Pathfinders: Growing up with Jordan Peterson (2022)

The Pathfinders Column from the September 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A darling of the ‘alt-light’ (that’s ‘alt-right’ without the swastikas) is clinical psychologist and self-help guru Jordan Peterson, whose YouTube videos and podcasts have been blowing up in recent years. To call him a divisive figure is an understatement. He is deplored and denigrated by some as a misogynist, even fascist ideologue bent on spreading hate. He is adored and promulgated by others as an articulate warrior against identity politics, post-modernism and ‘cultural Marxism’, popular if vague dog whistles that Peterson and his fans have no problem conflating into one toxic conspiracy bundle.

Not surprisingly, his grasp of Marxism is non-existent – Stalin and Mao killed millions, end of. He likes big ideas designed to shock, but without fussing over details. So he argues that order is male and chaos is female, and that chaos is currently winning. This has produced a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in which men are being turned into feminised weaklings who need to stop being man-children and grow the hell up. At the same time, women who want to get ahead in the world and stop playing second fiddle to men in terms of jobs and pay, should learn to overcome their built-in tendency to please and appease. The world is a hierarchy based on competence, not on discrimination, and the sooner you quit whingeing about how unfair it all is, the sooner you’ll start changing your life for the better.

His runaway success has come as a surprise to many who must have thought society had moved beyond caveman capitalism but who, it is argued, have ‘underestimated the fury being inspired by modern preoccupations like white privilege and cultural appropriation, and by the marginalization, shouting down or outright cancellation of other viewpoints in polite society’s institutions’ (bit.ly/3C2rU8j).

To all this, he offers a simple antidote, indeed alibi. Instead of having to fit in with your socially aware friends and pretend you care deeply about the hard lives of underprivileged foreigners you’re never going to meet, how much easier it is to say ‘Screw them if they can’t keep up’. Instead of going to the effort of listening to other perspectives and honestly evaluating criticisms of your own behaviour, what a relief to say ‘Go kiss a leper, loser’. Peterson absolves you of all guilt and concern for others. You never have to feel inadequate. You never have to empathise. You never have to doubt. Don’t ask, just take. That’s what real empowerment looks like, buddy. And what’s more, it’s the natural order of things, as explained by Science.

The problem his opponents frequently have is that they share, or at least don’t question, the assumptions that underpin his own worldview, so their attempts at criticism start off wide of the mark and stay there. Instead they pick away at him guerrilla-fashion, attempting to bury him in moral indignation or truculent fact-checking. It offends them to think he’s right, but they can’t see how to argue with him.

A socialist would see through Jordan Peterson in 10 seconds.

It’s the circularity of the argument. Suppose you find yourself in a savage kill-or-be-killed environment, and you’re unhappy about behaving in a savage kill-or-be-killed way. Your life coach tells you that your sub-optimal behaviour is the problem, and advises you to stop being such a pussy and get out there with guns blazing. He doesn’t ask or care why society is savage and kill-or-be-killed. He’s a psychologist, not some woke social justice warrior or cultural Marxist. If you suggest that the psychologist and his advice might be the very factors helping to perpetuate the savage kill-or-be-killed society which drove you to seek his advice in the first place, he will accuse you of refusing to take personal responsibility and tell you to grow the hell up.

If you have bought into the capitalist mindset, people like Peterson make a kind of terrifying sense, however uncomfortable that makes you feel. And if it makes sense today, it must have made sense yesterday, and for all previous days. Thus the circularity appears timeless. This is probably why he permits himself to justify human hierarchies by pointing, not to some historical event or near genetic cousin, but of all things, to lobsters. Lobsters, he says, are tyrannical hierarchs, and because we share some lobster genes inherited from our remote past, we are surely programmed to act the same way.

But you could apply this argument to anything. On this logic, all men should be rapists because, well, just look at ducks. For infanticide, see lions. For cannibalism, check out chimpanzees, hamsters and even hippos. But lobsters? No ‘proof’ can elude someone who is willing to go back so far along the evolutionary chain they’re no longer in the same genus, family, order, class or phylum. The term ‘logical fallacy’ barely does justice to this kind of thinking.

Jordan Peterson’s worldview is essentially a snapshot of the world right now, made to look immortal and unchanging. He doesn’t care that it’s ahistorical and if anything untypical of human behaviour in deep time, as many anthropologists would be at pains to point out. Indeed he dismisses anthropologists as being infected by the disease of postmodernist cultural Marxism, as indeed are the faculties of sociology, English literature, and ethnic, race and women’s studies, all of which, like the equally infected and spurious science of global warming, should be defunded immediately in his view.

Like any snake-oil salesman, he doesn’t consider the downstream consequences of the Randian product he is pushing. With the profit-driven frenzy of capitalism already burning the Earth and causing the sixth mass extinction of species, he is quite happy to advise emulating the same behaviour, in order to cash in on gullible people who think their failure is somehow because they weren’t ruthless enough.

On the plus side, Jordan Peterson does admit that his popularity is mainly on YouTube and that the YouTube audience is 80 percent young males. Once these young men have had a dose of trying to behave like the callous psychopaths he advises them to be, and finding that it makes them lonely rather than rich, they will perhaps start listening to wiser counsel. But we can’t wait that long. We need them to realise, right now, that capitalism is a gigantic and destructive social problem to which the only possible solution is gigantic and constructive social cooperation. That’s what growing up really means.

Paddy Shannon

Letter: Ex-entrepreneurs Unite! (1988)

Letter to the Editors from the July 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ex-entrepreneurs Unite!

Dear Editors

I'm so glad that someone has at last spoken up for the unemployed "business-people". I thought no-one wanted to know us. Especially since I've "failed" and slipped back into the under-class. Worse off than ever having spent up savings from when I was last employed. With your MSC folder — "You've got the Enterprise, we've got the Allowance" — you go from being a despised unknown to being much sought after by sellers of advertising space and organisers of trade fairs and such like after your precious fortune of forty pounds a week. Suddenly complete strangers know your name. You are flattered and famous! This tells the "ex" claimant a lot about a society where your worth is based on your material wealth and potential for increasing other people's wealth. Your value as a human being just doesn't come into it.

But personal sour grapes apart, I am very worried about the implications of all this lonely (it is pushed as mostly sole-trader) enterprise. Obviously the government sees it as yet another way of hiding real unemployment figures. There isn't sufficient support such as low-rent premises and adequate financial assistance for it to seriously create new jobs. After all. they think when most of last year's entrepreneurs have gone bump, there's this year's batch to take off the register, and last year's failures can then be hassled to take low-paid jobs on Restart

Also there is the question of self-exploitation. Life isn't exactly a bed of roses for the employed worker, but while on the scheme I was told that 80 hours a week is necessary to succeed in business. And if you can't cope with an 80-hour week? If you fail? How convenient; no longer do you blame the capitalist — you blame yourself What better way to break our solidarity.

Paula Dibb 

Accrington 

Lancashire

Not amused (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human beings have the capacity for historical hindsight. We can look back critically at the slaves of ancient society and agree that they were misguided in believing that their situation was “natural” and “proper". We now know that there was nothing innately inferior about slaves, that they were simply born into servitude. We have also passed that phase of society where the social structure was a rigid hierarchy in which the serf looked up to the knight, the knight to the Lord of the Manor and everyone looked up to the monarch, though few would ever see one. We can watch Upstairs, Downstairs and laugh when Hudson the butler speaks about the need for everyone downstairs to be aware of their “station in life", so that a bedroom servant could be rude to a scullery-maid but not to the cook. If we look at our own period in history with the same awareness of change and the impermanence of social ideas, we can see that there is nothing natural or necessary about the wage-slave status of the majority.

The Tories have been particularly vocal about denying this idea. They say that there must always be rich and poor. Many supporters of the Conservative Party claim that they have “no political philosophy”; they insist that if you desire change in one form or another you are “political" but if you merely happen to agree with the way things are, and accept the prevailing, popular ideas, then you are apolitical. But look at the political ideas on which conservatism is founded.

Conservatives believe in “Self-reliance". This amounts to equating poverty or insecurity with inadequacy, being unable to make your own way. Margaret Thatcher has spoken about her support for “Victorian values". What does she mean? The values of a society where the abject destitution of the majority and the sickening conditions of the workhouses were kept in being by indoctrinating the workers with docility and humility from birth? The values which said that it was the job of the masses to work hard and keep quiet and the right of the minority to enjoy great wealth and remain idle?

In its 1979 Election Manifesto the Conservative Party said:

  No one who has lived in this country for the last five years can fail to he aware of how the balance of our society has been increasingly tilted in favour of the State at the expense of individual freedom. This election may be the last chance we have to reverse that process, to restore the balance of power in favour of the people.

It was Disraeli who referred to a Conservative government as an "organised hypocrisy” and that may be a fairly appropriate term when it comes to this business of democracy. You could perhaps imagine Margaret Thatcher choking on her champagne if there was any immediate prospect of the people actually taking power away from the wealth owners who now exercise it. And you can't help but think it peculiar, that the government which has recently guided the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill through Parliament (dramatically to increase police powers of arrest and forced searches) should be so concerned with weakening the power of the state. “Individual Freedom” is a phrase which often sounds good, but in fact boils down to the freedom of the poor to suffer their lot, the freedom of the unemployed to get a job if they wish, and the freedom of the majority to fantasise about becoming millionaires while the wealth owners are left free to enjoy their parasitic status.

What else are the Tories in favour of? They listed “five tasks" in their 1979 Manifesto and we can see now how far these tasks have been completed and what the consequences have been.

The first task was "to restore the health of our economic and social life by controlling inflation and striking a fair balance between the rights and duties of the trade union movement". Although price rises have tended to flatten out, wage rises have been largely below this rate and workers have sustained a drop in their standard of living. We have seen this government give a smiling thumbs up to the Polish workers who were trying to augment their trade union powers against the wishes of the bosses of Polish state-capitalism, while at the same time introducing the Employment Act to restrict trade union power. What was it Disraeli said about hypocrisy? During the water workers’ strike at the beginning of this year Thatcher, speaking in Glasgow, said that “honesty, thrift, reliability and hard work and a sense of responsibility for fellow men are not simply Victorian values but part of the enduring principles of the Western World". She urged the striking workers to respect a “puritan work ethic" instead of trying to “deprive the community of one of life's essentials". You might wonder whether Thatcher ever pokes her head through the doors of Buckingham Palace, or the Hilton lounge or the gentlemen’s clubs to lecture the inhabitants about the puritan work ethic. When the government spends money on bombs, telling us that nurses and kidney machines are not as important, does she berate herself for attempting to "deprive the community of one of life’s essentials”? The similarity between the right-wing Conservative and Kremlin attitudes to free trade unions is, if you'll pardon the expression, striking. The recent report of the Tory Centre for Policy Studies recommending legislation to prohibit strikes in essential industries is just the recipe for keeping the workers down which is favoured by Andropov and Jarusekski.

The second task was to “restore incentives so that hard work pays". As you know, working hard for the boss all your life means not only that you are left with next to nothing to spend at the end of your days, but that you are usually too exhausted to enjoy what little you have. The only way hard work pays is when you happen to have a lot of people working hard for you. Hard work pays? Elizabeth Windsor gets £3,260,200 a year. She must work hard. R.V. Giordano, the director of BOC, gets £450,000 as a salary. He must work hard. The Duke of Buccleuch owns 258,000 acres so he must have worked pretty hard, plus he’s got all that gardening to do.

It is an old dodge of politicians to blame the cause of social problems on the government of the day and then, if those carping politicians ever themselves become the government, to switch the blame (correctly) on the uncontrollable forces of the market. Tory politicians are no exception to this rule. We find them in 1979 blaming the Labour government for social problems in Britain: “Their favourite but totally false excuse is that their appalling record is all due to the oil crisis and the world-wide economic depression.” After a couple of years they were themselves using exactly the excuse they had found unacceptable coming from Labour: "There’s been a world recession, not our fault — Germany, France. Europe are suffering as well — some suffering even worse . . . there are other countries that have even worse unemployment than we have, some less, all are struck by world recession” (Guardian. 7 March 1983).

The third task was to "uphold Parliament and the rule of law”. The upholding of the law usually has different results depending on your class. Take two examples: “An unemployed woman who stole a purse containing 50p was jailed for eight months” (Daily Telegraph, 28 February 1980), whereas "The Duke of Westminster’s cousin William Grosvenor was given a 12-month suspended sentence and fined £1000 for conspiring to defraud the Inland Revenue . . . he admitted helping to hide the £8.500 cost of champagne and whisky, grouse shooting party at Glenfiddich in otherwise genuine tax-deductible bills" (Daily Express, 24 January 1980). Wealth is produced by labour. Yet those who are most productive own least. This society works on the basis that those who produce do not possess and those who possess do not produce. All legal systems legitimise the massive institutional theft of wealth by the ruling class. The wages system is legalised robbery because we get back less than the value of what we put in. Apart from this primary purpose, the law has to be used to control the frustration which is a daily occurrence in capitalism. With a worsening recession and austerity the Tories are condoning greater police violence to cope with riots and a proliferation of brutal robberies. But a point which is not fully comprehended by those salivating Tories at their annual Conference who speak about the need for harsh punishments and more discipline is that you cannot create content with a truncheon.

The fourth task was to “support family life, by helping people to become home owners raising the standard of their children’s education and concentrating welfare services on the effective support of the old, the sick, the disabled and those who are in real need". This sounds sincere. In fact it does not altogether match up with what the Tories did in practice. Family life. well yes, unless you are in an Asian family in which case you may come a cropper of the Nationality Act which limits the entry of parents, grandparents and fiancées to live with the rest of their family. Own your own home. yes. but they forget to mention that paying the mortgage does bear certain similarities to paying the rent. Last year 27,000 people lost their homes as a result of being unable to keep up the mortgage payments. Today 87 per cent of the population own only 9 per cent of the land. 60,000 families are officially homeless and about 1.5 million families are waiting to be rehoused (Shelter). We are living in a society where property company boss Sir lan MacTaggart can sit in one of his £1000 a week marble-floored penthouses (Daily Express, 24 June 1981), pick up a newspaper and read about 18-year-old Linda Jackson who gave birth to a stillborn baby because of freezing conditions while she was having to live in a tent on the banks of the River Dee in Chester (Daily Express, 4 December 1980). You cannot have such a thing as a property-owning democracy because the idea of property (“This is mine, the rest of you cannot have it”) is opposed to the idea of democracy. By the same token, “equal opportunities" in a property society do not count for much. Anyone is free to send a child to Eton (for about £4,000 a year) for that child to have a prosperous life. Anyone is free to pay £250 a day for private hospital treatment. It is just that the majority of us begin this unnecessary competition for "success" with the handicap of being in the working class.

The fifth task was to "strengthen Britain’s defences and work with our allies to protect our interests in an increasingly threatening world”. What the Tories, like the other pro-capitalist parties, fail to make clear here is the precise nature of "our interests”. The only interest most of us have in Britain is that this is where we pay rent, receive dole, or sell ourselves to the boss. Where we consume the culture of Terry Wogan, Crossroads and baked beans. The economic interests of Charrington-Coalite, who virtually own the Falklands. were scarcely mentioned during or after all the unnecessary bloodshed in the South Atlantic. The Tories are emphatic about the need for bombs "to keep the peace" and about the need to protect ourselves against our enemies. Norman "on-your-bike" Tebbit is a man who cannot really count logic or consistency as among his strengths. While spending much energy arguing against the heavy-handed interference of the state, Norman recently urged parents to keep their children away from school when plays about the Hiroshima bomb and the need for peace were due to be performed. He presumably considers that young minds should not really become acquainted with what happened at Hiroshima and why we should take steps to avoid travelling down the same road again. Negligently overlooking the government propaganda anti-Russian leaflet for schools, How to Deal with a Bully, Norman then further confused his opposition to the peace plays by saying "I prefer politics to be kept out of schools”. With such a clear liking for having his head in the clouds, Norman would have perhaps done better to have remained an airline pilot.

The solution to the social problems of the majority is a dramatic change of social organisation to socialism. This is not the decoy duck which the Tories set up to shoot down. It is not “Less freedom . . . Nationalisation . . . Levelling down . . . high spending . . . high taxes . . (Fifty Questions & Answers, What Socialists Believe In. Conservative Research Department). Neither is it Labour’s "new” plan to re-organise capitalism, with "a priority to create jobs (more exploitation) ... a five-year national plan (Stalin would have been proud) . . . and plans to abolish the legislative powers of the House of Lords" (Labour's Plan, The New Hope for Britain).

Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth. It means acting to put an end to the need for wars and starvation. An end to eating synthetic food, living in inadequate accommodation. An end to the culture of tension, television-trances and Tcscos. Thatcher says "stand firm” as she harangues us about Victorian values. We are not amused.

Gary Jay

Jottings. (1921)

The Jottings Column from the July 1921 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reading the Press from day to day we are kept fally informed of the plots that are hourly discovered and which are intended—so we are usually told—to undermine the edifice of the British Constitution and to bring to ruin and decay the civilisation upon which rests our "glorious Empire." Full details have been collected of Sinn Fein plots in England, Irish plots in Russia, German plots in Palestine, Jewish plots in Germany, Communist plots in Timbuctoo, and so on without end.

Lord Birkenhead (famous for his connection with the Ulster plot) was telling the Cotton Conference at Manchester the other day what he knew about the plot of the Bolsheviks to extend the coal strike in England to a general stoppage. After referring to the source of information as "detected intercepted documents," he went on to pay a tribute to the "traditional commonsense of the British people," and to say that owing to the "sanity and sobriety of the British working man" the sinister plot had been shattered, and, he hoped, shattered beyond recall. "However misguided the miners may have been, their loyalty to their leaders and endurance typified the spirit of loyalty and determination which enabled Great Britain to make such a special contribution to the winning of the war." ("Manchester Guardian," June 23, 1921.)

The reader will at once conclude that this sounds fishy, and that there must be something behind it all. Of course there is. Turning to another part of the same paper we find in the political correspondent's report that a conspiracy had been revealed which was led by Lord Birkenhead and included Churchill, Lord Beaverbrook, and others, the purpose of which was the overthrow of the Prime Minister in order to alter the basis of the Coalition. In this case also the plot was shattered—not because of the "traditional common sense of the British people," but because Churchill did not see his way clear to success.

The connection between the two instances is obvious. Everything depends upon being able to secure the support of the working-class population of the country by means of their votes, hence the talk at Manchester and the Press reports.

Which is bluff, purely and simply. For their own purposes they have other methods, also, which are not supposed to be the concern of those outside. The British workers may possess those qualities attributed to them by Lord Birkenhead, but they will certainly have to be applied in a different direction if they are ever going to come into their own.

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The dishing of the Communists by the Labour Party over the question of affiliation to that body will certainly rile them. In seeking affiliation they not only prove that, stripped of all their pseudo-revolutionary trappings, they are nothing but a party of opportunist reformers, but also that they haven't a platform strong enough to stand on. Their understanding of Socialism is certainly in need of a tonic when they claim that by joining forces with the anti-Socialist left wing of Liberalism they can better serve the interests of the workers. That exhortation to the trade unionists to "watch your leaders" is really funny.

--0--

Lever Brothers, Ltd. report a profit of £3,270,091 in 1920, after providing for depreciation, insurance, etc. This compares with £2,439,067 in 1919. The fixed dividends on the preference and the prefered ordinary shares are to be paid, and the ordinary, held by the Lever family, will have 20 per cent. paid on them, absorbing £456,000. This is 2¼ more than in 1919. Not very bad considering these rotten times.

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Some little time ago the Editor of "John o' London" invited well-known people to state in his journal what particular book they would place in the hands of a young man of 21 in the belief that it would tend to form both his mind and character to his life-long advantage. Lord Leverhulme was one of those who was invited to have a shot. He replied—you've guessed it—Smiles's "Self Help"!

Tom Sala

Thatcherism: a PR gimmick (1989)

From the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is hard to believe this now, but in 1984 there was some doubt about whether Margaret Thatcher would carry on for long as prime minister. Of course she did not share these doubts and when she declared her intention of carrying on she did so in words which were not only unmistakeable but also illuminating:

I believe that five years ago the British people made me prime minister because . . .
I believe that I was re-elected with an overwhelming majority last year because . . .

This assumption of the status of a sort of president, elected by direct vote instead of relying on the support of her party MPs, could not have been re-assuring to the Tory hopefuls with nervous ambitions to succeed Thatcher. For one thing, she was asserting a line of contact with the voters which was unhampered by those inconvenient and irritating people she had given ministerial jobs to and who would like to insist that they should somewhere, somehow, come into the reckoning. But five years later, with a decade of residence at Number Ten behind her, there are no longer any doubts or questions: with no substantial opposition to her, Thatcher stays as Tory leader for as long as she chooses. The government is now very much her own creation, purged of almost all dissension. If any of her ministers seem to be in a muddle, to be cutting a less than masterful figure in public and so undermining popular respect for the government, Thatcher will quickly move in to take control, setting up some committee in which she is in the chair or herself taking on some negotiation. This may mean that ministers like Paul Channon and Colin Moynihan — even the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe — are pushed to one side but it does give the voters the impression that decisive action is being taken on some pressing problem and that, in the long run. protects support for the government.

Thatcher Publicity Machine
A minister in a former Conservative government, Charles Hill, once said that the ‘most riotous fun" he ever had was when he was on the opposition benches: "then we could make speeches without responsibility and make proposals that hadn't got to be carried out". Well the 1979 Tories had had a lot of that kind of fun, such was the confusion and impotence of the Labour government in its struggles to protect the interests of British capitalism. Labour's battles with the unions over pay claims had exposed the fact that, no matter how close the ties between the union leadership and a Labour government, their power to restrain rises in workers' living standards had limits. Even so. the Tory manifesto in 1979 was by no means dogmatic or extreme as a statement of their intentions or as an analysis of the problems of British capitalism:

Some of the reasons for our difficulties today are complex and go back many years. Others are more simple and more recent. We do not lay all the blame on the Labour Party: but Labour have been in power for most of the last fifteen years and cannot escape the major responsibility.

There was no mention of any large-scale privatising of state industries although the manifesto did state a clear intention to cut back the bargaining power of the unions, to allow council tenants to take out a mortgage on their home and to look into the administration of the National Heaith Service (some of whose employees may now be surprised to learn that in 1979 the Tories planned to “cut back bureaucracy" in the NHS). A reasonable view of the 1979 election, then, is that the working class in Britain did not so much vote positively for a Tory government as against another dose of the Labour Party in power.

If there is such a thing as "Thatcherism" it has developed since then, as Tory Party propagandists have realised how successful a vote-winner is the image of a strong and resolute leadership and how reality can be distorted to give the impression of a clear-sighted, consistent policy for dealing with the affairs of British capitalism. This is an important political factor. The vast majority of voters are members of the working class, who depend on selling their working abilities for their living. Capitalism works against their interests but they continue to support it, which is another way of saying that they are unaware of the facts of life in this system: they are vulnerable to many kinds of deception. Among the most potent of these is the delusion that workers and their employers have some common cause, that if British capitalism is prosperous then so are British workers. Thatcher's publicity machine has effectively exploited this ignorance: for example she has been depicted as tirelessly travelling abroad in order to handbag foreign leaders who, as foreigners are liable to, have designs on pulling a fast one on the eminently reasonable and patiently peaceable British nation. Of course sometimes handbagging is not enough in which case it becomes necessary to send some British workers dressed up in uniforms and armed with an array of weaponry to do rather more than handbag — to kill other workers and to be killed themselves. But even this, as in the case of the Falklands war, did not damage Thatcher's standing: indeed the evidence is that it had such as appeal to the more absurd depths of patriotism among workers that it actually helped her to win the 1983 election.

Since then there has been an impressive sequence of successes for this government. They have got rid of a number of local authorities, such as the GLC. who were proving troublesome. Although they claim to stand for less state interference they have clamped down some rigid controls on local councils from Westminster. They have privatised a number of state industries, in the process allowing workers to buy a few shares, which again bolstered the delusion of a common national interest. They have killed off the assumption, which at one time had the status of an orthodoxy, that union leaders should hold a central and continuing place in decision making about the economy of British capitalism. They have passed laws which savagely restrict strikers' ability to carry out their part in an industrial dispute; the miners who once fought so long and so bitterly against pit closures now have no choice but to accept them, as British Coal decides. They have, while claiming to improve state benefits for the sick and unemployed, actually cut them back and in some cases, such as people under 18, have virtually abolished them. They have quickly learned to dress up inconvenient statistics so as to present an untrue picture, for example through various ruses which effectively remove workers (like those under-18s) from the right to apply for benefit and so reduce the figures of unemployed. They have promoted the idea that workers should stand on their own two feet (as if we ever did, or were ever able to do. anything else) rather than depend on the state machine to pamper them with its schemes of health care, social services and benefits.

Recession Gains Strength

The list is a very long one but it is a mistake to ascribe it to the whims of one person or to the collective malevolence of a government — to this thing called Thatcherism. Many of this government’s policies were in response to, and were possible because of, the recession. For example, since 1945 successive governments have tried to curtail the power of the unions. The Heath government of 1970-74 began its life with stated intentions towards the unions little different from those which Thatcher's government have been able to carry out. During its final spell the first Wilson government was split over the proposals in Barbara Castle's white paper In Place of Strife, which were aimed at weakening union power. All these attempts came to grief because the British ruling class felt they could not afford a fight to the death with the unions. This situation was changing, as the recession gathered strength and as the unemployment figures mounted, as the Labour government of James Callaghan came to its end. The Chancellor of the Exchequer in that Cabinet. Denis Healey, is in fact credited — if that is the right word — with being the first Thatcherite Chancellor, such were the policies he was implementing and planning for the future. Thatcher came to power as the recession deepened; one union after another was brought to heel and finally the miners, who were always expected to provide the strongest opposition, were beaten.

This type of experience has not been confined to this country. In France, the allegedly socialist President Mitterrand, whose advent to power was greeted so ecstatically by the French workers. did not take long to reverse the policies on which he had won the election. Under the pressure of the problems which the French capitalist class were going through, Mitterrand outdid Thatcher in the zeal of his policies of retrenchment and attacks on working class living standards. It is clear that Thatcher likes no-one so much as a politician who agrees with her; she and Mitterrand are said to have a cordial personal relationship — as she also has with Gorbachev and had with Reagan. 

So this Tory government is not an aberration in the administration of British capitalism, nor a breach in its continuity. It is simply an appropriate response to the conditions of its time. Although it assumes a character of infallibility in fact, in its own terms, it has made numerous blunders and its history is not one of steadfastly pursuing its objective but of a normal amount of inconsistency. For example in her five year anniversary statement Thatcher claimed one of her government's achievements to be that interest rates were at their lowest for 16 years. Be that as it may (for interest rates are not something affecting working class conditions in any significant sense) the fact is that they are now at their highest for seven years and likely to rise even higher during the immediate future. Thatcher claimed in 1984 that low interest rates were a sign of her government's success; how then does she assess the high rates which are now in operation?

Prejudice and Ignorance

The point is that she is not the Iron Lady of Tory mythology. Her achievement (which by any standards is impressive enough, if diabolical) is the guile with which she and her public relations caravan have seized on the historical opportunity to present her in that way. Thus even what have been called her knee-jerk reactions — which are actually finely tuned to exploit working class prejudices and misconceptions about society — are able to be depicted as responses from strength of conviction and rectitude. When another politician might flounder and fumble in face of a crisis Thatcher responds in what appears to be a direct, firm and clear sighted manner. Against all expectations of her, she is able to tap into the issues which preoccupy the voters, which does not mean that she speaks in their interests. In an interview in 1980 with Hugo Young, the political correspondent of the Guardian, she set out how she sees herself:

Deep in their instincts people find what I am saying and doing right. And I know it is. because that is the way I was brought up.

Prejudices and ignorance are, by their very nature, difficult to argue against. When they are in harmony on both sides of the class barrier it becomes even more difficult to deal with them. Perhaps that is why Thatcher seems to think that she is invincible. if not everlasting. However the cosy, pernicious circle in which one prejudice links with another to entrap human progress can be broken by the working class making a proper assessment of their standing in society, of the fact that the unimaginable wealth of a minority rests on the exploitation of the majority and that that majority suffer all manner of indignities and impoverishment. After ten years of Thatcher it may be hard for some people who are desperate about the world, to realise that her rule will not last for ever. But it won't. And if anyone thinks that is reason to rejoice let them take the argument a stage further. Capitalism won't last for ever either

Ivan

Be your own boss? (1988)

The Running Commentary column from the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the nineteenth century Samuel Smiles offered the doctrine of hard work and abstinence to the British working class as a path from the poverty and suffering they experienced during the "golden era" of empire and industry.

Today the government peddles a similar message of self-help to the unemployed through its Enterprise Allowance Scheme with advice on how to become self-employed. The Prime Minister has revealed her vision for the future — a nation of self- employed. This is a bold vision in its denial of economic reality but it does reflect the pressures of party politics.

At the heart of the matter is government concern over unemployment levels and the consequent fear of losing power at the ballot box. This is a problem that has been faced by successive governments, whether Conservative, Labour, or Liberal (and will no doubt prove a source of worry to the new SLDP). Each has offered a variety of "solutions" that have proved useless without exception. Unfortunately for all parties hoping to capture power and administer capitalism the problem remains that unemployment is an inherent part of the capitalist economy and not capitalism gone wrong. As such the "solutions” offered by these parties and their accompanying economic advisers are spurious and, regardless of the promises, unemployment will be relatively high or low depending on the prospects for the capitalist class of realising a profit given prevailing market conditions. If the economy is expanding the capitalist will draw on the reserve of unemployed workers to increase production. When the economy contracts redundancy notices are issued.

The present government is offering the unemployed worker a chance to Be Your Own Boss. This self help booklet is available at Job Centres and offers advice and financial assistance in setting up your own business. It promises that "You won't have a boss breathing down your neck" (not that the target audience has the luxury of this inconvenience) and offers a list of services you could provide as a budding entrepreneur. Among the services listed that could launch you on the road to prosperity are: picture framing, making pottery, sign writing, gardening and child minding. Contact with reality is avoided by ignoring those crucial elements of market economy — competition and profitability. The reader is simply advised to identify a service that cannot be obtained at the "right price" in the area they live. The realities of the market place are left further behind when advice is offered on forming a co-operative. A co-op may suit you if you are ". . . more interested in serving the community than making profits". It would be hard to find a more cynical denial of the priorities of capitalism than to offer hope to unemployed workers by implying that a desire to help others may be enough to earn a living.

Tony Dobson