Socialism and the immediate future (1952)

From the April 1952 issue of the Socialist Standard

The starting point of any fruitful discussion about the conditions of the immediate future must be found in the present ones. Past revolutionary changes of the economic system have taught us that in any new society there can never be a complete break with the conditions of the immediate past. The physical basis upon which the new society rests is the end product of the development of the economic and political forces within the old society. This is why socialists stress the necessity of understanding how capitalism functions, as a necessary pre-requisite to taking action to replace it by Socialism.

The method and means of production that Capitalism has developed and will develop are the only ones upon which Socialism can be built. As long as thinking about the future takes the form of planning an ideal world, as an architect plans a house, it will remain a dream, unrelated to and without bearing upon the present. One of the chief reasons why those who agree that Socialism is desirable refuse to work for its establishment is that it is regarded as having no connection with what to-morrow is likely to bring. It is important, therefore, to emphasize that the form of society we direct all our efforts towards attaining is possible to institute to-morrow, given the understanding of and desire for it by the majority of people.

What is there about Capitalism that enables it to continue, in spite of the fact that it produces effects which are repulsive to the majority who endure them? The answer is that acceptance of its basic institutions— wage-labour and capital, money, the state—is deeply rooted in most people’s minds. These institutions govern property relationships and their continued existence is, in fact, unchallenged except by socialists, though others may express a desire to modify some of them.

The basis of production under Capitalism is the pursuit of profit and this economic basis creates effects which permeate the whole of capitalist society. It is not just production for sale and profit that is tacitly, if not avowedly, accepted by the majority, but the whole set of ideas, ethics or morals that is in line with it The two-class nature of present society is accepted, not consciously as a scientific theory, but implicitly in all the conventional mental attitudes towards it in practice. Such is the power of tradition that most people invariably expect the continuation of property relationships into the immediate future at any rate and can conceive the possibility of only superficial changes in them.

Having acknowledged the power of tradition let us now look more closely at how it exercises its sway over the minds of all who fail to examine it critically. The class that owns the means of production and distribution also controls the instruments of mass education and propaganda — schools, churches, newspapers, cinemas, radio, etc. Only those ideas and concepts that do not militate against the present order of things are reproduced on any wide scale. In effect there is an even narrower choice of mental diet than that dictated by the requirements of Capitalism as a world system. Periodically the citizens of each nation are inculcated with the ideas needed to ensure their support for the prosecution of a particular war, though not for war in general

The ideas and edicts which make up the moral code (in the widest sense) of the present system must be acceptable to or at least not opposed by, members of both capitalist and working class. In the case of the former, rights connected with property ownership are to be upheld and of the latter their continued acceptance of wage-slavery is required. Although the moral code is interpreted in a different way in each of these rôles, it necessarily has certain feature which are common to both. For example, most workers offer as much resistance to the idea of a world without money as capitalists do, and they have the satisfaction of knowing that this is a “common sense,” i.e. mass produced, attitude. Their explanation of this similarity of outlook is that the basic difference between capitalist and worker is not primarily a political one, but one of relationship to property. An employer stands in relation to his employee as owner of means of production to non-owner and the relationship is accepted, willingly or not, by both.

In order to retain the acquiescence of workers as a whole in this arrangement the capitalist class, through all the media of mass influence, diverts their attention from abolishing it by allowing and often encouraging them to reform it The level of political understanding is prevented from rising by the dominance of the so-called "practical” programmes which involve the continuation of the property system and the consequent need to preserve it in modified or unchanged form.

Thus Capitalism continues because the possessing class uses its control of the means of mass influence to persuade the producing class that no other order of things is possible. It is the task of socialists to point out that there is an alternative which may be put into effect just as soon as the need for it is commonly understood. To hold no opinion about how society is and could be organized is not neutrality but assent to its present form, Capitalism. It is not logical for workers who are capable of achieving Socialism to refuse to work for it because it appears to be out of the question as far as the immediate future is concerned. Once the position is taken up that Socialism is the only solution to our common problems then all political effort should be directed towards bringing the day of its establishment nearer. This involves the rejection of all the ideas and concepts that sustain Capitalism and the adoption of a revolutionary outlook towards all its institutions.

To many workers it may seem a tall order to refuse to swallow the mental dope which is offered on every hand to give the ugly present a roseate hue. This is no doubt partly due to the fact that the routine work connected with capitalist propaganda is mainly carried on by members of the working class themselves, either as their paid job or, in its less obvious forms, as conventional conversation. Unfortunately most minds tend to act only as receivers of ideas, which they repeat to others, and the most powerful transmitters are capitalist controlled. However, once it is realized that their object is to keep the property basis of present society intact then there is a strong incentive to challenge every idea that seeks, no matter how indirectly to prolong it.

Stan Parker

Escape from capitalism? (2026)

From the April 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

On 13 February Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviewed Clara Mattei for Channel 4 News to discuss her book Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention which later circulated as a podcast.

In the interview Mattei argued that people are taught that capitalism is an economic system that arose spontaneously out of humans’ supposed natural propensity to barter, but in fact it is of relatively recent historical origin and was brought into being through violence and coercion. The state forced people off the land who, no longer able to meet their needs from directly working land, had no alternative but to work for wages.

Wage-labour, said Mattei, with workers creating more value than what they are paid as wages, is one of the two basic features of capitalism. The other is what she called ‘private investment’ for profit controlled by and for a privileged few; nothing is produced except in the expectation of ending up with more money than invested at the beginning. This means that ‘austerity’, in the sense of restricting how much people as wage-workers get to consume, is a structural feature of capitalism; it is not merely a policy pursued by some governments or the system not working properly but is the basis of the system. The logic of profit required that workers be denied direct access to what they need to live so obliging them to sell their ability to work for money to buy it; the money they are paid was never going to be enough to enable them to live without having to continue working for wages. Austerity, she concluded, was necessary for the system.

Good stuff. Questioned by Guru-Murthy, Mattei agreed that she was in the ‘Marxian tradition’ (she seemed to have deliberately used this adjective rather than Marxist, which is fair enough). What she particularly liked was Marx’s criticism of earlier writers who thought that capitalism was the natural economic system for humans; wage-labour and production for profit were parts of a system constructed by humans and so could be replaced by human action.

How, then, did she propose that people escape from capitalism? As well as being a professor of economics at Tulsa University in Oklahama, she is also the director of its ‘Forum for Real Economic Emancipation’. Here, she explained, she is running a pilot project to test on the ground an alternative. This involved encouraging people to take part in collective decision-making on economic matters, along the lines of ‘participatory budgeting’ practised in a number of cities in Brazil. Under this the local population are involved in deciding how money raised through local taxes should be spent. The implication is that in an alternative society to capitalism all economic decisions would be taken in this way, including in workplaces.

This brings out the ambiguity of the term she used to describe the second basic feature of capitalism, ‘private investment’. This could suggest that what is wrong with investment (as money used to initiate production) is not that it is money invested in production with a view to making more money but that it is controlled by a few at the top rather than democratically by all involved. What she seems to have in mind are factory councils as envisaged at one time by Gramsci (who she name-checks) and assemblies; these should decide democratically how the money obtained from sales should be allocated between individual workers, social amenities and new investment. In other words, a form of what has been called ‘market socialism’.

However, this wouldn’t be an escape from the logic of profit; it would mean that this logic would be applied by workers themselves rather than by their bosses as now. Escaping from capitalism has to mean escape from production for the market and the economic pressures this exerts on whoever actually takes the decisions at workplace level.

Adam Buick

The position of the I.L.P. A parallel and a moral (1910)

From the December 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

The means by which the defenders of an established order seek to retain supremacy and resist progress are always interesting, not merely from an abstract point of view, but also because of the valuable lessons which can be learned by a thoughtful observer, and applied with advantage in the future. Such a case occurred when the theory of Natural Selection, so intimately associated with the name of Darwin, burst like a thunderclap over the old ideas of a special creation, with each human individual, as distinct from the lower animals, endowed with a “soul” or “spirit”. These modern notions were met on the one hand with a conspiracy of silence, on the other with a venomous outpouring of abuse. But, of course, neither method proved to be any great barrier to the progress of an idea that was bound to grow and spread, by reason of its intrinsic truth and logic. The more astute, though less honest, apostles of ignorance were not slow to realise this, and in consequence they adopted a new method of combating the truth. We are now generally told that there is no real or necessary conflict between science and superstition, or, as it is phrased, between evolution and religion. Science is now invested with clerical garb where formerly it was reviled. By such means do the clergy desire to prevent its real significance being known, and to prolong the life of their creed and therefore the term of their occupation.

The essential features of the reception given to the above mentioned idea are also common to the attitude adopted toward the theories in which we are more immediately concerned. I refer to the principles upon which the Socialist takes his stand. The starting point is as follows:

The way in which wealth is produced and distributed in every social system determines the ideas of the people; in other words, material conditions dominate and form the basis of all the legal, ethical, moral and religious superstructure of society.

In modern society there are two distinct classes, namely, the producers and the possessors. The material interest of the possessing class lies in the direction of more profit, which means more poverty and greater hardship for the producers. The interest of the workers is, of course, against this, and lies in getting all the wealth it produces. Such is the position to-day, and we cannot ignore it. The ideas and aspirations of the master class are rooted in their class privilege — they will not abdicate their favoured position. Their legal and moral codes seek to justify their position as robbers. The man or the party that advises the workers to support capitalist candidates or parties under any circumstances is an enemy of the working class. It is our duty to keep the class issue clear. Either you must engage in the struggle against the capitalist system or else actively or passively support the ruling class. With its cause lying in the private property basis of society, the class struggle cannot be suspended, but must be waged with increasing bitterness until the capitalist class are overthrown and classes cease to exist. We do not cloak these facts, but make their clear presentment to our fellow-workingmen the very first object of our propagandist endeavours.

Realising the dangerous character of these revolutionary theories, the master class and their henchmen first endeavour to keep the working class in ignorance by such clumsy methods as the exiling or imprisoning of men (such as Marx) who discovered and first stated these facts, and by the suppression of their works and the harrying of those who openly accept their ideas. Finding the futility of such a course, they take a lesson from the Church, and resort to the boycott. In this the capitalist class in this country found a useful ally in the Independent Labour Party, and later in the Labour Party. The I.L.P. (as also the L.P.) at its inception completely ignored the fundamentals of working-class organisation, thus playing directly into the masters’ hands. This party, with whom popularity and Parliamentary seats appear to be the only measure of success, is bound in order to maintain its success, to preach and support anti-working-class nostrums which have been popularised by capitalist agencies. An ever-growing number of the working class have pointed out the futility of dropping revolutionary principles for votes and fighting elections on election cries kindly provided by the Liberal party, and specially designed to serve capitalist interests. Naturally enough, the labour leaders have been annoyed at these irreconcilable notions, and when they could not ignore them they have indulged in violent denunciations of the principle of the class struggle and everything connected with it.

After the International  Conference at Amsterdam Mr. J. Bruce Glasier, a prominent I.L.P.er, distinguished himself in this direction with the following (Labour Leader, 26.8.04): “The Class War dogma is a reactionary and whiggish precept certain to lead the movement away from the real aims of Socialism”. On another occasion Mr. Keir Hardie showed his “love” for the materialist class-war basis of Socialism by stating that if Socialism was to be achieved on these lines nothing would be changed, except for the worse, adding that it would be “a merely glorified animalism, dangerously akin to bestiality” (Labour Leader, 17.8.01). This sentiment, of course, is merely a variation of the old “religious” wheeze that everything materialistic is inexpressibly vile.

Another instance (out of many) of specific denial of the Socialist principle of the class struggle is contained in The New Theology and the Social Movement, a pamphlet issued by the I.L.P. Publication Department. The brochure is a report of the first I.L.P. meeting the Rev. R.J. Campbell addressed (Hope Hall, Liverpool, March 25, 1907). Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour M.P., wrote regretting his inability to attend and added: “Mr. Campbell’s adherence to the principles of our party is one more proof that we do not appeal to narrow class interests or prejudices, but that we aim at a state of society which commends itself to conscientious and rational people irrespective altogether of social status”. This childishly Utopian notion of a perfect society commending itself to all “conscientious and rational” people becomes merely laughable when tested by the historical fact that no ruling class has ever willingly relinquished its power, no matter how “good” or “rational” such a course might have been.

But in spite of this Keir Hardie specifically endorsed MacDonald’s effusion. “As MacDonald says” he declared, “his (Campbell’s) presence here is one more proof that the Socialism of the I.L.P. is no narrow class movement. It is a great principle which we invite all classes to come into and help to realise”. This is the sort of stuff Hardie ladled out in the name of the I.L.P. as an antidote to Marxian principles, and, be it noted, none of these statements have ever been repudiated or even objected to by his party. In fact, in I.L.P. leaflet Nº 5, ironically called “A Statement of Principles”, the same position is taken up. We are told that the party does not make war upon a class but considers a man’s convictions and not his social status, thus making it plain that they consider the two things entirely separate instead of, as the Marxian philosophy shows, vitally connected.

Considerations of space prevent me quoting further evidence of the opposition of the I.L.P. to Marxian tenets. Sufficient however, has, I believe, been written to prove beyond all doubt the hostile and anti-working-class attitude of the Labourites.

It is becoming increasingly evident that after all neither Utopian day-dreams nor sentimental piffle have much effect upon the steady progress of the Socialist idea. With the deplorable results to the labour “leaders” themselves consequent on the workers embracing the new philosophy, ever before their eyes, the more astute of them have fallen back to their last ditch. The time has gone by when it was profitable to repudiate Marx, and now the wirepullers of the “Labour” movement shift their ground and affirm that the Labour Party is based upon his teaching.

In view of this insidious move it is more than ever necessary for us to point out what position the labour “leaders” and the organisations they dominate have occupied on this question. Let any of these “latter-day Marxists” show, if they can, how a Marxian party could be guilty of such anti-Marxian pronouncements as those quoted above.

It is peculiar that it should have been left to Keir Hardie, who has so vehemently denounced the principle of the class struggle in the past, to introduce the new methods and pose as a Marxist. Yet, relying on the proverbially short memory of the British working class, he has not shirked the task. In My Confession of Faith in the Labour Alliance, a pamphlet issued just after the Edinburgh conference of the I.L.P., Mr. Keir Hardie, among other curious statements, makes the following assertion: “The Labour Party is the only expression of orthodox Marxian Socialism in Great Britain”.

Unfortunately for Mr. Hardie and his gang of political brigands, he neglected, when perpetrating this foul lie, to give his confederates the cue, with the result that some amusing complications have arisen. Father should have said “turn”, for the sake of harmony. As it is some of the party are still declaring that Marx was the last of the Utopians, while others, more up-to-date, are repeating Hardie’s prevarications. For instance, after the latter had discovered that they were a class party, Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, of the “Brunner Bill” fame, wrote in the Labour Leader of May 21st, 1909: “The Socialist movement knows no class but is drawn from all classes”, and clinched the matter thus: “So I can sum up, the Labour Party is not a class but a community party”.

What a spectacle of contradiction and confusion! Here are two men with unrivalled opportunity of knowing what the Labour Party really does stand for, flatly contradicting each other on the very basis of their movement. If the leaders are so divided on root principles it may be left to the reader’s imagination to determine what state of mind the “rank-and-file” of the party must be in.

The most important point, however, is just that the labour “leaders” have in the past first ignored and then opposed the theories of Marx. Only recently have they attempted to “revise” these great scientific truths. The “revising” process is merely an endeavour to emasculate the Socialist doctrine, to rob Marx’s terms of their meaning and so make them fit in with the confusing and contradictory propaganda of the Labour Party.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the new plan has already caught on. The official organ of the I.L.P. for September 9th last tells us that no one can have a complete knowledge of Socialism unless he is acquainted with the theories of Marx. Incidentally it has taken them seventeen years as a party to find this out. But they go on to say that Marx’s work belongs to the pioneer stage and requires some restatement. In this way they seek to impose upon the credulity of those of their readers who do not know that Marx’s work was the laying bare of the economic foundation of society – which remains the same now as when his labour was accomplished. Consequently they do not suggest a study of Marx’s works, but advise the perusal of a pamphlet written by a pseudo-Marxist of the Labour Party type, who can be depended upon to suppress awkward truths and distort inconvenient theories.

It is not my special purpose here to show that the class struggle has nothing in common with licensing bills, capitalist budgets, Free Church councils and P.S.A.’s, even were it necessary to do so; but I shall be satisfied if I enable my readers to see through the shame enthusiasm of the Labour “leaders” for their perverted Marxism. Just as the clergy opposed the theory of evolution until its progress made it imperative to smother it with embraces, so too the changed attitude of Hardie and his gang toward the principle of the class struggle is forced on them by the rapid spreading of the idea among the working class. Hence it is a hopeful sign, signifying that the Labour tricksters are being forced into their last resource.

When the facts are known, the insincerity and double-dealing of the Labour “leaders” are plain. It is not surprising that their fight against progress runs on parallel lines to that of the clergy for they have much in common. Both are the servile tools of the capitalist class, and their function is to mislead the workers and so postpone the day of reckoning – hence the Socialist Party spare no pains to effect their exposure.

R. Fox

Violence and war: Are they inevitable? The long view (2025)

From the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

It’s become widely accepted that, for well over 200,000 years, hunter-gatherers, humans like us, lived in egalitarian societies. So why, beginning around 12,000 years ago, did most of them, within a relatively short period of time, give up that lifestyle for settled agriculture and, in so doing, move to a different way of life and new social structures, where a dominance hierarchy of the few began to take over from equality for all, leading to exploitation, slavery, violence and war?

The invention of scarcity

The answer to that is multi-faceted. But, broadly speaking, such a transformation can only have come about as a result of environmental factors pushing people into the imagined greater security that the longer-term and more abundant supplies of food and other materials derived from farming would have been capable of producing. The trouble is that, once that happened, there was no obvious going back, as it brought with it the creation of hierarchies and states and rule by those few who in previous societies would have been considered anti-social for their dominating tendencies. That minority would now have much freer rein for their deviant behaviour, resulting in struggles for power, the development of classes and rulers and ruled, and the emergence of what came to be considered natural orders headed by kings, emperors, pharaohs and high priests, with the majority living at a lower level of subsistence than as hunter-gatherers (‘the invention of scarcity’, it has been called). This in turn gave rise to full-scale predatory social systems (first slavery, then feudalism, and now capitalism) where the majority have been kept in check by tiny, privileged minorities either by the threat of violence from higher authority and/or by ideological constructs or smokescreens such as tribal loyalty or nationalism.

Original sin and the free market

In the lens of recorded history the result of these dominance structures and of the conflicts over wealth and resources that have arisen between the privileged ruling minorities has been (and still is) large-scale violence and continual wars. And over most of this history, the explanation for this found in writings, both secular and religious, has been that conflict between humans is the natural state of things. Christianity, for example, expressed this through the idea of ‘original sin’, while commentators not dependent on religious doctrine tended to come to similar conclusions. For example, the 16th century Italian political writer Machiavelli, in his famous essay The Prince, stated that human beings were ‘ungrateful, fickle, dissembling, hypocritical, cowardly and greedy’ and ‘never do anything good except out of necessity’. Similar views were expressed in the following century by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, which argued that human beings are greedy by nature and that human life is ‘a condition of war of all against all’. The following century, the economist Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations, also famously insisted that private interest (or ‘self-love’) was ‘natural’ human behaviour, justifying a society based on the ‘free market’, where everyone seeks their own self-advantage regardless of the social and economic inequality that goes with it. Some questioning of these views did begin in the 19th century with the writings of Charles Darwin and early practitioners of the science of anthropology such as Lewis Henry Morgan. But it was only in the 20th century, with the increased flowering of anthropology and the new science of archaeology, that serious doubt was cast on the belief that human beings were deep-down selfish, wicked and aggressive, as new perspectives emerged from growing evidence of how people had lived and interacted in the pre-farming era, the overwhelmingly longest period of human existence on earth.

Not that the traditional ‘fixed human nature’ view simply went away. It continued to be expressed in much popular writing in particular. Examples of this between the 1950s and the 1970s were books like Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, Konrad Lorenz’s On Aggression, Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative, and imaginative fiction like William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (and arguably George Orwell’s Animal Farm too). It also carried on coming from some ‘scientific’ sources, for example Richard Wrangham’s 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence and, most recently, Richard Overy in Why War (2024). Such writers tend to see war as having been constant throughout the whole of human history, suggesting that humans are war prone and have what Overy calls ‘a psychological predisposition for warfare’. And this leads that writer to conclude that ‘if war has a very long human history, it also has a future’.

But, overall, the last 30-40 years have marked a significant shift in perspectives both among social commentators and scientific experts. Among a slew of studies on this and allied topics (some of them reviewed in this journal), titles like Beyond War, The Human Potential for Peace, Team Human, Survival of the Friendliest, and Ultra-Social tell their own tale. The majority of these writings conclude from their authors’ investigations not that human beings are non-violent and non-prone to war per se but rather that violence and fighting are not their most natural inclination, even if they are capable of being driven to it by circumstances. Even the widely read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, though often cited as supporting the idea of innate human selfishness, on close examination does no such thing. In fact it is largely a book about altruism and cooperative behaviour. Even its writer is on record as saying that its title may have been an unfortunate one and that perhaps a different title such as ‘The Immortal Gene’, or even ‘The Altruistic Organism’, might have been more appropriate.

Highly flexible or pro-social?

Highly relevant in this connection too is the work of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, who has spent 50 years researching the origins of war and has been called ‘the greatest living scholar of human warfare’. In an article in Scientific American in 2018, entitled ‘War is not part of human nature’, Ferguson notes that the overwhelming evidence on war, which he defines as armed conflict and killing sanctioned by society and carried out by members of one group against members of another group, suggests that it was not always present among humans. Instead it began as a result of societal changes at varying times in different locations but with its earliest signs appearing around 12,000 years ago – so closely coinciding with humankind’s first experiments with agriculture. In a later article (2023) in the journal Public Anthropologist, he states: ‘Our species is not biologically destined for war. War is not an inescapable part of social existence’; and ‘Obviously, we are capable of war and often choose it. The question is whether evolution tilts us in that direction. I say no.’ His findings, he says, show that: ‘egalitarian mobile hunter foragers generally don’t make war’ and that ‘agriculture and states went along with more war’. His most recent book, Chimpanzees, War, and History: Are Men Born to Kill? (2023) reiterates this with the conclusion that ‘Men are not born to kill but they can be cultivated to kill’.

This is a perspective also echoed by Yuval Noah Harari in his best-selling book Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014). Here Harari makes a clear statement about humans as essentially flexible creatures, insisting that human behaviour is shaped by the society into which we are born and become part of. He goes on to say that, if our social arrangements were determined simply by our biology, then there would never have been the wide gamut of behaviour patterns, relationships and cultures which we know about and which can also be witnessed in what we see around us now.

Some studies go even further than this, seeing humans as naturally ‘pro-social’ beings with cooperation not competition, peacefulness not violence as their intrinsic default. In such studies, qualities such as kindness and empathy are seen as existing ‘naturally’ in the overwhelming majority of humans, as long as overwhelming forces don’t get in the way of it. The historian Tine De Moor, for example, in The Dilemma of the Commoners (2015), claims that ‘history teaches us that man is essentially a cooperative being, a homo cooperans’, that ‘human beings claim togetherness and interaction’ and that ‘our spirits yearn for connection just as our bodies hunger for food’. This kind of outlook is echoed by Rutger Bregman in his book Humankind. A Hopeful History (2021) in which he presents arguments many have found compelling that the innate, fundamental default of human beings is to be friendly, communal and cooperative and that the outstanding feature of human behaviour is the desire to act together and to display tolerance and mutual support even if circumstances are dire. As part of the evidence for this he points to the plethora of everyday gestures of help, cooperation, solidarity and compassion people in all societies all over the world show to one another on a daily basis without any prospect of gain or reward. John Gowdy’s Ultra Social. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), though in most ways a quite different kind of book from Bregman’s, echoes a similar message with statements like ‘Our current predicaments are not gene-based. They have risen out of the material base of human economies and the associated cultural adaptations and supporting institutions’ and with an insistence that, if we have a ‘nature’, it is a ‘pro-social’ one, a natural inclination, to be empathetic, associative and cooperative.

Such considerations about human behaviour have been accompanied – and often confirmed – by the more detailed and scientific studies of primeval hunter-gatherer societies that modern technological methods have made possible. A recent study, for example, analysing evidence of traumatic injuries in 189 individuals from 25 different sites revealed healed bone treatment, suggesting a story of mutual aid, patience and dedication among those people (Victoria Romano and others, ‘Bone trauma and interpersonal care among Late Holocene hunter-gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina’, International Journal of Paleopathology, December 2025, pp.10-24). It has been estimated that around one in five hunter-gatherers would have been likely to suffer some kind of injury or disability and while most wounds would have been the predictable bruises and fractures of daily life requiring only a short break from everyday activities, others were likely to have been worse, leaving individuals unable to hunt, gather, grind plants, craft tools, etc, for months, or perhaps a lifetime. Here we are presented with evidence that those suffering in this way would have been cared for by the community, even if they were not economically ‘useful’. Such research, therefore, lends weight to the ‘pro-social’ arguments many are making about a fundamentally benign human nature.

But in the end, whether humans are intrinsically ‘pro-social’ or simply highly flexible, the evidence is that, while violence and war are certainly possible forms of human behaviour as both history and the present show, coexistence without violence or war also presents itself as another possible form of human behaviour. This was a reality recognised as far back as 1985 in Unesco’s ‘Seville Statement on Violence’, in the following terms: ‘Biology does not condemn humanity to war … It is scientifically incorrect to say that war or any other violent behaviour is genetically programmed into our human nature’. And the undeniable fact is that the vast majority of interactions that take place in daily life between human beings are co-operative, peaceful and harmonious, not rude or cruel or anti-social. We do not normally expect to have arguments or experience serious friction with our fellow humans in the course of our daily activities, and most of the time we don’t. And, on the relatively rare occasions when that does happens, it stands out – precisely because it is rare.

Cooperation or competition?

The broader point here is that, while we do not say that the kind of society socialists advocate and regard as eminently possible will be entirely argument or conflict free (no human society could be), we do say that the scope for argument and conflict will be far less than in the competitive, insecure society we live in under capitalism. This society, in both its ethic and its organisation, runs directly contrary to the ‘normal’ human tendency to help and cooperate with others. It drives people to compete with others, to try to get the better of them and even to do them down. It does this by tempting people with the lure of gain or reward, often financial, so pushing them to behave in ways that divide them from their fellow humans and often making the ‘success’ of one into the ‘failure’ of others. Given this reality, what is truly remarkable and significant is that, despite the overwhelmingly powerful pressures capitalism places on people to get the better of others and so not be ‘kind’ to them, in so many of the actions and connections and competitive situations created for us in our daily lives, most of us still manage to be largely kind to others, to cooperate with them and to share. In a new kind of egalitarian society, one of free and equal access, with no buying and selling or wages or salaries, with co-operative endeavour, and with technology and the abundant resources of the planet used to satisfy need and not for profit-making ends, is it far-fetched to believe that such behaviour will come fully into its own?

Howard Moss

Blogger's Note:

Books mentioned in the article that have featured elsewhere in previous Socialist Standards

• Sep 1969: A review of The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris.
• Aug 1993: A review of Lord of the Flies by William Golding.
• Nov 2015: A review of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
• May 2021: A review of Humankind. A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
• Sep 2022: A review of Ultrasocial. The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future by John Gowdy

Proper Gander: Manipulated by the Monoform (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The mass media is a ‘systematically organised, one-way path from the producer to the spectator. Constantly. Constantly. And that is not communication. We should try and find some other word for it. And it’s certainly manipulation’, according to film-maker and theorist Peter Watkins, who has died at the age of 90. His words come from a 2001 video interview following the release of his film La Commune, through which he aimed to use the medium of film-making to communicate, rather than just present one interpretation. The film re-enacts the Paris Commune of 1871 and was made in a less hierarchical, more democratic way than found in the mass media’s usual output, by having non-professional actors improvising scenes and shown discussing the views of both their characters and themselves.

La Commune was the last film Watkins made, after which he honed his theories about how the media industry functions for his 2004 book The Media Crisis. His films, in one way or another, focus on conflict between states and between classes. Their subject matter includes nuclear war (The War Game, The Journey), oppression of political activists (Punishment Park, Evening Land) and historical flashpoints (Culloden, La Commune). His two productions of the late 1960s, Privilege and The Gladiators, share the theme of the elite using the media to divert and channel working class dissent. These films employ a setting of the near-future to examine this, while his theories about film-making investigate how this happens in real life.

Watkins argued that the mass audio-visual media (MAVM) industry moulds the reactions of its audience through the style and arrangement of its products. He called the prevailing template for films and programmes the ‘Monoform’. This is defined as ‘a formatted and repetitive TV language form of rapidly edited and fragmented images accompanied by a dense bombardment of sound, all held together by the classical narrative structure’ (Notes on the Media Crisis, Peter Watkins, 2010). This is a familiar description of dramas and documentaries with predictably linear plots, scenes too short to explore details and mood-accentuating soundtracks. This style is particularly noticeable in the common practice of documentaries starting with a quick summary of the programme to come, reducing what could be a complex subject into a couple of minutes (before then reducing the subject into only forty-or-so minutes for the rest of the duration). Watkins continues ‘Because of its extreme rapidity (especially the version developed over the past 20 years [ie, from circa 1990]), the Monoform gives no time for interaction, reflection or questioning […]. It is organised to create pre-determined responses, which means that before the audience sees any Monoform film or television programme, its producers already know how they (the audience) will react – or at least such is the intention’ (ibid). In emphasising how the format or approach adopted by film-makers can be used to push an agenda, Watkins is echoing Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said ‘the medium is the message’ in his 1964 book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. As the MAVM is owned by corporations, their films and programmes are intended to reinforce acceptance of the social framework of which the MAVM is a part, as well as make a profit for their shareholders. The Monoform followed by the MAVM’s products reinforces this acceptance by discouraging critical thinking about that social framework. Here, Watkins’ views have similarities with those of Frankfurt School luminary Herbert Marcuse, who described how capitalism utilises the mass media as a means of social control, including by stifling anti-capitalist thought.

A film or programme’s style, music and editing support the priorities of the media industry even if its content appears to criticise society. Watkins says ‘The fact that many filmmakers and media intellectuals believe that a radical subject or a powerful theme in themselves create an ‘alternative’ cinema is another paradox. In most cases it is only the content that could be considered alternative: a radical theme per se does not challenge the over-riding problem of hierarchical form, process and structure. In fact, it only confuses the issue, and is a prime reason why critical thinking on the role of the MAVM has not developed beyond a limited point’ (ibid). This may explain why films and TV programmes haven’t prompted truly radical political action, even when they often depict capitalism’s failings.

Another way that programme-making is shaped by its capitalist context is what Watkins called ‘the universal clock’. This refers to how television shows are made in uniform lengths to allow time for adverts within and between them on a fixed schedule. The prerogatives of the marketing industry are important enough to limit the running times of programmes, chiefly those on traditional broadcast channels. YouTube has its own norms for how advertising affects content, with commercials intruding upon videos mid-sentence, and vloggers interrupting their spiel to promote their sponsors, both in a crass way which makes the scheduling of TV commercial breaks almost seem polite in comparison.

Watkins gave a cogent, class-conscious account of how the media industry’s role in capitalist society impacts on the nature of its products. Films and TV programmes project the hierarchical structure of capitalism through the way they are edited and paced, regardless of their content. The template followed by MAVM output is intended to present a one-sided view, reinforcing acceptance of the status quo and discouraging critical discussion among the audience. In his own films, such as La Commune, Watkins tried to counter these tendencies through his collaborative, improvisational methods, with the consequence that his work became unattractive to major studios, distributors and broadcasters. His marginalisation, to some extent, proves his theories right. He has left us with not only a set of challenging, passionate films but also a valuable contribution to explaining how capitalism’s media industry has to operate, by manipulating us, its consumers.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Further reading on Peter Watkins from the Socialist Standard archives

• Oct 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 1
• Nov 2015: Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker - Part 2
• Jul 1966: Review of The War Game
• Oct 1980: Review of The War Game

Social philosophy? (2025)

Book Review from the December 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard 

 

A Social History of Analytic Philosophy. By Christoph Schuringa. Verso, 2025.

This book describes the social history of philosophers, not philosophy. It is an interesting, blow by blow account of Western philosophers and their schools, mainly around the turn of the 20th century. But it takes the position of philosophy, that the activity is valid – that there is such a thing as philosophy to be found. This is the most socially historical aspect of the book – that the author, a philosophy professor, must start by accepting uncritically that professing philosophy is a valid thing to do. As Upton Sinclair noted, ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it’.

In the Western tradition, a society of élite men, nominally confronting each other as equals beneath constitutional monarchs or in republics, felt capable of eyeballing God from their armchair or bathtub. Western philosophy is the sublime arrogance of thinking that one is one, and one can ‘know’ – that, for example, if all one has is sense perception, then all that exists is sense perception, rather than saying what a less privileged person might say, which is that you just don’t know and should instead just write down what you see as such. Just as the hand mill gives you feudalism and the steam mill industrial capitalism, so the ruling ideas of that epoch are echoes of the experience of elite life under these conditions.

This book contains much material that could be used for such a study of the social history of philosophy: but by taking philosophy seriously, it is not that study. Its relentless disdain of the Bloomsbury group, for example, is just gossip, while the real differences in background of this group, and Cambridge scholars, and Viennese scholars, and women trying to enter the debate, could have been measured against the social conditions of the various states in order to gain real insight. In short, to write this work adequately, one would first have to break with philosophy. Until this is done, all that remains is a discussion of events of the day, and a skeleton description of this philosophical history instead of the real animal.

In the last chapter (the book really needs a conclusion), Schuringa describes one of the most infamous encounters of Marxism with philosophy, that of G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence. In it can be seen everything that is wrong with using analytical philosophy to describe Marx’s work. The background of Cohen and the rest of the September group, and their encounters with Marxism: the group’s intellectual trajectory, under pressure of the universities they were in, their peers, publication, the development of the idea that ‘dialectics is bullshit’, and repudiation of Marxism; all would provide data for a fascinating case study, but receive a mere two pages. But this would be to question the validity of philosophical thought, which in the introduction Schuringa says he refuses to do. As such, it’s not clear with which Marxist tradition he is in line. Certainly not one that Marx could inhabit.

SJW

Blogger's Note:

Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence was reviewed in the August 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard.

The Socialist Case — Part 2 (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The superstructure of society today, after many years of development, has reached a high stage of efficiency. It is the direct outcome of the economic foundation of society, the capitalist mode of production, and functions almost exclusively in its interests. This does not appear to be self-evident unless one examines the basic factors of the organisation of society.

We are constantly being told that our “great and good” men are earnestly striving to bring about changes in which all will benefit considerably. Social morality, legality in its civil and criminal aspects, and politics, are features of this superstructure and are held to be eternally good and true. The machinery of government, the armed forces and police are allegedly neutral and impartial and are claimed to regulate the affairs of society on the highest principles of “justice.”

We Socialists do not accept that point of view. We see in this whole structure the capitalist class organised as the ruling class. This state machinery with its attachments does not stand on the sidelines. The maintaining of law and order, the advocacy of this morality, the dispensing of “justice," and the politics pursued, are all definitely capitalistic in character and are intended to enhance, preserve and maintain the system in the interests of the class who own. The channels of education are controlled and the class of. education is designed to maintain the fallacy that this is the best of all possible forms of social organisation. Add to this the general propaganda of the press, radio and pulpit and we have a formidable array. This deception has been carried on for a long, long time, but Socialists are not taken in by it.

Furthermore, a constantly growing and larger number of people are also realising the truth that social systems must also change. The so-called virtues, in workers only, of meekness, humility and servility, are receding to a greater extent. The surface appearance of capitalist society seems to indicate that the commercial transactions of men are. in all cases, strictly honest. No one apparently takes advantage of another. People go to their bakers, butchers, tailors, etc., select their merchandise, pay and depart, each in most cases pleased with the transaction. Money, which is the universal or social form of value, is paid in exchange for an equal quantity value in some commodity. It appears that in all cases everyone has had a fair exchange and generally speaking this is true. The error arises in the claim that the worker who sells his labour power gets the full value of his labour. To repeat—he does not and cannot get the value of his labour. Labour power is a unique commodity, the sole commodity which can produce more than it itself consumes. The worker in fact gets the value of this labour power, but produces probably twice that amount, one-half of which total is profit to the capitalist.

Profit is the keystone of capitalism. The capitalist mode of production, commodity production, creates the basic social relationships of capital and value. These relationships arise directly out of man's productive circumstances. They are social phenomena particular to the present mode of productive activity. In the industrial field the capitalist—an owner, but non-producer—meets the worker, a non-owner who has only his labour power to sell. Here the sale of labour power takes place. The worker, having received his wages, becomes a buyer of the goods required, but which are owned by and in possession of the capitalist. This cycle keeps on repeating itself and is exclusive to commodity production.

Buying and selling, or, in other words, value relationships, are social relationships concerning the sale or exchange of commodities or things. Money is the social, or material form of value and. whatever the need may be. this need is almost certain to be provided for cash. This capital relationship — employer and employee, and value relationship—buyer and seller, are specially evolved to wring rent, profit and interest out of the sweat and toil of the working-class. From our Socialist point of view they can never do anything else and should be abolished forthwith. The State machinery with its armed forces and police functions mainly to protect the private property institution and secure its continuity.

Man has travelled a long, long way since his simian ancestors, but there is one aspect which it is relevant and important to mention. It has taken him countless thousands of years to learn and train his brain to think. But he has succeeded and the highest product of nature, the mind, has been developed from his lowly and comparatively speaking, non-thinking ancestors. In this regard man stands unique in the field of intellectual attainment. He alone among all the animals is capable of thinking abstractly. A fundamental distinction is his ability to accumulate and organise knowledge and utilise it to change and improve his living conditions and his environments.

This basic distinction has created an unbridgeable gulf between him and the other animals. The problems arising from the material conditions of his life in the past were eventually understood and solved. We are certain that he is capable of understanding and eventually solving the social and other problems of the present and future. Because of this we are firmly convinced that a majority of the working-class will eventually consciously deal with the social re-organisation of society.

The social solution is in itself very simple. Much of our time is devoted to argument arising expressly from the complexities of aspects of capitalism we have already mentioned—money, banking, etc. The major question is—can mankind produce sufficient food, clothing, houses, cultural and recreational requirements to meet its needs? The answer is “ Yes’’—positively an abundance. Society’s capacity to produce is limited only by the extent of the productive equipment, raw materials and available labour.. At today’s stage of development it is more than sufficient. Once freed from the restrictions of private property, society can solve its problems in an amazingly short time. When this structure of private property is removed there is nothing to prevent the available productive machinery from being used to the fullest extent for the sole purpose of satisfying human needs.

The overwhelming majority of each generation are doomed from birth. They are condemned to a life of hard work, drudgery, poverty and slums. At any given period in the life of society only a definite amount of unskilled, semi-skilled and skilled jobs are available. In this great industrial organisation this number may vary slightly from time to time. But it does mean that approximately 85 per cent. of the total population are unable to radically improve their lot. The grandiose schemes and plans of youthful ambition are doomed from birth. In addition, at the moment we stand in constant fear of the outbreak of a third World War with its devastating atomic weapons. The future is indeed, “prosperous, happy and bright.”

The abolition of capitalism is therefore, a proposal which merits your determined and serious immediate attention. The reorganisation of society on a Socialist basis is the only solution and, as the S.P.G.B. is the only Socialist Party, it demands your active support in our task of Socialist propaganda. This task of abolishing capitalism is the historic mission of the working class. It requires the conscious and determined action of a majority of workers and for practical purposes is their exclusive job. Capitalism presents the best of all worlds to the ruling class and their hirelings. They are not therefore likely to approve or assist in effecting any social change which involves its abolition.

In order to transform existing society into a Socialist society, the working class must organise themselves politically on the basis of a majority who understand and desire to bring about Socialism. When they reach this stage of social consciousness they, the workers, will establish their political supremacy, take control of the machinery of government and effect the social re-organisation of society. To develop this class-consciousness is the immediate job of the S.P.G.B. Our propaganda activities in this direction are very limited both physically and financially.

If you believe that a system of society wherein human need and not profit should be the object of production; that the economic and social equality of man should prevail; and that from each according to his ability and to each according to needs should be a first principle: then let’s have your support. The measure of your sincerity and determination is your physical and financial aid to us.

John Higgins

[Concluded]

Doping horses (1960)

From the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Monday, August 8th, five men were accused at Newbury of conspiring to administer drugs to racehorses so as to affect their performance and thereby cheat, defraud and give the run-around to owners, bookmakers and punters. Caffeine, it was alleged, was the drug used. Given between thirty and sixty minutes before a race, it was said to have jacked up the horses’ nerves, muscles and heart, made it more alert and stimulated it to a win. The timing was vital; given six or more hours before the race the drug slowed down the horse, because by then its depressing reaction had had time to work. The chemist who was said to have supplied the caffeine stated that doping of racehorses had been going on for years; he supplied the stuff in return for racing tips.

Of course, this carve up caused quite a fuss and many remedies were suggested. Some people thought that a Tote monopoly of betting would bring a clean up. Others wanted a list of drugs, as distinct from tonics, which it would be prohibited to administer to horses, the trainers to be held responsible for their animals’ conditions. One newspaper showed how deep its love of our dumb friends goes by hoping that, after the clean up has put racing and betting on a sound financial basis, the horses will no more be silent and helpless tools manipulated for sordid and undesirable ends.

Now all this is very touching, as anyone who has lost his lot on the horses will agree. But doping and racketeering are only two of the illegal wavs of making money, if the law can be successfully evaded. There are also legal ways. One is to work for it—not very fruitful. Another is to persuade other people to work for you and to exploit them during the course of production. This is respectable. It also produces some very large fortunes.

The set up here is that we workers work for the capitalists. The capitalists pay us our wages and sell what we produce; they also have to buy materials and machinery. When they have done all this, they have a surplus left over. They have profit. This process continually repeated makes for a fine accumulated sum and it is all fair and square. Not racketeering. Just good, plain exploitation.

When the goods arc produced we do not always find ourselves able to obtain them. They are whisked off to warehouses, stores, shops, and so on, and we can only get them out of these places if we have enough money to meet the price which is asked for them. There they lie in plenty, but alas! for sale only. When people try, by hook or by crook, by fiddle or diddle, to amass a lot of money, what they are really doing is trying to get the power to purchase a lot of these articles which make for a happier and more comfortable life.

Where does dope come into this? Why. for generations, the working class have been doped by capitalism's propaganda. Schools, churches, radio, television, newspapers, political parties—they are all in the act. The Labour Party dished out a large dose of nationalisation, which left the workers' situation unchanged. The Communist Party peddle the dope about the so-called Socialist class emancipation in Russia, which is in fact a ruthless capitalist dictatorship. The Tories tell us that we have never had dope so good.

Amongst gamblers, doping is known as ”fixing ”; if you want to fix a racehorse, give it caffeine. In this sense, capitalists are not fixing workers under the wages system—the whole transaction is fair and above board. Nevertheless, the workers find themselves in a fix by their acceptance of the system. They are perpetually chasing the dream that, if only they can lay hands on a large enough amount of money, they will be able to get all that they need to make life pleasant. It is this bodily occupation and mental illusion that keeps the working class in political ignorance and. consequently, in economic enslavement.

But horses can run without dope and people can live without the artificial incentives of capitalist society. We only need the understanding that all social wealth would be better produced solely for use—made and used how we like. That is the key to the better world which we call Socialism.

However much horse-racing depends upon betting, capitalism is more dependent on the support of the world’s working class. When they have stopped allowing themselves to be exploited, stopped chasing after ephemeral remedies for the many, many unnecessary social problems of capitalism, they will have exposed capitalism's dopers. Socialism will be the surest walk over that ever was.

Joe McGuinness

Letter: Marxism and pigeons (2025)

 

Letter to the Editors from the November 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marxism and pigeons

I always enjoy grabbing the Socialist Standard from the local radical bookshop, and read with interest the October Life and Times piece, ‘Chasing pigeons in the park’. Here stalwart HKM finds himself in a fractious encounter with a working class mother, and unsurprisingly, comes off worse for it. I would never advise anyone, Marxist or otherwise, to intervene in the parenting of a stranger’s child. It smacks of condescension, and I’m hardly shocked that she went straight for the jugular.

That aside, while I appreciate the article’s humane spirit and its attempt to connect everyday behaviour to the wider social order, I think it falls into certain traps that weaken the socialist case.

As an anecdote and moral exhortation, one small incident, a child chasing a pigeon, is made to carry the burden of a sweeping claim about capitalist society. What’s needed instead is structural analysis, grounded in class relations and historical development. Otherwise the critique risks idealism, as if cruelty will simply vanish once capitalism is abolished, and empathy will bloom automatically.

The piece also overlooks the way ideology and institutions actively reproduce capitalist values. Capitalism doesn’t just ‘promote thoughtlessness,’ it systematically manufactures individualism, competition, and alienation through schools, media, and the daily grind of wage labour. Those habits of thought won’t dissolve on day one of socialism, they will need to be challenged through conscious struggle, education, and organisation.

Under capitalism, ‘competition,’ ‘self-interest,’ ‘private property,’ and even what counts as ‘good parenting’ or ‘normal behaviour’ are all suffused with hegemonic ideas.

Finally, the article sidesteps the harder question of how socialism itself will handle conflict, scarcity, or antisocial behaviour. To imply that a socialist world will be one of effortless harmony is to underplay the ongoing, practical work of building and sustaining solidarity in the face of real contradictions.

In short, the piece has a sound moral impulse, but its reliance on anecdote and lack of class analysis blunt its usefulness as a Marxist critique.

Marx himself could well have been a pigeon fancier, though most likely encapsulated in pastry and well baked in a pie. While I can’t cite a specific reference for that, it is at least recorded that he did enjoy a pork and matzah sandwich when he could.

A.T.

Letter: Manipulation and Brainwashing (1993)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Dear Editors,

The September Socialist Standard article "Manipulation and Brainwashing" made a good point: "the people responsible for this manipulation (of the masses| are the cadres of intellectuals serving the interests of the ruling class, who reinforce its sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life are: psychologists, economists, historians, sociologists and other people in public life".

However, I think making this point in such a few words runs the risk of putting some of the people working in those fields off the Socialist Party, who would otherwise be favourably disposed towards us.

Is it easy, in many cases, to distinguish which activities of these "cadres" are serving the interests of the ruling class and which ones are beneficial to socialist arguments? For example there are psychologists (who are integrated into the system) who have demonstrated time and again that some people behave in socially harmful ways, not because they’re "born that way" or are "bad/evil", but because obstacles to socially useful development (which proved to be insurmountable) have been placed in their way by society.

Cliff Begley,

London WC1

Letter: Royalty – an irrelevance? (2006)

Letter to the Editors from the October 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Royalty – an irrelevance?

Dear Editors,

On the road to Socialism there are powerful institutions in the way. Monarchy, with all its associated inequalities and public loyalty, is a powerful support for capitalism. It embodies wealth and privilege alongside emotional adoration by the poor. Cromwell managed to remove a king, but soon after his death the monarchy was re-established.

Why has it been as successful as an institution? It no doubt has its own methods for self-survival (modern PR experts, and years of experience of being a monarch, plus perhaps a genuine love for the British people). Yet the institution can only survive with public consent. None of the political parties that have attained power has bothered to question in any serious way the existence of the monarchy; partly I assume because they dread the loyalty of the British people.

We are been socialised into a culture that respects the royal family, at least in principle (people may frown at certain incidents with the royals, but basically accept their existence). Submission to the monarchy is encouraged from the cradle to the grave, and even if cynical, a person may find it difficult to resist a feeling of pride when a member of the royal family visits their factory or local area. Celebrities have occasionally returned MBEs, but they are few and far between.

Vast arguments are put forward to justify the royal family (e.g. encourages tourism and hence the pockets of the people) We all ‘immersed’ in royalist propaganda and culture. Yet how can it be right for one family to be so well provided for (houses, land, wealth, public adoration etc) when other families struggle from day to day?

They also assist and legitimise other people who have unfair amounts of wealth (in the past kings and queens have helped each other in difficult circumstances – when the peasants are getting above themselves for instance).

The institution also puts unfair pressure on the members of the royal family. The horses the Queen must have sat on horses on rainy days to fulfil her royal duties; and the boredom of watching parade after parade! The lack of privacy – even minor scandals blown out of all proportion, and the difficulty of moving in privacy from A to B.

We are so ‘brainwashed’ into the advantages of monarchy, that we grossly underestimate the disadvantages. Yet it take courage for a politician to suggest to suggest we abolish it – the inaction of millions of indoctrinated people can be a formidable thing to experience. Other politicians would condemn his very words (in the hope of gaining votes for their own parties!).

Are we all involved in a ‘mother-figure’ complex (or for ex-public school types –‘matron’)? Do we feel more comfortable knowing she is then looking after us? Or are we being childish? Shouldn’t we liberate her and her family, as well as the public, from an institution that goes hand-in-hand with unequal society? Draw a line under history and move on?

Paul Wilson, 

Brighouse, West Yorks

Reply:

Obviously if the monarchy is still around at the time socialism is established it would be abolished immediately. Such institutionalised privilege can have no place in a society of equals. This said, we don’t see any point in wasting time campaigning to get it abolished under capitalism. Whether or not a capitalist state is a monarchy or a republic makes no difference to the economic structure of society, which is the root cause of the problems wage and salary workers face today. Just look at the USA, which has been a republic since the 18th century – Editors.

Who needs schools? (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is September. The prison gates must be unlocked and the young people who must be taught a lesson or two are being returned to their place, to be instructed, shouted at, forced to memorise the often irrelevant — to have games played with their minds. When it is enacted by the master class that all children between the ages of five and sixteen shall be subjected to schooling they are doing our class no favours: they are endeavouring to catch early the impressionable minds of the young.

How valid is the analogy between school and prison? The more detached from the prison walls of the school one becomes the stranger it might seem, but to the children being schooled (not educated the two are different) the relationship between school and denial of freedom is all too clear. Schools are places where children, coming in with the innocent belief that they are at liberty in the world, are taught the firm conviction that to behave freely is a crime. They must learn to know their place.

Capitalism sends those who do not know their place to prison. It is done "for their own good". Children are told that schooling will be for their own good. In prison you obey orders or you are punished. And in school. Do not question orders. Do not question the right of the person giving orders to give them. They are dictators appointed by the state; the tax paying capitalist has invested good money so that the orders will be carried out

The prisoner is stripped of individuality and made to wear a uniform. So are school kids. In both cases, uniforms make identification and discipline easier. In prison you become a slave to routine. When a bell rings you eat, you exercise, you work, you slop out. In school, children learn to jump to the dictatorship of the bell: "Why are you outside after the bell has gone? It went five minutes ago. When the bell rings you must be in your proper place". Chimpanzees can be taught such bell-obedience: in a human being it is a descent, not progress.

In prison it is assumed that the prisoner can never be equal to those with authority over him. In schools, however clever the pupil becomes, the teacher will always be superior and one will teach while the other learns and never shall the roles be reversed. You are sent to prison for breaking socially-made rules called laws. Often this means you have stolen food because you are broke, an act which would not be criminal in a world without property. You are sent to school to learn how to accept the wisdom of insane socially-made rules. The "rehabilitated” prisoner, like the properly “educated" school student. is released in the hope that they will be a decently exploitable wage slave.

The function of schooling is to create little human commodities: neatly-packed, subservient embodiments of labour power, there to be exploited as wealth-producing wage slaves. A well-schooled young worker will be fit to go out into the market and sell themselves. The skill of the teacher is not to bring out from a child what it could be. but what the capitalist social system requires it to be. Eighty years ago the Report of the Consultative Committee to the Head of Education on Higher Elementary Schools was candid in explaining the declared needs of employers for which schools should cater:

. . boys and girls in their service should possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self- help, and pride in good work for its own sake whatever it might be. (1906 Report)

The Report complained that

Employers are said to be dissatisfied with much of the elementary education given, because the instruction, in so far as it is carried beyond the simplest elements, tends, if anything. to make a boy a little above his job.

The present recession has provided educational authorities with the ideal opportunity to make schooling more than ever a job-based process. It is all very well teaching children to express themselves freely through dance, say the traditionalists, but what good will that do them as training for a life behind the check-out counter in Tesco? The investors in Tesco need wage slaves who can add up (we can’t have Lady Porter short-changed. can we?) and not poets, dancers or inventors. So at school the child is taught to regard big ambitions as dreams for the back of the mind: the real objective must be to become a purchasable labour-power commodity.

Capitalism cannot cope with childhood. It needs children, because they represent the reproduction of labour power — new profit-makers for the future. But children must be censured for being childish. The great, civilised struggle for maturity must be entered as soon as possible. To be mature means to be as stupid as the others who have been conned by the system. A child is a dangerous being: not yet conditioned, not yet afraid to see the world as something to be shared. So schools keep children out of society's way. just as prisons keep others away until they are prepared to conform.

Workers need education but not schooling. Education means learning to know what is happening and why. In social terms, there can be no doubt that the working class needs to learn what is happening in the world and why. In this way we shall see the capitalist system as the cause of our problems and then the solution will be not far off. But working class self-education is very different from what passes as education in the capitalist school. From the earliest days socialists have rejected that schooling designed, not to expose social reality but to indoctrinate working class kids to “ honour the Queen, obey your superiors, and run away from every policeman" (Justice, 30 June 1894). It was not education for life, but propaganda for submission.

Many reformers of capitalism have engaged in several campaigns to humanise the education system: to make it useful, or at least better, for the working class. At the beginning of this century the Social Democratic Federation campaigned for free school dinners. It was in opposition to this piddling reformism that revolutionaries left the SDF. refusing to plead for bit-by-bit changes to the exploitation system. As with many reform campaigns, this one was never successful but parliament did grant free school milk which was subsequently withdrawn.

Immense reformist effort went into abolishing the old grammar school system. This fight was nominally won but comprehensive indoctrination has hardly changed the essential nature of the oppressive schooling process. Parent governors have been introduced even student governors — but they would be the first to concede (and often complain bitterly) that their views count for little in relation to the state s dictatorial control of schools. Another campaign has been to abolish public schools for the children of the privileged. Eight Labour governments have made noises about them, but not one has made a single move to abolish them.

When Neil Kinnock was shadow Education Minister he became a darling of the Labour Left by promising to put an end to privileged schooling. It will be worth watching his efforts in this direction if he becomes Prime Minister. The fact is that reformists have played around with the form of schooling. but none has proposed to revolutionise the function of education. This cannot be done in isolation from a socialist transformation of society, for it is only when commodity society has been transcended that commodity-based schooling can be removed. There have been a few inspired and brave efforts at establishing non-conventional schools ("free schools") within capitalism but they have had an uphill struggle within a social environment which cannot cope with freedom.

A socialist society will not need to mould children into servants of an omnipotent production process. In a world where the producer’s quality of life and the quality of the product will be equally valued there will be no requirement of a person but that they learn to live well, for part of living well is to live creatively and to give as well as to take. In a society of production for use the experience of education will cease to be a process which takes place in an institution under compulsion.

Whether the word "school" will survive or not we cannot forecast but that any socialist school would be unrecognisable in comparison with those of today is a matter of certainty. There will be no teachers who are not learners also; there will be no end to education but the satisfaction of human needs — a process which will not stop at eighteen or eighty. In chapter five of William Morris's News From Nowhere there is one great vision of what education might be like in a socialist society. It will be for the workers (and that includes children) who establish socialism to decide how to educate themselves and it will be for each generation to reexamine methods of learning and to assess their worth in the light of what it has produced in their elders.

The ultimate condemnation of capitalist "education" is that it has played a key role in producing capitalist-minded people. A society of people who love nations which they do not own. hate foreigners, are willing to kill in wars, offer themselves as victims to the profit system and obey those who abuse them, is a society of badly educated inhabitants. In a book called The School That I'd Like, compiled as a result of essays on the title submitted by school kids for a competition run by the Observer in December 1967. one girl of fifteen wrote that

I am tired of hearing that the hope of my country lies in my generation. If you give me the same indoctrination . . . how can you expect me to be any different from you?

Steve Coleman

What their papers say (1982)

From the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

There is a popular belief that certain newspapers report things "the way they really are" — without bias. In fact, there are no such things as neutral news items, recognisable entities independent of journalists. Rather, there are those incidents and issues which are perceived by editors as "newsworthy".

Journalists are trained to spot particular aspects of social affairs as suitable material to report on with a bias or “angle". Although we find a slightly different point of view in the liberal, "quality" press from that expressed in the rest, all newspapers have a common standpoint on the profit system — they support it. It follows that what they tell us about the world cannot help but be politically slanted. Last year thirty million people died through lack of food while mountains of beef were produced; thousands were slaughtered in wars while the combatants wished for peace; and millions remained homeless while palatial accommodation stood empty. The press was unanimous in ignoring these contradictions and reserving its astonishment and critical analysis for royal weddings and trying to detect a "new" SDP policy.

Before it is represented in the press, reality is put through the great distorting process. The four main journalistic devices are to personalise, trivialise, historically fossilise and moralise.

They personalise

Society is presently organised on the basis of minority ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. Production is geared to profit for the few, not for social need. Problems like industrial disputes, unemployment and wars are consequences of our social system but the press encourages us to look at them in terms of individual responsibilities. Hence, Margaret Thatcher is portrayed as the demon who has somehow personally engineered the unemployment of over three million people, or else a triumphal heroine who will put "Britain" back on its feet. Strikes are blamed on the personal irresponsibility of reckless trade union leaders. Even self-proclaimed non-revolutionaries like the former Longbridgc shop steward Derek Robinson and the GLC leader Ken Livingstone come in for prolonged campaigns of abuse in which they are reduced to being known as "Red Robbo” and “Red Ken". A variation on this technique of masquerading social issues as personal is to actually personify territories and to speak of "Britain fearing the proposed EEC policy" or “France will be taking steps to ensure that . . .". The persons created by this linguistic trick embody the interests of various sections of the ruling class, so that "Britain’s overseas investments” are in reality the investments of a small minority of wealth owners associated with Britain.

They trivialise

The papers are always littered with inconsequential revelations. We are prompted to turn our heads away from the condition of the world, our poverty and insecurity and busy our minds with matters such as “Why the Duke of Kent is to visit Darlington”, the new rhinoceros at a famous zoo and a thousand other inanities. Socialists are sometimes accused of being killjoys for not wishing to participate in discussions on such matters. But stop to consider why. As they are sliding the neutron bombs into their launching positions are we really expected to open a copy of the Daily Express, read about the man who fell into a vat of custard and still be slapping our thighs as the radioactive dust descends upon us?

They historically fossilise 

Society is in a constant state of change. The institutions, social relationships and problems of today have not always been with us and are only transitory. Journalists give us a misleading vision of society because they have a “photographic” perception of affairs rather than an historical one. They try to present an accurate picture of “the way things are” but they tend to freeze what they look at without seeing each situation as part of a much wider set of social relations which are not only changing all the time, but which we are capable of shaping for our own requirements. Thus, nation states, armies, managers, police and the wages system are all regarded as part of the fabric of society which is beyond any critical comment.

They moralise

On many issues that they examine, journalists pass moral judgement. They try to persuade us that something is good or bad, but the point is that the morality which they peddle is one which favours our social superiors and flies in the face of our own interests. Their moral precepts contort to keep us in place. So strikers who seek a paltry addition to their wage to try and make ends meet are greedy, while business tycoons who acquire additional companies have praiseworthy initiative and enterprise. If a man murders people in North Yorkshire for no reason he is an anti-social wretched villain. If the same man, trained by the SAS, commits the same acts for H.M. Government with a uniform on he will be hailed as a hero. When wealth producers reclaim goods from the wealth owners without paying for them this is theft and is morally reprehensible, but when the capitalists steal from us the fruits of our labour this is making a profit and is seen as morally virtuous.

The press like any other industry is owned by a few privileged people. Three major companies (News International, Reed International and Associated Newspaper Group) own three-quarters of all British newspapers and each company has similar interests in book and magazine publishing concerns, television companies and independent radio stations. In 1948 Lord Beaverbrook said to the Press Commission: “I publish my paper (Daily Express) purely for the purpose of making propaganda and for no other motive”.

Earlier this year. Rupert Murdoch sacked The Times editor Harold Evans because he resisted pressure to take a more right-wing editorial line supporting Thatcher and Tory economic policies. According to Anthony Holden, the features editor, “Mr. Murdoch wants a poodle as an editor” (Guardian, 13 March 1982). The press barons still like to enjoy control over exactly which arguments, about how capitalism should be run, are put in their papers, but there is not a conspiracy of newspaper magnates and most of the time connivance in capitalist propaganda is less explicit.

Nevertheless, the propaganda is always there. Take June 28 this year when there was a brief strike by the National Union of Railwaymen. All the papers were against the workers and with varying degrees of openness took the side of the bosses. Reports were brimming with comments and views from David Howell, the Transport Secretary, Peter Parker, the BR chairman and cabinet ministers, but no report came anywhere near presenting an adequate account of why the workers were dissatisfied with what they had been offered. The Daily Mail displayed a headline “Britain WILL Get to Work” and listed the ways in which workers should attempt to get in to produce profits. On 7 May 1926 the same paper had a similar message for suffering workers: “If you must go about walk as far as you can . . . don't buy more coal than usual. Keep a stout heart and smile at your troubles”. The Sun headline on 28 June was “STRIKE RABBLE" while the Daily Mirror (the paper which claims to stick up for the workers!) spoke shyly about the urgent need to end the strike and for “increased productivity”. The tirelessly liberal Guardian was also urging the railwaymen to “give reality a chance” — in other words “get back to work and stop complaining”. The Times and the Daily Telegraph had identical lines, only couched in more stilted language, whereas the Star took a similar line but with a bare minimum of written language.

Apart from imparting news, the papers also vie with each other to cultivate and cater for a popular culture for their markets. They reinforce ideas about desirable lifestyles, from the adverts in the Financial Times for special credit cards “for people who travel and entertain around the world. People whose lifestyle and income requires and justifies an additional range of financial services" (28 June 1982), to the crude horoscopes and cheap, brash “lighthearted" pages in the gutter press. Pleasure is promoted here as a spectator sport, something you need to get with cash, something where you are “being entertained". The lowest common denominator of interest among an estimated readership is exploited to the hilt to maximise sales. This converts the paper into another type of mass entertainment to be mechanically produced for profit on one side and passively consumed for gratification on the other. As Richard Hoggart observes in his book The Uses of Literacy:

These productions belong to a vicarious spectators' world; they offer nothing which can really grip the brain or heart. They assist a gradual drying-up of the more positive, the fuller, the more cooperative kinds of enjoyment. in which one gains by giving much (p. 340).

The only paper which represents the interest of the working class, because it stands for socialism and nothing else, is the Socialist Standard. The press and the other means of communication can only be used for their proper function — the unrestricted dissemination of ideas and other information — when they, along with everything else, are commonly owned. Raymond Williams approaches this point when he observes:

The irony is that the only practical use of communication is the sharing of real experience. To set anything above this is quite unpractical. To set selling above it may seem normal, but it is really only a perversion to which some people have got used: a way of looking at the world which must be right and normal because you have cut yourself down to its size (Communications, p. 26).

Remember knowledge is power, and every new reader of the Socialist Standard makes the movement for socialism stronger.

Gary Jay