Proper Gander: Theroux the keyhole (2026)

The Proper Gander column from the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Louis Theroux has built up his career as a documentary-maker since the 1990s, with his trademark approach being to patiently spend time among society’s stranger subcultures to learn about what motivates the people within. The subjects of his latest film are prominent figures in the ‘manosphere’, a loose online network which upholds hard-line versions of masculinity. Netflix’s Inside The Manosphere follows Theroux as he meets influencers who have amassed millions of young male fans through their social media platforms, livestreams and podcasts. Their content extols their values of conspicuous wealth, sexism and conspiracy theories, with the influencers all living extravagant lifestyles and exuding confidence, giving their views plausibility among their impressionable followers.

In Marbella, Theroux visits Harrison Sullivan (aka HSTikkyTokky) and Ed Matthews, whose online content includes videos of macho fitness tips and ‘predator stings’ confronting alleged paedophiles. Sullivan becomes suspicious that Theroux is trying to catch him out and cuts short the time he agreed to spend being interviewed, although he later backtracks after his videos about their first meeting attract more clicks. While Sullivan and Matthews represent the ‘laddish’ style of influencer, Justin Waller from Louisiana is more measured, wearing tailored suits as he drives Theroux around in his Lamborghini. Waller’s material combines business advice with a disdain for feminism, saying women tend to prefer traditional family roles. He and his wife are in a ‘one-sided monogamous’ relationship, and it’s not him who’s monogamous. This arrangement is also a preference of the Miami-based influencer known as Myron Gaines, who claims women ‘want a guy that can lead them and dominate them’. Theroux sits in during Gaines’ Fresh & Fit podcast in which his female guests get objectified, belittled and embarrassed. As Theroux later comments, many of the influencers ‘advocate for traditional values while at the same time wanting to be seen with scantily-clad models’.

The confidence which influencers have in their derisory beliefs about women’s roles comes from their ‘red pill’ ideology. This is a reference to the 1999 film The Matrix, which we’re told in this context means seeing through the mainstream media’s discrimination against men, although ‘redpilling’ is usually shorthand for adopting a far-right viewpoint. New Yorker Sneako is among the more politicised of the influencers Theroux meets. Alongside being a Muslim Trump-supporter, he claims satanists run the world, leaving clues in pictures of celebrities using ‘one eye’ symbolism and telling people such as singer Sam Smith to become transgender. Predictably, he adds that the aim of this satanic cabal is to establish a single global government. While Sneako denies this is Jewish, other influencers share the conviction that a small group of Jews are behind a plan to promote degeneracy through manipulating culture, especially gender politics.

The outlook spun by the influencers is really a convoluted way of enticing people to buy the financial products they have a stake in. Theroux tests one of Sullivan’s investment opportunities and loses most of the £500 he paid in. Sullivan is at least honest in admitting that what drives his material is what makes money for him rather than what is considered right or wrong. An example is when he says he was ‘clip-farming’ by including antisemitic content while not believing it, as he knew this would generate attention. Getting exposure in order to gain more supporters and therefore customers is the priority. The notion that ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ would apparently be confirmed after Inside The Manosphere was released, with Sullivan accruing more followers because of the coverage it has given him, according to an article in the Metro (7 April), which itself represents more promotion.

As the focus of the show is Theroux meeting people, not much time is spent analysing the manosphere’s place in society. This approach either admirably allows the viewer to reach their own conclusions or disappointingly makes the programme feel shallow. Theroux posits how the upbringing of the influencers may have contributed to their mindset in that many of them lacked a supportive father figure, perhaps affecting their attitudes to relationships, such as ‘one-sided monogamy’. More widely, he says they are ‘products of a culture – growing up online in a world that’s changing at dizzying speed’ with long-established male roles challenged. He adds that they now project their trauma by ‘spewing hate’ to an audience of young men looking for something to feel they belong to, preferably with money to buy financial products. The fans of the influencers we see in the documentary clearly feel empowered by what their heroes advocate. Theroux recognises that while the influencers offer hope to troubled men, it comes with a belief that they are living in ‘a matrix purposely designed to make men fail’. He suggests ‘the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers, an illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top’.

The personal traumas which shaped the mindsets of each influencer and follower happened in a world which is ‘designed to make men fail’ (and women too, often in different ways). This is the divisive world of capitalism, driven by aspirations of wealth amid poverty and power amid powerlessness. They have misinterpreted this, though, and don’t identify the economic system itself as structurally creating (nearly all) people’s disadvantaged position, but instead blame the ‘matrix’ of feminism and a supposed Jewish cabal. This poisonous stance has proved lucrative for the influencers because it attracts attention online among vulnerable men, reinforcing a worrying association between wealth and bigotry. The confidence with which this mentality is promoted disguises its errors and contradictions, such as its ridiculous ‘evidence’ for a Jewish / satanic conspiracy and the hypocrisy of its attitudes to women. For an ideology apparently based on dogged independence it relies heavily on fan worship of the influencers. The ‘manosphere’ is both an expression of the alienation which comes with living in capitalist society and a dangerously misguided attempt at compensating for that alienation.

Mike Foster

Action Replay: Abuse of position (2024)

The Action Replay column from the May 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

It started with a kiss, when in August last year the head of the Spanish FA kissed one of the players, Jenni Hermoso, on the lips at the award ceremony for the Women’s World Cup. This led to a great many protests, with the president (who has been the subject of other complaints) being forced to resign, being banned from football activities for three years and then being charged in a court. Except of course that it didn’t start there at all, as women athletes have frequently been subject to discrimination and sexual harassment.

Many women coaches in football, for instance, have encountered prejudice of various kinds, including verbal and physical assaults, and even being completely ignored by the male coach of the opposing team at a match. Only about one professional coach in ten in UK sport is a woman.

Swimming is an area that is particularly problematic. From girl swimmers who have problems with periods during a training session to those who just don’t want to appear in a swimming costume in front of the whole school, young female swimmers can encounter all sorts of difficulties. The appearance of women swimmers can lead to body shaming if they have big shoulders. Last year two Italian TV presenters made sexist remarks at an aquatic championship, describing a Dutch woman diver as ‘big’, adding, ‘They’re all equally tall in bed’.

Women who are swimming just for fun and exercise often encounter sexist behaviour too: being followed into the showers, having their bottom pinched or being leered at from the public gallery, and men swimming slowly in front of them or taking up excessive space,

Prejudice in sport doesn’t just affect women, of course, as male swimmers can also be subjected to remarks about them gaining weight. In football there was an appalling scandal involving sexual abuse by coaches and scouts of young male players, starting in the 1970s. The true scale of this only emerged from 2016, with fourteen men being convicted. However, it does seem to apply to women more often, and girl gymnasts have been starved and body-shamed by coaches, with the ostensible aim of improving their performance, and very many have described physically abusive behaviour,

It’s not just in sport: in education, entertainment, business and so on, people in authority can harass and even abuse those they have power over. All in a society based on hierarchy, with pervasive sexism.

Paul Bennett

Liberating Women's Lib (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

The fact of women's oppression in many eras and in many places is undeniable; the determination of the ‘women’s movement’ to end this oppression is understandable; but their specific aims are much more dubious. They make their views known in many spheres with various demands: 24-hour nurseries, abortion on demand, wages for housework, freedom for women to work in manual trades, to name a few. None of these reforms is worth fighting for within the framework of capitalism, for even if they are achieved they could not radically alter the position of women as members of the working class, any more than reformist action will genuinely improve the position of any other oppressed group. Black people, children, the disabled, the old, for example, all have pressure groups devoting their energies to reforms which will supposedly alleviate their particular problems.

The futility of such reformist aims can be demonstrated by taking a look at some recent examples of women’s liberation campaigns taken to their logical conclusions. One such is the question of prostitution. Recently, at a well-attended meeting at Central Hall, Westminster, baronesses, MPs, and leading figures in the women’s movement shared a platform with prostitutes fighting for recognition of their right to sell their bodies freely without harassment from the police. This was followed by the first national meeting of PROS, which is campaigning to end the imprisonment of prostitutes, to abolish the offences of loitering and soliciting for the purpose of prostitution and to stop the use of the term ‘common prostitute’ in legal proceedings. They also want to “get more street women involved on a regular basis so that they are taking the initiatives and finding a voice for themselves. That is where real change will come from" (our italics) (Guardian, October 9, 1979). Just how such reforms could make any appreciable difference to the life of a prostitute is hard to imagine. Nearly all prostitutes are driven into their trade by poverty and no matter how many reforms are enacted this will not change. Yet we have the spectacle of ‘liberated’ women seriously suggesting that removing a few restrictions and harassments will enable prostitutes to ply their trade with dignity and honour.

Another example of the absurdity of certain women’s campaigns relates to the ‘inferior’ position of women in the armed forces. Here we are expected to struggle for equal “rights” of women to fight and kill alongside men, and unfavourable comparison is made between the British armed forces, where women may only perform auxiliary duties, and the armed forces of Israel and the USA, where they are entitled to undertake full combat duty. In other words “liberated” women should be calling for the right to kill their fellow workers (men and women alike) in other countries an example of emancipation at which the mind can only reel.

Similarly, the fact that only one per cent of bank managers and two per cent of chartered accountants are women (Observer, 23 September 1979) must reflect the subordinate position of women. But are we to demand that these professions, which exist merely to service capitalism, should henceforth employ equal numbers of men and women? If, overnight, 50 per cent of bank managers and accountants were women, capitalism would be exactly the same and socialism no nearer. Even with total equality in the labour market women will remain wage-slaves, like men.

It is mistaken to assume that men, because their pay is generally higher, and because hitherto they have done some jobs to the exclusion of women, and because they usually go out to work for most of their adult lives, therefore have something that is worth striving for. The serried rows of clerks, factory hands, salesmen, plumbers no more have jobs which are intrinsically satisfying than housework and childcare are intrinsically stultifying. This is not to say that women are better off staying at home but it is a warning that exchanging one situation for another is not an act of liberation. The main, if not only reason most members of the working class—male and female—go out to work is for the small brown envelope they receive on Fridays; and it confers not dignity but humiliation that their worth as human beings should be so narrowly defined. The fact that many men have misconceptions about their role in society and their relationship with women does not warrant either wholesale hostility to them nor the belief that equality with men within capitalism will lead to emancipation.

Another example of women tying themselves in knots in furtherance of their cause is the support given by some sections of the women's movement to Margaret Thatcher: simply by virtue of her sex we were encouraged to vote for her, what she might or might not do in power being apparently of secondary importance. Although some of those who took up this position before the election have now repented, there are those even now who cling to this absurd notion; the writer of a letter to Spare Rib (July 1979), although abhorring the Tory Party, writes, “But when I read or hear the words ‘the Prime Minister was present. She said . . . ’ I am filled with a deep, half-incredulous satisfaction”. Another example of equal irrelevance to women’s real interests, is the decision by the Swedish Parliament to make “the monarch’s first-born child rather than the first male child heir to the throne” (Guardian, 8 November 1979), thus disinheriting the young prince in favour of his elder sister. Big deal.

There are many other areas where women seek to remove petty restrictions and barriers which make no real difference at all, and yet they are hailed as some kind of achievement. We learn, for example, that American Catholics may remove ‘sexist language’ from prayers; apparently sexist “language in liturgy has been a target of feminist groups”, so now a revised prayer instead of reading Christ’s blood is “shed for you and for all men” would read “shed for you and for all” (Guardian. 25 October 1979). Now there's something to make us feel better.

Women are rightly disgusted by blatantly sexual advertisements which display their bodies to sell products, but although putting stickers on these posters to express their outrage will make some women feel better, it will have little effect. The capitalists must sell their products in order to realise their profits, and they will use whatever means they find most effective to do so. Furthermore, men are just as degraded by the macho, he-men advertisements also used to sell products, or the “It’s a Man’s Life in the Army” type of approach used to incite workers to kill other workers on behalf of their masters. But what about the television advertisements which, in the pre-Christmas period, aim to inspire in children a crazy lust for worthless toys? Even if an organisation such as Affirm—"a feminist alliance against ads, articles and images that exploit women” were to succeed in its aims “to abolish all sexism in the media” (Spare Rib. July 1978), where would that leave us? Advertising would still be there, capitalism would be intact. Protesting about any of these advertisements is useless without tackling the underlying cause.

The most positive thing to emerge from the women’s movement will be the active involvement of large numbers women in questioning their role in society. Let us hope it is not too long before they turn their attention to a more constructive approach to the problems which face us all, men and women.

J.

Gender myths (1979)

From the December 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many words have been written to explain, justify or rationalise women's social inferiority as against men. There are those like racists with their particular prejudice, who have claimed that this social inferiority is a direct reflection of women's biological inferiority. For example, it has been said that the average brain size in women tends to be smaller than that of men, the inference being that women are less intelligent. It is true that the brain of the female sex in homo sapiens tends to be smaller than in the male, but then the whole morphological structure tends to be smaller in the female than in the male — something known in scientific jargon as sexual dimorphism. The Neanderthal human, who preceded — and was for a time a contemporary of—homo sapiens, had an average brain size of 1,4550 cc. or 100 cc larger than the modern human. However there have been few, if any, attempts to claim that Neanderthal people therefore must have been more intelligent than homo sapiens.

There can be no doubt that the social position of women is closely bound up with the emergence of private property relations and class society. Lewis H. Morgan who, together with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, can be said to be the founders of social anthropology, was the first to discover this connection. His claim was that people living in those stages of human development which he called savagery and barbarism, had social organisation democratic in character. They practised communism in living and operated a matriarchal kinship structure, in contrast to institutionalaliscd private property and territorial government which. Morgan claimed, had evolved from primitive society. He was able to show that the patriarchal and monogamian type of families had not always existed — a complete break from the theory of original sin and the idea that primitive people were the result of degeneration from previous civilisation.

Morgan’s works greatly upset the academics of contemporary society. While Morgan put no special emphasis on the social position of women in primitive society, in the much more free society he described the implication was that women were not oppressed as in civilised periods. Much of what he claimed for primitive society is substantiated by modern anthropology.

However, it must be remembered that the peoples he studied were organised in tribal society and were not primitive in the prehistoric sense as understood by modern anthropologists in their studies of hunter gatherer bands. For example, Elman R. Service, who has made a close study of hunter gatherer peoples still existing in various parts of the world, and who are the closest approximation of early homo sapiens society of 40,000 years ago, says this in his book The Hunters:

Food gathering is the major enterprise of course, but more than that, it is a direct confrontation of man with nature. That is to say, there are no specialised groups who get their food by buying it from, the producer or exchanging services for it in some way. There is no full-time specialisation of labour other than the domestic age and sex divisions that are found in any family. Among hunting-gathering peoples this division of labour is simply that men do the hunting, at least the kind of hunting that takes them any distance from the camp. Women, probably because of the relative confinement of bearing and rearing children, are left to forage near the camp for vegetable foods and such small game as can be easily caught. But this does not mean that men's hunting is necessarily of greater economic importance than women's work.

Service calculates that in aboriginal Australia, even on the northern coast where game and fish are abundant, vegetables make up 70/80 per cent of the people's diet—collected, of course, by women. Woman’s work is important: most hunting-gathering populations could not be maintained without it. On the other hand, they can, and do, go for long periods without meat hunted by men. Only the Eskimos live by hunting and fishing alone, and Eskimo women do most of the fishing.

The question now arises: why was it that the oppression of women by men took place at all? In spite of its shortcomings, the probable explanation for this is that contained in Engels' The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State based, as it is, on the concept of historical materialism and with much use of the researches carried out by Morgan. 

Needless to say, this explanation has been, and still is, rejected by most of the supporters of that epitome of all private property societies, capitalism — and by sonic of those who are interested in what is constantly referred to as “the liberation of women”. One such is Simone de Beauvoir who, in her work The Second Sex, says:

. . . On the same grounds it is impossible to deduce the oppression of woman from the institution of private property. Here again the inadequacy of Engels' point of view is obvious. He saw clearly that woman’s muscular weakness became the real point of inferiority only in its relation to the bronze and iron tool; but he did not see that the limitations of her capacity for labour constituted in themselves a concrete disadvantage only in a certain perspective . . . 

Instead, she implies as a metaphysical explanation:

Thus it is that man’s interest in his property becomes an intelligible relation. But we see that man's interest cannot be explained through the tool alone: we must grasp in its entirety the attitude of man wielding the tool, an attitude that implies an ontological substructure, a foundation in the nature of his being

It is not surprising that someone with these ideas can write the following passage in relation to the aspirations of women:

I have pointed out in the introduction how different women's situation is, particularly on account of the community of life and interests which entails here solidarity with man — and also because he finds in her an accomplice: no desire for revolution dwells within her, nor any thought of her own disappearance as a sex — all she asks is that aspects of sexual differentiation be abolished.

In other words, let capitalism remain providing women are not discriminated against. If the determining factor in women's inferior standing is an existentialist one and is not linked to the rise of private property relations and class society, why did women allow it to happen? If the special oppression of women is not a necessary corollary — as de Beauvoir suggests — why was it that the agitation for woman’s liberation had to wait for the 20th century?

During the 20th century there has been much anthropological field work and study of the cultural diversity — and similarity — of various peoples in different parts of the world, with the emphasis on the differences. Margaret Mead, in her book Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, describes her study of three tribes living in New Guinea; the Arapesh, the Mundugumor and the Tchambuli;

We have now considered in detail the approved personalities of each sex among the primitive peoples. We found the Arapesh—both men and women displaying a personality that out of our historically limited preoccupations, we would call maternal in its parental aspects and feminine in its sexual aspects. We found men as well as women trained to be cooperative, unaggressive, responsive to the needs and demands of others. We found no idea that sex was a powerful driving force either for men or for women. In marked contrast to these attitudes, we found among the Mundugumor that both men and women developed as ruthless aggressive positively sexed individuals, with the maternal cherishing aspects of personality at a minimum. Both men and women approximated to a personality type that we in our culture would find only in an undisciplined and very violent male. Neither the Arapesh nor the Mundugumor profit by a contrast between the sexes. The Arapesh ideal is the mild responsive man married to the mild responsive woman: the Mundugumor ideal is the violent aggressive man married to the violent aggressive woman. In the third tribe, the Tchambuli, we found a genuine reversal of the sex attitudes of our own culture, with the woman the dominant impersonal managing partner, the man the less responsible and the emotionally dependent person. These three situations suggest, then, a very definite conclusion. If those temperamental attitudes which we have traditionally regarded as feminine, such as passivity, responsiveness and a willingness to cherish children — can so easily be set up as the masculine pattern in one tribe and in another be outlawed for the majority of women as well as for the majority of men, we no longer have any basis for regarding such aspects of behaviour as sex-linked. And this conclusion becomes even stronger when we consider the actual reversal in Tchambuli of the position of dominance of the two sexes, in spite of the existence of formal patrilineal institutions.

Whatever the other conclusions or speculations one can draw from this, one thing is certain. It show's that human society is capable of a variety of behavioural patterns, and that the so-called masculine and feminine characteristics are not based on fundamental sex differences, but reflect the cultural conditioning of their societies. The question could be posed here, what are the crucial factors which determine the cultural conditioning? It would seem that these studies go some way to support the implication of Simone de Beauvoir of an ontological explanation, and to invalidate the universal approach of Morgan in his insistence that “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress.” However, what has to be taken into account is that all of these studies have been carried out with peoples living in tribal society where private property relations had already developed to a considerable extent, as indeed were Morgan’s, and should not be regarded as examples of the hunter-gatherer society of prehistoric people of some 40,000-50.000 years ago. As E. R. Service points out in his introduction to The Hunters “All the hunting gathering societies listed above have certain characteristics in common that serve to set them apart from tribal and other higher levels of society.”

As mentioned earlier, the hunter-gathering peoples studied by Service and others are the nearest approximation to the society of primitive humanity. There is no substantial evidence whatever to suggest that ownership aggression or the domination of one sex by the other has any part either with the hunter-gatherer peoples living, or in the society of primitive peoples of prehistoric times.

The agitation for women’s liberation is a phenomenon of modern capitalism. The oppression of women by men only arises in those societies where the form of marriage and the family is patriarchal or monogamian. and is associated with private property relations of an advanced kind. The problem is only recognised after the possibility of its solution has become apparent.

The social problems engendered by capitalist society, which dominates the whole world, cut across all speculation, all special pleading. The liberation of women is inextricably bound up with the liberation of the whole of humanity. Capitalism exploits its working class regardless of their sex. The question to-day is not just the emancipation of women, but the emancipation of the working class, regardless of sex.

Harry Walters

Women’s Liberation (1974)

From the Special 300th issue of The Western Socialist

A long time ago — back in 1904 — our Companion Party In Great Britain was organized and drew a Declaration of Principles made up of eight clauses. The fourth Principle states:

“That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex.”

Of course a lot of water has flowed over the dam since 1904. And yet, despite all the struggles in the last six or seven decades in the area of equality for the different ethnic groups and for women, inequality for the so-called colored peoples within society and for women throughout the world has not appreciably lessened. Nor can so-called equality for most non-whites wherever whites are dominant, or most women, anywhere in the world today mean very much since most of the population regardless of so-called race, or sex — is compelled to live out a lifetime in a condition of wage servitude. Equality under capitalism can be nothing more for most of us than “equality” within slavery.

Look at the question of wages, for example — equal pay for equal work — for women. Certainly it is true that women have always been paid less than men wherever that was possible. And certainly it makes sense to rebel against this discrimination. And yet there is something radically wrong with the attitude expressed by militants of the Women's Liberation Movement on this question. Women, as a group, have been used in the same sense as all workers from industrially-backward nations who become immigrants in industrial countries. Because it is the nature of capitalist economics that capitalists should be able to purchase labor-power at the cheapest possible price, women are taken advantage of to the fullest extent this is possible. Certainly women should rebel and certainly, too, the labor unions should take a strong stand against such practices, even among the unorganized. For the purpose of labor unions is, primarily, to keep wage rates from becoming further depressed, to fight for better wages and conditions. Most women are part of the working class as a whole. It would be more apropos, then, for militant Women Liberationists to work for equality in wages from a class angle rather than to segregate themselves into separate units based upon sex.

And yet, even this would not solve the problem of slavery and discrimination against most women. In the final analysis, labor power is a commodity and, as such, sells for what it takes to produce and reproduce the worker and his family. Total commodity production is not determined by the gross total of workers — male and female — but on the conditions of the market. The needs of the population, as a whole, have little to do with the matter.

Certainly the whole history of women in class society has been and continues to be a history of special discrimination, of attitudes based upon male superiority. But these attitudes are a product of class society and are not due to something in the male character. They did not exist among primitives in tribal communist society and they cannot possibly exist under world socialism. Why spend your lives fighting against this effect of capitalism? Women can't be free until men are free — just as black workers can't be free until white workers are.

Why not join with us in working toward a goal of world socialism which will make all mankind free — with no discrimination against race, or sex?

Letters: No opposition worth mentioning (1995)

Letters to the Editors from the April 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

No opposition worth mentioning

Dear Editors,

Politics is the art or science of administration of affairs; and not the art or science of government as most people think, because the whole concept of government is thrown overboard by all serious students of politics ever since the law of social change was discovered in the middle of the last century.

The concept of "unfolding of productive forces" stands today unchallenged and unassailable; that is: factories, mills, workshops and farms in every country in the world are waiting ready to produce all we need abundantly; in other words, we have a potential plenty today. This is not at all a controversial issue; but only a fact acknowledged by all experts in the field of science and technology.

But why can’t we unfold these productive forces and produce all we need abundantly, and then distribute all over the world?

The real barrier to the unfolding is the lack of knowledge of a new alternative on the part of working people all over the world, and not the opposition of the owners of those productive forces as most people think. That was an old idea held by many in the early stage of the present economic set-up. in the last century, because democracy as we see it today had not developed then, i.e. universal franchise, freedom of speech, and the separation of the executive and the judiciary. After the development of democracy in its full form, it was taken for granted that any minority will be compelled to leave the scene on the emergence of a new majority, with any new idea.

In those days some groups, here and there, held that even an armed conflict is likely between working people and those owners of productive forces in order to defeat them. Now we are in an entirely new situation where we tragically fail to realise the simple truth that there is an alternative to the present way of living. Once this alternative is widely grasped by people everywhere, there is no question of any opposition worth mentioning.

Each and every reader is cordially invited to think over this matter very deeply on the line of discovering any new concrete proposal, which can be implemented in present-day society, through which we can break new ground from where we shall straightaway drive into a new set-up without buying and selling. and producing only for use. 

M. J. Panikkar, 

Kerala, India

Cardboard cut-outs and “collateral damage”

Dear Editors,

Remember the bellicose drum-beating of the Tory cabinet in the Gulf War; or the cheapjack nationalism of their lackeys in the right-wing press; or the American general like some grotesque cardboard cutout from MASH, talking of "collateral damage” in the bombings of women and children?

Of course it was in the interests of all those people in the UN to show illiteracy of our historical culpability in this region. This war was all about oil and less about justice: the little Mussolini still remains, savaging his own people—the Kurds and the Marsh Arabs.

The early 1920s and the British Empire reigns supreme. My late father recalled as a boy, after the First World War, the maimed and blinded veterans of the trenches begging in the streets of Watford. As one of a poor family with eight children, he enlisted at 18 in the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. That was in September 1923. Scores of young men in towns throughout the land would have done the same—to face a life of harsh discipline, gruelling 25-mile route marches and abysmal pay of two shillings a day. to escape the crippling unemployment of those times.

In November 1924, the Bedfords were despatched to Iraq, the men travelling like cattle for two days in open trucks, with the bitter desert cold, arriving at the largest British aerodrome east of Suez.

Oil was being discovered in large quantities in Iraq and British military operations were being carried out with a planned and ruthless precision. Patrols of 60 men would guard the huge airfield and Rolls Royce armoured cars would race though villages, with rocks being hurled by the angry local people. In 1925 a Company of the Bedfords (2nd Battalion) became the world’s first airborne troops, when they were flown up to Kurdistan in Vickers Victoria bombers. Here they occupied a ruined fort captured from the Turks in World War One.

One day an order came to despatch a platoon of 36 men into the hills to punish a remote Kurdish village. The Desert Police who dressed like arabs and were a sort of archetypal SAS had alleged that the villagers had shot down a small bi-plane and tortured its geologist pilot to death. My late father was a heliograph signaller in this small punitive force, which by dawn on the third day’s march from the fort surrounded the village. No real resistance was made: yet the village was burned to the ground, hidden underground stores of grain and water destroyed, some men in the village were hung and women, children and old men were driven out into the hills. It was October 1925, with winter coming on. Back at the fort, a brigadier had been flown up from his safe office job and congratulated the platoon on their return, ending with the words: "in three months, that village will cease to exist”.

Those who dispute the authenticity of this engagement will doubtless find it documented in the archive material of the "Bedfords" regiment. More importantly, those who boast about the Gulf War might digest and reflect on with a little humility the incidents described here. As our historical stupidity in Ireland formed a security platform for the IRA, so former arrogance and greed in Iraq, aided by subsequent collusion in arms sales, sowed the seeds for the bullying rise of Saddam.

The incident described here is an extreme and nasty example of the sort of militarism which must have been commonplace enough throughout the colonial Empire—an unwholesome collusion between the thuggery of emerging multi-nationals and right-wing politicians—with the soldiers "at the sharp end" doing their dirty work for them. It is this same rapacious greed— fuelled by "market forces" thinking—which is allowing the extermination of indigenous peoples and millions of acres of rain forest. treasure houses of irreplaceable bio-diversity beyond mere price, which must be checked by sane people at the present day. 

John Sears, 

Egremont, Cumbria

Reply:

One point. It was not us workers who were responsible for bombing the Kurds. It was our ruling class. So it's their "historical culpability" not "ours".

Editors

Ernie rides again?

Dear Editors,

In reply to the Scavenger’s “Bimbos for Christ's sake!”, (February Socialist Standard) please would you print the following: "Scavengers for Christ’s sake!

Beer bellies and bald heads are currently the fashion for those men who give slobs a bad name. But now sexism is becoming fashionable too.

Men like Benny Hill and "The Scavenger" (still reactionary after all these years) have embraced a few dodgy assumptions and bared a few prejudices in their time. But now, apparently, they are embracing misogyny and baring their ignorance as well. Let's face it, it’s got to be true if the bigots believe it.

Veronica Clanchy, Kate Rigby, Ann Rigby,

Poole, Dorset

Reply:

We can assure you that The Scavenger is not a Benny Hill loving misogynist.

Editors

Aspects of the “Woman Question.” (Part 5) (1929)

From the November 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 4.

(Based on Notes of a series of Lectures on "The Sexes in Evolution.”)

Many have contended that the work of propaganda among women requires essentially different methods than are used among men. Woman is dependent upon man—yes, that is true, at least of the majority. But what is man dependent on? A wage, which in turn depends on a job. Who owns the job ? Not always the man who does it. So that woman’s dependence and man’s dependence are all of a piece— it is all part of the same problem. Where women have gone into industry they have shifted, to some extent, their economic dependence from husband or father, to that of an employer. But even so, it has only made her problem more identical with that of the working man.

I am unable at the moment to give the latest figures of the number of women employed, but this is relatively unimportant. Their actual industrial position is reflected by the amount of wages received by them. Here again actual figures are lacking, but the crucial point is this—the Capitalist system finds in the huge body of unemployed a source of strength in that they compete with each other in the labour market. Women further intensify this competition by the fact that they can be compelled to accept a lower wage than a man. The minimum wage of all labour being determined by the amount on which a man can live, it is taken for granted that this must be higher for a man than for a woman. Woman, whether true or not, is looked upon as having no dependents, and her known ability to live more cheaply than man is undoubtedly taken into account.

The same laws of competition, over-supply, etc., hold with the labourer, whether man or woman. There is no difference whatever in the way in which Capitalism exploits men and women. In the economic fight it has been the one who endeavoured to maintain life on the barest necessities, and who possessed at the same time the least power of resistance, who has been pushed to the wall—whether man or woman. As pointed out by J. A. Hobson —”It is not the difference of sex which is the chief factor in determining the industrial position of woman. Machinery knows neither age nor sex, but chooses the labour embodied in man, woman or child which is the cheapest in relation to the degree of its efficiency.”

Women, also, are badly organised—they are not good trade unionists. Possibly this is partly because she is by training domestic, and that such things as trade unions, politics, etc., have not come within her purview. Partly too, because she hopes that her entry into industry will not be permanent. . . .

As regards home and family life, even the most superficial observer will agree that the prevailing system exerts a harmful effect.

Take the case of marriage. It is a prevailing impression that marriages are based on the love and mutual respect of two persons for each other. So they are in many cases, but often with consequences of economic disaster. In a large number of cases, however, there is not the slightest doubt that girls enter into marriage for the express purpose of escaping from a life of toil in the office or factory. The marriages and social affairs of the idle rich we can leave out of account—their carryings-on would take volumes to describe. So that from this standpoint alone we can see that it is not remarkable that when economic trouble arises domestic life is directly affected. A good deal of the existing unhappiness in working-class homes is traceable to this source. We all know of the misery entailed through couples being unable either to furnish or buy a house. Either there is a shortage of houses to let or a shortage of money to buy one. After so influencing the structure of family life as to make it conform to its requirements, and then helping to undermine the very foundations of this structure by its degrading conditions, Capitalism goes yet further and displays complete indifference to the fact that for thousands there are no homes at all ! So cheaply is human life regarded. And yet if any lapse from the path of moral rectitude occurs, we are taught to look on it as a shame or a disgrace—that is unless one belongs to the upper ten. The more we look into it, the more do we see the necessity for the closer co-operation of men and women in the fight for the conquest of political power. Many advocates of women suffrage have only sought and worked for sex emancipation, quite failing to realise that its full significance lies in a full social and political education for both sexes before its value can be fully utilized.

Tom Sala

(To be continued)

Aspects of the “Woman Question.” (Part 4) (1929)

From the October 1929 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 3.

(Based on Notes of a series of lectures on “The Sexes in Evolution.”)

We are told there is a sex antagonism. Any morning we can open the pages of the stunt press and find articles calling attention to the intensity of the sex war. In the old days of the Women’s Suffrage agitation the success of the movement depended upon women’s adherence to, and recognition of, this sex war. As a matter of fact there is no sex antagonism and hasn’t been for thousands of years. How many books have been written explaining the sex problem ? Yet—there isn’t a sex problem. There is a problem, but it is a social problem. And that problem is the problem of getting a decent living. Hunger and Love are the two dominating factors of life. They are the basic biological principles which underlie every form of living activity and every institution. The satisfaction of these two primal necessities is the first concern of all living things. But since we—different from most other animals—are obliged to cooperate with each other in order to obtain the food we require, the question becomes a social one. Further, since we find that the means of getting a living are in the possession of another class, the social question becomes a social problem, and, by the very nature of the existing structure of society, a political one as well. Incidentally, we know quite well that a problem is a problem no longer when its solution is known. We know the solution as readers of this journal will be well aware. For present purposes, however, we speak of the “social problem.”

The so-called Women’s Movement, so far as it has gone, has been a movement for the advancement of certain reforms within the framework of the present social system. It would be true to say that even if all their claims for equal political and social rights were achieved it would not mean the emancipation of women, or anything near it. Only those women would benefit who belong to the privileged, or propertied class in society—those with sufficient wealth to possess a political “pull.” The majority of women, like the majority of men, belong to the wage-earning class, and this class cannot benefit so long as the tools of production —and not only the tools of production but the product as well—remain the property of another class.

To those who see the effects only and do not trouble to trace causes, the women’s struggle appears to be a struggle of sex against sex, and this idea is carefully worked upon. This mistake was made by the leaders themselves in the early feminist movement. They accepted the suggestion that woman was inferior to man, and in thousands of homes—especially those of working folk—it went without question.

That women are in a condition of subjection goes without saying. But they are not in subjection to the men. Individuals certainly may be, but not as a class. Men are in subjection—slaves to a system, and because the men are in subjection the women necessarily are in subjection, too. Morgan, in his valuable book, ”Ancient Society,” has shown that human society has an essentially economic basis. He has shown that the evolution of human society has progressed in accordance with the development of the means of production, and the methods of their ownership. Here we have the secret of the origin of all forms of social slavery, the subjection of women among the rest. Without the introduction of economic inequality, sex inequality could never have spread throughout the civilised world as it has done.

In the days of the adult suffrage agitation it was maintained that the acquisition of complete enfranchisement would mean sex equality. How true this claim was has now a chance of being shown. But right here it can be said that to make this claim is to lose sight of the true function of politics. Woman’s subjection did not arise from political disabilities—in fact these disabilities themselves arose from woman’s subjection— and, as already stated, this subjection has its roots deep down in economic inequality. Politics are the result of economic conditions, and in all its variety political action has gone upon the lines of economic interests. The enfranchisement of every man and every woman, now that it is practically universal, will certainly extend the possibilities of political action, but cannot of itself remove or alter the economic conditions under which people suffer. That is, so long as the majority of men and women remain un-conscious of their class position in society. So that universal suffrage, to be of value, depends upon the use to which it is put. Granting the vote to every man and woman does not in the least jeopardise the position of the exploiting class at the present stage of working-class political education. We need only ask : who possessed the greatest social power—the woman employer who hadn’t a vote, or the enfranchised wage-worker she exploited?

Tom Sala

(To be continued.)

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

Proper Gander: Turning The Page (2020)

The Proper Gander Column from the August 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In 1969, The Sun newspaper was a left-leaning broadsheet, believe it or not, and one which was running at a financial loss for its owners. This all changed when it was bought by Rupert Murdoch and relaunched as a more populist red-top tabloid to directly compete with the Daily Mirror. As part of this revamp, The Sun started to feature photos of topless women, and within 12 months its sales had doubled. Since the 1970s, ‘page three’ has been most associated with The Sun, although such photos have also appeared in other tabloids. A recent documentary on Channel 4, Page Three: The Naked Truth, told the story of this seedy tradition and how it has portrayed and affected women and girls. Unsurprisingly, it’s money which has driven the ‘page three’ industry. Lucrative contracts have drawn people in to being ‘glamour models’, there to make profits for publishers and promoters.

The 1980s was when ‘page three’ was most well-known, especially after Samantha Fox became a household name. When she was aged 16, her mother sent clothed photos of her to the Sunday People for its ‘Girl of the Year’ contest. This led to a photo-shoot, and Fox agreed to topless photos thinking they wouldn’t be published, as she was still at school. She and her family were shocked when they saw one of these pictures plastered on the Sunday People’s front page. Fox remembers being told by a photographer ‘you’ve got the face of a child but the body of a woman’, and only realised how sinister this was in hindsight. Some newspapers had sickening ‘countdowns’ to when their models reached 16 and they could be shown partially naked. All of this was somehow acceptable, or at least just something to put up with. It wasn’t until 2003 that legislation came in to make 18 the minimum age to appear unclothed in print.

The age of models wasn’t the focus of campaigns against ‘page three’ during the 1980s, when attempts were made to ban it entirely. In 1986, MP Clare Short introduced a Private Members Bill which proposed prohibiting newspapers from publishing sexualised pictures of naked or partially naked women. When she raised this in the House of Commons, many male MPs’ reaction was laughter, and presumably they were those whose votes made the bill fail. For The Sun, who branded Short a ‘killjoy’ and ‘fat and jealous’ when she renewed her campaign in 2004, this was decent publicity as much as anything.

As summed up by Clare Short, ‘what page three says is ‘take me, use me, throw me away’’. This isn’t only an attitude towards women which ‘page three’ photos encourage among the public, it also describes how models have been treated. Being groped (i.e. sexually assaulted) on a chat show or being preyed on by drunks at parties were seen as part of the job. A particularly sad example of how women have been treated is what happened to Emma Morgan. In the 1990s, her boyfriend sent a topless photo of her to the Sunday Sport, which printed it without her knowledge. That Morgan (like Fox) wasn’t considered important enough to even be asked if she minded having such an image published highlights the extent to which women have been demeaned. Morgan’s modelling career started by being used and it ended in a similar way, when she says she was set up by an undercover journalist who filmed her taking illegal drugs. The story appeared in the News of the World with the headline ‘Page 3 Girls’ Drugs And Vice Scandal’ and as a result Morgan lost her contracts, spat out by the same industry which had got her into the situation.

An argument in support of ‘page three’ is that women are free to choose their own roles, and if they enjoy being a model, then why not? Some of the models themselves would agree with this, but it rings hollow to those who were tricked into starting a modelling career, often when still a child, or who found this was their only opportunity to escape poverty. The wealth and the celebrity lifestyle came at a price for Emma Morgan and others. Debee Ashby, like Samantha Fox, first had topless pictures published without her consent at the age of 16, and later regretted her subsequent modelling career, as it led to her suffering from bulimia and undergoing therapy.

The decline of ‘page three’ came about not through changes to legislation, but following a grassroots campaign run by author and actor Lucy-Anne Holmes. Her ‘No More Page 3’ crusade began in 2012 when she noticed the disparity between how men and women were depicted in newspapers. She says that men were represented as active and industrious, but photos of women on page three were sending out the message that they have to be ‘pretty and passive’. Holmes said that the campaign wasn’t against pornography as such, just that a ‘family newspaper’ isn’t the place for it. Three years later, The Sun retired ‘page three’, although not on its website until 2017. The Daily Star didn’t stop printing photos of topless women until 2019, and the Sport newspapers still continue the degrading tradition.

Of course, it’s a step forward that fewer people now believe it’s acceptable for women – and girls – to be reduced to ‘page three’ fodder, but the feature’s demise doesn’t seem all that significant considering that far more extreme images can easily be found with a few clicks of a button. It’s likely that ‘page three’ has largely died out more because newspapers can no longer rely on softcore porn to sell copies than due to campaigns. What’s profitable has shifted away from print to online. So, rather than ‘page three’ being brought down, it’s instead been superseded. The market will find new ways to objectify women as long as there’s money to be made.

Mike Foster

Proper Gander: Police And Abuse (2021)

The Proper Gander column from the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

Police And Abuse

In September, police constable Wayne Couzens was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison for the horrific rape and murder of Sarah Everard. Couzens, employed in the division which guards government and diplomatic buildings, used his position as a police officer to falsely arrest Sarah while she was walking home, under the pretence of breaching Covid-19 regulations. Not long after Couzens’ sentencing, Dispatches documentary Cops On Trial (Channel 4) highlighted the wider problem of police who use their role for twisted motives, in particular their own sexual gratification. Reporter Ellie Flynn interviewed victims of predatory officers, and also looked at research showing the extent of the issue. Requests using the Freedom of Information Act brought in responses from 39 police forces (out of 45 in the UK) stating that in four years nearly 2,000 officers, special constables and PCSOs were accused of sexual misconduct. Bournemouth University also collated 514 proven cases of sexual misconduct by police officers in 33 forces over the last five years.

Couzens’ actions were particularly vicious and didn’t follow the usual pattern found when police officers target women. The research cited in the documentary showed that the most common type of abuse is when an officer uses his role to instigate an ongoing sexual relationship. This tends to happen when a woman reports a crime and is then visited at home by an investigating officer who pretends to be empathetic and understanding while being motivated by his own sexual gains. The perpetrators exploit how their police uniform gives the impression both that they can be trusted and that they have authority. The women they target are all in vulnerable situations: according to the research 40 per cent were victims of previous domestic abuse, 20 per cent had mental health issues and a quarter had suffered sexual assault. The perpetrators find those who are most susceptible to being manipulated, meaning that although the subsequent relationships are apparently consensual, they’re abusive. This inevitably causes the women to be traumatised further, when abuse escalates and when the relationship is exposed and investigated.

While Cops On Trial is timely in highlighting how Wayne Couzens wasn’t alone in misusing his position, it isn’t revealing the problem for the first time. In 2016, a report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary identified 436 claims of sexual abuse against police officers over two years. Less than half of these incidents were referred to the Independent Police Complaints Commission and, as the report worded it, there was a ‘disconnect’ between the numbers of alleged cases and sackings (tinyurl.com/kynyucty). Across Police Scotland, for example, 166 officers have more recently been accused of sexual misconduct, and none have been dismissed. One way which many perpetrators have avoided the consequences of their actions is to resign before they get sacked, which also means they keep their pensions. Those police officers arrested and charged with domestic abuse are a third less likely to be found guilty than other people, with a conviction rate even lower than four per cent. Police know how the investigation procedure and legal system work, and they can use this to their advantage. They can also protect each other, using connections and contacts with the investigators. As Nogah Ofer from the Centre for Women’s Justice points out in the documentary, the system is on the side of the abuser.

One way in which abusive behaviour has been perpetuated has been by other staff missing ‘red flags’ or not taking sufficient action when there are concerns about an officer. According to Bournemouth University’s research, of more than 500 proven cases of sexual misconduct by police, each of the officers involved had an average of six disciplinaries or allegations on their records, and half had warning markers about their sexual behaviour. Couzens had previously been reported for indecent exposure and was nicknamed ‘the rapist’ by colleagues. That these warning signs didn’t lead to action which prevented behaviour from escalating indicates that the police force hasn’t taken risks to women seriously. Susannah Fish, formerly the Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire Police, says that she worked in a culture which was testosterone-fuelled and macho, and therefore not able to resolve or even recognise the problem.

Unfortunately, Cops On Trial doesn’t spend enough time on the questions of why this culture persists and why some officers use their role to abuse others. Assistant Commissioner Louisa Rolfe, the National Police Chiefs’ Council Lead for Domestic Abuse, gives a succinct enough answer by saying that ‘a small number of people are attracted to policing because of the power, the control and opportunity it affords them’. Police are there to exercise power and control on behalf of the state, according to the laws which are supposed to keep our unequal, divisive society in order. So, even when police stick to the law and the code of conduct for their role, they are working in a framework which involves coercion. The minority of predatory police officers have used this framework as an opportunity to abuse others, and found that it’s enabled them. Tighter vetting, training and disciplinary procedures could weed out some of the predatory officers and prevent some future tragedies repeating what Sarah Everard and other women have suffered. Measures like these will no doubt be recommended by the inquiries which have been commissioned to examine the standards and culture of the Metropolitan Police, where Couzens worked. But reforms can only tweak how the police force runs, they can’t change what it is: an institution with built-in opportunities to exert power and control. So it’s always going to attract a number of people who want to exploit these opportunities for themselves. The more fundamental issue is what causes some people to act in abusive, manipulative ways, a problem much too wide to be affected by any future changes to how the police operate.

Mike Foster

Get Your Repeats Out For the Lads (1998)

TV Review from the May 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Never let it be said that BBC2 runs voyeuristic programmes masquerading as concerned, serious television. And never let it be said that Politically Incorrect Night (BBC2, 13 April) was an example of it. This day being Easter Monday, BBC2 was especially keen to attract viewers from the other channels and networks and its attempt to do this was centred on the re-showing of copious amounts of dubious material, mainly from the 1970s, under the guise of examining British television before the supposed advent of “political correctness” a decade later changed things forever.

As Mark Lawson commented, it was difficult to see this night of politically incorrect material as anything other than a voyeur`s paradise, “excused” by the use of ironic remarks and carrying a public health warning, a ring-fenced series of programmes set apart from the rest of the schedule in a sort of televisual isolation unit.

The worst of the voyeurism concerned the programme on the history of Miss World (which may have had some tenuous justification) and a piece on pop videos which rate highly as classic teenage masturbation material (which didn`t). On the latter, the presenter reminded his audience to have the play and record buttons at the ready on their video recorders, and then undercut this remark by saying that they probably had already, anyway. To supplement the voyeurism there was a heavy dose of other material of an equally dubious nature, much of it racist. The On the Buses feature film had another run-out and there were numerous clips of Bernard Manning doing jokes about “the Pakis”, and Jim Davidson doing his “Chalkie” impression, which was always, ahem, at the cutting edge of social observation.

Get to the (low) point

Some of these compilation programmes were just cheap television aimed, as always, at the lowest common denominator. The revival in 1970s culture, fashion and styles has simply given the BBC the opportunity to resurrect some old faithfuls, testing the water for possible future repeats (following on from the recent success of Are You Being Served? on Saturday nights). One of the themes of Politically Incorrect Night was that there has now been a “loosening up” of attitudes towards racist and sexist television from an earlier era and Auntie Beeb is obviously now hoping that having got away with John Inman mincing across the screen in recent months it can bring back the likes of It Ain`t Half Hot Mum (even worse ITV could bring back Mind Your Language and Love Thy Neighbour).

This would be forgivable if it could be stated with any confidence that the BBC really knew what it is doing. Unfortunately, it manifestly doesn’t, and has demonstrated time and again that it can’t see much further than the next few months’ ratings.

Needless to say, this is not a situation which is entirely of the BBC’s making. The Beeb operates in a cut-throat competitive media environment and is under challenge on so many fronts it is now dazed and confused as to where the next attack on it is likely to come from. The BBC is increasingly a product of the modern market economy and must respond to the needs of that market at every opportunity, however distorted and twisted they are. Under the guise of “giving people what they want”—or more accurately, what they have been trained and encouraged to accept—it is likely to plumb the depths of the modern television experience like it never has before if it is to survive in anything like its present status and condition. BBC executives may laugh at Topless Darts on Live TV, but how much longer are they going to be able to resist that sort of temptation, however “ironically” packaged is open to doubt. The most likely answer, it would seem – judging by Easter Monday – is not for very long.

Dave Perrin

February (1960)

From the February 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

We know a brawny young man who, because he was born on February 14th, was nearly named Valentine. And that, you might say, is taking the anniversary business too far. Of course, it’s the young ones who keep up Valentine’s Day—especially the girls. Why? However off-hand about it they pretend to be, somewhere they are nurturing the dream of marriage. That way, they think, they’ll get security. If the fellow's got looks as well as money—well, that’s just as Woman’s Own says it should be. The reality is the monotonous typing job from nine to five-thirty and then two bobs-worth of dark with Sid Osgood. Life can be better than this. Socialism is ours for the taking: which means that peace, security and freedom can be had right away.

THE SOCIALIST PARTY OF GREAT BRITAIN NEEDS MONEY BADLY. PLEASE SEND ALL YOU CAN TO THE TREASURER AT OUR HEAD OFFICE.

Women’s Lib has got it Wrong (1974)

From the July 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

Lord Baden-Powell wrote a book for young men called Rovering to Success in which the Rocks to beware in the Voyage of Life were drink, horses, irreligion, cuckoos — and women. “Cuckoos” meant holders of all political views other than raw patriotism, and of women Baden-Powell wrote:

This means on the part of the man a deep respect and tender sympathy for them, coupled with a manly strength of mind and strength of body with which to stand up for them . . . and even, on occasion, to help them against their own failings.

A main step to happiness in this direction is to select the right kind of girl. There are woman and there are dolls . . . You have got to catch yourself up in little bits of selfishness on your part, such, for instance, as grousing at the food because it isn’t exactly to your liking, and that sort of thing. Look at things from her point of view.

That was written in 1922. As an illustration that attitudes have not altered very much, a 1972 book on professional footballers called The Glory Game listed their answers to “Do you help in the house?”:

Jennings : I never help in the house. I couldn’t change a nappy. I’ve never washed a dish. She’s never asked me to. I wouldn’t expect her to, neither would she. 

Kinnear : I just want my wife to be a woman, you know, bring up the kids. I’d be the boss, but I'd ask her opinions. 

Pearce : The bloke has to be in charge. A wife shouldn’t be equal. I do the decorating but the baby’s hers. She looks after it.

This is part of one half of the population talking normally about the other half, and it would be surprising if the victims did not cut up rough and talk of “liberation”. The titles of Women’s Lib books are accurate reflections of Baden-Powell and the footballers: Woman's Estate, The Female Eunuch, The Captive Wife. Add to domestic servitude the fact that women are disabled throughout society — excluded, regarded as cheap labour, required to fall in with sexual expectations or be ridiculed. The case for ending such a gross inequality is self-evident to Socialists. The question is whether the Women’s Liberation movement has an analysis and policies which will end it.

Groups and Demands

Women’s Lib came into existence in the late nineteen-sixties. Of course “feminist” organizations were in being long before, for particular purposes like that of the National Union of Women Teachers which ceased to exist when equal pay was granted. Juliet Mitchell, in Woman's Estate, says of the suffragettes:

And indeed when in 1918 in England it [the vote] was given to women over thirty who owned property, the most powerful wing of the movement was satisfied and the force of the struggle evaporated.

The aim of the modern movement is to go to the fundamentals of women’s position in society. Many of those who started it had been in left-wing and protest groups where, finding themselves required to make the tea while the men talked about justice and equality, they concluded that women needed a separate movement of revolt against “patriarchy’’ and “sexism”.

However, Women’s Lib is not a single unified movement. It consists of small autonomous groups under, roughly, four headings:— (a) political, incorporating or accommodating left-wing aims; (b) reformist, seeking particular improvements; (c) feminist, endeavouring to promote “female consciousness”; and (d) radical feminist, rejecting women’s biological rôle. The last is expounded most fully in Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. Its argument is that women’s basic oppression is child-bearing, and that technology — test- tube babies, baby farms, etc. — must be made to bring about an “androgynous culture” which will solve all the problems of mankind.

There is general acceptance of the four demands laid down by the first national women’s conference held at Oxford in 1970: equal pay, equal education and opportunity, 24-hour nurseries, and free contraception and abortion on demand. In fact the Equal Pay Act was passed also in 1970, after being on the trade unions’ agenda and receiving only desultory attention since 1888; it remains to be seen how the employers find ways round it, and the extent to which it will affect women’s positions in the jobs they now hold.

Teaching Division

For — and this is the dilemma for these Liberationists as for all others — they are working within capitalism. Some are at least partly aware of it. For instance, an article “Towards a Statement on Women’s Liberation” by JL and RN in ORA Newsletter No. 4 in 1972 says:

Thus we should be able to explain how the "woman’s rôle” has developed under capitalism; where the origins of that rôle existed before the Industrial Revolution; and why it is that women as a group cannot be liberated under capitalism now.

The statement points out that in the present system “it is not only the woman who is restricted” but children and men are restricted too. It then lists a series of demands for women, beginning with the 1970 four and including campaigns against female fashions and women’s magazines.

But if the article’s own premises are correct, what would be achieved by the measures proposed ? The achievement could only be an exchange of female bondage for male: out of one cage, into another. Perhaps a radical feminist would argue that it is a less uncomfortable cage, but let nobody pretend it is liberation. However, it is not even a matter of different cages. The subjugation of groups by other groups — black by white, have-not by have, female by male — is only a collection of aspects of the single over-riding division on which capitalist society is founded.

Juliet Mitchell in her book gives an ingenuous example of this by speaking of the “anxiety” in Women’s Lib in the US over the “absence of black women in the movement”. Once the claims of groups and sections are acknowledged, it is anyone’s choice which has priority. We are often told of the “divisiveness” of sexism and racism. But the dividing is effective only when the subjects accept it and believe their interests are concerned predominantly with being female, black, or whatever. If it is rejected and the basic working-class identity of interests recognized, there is no obscurity over either the problem or its solution.

Women’s Lib responds to this by saying that the subjugation of women exists, due to men, independently of society and its classes (Millet and the other radical feminists); or that women’s struggles are a special way of attacking capitalism (e.g. Sheila Rowbotham, Woman’s Consciousness, Man's World)’, or that they are a precondition for achieving Socialism (variously understood). A Northern Region conference in June 1972 agreed that its statement of aims should begin with the words:

No women’s liberation without socialist revolution. No socialist revolution without women’s liberation. We aim to change the social relations of reproduction as well as to change the social relations of production.

It was honest, at any rate, for the report of the conference to add: “There was some discussion about whom this was intended for — it was pointed out that ordinary women would not find it very clear.”

Where Reforms Lead

But however the theorizing goes, in practice Women’s Lib lives to make immediate demands for reforms. In many ways it is itself a reflection of changes already taking place. The presumption, as always, is that society can be made to give way to their augmentation, and that if this happens it will end inequalities and confer benefits.

What should be pointed out at once is that the Socialist movement exists precisely because that was found not to be so. Reforms not only do not work like that, but all too frequently recoil. There are two outstanding modern examples of governments “liberating” women and thus obtaining an extra instrument for economic and social manipulation. One is in China, where women have been promoted impressively for the purposes of production, to the accompaniment of rigorous sexual repression. The opposite of the nineteen-thirties’ and -forties’ Russian cult of maternity is pursued, but likewise for demographic reasons: China, it is said, may be a pioneer country in State-authorized free contraception for all.

The other, still more relevant, example is Sweden. There women are little short of what is demanded by Women’s Lib in Europe and USA: wages near men’s, no discrimination in jobs or education, contraception and abortion and divorce all easily obtainable. Sweden should be acclaimed by the Liberationists, but is not. Mitchell affirms that concern with the position of women arises in all countries when their economies demand it:

But in Sweden this alteration is accompanied by a resurgence of explicit discussions (claiming to be disinterested) in women’s rôles. This overt debate can, in fact, obscure the issue; the economic expediency becomes invisible behind the social concern . . . The very stress that Swedish society puts on sexual equality makes it hard to see the oppression of women.

What makes them believe that the same reforms in other countries would not be taken as grist for capitalism’s mill? Indeed the same writer tells us that wages for housework (demanded by Selma James in Women, the Unions and Work) “was supported by conservatives (after all, it is a way of keeping women at home)” in Sweden.

Find the Right Answer

The Women’s Liberation movement is not different from other reformist organizations which choose to put immediate aims before a revolutionary change in society. Engels traced the origin of the suppression of women to that of private property, and he and Marx showed how it was maintained throughout historical transformations up to modern times. Private ownership turns liberation movements into the agents of ruling classes; common ownership alone can give the facility for new kinds of relationships.

The alternative case of the radical feminists, that women’s suppression is not societal but is the male at work, is no case at all. Their belief in this “human nature” argument is the antithesis of radicalism — what it supports is the ruling-class yarn that lords and masters are not made but born. On the other hand, some research done in the Women’s Lib cause provides fresh insights into capitalism and how things can be under Socialism: about parent-child relationships, or the studies of conditioning made in books like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique.

It is a fact that some Women’s Lib has become (no doubt against others’ wish) a partial front organization for Communists, IS, anarchists and other left-wing groups with other aims. It is likewise a fact that, even were Socialists favourably disposed to it, male ones would be barred from most of its meetings; and we do not distinguish between male and female chauvinists. Socialists are opposed to Women’s Lib. We are for liberation, indeed — of the whole of mankind, and whoever wants the liberation of any part of it must join with us. And if from woman’s estate, she will find that in the Socialist movement the distinction is not made. We exist as comrades with one object in common.

Robert Barltrop