Notes by the Way: Something to Cheer About? (1947)

The Notes by the Way Column from the December 1947 issue of the Socialist Standard

Something to Cheer About?

On November 6th Molotov announced that Russia had solved the secrets of making atom bombs.

The following is from the Daily Worker (7/11/47) : 

“When a mass meeting of 15,000 in the largest hall in Paris were told of the Molotov atom bomb statement, they rose to their feet and cheered enthusiastically for 20 full minutes.”

* * *

Scientists in Russia

In “Scientist in Russia” (Pelican Books Edition, 1s.), Professor Ashby tells what happened to a Russian scientist who opposed the scientific theory backed by the Russian Government. He writes as follows :

“The argument by heresy-hunt was used with deadly effect against the most outspoken and devastating critic of Lysenko, the famous Russian biologist N. I. Vavilov. Vavilov probably went beyond safe limits in condemning the new genetics as an outbreak of medieval obscurantism. He paid a high price. He was accused of dilatoriness in getting practical results, of lending support to fascists by his theory of centres of origin of crops, and of aligning himself with Bateson, the leader of genetics in England. In 1940 he was deprived of his directorship of the Institute of Plant Industry. He was subsequently imprisoned and he died, without any announcement or explanation, probably in 1943. The type of argument used against Vavilov is well illustrated by a comment made to me by a prominent animal physiologist in Moscow in October, 1945. ‘I reject Vavilov’s views,’ he said, ‘because Vavilov believed in Bateson, and Timiryazev condemned Bateson.’ The same argument has been put on paper by Prezent.” (P. 111).

In a letter to the Manchester Guardian, as in the book itself, Professor Ashby made it clear that such intolerance is not in his view the whole picture. He wrote :

“It is true that Vavilov was killed because he adhered to bourgeois genetics; it is no less true that there are to this day two professors of bourgeois genetics in the University of Moscow—no other kind of genetics is taught there, and the official text-book was written by an American. This sort of inconsistency is, in my opinion, the key to an understanding of Russian policy not only in science but also in public affairs.”—(Manchester Guardian, 1/11/47.)

To which the Manchester Guardian reviewer replied as follows :

“When Russian scientists see a political adventurer, half charlatan and half visionary, attacking the most eminent scientist of the country with pseudo-scientific, slogans steeped in political venom ; when they have to stand by helplessly and watch the victim standing at bay and being hounded in the end to prison and death (the campaign took about, ten years from start to finish) – then I am sure they felt exactly as any of us would if this happened here. The more dearly they love their country, the more bitter is their shame and horror, and their seeming unconcern is simply a token of the reigning political terror.”— (Manchester Guardian, 11/11//47.)

* * *

Why Financiers Like Labour Government

The following is from the Financial Times, (8/9/47):

“Despite a formidable total of bear points—inadequate supplies of coal, steel and other materials, reduced home consumption, dollar shortage, and a possible autumn Budget—there are more favourable aspects which, at the moment the market tends rather to ignore.

“This is the view expressed in their current circular by a leading firm of Stock Exchange brokers.

”‘There can be no comparison with conditions in 1931 when industry was facing a widespread saturation of its markets through over production,’ says the circular, ‘and while the sequence of events ten years earlier after the 1914-18 war were rather more closely comparable, there is one significant difference—the fact that a Labour Government is in office will surely mean that we need not fear widespread or long lasting strikes of the character which then caused the collapse of post-war industrial activity.”

* * *

Machinery and Unemployment

“NEW YORK, Friday.— Mechanisation and other agricultural developments threaten to make displaced persons of many American farmers, according to a report by the House of Representatives’ Agricultural Committee.

“More than 3,000,000 farm labourers were unemployed last year because of mechanisation, although crops beat all records.

“Further displacement of people now making some kind of living from the land is expected, says the report.–Reuter.”—(Evening Standard, 12/9/47.)

* * *

The U.S.A. and the Mediterranean

“Admiral Bieri, commanding the United States Mediterranean Fleet, has given an interview in Naples to the correspondent of the Milan daily Corriere Lombardo in the course of which he is alleged to have said :

”The United States Fleet is here and intends to stay here in Italian and Mediterranean waters. American interests in Europe will not cease with the signing of the German treaty. In accordance with the policy of the United States Navy Minister American forces will be allocated wherever there are American interests, in closest co-operation with the British’.”— (Manchester Guardian, 10/9/17.)

* * *

The Miners’ New Masters

“Mr. Bernard Rees, chairman of the National Union of Mineworkers’ lodge at Arrail Griffin Colliery, Abertillery, where 16,000 miners are on strike, said this afternoon :

” ‘Surface workers are still being paid wages at starvation level and the National’ Coal Board’s policy of subjection has been worse than anything we ever experienced under free enterprise.

” ‘N.C.B. officials are standing over men to time their movements, and the miners say that they are turning our colliery into something which resembles a concentration camp.’ “—(Evening Standard, 21/10/47.)

* * *

NOT the Socialist Party

“One of the richest men in England has just joined the Socialist Party. He is metal-magnate Steven James Lindsay Hardie, 62-year-old Scot, chairman of British Oxygen Company and its associated companies.

“British Oxygen has a capital of £6,000,000 and directly controls eight companies, with interests in South Africa, Australia, India find Norway.

“Total directorships held by Hardie, 27. Among them is vice-chairmanship of the £2,750,000 firm of Metal Industries, Ltd. As an industrialist Hardie makes metal products ranging from screws to ships.”— (Evening Standard, 14/10/47.)

* * *

Erstwhile Internationalist Proclaim National Sovreignt

The report to the Warsaw Conference at which the new Communist International organisation was formed was made by an influential Russian Communist, Zhdanov. Much of it was reproduced by the Manchester Guardian (3/11/47). One illuminating passage reads as follows:

“Taken up by the bourgeois intelligentsia, dreamers and pacifists, the idea of a ‘world government’ is being used not only as a means of ideologically disarming the people still defending their independence from the encroachments of American imperialism, but also as a slogan specially aimed at the Soviet Union, which constantly and consistently defends the principle of true equality and the maintenance of the sovereign rights of all nations, great and small.”

In the meantime Russia,, like the other capitalist Powers, keeps troops in occupation of several countries and is at the moment trying to induce the Persian Government to carry out the agreement to set up a Russian controlled oil concern in North Persia, the agreement having been forced on the Persian Government last year while Russian troops were in occupation.

Letters: SDP rewrites D of P (1987)

Letters to the Editors from the June 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

SDP rewrites D of P

Dear Editors.

As a committed and active Social Democrat, you may think that I have nothing to offer the socialist debate. On the contrary, socialism is seen by many to be out of date and out of touch, and ripe for extinguishment by Mag T. In a true democracy. this should not be allowed to happen.

I offer a Social Democratic alternative to your Declaration of Principles. Make of it what you will.

1. The ownership of the means of living is not in the hands of a human master class, but in the jaws of a faceless machine enslaving even those who believe they control it.
2. The antagonism of interest lies between those who collaborate with this machine, and those who do not.
3. The antagonism cannot be solved by the emancipation of particular collaborating classes, but only by abolishing those classes and enabling those trapped within to escape. The renewed vigour of those freed, working co-operatively for the benefit of each other, will lead to the downfall of the machine.
4. The “working classes" are being corrupted and abused by the machine which created them. True emancipation can only occur by relinquishing all class distinctions.
5. Every single person has the capacity to emancipate themselves by relinquishing his or her class, and recognising the common humanity of all.
6. The wealth and power of Government, when controlled by those who have relinquished class, will no longer maintain and serve the machine, but will exist to protect all people and to enhance their lives.
7. Political parties serving the interests of the collaborating classes are themselves bound together to the machine, and should be opposed as one.
8. The SDP of Great Britain therefore exists to create and defend an open, classless and more equal society which rejects prejudice based on sex. race, colour or religion.

I look forward to the day when my party and yours can stand against each other at an election. Until then. I hope your readers will vote for our Alliance.

Yours sincerely.

Jeremy Morfey

Bromyard.

Hereford

Reply:

We do welcome all contributions to the debate about socialism, especially from people who express thoughtful concern for democracy and an "open, classless society". Incidentally, the debate has been going on for well over a hundred years and countless politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, have dismissed the subject as closed, irrelevant or out of date. Yet it will not go away because it inevitably springs up again and again out of the conditions under which we live.

Our correspondent tackles the question head-on by arguing with our Declaration of Principles and substituting eight principles that he considers to be more true to reality. Let us examine these. The crucial clause in the alternative D of P is number Five, which says that it is possible to escape from ones class position by “relinquishing'' it. Well, it may be possible for an individual capitalist to relinquish their wealth. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us cannot relinquish our poverty. We may not all be starving or destitute but we cannot live on our wealth. However wishful our thinking we shall still be forced by our economic circumstances to sell ourselves to employers throughout our useful lives. This is what determines our class. Our function in society, and hence the pattern of our lives, will be as workers, whether we work in overalls or lounge suits; whether we are bossed around by others or are part of the management hierarchy ourselves. We are unable to relinquish our class position while capitalism lasts because our wage enslavement is the necessary condition for its continuing. It is out of the wealth that we produce, collectively as a working class, that the capitalist class in every country goes on expanding its wealth and the power of its state.

One of the ways of ensuring that virtually all society's wealth remains firmly in the hands of this minority is to keep the majority confused about it — ideally to persuade the working class that there is no capitalist class. All the major political parties are devoted to this objective. In this the SDP is in resolute agreement with Margaret Thatcher's party, as well as with the Labour and Liberal parties. They are unanimous in trying to deny the incontrovertible fact that society is forcibly divided into two unequal and inevitably conflicting sections of people.

Mr Morfey acknowledges that all is not well and offers his own explanation. In six of his clauses he refers to a "machine" — a machine with jaws but no face; a machine with which some people collaborate. and which others are "trapped within". but which can also have a "downfall". Obviously this is a metaphor; but metaphors should correspond closely with the reality they denote. Otherwise they lead to very faulty thinking. We use a metaphor in our Clause Six — the word "machine" to refer to the combination of people, organisations and equipment used by the state to defend and further the interests of the ruling class — this is the "state machine".

No one would claim that it is easy to understand. let alone describe accurately, the way modern society functions and is structured. Socialists rely heavily on earlier writers and thinkers, especially Marx and Engels. But we examine all ideas, even theirs, with ruthless scepticism. We try to make sure that the ideas correspond with our real, everyday experiences. Although our D of P was written in 1904, and its language shows this, it provides the basis for understanding what goes on in the modern world far more consistently and accurately than the theories which are produced with money provided by government or capitalist sponsors. We understand quite well why political parties such as the SDP hope to become involved in an interminable merry-go-round of forming governments. being thrown out. becoming a vociferous Opposition, campaigning to get back into office — and all the time real life for the great majority of us. the working class, is almost totally unaffected by it. A look at the government's own statistics about the ownership of wealth in Britain shows that our Clause One gives the facts, as opposed to expressing concern about a vague threat. This applies all through Mr Morfey's Declaration, but that is not good enough. The "political arena" is far too dangerous a battle ground to enter without knowing precisely what is happening and what is at stake.

Editors.

Scepticism is dangerous

Dear Comrade,

In New Scientist (16 April page 51) Ian Anderson reports on the annual meeting of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal or SCICOP for short. The following is a quotation from his report which itself is a quotation from the meeting.

Polls have shown consistently that a majority of American teenagers believe in pseudoscience. Fifty-five per cent believe in astrology, for example. But reaching young people means changing the education system and Carl Sagan, in his talk, noted how hard that was going to be:

If we teach school children the habit of being sceptical, they may start asking awkward questions about economic, social. political and religious institutions. Scepticism is regarded as dangerous. It is the business of scepticism to be dangerous. That is why there is a great reluctance to teach it in schools.

This interesting comment by Carl Sagan (a well known American astronomer) on education in capitalist sodety I feel certain would be of interest to readers of the Socialist Standard.

Best wishes.

Bill Williams

Wood Green

Halo Halo! (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the September 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is China to be congratulated on putting ‘illegal religion and superstition’ books into the same category as pornography? Heterodox teachings are prohibited. In June the Market Supervision Bureau in Shangcheng County raided bookstores looking for those types of books and confiscated those found. With impressionable youngsters in mind the MSB searched bookstores near schools and colleges (Bitter Winter 29 June).

China’s Central Institute of Socialism (sic) has been teaching Christian leaders ‘core Marxist principles (sic), the 20th National Congress of CCP, and Xi Jinping’s thought on a “new era of Socialism”’! (Bitter Winter 13 June). Crack the ‘he’s not the messiah, he’s a naughty boy’ joke about Xi Jinping at your peril.

* * *

Richard Dawkins, as of 25 June, is very annoyed with New Zealand. Science students in NZ are to be taught that, ‘Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science.’ Dawkins calls this a ‘ludicrous policy’ and ‘adolescent virtue-signalling’ (tinyurl.com/yb54tfwa).

Which country will be the first to elevate Mary Eddy Baker to a surgical genius and insist that Christian Science replaces the learning presently taught in medical schools?

* * *

Welcome to the class struggle Brothers! Church of England clergy discover that they’re members of the working class! The trades union Unite has a Faith branch and the 2000 who pay their union subs every week have got their District officer to put in a first-time-ever pay claim for a minimum of 9.4 percent. Their employer has, amongst other assets, a £10.3 billion investment fund which produces over a ten per cent return. Those Sunday collection boxes must be raking in the gelt. Unite’s General Secretary says, ‘The clergy deliver a clear message for the Church of faith in the hereafter. Unite is fighting for a better deal for them in the here and now’ (Counterfire, 23 June).

Sounds like those preaching pie in the sky need to put down their bibles and pick up the Socialist Standard.

* * *

Does anyone remember the Only Fools and Horses episode, The Miracle of Peckham, where DelBoy scams money from exploiting a weeping statue of Mary in the local church? The ‘miracle’ occurs because the lead of the church roof has been nicked and when it rains the water drips down and off the face of the statue. Has the Pope seen this episode and is it one of his favourites?

Miracles don’t happen! The pontiff has been berating his flock for believing in ‘miracles’ and weeping madonnas in particular. ‘Apparitions of the Virgin Mary are “not always real”, he said, in what appears to be an indirect reference to a woman who drew thousands of pilgrims to pray before a statue that she claimed shed tears of blood.’ ‘The Madonna has never drawn [attention] to herself,’ he added. The statue was bought by Maria Scarpulla in Bosnia, who returned to Italy and claimed the Madonna wept tears of blood and communicated to her (Guardian, 4 June).

As if!

DC

Review: The Problem of Race Culture. (1908)

Book Review from the April 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

[“The Bar of Isis : the Law of the Mother.” By Frances Swiney. The Open Road Publishing Co. 6d. Nett.]

The subject discussed in this well-printed brochure of 50 pages is one that is beginning to have more attention paid to it than formerly, although not more perhaps than it deserves. Isis, the wife and the sister of Osiris, the God of the Egyptians, became later the patron Goddess of women, and the Bar of Isis represents the sanctity of the prospective mother from all approaches of the male. The argument of the book is that the husband must learn to be sexually abstemious, for on his continence depends, to a very large extent, the health and constitutional vigour of the offspring. Many of the ailments of children are alleged to be attributable to the incontinence of the father during the period of gestation. Medical evidence is quoted in favour of this position, yet Dr. Allinson lays down a different position, and he is probably one of the best known writers on this subject. Apart from certain personal factors, he says nothing in favour of complete abstinence on the part of the husband and no injury to the offspring is suggested as the result of indulgence during the prohibited period.

But all that apart. We are not particularly concerned with questions of that nature. The important part of the book to us, is where it is argued that race deterioration and degeneracy are attributable to the violation of the Bar of Isis ; for whether such violation does or does not adversely affect the child, it seems abundantly clear that such pre-natal factors are as dust in the balance against material factors of a post-natal character, such as food, clothing and shelter. As with our author, so with the Eugenist. Indeed, their objects seem to be the same, viz., a short cut to the solution of the social problem; the one through heredity, the other through an improvement in pre-natal environment. Both positions fail by ignoring the material conditions with which the Socialist primarily deals. The offspring of genius, developed under ideal conditions of pre-natal development, would still need to be fed, clothed, housed, educated, etc. The words of Max Nordau in this connexion carry considerable weight owing to their obvious truth :

“Marry Hercules with Juno, and Apollo with Venus, and put them in slums—their children will be stunted in growth, rickety and consumptive. On the other hand, take the miserable slum-dwellers out of their noxious surroundings, house, feed, clothe them well, give them plenty of light, air, and leisure, and their grand-children, perhaps already their children, will reproduce the type of the fine, tall Saxons and Danes of whom they are the offspring.”

There is no way of taking the slum-dweller out of his noxious surroundings except by abolishing the poverty that sent and keeps him there. As William Morris said, while you have poor people you will have people poorly housed; and the same thing applies to feeding, clothing, etc. Socialism alone can abolish poverty by abolishing private ownership of the means of living which allows the workers to be expropriated of the wealth they produce, yielding them only as wages the cost of their subsistence.

Were it not for the overshadowing fear of the Editor’s blue pencil, I could show, from the pronouncements of the Eugenists themselves, that the improvement of the environment is essential to the improvement of the race. Eugenics is, for the present, mainly negative. It consists, in the words of Dr. C. W. Saleeby, in the denial of the supreme privilege of parentage to those suffering from congenital defects of mind or body. On the other hand it seeks to encourage the fecundity of superior types. This then is the Eugenic aim, the discouragement of the unfit and the encouragement of the fit to perpetuate the species. There is a difficulty in the fact that the lower type is naturally the more fertile. Dr. J. L. Tayler, in a long paper on Individuology, in discussing this subject, differentiates the prevailing types as mainly paleogenie and neogenic, which we, being under no obligation to use unnecessarily long words, may call the low type and the high type. He shows that the low type persists owing to the existence of the material environment adapted to it; and it would seem, therefore, that the more effective method of discouraging the continuance of the low type lies, not in artificial and oppressive sterilisation, but simply in improving the environment, thus automatically discouraging the low type by forcing it upward in an endeavour to adapt itself to a higher environment. The potentially high types who acquire the characteristics of the lower through “noxious surroundings” would be enabled to develop ; the low types would cease to flourish in an environment unsuited to them; while each individual of whatever type could adequately develop the best that it had the fortune to inherit.

This cannot be done under the conditions of modern society. The thirteen millions of people in this country “on the verge of hunger ;” the 30 percent, of the people of London who live on or below the poverty line ; the million or more of the inhabitants of London who live under “overcrowded” conditions, are all hopelessly handicapped in their development, and it is to these conditions we must turn our hand before we can even be sure of the other facts in the question. Socialism will apply the solution to all these problems, in the first and most important place, by removing the economic hindrance to a full and adequate satisfaction of the material requirements. In the second place by removing the property restrictions which hinder the operation of what in biology is known as sexual selection, and allowing freedom of choice between the individuals, irrespective of the all-pervading influence of economic considerations. And in the third place by removing that economic necessity of obedience to the breadwinner which will probably explain to the author of the book we set out to notice the main causes of the violation of the Bar of Isis.

Dick Kent

Pathfinders: All Quiet in the Western Front Room (2010)

The Pathfinders Column from the April 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

All Quiet in the Western Front Room

Pathfinders, in defiance of its own dire warnings against making predictions, predicts that watching too much BBC iPlayer will lead directly to a net fall in wages. Oh yeah, how come? Well, see if you can fault the logic. Currently, according to Microsoft’s own possibly somewhat self-serving trends analysis (EUROPE. LOGS ON. European Internet Trends of Today and Tomorrow, April 2009), while all patterns of media consumption are flat or, in the case of DVDs, declining, internet use is climbing inexorably. TV consumption at 11.5 hrs pw is set to be outstripped by internet use at 14.2 hrs pw by June 2010. There are of course a variety of reasons for this, among them people’s mania for buying and selling mostly useless tat (eBay) and reading and writing mostly useless tittle-tattle (blogs, Facebook etc).

Still, one can’t be too curmudgeonly about a social trend that connects people more than they’ve ever been connected in living memory, especially if it gets them off the front room sofa too. People are eschewing the traditional sit-down-and-slurp-it-up TV diet in favour of an a-la-carte and on the move eclecticism. Microsoft estimates that one in seven of the age range 18-24 watch no live TV at all.

This is affecting not only the pattern of what is being watched and when, but where. Increasingly the viewing audience is lounging in its bedroom with a laptop, so what does this mean for the lonely and neglected TV in the now rarely occupied front room? Do the householders succumb to the blandishments of TV manufacturers and buy yet more and bigger flat-screens, and soon to be had 3D TVs? Maybe, but probably not in this economic climate. Instead,  the TV goes on eBay with the rest of the junk and the front room stands ready for other purposes. The creative householder, mindful of the high cost of housing and the consequent demand for rented rooms, now decides to turn the vacant room to good account by sub-letting it. Thus, cyberspace turns TV space into living space.

What happens? The sudden availability of rented accommodation creates a downward pressure on rents and also on housing demand and house prices. Seeing that workers are now paying less to live under a roof and therefore are being paid just that little bit too much, employers will put the squeeze on wages until they in turn show a net fall.

Dare one go on? Increased friction between workers and employers, together with all this networking, media choosiness and increased domestic sociability will lead directly to an upsurge in political class consciousness and the emergence of a new revolutionary… oh, but wait, it’s time for the pills again . . .

All this tireless internet activity has also, of course, raised the hypothetical question: what if somebody sabotages it? The House of Lords EU Home Affairs sub-committee, charged with the task of investigating this question, has reported that the UK is very well placed to withstand a cyber-attack from persons unknown (China) or rogue states (China) or criminal masterminds (China). “Last year the UK government staged a simulation of a catastrophic nationwide failure of the phone network, codenamed operation White Noise” (‘UK can cope with cyber attack, says Lords committee’, BBC Online, 18 March). The phone networks promptly fell over each other’s feet in a straggly attempt to recover from this, however the fact that the UK did this experiment before the EU is what entitled the sub-committee to claim that the UK is ‘ahead’ in its war against non-specific cyber-crime (China) and thus claim a victory rather than a sprawling mess for Operation White Noise (Yellow Peril). Why all this paranoia? you ask. What evidence is there to suggest that persons unknown (China) are really expending every effort to bring down western civilisation, especially given that they already own most of its financial institutions? Well, the evidence is cold-war logical: our spooks are doing it to them, so they must be doing it back.

Meanwhile, once again fortified with reality pills, Pathfinders wonders whether the odd internet shut-down would be so terrible anyway. According to Microsoft only 30 percent of internet traffic involves commerce while 65 percent is instant messaging and social networking. If nobody could text their friends for 24 hours they might regain all feeling in their thumbs and rediscover the art of conversations longer than four sentences but may otherwise be entirely unharmed.

It seems barely a moment since the capitalist state fretted over the internet’s ability to undermine its power, and now here it is fretting over somebody’s ability to pull the plug. Among the several measures being suggested for emergency communications during a cyber shut-down the boffins seem to have overlooked a tried and tested system that would get us all out in the open air—bonfire beacons on every hillside from coast to city, just in case the Chinese invade. Instant messaging plus roasted chestnuts. Well, it worked with Napoleon.

Climate sceptics pass ID test

 Those who think there is an element of doubt about human-caused climate change are of course correct, but only because there is always an element of doubt in science, and always will be. This does not mean, however, that there is an evenly balanced controversy, despite what the deniers claim. In science as in socialist theory there is rarely if ever proof, only a weight of evidence.  Pseudo-scientists exploit this lack of certainty to insinuate their own bogus ideas into the public consciousness, demanding in the name of free speech the right to air these ‘controversies’.

Does all this remind you of anything? Of course, evolution versus intelligent design! Coincidental then that in Texas the pro-ID lobby are now moving to align ID with climate change denial, in order to shoehorn the former back into school text books on the basis of the supposedly more respectable latter (‘Battle over climate science now spreads to US schoolrooms’, New Scientist, 13 March).

Socialists must be on their guard against the misrepresentation of supposed controversies. Just because there is a Flat Earth Society doesn’t mean there is legitimate doubt about the shape of the planet. Pseudoscience isn’t just cranky, it’s downright dangerous. The MMR scare persuaded parents to disregard the scientific consensus and refuse to vaccinate their children, exposing them to risk, while tourists to Asia returned suffering from malaria because they believed their homeopathic remedies would protect them. Pseudoscience is an unscrupulous and dishonest fast-buck industry, and reacts to defeat by changing its argument, as with the recent MMR class action in the US. “They keep moving the goalposts”, remarks one scientist, “It’s the hallmark of pseudoscience”(‘Victory for vaccines’, New Scientist, 20 March). Workers need their wits about them, because capitalism is always finding ingenious ways to stitch them up.

Paddy Shannon

Biology as Ideology (2008)

From the June 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

For over 40 years there has been an increasing momentum to the wholesale medicalisation of human and social problems

It was in the late 19th/20th centuries that the notion of conceiving of distress/madness as a ‘mental illness’ came to predominate. In particular, the work of Emil Kraepelin, and the notion of trying to classify distress into a number of discrete psychiatric disorders, and that these disorders were diseases of the brain, and that these diseases of the brain were categorically distinct from the normal brain and normal behaviour.

For the last hundred years biological psychiatrists have been looking for pathologies in the brain to explain the different symptoms that ‘patients’ present. What with the 1990s being declared the Decade of the Brain, and with the Human Genome Project, they have had a good twenty years to propagate their view. Indeed, for over 40 years there has been an increasing movement towards the wholesale medicalisation of human and social problems. Virtually every problem is conceived as something that can come under the scrutiny not only of medicine in general but psychiatry in particular. Who are the gurus on TV and the press to whom we turn to for solutions to our personal and societal problems—Dr. Mark or Dr. Joan! The politics is taken out of problems. It is not social conditions that require changing—it is our biology. And for ‘mental illness’, this means the resort to pills—the chemical balance of your brain needs to be adjusted.

Today, the bible of psychiatric approach to human misery is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-IV). When it appeared in 1994 (only 7 years after DSM-II), it was some 900 pages long (a revision is due in 2010 and is expected to be 1250 pages). Within DSM are over 300 diagnoses. If you feel in need of a diagnostic label you are sure to find one here.

Over the years of revision from DSM in 1952 the shift has been away from a psycho-analytic perspective to a biological one. Now, the biological perspective is the dominant one, and refusal to toe the line can lead to a psychiatric career coming to an end—not only in terms of posts but also any research grants. No longer is the personal political – the personal has become biological.

The biological approach, however, has come under attack from a number of perspectives. The whole of the conceptual apparatus has been undermined by psychiatric service users, psychologists and sociologists. Yet the edifice still stands and may be gaining in strength. The general public seems to be keen on it, let alone other professional and political interests. It will be a tough nut to crack.

As more mental illness categories are added because more people are showing their misery in different ways, this provides an ideal opportunity for the commodification of happiness—with the solution to unhappiness being offered by the pharmacology industry, often referred to as BigPharma.

No place for culture

The biological approach claims that its diagnostic categories are objective and universal because they are based on the pathologies of the brain. Schizophrenia is schizophrenia in AD 2007 or 2007 BC, in Britain or Borneo. The particularities of culture have no place here.

But this is not the whole story. There are cultural psychiatrists who are opposed to this Western imperialist encroachment. Not only are there differences across contemporary culture but even in the West differences are found across time. To show the difference in how misery shows itself across cultures consider these examples of what are called culture-bound syndromes.

Koko: usually Malaysian males who believe their sexual organs are shrinking, and is accompanied by panic as this is an indication of imminent death.

Latah: experienced by Indonesians who develop an exaggerated startle response, which includes shouting rude words and mimicking the behaviour of those nearby.

Western psychiatry tries to put these cultural forms into its categories.

To show how even in the West psychiatrists have changed their mind, consider what Samuel Cartwright classified as “drapetomania” in 1851. This disease was previously unknown to medical authority, although its diagnostic symptom was well known to “our planters and overseers”. This symptom was found only in black slaves and involved “absconding from service”.

He concluded that what “induces the Negro to run away is as much a disease of the mind as any other species of mental alienation and much more curable”. The cause was not pills but “whipping the devil out of them”. The patient should be treated like a child. But he warned against being too lenient or overly severe whipping—both of which would induce “drapetomania”. The term is derived from the Greek “drapetes”— a runaway slave.

Even schizophrenia has been seen as a disorder that is of recent origin, being rarely noted before the rise of modernity, in traditional or pre-literate societies.

The biological approach is not only wrong, but it is also ideological. This is not to deny that biological factors are not prominent in certain disorders. But whatever role biological factors play, psychological interactions cannot be reduced to the biological. As biological entities, all our activities have a biological component. But psychological activities are constituted in the interaction or transaction of a biological organism and a physical social environment.

Social relationships

A significant difficulty in looking at the literature which makes reference to social conditions is trying to sort out those which are capitalist specific or class specific from those which are a part of social life in general.

Moreover, it is difficult to sort out those sites where capitalist social relationships have direct effect on the conditions occurring there, such as work and unemployment, from where they have a mediated effect. That is, where capital does not directly create that site but works through an already existing institution, such as the family, gender relations, ‘racial’ relations, and personal relations.

In addition to those, there is the problem that capitalism has with the notion of class. Capitalism likes to think that class problems are a thing of the past or is a subjective matter. Therefore, it is reluctant to fund research which looks at this as a variable. It will accept an occupational or educational definition of class but it will not accept a Marxian definition.

Psychiatric research relating to class seems to have gone through three phases:

First, from the Victorian period up to the Second World War. Unlike mainstream medicine which was very much concerned with the environmental and social conditions of the poor—important public health measures, e.g. sewerage and water, were the focus in trying to improve the physical health of the working class—the focus of psychiatric epidemiology was on the identification of types of mental disease and (because of the brain pathology notion) localising the source of these in the constitution of the person and their family inheritance. This was the period of tainted genes and eugenic solutions.

Second, from the Second World war to the 1970s. The period of the long boom and of social reconstruction, of making capitalism modern, saw an interest in the social conditions of the working class. With the rise of the community health movement, the sources of mental health problems were seen to be, at least in part, those of poverty. Eugenics had of course lost all credibility. So, instead of segregating the mentally ill, the issue was to ameliorate social conditions. Studies showed that schizophrenia was more common in the poorer communities, as well as depression and anxiety.

Third, from the 1970s to the present. With the end of the post-war boom and the crises of the 70s and 80s, the social reformism came to an end. Community care was found to be too expensive and so cuts were made. Once again identification of problems, rather than sources of problems, became the main issue. With the introduction of new diagnostic practices and pharmacological treatments there was a return to the biological, and there was a strong bias against showing the effects of social conditions on the origin and development of the disease. There were exceptions, but that is what they remained. If you wanted large research grants from the biologically dominated institutes you put in a biological proposal.

Because of this state of affairs, it is difficult to identify clear-cut research studies which put social class in the forefront. But those few that are available all show that the ‘lower’ the social class and degree of urban poverty the greater the incidence of mental health problems. However, the relationship is not always clear-cut. For example the chronically unemployed are less distressed than those who are poorly employed (i.e. those in stressful, badly paid and insecure jobs).

In dealing with this distribution of mental health problems two, antagonistic, hypotheses have been proposed. The first assumes that social stress causes mental health problems. The second assumes that inherited or acquired causes lead to the patient being socially disadvantaged, and this leads to a downward social drift.

The emphasis on social stresses points toward a change in social conditions, whereas the social drift model with the emphasis on genetic faults or self-induced damage, such as alcohol or drug abuse, points toward blaming the person and the use of individual treatments.

Psychic reformism

Throughout the 20th century there have been movements that have promised happiness to us: Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better”, Gestalt Therapy, EST, self-actualisation, the human potential movement and so on. They’ve come and they’ve gone. They fail to meet the hype because in part they are confined to merely individual happiness—I’m OK. They argue that if you sort your head out you can be happy. But it ignores the nature of the society in which we live. Unless this necessary condition for being a human being—miserable or flourishing—is taken into account, any hope for change is doomed to failure—yet another form of reformism. But we’ve had enough of reformism dangled in front of us, promising this time that things really will be different.

But is there anything to think that socialism has something to offer as an answer to the problem of human misery? In socialism we will still have some of the problems that make you feel miserable, scared, depressed or demented. Socialism is not a solution to all mental health problems, it is a solution only to those created by capitalist conditions of life, or to class conditions of life. While some of the problems are due to being human beings living within a social setting, others are due to being biological organisms, and as such will break down if we are damaged or just get old (e.g. aphasia, epilepsy, anger management problems, Alzheimer’s, front lobe syndrome, pharmacologically induced psychosis). While there could be a reduced use of medication and an increased use of social therapy, the power to detain people whose condition renders them dangerous to others will still be needed.

Socialism involves the abolition of the wages system. This entails that our ability to use our labour power is no longer subjected to the power of the capital social relationship, to be used only when capital sees a profit. Rather our labour power becomes ours, to be used voluntarily as part of our relationship with others, working in association towards our goals—to production for use to meet our needs.

Socialism also involves:

• The abolition of useless production, freeing up of millions of people from producing products and services necessary only for capitalism.
• Social decision-making on what is useful—no tat, built-in obsolescence or environmental damage.
• Breaking up of the division of labour, having multiple roles in society.
• Voluntary work—from each according to their ability; less emphasis on efficiency so people can work as much as their competence allows
• Co-operation between user and provider: not a commodity relationship; providers doing it because they want to—so less likelihood of abuse; no power differential between providers and users but partners; emphasis on building competencies

The case for socialism as more than an opposition to the economic exploitation of the working class. Throughout their writings, Marx and Engels criticised capitalism because of its effects on the working class as human beings, as more than mere economic agents.

In arguing against capitalism there was a positive model of human being set up in opposition, and as a position from which to evaluate capitalism. This positive possibility of human socialism needs to be put forward. Socialism is about establishing a mode of society which allows individuals to develop their powers to be more than mere producers or consumers. Capitalism has long produced the potential for such individual development, the task now is to realise it, to persuade working people that there is more to living than the shit of capitalism—we are more than pigs, content with mere physical satisfaction.

Ed Blewitt

Pathfinders: ESA’s eggs in one rocket (2009)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

ESA’s eggs in one rocket

One gets so used to warnings of woe and dire prognostications that the occasional ‘good news’ item really stands up and waves with both hands, and lately there have been more than one such item. We have recently learned, for example, that the disaster attending the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet might not be so bad after all (‘Ice sheet melt threat reassessed’, BBC Online, 14 May). No indeed, instead of the sea level rising by six metres, it may only rise by three. This may not comfort the sub-sea-level Dutch, who can’t afford a rise of three centimetres never mind metres, but you might be able to get by living on the first floor of your house and punting to work. Heartwarming news, too, that some species of insects are not as threatened with extinction as previously believed. “We were a bit surprised that the dragonflies are not that bad off”, says one researcher (‘Dragonflies face uncertain future’, BBC Online, 15 May). Entomologists probably won’t be partying while Rome burns for mammals, birds and amphibians, who make up 63 percent of threatened species. It’s just amazing that the Grim Reaper – that Horseman of the Apocalypse known as ‘Capitalism’ – has been so remiss as to overlook something.

Rather more inspiring news for astronomer buffs came with the successful lifting off of the Herschel and Planck space telescopes on an Ariane 5 on 15 May. Herschel is an infra-red telescope that will see through gas and dust clouds to observe stars and galaxies being born, while Planck will study the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation, key to unlocking the secrets of the Big Bang and the proposed Inflation event, and perhaps even finding hints of earlier universes. The holy grail of grails would be to find experimental evidence of the ‘multiverse’, the supposed multiplicity of parallel universes predicted, or rather unavoidably encountered, by string theory. This might then suggest that physics has not, as some suspect, been wasting its time for thirty years tunnelling down a hopeless blind alley.

Easily the most expensive projects undertaken by the European Space Agency, these telescopes were bundled together on one rocket (which has been known to explode) for economy’s sake. So were the scientists nervous at take-off? You betcha. It wasn’t just the prospect of a £1.7 bn firework display, it was the gambling of a huge time investment by hundreds of people. “I woke up at 4.15am this morning, I was so nervous”, said one Cardiff astrophysicist. “Some people have spent 10 years and more on this …. I felt sick to the stomach.”

And it wasn’t just past effort that was riding on the launch. “If this were to have blown up… a lot of people could have lost their jobs and grants and funds coming for it would have gone.” (‘Jitters and joy at rocket launch’, BBC Online, 14 May). As a bonus, Cardiff University looks forward to seeing a big boost in undergraduate admissions as a result of their involvement in the ESA project. In capitalism, even in pure science, there’s always an angle.

Patent Stupidity

Imagine getting cancer and being told that you can’t have a cancer test because one of the genes involved in the cancer belongs to a private company. This is what happened to Genae Girard of Austin, Texas, in 2006, when she ran up against a patent owned by the company Myriad Genetics. Now, with the backing of other cancer patients and professional groups of pathologists, she is suing Myriad and the US Patent Office (‘Cancer Patients Challenge the Patenting of a Gene’, New York Times, 12 May). At stake is the question of whether it is legitimate for companies to own natural processes. Yes, say companies like Myriad, who wish to charge patients like Girard $3,000 and who refuse to work with their health insurers. Yes, says the Patent Office, who argue that patent restrictions encourage technological development. No, say a host of researchers, who argue the precise opposite, that patents limit research and result in mediocrity and stagnation. Other companies say they can do the same work as Myriad, faster and cheaper, but are legally prevented from doing so. Though one patent-owning company drew praise by being generous with free licensing, this is not likely to be the norm, and future research involving the crossing of multiple patent walls will most probably founder. Many scientists are simply outraged at this imposition of market values on the quest for knowledge. For them, the future of science is in the balance. “You can’t patent my DNA, any more than you can patent my right arm, or patent my blood,” says Jan Nowak, of the Association for Molecular Pathology. But in capitalism, you can own anything, no matter how much it flies in the face of common sense and common interest

We can only hope that the next bit of good news is that someone has patented the swine flu virus. That way, none of us will be allowed to catch it.

Lawfare and Disorder

While litigators across the Pond battle over intellectual property rights, litigation over in the UK seems bent on abolishing intelligence. The well-known enthusiasm among member states of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to pursue libel suits against Western newspapers and individuals seems now to have spilled over into junk science. Using libel law to prevent and punish unwelcome criticism is known as ‘lawfare’ and even ‘libel terrorism’, and is a standard tactic for the OIC, but now snake-oil merchants everywhere will be ecstatic that the British Chiropractic Association has won its libel case against the science writer Simon Singh, who described certain of its practices as ‘bogus’ (New Scientist, 16 May). This victory may owe a great deal to the fact that, in English libel law, the burden of proof is upon the defendant, not the prosecution, a peculiarity which has spawned a UK-centred ‘libel tourism’ industry. Now the homeopaths and crystal-therapists will be catching on. You don’t need to prove that your ‘alternative’ homespun voodoo works, you can just rely on the defence being unable to prove that it doesn’t. Were we to claim in the Socialist Standard that fairies don’t exist, we would nonetheless have a hard time proving it.

 Paddy Shannon

A plea for some rational skepticism (1990)

From the May 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

  "There is today in the West (but not in the East) a resurgent interest in vague, anecdotal and often demonstrably erroneous doctrines that, if true, would betoken at least a more interesting universe. but that, if false, imply an intellectual carelessness, an absence of tough-mindedness, and a diversion of energies not very promising for our survival. Such doctrines include astrology (the view that which stars, one hundred trillion miles away, are rising at the moment of my birth in a closed building affect my destiny profoundly); the Bermuda Triangle 'mystery' (which holds in many versions that an unidentified flying object lives in the ocean off Bermuda and eats ships and airplanes); flying saucer accounts in general; the belief in ancient astronauts: the photography of ghosts; pyramidology (including the view that my razor blade stays sharper within a cardboard pyramid than within a cardboard cube): Scientology; auras and Kirlian photography; the emotional lives and musical preferences of geraniums; psychic surgery; flat and hollow earths; modern prophecy; remote cutlery warping; astral projections; Velikovskian catastrophism; Atlantis and Mu; spiritualism; and the doctrine of the special creation, by God or gods, of mankind despite our deep relatedness, both in biochemistry and in brain physiology, with the other animals. It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.”

—Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden.

Rear View: Dumb and dumber (2020)

The Rear View Column from the March 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dumb and dumber

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Needs to Learn Economics (nationalinterest.org, 26 January). Indeed. But so does the author, Ben Shapiro. He objects to AOC’s claim ‘No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.’ But that was one of the things she got right. ‘According to AOC, the very mechanisms of capitalism mandate such theft. In her view, successful businesspeople simply exploit their workers while maximizing their profits.’ By contrast, the Conservative Shapiro believes ‘consumers determine the value of products; producers do not. The diffuse informational system of the free market, which rewards the power of entrepreneurship, rather than punishing it…’. Socialists assert that profit can be traced to the additional value generated in the production process. Consider, a US factory worker’s output $73.45/hour vs. hourly pay of just $23.32 (huffpost.com, 6 December 2017) and ‘Almost 80% of US workers live from paycheck to paycheck’ (theguardian.com, 29 July 2018). This ‘surplus value’ is the difference between the labour time workers actually expend in the production process and the amount of labour time embodied in the commodities the workers themselves must consume to reproduce their capacity to labour, which Marx terms ‘labour power’. Even a ‘fair wage’, or co-operatives, which AOC supports, do not change the source of Shapiro’s ‘rewards’. He actually quotes approvingly from the Guardian with regard to the Spanish Mondragon Cooperative Corporation, whose worker-owners have ‘learned to think like the shareholders of any other global business.’ Exploitation of labour as the basis of profit accounts for the merciless drive of capitalists to extend the working day, so as to suck out every last drop of surplus value.

Do no homeopathy

Capitalism is parasitic, seeking out profit wherever it can be made and leaving war and want in its wake. There is potential profit in the coronavirus. ‘The virus appears to have originated from a Wuhan seafood market where wild animals, including marmots, birds, rabbits, bats and snakes, are traded illegally’ (wired.co.uk, 30 January). Imagine the conditions for animals and workers involved with illegal farms and markets. The Indian government is doubling down on the damage done by promoting homeopathic treatment. ‘Far from being a “prophylactic medicine,” as the ministry suggests, this miracle concoction is, in reality, a super-diluted form of arsenic trioxide. Not only is the compound known to be fatal if improperly used, but there’s also no evidence to suggest it works on the coronavirus, or any other condition for that matter. If it weren’t for the Dalai Lama recently telling his followers to chant a mantra as protection, India’s purported tips to fend off the coronavirus might be the least effective advice offered yet. Now, the two will have to battle for that top spot, and India’s ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, Sowa Rigpa and Homoeopathy) has even more nonsensical suggestions to offer in the fight… a drop of sesame oil in each nostril upon waking, and a “light and soft” diet…. Ayurveda and other traditional medicines, like Unani, are seen as a legitimate and burgeoning industry. The Prime Minister… wants to make them “a way of life”… and as holistic medicine becomes ever more profitable, the government has started promoting traditional remedies more and more’ (sciencealert.com, 30 January).

A world to win

We live in a sick society, yet a small minority continue to thrive. ‘The richest Americans are set to inherit a staggering $764 billion… The study noted the US has one of the lowest levels of upward mobility, which now “heavily depends” on the circumstances of birth’ (markets.business insider.com, 28 January). Who runs things from top to bottom? Who grows the food, who builds the houses, who mines the minerals, who transports them, who processes them, who fashions them into useful things, who does all the administrative work for this, orders the supplies, draws up the designs – who other than the working class`? The shareholding capitalist and the fat-cat company director are completely redundant as far as the actual work of wealth production is concerned – and new wealth can only be created by the application of human labour to materials that originally come from nature, not by speculating on the stock exchange or planning take-over bids. Their social role is purely parasitic – a mosquito that banks the blood it extracts, part of the wealth created by the rest of us. This is the system which AOC and Shapiro, with more or less governmental intervention, support, and which only a majority of us can end.

Raging Hormones (1994)

Book Review from the March 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Raging Hormones, Do They Rule Our Lives? by Gail Vines. Virago, 1993, £6.99.

If Gail Vines is right, "the 1990s seem set to witness a resurgence in ’biological’ explanations of human capabilities and frailties". Her book is a timely attack on a scientific determinism which seemed long dead. Although primarily a feminist critique of the medical profession’s supposed objectivity, her arguments work equally well against all attempts to treat science as a thing unbiased by the perceptions of its time, to "push human agency and the social context of our lives out of the picture".

Thus, we find that men who are dominated by their hormones are "deviant", yet for women it is expected. The "feminine" hormone, oestrogen, even takes its name from the Latin for gadfly, "that which causes a frenzy". Gender roles are socially constructed, so society covered its tracks with the ideology of the hormone, giving an unchangeable basis on which these roles could be justified.

It is an ideology, moreover, well suited to late twentieth century capitalism. The study of hormones betrays a fascination with the uncontrollable within us, a deep psychological anxiety which stems (Vines convincingly argues) from instability in the social and economic spheres.

The Victorian medical profession — male, of course — was obsessed with menstrual bleeding, the fear of obstruction and accumulated waste mirroring the laissez-faire economics of free-marketeers like Herbert Spencer. The fad of today, fatness, symbolises our modern concern with self-control and the "correct" management of desire. Women cope with fears for their role in a consumption-driven society by dieting, men by transposing them on to the unstable "other" woman: woman herself.

The menstrual cycle is seen as defining the essence of womanhood, and its end at the menopause as a loss of allure. Nevertheless, from puberty onwards, girls are conditioned not to let their "private" time encroach on the "public" time of their working environment, whether school, home or workplace. Any conflict between the two is met by attempts to "get the woman regular".

Many accounts of pre-menstrual tension (PMT) stress the loss of mental and physical discipline, the very things which capitalism demands. Another classic symptom, anger, is usually the cue for therapy. Rarely is it hinted that women have anything to be angry about. Vines questions the hormonal basis of PMT (there seems to be no link between its occurrence and hormone levels), and explains its survival in medical folklore partly through casual sexism, but also through a more easily quantifiable reason: the drugs companies enjoy having such a large market for their “cures". The causes of stress, too, come less from within than from the inability to control and predict the environment, most noticeably the working environment. Again, capitalism’s problem becomes a women’s problem in particular, because they are urged to conquer stress not just for their own sake, but for others — boyfriends and husbands (in advertisements), and customers and clients at work (contact work, for example in shops, is done most often by women).

Likewise, hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has two faces. Originally introduced to combat the short-term symptoms of the menopause, its pioneer, Robert Wilson, claimed rather more. His 1966 book was entitled Feminine Forever, a ploy followed by modern HRT evangelists such as Teresa Gorman MP, who tells women that "if they want to keep the older man from leaving home for a dolly bird, they too will get smart and use HRT" .

As with PMT, powerful pharmaceutical interests stand to gain from hormone replacement treatments. A mere $1.3m of their money paid for the establishment of the Wilson Foundation in 1963, while by 1991 American women alone bought $730m-worth of oestrogen products every year. Better still, the market is set to expand as the baby boom generation reaches middle age.

Like PMT too, however, the menopause itself is, at least in part, a creation of our society. In Mayan villages, women look forward to it as the end of child-bearing and lack the symptoms found in the West, such as hot flushes. It is only now appearing in Japan, at a time when their gynaecologists’ traditional income from abortions has fallen because of better contraception. In this, the situation is similar to that in the US, the biggest market. In Britain, at least until recently, doctors under the NHS had no need to sell drugs to give them an income, and HRT was consequently much less popular.

Vines maintains that gender and sexuality are the result of upbringing, and no more determined by our hormones than aggression is, or (we might add) greed. There is no "brain sex" which determines, for example, that women have poor spatial awareness, and therefore make bad drivers or bad engineers. In most cultures, boy and girls are treated very differently from their first months, and it is therefore impossible to distinguish biological and cultural factors.

To pretend that people are as they are because of their biological programming, whether by hormones or genes, carries obvious risks of discrimination and worse: it oppresses the individuality of all of us, and takes our sexuality "out of its lived context". This book is designed to give us a better idea of how hormones, and scientists, work. It is designed to put us back in touch with our bodies. "Such empowerment will come only with the knowledge that in reality, collectively and individually, we are continually creating ourselves."

Toby Crowe

Socialism and "Science." (1913)

From the January 1913 issue of the Socialist Standard

Spencer and Huxley, Tyndal and Lewes, Darwin and Buckle, are names coupled with science in the fighting stage, battling against the learned champions of ignorance, the clergy, and the Church. But Science to-day is in a bad way. She no longer battles for her existence against a militant clergy, but sleeps beneath their caresses. The progressive materialism of an earlier time has gone out of fashion, and our scientists now talk mysteriously and darkly about thought-waves and telepathy, discarnate souls and such immaterial subjects. Witches and magic, demons and angels, that we had confidently supposed had been laid for ever with the other ghosts of popular superstitions, have cropped up again under the patronage of “scientific” men. The immortality of the soul is said to be established on evidence sufficiently strong to satisfy the scientific mind, and doubtless hell will flare up again, if only to illumine the same “scientific" minds.

The connection between the clergy and the ruling class is too historically obvious to need elaboration; the partnership of the parson and the squire in the government of the country belongs to history. The attack on the clergy by the scientist was simultaneous with the attack on hereditary privilege by the capitalist The political struggle and the intellectual struggle arose from the same set of economic circumstances. The thing preceded the idea; the actual power achieved by the capitalist class on the economic field had to be accompanied by political recognition and intellectual sanction.

The same movement of economic forces explains the present reaction of science. Capitalism has achieved its mission: it is the predominant power in the State. In the main it has absorbed the aristocracy, its erstwhile enemy. Being at peace with the landlord, it is at peace with the parson.

The capitalist having absorbed the landlord, the Whig and Tory being transformed into the Unionist, the scientist and the theologian have also called a truce. The whole force of united rulers are therefore able to show a single front to the working class pressing upon them. The side-tracks of the patriotic and political order are still useful in some quarters, and the mysticism of the scientist-cum-theologian is equally useful in others. The possibility of conversing with the spook of a departed friend, or the possible influence of the planets on the individual character, may have as much fascination as a game of whist or a visit to St. James's Hall, bat that they are established as ready for the acceptance of “scientific” minds is beyond credulity. They are still useful as will-o’-the-wisps to set the more curious of the workers chasing instead of looking into the things that matter in their own lives. The New Theology and Christian Science, with a hundred and one forms of occultism and mysticism that are fashionable in some quarters point out the trend among our intellectuals.

All this would not matter if it were not that Socialism—the social philosophy of Materialism —is dragged into it by some of its alleged votaries. R. J. Campbell, who, it is confidently asserted, is controlled by the spirit of Jesus Christ, is a member of the I.L.P. Bernard Shaw, who is said to believe in the Yogi Rama seeing with his eyes blindfolded, in spite of a scathing exposure of the performance, is a Fabian. Others might be mentioned who are both pseudo-Socialists and occultists ; while the effort of advanced churchmen to nobble the Socialist movement is a recognised phase of the workers’ struggle by the really class-conscious ones among them.

Fortunately, the S.P.G.B. stands clear for Socialism alone. The attractions of the higher life or the call of the spirit leave us Socialists all the time. The bread and butter question is first for us. The struggle for working class supremacy has first to be fought out. Given the success of Socialism, there will be time enough to investigate with a far greater degree of dispassionate and clear-sighted enquiry, the claims of the new science, new theology, theosophy, spiritualism, and what not, to separate the grain of truth there may be in the mass of commercial charlatanism that passes now under the various titles of psychic mysteries.

Socialists at this time of day have no business with Psychical Research, however attractive the “search for truth" may be made by those who have nothing better to occupy their time and minds with. Sufficient economic and social science is incontrovertibly established to enable us to know, even if we did not know by rougher and more empirical methods, that food, shelter, and clothing, the prime necessaries of existence, can be had in abundance by all when the cornerstone of capitalism is dislodged and the workers control industry for their own ends. Until this is done nothing else matters.

The education and organisation of the workers for this great purpose is the work of Socialists. No “saviour from on high" will help us. All the “saviours" of the past, and their current representatives, are on the side of the powers that be; and there is no reason for supposing that the future will differ from the past in the part the priesthood, in its widest sense, will play in the social straggle. That science—or rather, the scientists, with some commendable exceptions— are hobnobbing with the mysticists is but another indication of the union of the forces of capitalism in every field, that points to the rapidly approaching time when this consolidated forces of organised class-conscious labour will meet the existing order for the last bout.

Then will be required all the strength of the Socialist demand. The more Socialism is overlaid with excrescences and absurdities the more chance is there for Socialism to suffer. The more simple the Socialist demand is kept the greater is the concentration on the essential point. Against the central citadel of Socialism all the thunder of capitalism’s politicians, preachers, and wizards will break in vain.

"Eugineer."

The Panjandrum: Science and Subversion (2017)

From the June 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The sacrosanct fetish of today is science. Why don’t you get some of your friends to go for that wooden-faced panjandrum – eh?’

The above quote is from Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent within which the employer of an ‘agent provocateur’ is attempting to persuade his employee to destroy an architectural symbol of science which he believed to be part of the iconography of bourgeois culture. Certainly during the nineteenth and early twentieth century this perspective is persuasive given the identification of science with the accelerating technological forces of production. There’s little evidence that the ruling class ever understood or took any interest in the intellectual rigours or origin of scientific analysis but many of them certainly believed it to be a symbol of the ‘progress’ that they thought of themselves as representing. Does science still possess this iconic status as a symbol of capitalism and the ideology of the class that bears its name? Or has the dialectical wheel turned to a point where science is now directly subversive of all that it once seemed to represent culturally and politically? Has science now turned against its own technological progeny and, in doing so, does it now represent an ideological challenge to the market/profit shibboleths of 21st  century capitalism?

Although some, including many within its own community, have made grandiose claims for science as the definitive form of knowledge (mathematics as the language of nature and/or god etc.) it is as well to remember that science is created and sustained by the labour of human beings (scientists). We may well see it as one of our greatest achievements but we must resist any attempt to dehumanise it and raise it to the level of some type of quasi-religion. As our creation, it is subject to all of the cultural and political influences that exist within all human endeavours. We can see this clearly within the arena of the law courts. ‘Expert witnesses’ will appear for both defence and prosecution and after confirming their exhaustive scientific credentials they will proceed to interpret the forensic evidence in often directly contradictory ways.

In the past we have seen such experts confidently assert that nicotine is not addictive and that tobacco can have positive effects on the health of those who smoke. Indeed some commentators have dated the end of the love affair between capitalism and science to December 1953 when the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC) was created in the US. This organisation was a pseudo-scientific front for the tobacco industry which employed those scientists who were ‘sceptical’ about the connection between smoking and serious heart and lung disease. It set a precedent for a way in which companies could deal with ‘unhelpful’ scientific data – they would not directly confront the evidence but would highlight and emphasise the inherent scepticism within the scientific method itself. We can ridicule such things in retrospect but remember that those who deny ‘global warming’ as a result of industrial activity (including some scientists) and those who desperately still look to science to demonise substances like marijuana are still playing the same game. It is not that they are necessarily consciously lying but rather that the cultural and political pressures to make the evidence fit the needs of the dominant ideology are sometimes irresistible.

Socialists are materialists and as such we attribute the success of science to its ability to represent, more or less accurately, the world in which we live. It can be seen as part of humanity’s ongoing project to understand itself and its world alongside philosophy, anthropology and history, etc. The results of scientific enquiry can be described as ‘correspondence truths’. As we have noted, these ‘truths’ seemed to consolidate the political validity of the capitalist class of the past; now they seem to have turned on their owners with a vengeance. Historically we have seen a similar phenomenon in religion as the Protestants of the Reformation turned on their former masters (the Catholic hierarchy) and used the same biblical scripture in the forefront of their struggle against Rome. As has happened with science today, the Christian faith was subverted by the specific political needs of the rising European nation states of that period. Some socialists called their more rigorous materialist approach ‘scientific socialism’ in an attempt to completely confiscate the beloved panjandrum of the bourgeoisie. Today we are more aware of the ideological component within the scientific method and so do not believe it to be the definitive description of the world that some once did.

Placing science and scientists within an historical and political context gives us a greater insight into its nature and how it has contributed to both conservative and revolutionary ideas. It is tempting to hope that science can still aspire to a value-free conception of nature (and the culture that created it) but this now seems increasingly naive. Is this a council of despair or, ironically, an example of the very same scientific approach that its conclusions seem to undermine? As we socialists are prone to say: only history will tell us. What we can say with confidence is that the political struggle will continue as long as poverty, privilege, exploitation and war thrive. That both sides will continue to utilise all of the intellectual weapons available to them is also inevitable. After the revolutionary resolution of this struggle it is unlikely that anyone will proclaim the victory as being that of ‘science’ or any other single component of human knowledge. What we can hope for from science is that no socialist revolutionary will die with any idealistic illusions, including those provided by its own panjandrum.

Wez

Racism debunked (1991)

Book Review from the August 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Mismeasure of Man. By Stephen Jay Gould. Pelican.

If intellectual dishonesty was a crime most of the 19th century racist scientists would he put on trial today. What they did was to concentrate on oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, and women—and come up with evidence claiming to show that they were biologically inferior and so deserving of their inferior status. In this they confirmed existing prejudices and allowed those who held them to believe that these had a scientific basis. It was the worst intellectual crime of the century.

This sordid history has been documented by Stephen Jay Gould in this excellent book where he shows that all the leading 19th century biologists followed the conventional view that blacks were inferior to whites. The lead was given in the 18th century by Linnaeus himself, the man who laid the basis for the classification of all living things which is still used today, and by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. Linnaeus distinguished between a homo sapiens afer (the African black) "ruled by caprice"and a homo sapiens europaeus "ruled by customs". Hume wrote: "I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all other species of men . . . to be naturally inferior to whites".

Cuvier, one of the pioneers of both geology and palaeontology as well as of comparative anatomy, considered Africans to be “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government”. Even Darwin took it for granted that Negroes and Australians (aborigines) were biologically inferior to “Caucasians (whites).

Both sides in the pre-Darwin debate amongst Creationists about the origin of different human races— monogenism (which held that all humans were descended from a single Adam) and polygenism (which held that the different human races were descended from different Adams)—argued, on different grounds, that blacks were inferior to whites. The monogenists said that races were the product of a degeneration from the perfect humans of the Garden of Eden, the blacks having degenerated more than the whites. The polygenists such as the leading American naturalist of his day Louis Agassiz said that blacks were a separate, inferior biological species to whites who were not entitled to share in the “Equality of Man".

Scientific evidence to back up these prejudices was provided by craniometry which was the leading numerical biological science of the 19th century. Those who practised it believed that, by measuring skulls, they could establish intelligence. Their findings invariably claimed to show that blacks (and women) were inferior.

Gould shows that this continued into the 20th century when craniometry was replaced by psychological testing as a way of supposedly measuring intelligence. Both were based on the fallacy that intelligence was some measurable thing located in the brain which allowed people to be graded into a single series. Like craniometry, IQ testing came to the conclusion that the poor, blacks and women were inferior because of their biologically-determined mental inferiority.

Gould re-examined the data of some of these scientists and found their evidence to be invalid. Sometimes it was simply faked, but in most cases it had been unconsciously biased by acceptance of the prejudices of the time. His conclusion is a devastating rejection of the claims of all forms of biological determinism:

   The classical arguments of biological determinism fail because the features they invoke to make distinctions among groups are usually the products of cultural evolution. Detcrminists did seek evidence in anatomical traits built by biological, not cultural, evolution. But, in so doing, they tried to use anatomy for making inferences about capacities and behaviors that they linked to anatomy and we regard as engendered by culture . . . We now believe that different attitudes and styles of thought among human groups are usually the non-genetic products of cultural evolution. In short, the biological basis of human uniqueness leads us to reject biological determinism. Our large brain is the biological foundation of intelligence: intelligence is the ground of culture: and cultural transmission builds a new mode of evolution more effective than Darwinian processes in its limited realm—the “inheritance" and modification of learned behaviour.

 Racism, as a variety of biological determinism, has no basis in biology or any other physical science. It also denies. as we point out in our pamphlet on Racism, the real division of capitalist society— class division—and the urgent need for workers everywhere to cooperate to end capitalism. Racism is an issue which the working class must deal with as an obstacle to their progress to a sane, free, humane social system.

Michael Ghebre