Letter: Allowing for the placebo effect (1995)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Allowing for the placebo effect

Dear Editors,

Adam Buick states that “aromatherapy, holistic massage, acupuncture, tarot reading and other such new age fads" are "not normally needed by the unemployed".

There are a great many things which people do not need but which they want. Does Adam Buick mean that socialists believe in people only receiving what they need? Or is it acceptable for employed people to get things they want but don’t need, whilst unemployed people only deserve the bare necessities of life? If unemployed people want aromatherapy, tarot readings or massage, why not encourage systems which make these more readily available?

The arguments in favour of local trading systems, although technically these would apply whatever currency was used, are ignored by Adam Buick. These include:

1. The closer the physical proximity of buyer and seller, the less energy (fossil fuel, etc.) will be consumed in the production/retail process: and
2. It enables buyers to keep a closer eye on producers, eg. growers of food, which is miles better than buying from dodgy multinationals.

As for acupuncture, if Adam Buick has evidence that, allowing for the placebo effect, it is ineffective he should say so. If it does work, he should start asking why it is not available on the National Health Service (clue: start thinking about drug companies . . .). Calling it a "New Age fad" is no help to ordinary people who may want to use it.

Katharine Gilchrist, 

Canterbury, Kent

Reply:

Don't be silly. Obviously we weren’t saying that unemployed people shouldn't have access to acupuncture, etc. if they want to. The point the aside was trying to make was that, in contrast to the claim that LETS schemes can help the unemployed satisfy their basic needs without money, a disproportionate amount of the services on offer in actually existing schemes were of the type mentioned (and were actual examples from a scheme in Kingston. Surrey).

The aside wasn't really commenting on whether the various types of alternative medicine were effective or not (though clearly tarot reading is a load of rubbish). That is another issue altogether.

To return to the main point, we note that you confirm that Lets schemes are just a rearrangement within the buying and selling system. - Editors.

The Ire Of The Irate Itinerant (2008)

From the December 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

The cloying embrace of the New Age (2004)

From the March 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard 

"The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that man is the highest being for man, that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all circumstances in which man is humiliated, enslaved, abandoned and despised”. (Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right)

In the last thirty or so years there has sprung up a set of ideas, loosely related in content but closely tied by form, referred to collectively as the ‘New Age’ Aquarianism, Wicca, crystal healing, aromatherapy, holistic remedies, along with a host of offshoots from more conventional religions whether Christian or otherwise. These institutions themselves are internal to a general ‘change of consciousness’, in the main anti-technological and pro-‘spiritual’, or ‘Green’.

We as Socialists often appear alone in standing against this seeming tide of goodwill, good vibrations, and wholesomeness, as if slaughtermen at a refuge for foundling woodland animals. People know, and usually respect, our position on organised religion; that religion is debilitating to the mind of the worker and thus to the progress which we wish to make as workers in advancing our interests. But the New Age? What could be bad about ‘healing’? Who could protest against a Green utopia? Or, indeed, the benefits of goddess worship in empowering women? Surely this New Age is at worst harmless fun and at best a route to a new, gentler society?

Our answer is that the New Age religion is merely the old age religion in a new, consistently modern form. For example, it follows all the rules of modern science, often becoming a cult of scientism itself, demanding (usually)? no virgin births or flat earths, and steps between the cracks of this modern science where it fails to tread, in the subjective part of human experience; the New Age’s powers are all developed on the side of ‘spiritual energy’, ‘psychic transformation’, etc. If the old religion was the opium of the people, then this is the heroin; no longer extracted by chance from nature but refined, even artificially manufactured, and all the stronger for the process. The chants and prayers of the old religion have become commodified into tarot cards, crystals, massage and healing workshops, incense burners, and scented candles.

How did this come to pass? How could a modern working class, far more capable at mental labour than our forebears, sink so low as to fall in love with our own mental chains instead of merely bearing them in guilt and shame? The answer is to be found in considering what religious alienation is.

Religious alienation

Religion is not a set of monotheistic doctrines, whether Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Buddhism, etc., but an ideal world where the problems of society are transcended in thought. The underlying cause, the system of society, capitalist social relations, which alienates us as humans from our material powers, remains intact, in fact, unchecked; it reproduces the problem. The New Age is not different from religion as anciently conceived; it is the perfection of it.

The old religions are dying in the West not because of a lack of proselytisation, the loss of God’s favour, or any other cause which religions might claim, but because actual experience of the modern world has ripped them asunder, and as dogmas they must break instead of bowing to this change. The Pope cannot end the Catholic Church’s stance on abortion, for example, even though every Catholic with a rudimentary scientific education knows that there is no divine spark at conception, unseeable until nine months later; the entire process of human reproduction is now well known and it would be expected in any doctor’s surgery that in practice no-one would hold such a belief.

Protestantism instead is the basis of the New Age religion, even though virtually unrecognisable once it has cast off its particular historical cloak of inherited catholic ideas, adapting new materials to its needs. What remains is that ‘each man and woman is their own priest’. As Marx put it, “Luther freed the body from its chains in order to put the heart in chains”; rather than obeying a priest, we choose the form of our own mental domination, just as in work we no longer slave for one master but can choose from hundreds to slave for. The pagan backdrop of Catholicism is filled by that of Hinduism, Buddhism, even Islam, removed from their own social contexts of native exploitation; all are grist to this mill, generating a thousand and one cults, sects, and aquarian societies.

What all these have in common is the form they take; the flight from reality into a magical world where the evils of the material world are transcended in thought. They are not revolutionary, as some might suppose, from their content of peace, love and contentment; they are escape, the only escape of the life prisoner staring from their cell window, and the form is the acceptance of their existence only as an ideal life, never as a fully material one. They are the product of personal inspiration, mental focussing, or good vibrations, not the actual powers of human beings living and breathing in and out all of the powers of nature.

Socialism/communism

So what is the socialist answer? Quite simply that we wish to abolish alienation at its root; rather than fleeing from its effects we wish to tackle its causes. These causes are, briefly put, the forces behind the capitalist mode of production.

To expand a little, the capitalist mode of production involves a division of the productive process into the production of two kinds of values; use values, which the capitalist later sells to make more capital, and exchange value, which is the labour cost, including reproducing our labour-power, of producing them. Note that there is no need to invoke Dickensian poverty or the lash of the Pharaohs in order to explain the reproduction of the working class; we are not necessarily materially impoverished by the process, that would be like failing to put oil in a car engine or charge the radiator with antifreeze. Instead, like the car, we are objects of use, means rather than ends, and as the productive process accelerates, as capitalism has come to predominate, mere cogs in a machine, and our creative powers of producing values appear irrevocably transferred to the objects we have made. As Marx put it, “in proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the labourer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse”. Contrary to popular apprehension, therefore, we as socialists are primarily concerned not with becoming better fed workers, but ending our existence as the ciphers of our own life process. Our immiseration, which we wish to overcome, is precisely that which the New Ager recognises at one remove, as the world of other people who have not heard of healing, spiritual crystal workshops, or whatever, which has transformed their life: we as socialists (or, the same thing, communists) do not have the luxury of such self-delusion, whether through an inability to be so hypnotised, an allergic reaction to religion, or sheer bloody-mindedness, and must therefore instead overthrow the conditions which give rise to the pain from which New Agers flee.

We are not fighting blindly. We have a theory of society, of our history, which explains how we have come to this pass and how we can escape it – a theory explained further throughout this journal and in books, pamphlets, in fact every time you stop a socialist and ask them the time of day. We have the vast mass of society potentially as allies, and stand at the end of society’s historical alienation process, with no further worlds to be won but our own. Moreover, the process itself is liberatory; again, as Marx put it, “Communism is the actual movement which abolishes the state of affairs” and anyone who has been to a big rally or demonstration will know a small part of the power that is to be had through participation in one’s own liberation, be the goal seemingly ever so far off.

These are the things which we offer instead of the New Age, and why we consider it to be such an enemy and attack it with such determination. It is a trap for our kind, all the more pernicious because of our potential to transcend its petty gifts were all its prisoners released and their energies devoted to socialism. Its supposed similarity to socialism at isolated points are invariably arrived at from opposite directions; ‘world peace’ from a sense of passivity as to world affairs rather than a wish to participate in world affairs; ‘communalism’ from an inability to conceive of social action above the level of the commune, a retreat rather than an advance; ‘abolish money’ in order to live the passive existence of a lotus eater rather than to produce and consume with abandon.

We would thus urge anyone who would see themselves as a ‘New Ager’ – and is probably now just angry enough from reading the above to have started thinking – to free themself from an imaginary world; there is a real world to be transformed, and that transformation itself contains within it the realisation of our social powers.

SJW

New Age anti-rationalism (1991)

Book Review from the July 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Truth Vibrations by David Icke. Aquarian Press, 1991. £4.99.

You’ve heard the prophesies, seen the turquoise tracksuits, and now you can read the book. David Icke, former professional footballer, TV presenter, Green Party spokesperson and now self- proclaimed “aspect of the Godhead” says this new book is all part of what he calls The Plan. The Plan, ostensibly, is to reveal the Truth, show humankind the Light, and thereby save the planet from famine, earthquakes and ultimate destruction.

But in case you've been put off already, The Truth Vibrations is actually quite a clever book. Not only does it try to address real concerns about ecology and the future of the Earth, it does so by attempting to draw together all the multifarious preoccupations of the New Age movement, the market at which it is principally aimed. Thus Icke's story about how the nature of The Plan was revealed to him by “higher beings". and the part he would play in its successful prosecution incorporates something from virtually every aspect of modern anti-rationalism. Spiritualists and “sensitives", psychic surgery, reincarnation, astrology, tarot, ley lines, earth chakras, pyramidology. UFO's and extraterrestrials (both ancient and modern), ghosts. Merlin, the Holy Grail, Atlantis and many others besides, all receive an airing of approval.

Anyone taking the view that it is capitalism with its ruthless drive towards profit and capital accumulation that is the major threat facing the planet has it wrong if this book is to be believed. The root cause of our problems, according to Icke, are the Earth’s imbalanced "energy systems” (and he isn't merely talking about gas pipes and electricity pylons). His explanation of how the “imbalance” has occurred is too convoluted and fantastic to be dealt with here, but this is the apparent reason for Icke's bizarre behaviour—chronicled in detail—of visiting various “energy sites” and “power points” around the globe so as to dance and chant messages that might “unblock” them before all is lost. However, one might mention that well-meaning but deluded individuals have been doing this for years at places like Glastonbury while capitalism has continued to cause despair and destruction all around them, and that this does not bode well for his efforts.

Icke is one of those Greens who sees industrialisation as a bad thing in itself, but to the extent that Icke specifically recognises capitalism's priorities of production as a problem for the planet, his vision of how they might be replaced is remarkably backward-looking. A move toward local “barter economies" is the best thing he (and his spiritual masters) have come up with, and considering all the denigration heaped upon him in recent months, one is left wondering whether it has all been worth the effort.

Dave Perrin

Natural and Supernatural (1978)

From the April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

While many industries are suffering from the present slump, and their workers live in fear of the sack or short time, one business has never known better days: that is, the large contemporary industry dealing with ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night. It includes religion, and also much else besides. It has often proved its usefulness to the state, which means to the rulers of the state. For the more the ruling class can persuade the workers that they have a great time coming, if they can only wait till they’re dead, the less time they will spend thinking about the system which keeps their exploiters rich, or planning to end it. The more their attention is taken up with mysticism and occult tales and supernatural forces, the less energy they will have to learn about the natural forces here and now, which the members of the ruling class will continue to own and control for their own benefit at the workers’ expense. A valuable weapon in this ruling-class campaign is a book just published, Natural and Supernatural, by Brian Inglis (Hodder and Stoughton, £9.95). This first volume speaks up manfully on behalf of spooks of various kinds, plus crafty dodges like alchemy and religious miracles, in the centuries up to 1914. (And very effective alchemy was, too—not in transmuting base metals into gold, of course, but in transmuting the true believers’ money into the pockets of the alchemists.) Volume two will bring us up to date (if that’s the right phrase).

Gnomes Rule — OK?

Bernard Levin, The Times columnist, and a friend of Mr. Inglis, sees how vital it is to inculcate a spirit of credulity among the workers, and he went so far as to produce a column vindicating the book two weeks before it was published (The Times, 6.1.78). To defend a book as yet unpublished, from attacks as yet unmade, in reviews as yet unwritten, requires unusual skills, but Mr. Levin was equal to the occasion. Exercising simultaneously the gifts of clairvoyance and prophecy, he claimed to know what would be said by reviewers as yet unchosen, and he produced at least one argument to confute it (plus some abuse of the phantom army of projected assailants—no one who refused to accept supernatural happenings after reading Mr. Inglis’s book could be “fully sane”, he said in his temperate and judicious way.) This was the argument: the fact that some people reject telepathy and the rest of it “seems to me to go far towards demonstrating the validity of the very argument it rejects”. So there you are. If you reject the belief that cows catch an illness because elves have fired prehistoric flint arrow-heads at them (the disease was called “elf-shot” 150 years ago—it still is, according to current dictionaries—and the poor cow was “cured” by bleeding it), if you are unable to accept that leprechauns cause this disease, you are merely confirming that it does happen.

Mr. Levin gave his testimony for the magical powers of, for example, Uri Geller, and illustrated his article by a picture of the wizard in person, holding some shop-soiled cutlery, and looking inscrutable. Geller is an unfortunate choice as an example of uncanny doings and psychic powers. His pretensions to be anything other than a clever conjurer have long been exploded, both by impartial investigators from outside show-business, and, even more effectively, by equally clever fellow-conjurers who are indignant at the way Geller has hogged the publicity by magical claims for tricks no better than their own (see past issues of the New Scientist and of the American periodical The Zetetic, and also The Magic of Uri, by “Randi”, Ballantine Books, 65p).

All aboard for Paradise

Fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Levin, Geller, and Inglis, in this spiritual onslaught with so much material significance, are the progenitors of the heterogeneous religious sects which have sprung up in the last decade or two and have proved so successful in promoting the prosperity of their originators and the other-worldly passivity of the workers they have converted. Not only have the leaders of the old-established religions deserved well of the capitalist class; so have such men as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon (his name alone must be worth a mint in the religious game) with his various productive schemes staffed by low-paid devotees; the well-built little guru who runs the Divine Light mission, in the intervals of seeing the world in great comfort with highly congenial companions; and Lafayette Ron Hubbard, last heard of cruising in his yacht while his Scientology Church spreads the gospel and organizes the contributions. All of them take full advantage of the mind-shattering boredom in which most workers (inevitably under capitalism) are forced to spend their working lives, a boredom which provides fertile soil for the growth of miracle men.

Another in the same line of business is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (or Veririchi, as unkind critics have called him). His international H.Q. is in Switzerland, and he runs Transcendental Meditation. He has discovered (The Times, 4.1.78) that when one per cent of the people of a town or city meditate transcendentally (and if you don’t know what that is, only £60—for six lessons— stands between you and your finding out), the cumulative effects “will wipe away its urban deprivation, and give it invincibility, peace of mind, prosperity”, and so on; “illness, crime, and accidents, decrease sharply”. This has already been proved (no doubt it depends on your standards of proof) in towns as far apart as Cleveland, Ohio, and Glossop, Derbyshire, to name but two. The same experiment is at this moment being made in Hackney. So now it’s up to 1,925 inhabitants of that hitherto lack-lustre locality, that’s one per cent of the population, if they’ve counted right, to do their stuff. If you’ve been to Hackney recently, to see a place in the process of being transformed by the power of thought, you may well have come to the conclusion that the Maharishi’s thinkers have a lot of hard meditating still to do. Poverty, and crime, and urban deprivation, are not easy to shift; but if the transcendental meditators think they have shifted them (as in Cleveland, Ohio, and Glossop, Derbyshire) it will do the ruling class no harm, will it?

Flights of fancy

Even more to the point, on the subject of Mr. Inglis's second volume; only last year the Maharishi discovered that transcendental meditation enables its practitioners to fly. It’s a real bonus: one crossing to New York under your own steam, and you’ve already paid for your introductory lessons. The faithful practise flying every morning in the front room of the terraced house which spearheads the campaign to transform Hackney; but they modestly declined to demonstrate their powers when a journalist called. “We are not very good at it yet; still a bit unstable in the air.” So New York is out, for the moment. Still, even a few quick flights to the factory or office would avoid those rush-hour journeys, not to mention saving the fare. These revelations are not to be laughed at: the more people laugh and refuse to believe these stories, the more (by Mr. Levin’s argument) it proves that the meditators do fly.

Anyway, Brian Inglis could spread himself on that in his second volume. He might like to hear of another uncanny case of paranormal powers, if he has not already written it up. A couple of years ago Patrick Moore was appearing on Pete Murray’s Radio 2 morning show. He told his listeners that while he was speaking the planet Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter, thus increasing their gravitational pull, so that here on earth people could jump in the air and experience a floating sensation. Minutes later, “the BBC switchboard was jammed with calls from people claiming the ‘experiment’ had worked. A woman holding a coffee morning said she and her eleven guests left the ground and floated round the room” (Sun, 2.4.76). Another man “said he hit his head on the ceiling”. Patrick Moore thought he was hoaxing people on April Fools’ Day (Jupiter and Pluto could play hide-and-seek all day, and it wouldn’t affect the earth’s gravitation), but there is obviously more to it than that. These witnesses who thought they could fly because P. Moore told them they could on the radio must surely reinforce those other witnesses who thought their spoons were bent because U. Geller told them so on the radio. Or are we to accept the apparent deductions that sometimes people want to believe something so much that they succeed in convincing themselves it really is true? To help divert the workers from the economic and political realities the magical powers of Moore and Geller and the rest have an important part to play, however much scoffers and cynics may sneer. After all, the more people laugh and refuse to believe it, the more . . . Where have we heard that argument before?

Without question, Mr. Inglis is doing a great job for the ruling class. We can only hope he never bumps his head on the ceiling.

Alwyn Edgar

Mass Psychology (2017)

Book Review from the December 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Wilhelm Reich and the Function of the Orgasm, Short Biography, Book Reviews, Quotes, and Comments’. By Peter Fritz Walter

Socialists know Reich as one of those who have tried to combine Marx and Freud, though he was always more Freud than Marx. In the 1930s he was a member of the German Communist Party and wrote The Mass Psychology of Fascism in which he argued that the type of sexual repression that people in Germany had suffered in childhood had contributed to making them prepared to support an authoritarian ideology like fascism. Later, in the 1960s this pamphlet enjoyed a popularity as if it had been entitled ‘The Mass Psychology of Capitalism’.

In the meantime Reich had moved on and had become a quack doctor claiming to have discovered a cosmic force called ‘orgone’ that could cure cancer, leukaemia and the rest. He got himself jailed over this and died in prison in 1957. No doubt he was sincere but people don’t have much sympathy for those who offer false hope to cancer sufferers.

Reich always regarded himself as a scientist and was convinced that he had made the same sort of ‘scientific discovery’ as other scientists. In this book, Walter argues that Reich was nearer to ‘the Eastern medical approach’ (with ‘orgone’ being the same as ‘chi’) and was ‘the true founder of the Aquarius Age’, i.e. that he was nearer to so-called ‘alternative medicine’. There is some truth in this. Walter regards this as a compliment.

Adam Buick

Personal Growth or Social Revolution? (1989)

From the August 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Open a few Sunday colour supplements and you’re likely to see a mention of some variety of “Personal Growth”. Look at the notices on the wall in most health food shops, or look in the back of city’s listing magazines and you’ll see adverts for this or that new approach. This term has come to refer to a whole variety of psychotherapies, holistic health methods, mystical approaches and self-improvement techniques. You may also see it referred to as “humanistic psychology”, “the human potential movement”, or “the growth movement”. If we were to make a rough and ready list of the sorts of things that might be included under these banners, we could start with encounter groups, meditation, natural health food approaches, Gestalt therapy, massage, and rebirthing. We also get approaches mixing religion and therapy such as “Zencounter” or “Zenanalysis”. Many of these approaches have become very popular, and are big money-spinners in the United States.

Changing the individual

So what are the common themes behind all these various ways to personal growth? At the risk of lumping together a lot of approaches whose practitioners hate each other, we could say that all of them aim to increase the individual’s ability to live life to the full and experience the world. They’re often concerned with emotions rather than our intellect. As Fritz Perls said, “Don’t think, feel. Lose your mind and come to your senses”.

Most writers in this area concentrate on the need for individuals to become more at ease with themselves. All of them argue that the so-called “normal” way that we live our lives today is frustrating and unsatisfying; and that we only fulfil a small part of our potential. Some writers blame this on the social system. For example:

    We are aggressive, compulsive and individualistic because these traits make us easily exploitable as workers and citizens (C. Steiner Scripts People Live).
   We have created a system that divides society and produces institutions to frustrate individual needs. At the same time, ideologies are created to justify this arrangement and to ensure that it will continue (A. Janov Prisoners of Pain).

To this extent, socialists would share their view that the world as it is now doesn’t offer most people the chance to grow and develop and agree with a more flexible approach to human nature than the “Original Sin” notions of Thatcher and her cronies. Where we differ from those involved in personal growth is how to radically improve the world.

For example, it can’t be stressed enough how personal growth writers see changing the individual as the main way forward. For example, here’s Carl Rogers talking about how the world will change:

  I see the revolution as coming not in some great organized movement, not in gun carrying armies with banners, not in manifestoes and declarations but through the emergence of a new kind of person, thrusting upwards through the dying, yellow, putrefying leaves and talks of our fading institutions (Carl Rogers on Personal Power).

Even more bold is Marilyn Ferguson:

   The great shuddering irrevocable shift overtaking us is not a new political or philosophical system. It is a new mind (The Aquarian Conspiracy)

Over and over again you see the same themes. The new society will come about through people undergoing change individually. Once enough people have changed radically enough, a new society will spontaneously evolve which will reflect the healthy characteristics of these new persons.

Changing Society

Well, what’s wrong with that? Don’t socialists want people to change before we can hope to bring socialism into existence.

Well yes, but we see changing present-day society as rather different. To get socialism you need a majority of workers in the world who are clear beforehand of how they see a new society working. But personal growth writers are prepared to accept that big improvements can be brought about in the way people relate without radically changing society first. For example, Carl Rogers describes how person-centred approaches to management radically improved the experience of individuals in firms. A “happy” by-product of this was increased productivity and profits! Even worse, here’s Ferguson again: “The military, with its guaranteed financial base, has more opportunity to fund innovation than any other institution”.

The innovation that the military funds has more to do with deadly nerve gases and neutron bombs than peaceful development of individuals. Of course, the military might use its resources for the common good to relieve starvation and destroy its weapons, in the same way that President Bush might join the Socialist Party tomorrow. Neither is at all likely, though.

The problem with a lot of writing about personal growth and how it’s supposed to bring about social transformation is that changing the person often becomes a lot more important than changing society. Once you’ve been through some sort of personal growth you may well feel that you’re living in a different world. Unfortunately it’s only your perception of the world that’s changed. Capitalism works pretty much the same whatever psychic self-improvement we may undergo.

Capitalism is a world economic system, it isn’t just a scatter of individuals with hang-ups. You can’t explain the way it works by looking at the individual characters of its component members. For example, social class exists. Rupert Murdoch and a Mexican peasant will still live in a different world even if they punch pillows or play trust games together in the same men’s group. Billionaires will live in the midst of the destitute as long as our social priorities are determined by profit and private property. Attempting to get rid of human misery by giving people psychotherapy is like trying to cure cholera by treating each individual case. It may help a few people, but in the long run it’s far better to clean up the water supply, or in the case of society, end capitalism.

Unless we change the whole obscene system, there will always be serious limits to what “enlightened” individuals can achieve when they try to humanize its consequences. Socialists argue that unless you change the way that things are produced and distributed, social problems will always come up however mature, feeling or laid-back we all are.

As long as things are produced to make a profit, the poor will stay poor, work will be boring and arduous, states will go to war to win economic influence, and valuable resources will be used up persuading us to buy things we don’t want or need. It is a system which gives rise to these problems, not our personal inadequacies. Any system based on private property and money is too inflexible to ever meet fully people’s needs.

Nice but naive

Now supporters of personal growth would get very angry at this point if they weren’t so laid-back. They’d say, “it’s all very well talking about some pie-in-the-sky socialism, but what about now? Let’s change ourselves and those around us, and that’ll change society in a much more solid way. If you fix the shape of the new society too strictly then you won’t be flexible enough to new possibilities”. The trouble is though, unless you’re clear on the sort of society you want, you can end up being pulled in a variety of ways.

Clare and Thompson sum up this dilemma for those going through personal growth:

  Which direction should I take? Should I try to imitate Jesus or Henry Ford or Lenin? Should I try to make money or retreat from the market place? Should I go back to sleep? (Let’s Talk About Me).

It would be nice (but naive) to believe that we were all on the same side, and that people who went through personal growth all came to want to work towards the same exciting and liberating society that we do. However, approaches like Sensitivity Training and Transaction Analysis have been used in the military and large corporations such as IBM and Honeywell (now called Bull). Some growth practitioners have seen the way forward as small businesses. Others have disappeared into communes and co-operatives. The sheer diversity of approaches shows that there’s no hard and fast rule. President Bush might not work towards bringing about a moneyless society even after he’s had personal growth!

None of this is to deny the value of personal growth; it certainly helps some people feel better. What it can’t do is change the society in which it is embedded unless it starts to talk about a revolution in social relations. At the moment, it seems more likely that its ideas will be used for harassed executives looking for greater “personal effectiveness”, and more importantly, better profits for their paymasters.

Unless you challenge the basis of capitalism your ideas will be incorporated into the very society that you set out to revolutionize. The term “personal growth” has become flexible enough to mean pretty well anything, and it is a truly helpless approach when confronted with a world of starvation and war. As one bank executive quoted by Marilyn Ferguson is reported to have said after the awakening of his staff through personal growth seminars: “For my money, these soul searchers are our future”.

Keith Aubrey

Editorial: Clones for sale (2003)

Editorial from the February 2003 issue of the Socialist Standard

In her utopian novel Herland that was first published in 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman describes a society in which there have been no men for generations. Naturally, she had to assume that reproduction had become possible without the intervention of men.

In a work of literature this is of course quite acceptable but as late as 1994 her book was being criticised, somewhat humourlessly, on this point for not realising “that without the fertilisation by the male, the human race would atrophy and disappear”. As it has turned out that Gilman was not talking biological nonsense, not that in a work of utopian literature she was required to be entirely realistic: an all-woman society lasting generations is theoretically possible (whether it's desirable or likely are of course completely different matters).

In fact even in 1994 biologists knew that it was theoretically possible to reproduce a mammal asexually: by taking a cell from some of part of a body and substituting it for the nucleus of an egg cell. However, this method meant that the new individual would have exactly the same biological make-up as the individual from which the cell was taken, i.e. would be a clone. After a sheep was reproduced asexually in 1997 it was only a matter of time before a human would too. Now, allegedly, this has been done, by a clinic linked to a New Age sect.

Although there can be no objection in principle to the procedure involved – it's not playing god (since there is no god; life, including human life, wasn't created, it just evolved) – the question arises: what's the point? Why do it?

The Raelian sect say they are doing it because they believe that human life was introduced on Earth 25,000 years ago by aliens from outer space and that this is what these aliens want us to have done before they return. Obviously, this is complete nonsense, though not quite so nonsensical as the more widespread belief that some supernatural being created all life on Earth some 6,000 years ago. Others are trying to do it for more down-to-earth reasons: to make money. And that's the point under capitalism. If there's a profit to be made from something some “enterprising” person will come along and try to do it – and there is a market in providing babies for childless couples.

A fair number of commercial “fertility clinics” are already in the market and cloning might be a more acceptable procedure for some couples than those currently marketed. Hence the race to get there first and make above normal profits before others join in. The irony is that the commercially-motivated clinics may have been beaten to it by a group moved by other considerations. In fact, some of the criticism of the Raelians sounds like sour grapes as well as concern that they might have queered the pitch by provoking a backlash that will make not just commercial cloning but already marketed procedures more difficult.

Normally the media – whose aim is to make money from advertising – feign to believe that there might be something in the “paranormal” – UFOs, ghosts and other strange tales – as this has proved a good way to attract an audience and so advertising revenue. But when something serious is at issue they drop this pretence and admit, as their ridiculing of the Raelian beliefs shows, that they no more believe all this guff than do most of the rest of us.

Having said this, genetic engineering does raise problems of choice – ethical problems, as they are called – that would persist even in a socialist society. Which particular genetic disorders should be corrected, and how? How far can choosing the sex of a child go? Since there seems to be no point in it, will human cloning continue?

But the point is that in a socialist society these matters will be able to be debated and decided in a serene atmosphere, free from contamination by commercial considerations. For socialism will be a completely non-market, non-commercial society whose guiding principle will be human welfare and nothing but human welfare, not profit and money-making as is the case today.

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

The power of unreason (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why has irrationality become so powerful an urge at this stage of capitalist development?

Where I live there’s been a noticeable growth of charity shops in town, a more reliable sign of the times, we suppose, than what the politicians tell us. One shop is selling Billy Graham tapes for 30p. My mate buys one (to record over). Then:

“So you like Billy Graham?" His eyes are on full beam.

“Er ... he’s all right like ... I mean, yeah." Nervously my mate coughs, transfixed by those eyes, unable to escape, unable to admit the real reason he’s buying a cheap tape.

“He’s wonderful, you know. I found Jesus through him. We all did. Do you believe in our Lord Jesus?”

"Well er ... no, not exactly ...” 

“You will when you’ve heard that. Here, have a leaflet. Take another. Jesus loves you."

He laughs confidently, as do the rest of the staff. Billy has changed all their lives. My mate backs his way out of the shop, making ingratiating noises. The stare never leaves him. Hugely discomfited, like a bird after a near- miss with a tarantula.Why is irrational faith so hypnotic? Why do religious people always cause such acute embarrassment while remaining immune to it themselves? Why is Unreason such a powerful force? A picture emerges: the Christian as ideological terminator, Cliff Richard with an Uzi. You can’t stop them, you can’t argue with them. You just better run.

Speaking of Terminators, I’ve been reading about "technofear" in the weekend rag. Lots of guff about humans turning into machines. Are machines taking over? Is it science fiction or fact? Readawlabahtit!!! What bollocks. If they did, they wouldn’t be so stupid as to operate a system of artificial shortage, would they? If humans learned a thing or two about reason and logic it would be a bloody good thing in my view. In fact, if the world was run by a pinball machine I shouldn’t think anybody would be any the wiser.

Of course technofear exists. Everyone is terrified these computers are going to do us out of gainful employment. Eventually this might well be the case. So-called "expert systems" are a serious attempt to replicate all the diagnostic and prescriptive abilities of a human expert, without his or her irritating tendency to take weekends off, get ill, go on strike or die. Programmers in the trade are expressing considerable surprise at the unenthusiastic response of the human experts whose brains they wish to pick. Some experts have displayed open hostility to the new technology. Next it’ll be sabotage. The programmers are bemused by ail this lack of co-operation. Why don’t these people want to have their expertise enshrined on disk? Why won’t they let us build machines to replace them? They scratch their heads and mutter words like “Luddite” to each other

This is a sorry case of what happens to some people when they overspecialise, I reckon. The programmers have forgotten the plot. Somewhere behind the loops of an algorithm Planet Earth recedes further and further form their view. Finally the light at the end of their tunnel vision goes out.

Capitalism is logical! (erm ...)

But is it just a case of a few techies doing us all out of a job? I think there’s more to this technofear than that. I think people are afraid of science and reason because they are the gods of the modern age and just look what a mess the modern age is in. In this society, people are increasingly afraid of the internal logic of the system. Because it leads to more pollution, closed wards, less freedom and less security. But this is logic built on sand. If there are wars, it is logical to build weapons. Capitalism proceeds therefore to build weapons. It follows its own logical architecture. It never questions its own foundations, however. War is not logical, but nobody has noticed. It is also possible to build a perfectly logical case that people should starve, if you accept the premise that it is all right for individuals to own food that other people need. That is what our society is faced with. Humans are starving. Capitalism is following the correct logical route. So it must be logic that has brought about this disaster. People are frightened of reason itself because they know from experience that reason levels cities and reason breaks hearts and reason always has really convincing reasons for it all.

In the circumstances, reason begins to look like the poisoned chalice. Religion—a state of benign Unreason—profits from this.There is a powerful sense that Chaos would have been better than the "Order" our logic has created. It is better to believe without evidence, because the evidence points to terror.

Or maybe our culture is at bottom genuinely frightened of logic. Anticipating that we will lose our title of Most Intelligent Species to the incipient binary hordes, we fall back on that ragged and bullet-riddled flag of distinction, the human “spirit”. Not having the faintest idea what a “spirit” is exactly, we only know that machines haven’t got one, so at least we can still crow about being special. We then blithely make a fetish of our own ability to think irrationally, as if this was somehow what made us great in the first place. Besides, illogic is more appealing to our prejudices, given that logic can often take you where you don’t want to go.

And isn’t this irrational flag-waving spirit-soaked species just painfully aware of what a disaster their society is? Doesn’t every newspaper broadcast endless proof of that? Like a supremely bad planetary manager, aren't we convinced that at any moment someone or something is going to come along and give us the sack, and that we deserve it? Underneath it all, everybody knows what a rational intelligence would do about the absolute capitalist system, but nobody wants to admit it.

So why is irrationality so powerful an urge? Perhaps it is nothing but our emotional swell, our hearts beating against our minds, that other force in us which is young as a child and older than all reasoning. The human race is still in the dark and in the dark ages, struggling with its shaky mastery over the planet, an unaccomplished student in the school of thought which it has built for itself. It is now at a desperate stage where it begins to suspect that its skill and cleverness have carried it too far, over the edge and into the abyss. It turns its fear and rage on the rationality that brought it to the very ledge where it now teeters. It’s as if, to recall the myth of Prometheus, we have decided that Prometheus was wrong and Zeus was right. Science has betrayed us, cries a voice in our heads, we should have remained ignorant! So the gift of Prometheus is flung back in his face by people tired of being scorched.

And yet socialists get tired of such knee-jerk anti-rationality. Unreason burned science at the stake for stating the obvious again and again. Nowadays, unable to summon up on demand an auto-da-fe to broil our uncomfortable knowledge, we seem to have buried our heads in “individualism" and telly soaps to avoid thinking at all. Rooted to the spot, like rabbit before the headlights or my mate before the Christian, we stare uncomprehendingly at the chaos bearing down on us, and blame ourselves for its design and manufacture.

We have just missed the whole point of knowledge, that’s all. When Prometheus gave us the fire of reason he neglected to mention that we should never allow it to become the private property of a few “specialists". Private ownership of knowledge is like private ownership of food—it is the conversion of a tool into a weapon, and now that the world is empty of tools and stuffed with weapons we cannot be surprised at people’s wholesale retreat into never-never land, where the bad guys (supposedly) can’t get them. In the world of capitalism, illogic is for many the logical response.

Paddy Shannon

How green can you get? (1989)

From the April 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Throw away the red paint, lads; green is the latest fashion. Red banners and class struggles are out of date. These days, if you want to look radical you have to be green. From Number Ten the Green Goddess has sounded the clarion call: "Let’s pretend we care about the environment — there are votes in this one". Where Thatcher leads the hapless promise-makers in the Neil, David and Paddy camps follow. On this year's Labour agenda, vote-losing, truncheon-battered miners are out, vote-winning baby seals are in. The Green Party is printing application forms on recycled paper for those who like the sound of its late Eighties, health-conscious. conservation-minded message. Pity that those filling them in have not checked the parliamentary record of the German Greens who, in order to make a few legislative deals with other parties, voted in favour of a huge military budget. The Left is going green too. In the Communist Party the fetishism of commodities is distinctly passé; Gramsci on the burning question of deodorant sprays and the ozone layer is big talk. The Two Royals, Phil and Charlie, are making speeches to whoever will listen about the importance of conserving this green and pleasant land. They own enough of it for the subject to be of direct interest. Meanwhile, they eagerly await the hunting and shooting season when they can pursue the noble sport of killing innocent animals. Elkington and Hailes Green Consumer Guide became a non-fiction best-seller last September, and now publishers are falling over one another to publish vegetarian recipes and shocking accounts about rain forests. It is fashionable to be green these days.

Socialists have been saying for a very long time that workers must wake up to the enormous threat of environmental damage which the profit system poses to the world around us. Nuclear weapons are just the most obvious and powerful symbol of self-destruction which capitalism has created. For decades it has been cheaper for capitalists to pollute the air workers breathe than to adopt clean techniques and practices. Methods of production which are unsafe, disease-spreading and potentially explosive have long existed. Workers' food has been adulterated for as long as there have been wage slaves; see Engels' comment about this in his book, Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In order to make a fast buck it has long been capitalist practice to destroy the earth’s irreplaceable resources. Animals are made to suffer and die needlessly; endangered species which have no exchange value in the market are free to become extinct. There is nothing new about any of this. It is not peculiar to the late Twentieth Century, and we did not require a new fashion to hit the tabloid headlines to recognise that we inhabit an endangered planet — endangered by the dictates of profit.

The Socialist Party is hostile to the Green Party. It is a party which stands for the continuation of the capitalist system, but in a different form. We stand for the abolition of capitalism in all forms. The two positions are irreconcilable. Those who vote for the Greens are doubtlessly sincere and caring people who want something different. In their own lifestyles, perhaps some of them have made genuine adjustments which are in line with a socially more co-operative way of living. So have many socialists, but we are well aware that individual lifestyle changes, whether they involve not eating meat or using what are called “environment-friendly" products, are not going to change the fundamental nature of the social system which oppresses us. A few million workers might give up using products which destroy the environment, but what power do we have in comparison with the minority who own and control the means of wealth production? The ruling class, be they multinational companies, state-capitalist bureaucrats or small manufacturers, have an interest in keeping their costs down. If their profits come before the long-term interests of workers, who can blame them for sacrificing workers’ needs? After all, workers voted for the profit system. Only by abolishing the system which is the cause of these problems can the effects be eliminated. The Greens, both in their own party and in the major parties, put out an on appealingly radical message, but when examined it becomes clear that it is a case for the market with a green tinge.

Green reformism

Let us imagine that a Green government is elected at the next General Election. What would it do? To begin with, it would govern. The job of governments is to run the coercive state on behalf of the capitalists who monopolise the means of life. So, like all previous governments, a Green one would be compelled to ensure that the workers are producing profits. In another sense, a Green government would not really govern at all: it would be governed by the profit system. Its Ministers would be constantly coming before us, like Labour reformists in the past, saying "Look, we honestly did want to reform this and that but. you see, with the capitalist economy being what it is..." And so the old story of reformist promises coming to nothing, followed by working-class disgust and disillusion, would go on. In Green Line (November 1988) Tim Andrews reported on a list of reforms which the Green Party Conference had just voted for: “the scrapping of the Common Agricultural Policy, the replacement of price support with income support . . . the party's intention to withdraw from the EEC unless reconstituted on ecological principles . . . opposition to free trade . . . commitment to economic as well as political decentralisation." In short, a package of policies to reform capitalism, many of which have been tried and failed in the past, and others which are just pious platitudes. A Green government of British capitalism would be no freer than any government before it to carry out changes which would conserve what is worth keeping in the world around us. Let us say that a Green government abolishes nuclear weapons, as they say it would. What weapons would it introduce instead? If none, then capitalism in Britain would be undefended and ripe for take-over by profit-hungry vultures from other states. If the Greens seek to introduce new, more humane, greenish weapons of murder, then let them spell out such a defence policy here and now. Likewise, let us assume that the Green government fails to persuade the EEC to reconstitute itself on ecological principles. Who will the British capitalists trade with? And why should non-EEC trading agreements be any less concerned with profit before need than the current ones are? Or would a Green government only agree to trade with nations which are ecologically principled? The question alone demonstrates the catastrophic implications of the expected green answer.

It is simply impossible to purify or humanise this capitalist system. And some of the more aware Green politicians, such as Jonathan Porritt, probably know this. They would argue that politics is about pragmatism, that is cynical compromise. It is about “lesser evils". But why vote for Porritt and his fellow would-be governors to administer the lesser evil when capitalism, which creates the evils, can be abolished altogether? The usual reformist answer is that the lesser evil will take less time to achieve than the grand socialist aim. The Socialist Party was told this by CND nearly thirty years ago when they were going to reform the threat of nuclear annihilation out of existence; we were told it by the reformists of the Labour Party over eighty years ago — they were going to eradicate poverty. It is a foolish myth that partial objectives are more worthy of support than realisable big ones. There is unlikely ever to be a Green government, and if there is, then its greatest critics will be present Greens who will complain that it has sold them out. It is inevitable with reformism; it must sell out in order to fit in with the needs of the system.

Green anti-materialism

Socialists are materialists, but not in the sense that the term is often used: it does not mean that we want people to have more and more “material” things, such as cars or video machines. To be a materialist is to recognise that human beings are rooted in our social environments. Our consciousness is social, and through conscious action we can alter the material environment of which we are a part. The environment is not something Out There which must be protected; it is part of us and we part of it. To be a materialist is to reject antiquated, idealist nonsense about the soul or the spirit. The present writer attended a debate two years ago in which the Green speaker pointed out that being green was all a question of the spirit. Asked to identify this spirit, the Greens laughed a little and ended up proclaiming that if you don’t know what it is then you ain’t got one. Are we to conclude from this that the new Green World is to be established by those who have discovered their spirits, leaving behind us poor wretches who have only our material selves to live with? There is a good deal of arrogant self-righteousness in the Green claim to have seen a better world. What they fail to understand is that seeing visions does not transform the world. Even Tories see glorious visions.

The task facing us is not to romanticise, but to revolutionise. Of such thinkers Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that they were “half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future: at times, by its witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history." Such will always be the condition of visionaries whose pictures of social completion are really images of a re-created past. The Green dream of a semi-rural arcadian utopia, undisturbed by the thundering force of Big Business and its needs, is really a looking backwards, a conservative ideal All this spiritual nonsense serves as a valuable diversion as far as the ruling class is concerned: while the proles are searching for the invisible spirits they will not be disturbing capitalism as a material reality.

The Times (26 December 1988) reported that "After a decade of old-fashioned pursuit of money and status. Americans and the citizens of the other rich countries will, as the planet runs low on space and resources, turn in the closing years of the century to spiritual fulfilment." The newspaper was responding to an article published in The Futurist, which is published by the World Future Society based in Washington DC. In the same city is the US Department which collects figures on official poverty. It reports that one in four citizens of the United States is living below the government poverty line. So, while bored Californians turn to the non-existent spirit for comfort in a worrying world, others cry for lack of material necessities to keep themselves warm, fed and clothed. There is no solution to be found in the so-called New Age ritualism whereby abstract idealism overcomes the need to attend to harsh material requirements. And it is precisely because there is no solution in such inaction that capitalism will quite willingly accommodate the growth of Green ideology.

Green profits

Big business is making plenty of money out of the new green consciousness. An article in The Guardian entitled “Conning of the Greens" (17 December 1988) pointed out that the supermarket chains are losing no time in cashing in on the willingness of workers to buy healthier food. This suits the capitalists who employ workers: the healthier we are the more exploitable we are. And it is increasingly suiting the retail capitalists who have created a whole new range of commodities which can be sold at extra cost — conscience money. Sainsbury's was selling organic potatoes at 64 per cent above the price of normal potatoes; organic leeks were 67 per cent dearer and organic lemons 114 per cent more. Tesco's is selling its “own-brand UK mineral water . . . that is calorie free ". John Elkington points out that “People . . .  like to feel that they are paying something extra to protect the planet." Very nice too, if you are one of the capitalists who own the planet.

Capitalism will pass a few minor reforms to win a few green votes, and also because the capitalists themselves realise that their investments are being damaged by the filth created by a lack of environmental concern. Just as they passed The Clean Air Act of 1956, so in the months to come they will attempt a few more self-regulating laws. Needless to say, these laws will be evaded by those rich and powerful enough to do so. Even when the capitalists are agreed on their common interest, there will always be one or two who will try to sneak behind the others’ backs and make an even faster buck.

The planet belongs to them. We, the workers who produce everything and run the planet from top to bottom, have given it to them. Our task is to take it away from them; to reclaim the planet. The Green Party, which does not stand for the socialist transformation of global society, cannot take the planet away from the capitalists. In the end, all they are is a rather futile reform group, pleading with the profit-taking class to do us all a favour and take less profits. Given such a pointless crusade, we need not to be surprised by the following section of the report of their 1988 conference:

Perhaps the most contentious issue at conference was the attempt by National Party Council to replace the sunflower as the party's logo with one of three designer-symbols commissioned by professionals . . . The arguments against keeping the sunflower were confused: it had become associated with healthy eating, some said, while others claimed it looked like a fried egg (hardly healthy food!). Commissioning new logos on such spurious pretexts seemed unnecessary. After all, sunflower logos only look like fried eggs when the petals have not been drawn properly . . . (Green Line, November 1988)

For further news of these exciting political dramas within the party of the future, watch this space.

Steve Coleman

Is The Truth Stranger Than Fiction? (2002)

From the July 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever heard the rumour that Paul McCartney was killed in a road crash in 1966? Apparently he was replaced by a double and surreptitious references to this are included on the cover - and in the songs - of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album. If not, perhaps you've heard that the moon landings were really shot in the Nevada desert? Or that Elvis faked his death and was seen, a few years back, working in a Burger King in Kalamazoo?

If you're familiar with any of these rumours then you've come across a major contributory factor in the persistent blurring of truth and fiction now prevalent throughout society: the conspiracy theory. From the Latin word conspirare, conspiracy means literally "to breathe together", but its most common interpretation is more pejorative than that, hinting at secret plots, clandestine illegal activities and mysterious doings away from the public gaze.

It has been a feature of late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics that conspiracy theories have been given more prominence and credence than almost ever before. Indeed, not since the Nazi rise to power in 1930s Germany, with their scare-mongering about "Jewish international finance capital", has the conspiratorial view of the world been in such vogue.

There's someone looking at you
It's not that conspiracy theories are in any way a novel phenomenon - far from it. They can be traced back to biblical times and beyond, with widespread and pervasive conspiracy theories probably arising for the first time during the Crusades. The difference between previous times in history and the modern era is twofold - firstly in the extent to which baseless conspiracy theories have recently proliferated and taken hold even amongst otherwise sophisticated and well-educated sections of the population, secondly because of the way in which virtually no major event or phenomenon can currently unfold without someone crying "conspiracy!" from the rooftops and finding a ready audience. Name a recent historical event - and it was a "conspiracy". Diana's death? A conspiracy, of course. European monetary union? A fiendish conspiracy hatched by un-elected, shadowy forces. September 11? Quite an obvious conspiracy (though by the US government itself apparently, not Al Qaeda).

Indeed, in recent times we seem to have entered an era of paranoid politics. For a whole series of complex reasons that have been charted previously in the pages of this journal, interest in real political ideas seems to have declined in the last ten or twenty years, especially in the so-called "advanced" capitalist states, and hand-in-hand with this has gone a suspicion of all those engaged in the political process.

We live in a technologically complex, sophisticated and supposedly "meritocratic" society and these are influences which have helped strip away much of the mystique previously surrounding our supposed elders and betters in the political elite, in the royal family and among others in the public spotlight. This distrust, which has been fuelled by very real revelations of wrong-doing in high places, has tainted the popular perception of not just the individuals involved but of the entire political process - and this is not just a phenomenon confined to Britain either. Mainland Europe, Japan and the United States (not to mention many of the more developing industrial states) have been gripped by the same distrust. And as any pop psychologist knows, distrust - in the right environment - breeds paranoia.

Postmodernist junk
The "right environment" in question is the one presented by postmodernism, that loose body of thought which contends that interpretation is everything and the truth an ephemera, and that science and reason are merely particular interpretations of events, being "narratives" with no more claim to validity than any other. It is postmodernism and the parallel distrust of science and progress that has arisen in recent years that has opened the way for conspiracy theories to multiply - whether they have a basis in reality or not. At the same time - and without coincidence - various New Age and occultist ideas and practices have gained ground. Postmodernism, irrationality and conspiracy theories now unite to form a bizarre trinity that informs much popular interpretation of historical events and processes.

Given this, it comes as no surprise that those most attracted to New Age and occultist theories are typically those who also give most credence to conspiracism as a systematic way of interpreting events. These are people who do not merely contend that conspiracies of some sort have taken place or have been uncovered (whether it be the JFK assassination or the Roswell UFO crash) but whose entire worldview is a conspiratorial one.

The Nazis, whose worldview was one drenched in anti-semitism to the extent that they thought the world dominated by a cabal of Jewish bankers, were steeped in a mysticism and occultism that had been handed down to them by fellow initiates of secret societies like the Vril Society and Thule Society in the period after the First World War. Modern day paranoid conspiracists are typically little different, blending the irrational theories and practices of the New Age with their conspiracist worldview.

In fact many have gone one step further than the Nazis and earlier conspiracists in thinking that all major conspiracies - real or imagined - together with all secret societies, are intrinsically linked, being but different aspects of the same age-old conspiracy. The current favourite is that they are all linked to the Illuminated Ones or "Illuminati" who were, amongst many other things, allegedly behind the founding of the United States (and its Federal Government), the United Nations, the European Union and other supposedly "centralising", "controlling" bodies.

So it is that in this theory, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Knights Templar, etc are all slowly working towards the achievement of some kind of centralised, totalitarian New World Order, and the clues - as always - lie in their occultist practices. For instance, here's the late William Cooper, a former US naval intelligence operative in his conspiracy-lovers' bible Behold A Pale Horse, illustrating the psychological tie-up beautifully:

"The numbers 3,7, 9,11,13 39 and any multiple of these numbers have special meaning to the Illuminati. Notice that the Bilderberg Group has a core of 39 members who are broken into 3 groups of 13 members in each group. Notice that the core of 39 answers to the 13 who make up the Policy Committee. Take special notice that the 13 members of the Policy Committee answer to the Round Table of Nine. You know that the original number of states in the United States of America was 13. The Constitution has 7 Articles and was signed by 39 members of the Constitutional Convention. The United States was born on July 4, 1776. July is the 7th month of the year. Add 7 (for July) and 4 and you have 11; 1+7+7+6 =21, which is a multiple of 3 and 7. Add 2+1 and you get 3. Look at the numbers in 1776 and you see two 7s and a 6, which is a multiple of 3. Coincidence, you say? I say "Baloney!" and I'd really like to say something a lot stronger". (pp.92-3).

In a similar vein, David Icke's recent works (notably The Robots' Rebellion and The Biggest Secret) are a case study of how spiritualist, astrological, numerological and conspiracist ideas (with a bit of "hollow earth", gaia and ufology thrown in for good measure) can interlock and reinforce one another. He too has jumped on the Illuminati bandwagon, upping-the-ante as only he knows how, claiming that the initiates of this secret group of "controllers" are really shape-shifting reptilians, notably including Ted Heath and the British royal family. And lest anyone think that David Icke and others of his ilk are an irrelevant political joke, his books sell tens of thousands of copies and his public meetings across the world are full and booked-up often months in advance - this being fairly typically of the genre.

Strange world
In some respects, we do indeed live in strange, puzzling and disconcerting times. Mass starvation exists amongst plenty. Wars constantly rage across the globe even though everyone says they want peace. And when "too much" is produced by the factories and farms, people get made unemployed and are plunged into dire poverty, presumably for being too successful.

In this environment, it is no wonder that people look for irrational explanations for seemingly irrational problems. Conspiracy theorists take the view that such a complex organism as modern world society must be controlled from the top - someone, somewhere must be pulling the strings. For instance, unfamiliar with the analysis of Marxian economics, they are yet to realise that at the heart of the capitalist economy is a genuine "anarchy of production" based on ruthless competition, where firms produce goods with only profit in mind and not the needs of other firms or the limits for their particular market - and without an overall external controlling force. This particular blind spot in their conspiracists' perspective can lead them to make ridiculous, unsupported claims like the following, quite typical of its kind:

"In 1929, the Brotherhood [Illuminati] bankers crashed the Wall Street stock-market and caused the Great Depression. From this problem came the solution, the 'New Deal' economic package offered by Roosevelt which won him the Presidential election of 1933. The 'New Deal' was a replica of the economic package offered by Hitler to the German people to solve their manufactured economic problems . . . Soon afterwards, with the American economy now completely under Brotherhood control, Roosevelt put their symbol, the pyramid and all-seeing eye, on the dollar bill. He was saying to the American people 'Gotch-yer'" (The Biggest Secret by David Icke, pp.230-1).

No explanation of this type of argument is ever put forward beyond a re-iteration of the inter-connectedness of some sections of the capitalists class (the Rothschilds and Rockefellers usually attracting particular attention) combined with the hoary old myth about the "mystical" power of the banks being able to create multiples of credit from a given deposit base. And needless to say, while all the evidence points to the economy being essentially beyond the control of politicians, bankers and economic forecasters too, the conspiracy theorists interpret every event (even contradictory ones) as being evidence that everything is under political control to the last detail and that the forecasters are just "playing the game".

In truth, very little concrete evidence is ever put forward for the more far-reaching conspiracy theories that imply a conspiratorial worldview. The stock-in-trade of the conspiracy writers is rumour, innuendo, guilt-by-association and half-knowledge passed off as fact. Take Bilderberg and its ilk as an example. Yes, there is plentiful evidence that organisations like the Bilderberg group exist. Yes, there is evidence that their members are rich and powerful people with their own agendas and quite some influence. But no, there is no evidence that such organisations "rule the world" and carefully manipulate states and economies at will - and no-one has yet provided any.

The dispossessed and disenchanted
Who are the real believers in conspiracy theories like these anyway? Conspiracy theorists are fond of quoting selected people "in the know" to show that the conspirators themselves occasionally admit what they are up to. Carroll Quigley, renowned expert on Anglo-US relations and mentor to Bill Clinton is a favourite, especially his book Tragedy and Hope, though in reality it is a weighty tome that says plenty about cross-Atlantic ruling class networks (The Round Table, Royal Institute for International Affairs, Council on Foreign Relations) but little about global conspiracies. Former British Tory Prime Minister Disraeli is another favourite, especially his statement that "the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes" (Conspiracies, Cover-ups & Crimes by Jonathan Vankin, p.265) but that is a quote that is familiar due to overuse more than anything else that there is to commend it. Disraeli had in fact been intrigued by conspiracy theories and secret societies from his youth and was apt to make phrases like this whether he really believed them or not.

Most conspiracy theories are really believed not by those who come into closest contact with the conspirators but by those at the bottom of the pile who are typically furthest away from them, metaphorically speaking - the disenfranchised and dispossessed. They are most likely to be found on the extreme fringes of capitalism's political spectrum, on the far left and the far right, whether they be anti-globalisation crusties of J-18 fame or the US militiamen polishing their guns in the hills of Montana and Arizona.

Interestingly, many if not most of the famous real-life conspiracies that have been documented beyond reasonable dispute have been hatched not by large, elaborate networks of the rich and powerful (who have a tendency and opportunity to use more subtle means, at least on the whole) but by comparatively small, well-organised groups of political dissenters, from those behind the Gunpowder Plot through to the Bolsheviks and in recent times the perpetrators of 11 September. That can be no surprise - the fewer people that know of a secret, the more chance there is of it being kept under wraps until the appropriate moment arrives.

Conspiracies everywhere?
So do conspiracies actually exist at present? Of course - from minor political conspiracies and plots (e.g. the Tory Party plot a few years ago to depose Margaret Thatcher) to the more renowned activities of political dissenters meeting in secret (the actual origin of most secret societies). There are of course plots and conspiracies by the rich and powerful to cover-up their misdeeds too on occasion (like Watergate) and it almost goes without saying that there have been well-documented clandestine activities by the ruling class and its agents against the organised labour movement, even from before the days of the First International. But we can also say with a fair degree of certainty that:

1. No reliable evidence has ever been furnished in support of a conspiracy "worldview".
2. Such views are typically the product of misplaced theories and perspectives that interlock with, and reinforce, other erroneous ideas (such as with the Illuminati and numerology; anti-semitism and the occult).
3. Postmodernist culture has helped open the floodgates to a swathe of unsound conspiracy theories that seek to systematically interpret world events in a non-rational and unscientific manner.
4. Conspiracy theorists' assertions that a complex, technologically advanced society like capitalism cannot be at root "anarchic" in many of its operations, are misplaced.

So the conspiratorial worldview is certainly not helpful in promoting an understanding of modern society and is itself, in large part, a product of the times we live in.

The organisation of society as it currently exists - capitalism - is certainly not a conspiracy, even if its structure means that conspiracies exist from time to time within it. And for those interested in overthrowing the system which now seemingly leads to secrecy and paranoia almost like night leads to day, a more fundamental approach is needed than that exhibited by the conspiracy theorists. A truly democratic society, where power no longer resides in the hands of a few, and where the incentive for power struggles and subterfuge will decrease accordingly, cannot be built within capitalism, by its very nature. Instead, a democratic socialist revolution, carried out by the majority and in the interests of the majority, will be the time in history when the conspiracy worldview is finally put to bed.

Meanwhile, for those struggling with the complexities and contradictions of life in capitalist society we can certainly say this: the truth is out there somewhere. It is just that it is not generally to be found in the New Age literature and conspiracy quackery currently invading the shelves of high street book stores across much of the western world. And there's definitely no mystery about that.

Dave Perrin