Editorial: Race prejudice is a barrier to Socialism (1963)

Editorial from the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Those who said that the last war was fought, among other things, for racial equality, are having to eat their words fast. Twenty years after the Warsaw Ghetto, we still see the ugly manifestations of racial intolerance and strife in many parts of the world.

Witness Birmingham, Alabama, scene of the latest battle in the struggle over desegregation, where more than nine hundred Negroes are arrested at one demonstration and Ku-Klux Klan bomb outrages wreck an agreement a few hours after it has been readied. Then go further North to Washington D.C., where the situation has produced the Black Moslem Movement, a bitterly anti-white. anti-Jewish organisation, aiming at the establishment of separate Negro States in the U.S.

Over in South Africa, racial oppression is sharpened by fresh laws giving sweeping powers of detention to the police, and to open your mouth too much in public is to invite a charge of treason and perhaps the death penalty. In another part of this unhappy continent, Nairobi based British troops riot in retaliation for the murder of one of their number.

Here at home, Chinese shops are smashed at St. Helens, Lancs, and there is the usual resentment against coloured bus workers—this time at Bristol. It is only a few months since the Colin Jordan affair and the tins of “Jew Killers.”

Racial prejudice and antagonism are with us all the time, but it is only now and then that they flare into headline news. Mostly they smoulder sullenly beneath publicity level, but ready to be sparked off. perhaps by some comparatively minor incident, into really nasty outbreaks of violence like the Notting Hill affairs a few years ago.

Then it is that ignorance and bigotry come fully into their own as hysterical fanatics hurl abuse and insults at coloured and other minorities. Scapegoats have now been found to blame for workers problems, it being conveniently forgotten that the problems existed long before the scapegoats ever appeared. Passions are inflamed and crime, one of the everyday hazards of private property society, now takes on a racial—almost political—significance.

In the welter of confusion it is not surprising that to many workers, race has become synonymous with nationality. It is a notion which the capitalist press has encouraged from time to time. During the last war, for instance, it was the policy of one paper at least to refer frequently to the “German Race” and to try and prove its essentially warlike nature. “Get back to your own country” is a remark often heard, and there was even one English father who refused his son permission to marry because the girl came from Wales, and who wanted frontiers established between the two countries.

Probably many people thought this quite ludicrous at the lime, yet it is really no more so than the whole notion of nationality which most workers support in a world made smaller almost daily by the advance of communications. It is the same notion which incidentally produced two opposing candidates in one ward in the recent municipal elections at Bradford, both standing for “Pakistani Interests.”

Socialists have always opposed racialist theories. There is no scientific evidence that one group is innately superior to another, and in fact it would be difficult to find a “pure” race in the world today, even if scientists could agree on a definition of the term. And among the capitalist class, too, there is a growing recognition that discrimination is decidedly damaging to their commercial interests. It was the “Business Community” in Birmingham, Alabama, which sought agreement with Martin Luther King.

While workers hold such ideas, there is the added danger that they will lend a ready ear to potential dictators, and that even today’s limited political democracy will suffer. But, above all, racialism is a barrier to the growth of Socialist knowledge and the recognition that the division between capitalist and worker is the only one which really matters. The interest of all workers everywhere is the same—the abolition of capitalism and its replacement by Socialism. Until they get this vital fact clear, they will stay in the mess that they are in today.

World View: The Blind Lead the Blind (1995)

From the December 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Impoverished and oppressed

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

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

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

John Bissett

News in Review: Summerskill speaks (1965)

The News in Review column from the April 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Summerskill speaks

The indignation of Lady Summerskill was on public view recently when on television she accused the Tate Gallery of pandering to a "pseudo intellectual snobbery” when it paid £60,000 for a painting by Picasso which she claimed was “ quite meaningless.” The money, she claimed, would have been much better spent on a hospital or a new operating theatre.

We don’t doubt that Lady Summerskill sincerely feels that she has lined up her social priorities in the right order, but then choices of this kind don’t really have to be made. There is no reason why either art or hospitals should carry a price tag at all. Her indignation is diminished by the fact that she herself accepts the phoney economic limitations that Capitalism places on the provision of both these necessary facilities.

30 years after

The recent Royal visit to Ethiopia, which was front page news in the British Press for a few days, carried the mind back vividly, exactly 30 years, to the days when Abyssinia filled not only British but world newspapers. This was in 1935, when Italy launched its brutal war of conquest against this strange survival from the ancient world. The news of bombing raids and poison-gas coming over the radio, provided a sickening curtain-raiser for the world-wide tragedy that was to follow.

For a year or more Abyssinia was the centre of passionate political debate, and the subject that dominated all street-corner meetings. It was the rallying point for the “Popular Fronters’’ until the Spanish Civil War pushed it back into the shadows. One can also recall the mass of misinformation, about Abyssinia, that poured from Communist and Fascist platforms alike—from speakers who one suspected, had only just heard of the place. Perhaps the crowning irony was the spectacle of the Emperor Haile Selassie, autocrat, with a system of government that made the late Tzar look like a revolutionary, becoming the idol of the Left and a champion of Liberty.

Can it be only 30 years since these events took place? The face of Africa has changed so rapidly in the last generation, that it is difficult to realise that Abyssinia was once the only independent state left in Africa, after the great European powers had carved up the continent. Mountainous and land locked, nobody particularly wanted it but Italy, desperate for glory to impress its proletariat, and for land to dump its surplus production.

Today Africa is covered with newly independent States, and it is those which are still under European control that make news. Capitalism is advancing, behind the rash of new flags, smashing tribal economics in its path, and producing the pattern of life so familiar to us. Ethiopia, with Italy’s old colony of Eritrea thrown in to give it a sea coast, has emerged as a kind of centre for the Pan-African movement, with Addis Ababa as an African Geneva.

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that the new African leaders, loud in their condemnation of Imperialism, are prepared to accept “ His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of Judah,” as one of themselves.

Wilson's chat

It was on the evening of 24th. February last that Mr. Harold Wilson, his silver hair carefully flattened into place, spoke to us all on television.

First, there was the little joke about Madame Tussauds, to prove that the Prime Minister is human. Then the smile, faint though it had been, vanished and Wilson piled into us.

We need, he said, a revolution (how many other politicians have said that, without actually meaning a revolution, nor perhaps even realising the import of the word?) in industrial techniques and national attitudes.

No more of the attitude that “what was good enough for grandfather is good enough for me.” No more “strikes arising from some real or imagined grievance."

No more “arguments about which of two men shall bore a hole in a sheet of metal... when "—and here Mr. Wilson's eye was level, his voice threatening— “waiting in the wings there are automative hole borers whose designers have not programmed them to argue about demarcation disputes."

The Tories watched and studied this broadcast very carefully. If the Prime Minister had said a word out of place, if he had been in the slightest bit “controversial," the Opposition would have claimed the right to reply.

But Mr. Wilson cut the ground from under their feet. The Conservatives could find nothing in his broadcast to argue with. The reason for this is plain.

No employer, no Tory, would disagree with the Wilson strictures on strikes, industrial disputes, —clock watching—even the sideswipe at expense account lunches. Indeed, some of them probably realised that Wilson attacked strikers much more effectively than the tweedy, remote fourteenth Earl could ever hope to.

In fact, Wilson ignored the minor differences between his party and the Conservatives and concentrated upon their grounds of fundamental agreement—upon their united support of the interests of the British capitalist class.

It is true that the broadcast gave the Tories one cause for concern. Wilson assiduously engaged himself that evening in building up the image of himself as what they call a national leader and therefore was, perhaps, winning votes from those workers who like to have a Big Brother at the head of their master class.

This is an apt comment on the standing of the Labour Party today. They have come a long way since the times when they professed to stand for the interests of the working class and in Harold Wilson they have found the man to bring them to the inevitable end of their journey. For now they are openly a national party of British capitalism, trying to boost British technology, British exports, British influence with no more nonsense about the class struggle.

Wilson himself made the point when he went for “ ... men pinching a few minutes here, an hour there ..." The significance of this is that men can only “pinch” time from their employer because they have already sold it to him—because they have sold to him their working ability, measured in minutes and hours.

Into Europe?

Anyone who has his nose to the ground cannot have failed recently to detect a familiar scent.

The British capitalist class is once more showing interest in joining the European Common Market.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, addressing the Young Conservatives last February, spoke of cementing “an agreement with Europe . . . economic and political and in due course it will cover security..."

Mr. Wilson, while outwardly he cannot so quickly discard his anti-European hat, is showing signs that he is attracted by its opposite. If he decides to wear this particular hat there will be, of course, no heartburning as a result of yet another abandonment of what were once presented as inviolable principles.

Foreign Secretary Mr. Michael Stewart has recently said that Europe should be "... an equal and influential member of the Atlantic partnership."

These friendly noises could mean that the British capitalist class are once more seeking other ways out of their immediate difficulties than national and Commonwealth ones. In this, of course, their hopes are illusory; the Common Market has not solved the economic problems of its members.

If Britain does try again to join Europe, there will follow the old battle between those interests (agriculture, for example) which see their economic fortunes safest in a massive tariff wall against foreign competition and those (motor cars, for example) whose mouths water at the prospect of penetrating the European market on tariff terms equal to the German and French industries.

Then there is the brooding figure of de Gaulle, who has fashioned French policy on the resolve to build a Europe independent, as far as it can be, of American influence, with France as the dominant power. 

This policy has no place, at present, for powerful competition from Britain. Here, once more, will probably be the biggest stumbling block to any British attempt to sign the Rome Treaty.

If Britain should sign, nobody should be deluded about the motives for it. An attempt to join the Common Market will doubtless be heralded by numerous politicians as a step towards human unity and the brotherhood of man.

When we have discarded this frill of lies, we shall see that a revival of interest in Europe is due, as The Economist put it, to ". . . realities, not sentiments . . . powerful pressures . . ."

They might also have added that the realities and the pressures are those of the balance sheet. The British capitalist class will try to get into Europe only if they are convinced that their general interests, in terms of profit making and maintaining, are safer that way.

Whether they are right or wrong in such assessments is beside the point. What is very much to the point, however, is that the people who make the profits, and who are exploited and degraded in the process—the working class—should for once not be misled by the frills and should face the realities.

Malcolm X

According to his autobiography, Malcolm X expected to die violently, but probably most people expected that, if this happened, it would be by the hand of a white man.

The assassination provoked an outburst of hysteria and apprehension—even regret from people who were only recently denouncing the doctrines which Malcolm X had expounded.

The murdered man moved in a world of violence. His mother, he said, was conceived after a white man had raped his grandmother. His father was also murdered, his skull smashed in and his body flung under the wheels of a street car.

It was only after the seemingly inevitable career of crime and drug addiction that Malcolm X became interested in the Black Muslims—an event which, he wrote, gave him “a little feeling of self-respect."

He soon became prominent in the movement, attracting a lot of publicity with his teachings that the Negro should be strong, disciplined and ready to answer violence with violence. A few months ago he came to the Oxford Union to defend his own interpretation of Barry Goldwater's famous remarks on extremism.

It is perhaps surprising that there was not a Malcolm X before. The oppressions and indignities to which the American Negro are subjected are so extreme that it was predictable they should develop their own, counter-extremist, organisation.

If history is any guide, it was also predictable that this organisation should split, and that the struggle between the two factions (the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s Organisation of Afro-American Unity) should be as bitter and as ruthless as that against their common adversary.

We have seen this before. We have seen it in Cyprus and in Algeria and many, many times before that we saw it in Ireland, in the days when Michael Collins was shot down on the far South road from Skibbereen to Cork.

In many ways, the United Slates today is a cauldron of savagery and hatred. In an ugly situation, the Negroes themselves offer scant hope. The summit of their ambition is in fact to be exploited on equal terms with the white wage slaves who now stand just a little above them on the social scale.

There is no reason to believe that, if the Negroes got the vote, and won full civil fights in the United States, they would use their new opportunities to end the social system which degrades workers of all colours all over the world.

The Negroes are desperate, and in their desperation they have turned to organisations which sometimes are little better than a black Ku-Klux-Klan. They show little interest in the fact that race prejudice is only one part of the monstrous wall of ignorance which shields and supports the oppressive capitalist system.

As long as this continues, there will be small comfort in the American future. The shots which killed Malcolm X signalled that the Negro movement in the United States has served some sort of apprenticeship, and is now ready to go out into the world and shed blood in earnest

Between the Lines: Beyond the hype (1993)

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

Beyond the hype

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

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

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

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

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

Who's being screwed?

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

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

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

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

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: Malcolm X (2015)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

According to his autobiography, Malcolm X expected to die violently, but probably most people expected that, if this happened, it would be by the hand of a white man.

The assassination provoked an outburst of hysteria and apprehension—even regret from people who were only recently denouncing the doctrines which Malcolm X had expounded.

The murdered man moved in a world of violence. His mother, he said, was conceived after a white man had raped his grandmother. His father was also murdered, his skull smashed in and his body flung under the wheels of a street car.

It was only after the seemingly inevitable career of crime and drug addiction that Malcolm X became interested in the Black Muslims—an event which, he wrote, gave him “a little feeling of self-respect.”

He soon became prominent in the movement, attracting a lot of publicity with his teachings that the Negro should be strong, disciplined and ready to answer violence with violence. A few months ago he came to the Oxford Union to defend his own interpretation of Barry Goldwater’s famous remarks on extremism.

It is perhaps surprising that there was not a Malcolm X before. The oppressions and indignities to which the American Negro are subjected are so extreme that it was predictable they should develop their own, counter-extremist, organisation.

If history is any guide, it was also predictable that this organisation should split, and that the struggle between the two factions (the Black Muslims and Malcolm X’s Organisation of Afro-American Unity) should be as bitter and as ruthless as that against their common adversary.

We have seen this before. We have seen it in Cyprus and in Algeria and many, many times before that. We saw it in Ireland, in the days when Michael Collins was shot down on the far South road from Skibbereen to Cork.

In many ways, the United States today is a cauldron of savagery and hatred. In an ugly situation, the Negroes themselves offer scant hope. The summit of their ambition is in fact to be exploited on equal terms with the white wage slaves who now stand just a little above them on the social scale.

(from ‘News in Review’, Socialist Standard, April 1965)

More promises in Washington (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemplating the problem, Chomsky agrees that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Bissett