Between the Lines: A very silly season (1986)

The Between the Lines Column from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A very silly season

The MPs' summer holiday — a modest break of ten weeks or so — is known by the media hacks as "the silly season". Without leaders to observe and interview the TV reporters are traditionally short of "news" to feed the working class. So, when a giraffe gets its neck stuck in the railings in Chessington Zoo or a tramp is found dead with a 1911 copy of The Tatler stuffed down his pants (the best place for it) it is several hundred times more likely to be "news" when the MPs are on holiday than when momentous things are happening in parliament — like when a Welsh Nationalist broke the arm off the Speaker's Chair.

Silliest of the silly TV "news' stories of the summer of '86, far outclassing even the policeman from Shropshire who handcuffed his wife and couldn't find the key to unlock her, or the expert in memory improvement who forgot to turn up for the Wogan show, was the case of the elderly parasite and the fish bone. It was on a Saturday in late August when the news broke: a silly ITN newsreader with a very serious facial expression announced to the nation that "Her Majesty, the Queen Mother has been taken by helicopter from her castle in Ayrshire to a hospital in Aberdeen after complaining of discomfort in the throat caused by what could be a fish bone eaten last night". The bulletins (and they went on throughout the evening and all the next day) went from bad to worse. On were brought throat specialists and fish specialists and bone specialists. Then we were shown a film of that awful, awful occasion only four years ago when the same woman had another fish bone stuck down her gob and had to stay in hospital overnight. It was excruciatingly silly TV, even for the silly season.

Not long after — or was it before? one loses touch the ITN Silly Squad was despatched to film Mrs Thatcher going in and coming out of a hospital, there to have an operation to stop her fingers from pointing in the wrong direction. Oh, where would we be without live TV coverage to keep us so closely informed about such events? While viewers were given minute by minute coverage of the case of the recalcitrant fish bone, no TV coverage was given to a speech delivered by economist, Professor Alan Williams (Guardian, 2 September) in which he stated that kidney patients in need of expensive dialysis treatment should be denied it because hip replacement operations are cheaper to perform and worthier of the money spent by the NHS. "We should not shrink from following where the logic of that approach leads us that hospital dialysis should be restrained and total hip replacement expanded." What sort of social system is it that can allow workers in urgent need of dialysis treatment to suffer and perhaps die while it can glory in the news that when its arch-parasites have a bone in the throat or a pain in the little finger no treatment is too good, no helicopter fast enough, to satisfy their needs. If it was a fiction it would be silly, but as social reality it is sick.

The triumph of scientific analysis

For four weeks Channel Four ran a series (Wednesdays. 8.30pm) entitled The Triumph of Capitalism. Each week a chosen expert (who does the choosing? who does the excluding?) was given thirty full minutes to sit in front of the camera and examine the success or otherwise of the capitalist system. Three out of the four chosen experts were firmly pro-capitalism. This is what is known as balance. Had the three supporters of capitalism presented serious defences of the system as it is. we could have devoted space to examining their talks. In fact, the three defenders of capitalism neither understood the economic laws of the profit system nor attempted to explain how it could ever function without the anarchy and social devastation which it so evidently causes. Perhaps we should have expected nothing more.

The fourth programme in the series (Wednesday. 3 September) was presented by Professor Gerry Cohen, an Oxford Professor of Philosophy whose book, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A defence would be of interest to readers. Rarely, if ever, has the case against the capitalist system been presented in so eloquent and logical a manner on British TV. Cohen, through a process of rigorous historical and logical criticism, exposed the system as one of unearned minority privilege and legalised robbery. He pointed out that capitalism, far from setting out to satisfy needs, seeks above all to satisfy profit accumulation and this occurs at the expense of needs. Gerry Cohen did not go on to propose a socialist alternative (fortunately, considering a previous effort by him to do this on a TV discussion programme), but he did deny the alleged inevitability of capitalism and the oft-asserted impossibility of revolutionary social change. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that as far as his analysis went, and with the exception of minor theoretical points (for some reason he began by referring to workers selling their labour and only later used the Marxist term, labour power). Cohen's presentation could have been given by a member of The Socialist Party. Workers could do with more TV education like this — it compensates for the fish bones.

Steve Coleman

Blogger's Note:

A number of Professor Gerry Cohen's books were reviewed in the pages of the Socialist Standard. To read the reviews, click on the dates below.:

• Aug 1979: Karl Marx’s Theory of History by G. A. Cohen
• Feb 2002: If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? By G. A. Cohen
• Dec 2009: Why not socialism? By G. A. Cohen
• Jun 2011: On The Currency Of Egalitarian Justice. By G.A. Cohen

Power pact (1981)

From the November 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

The political alliance between the Liberals and the ‘Social Democrats' pales into insignificance in comparison with the more sinister alliance between the SDP and the BBC. The media in recent months has outdone many of its previous efforts in paving the path of ‘moderation' as the TV, radio and newspaper journalists invent stories to prove that there is now a popular burst of opinion in favour of ‘centre politics'. What began as a Gang of Four has become a rabble of many: ex-Labour cabinet ministers, sixteen members of the ruling group on Islington council, some Liberals who look like they have just won the jackpot at Bingo, and even an inoffensive looking Tory from Norfolk. Names that once sent us searching for a copy of Who's Who (Had you heard of Bill Rodgers when he was a member of ‘our great movement’?) are paraded across our screens as the speakers of Truth; Liberals who used to write manifestos about saving whales and giving power to Wales (or was it the other way round?) are now adopting pompous airs and talking about ‘preparing for government'; even that undying enemy of labour and friend of Labour, The Daily Mirror, has opted for the alliance, with full-page photographs of semi-nude women saying The middle way is the best'.

In order to establish the mythical middle, mythical extremes are needed. One can imagine the editor of The Guardian issuing the order: ‘Go out and create us a couple of really awful extremes so that we can sell this new centre.' And so the caricatures came to be. First, there is the caricature of the wicked, thoughtless Thatcherite Tories who plan to increase unemployment and blow up the world with American weapons once they have succeeded in getting the whole working class standing in one long dole queue. Like the witch in a children’s book, Thatcher is painted as being wickedness personified. The other side of the caricature is the Marxist- dominated Benno-Trotyskyist Labour Party. Benn is portrayed as a modern Stalin, waiting patiently for his chance to grab power and destroy Western Civilisation (coming soon).

Like all myths, there are elements of truth. Thatcher and the Tories are viciously anti-working class. When have Tories not been? Their ignorant and unhistorical monetarist policies do fail to provide any solution whatsoever to the social problems of our time. They are impotent in the face of disaster and arrogant in the face of criticism. With increasing unemployment, increasing cuts in social services, increasing armaments production and increasing poverty, workers are right to regard the promises of Thatcher and her team as an insult to human intelligence. The memories of Labourites are as short as their alternative policies for getting society out of the mess it is in.

They attack the problems as if Thatcher caused them. As if unemployment did not double under the last Labour government; as if Labour Ministers were not in the forefront of cutting social services in order to balance the books; as if the last Labour government did not place armaments production as a top priority; as if the rich did not get richer during the period of the last Labour government. Who are these people trying to kid? But now they have an ‘alternative economic policy’ and the story goes that if we give Benn another chance (‘another' because he was in the last Labour government) he will run capitalism in the interests of the working class. This claim is a foolish and cruel con-trick. The next Labour government (if there is one) will not run capitalism; capitalism will run it. The portrait of Benn and Co. as a socialist alternative may attract a few people to the Labour party, it may scare some off, but in the long-run it will be seen as a waste of political energy.

And there they are, standing in the middle between the Wicked Witch and the Bogus Marxist Threat: the Liberal-SDP Alliance. Dead centre, dead honest, in fact they claim to be so innocuous that they might as well actually be dead. There is that nice young David Steel and that dear old Roy Jenkins . . . all terribly nice chaps with whom any self-respecting media hack would enjoy sharing a bottle of claret, but there is just one little thing: What the hell do they stand for? So far they have left the electorate in the dark about this minor aspect of their alliance. Like a well-rehearsed play for which there is not yet a script, the Alliance are selling plenty of tickets, but what will they do when their followers demand to see the performance? Not long ago a successful SDP candidate for a local council in the North East was interviewed on the local radio: “Now that people have voted for you, could you tell us exactly what policies you stand for?" asked the man from the media; “Well, we’ll be deciding our policy later this year and as soon as we have, the electors will be the first to know", replied the man from the media. So, there you have it; vote for the Alliance and ask what you are voting for later. History being made? It’s more like a mystery being made.

On one point the allies are definitely in agreement. Both are one hundred per cent committed to the maintenance of the capitalist social order. No need for a policy statement about that. Both the Liberals (who claim to stand for capitalism) and the SDP (who call themselves ‘democratic Socialists’) accept a way of running society in which goods are only produced if there is a prospect of selling them on the market for a profit. Both are opposed to any challenge to the class ownership and control of the means of wealth production and distribution. In this vital respect the alliance is broader than it thinks, for it includes the Conservative and Labour parties. All of the Lefties with their ‘alternative economic strategies’ (for which read, ‘previously tried and failed Keynesian policies’ are as committed to the buying and selling system as any Liberal or SDPer.

As reported in a previous issue of the Socialist Standard, the SDP has refused a challenge from the SPGB to debate its views in public. Its leaders prefer to state their case from the secure distance of a BBC Any Questions studio rather than face real working class people with real problems arising from a real cause which the SDP will do nothing to remove. As the media continues to persuade us of the moderation and reasonableness of the new messiahs; as David Steel prepares to resume where Lloyd George left off; as political careerists from all parties point the accusing finger at one another and say that everyone is an extremist but themselves; as the word ‘socialism’ is tossed about the political arena like a football which changes shape each time it arrives at another team; as a Gang of Bores awaits its call to do for the working class what has never been done before and what can never be done, it is high time that we, the working class, took a good, hard look at those who want us to follow them, and when we have seen them for what they are we can tell them precisely where to go.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Of Contras, Pros . . . and Socialists (1987)

Editorial from issue 3 of the World Socialist Review

From the inordinate amount of attention being given to the Reagan Administration's double-dealing in the two affairs of arms to Iran and the diversion of funds to the contras, yon would think something really big was happening in US capitalism these days. For Irangate/contragate has become a major media event.

Despite the apparent ferocity of the clashes currently taking place between rival political factions within the capitalist class, from one angle they are actually beneficial to the capitalist class as a whole: they obscure from view the more basic scandal of the division of the world into political entities or nation-states; they deflect attention from the more insidious ongoing misappropriation constituted by the monopoly of the capitalist class of the means and instruments of wealth production.

Media-generated concern over the poor little Reagan Administration's predicament masks (or perpetuates) the working majority's confused identification of its interests with those of the "top ten" per cent of the population making up the owning class. And—every bit as much as the more flamboyant histrionics of Dallas or of Dynasty— this fondling of the rich and the powerful belies a pernicious cult of personality on the part of the media around the world (and one by no means limited to Russia and China).

The World Socialist Movement, for its part, does not find much of an issue in all of the hoopla. Its one and only reason for existence is to disseminate information relating to the functioning and foundations of capitalist society as well as to sow the seeds of socialism. The crises that shake our planet and even threaten the viability of life on it do not spring from the actions of conniving, dishonest politicians—though these latter certainly may help to trigger catastrophes.

The real problem is rather the continuation of the system of producing goods and services for sale on the market (ie, commodities) with a view to profit. The real solution is a socialist organiza­tion of society, the introduction of a worldwide society based on production for use.

So while we as socialists may derive some enjoyment from watching the capitalist class being forced to do its dirty laundry on TV (there is after all no reason why its own propaganda can't occasionally degenerate into farce), we ought not to imitate the reformists and ignore the real issue that we never find presented in the media: the urgency of common ownership.

Short of that, all that is really possible is the replacement of one governing party or regime by another. Socialism, or common ownership of the means of production, will on the contrary only come about through the conscious action of the working class around the world, aimed at replacing the entire system of exploitation, and it is only in helping to bring this about that socialists can ever hope to distinguish themselves from both the witting and the unwitting supporters of capitalism.

—Editorial Committee, WSP (US)

O. J. (1995)

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

Certain combinations of letters from the alphabet, without forming words, convey a curious symbolic significance. Phonetically meaningless letter-clusters like JFK, Plc, CP and PhD have entered our common discourse, turning us each into little Second World War codebreakers. We have only to see a Plc to know that They own more than Us (not to be confused with U.S.) and are probably crooked. JFK invokes tedious murder conspiracies and it is hard to think of a CP or an SWP without expecting a dead Russian to introduce himself to you. U.N. equals impotence, E.R. is for arrogance and GMTV is a password for ignorance.

CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC, closely followed by BBC 1, are in the midst of an obsession about O.J. Guilty or innocent? For a state which murdered over a hundred thousand people with two atomic bombs it is a somewhat belated shock at the news of a murder. Daytime soaps have vanished from US TV as millions tune in to the latest dramas of barking dogs and melting ice-creams which comprise the evidence in the O.J. trial. Never since J.R. was shot have so many Americans been so involved in a matter of such earth-shattering triviality.

The fact that O.J. is rich means that he can afford the best defence lawyers on the market. The fact that he is black means that he needs them badly. How many black workers are waiting on Death Row right now while the world holds its breath to see if O.J. will be O.K.? A Los Angeles Times survey conducted last month found that 65 percent of those polled knew the name of the Judge in the O.J. trial (Ito by name, which is possibly two letters in Korean: a man who looks permanently surprised that he is not a waiter in a fancy restaurant), whereas only 45 percent knew the name of Newt Gingrich, the reptilian Republican who makes Toad Clinton look vaguely sane.

Orwell’s horrible prediction that words would one day be so diminished that nobody would have anything left to say which the state did not want them to say is probably no more than a tax inspector’s fantasy. In fact, far from being dominated by Newspeak or suppressed into pitiful silence, the tendency is to let the chattering millions choke on their own babble. A people prattling about whether O.J. is an S.O.B. is unlikely to notice that a black American is more likely to be in prison than in university.

Babble has reached its nadir with the latest pollutant of the airwaves. Talk Radio UK. (Of course, U.K. is a coded euphemism for an enforced combination of countries; what Tory right-wingers would call a super-state when UK is replaced by EU.) You know' how advertisements for the Sun are shouted by loutish buffoons for whom salesmanship sounds like a kind of threat? Well, Talk Radio UK is like that all day; It is like a philosophy seminar conducted by the Mitchell Brothers from EastEnders, with callers who drone endlessly about O.J. and their sexual secrets (revealed to anyone bored enough to listen).

Given the job (assuming for a few paranoid moments that there is such a job) of ensuring the passivity of the working class there would be two potential strategies. One of them, which we may call the Iranian Solution, would be to torture the life out of anyone suspected of an independent thought. This approach is big in Teheran and Damascus and provides healthy profits for torture equipment manufacturers in Coventry, although it is costly on bullets and wages for the army, screws and secret police. The cheaper way can be thought of as the Talk Radio UK Solution. Let them eat cake; let them talk crap — same principle, different century.

Trying to hold a conversation with a fourteen-year-old about computers is an invitation to a world of alphabetical derangement. It is the nearest experience on a personal level to sitting day after day in the Stock Exchange where language has been reduced to figures, catchphrases and communications where buttons have relieved brains of the need for activity. It is a world of codes written by idiots to convey the rules of idiocy.

Talk Radio UK, the First national commercial radio in Britain, tells the story of a world where reality has become a lost cause. They don’t talk about life, they talk about talking about life. The U.S. legal pundits whose daily reflections about the O.J. case give some poor wretches something to wake up for, are not talking about truth or justice or evidence, but about how these things are being talked about—or, more often, not talked about. Blabbering about blabbering: the pastime of a society in which life is increasingly acted out rather than lived. The irony of O.J.’s limited acting talent which was employed to make profits for a movie called [Naked] Gun is only matched by the recent decision of the rock megastar, Prince, who, going one stage further than turning himself into an initialised rock code (U2, UB40, El7, INXS), is to be known in future by a shapeless squiggle. Surely a future presidential candidate in the making here. 

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Media Distractions (2004)

Editorial from the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

Greasy Pole: Hacking? Who’s hacking? (2011)

The Greasy Pole column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard 

“Sundays won’t be the same again,” whined the Political Editor. Or rather the ex-political editor of the abruptly defunct, paedophilia-hounding, police officer-corrupting, phone-hacking, record-circulating News Of The World. No more blearily turning the pages for a weekly dose of insight into the chaotic privacy of a select few handily grouped under the shield of celebrity. No more envious excursions into a growingly denser jungle where the more luxurious the undergrowth the larger the financial profit. Never the same again? Are there any who would be ungrateful for such a small mercy? Even accepting that it came swaddled in breathtaking hypocrisy?

 

BSkyB

 The earlier reaction to Rupert Murdoch ending the News Of The World was that it was the tycoon’s punitive response to the exposure of the paper’s habitual intrusion into the private lives of anyone liable to be regarded as newsworthy through hacking into their telephones. However within an hour or so a more acceptable explanation came onto the scene. For some years Murdoch’s News International had been manoeuvring to take over the 61 percent of shares it does not hold in BSkyB, which is estimated to yield them some £1 billion profit during the next financial year. It seemed like good balance-sheet sense to help this process by surrendering the News Of The World’s comparatively modest £12 million annual profit – apart from the prospect of the tighter binding of Murdoch’s relationship with the Tory and Labour leaderships, with all that promises in terms of future concessions for his media machine. It is a long time since political leaders have operated with no regard for the ambitions of that fearsome magnate. A long time since a Prime Minister has omitted to invite Murdoch and his underlings to one of those regularly sickening ventures intro terrified sycophancy among the lawns and terraces of Chequers. And, until the events of recent weeks, it was promising to be a long time before that situation changed. 

 

Gotcha

In essence it was a simple strategy. The party leadership and their advisers paid heed to the prejudices, fears and misconceptions which were stimulated by, and advantageous to, the Murdoch operation and calculated that these could be applied to their electoral advantage. In other words, the Murdoch empire could win elections – a theory which might be said to have fitted in with events in this way:

• 1969 Murdoch buys the News Of The World and the Sun, revamped from the successor to the old Daily Herald. 
• 1979 The Tories under Margaret Thatcher and supported by the Sun win the general election against an exhausted and demoralised Labour Party.
• 1981 Thatcher’s government supports Murdoch’s recently formed News Corporation bid to buy the Times and the Sunday Times – with the predictable guarantees of “editorial independence”.
• 1983 After surviving a number of problems during their early days in power the Tories win an emphatic majority, helped by patriotic hysteria over the Falklands war, marked by the full-page headline in the Sun screaming GOTCHA! over the sinking of the Belgrano. 
• 1987 Another Tory election win, with a majority reduced probably in reaction to Thatcher’s impending replacement by John Major
• 1992 John Major, struggling against the Eurosceptics “bastards” in his party, notches up an unexpected election victory. The Sun helps him on his way by devoting its front page to a request that in the event of Neil Kinnock’s Labour winning “…will the last person to leave Britain…turn out the lights”. Then crows that “It was the Sun wot won it.”
• 1997 With the Tories descending into a confusion of sleaze, economic chaos and scandal Murdoch joins forces with his persistently loyal friend Tony Blair and his party and Labour win the election in a landslide. 
• 2010 After Murdoch defects to support the Tories, Gordon Brown’s Labour Party loses the election, replaced by a fractious Coalition.
• 2011 As the hacking scandal breaks into the open previous assumptions about electoral alliances, governmental stability – and the influence of the Murdoch clan – need to be re-assessed. 

 

Profit

 That ex-Political Editor told us why he grieved at the closing of the News Of The World: “Villains, paedophiles and corrupt politicians will be able to sleep more soundly now that the greatest investigative newspaper on Earth has gone.” He did not mention that such newspapers work so devotedly to unearth their scoops in the cause of higher sales, advertising revenue and investment – or that in that process a significant clutch of criminals and corrupt politicians are enabled to stay active. One investor in News Corporation, the Church of England, held £4 million worth of shares overseen by a body incongruously known as the Ethical Investment Advisory Group which described the News Of The World’s hacking campaign as “utterly reprehensible and unethical”. Compared to that, and in the present crisis in the industry, the advice of Murdoch’s favourite son James, chairman of News International, to the 2009 Edinburgh Television Festival, that “the only guarantee of independence is profit” reads as more illuminating and useful – if menacing. Among the terrified hysteria of Westminster, the panic of laggardly journalists and manipulatory police officers, the figures – an expectation of £135 million a year circulation revenue, £38 million advertising income, and, if the bid for BSkyB succeeded there would be an additional £1.6 billion a year – carried more weight than the exotically titled, smugly gambling excuses of the clerics. The simple fact is that what we know as the media, in all its forms, is no different in its need to conform to the rules and demands of a commodity society. Unavoidably, politicians saw it as a priority to foster such ambitions in the assumption that come the next election it would yield a rich harvest of votes. The sudden flooding of these facts into what is known as ‘the public domain’ provoked widespread outrage. Another example of the urgency for the ‘public’ to react in a proper, reparative manner.

Ivan

The Moral Craze (1998)

From the June 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

A miserable moral anxiety is in the air. The self-righteous are on the march. Wrong. Right. Good. Evil. Simplistic moral certainties blast from the megaphones of the media, as the high priests of Capital cast their judgements upon everything but the lousy system of class exploitation that keeps the vicars, the rabbis, the mullahs and assorted other bullies in business.

From presidential blow jobs to ex-murderers signing book deals, an obsession with the trivia of individual transgressions serves as a soap opera distraction from the pervasive atrocities of the system. How much easier it is to incite crowds of under-educated, aimless, embittered kids to riot in Bristol because a sex offender released from prison is sitting in a police cell thinking deranged thoughts than to attend to the malignant rationality of a social system which condemns millions of children to the fatal abuse of starving in a world of plenty.

We know what the Moors’ murderers did. We know where they are. We know that Evil is getting its due reward. And how easy it is to sit in perpetual anger, demonising their villainy. We are told their names and their crimes are repeated with regularity in a frenzy of tabloid outrage, as if these were the sole disrupters of an otherwise tranquil society. We do not see published the names of those decision-makers in the World Bank whose determination to cut aid here and finance dictators there has led to millions dwelling in poverty and perishing needlessly. There are no scowling mugshots of those men in suits from the IMF who enrich themselves upon the corpses of those who cannot be milked for profit. Where are the lurid tabloid accounts of the sordid merchants of death who jet from nation to nation attending arms fairs, exchanging millions of dollars for the latest weapons of murder, the most sophisticated torture equipment, the means of creating hell on earth? For such callous inhumanity they will be medalled, given knighthoods, made richer than the most violent of gangsters could hope to become. It is a highly selective morality that capitalism embraces.

Jack Straw, the man who shopped his own son to the police for possessing dope, appears in front of every camera that will recognise him. He is in a denouncing mood. He has been taking lessons from Michael Howard. He is Disgusted of New Labour, ready to write to his MP and demand that something is done when it occurs to him–I am an MP, so I can pursue my philistine rage in the name of justice. So the tabloid rags, with their naked models and naked lies, provide space for the Straw man to denounce the child killer who was paid money for helping to write a book about what, as a deranged child, had made her kill. Thatcher demands $25,000 a time to appear before worshipping Americans with her kiss-and-tell Falklands memories. The murdered conscript crew of the Belgrano is conveniently unmentioned either by Thatcher or the tabloid bog rolls. But Straw is not denouncing Thatcher. Neither is Blair. They are out to pick on an old woman who has written a book regretting that she had once committed a hideous offence. Is it the money that they begrudge her? Or the fact that she has dared to confuse the simplicity of witch-hunting by expressing remorse?

Sickening hypocrisy

How convenient these moral distractions are for those with an indefensible system to sustain. So, Robin Cook insists that he did not know–or forgot–or wasn’t as bad as the Tories had been if he did indeed know–that arms were being sold to mercenaries in Sierra Leone, even though international law forbade it. Call in the broadsheet detectives who will piece by piece, in the manner of a bad Agatha Christie novel, seek to unravel the story. There is a rather bigger story they will ignore, of course. Who are the regimes to which Mr Cook is quite happy and legally free to sell weapons of mass destruction? When last did the Foreign Office publish a list of those companies in Britain which make profits from selling torture equipment to dictators? And how big are those profits? And what precisely has happened to those upon whom they have been used? Can we expect a statement about that, Mr Cook? Perhaps the tortured and the bombed should be informed that these

British weapons have been sold in the name of an “ethical foreign policy”. A further twist of the knife. But Cook can rest easy in his bed, for the journalists are much more concerned about who he shares it with than how many lives he helps to ruin as head of one of the biggest arms-exporting nations in the world. Now, that’s what the public need to know: Was Robin Cook unfaithful to his wife? Will he be unfaithful to his new wife? And was Bill Clinton the innocent victim of a crazed young girl’s fantasy or was she the victim of a dirty old man’s fantasy? And what about OJ Simpson–and George Michael–and Michael Jackson–and on and on until a frenzy or moral anxiety scares everyone into trusting no-one, particularly themselves. Because when the majority are frightened and unconfident they trust the nearest bully who will tell them that his mob can keep the streets safe.

Law and Order.

We have always known that Labour and Tories support the same system. The current fashion for shocked or amused realisation that Blair is to Major what Major was to Blair is no postmodern irony–just what socialists have been saying for decades. But can even the most hardened of scientific socialists be permitted just the merest morsel of surprise at the ease with which New Labour has taken to its very heart–or, more probably, its Christian soul–the indecently unforgiving, excessively punitive, uncouthly scapegoating rhetoric which seeks to monopolise virtue as a state asset while condoning every crime of capitalism as if it has nothing at all to do with them? The fine-tuned skills of sickening hypocrisy have exceeded all negative expectations.

The worst of this obsession with personal moral transgressions is its failure to see anti-social behaviour as anything but inner weakness: an inherent flaw. So the fault must be purged–isolated–tormented–anything but understood. And this is the right way for capitalism to respond. Because the alternative would be to go beyond the tabloid simplicities of crime and punishment and seek the cause of what makes killers kill and sex offenders offend and muggers mug. There is the Saudi Arabian response–of which New Labour’s toughness is a cowardly imitation–which refuses to ask questions. And if you cut off the hands of enough shoplifters and whip enough adulterers it will not be too long before the message is driven home and only the most persistent offenders need to be tortured, killed or incarcerated. Elegantly simple. The more complicated alternative of seeking causes is not that difficult. Most child sex abusers were themselves victims of child sex abuse. Most muggers are from families that are poor and uneducated rather than affluent and privileged. Many rapists have immersed themselves in commercially packaged porn, appealing to their disempowered craving for respect and power, before they rape women. In short, the behaviour of those we least like arises from specific social relationships. We cannot ignore or approve of the relationships and then indulge in orgies of moral indignation because they produce inevitable social effects.

Steve Coleman

Mechanical Loyalty. (1911)

From the June 1911 issue of the Socialist Standard

An English nobleman once tried to train a mule to box scientifically with its hind hoofs. The verdict was “Death from very natural causes."

When the capitalists created a cheap gutter Press they little suspected it would contribute to their undoing. Yet the rags continually, if unconsciously, deal murderous blows at the system they were intended to strengthen.

Just an instance:

That the Queen rehearses her train-bearers may be good reading, but it scarcely conduces to popular acceptance of her inherent grace. Snapshots of the State horses being inured to cheering, firing, and flag-waving seems calculated to take the gilt off the ginger-bread—or even off the State coach.

The people should be given to understand that all things royal are spontaneously dignified. Else what price a circus parade?

But the cruellest Press photos were those of the elephants learning to kneel, the dromedary and pony learning to bow. Not so would the show have been given away in the past. Our forefathers believed that the very animals recognised and did homage to anointed majesty.

Coronation—hungry children—Church and armed forces—full pubs.—full gaols. What a hotch-potch! Also enthusiastic obeisance from well-trained quadrupeds and well-drilled humans.

And the royal nonentities will carry on as if they swallowed it all. Poor henpecked George will try not to look thirsty, while his grim-faced consort conveniently forgets that she married him after his brother (her first betrothed) died, selling her body for a crown as surely as some of her less fortunate sisters sell theirs for five shillings.

A. Hoskyns

Royal Labour Power (1982)

From the June 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

We had better brace ourselves. For, no sooner has one tidal wave of media effluent—the inevitable consequences of the recent royal junketings—broken over our battered heads than another gathers pace and roars menacingly towards us. And the occasion of this impending deluge? No; not, as we might reasonably have supposed, the bloody fiasco taking place in the South Atlantic. And most certainly it is not the mounting misery and insult visited upon the unemployed, the homeless, and the dispossessed. It is, as you will have guessed, the threatened arrival of yet another parasite to swell the ranks of those many others that infest the corporate body of the working class.

Our royal masters are spawning—an activity which, arguably, is the nearest they’ll ever get to hard work in their pampered lifetimes. And even though the carefully orchestrated and sycophantic public celebration of the event may stick in our throats, the media intends to make certain that we are unable to escape their overblown attentions without a struggle. They will thrust their unctuous products at us from all quarters and by every conceivable means short of tying us to our beds and ramming them down our constricting throats with a broom handle. No matter if, as some of us must, we retch and heave on their repulsive diet: the cringing lackeys of press and broadcasting will have done their duty by queen, country and their capitalist masters. And all this on behalf of a grossly over-privileged individual who, although it will probably get no nearer its mother's milk than its royal grandmother does a pint of keg fizz and a bacon sandwich, will nevertheless in due course suck the rest of us dry.

Meanwhile we have no need to look a million miles from the royal nursery in order to remind ourselves that many thousands of other unsuspecting young lives are about to begin. It is almost rhetorical to ask ourselves what life—if it is permitted to continue—holds in store for them. One thing is eminently predictable: if we exclude the ten per cent of the capitalist class, who will have no need to work, then at best they will find themselves in the market place trying to sell their labour and brain power to the highest bidder. (At worst—and this hardly needs to be spelt out—for millions more of them life will be nasty, brutish and short.) And should these same workers have the misfortune to fall prey to, say, serious chronic illness, they will find themselves reduced to social security handouts and all the degradation that this entails.

[The Princess] of Wales—no less—finds herself, for a short hour or so, obliged to join the labouring classes? Well, to begin with, there has to be an avalanche of gaudy rubbish remarkable only for the fact that some workers seem ready actually to spend their money on it. The junk on offer will range over coffee-table glossies and inscribed glassware to the screen-printed tea-towels, decorated chamberpots, mugs, plates and so on with which the sharks who sell them patronize the poor. In short, it will add up to just another vulgar rip-off which should net its unprincipled perpetrators, most of whom wouldn’t be seen dead with their own products, a huge fortune. (As if they weren’t making enough out of the Pope’s visit.)

Then there’ll be those banner headlines: "IT'S A BOY!”, perhaps, or “THAT SLY SMILE: BUT IT’S
DADDY'S EARS”: or “OOPS-A-DAISY” accompanied by a telephoto’d picture of Pater anointing his offspring with vintage port. Of course, we could be in for a surprise: ‘THE DAY GREAT GRANDMAMMA GAVE IT THE WRONG BOTTLE’’ across four columns of The Times.

However the truth is that were the royal infant to parade, on its backside, a birth mark in the form of the Holy Grail it would make not a ha'p’orth of difference to the situation as it affects the working class. A tick is a tick and, battened onto the back of a sheep, it must inflate itself with the blood of its host. And herein lies the heart of the matter. The ruling class, in all its guises, is at the same time a dependent class. Without the broad acquiescence-benevolent or grudging—of the working class it could not survive. In order that workers may the more effectively be exploited the masters must be able to rely on the collaboration, at the point of production and elsewhere, of those same workers. One way by which they secure this collaboration is through the assiduous promotion of the mystique of royalty, or the presidency, or some other military overlordship, or whatever. Other symbols of class rule include the church, with its crass mumbo-jumbo, the military, with its bombast, the Palace of Westminster, with its traditional idiocies, and the law, with all its vicious hocus-pocus. And it should never be forgotten that our masters have had plenty of practice in their art, with the accumulated experience of hundreds of years of capitalism to call upon.

Another Machiavellian ruse in the armoury of the ruling class is to divide us against each other. With the utmost skill and perseverance, and with the enthusiastic cooperation of the media, our masters have succeeded in persuading us that we are, each and every one of us, through our “natures”, motivated solely by self-interest; that class is a myth; that our rulers are where they are through their own effort and initiative; and that the wealthy deserve “their” wealth. Indeed — or so they keep telling us — where would the rest of us be without their power to invest? (They also happen to believe that they were born to rule, although they would not nowadays advance this theory in public.)

As a class the workers have accepted this fatalistic view of society without serious question. Indeed, were this not the case the existing system of worldwide capitalism could not survive. For fundamentally to question the existing order is effectively to expose it and challenge it. A reasoned understanding, on the part of the working class, of the system which alone must take responsibility for ninety-nine per cent of human misery would effectively see off that handful of grasping thieves who, for so long, have held us in thrall. Such an outcome would necessarily place in their proper perspective those princes, prelates, military bully-boys and the like who have been permitted to be adorned, adored, and elevated to such ridiculous heights. Only through a common understanding shall the workers find the strength to sack the class who rule over them. Capitalism’s cover, blown many years ago by Karl Marx, would at last be blown by the working class itself—the same class that that courageous thinker and revolutionary fought so hard to enlighten in his own times

Richard Cooper

Another Victim of Capitalism (1997)

TV Review from the October 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Among all the protracted TV coverage devoted to the death of Princess Diana. (BBC and ITV all day. every day) several important questions remain unanswered. Not just why she should have received countless hours of TV airtime devoted to her work with the poor and needy when millions across Britain— who have done just as much and rather more besides— never get mentioned and probably never will get mentioned.

And not necessarily the type of questions that have been concerning the media either—like whether Dodi Fayed’s bodyguard was drunk, what speed the car was going at when it crashed or whether MI6 are competent enough to kill renegade princesses. No, there are other questions, at least as relevant as any of these, that spring directly to the fore of the inquisitive mind.

One of the most obvious is this. Which person in modern human history has received the most attention from, and been the subject of more media predictions by astrologers, numerologists, spiritualists, soothsayers and other crystal ball gazers, than Princess Diana? And furthermore, why did not a single one of these professional fraudsters prophesy Diana’s fatal accident? And just as bizarrely, why has no-one apparently noticed this? The British media, increasingly including the TV media, feeds the working class a meaty daily diet of tricksters and charlatans who claim to have the future in their hands. And yet when further incontrovertible evidence emerges of their complete inability to do what they claim they can, we don’t hear a peep from their media pimps. How odd.

Shooting from the hip

More questions, and of greater import still. Who or what really killed Diana? Was it the press? Or, as Andrew Neil and others have seemingly implied, the public who actually watched the news and bought the papers? Frankly, neither of these explanations is truly plausible. The media could hardly be described as sole agents in her death as they were merely responding to the competitive impulses engendered by circulation wars and the market (as indeed were the paparazzi). But in that case, were not the buying and watching public themselves to blame?

This idea is even less plausible.There has not been a single UK national newspaper or TV channel which has not pursued Diana at some time or another to sell papers or attract viewers and advertising and thus make more profit. In that situation, where is the choice for those who want genuine news? Wherever people looked, there she was on the most ‘‘serious’’ of TV channels and newspapers commonly available.

Even if it can be argued that the bulk of the working class have tended to gravitate towards those sectors of the media offering the more sensationalist type of coverage of the royal family it is risible to claim that the newspapers were only providing what the "real culprits’’—the general public—wanted. Firstly, this totally ignores the effect the media has in determining what is on offer to the public and the undercurrent of bias and manipulation with which they steer the public towards certain ways of thinking and acting. Secondly, it is little more than pathetic to suggest that the media was just bowing to "popular demand" as if they—or any rational person—think that majority opinion at any one moment in time and on any issue in today’s society must be followed to the letter.

Given the spurious and hopelessly distorted levels of democracy currently in existence in countries like Britain, majority opinion at any time can be taken to be just that and no more because whatever majority opinion exists on a subject is refracted through a distorting prism called the economy where there is no democracy at all. The resulting picture is often mangled and disfigured beyond recognition as a result. It would be ludicrous to take an opinion and defend it on all grounds simply because it is currently that of a majority. The media have certainly not done so in the past so why use this excuse now?

Taking some examples, if the majority of people had been calling for Diana’s imprisonment or worse on grounds of treason would that have been okay and would the media have led the charge simply on the grounds of giving the public what it wanted? Extending this logic further, if the majority of the population was overtly racist would we all have had to start going round killing black people and would the media have campaigned for the setting up of concentration camps? Hitler had majority constitutional backing at one key point in Germany’s history—was that all right too? Of course not, and the media must know it. Democracy is a qualitative not just a crudely quantitative phenomenon.The bottom line is that if you know something is wrong you argue and fight against it, not pander to the worst sort of prejudices going. What the media have been doing is merely using the public to divert attention from their own alleged complicity in the whole affair.

Which brings us back to what really did for the "people’s princess". Avoiding the trap of scapegoating, it was clearly the pressures and conflicts brought about by present-day society itself, not just isolated parts of it. At root we live in a money and status-obsessed society which elevated the wretched girl to the ridiculous and fantastical heights of being a royal princess, stuffed her mind full of some of the most ridiculous notions and "rules" imaginable until she became possibly the world’s most visible neurotic, and it was this same hierarchical and profit- hungry society which hunted her to death in the pursuit of the great god Mammon.

Socialists are unremittingly hostile to hierarchy and privilege (far more so of course than Diana herself— despite the claims of Trevor McDonald and his like) but that does not mean we have no sympathy at all for those outside the working class who are also sometimes victims of a mad. uncontrollable system. For let there be no mistake. Diana the Princess of Wales was not merely killed by “the media", the "paparazzi" or the amorphous "general public". Diana, in truth, was created by capitalism and then killed by it too. But what are the chances of a week's constant TV discussion of that?

Dave Perrin

Editorial: Breaking the ice (1989)

Editorial from the January 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Looking back over 1988 and forward to the New Year, how are we to understand what has happened and what is in prospect for us over the next twelve months? We could do worse than to consider, for what it had to tell us about this society and what is possible for the human race, the matter of the three trapped whales. As they floundered miserably in the holes cut for them in the Arctic ice, the response to their plight was unintentionally instructive.

This was a story with what editors (or so we are told) like to call a human angle. There were the whales, one of them a baby, under sentence of death unless something could be done to cut a way for them out into the ocean. And the world rallied to their defence, while the international media headed out into the ice and each day pitifully frozen hacks sent their heart-wrenching stories of the heroic efforts to save these ugly creatures.

In all the excitement, the barriers of the Cold War melted a little more, with the Russians generously sending their ice-cutters to the rescue. When the whales were eventually free, leaving the baby dead behind them as they swam out into the ocean, the media did their best to see that there was hardly a dry eye across the surface of the earth.

This was, we were told, a co-operative blow struck in the cause of world conservation (never mind that in other parts of the world the rain forests continued to fall under the axe, the nuclear power plants still spewed out their deadly residues into the sea, rivers ran foul with pollution and masses of wild life perished under clouds of agricultural chemicals). When life is at stake, cost is of no account; the nastier things in life like nuclear weapons, poverty and starvation are really the tip of an iceberg which beneath the surface is not deadly and destructive but caring, benign and reassuring to the social mass.

Well, this sounded very nice except that saving two whales had very little effect on this thing called "conservation". It was little more than a publicity orgy. The hacks endured their terrible suffering because their reports helped to sell newspapers and capture viewers in competition with rivals. And selling is of prime concern to this society; indeed it is the motivation for production and distribution. The media give the same kind of attention when it is a case of some grisly crime; if someone had been murdered and raped out in the ice they would all have been there, clutching their microphones, pounding their typewriters, racing to get out the first paperback about it.

And how do we reconcile this sudden concern for life with other events which were happening at the same time? With the government's battle with the nurses over their pay. although they knew that they were fighting not just over wages but over the lives of the people in the nurses' care. There is no doubt — the medical profession have been saying so for some time — that people have died because there has not been enough money available for their treatment. How do we reconcile it with the reshuffling and re-naming of the benefits for unemployed workers, and for others in similar desperate need, with the effect of sinking them even lower into poverty and making their survival even more difficult?

What of the workers thrown out of their jobs because their employment was no longer profitable? In December, soon after the rescue of the whales, the decision was taken to close the shipyards in Sunderland. There had been attempts to find a buyer for the yards but these came to nothing because there was no prospect of profitable production and unless profit is made or promised there is no production. As a result 2000 workers and their families will subside deeper into the cold waters of severe deprivation. Meanwhile, in booming London a leading merchant bank — Morgan Grenfell — plans to close almost all its share dealing operations in the capital, which means giving the sack to 450 staff. The bank was not able to weather the storm of the falling Stock Market and during 1988 they lost over £20 million.

So what happens to that social virtue, that whale-saving concern, which we are told lurks beneath the surface, beneath the obvious cruelty and deprivation of capitalism? Why does it never come to the top, to break us free from problems like war, class conflict, poverty, accidents and diseases which need not happen? Capitalism's essential nature, as a system in which the means of life are monopolised by a minority, lies like a vast sheet of ice over all efforts, no matter how sincere or well-motivated, to organise our affairs in a caring, co-operative, humane way. The reality of this is so awful that it is assumed we need periodic distractions to divert our attention from it — like royal weddings and births, like the sexual eccentricities of the ruling class, like the emotional problems of media stars, like battling to save the lives of a couple of stranded whales.

If that incident proved anything it was that this social system is basically inadequate and can never improve on that. There is a way out which does need the world’s people to think and work together, to bring about a social change which will set them all free.