Lather and whitewash (1986)

From the September 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

"Power, sex. greed and money". Not another Sun story about an indiscreet bishop, but the necessary ingredients of a successful American soap opera — according to Leonard Katzman. a producer of Dallas. But for a low-temperature wash, many people prefer the more mundane soaps like Coronation Street. Harry Kershaw, one of its writers and producers, has attributed the programme's success to the fact that "it is a folk opera in praise of, for want of a better phrase, the ordinary people of Britain".

Do you follow a soap opera? Millions do. In California ABC TV broadcasts continuous soap opera from 11am to 3pm every day, while the daily output of Americas three network channels is 11 hours of soap with an average audience of about 35,000,000. In Britain, East Enders glues 23,000.000 viewers to BBC 1 twice a week. Coronation Street enjoys about 10,000,000 visitors and Brookside corners a respectable 7,000,000.

The label "soap opera" was first attached to dramatic sagas broadcast by American radio in the 1930s. Drama of this sort was found to be the cheapest way of filling in the gaps between the commercials for detergents which sponsored the radio shows. Many radio soaps are still very popular, including The Archers, which has a weekly audience of about 3,000,000. Some soap addicts can become a little over-credulous and write letters to the drama characters as if they were real people:

Dear Angie,

There's no doubt in my mind now what you should do about Den. Leave him and The Queen Vic and start a new life for yourself. When I left my Terry six years ago . . .

Every week, the television studios receive many letters of love, hate, advice and enquiry relating to people who do not exist. The deluded letter-writers may number only a few but there are undoubtedly millions of people who allow the characters and events of the soaps to become a part of their mental social circles. Whatever you think about soap operas, they are a reasonably influential medium in our society and for that reason, deserving of comment by socialists.

There are many television programmes in this category: Sons and Daughters, Albion Market, Emmerdale Farm, A Country Practice, The Young Doctors, Crossroads and so forth. They are a massively popular form of entertainment — mass commodities, as widely consumed as coke or crisps. But unlike coke or crisps soap operas affect us socially. They promote certain ideas as being worthy of our approval and certain ideas are dealt with in ways which subtly invite disapproval. Someone once described much of what is broadcast on television as "chewing gum for the eyes '. Following soap operas in a relatively uncritical frame of mind over a number of years by way of relaxation will fortify certain popular prejudices about the world. The boundaries of the television fantasies have recently been extended into an accompanying literature. There are over a dozen magazines in America devoted to providing gossip, interviews and story-updates connected with the TV soaps. Soap Opera Digest, the market leader in the USA has a readership of over 4.000.000. In Britain the tabloid press has widened its coverage of the private lives of the famous soap actors and actresses, sometimes going to extraordinary reaches of triviality to dredge up a story. Take as one example the front page of the Daily Star earlier this year — a colour photograph of East Enders Dirty Den (actor Leslie Grantham) meeting Coronation Street's Ken Barlow (actor Bill Roache). There was no real story of any consequence other than the fact that they met. One newspaper editor has suggested that.

Soap operas are as much a part of the national fabric as Sunday Lunch Our readers spend a lot of time watching TV (the national average is about 20 hours per week) and we reflect their interests; part of the success of East Enders comes from the very real characters and very real situations which our readers identify with. (Philip Walker, Deputy Editor, Daily Mirror)

Whether they deal with the pressures of life in a humdrum working-class community or the extravagant affairs of tycoon terrain, the purpose of the soaps is to portray what some drama critics have called a "slice of life". Before making comment on the social effect of these programmes a few observations should be made about life outside of the box. Slices of what, in other words, do the dramas seek to depict?

Life outside the box

The society we inhabit — all over the world — is completely dominated by the commercial system, the profit system. It is a class-divided society in which a very small minority of women and men, between them, own and control all of the world's resources. The majority of us own nothing to speak of except our ability to work. We therefore need to sell ourselves to an employer (a company, local government, the state) in order to earn a living. The minority are able to live lives of material luxury from unearned incomes through rent, interest and dividends. It is a society divided between those who produce all of the wealth and possess nothing and those who produce nothing but possess virtually all of the wealth. A class of legalised robbers control society and it is at their behest that we are thrown out of work when it no longer becomes profitable to employ us. It is also at their behest that governments pitch young men and women into war to slaughter strangers when their economic interests — trade routes, key areas on the trade map and regions representing important markets — are threatened.

If you are in any doubt about the nature of the class society you live in consider the evidence. In 1986 government sources show that the top 10 per cent of the population own 54 per cent of all marketable wealth, and most of the rest is owned by a small percentage of people directly below the top 10 per cent. If you are working-class in Britain today, your child is twice as likely to die at birth than children from the wealth-owning class. Richard Wilkinson of the Centre for Medical Research (University of Sussex) has pointed to "a clear widening of differences in death rates and in life expectancy between social classes. Infant mortality figures which have been released, show that mortality rates are now increasing in lower social classes while they continue to fall among the more privileged". A recent report by the Office of Health Economics suggests that up to 1,000,000 people in Britain are suffering from mild mental handicap because of poverty rather than any detectable brain damage. (Mental Handicap: Partnership in the Community? 1986.)

Capitalism is a society of contradictions because its main aim is the quest for profit and not the satisfaction of human need. There are now more "surplus" bricks in Britain than ever before. There are about 400,000 construction workers who want to work but who are prevented from doing so because it is not profitable for them to be employed. Alongside this stagnant potential — enforced by the economic interests of the construction industry shareholders — there are an estimated 70,000 homeless families. Earlier this year, in July, there was a move in the London borough of Tower Hamlets to "solve" the acute housing problem there by dumping many of the 650 desperately needy families into a redundant passenger ship in the Thames and calling it a "floating home scheme" While this piece of imaginative inhumanity was being seriously discussed by the local authority pundits in their forlorn efforts to patch up the perennial problems of the profit system, there was no shortage of luxury homes (for the right sort of person) being advertised in the "quality" press. From Berwick to Belgravia, 40 acres . . . 50 acres . . . 2,000 acres, swimming pools, private cinemas, all you need is a tidy £500.000 and that will do nicely.

Under the commercial system, the majority of people experience life in a weak and strenuous fashion, like a person with nasal congestion trying to breathe fresh air. We live in an atmosphere of stifled creativity where the human potential for imaginative flair is choked and suppressed by routine and wage-slavery. Gazing at soap operas, slumped in an armchair with a cup of tea, is an example of the perverse pleasures we are encouraged to enjoy.

What socialists want the working class to do — what we are organised to achieve — is to abolish this social system and establish in its place a classless, moneyless society. A society without property relationships, employers or employees — a society where the sole principle of production will be "from each according to their ability, to each according to their self-determined needs". No legislative reform can make any significant difference to the basis of class-society. Socialism is the only thing worth acting for. Do soap operas help or hinder the revolution in social ideas which is necessary for the majority of people to establish socialism?

Soaps as soap boxes for socialism?

Most soap operas have no distinct social message, let alone a message for social change. Channel 4's Brookside though, does have a reputation for advocating changes to benefit workers, or at any rate it is supposed to expose aspects of capitalism which cause working-class misery. Jimmy McGovern, one of Brookside's scriptwriters has said.

I can have more effect as regards the bringing forward of an alternative society than Howard Brenton (the playwright) could ever have. It's a cosy programme but a powerful speech coming from a character you know and love can have a great impact — there is a potential for really subversive drama and it's exploited now and again. There will always be the argument that it's losing its balls, but that will go on forever — and that's good.

(Guardian, 9 July 1986)

In my own view, Brookside usually produces a very high quality of drama but politically it clearly opposes socialist arguments. Several of the programme's scriptwriters are self-avowed supporters of the Labour Party and the continuing political implication of Brookside's script is that a Labour government replacing the Conservative one is something that workers should aim for. This message is not expressed to the viewer directly but by a subtle process of showing a selective series of workers' experiences, seen from a particular point of view and scripting the characters to form certain conclusions which their subsequent experiences demonstrate to be "right" or "wrong".

It should not be forgotten that the Labour Party stands for the continuation of capitalism. It professes to be able to preside over the profit system in a way which benefits employees and that is an impossible objective, like trying to run slavery in the interests of the slaves. Labour administrations have been in government for about half the time since 1966. During that time the basic wealth structure has remained almost exactly the same. Labour governments have developed the nuclear bomb, introduced the vicious Special Patrol Group (now re-labelled). broken strikes, frozen wages and sent workers to war to protect the economic interests of the bosses. Compared with the quality of medicine available in the opulent, high-tech private hospitals, the NHS only offers a second-rate first-aid service because of the financial constraints it suffers. This is not surprising when you consider that its purpose, as implied in the Beveridge Report which proposed the NHS, was to mend broken workers with as little cost and fuss as possible. Yet there is in Brookside a recurring innuendo that the NHS is essentially a good idea which just needs a bit more money.

It has also been argued that soaps about working-class life, especially programmes like Coronation Street, help foster a better class consciousness by allowing workers to see their own plight through other characters. at a distance on the box. With your own problems, the argument runs, you're so entangled that you can't really see the wood for the trees. Watching the struggles of wage-slavery as an armchair observer rather than a hassled participant is supposed to provide a sharper picture of what's wrong with society. The trouble is that there is absolutely no evidence to support this argument. How many socialists has 25 years of Coronation Street produced? There can be no substitute for direct and clear socialist argument. Before socialism can be established there will have to be a revolution in the ideas of the majority of people. Such a change of ideas will not come about if we rely on people reading between the lines of television drama and forming the uniform conclusion that wage-slavery must be abolished.

Then there are the American soaps. It has been said, perhaps not very seriously, that programmes like Dallas, Dynasty and The Colbys help fuel the class war by flaunting the ostentatious wealth of the privileged. By showing how the idle rich live, the programmes are alleged to be encouraging some viewers to see this social parasitism for what it is. Certainly, these serials don't skimp on the spectacular. Dallas (the most commercially lucrative programme in the world) is produced as five-star escapism. Chic fashion, lavish decor, sumptuous food and drink. All this interwoven with the torrid affairs of the tycoons, as active with their bed sheets as their balance sheets as they glide through the pleasures of their latest company merger.

We are invited to sit in poverty and peer at their prosperity. A prosperity which has been produced by us, not them. It's all a bit twisted when you think about it. Most avid viewers when asked for their opinion about this sort of programme reply along the lines of saying it’s exciting to watch and it would be nice to' have that sort of money. Nothing more or less than that. To have no ambition beyond getting vicarious pleasure from watching your exploiters revel in the wealth which we produce is to be played for a sucker.

It must be concluded that there is nothing to speak of in any of the soaps which does anything to promote the cause of socialism.

Soaps and brainwashing

Most soap operas, for most of the time, play a part in confirming social prejudices which support capitalism. Implicit in the drama, or as the critics say "written into the sub-text", are all sorts of notions about the world we live in. Many of these are quite wrong, would not stand up to scrutiny nor cope with the evidence of history, biology, anthropology or political economy. Yet tucked away securely in-between the lines they never have to come out to defend themselves. They satisfy themselves with being self-evident truths rather in the way monarchs who could think of no other justification for tyranny would claim to be ruling by divine right. What are these notions tacitly accepted by soap scripts? They include the ideas that people suffer from something horrible called "human nature" — an incurable condition which can only be softened or controlled but never removed. It means that people are innately anti-social and irrational. Other assumptions include the idea that the majority of people are not intelligent or responsible enough to exist socially without bosses, political leaders and police forces to keep them in order.

The television programmes reinforce the prejudices of the commercial system in two ways. One is by showing a picture of society in which particular institutions are presented, like day and night, as being a part of an inevitable scheme. So you get rich people and poor people, peace time and war time, palaces and prisons. You are encouraged to lament the worst horrors these contradictions cause but never to question the need for the institutions themselves. The other way that the programmes give a misleading picture of society is by what they don't show rather than what they do show. It is not just swearing (which is carefully edited out of the "realistic" soaps); neither the more gruesome parts of working class suffering nor the sheer bloody monotony of daily routine are presented on the programmes.

That the programmes create a sort of resignation in many people to the problems of class-society is not so surprising when you consider the essentially conservative outlook of some of the influential writers. Harry Kershaw has been involved in Coronation Street as a writer and producer since it began. Commenting on the Street's audience over the last 25 years he has said it

. . . may have become a little richer, a little healthier, and rather better informed but, basically, they still have the same worries and the same aspirations as they had 25 years ago. The car in the garage and the VCR next to the TV set may point to material change but the important factors of life remain the same.

(Coronation Street 1960-1985)

He may be right in the sense that politically nothing has really changed for the working class over the past 25 years but programmes like Coronation Street do nothing to alter the route of the grim march hitherto going nowhere.

Finally, consider the view of Agnes Nixon, a prolific writer for American soap opera and the creator of three of them from scratch. Barry Norman asked her what she thought was good about soap operas. "In soap operas" she replied, "everyday is a new day just as in our lives and we can't predict what will happen in our lives from day to day. We sort of think and plan, fools that we are. and think that we can have some control over our destiny and we have none." (Barry Norman's Guide to American Soaps, 1986). No control over our destiny? It's all in the lap of the Gods? There's one life for your JRs and one for your Jack Duckworths and there's nothing we can do about it — fools that we are? Are we? Are you?

Gary Jay

Blogger's Note:

On a related note, the following year Steve Coleman wrote a similar type 'soap operas are "chewing gum for the eyes" ' piece in his Between the Lines column and it was subject to a sneering smear attack from the Sunday tabloid, the Sunday People. For more background on what actually happened, click on the link. Sadly, I didn't see this hit piece at the time . . . we were a News of the World and Sunday Mirror household.

Life & Times: An everyday story? (2024)

The Life and Times column from the December 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

I’m not a soap opera fan. But I do make one exception: the Archers. I’ve tuned into it more or less daily for years and – though I’ve sometimes found the story lines ridiculous, trivial or far-fetched, and have vowed to stop listening, I still find myself drawn back to the goings-on in the fictitious village of Ambridge, to its improbable cast of characters, and to what the BBC used to call ‘an everyday story of country folk’.

Though rarely referencing current news events, the programme has in more recent times taken to including among its story lines ongoing issues of broad social interest. Examples have been drug dealing, coercive control, modern slavery, alcoholism, and, most recently, the crime of perverting the course of justice as committed by one of its teenage characters, George Grundy. George had always been a problematic young man, causing trouble for himself and those around him, but then he took it to a whole new level. He found himself driving a drunken Alice home in her car and when it crashed, endangering the lives of people in an oncoming car. He moved his torpid, inebriated passenger into the driver’s seat to evade responsibility and incriminate her. It worked for quite some time, but then the truth came out and, despite his genuine remorse about what he had done and how it had affected other people’s lives, he was sent down for three years by a stern, unforgiving judge – a sentence perfectly permissible in law.

Before the fictional court proceedings, online discussion abounded among Archers fans about the likely sentence with most seeming to favour a suspended sentence and/or community service, especially given his guilty plea, his repentance and the fact that it was a first offence and no one was seriously hurt in the incident. In fact George had actually put himself at risk by rescuing from the river the people in the car he’d crashed into. But the judge was implacable, and a fearful, desperate George was sent to a prison for older criminals since all young offenders’ institutions were full. This gave rise to much further discussion and protest among listeners. But there was nothing to be done. The law had spoken.

Obviously, the Archers is a fiction. Yet stories like this do shed light on aspects of the way the society we all live in is organised. Most crimes committed in this society are to do with property or money in one form or another – theft, robbery, fraud, etc. Some of these manifestly cause pain, misery or loss to others. Some do not in the sense that when large institutions (banks, building societies, etc) are affected, there are no manifest individual victims. But in all cases, if the perpetrators are found, the system inflicts punishment on them because a society based on property and money cannot allow ‘illegal’ methods of procuring those things to take place without the threat of such punishment. Otherwise the whole basis of that system would risk being undermined. But does a society, even one based on property and money, need to punish those who violate its norms not by stealing or such like but by what can broadly be called antisocial behaviour, in George’s case, for example, trying to blame someone else for your own misdeed?

Well, certain countries, for instance Denmark and New Zealand, practise what is called restorative justice, whereby individuals who commit antisocial acts are asked to face their victims, discuss with them what they have done, and ideally to understand, empathise with them and work with them to repair the harm – and then hopefully to learn lessons for the future. And even in the UK, some courts and judges take the view that, if there is genuine remorse and understanding on the part of an offender who has behaved in an antisocial fashion, a suspended sentence or work in the community is a better solution than locking that person away. Of course, any such solution is always an individual one, since the social and economic inequalities inherent in the system of society we live under – capitalism – and its dog-eat-dog mentality will always provide a fertile breeding ground for what is known as ‘crime’, even if, despite that, most people most of the time exhibit a natural inclination to help rather than to harm others.

This leads on naturally to thoughts of what the situation will be in the moneyless society of voluntary work and free access to all goods and services that socialists advocate and work to bring about. Clearly in that society theft and other ‘property crime’ will be obsolete. There will be no point in ‘stealing’ what is readily available to all. Also, since it will be a society without the coercion of wage and salary work with each member simply working according to their ability and taking according to their needs, we would expect there to be essentially positive connections between its members. However, it would probably be naïve to imagine that it will be a society entirely without personal conflicts or even violent confrontations between individuals. But if such there were and resolution needed to be found, surely this would be in terms of the kind of restorative practice we have already seen happening at least on a small scale even under the current system, so that genuinely repentant or remorseful individuals are given a ‘second chance’ and punishment such as removal of liberty is only considered if that proves unsuccessful.

George in the Archers was not given that ‘second chance’. So when he gets out of prison, will the troublemaker return to Ambridge a reformed character, or will he just continue as before and keep carrying out ‘antisocial’ acts of one kind or another? If what is known to usually happen in the real world is realistically reflected in the Archers, then the second of these options is the more likely. But time will tell.

Howard Moss

Between the Lines: Land of Dopes and Tories (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the October 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

Land of Dopes and Tories

Three cheers for Mark Elder, the conductor who refused to include Rule Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory in The Last Night of the Proms (shown on BBC1 and BBC2 on 15 September) Elder was of the view that:

"the words of those songs come from an age that was able and happy to celebrate Britain's irresistible march across the world. Now if we are actually engaged in combat I would not be happy to proceed. It would seem callous in the extreme. "

The Guardian 8 September

The BBC's response to Elder's sensitivity was in the best tradition of imperial callousness. They sacked him.

Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory, the words of which express English imperial arrogance in all of its declining folly, was first promoted by the British ruling class as workers were being slaughtered during tho First World War. At the time Elgar had issued a Manifesto of National Service which called for an:

"organised effort to carry on the war. Every fit man must be made available . . . for the fighting line or . . . for National Service at home."

Elgar himself spent tho war living in his mansion in Hampstoad, while at the same time German and Austrian musicians were being persecuted by the British state.

The Last Night at the Proms is a ridiculous, anachronistic celebration of a Great Britain, which was a land of no hope and little glory for the vast majority in its finest hour, and is now an appendage of American imperial foreign policy.

'The horror . . . the horror.'

Speaking of Dopes . . .

What is the most popular TV programme in Britain today? The twice daily Neighbours (BBC1. 1.35 pm and 5.35pm) which is brought to us by one Reg Watson, the man who 'created' Crossroads. It is staggeringly bad: awful acting, incredible plots, cliched scripts, a disgusting view of what human beings are all about. Millions of workers love to watch it. The BBC celebrated its one thousandth episode last month (BBC1 13 September).

It has been argued that Neighbours represents a poor man's wish for what it would be like to live in a real community, rather than the alienated heaps in which most of us find ourselves; a sort of late capitalist News From Nowhere. Others argue that the programme's success is the fresh good looks of its actors. Or maybe its success is thanks to its popularity with the under-twelves who regard it as truly great drama. Who knows?

But has anyone thought that a period of cultural history which will be remembered for the acting of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan is not one in which songs celebrating hope and glory are appropriate?

Speaking of Tories . . . 

By far the funniest TV moment of the last month was watching Enoch Powell (Talking to Myself, BBC2, 10.20pm. 7.9.90). This new series allows famous people to both ask and answer the questions in a ten-minute interview. Powell sounded like a dishwasher on the blink having a pompous talk with an air-raid siren Of course, he is not to be blamed for his strangely whining voice, even if it is hideously full of affectations.

One Powell is a slightly barmy fanatic in the cause of capitalism. Two Powells are totally round the bend. Powell told Powell that the greatest moment in his life had been when he had been asked to join the British army and give unqualified and unquestioning loyalty to the British Empire. We know what Powell will have been doing on The Last Night of the Proms — singing Rule Britannia! as a duet.

Speaking of Dopey Tories . . .

There are times when video machines come in very handy. A politician says something and you can't quite believe that anyone can be that stupid. And then you play it back and the wonder of technology allows you to see that you were wrong to doubt.

Such a moment came in The Walden Interview (ITV. 1pm. 9 September) when Walden asked William Waldergrave. the British Foreign Office Minister, when the government would consider that Iraq had been defeated.

The first requirement, said Waldergrave. is that "liberty must be restored in Kuwait". It was the "restored" that led my finger to the play-back button. Since when has there been "liberty" in Kuwait?

It is a country ruled by unelected, semi-feudal dictators, put in power by the British. It is a country where only 60,000 people out of a population of 2 million have the vote. It is a country where women have no political rights, including voting. Is that the "liberty" which Waldergrave seeks to restore? Is that why British and American workers in uniform will die? Land of hope and glory? Hang your heads in shame, those who have been foolish enough to fall for the absurdities of nationalism.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Heart of a Heartless World (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the September 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Heart of a Heartless World

Marx saw religion as "the sigh of the oppressed". As oppression imposes itself upon people in ever new ways, from the crushing weight of the credit card to the mind-numbing sterility of Madonna, the religious cries in the wilderness become more pathetic, more ridiculous, more religious than orthodox religion. Everyman (BBC1, 10.30pm, 4 August) offered a glimpse into the crazy world of the Kensington Temple, an evangelical church for born-again inmates. They screamed that Jesus is Alive in much the way that born-again Stalinists used to stand on street comers yelling that inflation had been abolished in Albania. The spectacle is highly amusing, until you think that these are potentially intelligent beings throwing themselves before the mercy of an all-powerful invisibility above the clouds.

The documentary showed how one woman had turned from stealing and drug-dealing to running aerobic classes for nifty Christians and reading the Bible with her boyfriend instead of sleeping with him. Clearly, for her the religious hallucinations offered by faith gave a better escape route than the buzz from cocaine. Members of the Kensington Temple wander round street markets offering salvation to wage slaves looking for cheap goods. Fortunately, most of the people approached by them in the documentary told them that whatever else they needed, they did not want to find the Lord. If Christianity is to have a future in places like Britain where most workers are not interested in falling to their knees as a strategy for escape, it is the loud-mouthed, emotionally-crippling, morally-obnoxious evangelicals who will carry the torch. By and large, though, the workers of the more developed capitalist countries will have little time for religion. Secular capitalism creates new gods, one of the oddest of whom is the man who died fourteen years ago as a drugged-exit, drunk-out obese clone who was too incapacitated to even wipe his own backside: he spent his last months wearing nappies, apparently.

The cult of Elvis is a minor form of secular worship in the USA, as it is in Britain. Viva Elvis (C4, 10pm, 12 August) was a journey to the outer reaches of human absurdity. There was a woman who has an Elvis museum in her house, including such exhibits as the Great One’s toenail clippings and a wart which he once had removed by a surgeon. Another crank had a shrine to Elvis in his living room which was constantly attended by himself and his son — Elvis, of course. An Elvis look-alike competition was shown in which grown men performed before screaming women who looked like recent escapees from the Kensington Temple. In Mexico a man called El Vez translates Elvis's profound lyrics into Spanish so that those hitherto stuck with the limited offerings of an Aztec past can now sing and sigh to their heart's content about hound dogs and other pressing questions of the day. Why all of this searching for gods? People who are made to feel small and powerless look for something which is big and powerful. They look and are offered a menu of Jesus, Elvis, not to mention Ron Hubbard and Lenin. Shut your eyes and believe in religion; open them wide and you might just catch sight of how big and powerful we all are if only we decide to be.

A Vindication

The newspaper, Stage and Television Today (1 August) interviewed Michael Ferguson who has been executive editor of the awful EastEnders since 1989. Jane Gamer, the interviewer, reports that "He has delved deep into soap psyche and seen battles of good versus evil, the foundation stone of Passion Plays, plus myriad struggles of Common Man and an ability to tap a deep-rooted need in millions of viewers". In this column we have repeatedly stated how soap operas are moralising mouthpieces appealing to alienated workers. EastEnders, in particular, offers its viewers simplistic caricatures of Good and Evil to be followed or avoided in line with the consequences depicted in the drama. We were criticised in the tabloid rag, The People, for making such observations, but now we have it from the horse's mouth; says Ferguson, ". . . there is a strong tie in it for me with the morality plays, there is good and evil. Nick Cotton is the personification of evil . . . Dot Cotton is a good character, she has a high sense of moral duty." Wage slaves used to go to Churches to be told what their moral duties were. These days, those who are not having evangelical orgasms in the Kensington Temple or paying pilgrimage to Elvis's left toenail are watching Saint Dot fight the twice-weekly holy struggle against Wicked Nick to see how the good life must be led.

Cat Sense

There is an irritating ad for Whiskas which says that if cats could do so they would buy Whiskas. Cats have more sense than to buy anything. Cats take what they need. Cats do not go shopping or carry credit cards or have overdrafts or make adverts selling horrible, cheap rubbish. My cat runs a mile every time he smells Whiskas. Come to that, he never goes to Church, worships no gods and has never been seen near the hi-fi when Elvis is on. And he has no sophisticated consciousness like humans do. Come to think of it, humans would not buy Whiskas, or any other commodity for sale, if they thought about it for more than five minutes.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: All the news that's fit to finance (1987)

'What did the Socialist Standard say about us, luv?'

The Between the Lines column from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

All the news that's fit to finance

Brass Tacks (BBC2,8.30pm. Wed. 26 August and 2 September) devoted two programmes to investigating the question of whether Britain has fair, decent, honest, free newspapers. Now. these adjectives are not ones which immediately spring to mind when one thinks of the press. Distorted, debased, dishonest and unfree are the more appropriate words which offer themselves as descriptions. Surely there can be few people in Britain who are unaware that if your name is Murdoch or Maxwell the press is just as free as you want to pay for it to be, but if you are looking for information you will be wasting your time sifting through most of the outpourings of Wapping Lies Ltd. and the other millionaire mouthpieces which constitute the illusion of the free British press.

In the first of the programmes Brass Tacks looked at four new newspapers and the editorial problems faced by the men who control them. Being commodities — like cans of dog food (but more tasteless) and strippergram girls — the newspapers have a principal aim to sell more copies, regardless of the journalistic standards which have to be abandoned in that sordid pursuit. So, as the newly appointed editor of the News on Sunday pointed out, despite the left-wing claims of that newspaper before and when it was established, the dictates of the market meant that vicar-beat-choirgirl-with-elephant-trunk type stories had to give way to exposes of brutality by the Greater Manchester police. You don’t make profits out of principles. The programme looked at the Today newspaper which has recently been pocketed by Rupert Murdoch, the man who has done for journalistic freedom what Adolf Hitler did for community harmony. David Montgomery. Murdoch’s editor of Today, summed up the answer to those people who stamp their feet with anger when it is suggested that the handful of capitalists who own the press are the dictators who decide what will go in it: "Clearly there’s bound to be a coinciding of Rupert Murdoch’s philosophy and the philosophy of his editors, but we have disagreements with him about style and content and we argue our corner. I suppose if the difference becomes so great then someone’s got to leave and it probably won't be Rupert Murdoch".

The second “Brass Tacks” analysis of the press took the form of a studio discussion. Facing the four editors who sat as a panel were people who had been victims of press distortion and manipulation. Predictably, the discussion divided into liberal sentiments about fairness in opposition to the real voice of capitalism: if it sells print it, if lies sell better make them big ones, if they will buy soft porn why give them news? Mike Gabbert, who was then editorial director of the Sunday Sport and is now editor of the new, "lustier" Daily Star, participated in the debate with all the elegance and eloquence of a football hooligan with a word processor. In response to women who objected to selling newspapers by displaying naked female flesh in between editorials moralising against rape, Gabbert blurted that they only held those views because they were too fat. This oaf needed a free education, not a free press. 

Speaking of press distortion 

While we are on the subject of the gutter press, let us turn our attention to The People (a nasty little Sunday rag) of 16 August. In it Ian Brandes writes a column headlined TV SOAP IS JUST A PLOT BY THE STATE!’ The article purports to be about comments made about soap operas, and Crossroads in particular, which appeared in this column in the August Socialist Standard. This party was not contacted by Brandes before he wrote his distorted nonsense. Despite letters from this journal to Brandes and to his editor insisting that the lies in The People article be corrected, we have not even received an acknowledgement, let alone a published correction. So. let us look at Brandes' article with a view to showing just how honest the dear old British press is. The article begins as follows: "The loony Labour left has launched a blistering attack on TV soap operas as the modern opium of the masses'." But the article deals only with comments made in this column in this journal which is published by The Socialist Party of Great Britain, a party which was formed two years before the Labour Party and has no connection with Labour or its left-wing. Brandes need only to have contacted us to find this out — or, easier still, he need only have read the August issue of this journal in order to find at least three articles referring explicitly to The Socialist Party’s opposition to the Labour Party. Second lie: The People article's headline suggests that we are claiming that soaps are a conspiracy or plot to fix workers' minds: in the article Brandes writes that "It (The Socialist Standard) claims that the nation's weekly favourites are just part of a sinister capitalist plot to keep viewers docile, while the bosses exploit their power." Compare this to what the Standard article actually stated: "It is not being claimed that soaps are a conspiracy to make workers accept capitalism". Third lie: in The People's account of our article it is said that we assert that "There would be no need at all for TV soaps" in a socialist society. What we printed was rather different: "Will there be soap operas in a socialist society? Who can tell? It is not for a small minority of socialists in 1987 to lay down a blueprint for how the socialist majority will decide to live”. In no sense can that be interpreted as stating that soap operas will not be shown on TV once we establish a socialist society. And lie number four: The People falsely claims that we were saying that there will be no soap operas in a socialist society: "There would be no need for TV soaps at all, the journal claims, if Britain would only embrace socialism". This column has never advocated the absurd, nationalist notion of "British socialism". If Brandes had taken the trouble to read the inside cover of the August Standard (as in this one) he would have read a series of clear questions and answers about what we stand for; in answer to the question. "What is the meaning of socialism?" we state in terms which are clear enough for even a People journalist to comprehend: "Socialism does not yet exist. When it is established it must be on a worldwide basis, as an alternative to the outdated system of world capitalism". So. in a newspaper article of less than two hundred words Ian Brandes and The People make four erroneous. dishonest statements about the contents of this column. What are they going to do about it? We'll be letting you know.

An after-dinner ramble 

UK Late (C4. Friday) is described as a programme of witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion. Quite who finishes their dinner at 11.30pm is uncertain, but we might suspect that if they take as long to cook the kebabs as they do to get to the point in these witty, punchy intellectual rambles they were lucky to have had dinner at all. On 4 September the collection of witty, punchy (rather dull, actually) conversationalists included a judge and a second-hand car dealer who had served a sentence or two for fraud. "We really think alike on most things, us two" said the judge, after an hour of exuding gas about crime and punishment. The criminologist, Jock Young, who is about as witty and punchy as a 1953 Boys ' Own annual, tried in vain to persuade the assembled guests to understand that criminality is a label usually placed by the state upon poor people, while at the same time City robbers (sorry, "entrepreneurs") are raking in millions as a result of their fiddles. What he did not mention were the millions more pounds being accumulated by the capitalists in the City, not as a result of illegal dealing, but due to good old honest robbery called making a profit, i.e. exploiting wage labour. The witty, punchy, after-dinner discussion about the meaning of class on 21 August was no more satisfying. The TV audience (that is. those of us who don't have after-dinner shouting matches of our own. so have to resort to the telly for a bit of genuine, semi-pissed prejudice) were treated to a collection of people who were able to say all kinds of punchy and witty things except a) what class means, b) why it exists, and c) how we can get rid of it. For answers to those questions read The Socialist Standard - as opposed to the half-witted, punch-drunk Sunday People.

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: A Simpler Truth (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Simpler Truth

In the month that has seen the parasitical pigs fighting round the ITV trough to see who can win the fattest franchises, the state-funded BBC announced that it will lay off 104 workers in its News and Current Affairs section so that it can slash its budget by £2 million. The BBC's new Funding The Future policy statement states that there will be a £75 million cut in BBC expenditure by 1993. This will be paid for by laying off workers, making cheaper programmes and selling off the big-audience productions to commercial companies who can pump them for profit. (For example, BBC's Question Time is to be sold off — just as all the leftists who appear on it have sold out.) The future of British TV, dominated by big-money outfits who are to buy up the deregulated commercial channels and a cut-price, game-show dominated BBC, will consist of more televised Ratners for the proles while the bosses entertain themselves in the casinos and opera houses on money they have acquired by robbing us.

Speaking of robbery, The Simple Truth concert (BBC2, 12 May, 8pm - 1 am) is worthy of comment. The concert, to raise money for the Kurds and other victims of "disasters" (for which read "every day occurrences of the profit system), was the brainchild (to refer to the parentage loosely) of top Tory, Jeffrey Archer. Young Jeff, it will be recalled, is a pretty generous sort of guy: prostitutes who have never met him before have only to drop him a line requesting £200 and it's in the next post. Archer hoped that the concert would raise £10 million. Viewers were urged to phone in with £5 donations. £10 million — a lot of money, eh? Until you start to think that

• The daily cost of the bombs dropped on the Kurds in Iraq during the recent Gulf war, which Archer proudly supported, was far greater than the amount collected by the concert.
• The daily rate of interest required from African states, where millions are dying, is greater than the money collected by the concert.
• The proportion of weekly income of an average British worker which £5 constitutes is a thousand times greater than £5 out of the weekly profits obtained on the basis of working-class robbery by Archer, the multi-millionaire creep.

Their Music

Another thing about The Simple Truth timewasting was the chronic irrelevance of nearly all of the music to any kind of real social change. The five hours of the concerts were filled with melodies to make us moronic. From the talentless drivel of super-hyped New Kids on the Block to the sub-Sinatra tripe of Whitney Houston, the whole show had nothing to say about what is actually going on in the world. The following Sunday your reviewer was at the Levellers' Day commemoration in Burford and heard the superb Peggy Seeger singing songs of real class awareness. She is not the only one writing and singing such material; there is a huge growth of singers, writers and bands coming out of and reflecting the experiences of the working class. What they have to sing about relates to the profit-caused problems of the Kurds, the starving Africans and Bangladeshis. But you don’t find the likes of Archer or the state-run BBC giving exposure to them. They might make the wage slaves think too much.

The Worst Show on Earth

Neighbours (BBC1, whenever you switch on) is in no danger of making the wage slaves think too much. A prerequisite for following the events of this implausible load of old tosh is that you do not think at all. Last month junior Education Minister, Michael Fallon, called for the programme to be banned, saying that it dulls peoples's senses. His Labour opposite number. Jack Straw, said that it was "a pretty trashy programme". Quite why a Tory Minister should object to workers’ minds being dulled (how else could they win an election?) or a Labour leader should object to trash (who but a collector of such would read the lie-a-minute Labour manifesto?) we do not know. We do know that the BBC, representing the true voice of the ruling class, put out a statement saying that Neighbours was a good programme because it offers moral education to its audience. Funny that: when this column exposed the predecessor of Neighbours, Crossroads for being a vehicle for just such moralistic propaganda we were atttacked by an article in The People newspaper suggesting that our claim was the loony delusion of deranged Marxists

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: Male violence (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the June 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Male violence

Channel Four's Brookside (Mon and Wed 8pm, Fri 8.30pm) has woken from its recent slumbers in a controversial attempt to lift its ratings, now down to little over three million. By introducing the gruesome Trevor Jordache character—a wife beater and child abuser— Brookside has once again set the daytime TV shows a-chattering. And with good reason. Brookside have simply introduced the best (and most original) storyline into a British soap for ages.

The background to the story has been that the Jordache family, of mother and two teenage daughters, had previously been moved to get [away from] husband and father Trevor, convicted of physical assault and sexual abuse. After ferrying them around bedsits for two years, the authorities have now found the Jordaches an inadequate “safe house” on Brookside Close. Unfortunately they have been beset by Trevor's unwelcome attentions once again on his release from prison. Having wiled his way back into the Jordache household with a cry of poverty, the plot has essentially been revolving around Trevor's increasingly hideous behaviour and the plans of the desperate mother and eldest daughter to kill him rather than face his continued assaults—or the alternative of eviction from their new "safe house” on Brookside Close if the authorities find out about Trevor’s return.

The portrayal of this sticky situation has been graphic, bringing into the homes of millions the torment suffered by those women and children with a monster in their midst, a monster mentally equipped for his wrong-doing by a society where sex is cheap and dirty and where violence appears as the "easy” solution to problems. The most interesting aspect of the story is the way in which, beyond the ratings hype, it has illustrated how monumentally badly capitalism copes with the situations it itself has helped create.

Viewers may well ask themselves whether a two-year spell couped up in a dingy prison cell was appropriate for a man whose actions towards those he professes to love have persistently bordered on the pathological. Dealing with any such individuals in a socialist society would not be easy, and no-one pretends it would be, but as Brookside has amply demonstrated, capitalism is at a complete loss, unable to provide the institutional framework to help those individuals who may not be able to help their own actions, let alone provide a situation where mother and children can live in safety and comfort.

Life should never be as brutal as it is for the imaginary Jordaches of Brookside, but unfortunately for thousands of families in the real world of capitalism, it most certainly is.

Female equality

If any show has demonstrated why feminism on its own is not enough it was BBC2’s “Ladies in Lines". Forty Minutes (4 May 9.50pm).This documentary about a platoon of raw female recruits into the Australian army showed why "equality” under capitalism is not generally much of an equality worth having. In this particular instance it was, to be charitable, equal opportunity to be treated like a lump of shit.

The young women involved, arriving with parents, boyfriends and teddybears were subjected to a daily routine that would not have been entirely out of place in a Stalinist labour camp. A quarter of those who started the basic training with the ritual hair-cropping were unable to compile the course and many who did seemed to spend a fair proportion of their time in the charge room, in tears, or both.

Why these individuals should have chosen to enter the army is a tribute to the strength of the society-wide propaganda which eulogizes the virtues of discipline, aggression and competition—supposedly "male values”—above all others. Indeed, virtually all the young women involved testified to an identity crisis. Although they knew they were really women, they were forced to behave as they imagined men behaved.

All in all it proved to be an unedifying sight. Many of the women eventually proved that they could be like male soldiers. but no one, including the women themselves, were really prepared to suggest why this might be a good thing. Beyond correctly identifying the emptiness of the life offered in civvy street, none seemed able to give a credible reason for their presence as women in the army.

In truth, this was not really their fault, as no such reason exists. How on earth can there be a realistic salvation for women under capitalism through simply acting as maniacally as men have so often being trained to behave? Could female soldiers really be the giant step forward for womankind that was implied? Surely not.

As socialists have always suspected, capitalism's reaction to an inequality is invariably to sink those previously at a more humane level to a more barbaric one. thereby giving the appearance of evening things out a bit. Across the world capitalism’s tendency has been to barbarise those who are most vulnerable to its unyielding propaganda, and the "ladies in lines" were as good an example of this as is possible to get.

Dave Perrin

The internet and capitalism (4) (2000)

From the April 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 3

In this concluding article in our series on the impact of the Internet we examine its possible effect on community.

Anyone who comes from a small village knows that one can get too much community. The close and frequently closed communities of feudalism were suffocating, parochial worlds with narrow horizons and narrow minds, a sink of intellectual inertia and ritual. Yet though the club wasn’t inspiring, one’s membership at least was not in doubt. Alienation from other humans was unknown.

One hundred years ago in Britain, urban workers lived together, worked together, went to school, got drunk, went on holiday or strike together, and were buried together. In such a milieu, an idea could take hold, and then spread. People were influenced by each other, they had common ground, they thought as a group, and they were not afraid to talk.

Today, after fifty years of the Welfare State and worker mobility, nobody seems to know or care who lives next-door. Friends are scattered and remote. Isolation is normal, experience and consciousness are private, discrete and discreet. Life is a claustrophobic micro-universe containing a TV and a closed front door. Unfamiliarity breeds contempt as our greatest desire is for the drunks and the drug addicts, the bores and the Christians to leave us alone. We don’t have community because we don’t want community.

Contrary to the claims of the Internet fraternity who see something new and exciting about “virtual communities”, we in the West have already been living in virtual communities for years. Virtual, because we have been remote workers, remote from our community, remote, one might say, from ourselves, stuck in motorway madness chasing remote jobs, going on ever more remote holidays, or slumped exhausted on the sofa with—you guessed it—the remote control. And when we’re at work, in spare moments, we gossip with people we barely know about people who don’t even exist.

Soft soap and schadenfreude 

Nowhere is the virtual community more realised than in the TV soap, the ultimate cry for help from an alienated society. Now the pundits talk sickeningly about “virtual e-soaps” where the viewer—you— can give these “people” advice. The soap characters are one-dimensional caricatures whose only purpose is to provide a cathartic release for workers after a hard day’s slog. It is simply an exercise in schadenfreude, that delight in other people’s problems so essential to those whose own problems could scarcely get any worse.

Yet nobody ever stops to consider that, quite apart from the characters, there is an even greater peculiarity about the soaps which is manifestly out of touch with reality. In Marxian terms, it is their economic base. None of the characters works away from the area. In fact, most if not all of them are sole traders, in other words, artisans. You get the publican, the tea-shop owner, the local entrepreneur, the corner-shop owner, the market-stall owner, the garage owner, and so on and so forth. Each works for himself or herself. Each owns his or her own means of production. Comfortingly, each has an income which we can guess is in rough parity with the other characters’ incomes. One or two of them employ people as staff, or more correctly as apprentices, but these are always locals too, with ambitions one day to start their own local business or to inherit the present one.

It is obvious that this improbable scenario is devised purely in order to allow the creation of a local community. Clearly it would not be possible for an Eastenders character to work in Brighton or Oxford but still appear regularly in the show. And community is very important in the soaps, because it provides the dynamic for drama but also because it provides vicarious relationships for real people to “relate to”.

Back in the 19th century a very popular reformist programme was that of Proudhon, a programme which in essence involved a society of artisans. Proudhon was very concerned at the tendency of employers to exploit employees, and thought that if society was made up of artisans then no such exploitation would take place, each worker would own their own means of production, and would sell their products at the market rate, since the market is an unbiased process of checks and counters, this would tend to balance incomes and prices and provide an equitable system of commodity production and sale, but without the massive problems of class division and exploitation.

There are people today who still believe this, Marx’s efforts to debunk it notwithstanding. The soaps encourage this belief. They provide an apparently working and stable model of an artisan economy, upon which is mounted a community-based superstructure which, despite being populated largely by cartoon characters, is fiercely attractive to the community-starved worker. The fact that this economy is fiction is overlooked. The focus of the plots is always kept away from the underlying economy, and while protagonists frequently experience exaggerated personal problems the artisan economy their community relies on remains perpetually in the background, innocuous and unchallenged. Markets do not change. Economic conflicts do not arise. Nobody goes bust. The plot-writers do not wish to present themselves with insoluble dilemmas – if they allow a character to lose their livelihood, they must either drop them from the soap or find them some other plausible occupation within the narrow confines of the community. It is in general easier for the writers not to let this situation arise. One insidious consequence is that people are always the focus of problems, while their economic circumstances are never seen to be the source of any conflict or difficulty.

Artisan production did exist in the late feudal era, when commodity production was in its infancy, but it was very rapidly overtaken by modern capitalism. As a model of commodity production, the artisan society becomes very quickly unstable in reality. To believe in a form of capitalism based on sole traders is to believe a fairy tale or, indeed, a soap opera. It is essentially a step backwards in time, a reversion to an earlier form. People want to believe in an artisan society (many idealistic left-wingers call this “socialism”, and it is intrinsic in much of the thinking of Greens) because in reality they want their communities back, and see this as a way to get it.

Doing your homework 

And yet, bizarrely, it is just possible, despite this, that history might repeat itself. The real revolution of the Internet isn’t online, it’s offline, in the world of the “homeworker”. If global destruction does not intervene beforehand, a new form of hi-tech artisanal society might indeed appear in the West. As production becomes computerised and the Internet pervades the workplace, more and more people are going to find it feasible to work from home, or from “hot-desks”, or from their portable “teledesk”. Due to the difficulty of defining “homeworking”, estimates for home-workers vary in the US from 10 to 15 million workers, or about 14% of the labour force, up from 4 million in 1990 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, quoted in American Demographics, July 1999: www.demographics.com). In Britain there are about 1 million home or teleworkers, and an estimated “52 percent of the working population will be homeworking by the year 2010” (Teleworking Survey: Link). That this has not happened faster or sooner can be ascribed simply to traditional business structures: “The barriers to teleworking tend to be managerial rather than technological. Traditional attitudes need to be chipped away at to make it happen.”

Community?

In addition, the casualisation of work contracts means that the main working pattern of the future may be freelance. Operating from home, many workers may find themselves doing not one but several different jobs for different companies, not as employees but as sub-contractors. They will in effect become sole traders, online artisans plying their wares and skills in a virtual marketplace. Although surveys show that homeworking is the most desired option by hi-tech workers (Washington Post, February 11, 1999) it is the capitalist class who stand to gain most, by saving on wages, costs and overheads, and by eroding worker’s rights:

  Behind the technological part of the information highway is the business community’s attempt to use the new information and communications technology to shift power from governments and the nation state to multinational corporations, from the public to the private sector, from small business to big business, from a unionized to non-unionized environment, from citizens to consumers, and from group rights to individual rights (Unions and the Information Highway: http://www.ofl-fto.on.ca/ftp/ppaper5.txt).

Even though homeworking would save a Londoner on average 10 working weeks per year in travel time (Home Office Partnership: http://www.hop.co.uk/) the chances are the worker won’t gain the full benefit:

the current wisdom is that up to half the commuting hours saved by telecommuting employees may be given directly back to the company as additional work hours. The Gartner Group estimates that telecommuting improves employee productivity by 10 percent to 40 percent (American Demographics).

Yet the home-working revolution is likely to bring some fundamental advantages which no amount of capitalist exploitation can outweigh:

 The community will benefit in the longer term as larger numbers of home workers abandon the peak-hour rush. There will be fewer cars on the road, less air pollution and traffic congestion, fewer health and work-induced stress problems and more community participation (International Journal of Career Management Conference, August 1995: http://www.mcb.co.uk/liblink/ijcm)

From the Tudors to telecentres 

But then there arises a new social dilemma for which people will have to devise a new solution. The isolation and domestic interruptions which working from home imply and which are cited by many workers as problematic may result in the development of a new kind of working environment, the work or telecentre. Just as the artisans of the Tudor age began to find it convenient and cheaper, as well as more sociable, to band together under one roof in order to share tools, materials and heating, so online workers of the future may find it desirable to band together under one local roof.

The result may be that local people will once again be able to work together locally. That they will all be working for different companies in different parts of the world hardly matters. The implications for the rebirth of local communities are obvious. The car culture evaporates and motorways empty of commuters as workers walk the five minutes to their local telecentre, greet their friends and neighbours, sign on to their individual company, and discuss politics and local affairs in their lunch and tea-breaks. In addition, the non-gender specific nature of teleworking means a sea-change in the realm of sexual politics and childcare, as homelife and working life converge in the local community matrix and gender becomes less significant than at any time since the agricultural revolution.

The social, cultural, political and environmental consequences of such a change in western working patterns are hard to overstate. But the class war won’t go away, indeed it may intensify. If unions presently fear the atomisation of an isolated homeworking labour force, the communalisation of working may change for the better the means by which workers organise in defence of their pay and conditions. Unions, previously based first on individual trades and latterly on individual companies, may in the future find individual telecentres the locus of organisation. This would cut across the traditional corporate divisions as workers from various sectors of industry, commerce, finance and other services band together to defend themselves. As capitalism becomes global, workers will need to globalise their strategies of defence, and one way to do this would be to network between these local centres.

Déja vu

But in yet another twist, as capital becomes ever less dependant on geographical considerations, companies may find it expedient to invade these local telecentres and take them over, lock stock and barrel. The way to do this would be to buy into the management of these centres, the capitalist bodies which administer everything from catering to arbitration, and then gradually take over the role of central employer, accountant and contractor.

Nevertheless, even in this worst case scenario, workers would have achieved, or rather re-achieved, the community which they lost in the period after the Second World War. The significance of this should not be underestimated. Community is essential to socialism, indeed community and communism are really the same word. A society with a strong sense of community is a society which can communicate the idea of a socialist revolution, and can bring it about. Far from representing some terminal retreat into virtual reality, the Internet may finally precipitate a wholesale flight out of one. If the future online world leads, not to a society of isolated electronic cave-dwellers, but to a new flowering of community working and activity, and to an explosion of communication, the prospects for social revolution cease to look unlikely, and begin to look possible, and even probable.

Paddy Shannon

Between the Lines: Know what I mean, John? (1993)

The Between the Lines column from the March 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Know what I mean, John?

Given a choice between being stranded in the Sahara Desert or spending a night drinking in The Queen Vic I would without hesitation start to pack my flask. The Queen Vic, focal point for the gathering of all those lovable East Enders, is Hell on earth. Its resident drinkers are amongst the most unlovable lowlives ever to have stained a television screen.

There are the vicious Mitchell brothers (Grant the ex-army psychopath and Phil the cheating lout); there is their moronically empty sister, Sam, whose big aim in life is to make it on to Page Three; and her pathetic wimp of a wage-slave husband, Ricky; not forgetting her spite-filled wastrel of a best mate, Mandy. Then there are the older East Enders: "Arfur" Fowler who has graduated from nicking the Christmas fund to cheating on his boring wife; Pete Beale, the bar-stool philosopher worthy of the National Front; the anti-social, self-pitying Pat Butcher who drove while over the limit and then expects sympathy because she killed a girl; the Bible-bashing Dot Cotton and her thieving, murderous family; and Tricky Dicky, the conniving northerner who isn't fit to clean the pavements down Coronation Street. The characters in East Enders are all detestable specimens of the worst in humanity. "So don’t watch it", I hear you cry. But that is not the point. Millions do. And they are shown the images which they are shown for a reason. Of course, part of the reason is to entertain: keep the proleys amused with simple dramatic episodes twice a week. But why these characters, why this image of humanity?

The East Enders are how they are because that is how the makers of TV (mainly "educated” people who imagine themselves to be creative and middle class) think that the working class is. When they see young working-class men they expect to see the Mitchell crooks, when they see young female wage-slaves they expect the Sams and Mandys and Sharons, when they see middle-aged proles they are surprised if they do not find a Pete Beale or a Frank Butcher — or better still a Big Ron. a huge proletarian lump who never speaks in more than monosyllabic grunts.

It is well known that if teachers expect non-whites or girls to be inferior learners their prejudiced prophecies will often result in reality: the non-whites or the girls fail in line with the prediction. And if the TV producers expect the workers to be mindless low-lives and they transmit that image twice a week it has the same effect.

East Enders is an insult to the working class. There are working-class pubs, some of them in the East End, where people discuss music and films and books and even political ideas. Some of them do it intelligently — more intelligently than in the pretentious late-night "culture" discussions on BBC2. But it does not suit the makers of East Enders to depict that image of our class. Let the workers think they're dumb and they're more likely to act dumb.

Without a doubt, there are pubs like the Queen Vic. There are plenty of nasty, narrow and mean-minded wage-slaves. Just as there are plenty of bent cops. But it is rather more than an accident that The Bill shows us only the occasional bent cop, whereas East Enders shows us nothing but working-class trash. The choice is political.

Know what I mean, Boris?

The cultural journey from Albert Square to Red Square is not all that far these days. Last summer Russian TV showed a 24-part Mexican soap opera made in the 1970s. Seventy percent of the Russian viewing audience watched it: a staggering 200 million daily viewers, making it the most popular TV drama in the history of the world. Set amongst the privileged echelons of Mexican society, it was called The Rich Also Cry. Something handy to think about when you’re queueing for sausages, eh?

Capitalist nonsense for beginners

Germany Means Business (BBC2, Tuesday, 2 February) was a rather dull documentary about how the Dresdner Bank is becoming the largest banking instituted in eastern Germany and is training young east Germans to become good little bank employees. The thrill of these poor wage-slaves at the chance to be trained to work in a bank (which is a lot more rewarding than learning the thrills of mass unemployment) was pathetic to see. The trainers were teaching them all the nonsense of how to see themselves as being part of the prosperity of the bank. In the final scene the trainees were shown at a dinner which was laid on for them. As for the growing number of unemployed workers in eastern Germany, one fast-learning girl explained that their trouble was that they didn't want to work hard. She could go far.

Killers on the box

Last month saw a set-piece moral debate about whether it was ethical to have shown a TV interview with a serial killer. In the same month both BBC and ITV carried interviews with Malcolm Rifkind, the Minister of Defence. After the bombing of Baghdad they interviewed the glorified mass killer. Storming Norman. What is the difference?

Steve Coleman

Between the Lines: The Born Villain (1990)

The Between the Lines column from the July 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Born Villain

Is Nick Cotton trying to poison his mother? (EastEnders, BBCl. Tuesday and Thursday. 7.30pm). This is not the most significant question of the early 1990s. It is not like asking, Will the Russian Empire survive under Gorbachev or Will Germany re-unify or Will Dr Habgood become the new Archbishop of Cant. Less important maybe, but a lot more workers are concerned about the case of Nick Cotton.

Let us try to explain to readers who are used to only watching TV documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine or televised operas on BBC2. EastEnders is one of the most watched programmes in Britain. Millions of workers relate to the made-up goings-on in Albert Square with a passion which we socialists usually reserve for the Paris Commune. Dot Cotton is a familiar character in this soap opera She is the sort of woman that we have all encountered once, usually for too long. She invents illnesses to torment herself with, indulges in futile gossip and is a dedicated Christian. She is the sort of person that every soap opera needs. Her husband. Charlie, is a cockney ne'er-do-well: the sort of hapless proletarian dope one might expect to find in a George Gissing novel. Charlie is a petty-crook and adulterer and he makes Dot's life more miserable than it would otherwise be We are supposed to laugh at Charlie—the affable old rogue. Now, Dot and Charlie have a son called Nick. He is a villain. A real soap opera villain. A proletarian Flashman. The sort of lout who would have sharpened the knives for Reggie Kray in' the Sixties and carried the leaflets for the National Front in the 1970s. Where Charlie is pathetic. Nick is dangerous. Over the years Nick Cotton has served as the East Ender without a heart of gold—heartless, conscienceless, morally off the edge.

As we have pointed out in this column on previous occasions, EastEnders is essentially a twentieth-century version of a medieval morality play. Its function is to show the proles what is right and what is wrong and how it shall come to pass that wrongdoers shall perish. (In Coronation Street the adulterous thief, Alan Bradley, literally did perish—knocked down and killed by a Blackpool tram as he was about to murder Rita). Some weeks ago Nick Cotton returned to Albert Square after a lengthy absence at Her Majesty's Pleasure He returned at a time when the ever-miserable Dot was rather less miserable because she had just won a fortune in a local newspaper competition. (Documentaries about pollution in the Ukraine are so much easier to follow, for a start) Anyway, Nick returned.

The inhabitants of Albert Square were less than happy to see that this born villain had resurfaced. But there lies the question. Was Nick Cotton a born villain? Is anyone born to be anti-social? Nick claimed to have transformed his personality and been "born again". The street-wise locals were unconvinced. "Once a villain always a villain", concluded Pete Beale, the fruit stall-holder and moral philosopher. Well, to cut the story short—bearing in mind that your reviewer and several million others followed the saga for many weeks—it turned out that Nick Cotton was far from a changed being. In fact, his reason for returning to his mother was to poison her so that he could get her money. The details of this tedious plot are not important. But the message should not escape us: the conservative belief that leopards never change their spots. Rogues are just like that—it's in their genes or something. Capitalist ideology is obsessed with the illusion of innate evil. EastEnders has served to fuel a sense of popular cynicism which sustains that ideology and helps to prop up those old myths about human nature

Old Myths and Ancient Bigots

Last month saw the unelected Lords' decision to prevent the prosecution of the old Nazis who had taken refuge in Britain, and also we witnessed the sick activities of newer Nazis who desecrated a Jewish cemetery in North London, leaving swastikas behind as a mark of offence. Two TV programmes made it clear that such mindless racism is still alive and . . . kicking is the appropriate verb, it would seem.

In Russia the Jew-hating racists of Pamyat are spewing out their poison in the new atmosphere of glasnost. World in Action (ITV, 4 June. 8.30pm) showed how Jewish workers in Leningrad were being indiscriminately attacked by these fascists. One boy in a Leningrad school was kicked down a flight of stone stairs by a PE teacher who had told him that he did not like Jews; a Jewish woman interviewed explained how her flat was broken into by Pamyat racists who killed her husband in the course of the vicious attack. Dmitri Vasiliev, a personification of poisonous ignorance who leads Pamyat, blamed the Jews for the Bolshevik revolution; "They may denounce Communism today, but they gave it to us as a present. Because Marx is a Jew and, I might add, they crucified Christ". So, after over seventy years of state-capitalist rule in the name of socialism the state has not even succeeded in wiping out the cancer of racism inside Russia. On the contrary, the utter failure of the Bolshevik experiment has led workers to seek scapegoats in order to take out their anger at the wretchedness of their impoverished lives.

But why make Jews the scapegoat? Shadow On The Cross (C4. 6 June, 9pm) was a very informative documentary about the historical role of Christianity as a machine for propagating anti-semitic racism. The programme quoted from the bigoted writings of the Christian saints (St Gregory: "The Jews are murderers of the Lord, rebels and detesters of God companions of the devil, darkeners of the mind . . . enemies of all that is beautiful" ) and showed how most of the anti-Jewish actions of the Nazis had been predated by papal edicts. For example, in medieval Europe, Jews were forced to live in ghettoes and wear yellow circles as marks of inferior identification. Luther, the father of protestantism. was quoted as asking: "What shall we do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews? First, to set fire to their synagogues and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man need ever again see a stone or a cinder of them. This is to be done in honour of our Lord and of Christendom. so that God might see that we are Christians".

Is it any wonder, the programme asked, that when the leading Nazi anti-semite, Streicher, was on trial at Nuremburg he pleaded that he was only obeying the teachings of Luther? It is a decadent and outmoded social system which concocts such poisons for workers to swallow.

Steve Coleman