Letter: Sexual preferences and socialism (1986)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sexual preferences and socialism

Dear Editors.

I would like to congratulate Haringey District Council for deciding to promote a "homosexual and lesbian awareness" programme in the schools they are in charge of.

I am 19, gay, and when at school, it was a dirty word, known as being gay. This is because I lived in a 1920s Tory area of St. Anne's near Blackpool, where you are outcast if you are anything but middle class, own a house, two cars, have two children at private school and vote Conservative.

People like that don't realise times have changed, and that people today should be able to have confidence in their sexual orientation, and be able to be open in their sexual preferences.

All I can hope for is that Labour win the next election, so that these shackles can be broken, and gay people can be fairly treated in confidence.

"UNHAPPY SOCIALIST”

Reply:

The continuation of the profit-system depends on the uncritical social conformity of the majority. Great pains are taken, from an early stage in our lives, to discipline us into being "normal" and to treat abnormality with suspicion and often with contempt. As "Unhappy Socialist" observes, the sort of normal aspirations which we are conditioned to accept involve getting a house and a family and settling down, frequently to a routine of grin-and-bear it. This is largely a very modest and unimaginative way to have to endure your life but even this modest goal presents serious financial and domestic problems for most people who bite the boring bait.

The main type of normality which workers are encouraged to adopt is that which makes them good wage-slaves. Unquestioning obedience to authority, dull resignation to a class-divided society, a view of human nature as inherently selfish and the requirement to see present society as the final stage of historical development, are all part of the mental make-up of a "normal" person. Normality. though, is a permeating precept. As a result, all sorts of unorthodox people are herded together by conventional wisdom (conditioned ignorance) and branded as abnormal. Even if their ideas or conduct do not directly attack the class system, they are labelled with disapproval with varying degrees of contempt from "eccentric" to "subversive". Some groups may not threaten the existing structure of normality in a way that could be seen as dangerous to capitalism's basic needs but they are despised because they refuse to be bound by convention. Some of the vehement tirades against the itinerant hippies recently chased by the authorities from one county to another were examples of this. Some infringements of normality may not endanger the class system, but from the viewpoint of the ruling class (whose ideas are in n the main put by the mass media) assaults on conventional conduct are to be strongly discouraged.

Human beings are capable of enjoying a wide range of sexual behaviour. But the variety of sexual expression which is subtly promoted by the way we are socially conditioned is that which results in Mr Normal marrying Mrs Normal and. after working hard for someone else, settling down to produce two little normallettes who will be encouraged to grow up and repeat the same pattern of behaviour. The only social environment in which human sexual experience will be likely to develop freely, unconstrained by prejudice and poverty, is a genuinely classless society: socialism. Because of the prevalent and routine frustrations of everyday life for workers under capitalism and the limited creative pleasures open to most people, sex has become a rather frenetic and obsessional preoccupation with many people. The sexual part of our behaviour might well be less frenzied or important in a more imaginatively creative world. It will more certainly be beyond the realms of taboo and insecurity which it often occupies today. In any event, for as long as the majority permit the continuation of a social system which causes most people to live in poverty and insecurity, there will be the risk that one or other minority groups will become a victimised scapegoat for social problems.

The Labour Party stands only to continue to run the profit system. If it attained power as the government. it would do as it has done in its eight previous administrations and preside over chaos, poverty and discontent. As with any type of government. it would need to foster a certain sort of normality and however "progressive" its legislation. the problems of class-society would continue to arise. History demonstrates that "enlightened governments" which profess to make life comfortable for workers often, when their policies have failed to deliver the goods (as is necessarily the case), leave a trail of bitterly reactionary attitudes in their wake. Perhaps Neil Kinnock was perversely trying to avoid such a future problem by actually aiming to get power over workers on the very basis of having such views when he recently said:

I'm a father, and no matter how much I try to convince myself towards the course of enlightenment. 1 know damn well that, put to the test. I'm what people would call a reactionary (Everywoman, August 1986)

We shall not enjoy a properly liberated society while we are trapped in the social system which consigns the majority to lives of impoverishment, "normality" and alienation Instead of hoping for yet another Labour government to run capitalism, we urge our correspondent to become a socialist and act for a democratic society.

Editors.

Greasy Pole: Maude Gone Mad? (2012)

The Greasy Pole column from the May 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

Apart from their bodyguards, Ministers of the Crown are protected by “special advisers” whose job is to advise them on how they might make governmental policies, however difficult, more presentable. So what went wrong with the system recently, when the Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General informed motorists that they could ease the pain of a petrol shortage by the highly dangerous practise of filling up some jerry cans with the fuel to store at their home? The most promising route towards answering that question is to examine the minister himself. Francis Anthony Aylmer Maude came into politics with high expectations – not least of himself – partly through his pedigree as the son of the late Tory MP Angus Maude, (described by one political correspondent as “caustic, dismissive-even arrogant” – he was, after all, a determined politician – and who in 1981 decided to give it all up to help his son’s developing political career.)

Re-shuffle

Maude arrived in the House of Commons in the big Conservative victory of 1983, with the voters in a kind of jingoistic coma after the success of the Falklands gamble. Very soon he was, as a Political Private Secretary (PPS), at the lower reaches of the Greasy Pole. At a time when some big Tory guns were said to “hate” the Iron Lady, Maude was hailed as one of her committed supporters. He even impressed the spiteful scheming Alan Clark who saw him in 1984 as “. . . much the best of the PPSs, sensible and quiet, but in good mind and sense of humour.” Clark did not seem to feel that this opinion needed to be re-assessed a couple of years later when Maude told a “jolly dinner” party of Parliamentary Tory bigwigs in discussion about a pending re-shuffle by Thatcher that Nigel Lawson could not be moved from Chancellor of the Exchequer to Foreign Secretary “as a Jew”.

In fact there was a re-shuffle of a sort in the following July which left Maude, again according to Clark, disappointed: “tearful . . . looks terrible . . . quite altered from the narrow-faced, fresh youngster who used to whip Employment”. Through his tears Maude whined that he had “ . . . thought that at least I might have some recognition for all my work in the Financial Services field” (he had been Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs but had not learned that in his chosen career rewards do not unfailingly sprout from achievement). Any resentment was absent when, in 1990, Thatcher was under terminal pressure about her resignation. Maude was the first of the men in grey suits to visit her: “. . . a reliable ally” was how she described him; he “. . . told me he passionately supported the things I believed in, that he would back me as I went on but that he did not believe I could win. He left in a state of some distress.”

John Major

Thatcher recalls that whatever the effect of this episode on Maude it did nothing to cheer her up. In any case he seems to have quickly become less passionate about her to the extent that he was able forcefully to promote John Major as the most likely winner, an act which provoked anger among those Thatcher supporters who were still capable of resentment at being double-crossed. With Major in Number Ten, Maude received his reward with the grand post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury. But he did not have long to savour this because in the 1992 general election the voters in North Warwickshire threw him out – a “terrible blow” to him, when so many of his rivals had survived and clung to their prestigious jobs.

With millions in the dole queues, Maude made one of his sillier statements: he felt “the pain” of the unemployed – while he was enjoying the income from jobs like Managing Director at the bankers Morgan Stanley and director of Salomon Brothers. But to prevent his agony being too intense he was found a safe way back to Westminster in the sweet Sussex constituency of Horsham and after the 1997 election he was again available for a place on the Tory front bench under the new leader William Hague who made him Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Foreign Secretary. But he did not live up to the promise implied by those two appointments and declined into minor jobs such as party chairman and the one he now holds.

Section 28

At the Tory conference in 2005 he was not warmly received for his strictures on the need for the “cleaning up” of the party’s ”brand”, as if he had had no responsibility for it. He has provoked irritation at the inconsistency of being a member of a Cameron- style “family friendly” government while being chairman of a company with interests in pornographic DVDs. While he was ranting about the reckless policies of the banks which preceded the credit crunch he was holding a well-paid job as director of a company (now out of business) which dealt in sub-prime mortgages. In 1988 he voted for the infamous Section 28 but now says that “. . . it was very wrong – very wrong . . . ” and that section 28 had become “. . . an emblem of intolerance”. He is now a supporter of gay marriage as “a deeply conservative idea . . .  part of the glue of people making a deep commitment to each other,” but this conversion came too late to help those who were condemned by that same repressive measure. Among them was his brother, who died of AIDS when he was 42 after a long struggle to prevent his family knowing that he was gay.

Maude’s ‘special advisers’ might have foreseen that his suggestion about storing petrol at home would have loosened a flood of calls for his removal from office. Except that this was only the most recent offer of futile and damaging ideas about capitalism and its dangers.

Ivan

Theatre Review: ‘Don Giovanni’ (2012)

Theatre Review from the July 2012 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Don Giovanni’ by Mozart at Heaven, London, Sunday 29th April 2012

Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, is set in London in 1987 with a modern libretto by Ranjit Bolt.  It was recently produced at the gay nightclub, Heaven in London. Bolt’s libretto has gay philanderer, Don, sung by baritone Duncan Rock but the rest of the cast has been reversed: basses and tenors become sopranos and vice versa.

Mozart represents the rationalist enlightenment when the bourgeois classes were wrestling power from the feudal masters of the ancien regime in 1789.  His opera, Marriage of Figaro, portrays the servile classes as good as their masters. Mozart himself was a servant to an Archbishop and the Hapsburg Emperor.

Bolt’s Don is both a feudal master with droit de seigneur and a greedy Thatcherite capitalist.  The supernatural apparition of Il Commandatore at the denouement does not have its horror-effect because the character appears like Miss Havisham from Dickens and elicits laughter from the audience.  AIDS as a Faustian metaphor is not pursued in the libretto. This is a pity because Forman and Schafer in the 1984 film, Amadeus, successfully incorporated the dark elements of Don Giovanni into the tale of the Mozart and Salieri intrigue. The aria, Il catalogo e questo, is very funny and appreciated by the audience.

In 1987 there was a palpable sense of the smell of Weimar in Britain when Thatcher won a third election victory: capitalism had been unfettered, the nationalised industries sold-off and the working class beaten down with the end of the miners’ strike.  Increased powers had been given to the police, and a Tory MP had declared on the Channel 4 programme, After Dark: Tomorrow Belongs to Us, evoking the brown shirts of Cabaret-era Berlin. Capitalism had one of its periodic crises when the stock market crashed on Black Monday. There was AIDS, and the frenzied voices of the petite bourgeois were heard in the newspapers, the Tory Party, the House of Lords, and the Police. There was talk of re-criminalising homosexuality. The Government introduced Clause 28, prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality; 30,000 marched against it and “Lesbians invade the Lords and the BBC” screamed the tabloids.

Gay rights are subject to the whim of reformist politics and moral re-armament revivals in capitalist society, as can be seen from events in 1987.  And even as recently as May 2012, in North Carolina, gay marriage has been prohibited.  This is a contradiction of capitalism: it allows gay identity to develop but still needs the working class to reproduce.  The family therefore has to be prioritised and homophobia is an inevitable by-product.  Engels identified that oppression begins with the family and the rise of class society, and thus the oppression of women and gays has its origin in class society. With the end of capitalism, the bourgeois family will vanish and, as Engels wrote: “the traditional bonds of sexual relations, like all fetters, are shaken off”. With the transformation to a socialist society all humanity will be emancipated and there will be an end to exploitation and oppression.

Steve Clayton

Before and After (2019)

Book Review from the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Protest: Stories of Resistance, edited by Ra Page  Comma Press £12.99.

Here is an interesting idea: twenty short stories, each dealing with an example of resistance and accompanied by an afterword. The stories range from the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 to the demonstration against the Iraq war in 2003, though most deal with the twentieth century. The afterwords are by a variety of authors, from historians to activists, and deal with various different issues. Most of the examples discussed are fairly well known, but some will be familiar to fewer people, such as the Radical War or Scottish Insurrection in 1820 and the National Blind March of 1920.

In his introduction, the editor notes that the stories are not about leaders or heroes but the ‘ordinary’ participants, about whom history usually has little to say. The only real exception is one scene dealing with a visit by Malcolm X to Smethwick in 1965, shortly before his assassination (this is based on a real event). A small amount is known about Andrew White, the central character in Laura Hird’s fine story of the Radical War: he was transported to Australia but later returned to Britain and probably became an active Chartist.

Three participants in that rising were executed, and state brutality is one aspect of the book. Michelle Green makes very vivid the trauma of suffragette prisoners being force-fed: the doctor ‘finds the gap … left by my treacherous missing tooth , and the steel jaws open with each turn of the screw, forcing bare the softness of my throat’. There were spies and agents provocateurs at Pentrich in 1817, and police violence at the Poll Tax demo in 1990.

A natural question to ask is how successful the various protests were. The Blind Persons Act of 1920, following from the March, did lead to improvements in the lives of blind people, and the repeal in 2003 of the notorious anti-gay Section 28 happened after a great deal of LGBT protest (though, as Em Temple-Malt says in her afterword, it probably also came after social attitudes had changed). At the end of Martyn Bedford’s story on the Miners’ Strike, one character says that the miners won, as you only lose if you don’t fight. But it is hard to see how the strike and the suffering and bitterness it caused resulted in success in any way.

Many of the stories emphasise the importance of co-operation and solidarity, but sadly also reveal how many struggles within capitalism do not deliver what was hoped for.

Paul Bennett