggles by tenants, claimants, students. But we say that conducting these struggles is the task of trade unions, tenants associations, claimant unions and the like, not that of the socialist political party (whose task is to advocate socialism). For us to intervene in them as a party would be to assume a vanguardist, leadership role, attracting the support of people who only wanted improvements within capitalism.

Our members participate in such struggles as individual workers who are personally affected by the particular problem. Naturally Socialists involved in such struggles will put the socialist case but as a party we confine ourselves to general principles, urging that the struggles be conducted under the democratic control of those involved and pointing out that capitalism is the cause of the problem and socialism the solution.

These are bread-and-butter struggles which people are forced to be involved in, whether or not they are socialists, just because they are propertyless in a society where you must get money to survive. So we have no problem over the miners’ strike of 1984-5 (though, to tell the truth, we did think a ballot should have been held to launch it) or the ambulance workers’ strike of 1977-8. Our members were behind them too.

As to other, political (rather than economic) struggles, we are of course against nuclear weapons, wars, homelessness, racism, pollution, etc., but that's the point; we are against all of them and don’t want to have to give priority to any one over all the others, putting them in competition as the various single-issue campaigns in effect do.

In fact our task as socialists is precisely to point out the link between all these problems— their shared origin in capitalism—and the shared solution to them in the establishment of a society of common ownership and production to satisfy people’s needs. This is a task no one else can do, but is essential if the people involved are to come to a socialist understanding as quickly as possible.

Somebody must be there to ensure that hearing the case for socialism also becomes part of their experience. We don’t need to take them through the experience of the failure of reformist struggles. Capitalism itself will do that. But we do need to ensure that they hear the case for socialism. Which only a separate, independent body of convinced socialists can do.

To be able to do this with any degree of credibility we have to practise what we preach and not give priority to any one of the various competing single-issue campaigns by supporting them as a party or joining them as individuals.

This isn’t necessary anyway since it is possible to make contact with those involved in such campaigns by being present at their meetings and demonstrations with leaflets and pamphlets which at the same time express agreement with their general aim and point out that this aim cannot be achieved under capitalism. This was the position we took up with regard to CND in the 1960s and over similar campaigns more recently.

In any event, we are not into either vanguardist politics (trying to take over and lead struggles) or reformist politics (trying to pressure capitalist governments into doing something). This means that we have a quite different political practice to that of those groups which adopt the "entryist" tactic of joining such campaigns.

They end up getting involved in the internal politics of such organisations, either trying to take them over or to stop some other group doing so. When one campaign peters out they have to look around for another bandwagon to jump on. And they are shouting "Stop This" or "Stop That" so much that they have no time to consider. let alone argue for, the idea of an overall change in the basis of society as the global solution to all the various problems.

We, on the other hand, are entirely free to do this and in fact are the only people who do so, fulfilling an essential role which no one else can: putting over the straight case for socialism and making hearing this a part of people’s experience.  • Editors

Down with Prisons! (1996)

The A Word in Your Ear column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The common belief that prisons are full of dangerously anti-social people from whom the rest of us must be protected is a lie. It is a lie so popular that even to question it is deemed to be an act of the wildest utopianism. We are taught to regard the imprisonment of the few as some kind of guarantee of the security of the many. But the many feel far from secure. And the imprisoned are mainly harmless, or harmful only to the extent that they are treated as they are.

As a child I remember a cop coming to the school-cum-prison in which I was being educatcd-cum-indoctrinated-cum-incarcerated to tell us all about what would happen if we broke the law. He carried the authority of a man born only a little too late for a career in the Gestapo and he terrorised little children with fears of the dire consequences of their wrongdoing. Boys with stolen sweets in their sticky pockets almost wet themselves. The cop painted images of dark dungeons presided over by men with the tolerance of Old Testament gods. We all agreed that this was no place to end up in. Next time our class went shoplifting the look-out arrangements were especially vigilant.

Years of being conditioned to fear the awfulness of prison hardships and indignities has done much to strengthen the unhealthy respect for property which so pervades the working class. Most people are afraid to take any of what they themselves produce, not because they believe it really should belong to the property-owning minority (the real thieves) but because they dare not break the thieves’ laws. They are scared. The prospect of prison is supposed to make us scared.

As a means of teaching people to respect private property prisons are remarkably unsuccessful. Most inmates come out with more knowledge about how to get away with breaking the law than they had when they entered. There is no evidence at all that prisons do anything very much except scare people who are not in them and brutalise those who are. The tragedy is that most of those in there have been quite well enough brutalised by the deprivations and degradation of being propertyless in a property society without needing a prison regime to roughen their edges.

The vast majority of the prison population is locked away fro one reason: they have violated the sanctity of property—taken what does not belong to them. Why have they done this? Aside from the odd cases (not infrequently fictitious) of millionaires’ wives roaming around department stores and stealing for attention, the main reason for stealing, whether from shops or cars or houses or workplaces is lack of money and lack of the hope of making a mark in society without gaining things which cost more than can be paid for. Stealing is a consequence of poverty and of powerlessness. Take away these factors and who need steal? (Take away money and property and who could steal?)

Millions of prisoners are incarcerated across the world simply for disagreeing with the government. From the tortured wretches in the hell-holes of Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran (apparent international enemies, but all at one when it comes to the Dictatorship of Property) to those in Britain who refused to become conscripted killers in time of war (the “crime” which sent so many socialists to prison) or pay their poll tax, what are these but prisoners of conscience? It doesn’t pay to stand by your principles under capitalism. In China there are approximately ten million political prisoners locked away in camps. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the trade boycott.

And yes, there are the few—a small minority even within the minority of the prison population—who are so damaged, so ruined by their upbringing and circumstances, and so driven to brutality that they have murdered, raped and committed unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity. Is the humane response to brutalise them further by locking them in cells and punishing them for what society has made them? It has become a commonplace of mean-minded conservative sneering to deride those of us who counsel compassion and understanding for those whose deeds the tabloid press choose to call evil. (Their evil-spotting becomes remarkably myopic when it comes to nuclear buttons and bombs dropped from legalised terrorists in the name of international order.) well, call me a “do-gooder” (which is preferable to being a do-badder) or a softy, but the truth is that only spite can justify taking an inadequate person and making them less adequate by throwing them into the hopeless despair of imprisonment. These places are an affront to a society which declares itself with haughty arrogance to be civilised. They are monuments to the barbarity of a system which cannot afford compassion and support for the damaged and so buries itself in the futile and spiteful torments of punishment.

Steve Coleman

Opportunity knocks (1996)

Claire Short and Peter Mandelson

TV Review from the April 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

With the next General Election on us within a year or so the bourgeois political parties and the TV companies are already preparing themselves for what might be a nasty campaign. Nasty, that is, and bitterly contested, but totally meaningless. The news teams at the BBC and ITN know what is in store for an angry and bewildered working class and so do the current affairs programme-makers. The two primary features of the last campaign will almost certainly be present in the next one—muckraking peppered with vacuous political assertions with little or no basis in fact. While the last election was bad the next one will be closer still—and therefore worse still.

Peter Horrocks, editor of BBC2's Newsnight, has confessed to his exasperation and disgust at the main parties for their increasingly authoritarian and devious handling of the news media. The Tories have, of course been masters at this for years, but writing in the Parliamentary Review, Horrocks claims that the Labour Party has become even worse:

  "Labour's internal machine has an iron grip. As a broadcaster and believer in open political discussion, one deplores such authoritarianism. Faced with polls we can't rely on and politicians who are prepared to be controlled like puppets, what do we provide for our audiences?"

What indeed? As an example of Labour ‘'fixing" Horrocks cited the Harriet Harman school-opt-out affair when the Labour leadership strongly advised its MPs to stay away from the studios. Many who initially agreed to appear on Newsnight and other programmes to criticise Harman changed their minds after being warned off by the leadership and Labour spin doctors. If this is the case—as it almost certainly is—then the MPs in question are just as culpable as those who now direct their media appearances. The only reason they can have for their behaviour is that of hanging on to their jobs and of a desire to win an election by default.

On the ball

Luckily, the television news media—for once—do not seem prepared to take this lying down. After taking political beatings from both Labour and the Tories previously with numerous accusations of bias and collusion, there are signs of a fight-back. Horrocks in particular has warned that the media will turn its attention away from the spin doctors and their puppets towards "genuine free spirits” out of their grasp as the election draws near. Most interestingly of all for those who offer a genuine alternative to the bogus socialism of New Labour, Horrocks writes:

  "Expect to see alternative politics covered. Tony Blair will attempt to portray himself as candid and realistic, but it will, be carefully controlled, designed to give nothing away."

If Horrocks really means this and is not just making idle threats, this is encouraging, particularly so for groups like the Socialist Party. In fact, if Horrocks and others like him are looking for a genuine alternative to the sterile politics of the capitalist parties, they need look no further than in our direction. Who else offers a serious alternative to the market economy and can provide the democratic debate and argument on which news programmes thrive? The Socialist Party will be standing candidates at the next General Election and we are willing and able to provide representatives to comment on a wide range of issues, all of whom will take the opportunity to expose the trickery and shallowness of capitalist politicians. Lively, democratic debate is assured—what more can Peter Horrocks want than that?

In the meantime we have lots of other suggestions to make. In particular we can offer a line of questioning guaranteed to expose the Tory twits and Labour fakers which still dominate the news media and which is to be particularly recommended to those interviewers with a reputation for integrity and tenacity:

• Which problems that beset the market economy e.g. unemployment, crime, poverty, war are capable of solution within the system?
• Why are previously tried policies on all these fronts being put forward when they failed in the past?
• Which policies offered by any of the parties now haven’t been offered in some shape or form in the past, both here and abroad?
• If there are any, did they solve the problems they intended to solve?
• If so, give examples. If not, why not?

We should no doubt be prepared for a long period of silence when politicians are asked of their successes in solving the problems of capitalism for we all already know the answer—there haven’t been any, as the problems are still there. Once their egos have been pricked and their policies exposed, the real opportunity for sustained and informed TV debate on the issues will then be upon us. But paradoxically, silence, as far as the tepid professional politicians go at least, would still—as likely as not—be golden. And not just for socialists, for it is clear that the “service’’ they give to supporters of the market economy is an increasingly embarrassing one and is recognised as such.

Dave Perrin

These Foolish Things: The Age of Leisure (1996)

The Scavenger column from the May 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Age of Leisure

"The holiday home was buzzing with the sounds of the modem cottage industry— faxing, computing, phoning . . .

Technology, once hailed as the liberator of the work force, has become an insidious thief that steals scarce holiday time. Laptops, phones and faxes are readily transportable, available at hotels, airports and on some planes. Holidays can all too easily turn into the virtual reality' of a day at work.

Rob Donnelly of the Confederation of British Industry, says: “More people in management roles are seriously eroding their free time. There’s a cult of irreplaceability that says, ‘As long as I keep my place. I’ll have a job”’ 

Mail on Sunday, 4 February.

Competition will cost £320 million

“Government plans to introduce full competition into the electricity market from April 1998 suffered a setback last night after warnings that an expensive new system for trading power was unlikely to be ready in time.

The committee governing the electricity pool—the wholesale electricity market—warned that a new £250 million computerised trading arrangement would need to be phased in and said it remained unclear how this initial price tag plus the annual running costs of £70 million would be met.”

Guardian, 21 December 1995.

On the scrap heap

The research will confirm “the significantly raised mortality of the unemployed in comparison to all men of working age,” according to tire 1996 edition of Social Trends—the bible of official social statistics . . . In 1990, analysis of an Office of Population Censuses and Surveys study which is tracking a sample of more than 500,000 people drawn from the 1971 census, showed death rates were 37 percent higher than average among men seeking work during the period 1971-81. 

Guardian, 25 January.

If you can pay

“Doctor John Stanford is about to realise a dream. It began in a swamp in Africa and it could result in a medical breakthrough that would rank alongside Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin . . . Skin tests carried out in Nepal, India and Burma revealed that somehow the harmless mycobacterium vaccae worked to stop the terrible tissue destruction effects of TB . . . The company in which John and Cynthia Stanford, Professor Rook, UCL and Eric Boyle retain a major share holding now has a capital value of £70 million ... if [the team at UCL] is right, a lot of people will make a lot of money. But, far more importantly, the world could be freed of the terrible threat of TB. . . “ 

Lorraine Fraser, Mail on Sunday, 25 February’.

“City delights at good round of job cuts”

"It is one of those paradoxes. While most ordinary people get upset at job losses, the highly paid young men and women in the City'—assuming they aren’t the ones being downsized—love them. Job cuts, they argue, enable companies to become more competitive, streamlined, “leaner”, helping improve profitability and dividends. On the wider front, they are also good for the economy as they also help keep down wage inflation. It was for this reason that yesterday’s move by United Utilities, to trim its workforce by a further 1,700, was so welcome in the Square Mile. The shares shot up 14p to 611p, after Wednesday’s 19p jump, as analysts smacked their lips in expectation of chunky dividend increases. One, who wisely asked not to be identified, summed it up this way: ‘The cost reductions are greater than expected, and that’s very good news, really exciting’” 

Guardian, 29 March.

The Scavenger