Liberal media: the barking dog of institutional power (2026)

From the May 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

There was a recent Reuters investigation revealing that one fifth of sitting US Congress members, living presidents, and Supreme Court justices are direct descendants of slaveholders. Liberal circles celebrated this as exemplary accountability journalism. But this celebration reveals the sophisticated mechanism by which modern media manufactures consent. Not through falsehood, but through strategic structural omission.

The investigation was conducted by journalist Blake Morrison. He meticulously mapped genealogical connections between today’s political elite and their slaveholding ancestors. He traced lineages through census records, slave schedules, estate documents, and family bibles. He identified at least 100 members of the 117th Congress with ancestral ties. The investigation even named the enslaved individuals where records permitted, giving human names to those previously reduced to property listings alongside sorrel horses and folding tables.

The dog is on the chain

Morrison’s reporting frame focuses on the personal impact of discovering these genealogical connections. It frames the story through individual family history and curiosity. It systematically avoids examining the legal and financial mechanisms through which slaveholder wealth was preserved, compounded, and transferred into the present day.

The Reuters investigation, like much accountability journalism, perpetuates the fiction that wealth passes simply from father to son. This is not how dynastic wealth operates. The actual mechanisms, trust law, estate law, corporate inheritance, land title chains, and complex financial instruments, remain entirely unexamined. By failing to map and explain the legal instruments that protected and grew slaveholder wealth across generations, the investigation performs a crucial ideological function. It transforms a systemic analysis of racial capitalism into a personalised narrative of ancestral discovery. The story becomes about individual bad apples and their personal reckonings with family history, rather than about the structural continuity of wealth extraction from enslaved labour into contemporary financial and property systems.

The everyday reproduction of consent

This is not accidental. It represents the operational logic of what Walter Lippmann termed ‘the manufacture of consent’ in his 1922 book Public Opinion. Lippmann argued that the professional class should manage democracy because they know about power and because raw political reality is too complex for most people. Columbia University’s journalism school is the training arm of the institution most closely associated with Lippmann’s legacy. And it’s where Blake Morrison teaches interviewing and investigation.

Now consider a story that Reuters is not currently investigating. In March 2026, the Poynter Institute reported that Thomson Reuters (Reuters’ owner) has multiple contracts with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), one of which gives DHS access to number plate reader data. Reuters journalists themselves signed a letter demanding the company explain what human rights and civil liberties due diligence it has undertaken in relation to this contract.

This story is not historical. It’s happening now. And it is about US government surveillance. Thomson Reuters has a $22.8 million open contract with DHS that runs until 2026. Another company, LexisNexis has a separate $22.1 million contract. These contracts support ICE and Customs and Border Patrol operations, including immigration enforcement and deportations.

A YouTuber, Ali McForever, traces the connections between state power, media systems, and global economic structures. Her analysis reveals how the manufacture of consent operates not through crude propaganda but through the careful cultivation of partial visibility.

She argues that Reuters will trace a family tree across centuries but will not trace a contract across subsidiaries. They will name an enslaved ancestor but will not name the shell company receiving ICE funding. They will expose a genealogical connection but not a procurement chain.

She also argues that Morrison’s investigations are formulaic. Although the story is always factual, the conclusion is invariably some bad apples and a regulatory gap. That is deliberate, not incidental omission. Legal wealth transfer mechanisms or surveillance infrastructure never appear anywhere in the investigation. A story containing falsehoods can easily be debunked yet stories that are structurally true but conclude just before the system is made visible produce something more durable. The wagging tail of accountability without any bite.

She argues further that Morrison’s work occupies a space where a systemic critique would otherwise exist. It occupies this space deliberately while Thomson Reuters takes millions from the same agencies that Morrison claims to expose. The public receives confirmation that journalism performs its watchdog function while never barking against the actual levers of power.

Trust structures

Let’s consider what a genuinely systemic investigation would require. Mapping trust structures established in the 19th century that remain active today or tracing land titles through Jim Crow-era legal mechanisms designed to protect white property ownership. Examining how corporate charters and financial instruments allowed slaveholder capital to transform into industrial and banking capital without passing through the father to son inheritance model that Reuters implicitly assumes.

Tracing the Thomson Reuters contracts through their actual ownership layers. Revealing which data brokers operate the number plate reader databases for ICE. Exposing the procurement chains that connect historical slaveholder wealth to contemporary border militarisation. This is work that Ali McForever has done. This is the work that Reuters deliberately avoids because it would expose their own complicity.

Journalism that maintains intimate proximity to power while performing the ritual of critique is in thrall to King Capital. It names the brokers but not the banks. It traces the genealogy but not the wealth. It exposes the contract but not the procurement chain.

This is workers’ consent being manufactured in its most abstracted form. Not through raw propaganda, but the careful cultivation of partial visibility, we are shown enough to believe ourselves informed, while the actual mechanisms of power, legal, financial, structural, remain unexamined behind a veil of individual narrative and personal moral narrations.

For socialists, we know when the bourgeois press celebrates its own accountability, we must ask what remains unseen. What legal instruments go unexamined? What ownership layers remain obscured? What surveillance contracts go unexamined? The answer reveals not mere journalistic failure, but journalistic function. To manufacture the consent necessary for the continued operation of capital and its dog, the military industrial complex, one carefully framed investigation at a time.

A.T.

White supremacy is stupid (1993)

From the November 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a world that is becoming smaller and societies that are becoming multicultural, it may be time for Western culture to examine critically its view of other cultures. For how much of Western culture is made up of prejudice about other cultures? How much of Western identity is constructed upon the negative identity of others?

Decolonization in a political sense has occurred. What remains to be addressed, however, is cultural decolonization. The legacy of several hundred years of Western expansion and domination, manifested in racism, continues to be recycled in Western cultures in the form of stereotyped images of non Western cultures.

Social Construct

It has often been observed that "race" is not a reality but a social construct. In his study of the "Jewish question'', Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Don't ask what the Jews are, but what we have made the Jews”. This applies equally to images of Africa and blacks. The term "White on Black” refers to the whole spectrum of relations in which Western interests were dominant — the trans-Atlantic slave trade, master-slave relations on plantations in the Americas, colonialism, the post-colonial era. and majority minority relations in the Western world. In each of these situations Europeans constructed images of Africa and blacks on the basis of selective perception, expedience, second hand information mingled with reconstructed biblical notions and medieval folklore, along with popular and "scientific” ideas that were current at the time.

Stereotypes of Africa and of blacks are still in circulation but old images have faded away or acquired new meaning and new images have arisen. In the second half of the 20th century, "race” is no longer invoked as the primary key to differences; it has been succeeded by systems of differences founded not on biology but on culture.

"Race" discrimination has increasingly yielded to discrimination along cultural lines, bringing with it different sets of images. Hence "racism" in the literal sense is no longer a satisfactory term to understand the changing realities. Culture as a new basis for differentiation is much more diffuse in its ideological claims than race theory, but in some ways equally effective in establishing boundaries and demarcations. While science marched forward, popular thinking in Europe still followed Christian modes of thought. Genesis (9:18-27) relates that "Noah drank wine and fell into slumber while naked”. Ham, his youngest son, saw him but did not cover his shame, whereas his brothers Japheth and Shem covered their father with cloth. Awakened, Noah praised Shem and blessed Japheth. but cursed Ham.

Curse of Ham

In the early Church the curse of Ham or Canaan was regarded as an explanation of slavery, but not simply of blacks because slavery at the time was "colour-less". The association of the curse of Ham with blackness arose only much later in medieval Talmudic texts. In the 16th century it became a Christian theme and by the 17th century it was widely accepted as an explanation of black skin colour. From here it was just a step to the interpretation of the curse of Ham as an explanation of and justification for the slavery of black Africans.

The view of Africa as a continent condemned to eternal servitude was well suited to a theological assessment of slavery. According to the theological explanation, the Continents were peopled by descendants of Japheth (Europe), Shem (Asia) and Ham (Africa), ranked in a master-servant relationship. Until well into the 19th century, even after the development of the theory of race, this remained the most popular explanation of slavery.

Minorities often a find place in society in certain specialized occupations. No matter how unreal and how dependent on circumstances its position in the labour market is. it is often extremely difficult for a minority to overcome the stereotyping that goes with that position.

The occupational roles allocated to blacks in Western society are an example a minority specialization which has been in existence so long that it seems to reflect the "natural" order: entertainment and sport.

The first role blacks were permitted to perform in White society, after that of slave or servant, was that of entertainer. Indeed entertainment was itself one of the functions of slaves. Entertainers do not threaten the status quo but embellish it. Emotive expression by blacks is accepted and conforms to the rhythm myth, the stereotype of musicality. Thus over the past century, blacks have become the musicians, dancers and buffoons of Atlantic culture.

Sporting challenge

Another terrain on which blacks have been permitted to manifest themselves is in sport. Several sports had travelled along with Africans to the New World and. according to a study by the tennis champion Arthur Ashe who died recently, by the mid-19th century several sports were integrated. The achievements of black athletes challenged "white supremacy" and breached the myth of "racial" inferiority. The integration of sport is part of overall black integration. But it is also a limited kind of success. Their success seems to confirm one of the stereotypes of the black as bestial brute, the all brawn-and-no-brains kind of athlete. At first the story was that blacks were inferior to whites in every respect, physically as well, and therefore unfit to compete with whites led to other stories about blacks having "abnormal muscular qualities, different from those of white men”.

Recently a Tory councillor in Derby was quoted as claiming that "black people do not use swimming pools because they cannot float":

"Retired teacher Colin Brown, 59, said: 'Black people are very heavily boned and they sink. It’s a physiological fact that was taught when I was studying physical education. You never see any black Africans in Olympic swimming finals, do you?’” (Sun, 9 September).

Racism never comes alone. It forms part of a hierarchical mental set which also targets other groups. The features attributed to groups define by “race" are not peculiar to racism, but are also attributed to entirely different categories defined according to social status, gender, age, nationality and so forth.

What racism and other forms of prejudice and discrimination all have in common is social inequality. The common denominator is power — the power that arises from a hierarchical situation and the power required to maintain that situation and, also the anxiety that comes with power and privilege.

Michael Ghebre

The Economic Basis of Morality. (1906)

From the October 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard

As all the advantages of the rearing of animals come to be realised, the savage “pack” gradually changes into a society of shepherds or herdsmen, in which the men are engaged in tending cattle, sheep, or goats, while to the women fall the subordinate offices of spinning the wool, milking the cows and goats, and making the butter and cheese. The men drive the flocks to pasture and water, regulate the breeding, guard the folds against enemies, decide which of the animals shall be killed for food, and break in the beasts of burden.

But in these pastoral pursuits it gradually becomes apparent to the men that labour is a valuable thing. A man who has been very successful in cattle-rearing requires a number of “hands” to keep his herds in order. Besides the domestic labour performed by women, he requires the outdoor labour of men, to prevent the cattle from straying or being stolen, to drive them to pasture in the morning and bring them back at night. To this demand for labour we probably owe two of the great institutions of the pastoral age : permanent marriage and slavery. There is really, as we shall see, nothing out of place in taking these two together, odd as the connection may sound to modern ears.

Permanent marriage is one of the essential features of patriarchal society. By superficial writers, its appearance is often attributed to some vague improvement in morality or taste. Unhappily, the facts point to a much less exalted origin, viz., the desire of the man to secure for himself exclusively the labour of the woman and her offspring. If the change had come about from exalted ideas of morality, we should probably have found two features in the new system (1) equality of numbers between the man and the woman ; (2) free consent to the marriage on both sides. It is notorious that just the opposite are the facts of the patriarchal system, at any rate at its earlier stages. Polygamy, or plurality of wives, is the rule; and while the husband is not at all particular about the conduct of his wife with other men, he is intensely strict about appropriating the whole of her labours ; and all her offspring, no matter who is the real father, belong to him. Again, the ancient forms of marriage, viz, marriage by capture and marriage by purchase, point irresistibly to the conclusion that the woman had little or no voice in the matter. In the case of marriage by capture, the husband carried off his wife by force from a neighbouring tribe ; and long after the reality of this practice has disappeared, it survives, as is well known, in a ficticious form all over the world. It is considered barely decent for the girl to come to the marriage without a show of force. Even in polite modern society the “best man” is said to be a survival of the friends who went with the bridegroom in ancient days to help him to carry off his bride, while the bridesmaids are the lady’s companions, who attempted to defend her from the audacious robber, and the wedding tour is a survival of the flight from the angry relatives of the bride. In the more peaceful form of marriage by purchase, the lady has become an article of marketable value, whose price is paid, usually in cattle or sheep, to her relatives or owners. It is a refinement of modern days that the “bride price” should be settled on the lady herself, or contributed in the form of marriage gifts, to stock the future home. In ancient times it was paid, if not in hard cash, at any rate in solid cattle, to the damsel’s relatives, who, by the marriage, lost the value of her services. Jacob, we know, paid for his wives by labour; but this was probably an exception. In patriarchal society, the father of a round dozen of strong and well-favoured daughters is a rich man.

Slavery arises from the practice of keeping alive captives taken in war, instead of putting them to death. In savage days wars are usually the result of scarcity of food, and result in the killing and eating of members of a stranger “pack.” But, with the increasing certainty of food supply, resulting among other benefits from pastoral pursuits, cannibalism becomes unnecessary, and captives are carefully kept alive in order that they may labour for their captors. It may sound odd to speak of slavery as a beneficent institution, but one of the first lessons which the student of history has to learn is that things which to us now seem very wicked may really have been at one time improvements on something much worse. Slavery is an ugly thing, but it is better than cannibalism. Again, however, we notice that the upward step was due, not to exalted morality, but to practical convenience. Morality is the result, not the cause, of social amelioration.

Edward Jenks, M.A., “A History of Politics.”

Black History (1972)

Book Review from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

In Red and Black, Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History, by Eugene D. Genovese, Allen Lane. The Penguin Press 5.00

This book is a compilation of some eighteen previously published essays by Professor Genovese and, like books of this nature, suffers a bit from disjointedness, even from an occasional contradiction. But it is not this in the book that really bothers us. It is, rather, the Genovese approach to the Marxian method of interpreting history. His opening chapter: On Being a Socialist and a Historian and his concluding essay: On Antonio Gramsci (head of the Communist Party in Italy in the early 1920s; arrested and imprisoned for the last eleven years of his life by Mussolini) should be read carefully as one sees, in starkness, the utter contempt or, at best, condescension of the self-appointed intellectual “Marxist” for the mental potentialities of ordinary working people. To Genovese, leadership—presumably of intellectuals — is certainly the most important factor in educating the working class to the urgencies of Socialism. He approves of Gramsci’s vision of the ideal party:

“A party justifies its historical existence when it develops three strata: (1) a rank-and-file of ordinary men whose participation is characterised by discipline and faith; (2) a leadership, which provides cohesion; and (3) cadres, which mediate morally, physically, and intellectually between the other two.”

Of these strata he stressed leadership:

“We speak of captains without an army, but in reality it is easier to form an army than to find captains. It is surely true that an already existing army will be destroyed if it lacks captains, whereas a group of captains, co-operative and in agreement on common ends, will not be slow in forming an army where none exists.”

But this is not Marxism nor was it really new with either Gramsci or Lenin. It is the sort of theory which Marx and Engels consistently fought against throughout their careers. As far back as 1848, in their Communist Manifesto, they made clear that: “The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” (Our emphasis). The Marxian case rests, indeed, on the theory that the ideas of man (not merely of leaders) are basically determined by the mode of production and that it is the business of working for wages for an owning class (not the preachments or captaincies of great men) that will cause workers to organise for Socialism.

The foregoing should not discourage the student of Socialism from obtaining the book (if he can afford it). There is much of interest to be gotten from the essays on the blacks in America notwithstanding the incredible misunderstanding of the Marxian method. Genovese, for example, sees American blacks as embracing “genuine ingredients of a separate nationality, even as they form part of a general American nationality … (and that) it is no longer possible to believe that a class can be understood apart from its culture, or that most modern classes can be understood apart from their nationality.” But what, after all, is a nationality? In the final analysis it is a group split into people with rival and conflicting interests. Even in the case of American blacks, where the percentage of capitalists is undoubtedly smaller than usual, the struggle between and within the classes is apparent. Black bourgeois pit themselves against one another as well as against the white bourgeoisie, and against the black (or white) workers they hire. Black workers, on the other hand, must also compete among themselves—as well as with white workers—for jobs.

It should also be pointed out that Genovese does a creditable job in showing the limitations of the economic determinists both of the non-Marxist and professed Marxist varieties. Creditable, that is, to the extent that he does not go overboard himself in an opposite direction. Certainly historians such as Charles and Mary Beard (who were not professedly Marxist) could be categorised as economic determinists and yet their analysis of the factors motivating the South to secede in 1860 was not as “narrowly defined” as he would have it. For the tariff did play a major role in antagonising the cotton planters who had an enormous stake in trade with England, Genovese and even Marx to the contrary notwithstanding. And the Homestead Law was certainly not in the interests of a ruling class that was based largely on latifundia-type labour, a wasteful sort of labour which, together with a one-crop economy, burned up land quickly and helped generate competition between North and South for frontier areas. The spread of homesteading certainly did offer a threat to the South.

Part of the problem of Professor Genovese seems to be his obvious lack of understanding of the basics of a capitalist system. Even his attempt to label the southern slave economy bears this out although he does correctly show that it was certainly not feudal, as so many professed Marxists maintain. Unfortunately, despite his grasp of the form feudalism, he declares that economy to be as different from capitalism as it was from feudalism. In fact the ante-bellum South had a system of plantation capitalism. True, the relationships were not [wage-labour and capital] but, rather, chattel-slave labour and capital (although there were many wage-slaves too). Nevertheless, unlike the classical systems of slavery and of serfdom, production was organised for sale on the market with view to profit. The production of cotton, tobacco, and (following the government’s ban on slave-importation) slaves themselves, was not carried on primarily for the use of the ruling class. A backward and inefficient type of capitalism, yes. But nevertheless capitalism.

Harry Morrison

(World Socialist Party of the United States)

Blogger's Note:

Not sure what happened but this review was a bit garbled in places and there were no corrections in a later issue of the Socialist Standard. It happens.

Dreadful Catalogue (2005)

Book Review from the November 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

50 Facts that Should Change the World by Jessica Williams (Icon £6.99.)

 

The obvious reaction to the title is to say that it’s people that change the world, not facts. But Jessica Williams begins by claiming that the facts she has assembled can change the way people think. The information gathered here does indeed provide many reasons why the world needs to be changed. Much of what is said will probably be familiar to readers of the Socialist Standard. One in five of the earth’s population go hungry each day, for instance, while one British child in three lives below the poverty line, and life expectancy is strikingly low in many countries, especially in Africa. Others are perhaps not so appalling: is it really so bad that Brazil has more Avon ladies than members of its armed forces?

 

But many will find much that is new and enlightening here. For example, far from slavery having been abolished, there are more slaves in the world today (27 million) than at any time previously. More people die from suicide than from armed conflicts: in 2000 around one million people killed themselves and at least ten times that number tried to do so. What sort of world is it in which so many find their lives insupportable to this extent?

Or where over two hundred million child labourers exist? In nine countries, same-sex relationships are punishable by death, while over 150 states make use of torture. One third of the world’s population live in countries involved in armed conflict, and black American men stand a one-in three chance of going to prison at some time in their lives. Two million women are subjected to female genital mutilation each year, while over one million people are killed in road traffic accidents.

The book presents a dreadful catalogue of poverty, violence, degradation and waste, a vivid picture of 21st-century capitalism, all backed up with useful references. Williams adds commentary of her own, together with ideas for solving the problems. Some of this is OK – she recognises that famine and malnutrition are not caused by food shortages. But far too much of it is concerned with what governments should do and how ‘we’ should influence them. The real lesson to draw, though, is that we truly do need to change the world, not just get the rulers to behave in a more enlightened way.

Paul Bennett

World View: Religion, racism and class (2002)

From the August 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

The absurd claim of racism is that people’s behavioural, physical and cultural traits conform to a certain fixed and immutable pattern; and this determines the superiority or otherwise of a group in relation to others. This is an outlook that has been used to justify some of the most unspeakable and horrendous crimes against humanity, sometimes leading to killings of genocidal proportions.

In Eduardo Galegno’s Open Vein of Latin America, he recounts that before foreign conquerors set foot on the soil of the land the Indians totalled no less than 70 million. But a century-and-a-half later, they had been reduced to 3.5 million; and in 1685 only 4,000 Indian families remained of the more than two million that had once lived between Lima and Paita. Yet Archbishop Linan by Cisneros exposed how some of the church elders had perfected lies into a fine art. He said: “The truth is that they are hiding out, to avoid paying tribute, abusing the liberty which they enjoy and which they never had under the Incas.”

Racism however is flawed on a number of counts, not just for its barbarism and irrationality. Its fundamental arguments are basically weak. Where are those people who conform to racial purity, let’s say in terms of colour? You will meet a lot of dark-skinned people in Africa, but you will no doubt also come across light-skinned types in southern Africa and eastern Nigeria. How can one also argue that the Yanamani Indians or the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert are less intelligent than people in Norway or Japan. The two groups live in different material conditions, and these varied environments impose on them tasks and solutions that respond to their peculiar circumstances. In spite of the gaping loopholes in racists’ theories racism has been used together with religion to justify the enslavement of other people.

Islam, Christianity and Hinduism 

The Arabs and their Muslim counterparts, according to Dais Brion, were the first people to develop a specialised long-distance slave trade from sub-Saharan Africa. They were also the first people to view blacks as suited by nature for the lowest and the most degrading form of bondage. Rotter’s pioneering work and the research of Benard Lewis reveals that for medieval Arabs the blackness of Africans suggested sin, damnation and the devil. Arab scholars most of the time also invoked the biblical curse of Canaan to explain why the sons of Ham had been blackened and degraded to the status of natural slaves as punishment for the sins of their ancestors.

By the 10th century some Muslim writers asserted that Ham begot all blacks and people with crinkly hair and that “Noah put a curse on Ham according to which the hair of his descendants would not extend over their ears, and they would be enslaved wherever they were encountered”. Benard Lewis also quotes a 13th century Islamic historian from Iran who concluded that the Zanj (blacks) differed from animals only because their two hands are lifted above the ground and that many have observed that the ape is more teachable and more intelligent than the Zanj.

In the 17th century Father Gregorio Garcia detected “Semitic blood” in the Indians, because like the Jews, “they are lazy, they do not believe in the miracles of Jesus Christ, and they are ungrateful to the Spaniards for all the good they have done to them”. When Bartolome de Las Casas upset the Spanish court with his fiery denunciations of the conquistadors’ cruelty in 1557, a member of the Royal Council had replied that Indians were too low in the human scale to be capable of receiving the faith. Another justification for holding other people as slaves was found in Leviticus 25:44 which said, “Both they bonds-men and they bonds-maid, which thou shalt have, shall be the heathen that are round you; of them shall ye buy bonds-men and bonds-maids.” But the most popular text on the matter is found in Genesis 9:25 which says, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brethren.” Some slave-owners went beyond the bible arguing that it might be wrong to enslave Christians, but that the Negro was not a human being and therefore could not become a Christian. One pious lady said, when asked if her Negro maid was to be baptised, “you might as well baptise my black bitch.” While Bishop Berkeley put the same idea into philosophical language when he said, “Negroes were creaturs of another species who had no right to be included or admitted to other sacraments.”

Similarly, racist sentiments are expressed in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures of ancient India. Indra, the God of the Aryans, is described as “blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the blackskins, which Indra hates”. The account further reports how Indra “slew the flat-nosed barbarians, the dark people called Anasahs. Finally, after Indra conquers the land of the Anasahs for his worshippers, he commands that the Anasahs are to be flayed of (their) black skin.”

The first distinctive feature to be noted in religion and racism is their appeal to a two-category system which presupposes a basic division of mankind into an “in” group and an “out” group. In addition, this fundamental division is supported, initiated and sanctioned by God himself. God has a special concern for the “in” group, and it receives his sustaining aid and grace. By contrast he is indifferent or hostile to the “out” group. In the final analysis God does not value all men equally, consequently he treats them differently. And this difference is not accidental but central to his will and purpose. The two-category system is correlated with an imbalance of suffering in which the “out” group suffers more than the rest of the people. In the account of the Rig Veda, for example, we know that God has less affection for the Anasahs because they suffer more than the Aryans. It is also evident from holy books like the bible and the Rig Veda that God’s favour or disfavour is correlated with the racial or ethnic identity of the group in question. God’s wrath and hostility are sometimes even directed at the physical features of a particular ethnic or racial community.

In the bible Yahveh often sides with the Israelites in the murderous campaigns to grab land from the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines, Amalekites in the same way that he was used to justify colonialism. Similarly in African traditional religion the God of a particular ethnic group assists it to overcome its enemies and brings prosperity to the “in” group. It stands to reason that whilst there is no rock-solid evidence to support the claim that God created man, there is enough justification in the materialist assertion that God is an invention of man. This is grimly illustrated by the fact that while Saddam Hussein was calling on God to help the Iraqis in the Gulf War, George Bush was doing the same thing. No God caused the death of the young men who were slaughtered; but the misguided beliefs and the greed of the ruling class.

Production and production relations 

Consequently the “out” and “in” scheme of analysis has nothing to do with God. It is a manifestation of the concrete and material world of humans reflected in their consciousness in the process of the production and distribution of wealth. Ultimately, production and production relations determine the ideas individuals have about themselves as a group, and about society at large in matters of morality, religion, metaphysics, etc. And it is only when we have identified and understood the material assets and constraints of a society, how it produces goods to meet its material needs, how the goods are distributed, and what type of social organisation sprouts from the organisation of production that we would have come a long way to understanding the culture and religious views of that society.

If the production relations are such that makes it possible for a minority to appropriate the end-product of the labour of the majority the views of the minority become the dominant ones in society, whilst the opinion of the majority are suppressed. The ownership of the means of production is thus important in understanding people’s perception of social phenomena – religion, philosophy, art etc. Bearing this in mind, we shall find that religious perceptions in any class-divided society are not neutral, but a tool in the hands of the dominant class in its struggle to maintain its control over economic surplus. Religious and all manner of spurious ideological theories are contrived by the ruling class or its representatives in the intellectual community and church organisations to keep the downtrodden perpetually entrapped in the vicious circle of exploitation.

As children in a predominantly Catholic community, we used to be told that God was surrounded by a host of angels with archangels. God was the boss and each angel and archangel had a specific assignment to perform in heaven. This was a world-view that sought to give blessing to the master-servant relationship that existed in the feudal era and class society in general.

Some quotations in the bible are also anti-worker if applied in today’s circumstances. Take for instance the saying, “But I say unto you, that ye resist no evil; but whosoever shall smite thee on thy cheek, turn to him the other also.” I suppose that when the Accountant General’s Office slashed as much as a 100,000 cedis from my salary in March, I should have responded: “Please my Lordship why are you so generous with me? Take 400,000 cedis more.” This would have been submissiveness stretched to its idiotic limits, and an invitation to exploitation and despotism. It could mean an acceptance of wage slavery, a system that is inimical to working people’s interests.

The New Testament also advises us to despise and deprecate worldly things in lieu of heavenly rewards. What would this mean for those who have already made material gains here on Earth? If people like Bill Gates are also God-fearing they would have a double reward; one on Earth and the other in heaven, whilst the God-fearing poor will have only one. As for the poor who are not God-fearing the extent of their loss and damnation is inestimable. The end result of these teachings if employed in a class society makes the working people docile and facilitates their exploitation by the owning class.

Convenient smokescreen

But this is not all. It also calls forth the other forms of alienation which are not strictly economic, but are organically linked to it. It is important to note that racism and religion tend to elevate the culture and other virtues of the dominant class; and denigrate that of the oppressed. But the class character of this domination especially becomes difficult to unmask if the oppressor class has a different racial background from the oppressed, as was the case during the heady days of apartheid and colonialism. Skin pigmentation and other physical characteristics subsume the class dimension of the problem, and exploitation is seen through the binoculars of race. One therefore develops a superiority or inferiority complex, depending on one’s physical traits; and the fundamental issue which is class exploitation is lost. Given these circumstances racism becomes a convenient smokescreen with which the ruling class masks its exploitation of labour. Eventually the attention of the working class is diverted from the real causes of its predicament; and a section of it becomes a pliant tool of the ruling class in its attempt to entrench the capitalist system.

The effect on that section of the working class which does not share similar physical characteristics with the owning class is to deny itself as different from the dominant class. It identifies and shares the convictions, doctrines and other attitudes of the dominant class which oppresses it. Guilt and an inferiority complex promoted by the dominant class and imbibed by the oppressed become the result of this process. Consequently the attempt to escape this inferiority by denying and condemning oneself becomes a lifelong struggle.

Let’s consider this for one moment. It is important to note that for many Christians, the traditional African religious individuals is superstitious and worships idols and several gods; there is only one God, though he has a son begotten by the Holy Spirit. This god is white, his angels are white; and when the saved finally go to heaven, they will wear white robes of purity. But the devil is black; his angels are black; sin itself is black and when the sinful finally go to hell, they will be burnt to black coal. It is surprising that the African converts sing in pleading terror: “Wash me Redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow?” And is it any wonder that some Africans buy skin-bleaching creams to lighten their dark skins? Is it also surprising that so-called educated and enlightened women often buy red, blonde or brunette wigs to hide their black hair or spend hours on end in hair saloons trying to make their hair curly and long?

Christianity even denies the African the right to their name. A name is a simple symbol of identity. But the African convert would normally be required to discard his African name and give himself such good Christian names as Smith, Verwoerd, Robert, James, Julius, Ironmonger, Winterbotham, Elizabeth, Summer, Winter and sometimes Autumn. This business of getting new names has its roots in slave property relations, where the person of the slave was the property of the owner to be disposed of and used as the master deemed fit. So slaves were branded with the master’s name.

The same story is true in art, dance, music, drama etc, but the ultimate objective in class society is one – to control the productive forces and appropriate economic surplus irrespective of the exploiter’s race or tribe. Economic control however is much more difficult to attain without political control. Political control is therefore established through proxy governments. Even then the vampire system finds that economic and political control are incomplete without cultural and hence ideological control. So the system employs religion and bogus theories like racism to ensure the mental castration of the worker be he European, Asian or African.

Adongo Aidan Avugma

Ending child slavery (2001)

From the July 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today’s world is fraught with deliberate distortions. This is why it is not unusual for NGOs, governments and the powers-that-be to, once in a while, pick on a banal issue and carefully weave a web of heart-breaking propaganda around it. This is done with the aim of covering up the reality and at the same time to arouse the fellow-feeling instincts of candid individuals to donate money. Last May the world was treated to such an episodic storm-in-a-teacup by an NGO-based in the Republic of Benin in West Africa.

This time around it was a big noise about an ageing ship which was not seaworthy carrying, according to the NGO, about 450 underage children to be sold into slavery in Gabon. These kids were allegedly bought in Togo and Benin. When about a week or two later the ship was tracked down, it was found out that there were actually about 40 youth in it. Only a few were underage, and many were accompanied by their relatives. I do not deny that human trafficking exists nor do I dispute the fact that the Benin slave ship incident was a case of child slavery. However, as will be explained presently there was gross exaggeration involved and, more importantly, virtually nothing was said about the nature, causes and remedies, to such a hideous phenomenon.

The nature of child slavery

Child slavery (and also adult slavery) is not a new phenomenon in the world (not only in Africa). The incidence of this cruel activity takes place in two main forms. In the first place there is the crude aspect of it where the child becomes the property of the rich owner. This is mostly found in Sudan, Mauritania and other North African countries. It is also practised in Ghana among the Ewe tribe (of former President Jerry Rawlings). It is called the “Trokosi”. However unlike the Trokosi system is based on culture and tradition, in North Africa mainly blacks are forcibly ceased and turned into slaves. The case of the victims of the Benin slave ship of those children who were being sent from Ghana to Gambia to work in the fishing industry (that controlled by some Ghanaian fishermen living in Gambia or even those children providing slave labour in cocoa or coffee plantations in West Africa are usually “sold” out by parents and relatives and mostly not for good. (See Daily Observer, Gambia, 10 May.)

The second, mild, type appears in the shape of such euphemistic terms as “maid”, “babysitter” etc. This category involves mostly females. These are children from impoverished homes who are supposedly employed by the more affluent families. But it is the conditions under which they work that betray the slavery relations – they find themselves in: they are mercilessly underpaid; they work throughout the day. Those who are made to sleep with the family they work for do not have “working hours”. As long as there is something to be done, they have to do no matter the time. But what is more pathetic is that they are often targets of sexual abuse either by the man or his sons. They are also subjected to verbal and physical assaults. This system is very widespread in the Senegambia region and among the Arabs.

In fact many of those making noises about child slavery keep maids. This abuse of children’s rights as regards their exploitation by the owners of wealth can also be seen in the so-called civilised world. Notice for instance the case of over half-a-million schoolchildren working illegally with many playing truant to do for just a pittance. (See “Voice from the back”, Socialist Standard, May.)

Why?

Many people may not be able to figure out how in this modern age people can indulge in slavery or, worse still, willingly offer their loved ones for sale. These people are so sympathetically touched that they cannot imagine the cause of such inhumanity. On the other hand those rabble-rousing on child slavery fail to highlight the causes, most of the time for obvious reasons.

But one thing very certain is that almost all those engaged in slavery (in all its forms) are Christians, muslims or believers for that matter. Under normal circumstances these slavers would not do any harm to fellow human beings especially innocent children. So if these people irreligiously defy the holy books and perpetrate such wickedness, then it is obviously for a reason more important than religion. And that is money, profit. The system in operation throughout the world today is based on money. Without money one cannot live. Consequently anything that one can do to have money is “normal”. Even religious leaders (Christian, Muslim, etc) will use every underhand tactic to extort money from their mostly impoverished followers, and without any pity; businessmen and women will tell every lie just to make profits, etc.

This world, as it is now, is controlled by those who own big money and the means of living. They use their wealth to form political parties which, when in power, rule on behalf of the owners. Since the rich make their money by exploiting the masses through their (the rich) control of the means of production and distribution of wealth, the ruling parties or governments act in the interest of the party owners. In the process, the masses are neglected since social wealth is appropriated by the few and rich party owners. Left with nothing to eat, a starving man or woman can easily (out of dire necessity) give out a child in exchange for food (reflected as money). This is what pertains not only in Africa but also in especially Asia and Latin America.

In the same vein, others knowing what such possibilities exist will take advantage of the situation and get involved as agents just to enhance their access to a continuous flow of money and thus food. Thus child slavery is real business (money – commodity – money) which is capitalism in practice.

In mid-May, in the wake of the Benin slave ship saga, government officials from Ghana and La Côte d’Ivoire flew to England to discuss the problems in the cocoa and coffee industries. The issue was apparently sparked off by the news of the Benin slave ship. The discussions highlighted among other things the fact that chocolate industries in Europe and America reaped all the profits whilst the poor cocoa farmers experienced lower and lower incomes. Such a phenomenon, they said, naturally leads to the search for cost-effective methods of production. This is a euphemism for the use of child slave labour in cocoa and coffee plantations. Thus the whole issue is making money, profit.

What is to be done?

In extolling their usefulness to society, NGOs and their ilk often claim that they sensitise the world community on problems or that they expose the problem to the whole world. This, to an extent may be true. But invariably it is done more to attract funds for their organisations than to seek solutions to the problems. A clear case of making money out of other’s misery. And that is exactly why most of the time they exaggerate or blow issues out of proportion.

However experience has proved that attempts to correct “injustice” in the world can never be attained by pursuing single-issue matters like talking to people about child slavery. Child slavery is only one of the symptoms of the disease confronting mankind. Call it the profit system or the rule of money or capitalism. Tackling child slavery is thus like trying to treat the symptom of a disease and leaving the disease intact. So the NGO and those agencies and governments who keep crying foul constitute in the main a dubious business entity. They solicit for funds from the two antagonistic sections of society: they are spawned by the rich to enhance exploitation by soothing the pains of the poor; and they also take from the poor (especially through contributions from taxes levied by states) to keep them (the poor) immersed in poverty.

In furtherance of such objectives governments, NGOs and other such groups facilitating exploitation of man by man, easily come up with farcical and indeed nonsensical solutions to such issues. Consider for example the suspension by a German football team of the owner of the Nigerian-registered vessel involved in the shipping of the child slaves from Benin to Gabon. The owner, a Nigerian professional footballer in Germany may rather use as a pretext his suspension or even total expulsion to get more deeply involved in child trafficking (if he personally did take part in the matter at all). Such solutions are hypocritical and complete non-starters.

Again, just around the time the Benin slave ship episode was unfolding, the BBC’s Focus On Africa programme carried a news item on a proposed trip to Sudan by the world-famous musician Michael Jackson to assess the issue of child slavery there. Paradoxically Jackson himself was alleged to have been accused before a law court of sexually abusing a little boy. The case was however settled out of court. Such is the double standards of this money-infested system that the rich who are seen to be solving problems are actually those causing them.

Child slavery like poverty, illiteracy, disease, war, hunger, corruption and all the misery afflicting the human race have one thing in common – they result from (the use of) money. Before I explain the relationship between these tribulations and money, one point will have to be noted. That is that a wrong notion is preached by the ideologues of the present system (who of course formulate and control public opinion) that human needs are unlimited whilst resources are limited. Therefore only those who have money can meet their needs. This kind of misinformation is wicked and malicious. On the contrary money is the root cause of all the woes we live with. A few examples will suffice here.

The most important human need is food. Available records indicate that world food production is far higher than the quantity required to go round all mankind. However because of money food is locked away in huge quantities just to make super profits in the form of money from those who have it. In fact sometimes they callously dump food into the sea or even refuse to cultivate arable land. This, just to maintain high prices.

Another problem facing mankind is sickness. The pharmaceutical industry is so advanced that enough drugs and medicines can be produced to prevent and cure most illnesses. Yet this will never be done and people will continue to die because they cannot afford medicines as these are manufactured and locked up in drug-stores reserved only for the few who can pay. The recent lawsuit brought by the South African government against some western pharmaceutical companies on the issue of HIV/AIDS medicines is a typical example of inhumanity of money. The owners of the companies may publicly declare that they help mankind, yet when it comes to their money and profit they refuse to allow cheap drugs to be produced for sick people who cannot afford the expensive ones they produce for the rich. One could go on and on.

Thus until the money factor is eliminated and in its place, a system based on free access is practised, child slavery; child soldiers, mass murders; war; want and deprivation, etc will continue to live with us.

The question now is: how can mankind attain this money-free society of free and equal access to goods and services? Part of the wealth bequeathed to us by those who preceded us in this world is written records of how society came about, underwent changes and how we can improve upon our life today. Marx, Engels, William Morris, etc are some of such thinkers. People who agree that there is something wrong with our society will have to acquaint themselves with the literature that these precursors have put down and lots more by others who think on the same lines. Once people understand these theories of change then they may want them implemented for the benefit of mankind and together we can make a change.

Suhuyini

Colour mania in the past (1965)

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Colour prejudice, and the classification of people as “superior” or “inferior” simply because of the colour of their skin, is one of the most persistent and pernicious of fallacies. The important thing to remember is that such an attitude is completely modern. It is not something that has existed from the beginning of man’s life, and neither is it a deep-rooted human instinct.

Its origins lie a mere three or four hundred years back. No European regarded Genghis Khan or Suleiman the Magnificent as inferior beings, or worried about their colour. And they themselves were “colour-blind;” their murderous and highly efficient armies were multi-racial. The shock troops of the Turkish army, the Janissaries, contained a large number of white men in their ranks. Again, in the 15th Century when Portuguese ships were edging their way around the coast of Africa, they did not consider that the colour of the Continent's inhabitants was important. Anybody who embraced Christianity and fitted into the economic set-up was accepted into the fold. Both Mulattoes and Negroes rose to high positions in Portuguese society. They commanded Portuguese ships, and many became priests, often rising to be high dignitaries of the church. They became interpreters and advisers to native chiefs and to resident Europeans, as well as brokers and merchants. Many settled in Europe, after a successful career of moneymaking. More important still, many became slave-traders of great importance, feeling no more affinity with negro slaves than a European aristocrat felt for a European peasant.

Certainly prejudices and hatreds of one sort or another have existed for centuries. Religious bigotry, fear and suspicion of strangers, aristocratic contempt for the lower classes, hostility between cities or states, and the bitterness of the merchant classes towards the landed nobility are a few examples. The permutations were endless, but they had nothing to do with colour. The Jews were the object of bitter persecution for many centuries, but this was purely a religious matter, and not racial.

It is to the history of modern Europe that we must turn for an explanation of colour prejudice. For about 300 years Western Europe had it all its own way, and dominated the world. As Europe moved from Feudalism into Capitalism, it went through a period of intense development—technological, military, and political. This gave it an immense advantage over other areas, especially the two great continents of America and Africa, whose inhabitants were in a much earlier stage of development. Ancient empires went down before mere handfuls of Europeans, and the treasure houses of Peru and Bengal were open to these rapacious plunderers. Whole continents were colonised and exploited by these same small nations. This gave rise to ideas about the superiority of the white races. The workers of Europe, slaving away in their dark Satanic mills, were able to console themselves with the thought that they were members of a “Master Race”. This gave rise to race theorists whose ideas, suitably simplified, are still trotted out today.

Of course three hundred years is a very short time in over five thousand years of recorded history, and if you apply the test—that military or scientific ability equals superiority—to five thousand years, and not just three hundred, then the white races have come out pretty badly. Race theories are now being put forward again in this country, for example by the British National Party, who are trying to exploit immigration difficulties in Southall. They overlook the fact that the people who formed the spearhead of European expansion—Portuguese, Spaniards and Italians: men like Columbus, Cortez, Vasco da Gama, and Cabot — were members of what race theorists consider an inferior section of the white races, dubbed by Lapouge, one of the most rabid of racists, as Homo Alpinus. You may not be able to have your cake and eat it but race theorists are always trying to.

As conditions change, so we are witnessing the racists shifts in attitude. Not so long ago the Chinese were regarded in a rather patronising manner. Romantic or sinister, mysterious or comical, but definitely inferior. A popular song of the 1920’s —Limehouse Blues—describes them as “Chinkies”. That sinister lot, with their opium dens in a kind of East London hell —any schoolboy, who could afford the price of a Tuppeny Blood knew that they were up to no good. In reality the Chinese of East London were small in number and engaged in the most mundane of occupations. But China, having led the world for most of its history, had temporarily fallen behind. It was divided and militarily weak, a prey to the greed of the European powers, and overshadowed by its pushing neighbour Japan. The Chinese could be regarded with amused tolerance. Today such expressions as “Chinkies” and “Chinaman” have a strange, archaic ring, and it is difficult to realise that they were once in common usage. Today China is a major power with its foot on the nuclear ladder, and is now challenging the U.S.A. or Russia. Chinamen are no longer comical.

But of all race prejudices, one stands out above all others—that against the Negro. An American Negro folk singer summed up the position in a few bitter lines.

If you're White, alright,

If you're Brown, stick around,

But if you’re Black, get back—get back—get back.

Unbelieveable lengths have been gone to, to keep the image of the Negro as an inferior being, and to write the lie into the sub-conscious mind. One example will suffice. The great folk hero of the 20th century is the cowboy, played against a backcloth of the legendary West. For fifty years they've galloped across the screens in their thousands. One thing you will never see; a Black Cowboy. But at the time of the great cattle drives, there were estimated to be over five thousand Negroes working as cowboys. This is not surprising, as cattle droving was a dangerous and badly paid job, and Negroes, like other members of the working class including Mexicans and Chinese, worked at it.

Forty years ago in the early Western films all cowboys were Whiter than White, while Mexicans, with their nasty faces under their big hats, were the villains. Today Mexicans and Chinese cowboys are portrayed, but the Negro still must not be allowed to be a folk hero. Why does such an attitude exist? The answer lies in one word; Slavery. With the opening of the American Continent there began a gigantic forced migration. The caravels that sailed from West Africa to the New World with their tragic cargo were radically to alter the pattern of world population. They were to make the Negro races second only to Europeans in their dispersion throughout the world. Estimates vary, but certainly many millions of Negroes were transported. Chattel slavery was an ancient institution, it was one of the economic stages through which humanity had passed. But modern slavery was unique.

In slave societies slavery was accepted as part of life, just as wage labour is accepted today. Anyone of any race or religion was liable to be a slave; even a member of a ruling class could be captured in war and enslaved. Slavery was regarded as a misfortune, it was not regarded as a sign of racial inferiority. But there was an important difference about the slavery that grew up in the modern world, in that the people who practised it had long left slavery behind. Europe had passed out of slavery, through feudalism, and was emerging into Capitalism by the lime the Western slave trade got under way. The world was treated to a new spectacle — slave traders who prated of freedom. At least the slavers of ancient Rome or Baghdad had not accompanied their activities with shouts of Liberty and Equality.

After all, the logical conclusion of a belief in liberty is that all men should be free, but the slavers’ profits were far too good for that kind of logic. To struggle, and even suffer, for political freedom on one hand, and accept slavery on the other, requires the kind of attitude that can look at a modern dictatorship and call it a Peoples’ Democracy, it also needs justification, and the only way the slavers could do this was to convince themselves that the slaves were sub-human, and fit only for slavery. To achieve this end the bottom of the intellectual barrel was scraped, and the Bible as well as pseudo-science were dragged into bolster up the double talk.

But colour mania goes beyond a mere question of skin colour. Race theorists have invented divisions within the “white” races themselves, with colour of hair, eyes and the shade of skin as the “tests’’. These divisions have been given such names as the Latin, Celtic, Slav or Aryan races. In fact these divisions are purely linguistic, and extremely vague ones at that; .they have nothing whatever to do with race. Which of them is held to be inferior or superior depends largely on which group the particular theorist happens to belong to. 

Perhaps the most violent and disastrous of all these myths was that of the Aryan, Nordic or Teuton, which reached its ultimate lunacy in Nazi Germany. “Teutons" are, roughly those people living in North West Europe, mainly Germany, Scandinavia, the Low countries and England. They are, according to themselves, the finest flowering of the human race. The "true Teuton” is blond, tall and blue eyed. This is so silly, as a glance at the majority of people in these countries will show, that one would be inclined to dismiss it, if it were not for the terrible example of Nazi Germany. One has only to look at many of the Nazi leaders — including Hitler — to realise the depth of self-deception that the racists can plumb.

The definition of the “true Teuton” is interesting. Every age and civilisation has its ideal type of person, and an ideal conception of beauty. This ideal changes, often from generation to generation, as a study of advertisements, matinée idols and popular magazines over the last half century will show. These ideal types tend to be portrayed in popular literature, art or poetry, in spite of the fact that they bear little or no relationship to the vast majority of people, so that a picture of an age, taken from these sources alone, would be completely deceptive. The “ideal person ’ of the Vikings and early North Europeans appears to have been tall, blond and blue eyed. All of the ”best people” in their sagas and poems, all the gods, heroes, and nobility, are portrayed in this manner. With the rise of German and other European nationalisms these ancient writings were brought out, and it was concluded, quite incorrectly, that all early and therefore “pure” Teutons were; tall, blond and blue eyed.

Workers who profess to support the theories of the racists, should read them a little more carefully. All the race theorists —Gobineau, Lapouge, Houston Chamberlain or Nietzsche to name just a few—had another side to their theories. This was their contempt for the working class. Whatever their differences on other fields they were agreed on this one point. The mere fact of being workers, they thought, marked people out as lower human types. All the race theorists had axes to grind — German nationalism, British Imperialism, control of immigrants into the U.S.A., and above all aristocratic supremacy. They would not have been at all impressed by such slogans as Keep Brixton White, considering that Brixton, like other working class areas, was fit only for what they called “lower human types” to inhabit.

Race theorists today are unscientific, inconsistent and pernicious. In this, they arc carrying on an inglorious tradition, and perpetuating a history of cynical deception..

Les Dale

Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the August 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

Thousands of British schoolgirls as young as eight face being taken abroad this summer to have their genitals mutilated and stitched up to preserve “purity”. A campaign by the Metropolitan Police and Foreign Office will suggest that more than 22,000 girls under the age of 15 risk being taken abroad by their family for “cutting”, based on data from The International Centre for Reproductive Health. Girls may have their outer genitals removed and stitched up to preserve their virginity, with an opening as small as a matchstick head, meaning it can take up to 20 minutes to urinate:

[Link.]

Anyone who thinks slavery ended with the 13th Amendment is not paying attention. According to the latest State Department statistics, as many as 100,000 people in the United States are in bondage and perhaps 27 million people worldwide. The numbers are staggering:

[Link.]

Just counting work that’s on the books (never mind those 11 p.m. emails), Americans now put in an average of 122 more hours per year than Brits, and 378 hours (nearly 10 weeks!) more than Germans. The differential isn’t solely accounted for by longer hours, of course—worldwide, almost everyone except us [in the USA] has, at least on paper, a right to weekends off, paid vacation time (PDF), and paid maternity leave. (The only other countries that don’t mandate paid time off for new moms are Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Samoa, and Swaziland.)

[Link.]

Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the  back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.

On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs’ brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease:

[Link.]

Here’s one financial figure some big U.S. companies would rather keep secret: how much more their chief executive makes than the typical worker. Now a group backed by 81 major companies — including McDonald’s, Lowe’s, General Dynamics, American Airlines, IBM and General Mills — is lobbying against new rules that would force disclosure of that comparison. In 1970, average executive pay at the nation’s top companies was 28 times the average worker income. By 2005, executive pay had jumped to 158 times that of the average worker

[Link.]

Tiny Tips (2009)

The Tiny Tips column from the July 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

A collection of more than 3,000 inverted stamps has sold at auction in New York for more than $5 million:

[Dead Link.]

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One billion people throughout the world suffer from hunger, a figure which has increased by 100 million because of the global financial crisis, says the UN:

[Link.]

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Cancer is a silent disease in Africa and in the developing world. World Health Organization (WHO) statistics shows that cancer kills more people in Africa than HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria combined. This is not a well-known fact, and a very disturbing one, especially since cancer diagnostics and treatment are of very poor standard in most African countries. Take for example Ghana – a country with more than 23 million people. They only have four oncologists to diagnose and treat cancer patients. WHO estimates that if we don’t take act now, more than 11 million Africans may die of cancer in 2020:

[Dead Link.]

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One in four men in South Africa have admitted to rape and many confess to attacking more than one victim, according to a study that exposes the country’s endemic culture of sexual violence

[Link.]

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The Dalai Lama has encouraged Tibetans in exile to embrace the democratic system of electing a leader, saying it was essential to keep step with the larger world and to ensure the continuity of their government:

[Dead Link.]

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Uganda has lost nearly a third of its forest cover since 1990 due to expanding farmlands, a rapidly growing human population and increased urbanisation, a government report said

[Dead Link.]

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The Senate unanimously passed a resolution yesterday apologizing for slavery, making way for a joint congressional resolution and the latest attempt by the federal government to take responsibility for 2½ centuries of slavery

[Link.]

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Nearly twice as many US army soldiers today are either alcoholic or engage in damaging behaviour such as binge drinking than six years ago, and experts blame the rise on repeated tours in war zones:

[Dead Link.]

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President Hugo Chavez is standing by his man in the Middle East, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iranians took to the streets Wednesday for the fifth straight day to protest his claim to a landslide reelection

[Dead Link.]

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Zimbabwe is suffering “persistent and serious” human rights violations despite the formation of a unity government four months ago, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khansaid

[Dead Link.]

50 Years Ago: £400 for a Slave (2007)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fairly recently King Saud of Saudi Arabia visited “the land of the free”—the United States of America, where he was feted by President Eisenhower, and other American politicians. Little is known of his country except that there is sand—and more important—oil, in Saudi Arabia. But a recent United Nations report (News Chronicle, 22/ 2/57) gives us some idea just how “free” and democratic King Saud’s oil-soaked land is.

According to the report Saudi Arabia has 450,000 slaves— just 20% of the population. Prices on the Jeddah slave market were said to be between £200 and £400 for a girl under 5; £150 for a man under 40 and £40 for an old woman. Like Christian Archbishops who also live quite well, Moslem Kings, such as King Saud, do not condemn slavery—chattel slavery in Arabia, and wage-slavery in Britain!

(from “Odds and Ends” by Peter E. Newell, Socialist Standard, April 1957)

Tiny Tips (2010)

The Tiny Tips column from the February 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The migrants are managed by a Mafia-run employment system, the caporalato, that operates like a 21st century chain gang. Saviano says that those who object to low wages or poor working conditions are simply eliminated — and not just by a pink slip. “It’s a military system. The farm and factory owners employ the Mafia caporali to bring the workers. The immigrants wait on the roads, the caporali pick them up and take them to the work. If they complain, they get killed.” 

[Dead Link.]

Despite more than a dozen international conventions banning slavery in the past 150 years, there are more slaves today than at any point in human history:

[Dead Link.]

Civil freedoms around the world lost ground for the fourth straight year in 2009 with Iraq improving, Afghanistan falling back and China acting as if it were under siege by its own citizens, Freedom House said on Tuesday. Bahrain, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Yemen moved into “not free” category, raising the total to 47 from 42 in 2008. The number of electoral democracies fell from 119 to 116, the lowest since 1995: 

[Dead Link.]

Workers at a Sussex-based electronics firm were today left “devastated” after being told in a video message that manufacturing at their factories is to end and 220 jobs moved to Korea and the Czech Republic:

[Link.]

Zuma famously likes to spend as much time as possible among his cattle in his native homestead at Nkandla, in northern KwaZulu-Natal province, where he is building a huge palace. In South Africa, R3m (£250,000) buys a pretty decent house, but Zuma’s new house there is costing R65m (£5.4m). ..It is a strange sight. Zuma, brought to power with the support of the ANC left, the trade unions and communist party, is ever more imitative of the Zulu monarchy – even down to the leopard-skin attire. It may have nothing to do with socialism, but then nor do, or did, the quasi-royal dynasties of many communist states such as the Kims of North Korea, Romania’s Ceausescus and the Zhivkovs of Bulgaria. And it should not be thought that these contradictions are embarrassing to Zuma. On the contrary, he is having the time of his life: 

[Link.]

One of the most callous reactions to the Haiti disaster thus far has come from televangelist Pat Robertson, who told viewers of his Christian Broadcasting Network on Wednesday morning that he knew the real reason for the quake: The country’s long-standing pact with Satan: 

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It has emerged that Kim Kardashian, the American reality television star, commands at least $10,000 per post. Many of Kardashian’s tweets are mundane - “I must have pinched a nerve in my neck . . .  I need a massage” - but when she mentions advertisers such as Nestle or the fast-food chain Carl’s Jr, she receives four-figure sums:

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Tiny Tips (2011)

The Tiny Tips column from the December 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Indian government has announced a drop in the number of poor people in the country by massaging the criteria used to measure poverty. By its reckoning, less than a dollar a day is enough to get by:

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China has accused European workers of being ‘slothful’ and ‘indolent’ after refusing to put any of its vast resources into rescuing the euro. The head of the Chinese state’s overseas investment arm said he would only help Europe if it reformed its ‘outdated’ labour laws and welfare systems. Jin Liqun, chairman of the board of supervisors of China Investment Corporation, said Europeans should stop ‘languishing on the beach’ and work harder it they want to drag the eurozone out of its downward spiral. And he said Europeans have become too reliant on state handouts and should stop looking to outside sources to tackle the debt crisis threatening the euro:

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In recent weeks, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has received a spate of applications from enterprising merchandisers, lawyers and others seeking to win exclusive commercial rights to such phrases as “We are the 99 percent,” ‘’Occupy” and “Occupy DC 2012.” Organizers of the protest centered in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park went so far as to file for a trademark of “Occupy Wall Street” after several other applications connected to the demonstrations were fi led with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Wylie Stecklow, a lawyer representing the protesters, said the Oct. 24 filing was done to prevent profiteering from a movement that many say is a protest of corporate greed:

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Since the abolition of serfdom and human trafficking more than 150 years ago, slavery is against the law in all countries on earth. And yet, according to the UK’s Anti Slavery International (ASI) there are still some 27 million people living in slavery, living at the mercy of landowners, earning virtually nothing:

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“In 1917, average income — including capital gains — among the top 0.1 percent was 127 times the average income of the bottom 90 percent,” Professor Hacker said. “Average income among the top 0.01 percent was 509 times as great. In 2007, average income among the top 0.1 percent was 220 times average income among the bottom 90 percent. Average income among the top 0.01 percent was 1,080 times as great.”

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The Occupy Wall Street movement has landed at Harvard University, where some 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class last week to protest what they saw as biased teachings. The students explained their walkout in an open letter to professor Greg Mankiw posted on the website of the Harvard Political Review. “Today, we are walking out of your class, Economics 101, in order to  express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics course,” they wrote. “We are deeply concerned about the way that this bias affects students, the University, and our greater  society.”

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Colour prejudice is just an idea (1970)

From the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Anyone who ever gets involved in arguments with racists sooner or later runs up against their assumption—sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit—that their prejudices are based on an eternal, natural law. The assumption which follows this is that racism has an existence independent from other social factors and that, unlike other ideas, it came into being regardless of whatever else was happening in the world and will, therefore, remain regardless of whatever else happens. The importance of examining this theory is not so much to assess the value of the racists’ assumption but also to look at an example of the forces which operate for changes in society and in its ideas.

Let us begin with the simple statement that the Negro, who has suffered centuries of oppression in America, did not choose to go there in the first place. He was taken there—mostly by force. This transportation began at a time when manufacture was developing in North West Europe and a plantation economy taking root in the West Indies and the American South. The first Negroes were brought from Africa in 1510, to work the gold mines of what was then Hispaniolia. By the beginning of the 17th. century there were settlements all along the east coast of America, from Massachusetts to the West Indies.

These settlements represented one corner of a triangular trade, which supplied raw materials to another corner which was European industry. The third corner was Africa, where the Negro slaves were to be found. The sides of this triangle were the voyages between the corners— first the carriage of manufactures from Europe to be exchanged for African slaves who had been captured in tribal wars and raids; then carrying the slaves across to America to be traded for raw materials; and finally bringing the materials to Europe, to feed the appetites of the manufacturers there. At first the Negroes were treated in the same way as white indentured servants and were allowed to buy their freedom; they were not subjected to any race prejudice. It was the demands of the plantations, with crops depending on regular, disciplined tilling, which brought the pressure for outright slavery. Virginia, the first American colony to import Negroes, legalised slavery in 1617.

The side of the triangle representing the carriage of slaves from Africa to America was called the “middle voyage’’ and it was here that great cruelty was imposed and suffering endured — and vast profits made. It is possible now only to estimate the numbers who underwent the horrors of the middle voyage but a cautious figure would be 15 million, with a death rate of about 20 per cent. The central fact of this trade was that the slaves were not regarded as being any more sensitive than inanimate cargo. Thus they had to be packed into the holds of the slave ships as tightly as possible—one writer describes them as lying “like spoons”—and there could be no second thoughts about jettisoning them if disease broke out aboard, or if the ship ran into heavy weather. Those who survived the crossing were cleaned and oiled and polished for the auction.

Many great fortunes were made from the triangular trade. In 1789, the total trade of France amounted to £17 million of which San Domingo, with its slave economy, was responsible for £11 million. The bourgeoisie of Bordeaux and Marseilles, and the merchant capitalists of Manchester and Liverpool, owed most of their wealth—their big, comfortable houses, their carriages, their women—to the slave trade and all that it meant in human suffering and degradation.

There was of course a contradiction in the erection of an entire, and very important, economy on slavery at a time when the countries which were responsible for it were themselves developing the commodity production of capitalism, which needed free labour power. An attempt was made to resolve this contradiction by the simple expedient of classifying the Negro as an inherently inferior being. Thus American slavery could be distinguished from earlier forms, which were in harmony with the prevailing mode of wealth production, by its conscious dehumanising of the slave. Negro families were broken up either during or after the middle voyage ; the slaves were forbidden any education in reading or writing and they had no legal existence other than as the property of someone else. In 1857 the Dred Scott decision, which caused such an uproar, merely gave formal confirmation to something which had existed in fact for a very long time.

By that time the theories of racism, having taken something like three centuries of the slave trade to form themselves, began to emerge. Before then, the climate of opinion was such that the slave was regarded as outside the pale of humanity—without law, morals or religion. As each wretched shipment came in, religious divines rejoiced at all those souls saved from the moral depredations of paganism and idolatry. (At first any slaves who accepted conversion to Christianity automatically won their freedom. But by the end of the eighteenth century the Church had decided that there was after all nothing inconsistent in the converted Negro remaining a slave—and of course the slave owners agreed.) Dr. Cartwright, a professor at the University of Louisiana, diagnosed the slaves’ lack of interest in their work, and their tendency to run away, as mental diseases with impressive names—dyaesthesia and drapetomanie—for which the only cure was a whipping.

And not only the pro-slavers were affected. In 1765 Granville Sharp, who was later an abolitionist, intervened to save the life of a slave who had been flogged almost to death. At the time Sharp did not regard this incident as anything more than an act of private charity—certainly not as a condemnation of slavery. It is not surprising, that the whole thing eventually became rationalised into a theory, or perhaps a series of theories. In the early nineteenth century, for example, the “Teutonic Origin” theory—the idea that all worthwhile cultural achievements were the work of the peoples of North West Europe—took root, fostered by intellectual leaders like Bishop Stubbs of Oxford.

What this means is that any measures which, say, the American government now takes on civil rights must run up against opinions and prejudices which have become entrenched over centuries. These opinions have been responsible for some pretty dreadful episodes; for example the Tuskegee Institute documented 1,797 lynchings of Southern Negroes which took place between 1900 and 1964. This figure takes no account of the undocumented killings—the quiet murders with the body dumped in the river or the swamp and few people beyond the victim’s family marking their disappearance. More recently, between 1964 and 1967 over forty Negroes and whites have been murdered or lynched in Mississippi alone, without any effective action being taken against those responsible, although often their identity is general knowledge.

In addition, widespread, persistent segregation exists, in spite of the many Bills which have been passed to outlaw it. Sometimes this segregation is open, as it is in the schools of the Deep South, eight out of nine of which are still segregated. Sometimes it is a more subtle, de facto segregation, in which the whites simply move out of a district and leave it, with its schools, to the Negroes. The effect of this in Washington, D.C. is that in nearly all district schools black pupils are in a majority of over 95 per cent.

Herding any depressed group into a particular section of a city brings its own problems and tensions. In the case of the Negroes in America, these are accentuated when coloured workers from the South, thrown out of work by the increased use of mechanised farming methods and pesticides, migrate into that section. This produces the classic immigration situation, of desperate people pouring into an area already run down, an area of crumbling buildings which house rats and lice along with the people and where rack renters and other exploiters can take rich pickings.

There is a short, evocative word to describe these areas. Ghettoes. Officially, their names are, for example, Watts in Los Angeles and Harlem in New York. It is no cause for surprise, that they are breeding grounds for all manner of social disorders; in Harlem in 1964 the juvenile delinquency rate was twice that for the city as a whole, the proportion of drug addicts about ten times, the incidence of venereal disease in the under-21s six times.

Yet the very existence of the ghettoes, and the ways in which the Negroes protest—by riots, burnings, Black Power cells—are all taken by the racists as evidence to boost their conviction that Negroes are sub-human and therefore deserve nothing better than confinement in more ghettoes, and subjection to more prejudice and fiercer suppression. This racism is self-perpetuating, feeds upon its own appetite—and all in the conviction that it is an eternal and immutable truth.

And that really is the key to it. Contrary to what the racists think, racism as much as any other idea is a product of the prevailing economic conditions in society. Which means that, like other ideas which in their day were just as reactionary, just as powerful, it must change, and die, as conditions outside it require.

Ivan