Greasy Pole: Farmyard Politics (2004)

The Greasy Pole column from the October 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Greg Dyke, ex-Director General of the BBC, has changed his mind. About Tony Blair, that is – although in the circumstances in which he was winkled out of a job which was supposed to make him one of the most powerful men in Britain, he has probably had second thoughts on quite a lot of other issues. Dyke first met Blair sometime around 1980 when Blair was a fresh faced, posh speaking young barrister who nevertheless wanted to ‘serve his country’ by being a Labour MP. “The Labour Party,” Dyke advised him, “needs another barrister like it needs a hole in the head” – which did not prevent Dyke helping Labour get another hole in the head by donating £5000 to Blair’s campaign for the party leadership.

   

That was then; this is now, when Dyke thinks Blair, in spite of his promise to introduce a new sort of politics, is really “just another politician and in some ways worse than those before him. He was either incompetent and took Britain to war on a misunderstanding or he lied when he told the House of Commons that he didn’t know what the 45 minute claim meant”. Regular readers of the Letters column in the Guardian, which seems to operate as a kind of counsellor’s couch for disappointed Labour voters, will know there are many who agree with Dyke. These are people who also supported Blair under the impression that Labour meant a different type of politics; instead they have got something which in many important respects is indistinguishable from the Tories. And Blair seems intent on supplying plenty of evidence to support the case against him.

1960s

For example on 19 July he made a speech grandly titled a Five Year Strategy for Crime, which purported to look back on the consequences of the 1960s and what the Blair government plans to do to repair the damage caused by that supposed time of “a huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of life style, of the individual’s right to live their own personal life in the way they chose”. Blair argued that law and order policy then focussed on the offender’s rights, protected the innocent and understood the social causes of criminality. But now:

“Today, people have had enough of this part of the 1960s consensus . . . they do want rules, order and proper behaviour . . .

They want a society of responsibility. They want a community where the decent law-abiding majority are in charge, where those that play by the rules do well; and those that don’t, get punished.”

That speech might have been made by John Major back in 1993 when, conveniently overlooking his affair with Edwina Currie, Major audaciously decided to lecture the rest of us on the need to get Back to Basics. He called for a revival of “the instinctive values of neighbourliness, decency and consideration for others”. He wanted the criminal justice system to “blame a little more and understand a little less”. Blair’s speech might also have been made by Michael Howard who, shortly after Blair shared his thoughts on crime and society with us, informed us that:

“Conservatives will stand up for the silent, law-abiding majority who  play by the rules and pay their dues. We will put their rights first.”

Among all this competition for votes Blair ignored the fact that during much of the alleged wild days of the 1960s when, he now thinks, the foundations of a seriously irresponsible society were being laid, his party were in power. They achieved that position not by respecting human decencies and behaving responsibly but by misleading the voters. Labour’s 1964 election appeal was based on the assurance that prosperity would come through an increase in productivity arising from technological development. The Tories had apparently overlooked this but Labour were led by the ravishingly clever Harold Wilson, who had graduated in economics at Oxford. After harnessing the technological revolution Wilson would put George Brown in charge of the economy at the Department of Economic Affairs and the rest was easy. The problem was that capitalism is not susceptible to being managed in that way. Wilson’s facile assurances were exposed and his government descended into chaos and crisis. One of Wilson’s senior ministers said “The trouble with Harold is one hasn’t the faintest idea whether the bastard means what he says even at the moment he speaks it”. Another agreed: “The tragedy of Wilson was that you couldn’t believe a word he said”. It was not a shining example of a government driven by a desire to play by the rules – unless it was those governing the methods used by political parties to get power over capitalism – and behave responsibly about their electoral promises.

Fettes

Meanwhile, how was the young Tony Blair surviving in those times of  moral peril?  From 1966 to 1971 he was a pupil at Fettes school, said to be the Eton of Scotland. It was the kind of educational establishment to have a strong appeal to the Blair of 2004 for the headmaster, a Dr. Iain McIntosh, was a disciplinarian and an ardent opponent of the “liberalising” influence of the 1960s. Fettes had a system of fagging, under which the younger boys had to be servants of the seniors. (Blair resented this but was praised by his senior for making “particularly good toast.”) Flogging by masters and senior boys was in force, with Blair the occasional victim (once at the unusually advanced age of 17). It must have been a proud moment for the headmaster when, after a game of hockey against a nearby borstal, the Fettes boys and the young prisoners compared their respective regimes; the borstal boys were sure they had the easier time.

   

Blair did not willingly submit to the Fettes regime as a valuable lesson in morality, which would stand him in good stead when he was later lecturing the rest of us from the eminence of Number Ten. He was in fact something of a disruptive influence in the school, persistently questioning and opposing the rules and procedures there. His housemaster assessed him as “the most difficult boy I ever had to deal with”. A fellow pupil remembered that “Masters were very worried about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and Blair looked like all three”. When he was 14 he ran away – simply walked off the train his parents had put him on to go back to school and made his way onto a plane at the airport – he said to fly “to somewhere like the Bahamas” – but the plan came to nothing because he did not have a boarding pass.

   

There were masters at Fettes who enjoyed Blair’s nagging and questioning as stimulating. Well there have been many others who have been bemused by his charm into accepting his flexible “principles”. Some of these people are ministers in his government. Others are just ordinarily deluded voters. This was the kind of tolerance – if that is the word – which helped him be accepted into Derry Irvine’s chambers when he was looking to become a barrister, a favour which has been repaid since. It slid him up the greasy pole, at first as a by-election candidate in the hopelessly Tory stronghold of Beaconsfield and then into the safe Labour seat at Sedgefield. It was not an obstacle to his climb that he joined CND, after he had been advised that the “more badges” he accumulated the better his chances of getting on in the Labour Party – advice he accepted with alacrity. It has seen him into Number Ten and keeps him there, in spite of the exposure of his deceits and the fact that in all important respects – in his policies, his speeches, his phraseology – he more and more resembles the Conservatives who are supposed to be his opponents.

Animal Farm

If it is impossible to discern any significant differences between the Labour Party and the Tories, that is because there aren’t any. On the basic issue of how to run the capitalist system they are thoroughly agreed that this must be done in the interests of the ruling class, which means that both of them in government must impose policies which are against the interests of the majority, while assuring us that they are doing something else. They must both define the problems of capitalism in terms of ruling class interests and offer “solutions” which at best are little other than palliatives. It is not a matter of chance that as they try to deceive the working class the party leaders use the same words, the same phrases. It is rather like the final passage in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, when the animals outside the farmhouse observe the pigs who have taken control of the farm inside, enjoying a raucous get-together with neighbouring farmers. As the evening wears on “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which”. That is what Greg Dyke and all those disgruntled Labour supporters are witnessing now; will they cling to Labour or will they consider the alternative to the cynical mess of capitalism’s politics?

Ivan

Workers’ Solidarity (2000)

Book Review from the January 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Unfinished Revolution: South Tyneside 1969-1976. Jack Grassby. TUPS Books, pp. 343, 1999.

The period around the mid-60s to mid-70s was seen by many then as a time of radical change. These were the days of “People Power”, of world-wide grassroots political action involving students, trade unionists, claimant groups and all manner of single-issue fanatics. The era was typified by such events as the student protests in the France of 1968, the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movement in the USA and the UK miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974.

Set against this backdrop, Jack Grassby’s book is an account of the intensity of grassroots political action from 1969 to 1976 on South Tyneside and in which the author played a key part. A cornucopia of reproduced pamphlets, documents and press reports from the region and period, the book is more a primary source for the political and social historian than any guessed-at academic account of a revolution that failed.

Chapter by chapter, the documents are carefully accompanied by a running commentary which gives a vivid detail of events and feel of the period.

Grassby makes no bold claim for his work and no remarkable political statement. As he states in the preface, the book has an “objective manner” in which the “political/social significance is left largely to the reader”.

Socialists have no objection to grassroots action—i.e. the struggles of claimant groups, students and trade unionists—so long as the struggle for socialism is not side-tracked by the campaigns for individual reforms, the futility of which this journal has been exposing for the best part of a century. And Grassby takes time out in an epilogue to remind us of the pitfall of reformism:

“Few of those involved in those events . . . would claim that their long-term objectives had been realised. Although some local campaigners can claim to have had a limited success—heating allowances for pensioners, social security benefits for students and strikers etc—their success was often transient and was overturned by subsequent government legislation. Even the miners’ success was to prove ephemeral.”

Grassby’s book presents as a fascinating testament of what workers are capable of achieving if enough are prepared to join together in common cause, whilst at the same time standing as a stark reminder of the philosophy of settling for crumbs in a world of abundance. As the title suggests, the revolution is very much “unfinished”.

The book is now on website: http://www.unfinishedrevolution.co.uk 

John Bissett

Notes from an ex—hippie (1992)

A Short Story from the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

During the 1960s, I became what was then known as a “hippie”. I grew my hair long, and wore some rather odd, shabby clothes like old, tattered blue jeans with flared bellbottoms and fringes, brightly-striped tee-shirts, Indian love-beads, Afghan coats and so forth. I went travelling around England, drifting from town to town, from squat to squat, and from commune to commune. In 1966 I smoked my first joint of cannabis, outside a pub in the West End of London. I met many beatniks and hippies; they told me things I d never known before about society, the law, politics, the police.

We did have some good times, we had plenty of harmless fun; we didn’t hurt other people. The "Beat Generation”, as it was called, were all for Peace, Love and Brotherhood—but things didn't turn out the way we planned.

Our movement soon came under the scrutiny of the police; politicians of the day such as Harold Wilson and his Home Secretary regarded us with profound hostility and contempt, but then, the feeling was mutual!

Among the things I learned from the hippies was that human beings are capable of living together peacefully and harmoniously on a basis of co-operation—if there is no impediment such as property or class division in the community to cause deep contradiction and strife. The hippies also taught me that all politics and governments are bad, they cannot find real solutions to society’s problems and only pretend that they can. That was why I didn't vote at all for many years, until I learned about Socialism—the only thing worth voting for.

I once encountered a certain police officer in London who showed a little more sympathy for us than most. He wasn’t too bad. When he asked me where I was going late one night in Trafalgar Square, I said, “I’m just going to sit down for a while. I'm tired.” We had a bit of a chat for a few minutes. I asked him, “What made you decide to be a copper, then?”

He said immediately, "Because I wanted to do something good for society—to protect honest people against criminals.”

I said, ’’But couldn’t you do something better than put people away in nick? That doesn’t solve or prevent crime; and it doesn’t protect anyone either, because there’s always more crime going on the whole time. D’you think there’s an alternative?”

The young copper scratched his chin and said, “Not really . . . What else can we do?”

I said, “Well, for one thing, you only get crime against property if society has property as an institution in the first place: if there were no such thing as minority class ownership there’d be no crime either, would there?”

He shook his head. “But there’s always been murder and violence; you can’t stop that—it’ll go on anyway, and if there weren’t any laws, it'd be even worse.”

“It doesn’t follow,” I replied patiently. “The historical records show that in past ages, when there were fewer restrictions and less property law, serious violence in society was much less a problem than it is now. And the primitive tribal societies arc known to be far more peaceful than our most advanced ones. They have virtually no crime at all; they rarely kill one another. Haven’t you seen David Attenborough’s documentaries on TV?”

“Well ... I grant you that . . . But—”

“But what?”

He pulled himself up to his full height, and turned away. “Mind how you go," he said over his shoulder as he strode off across the square.

I never saw him again.

D. E. F.

‘When the looting starts, the shooting starts’ (2020)

From the July 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘Miami, Florida – December 26, 1967: just a few months removed from the ‘long, hot summer of 1967’, in which rampant unemployment, poverty, and police brutality in black America reached a boiling point, sparking almost 160 race riots across the country. Ironically, that same summer was referred to as the ‘Summer of Love’ by hippies due to their rapid concentration in San Francisco. Miami’s Police Chief, Walter Headley, held a press conference regarding a spike in violent crime in the city’s ‘Negro district’ that past holiday weekend. Miami narrowly avoided race riots that summer, with Headley saying ‘We haven’t had any serious problems with civil uprising and looting because I’ve let the word filter down that when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ (snopes.com/fsact-check/trump-wallace-looting-quote). We’ll leave aside the fact that this statement contrasted with a recent comment from Sheriff Purdy, saying that his department’s community relations programs and specialized training projects successfully prevented the civil disorders. This statement encouraging police to murder irreplaceable citizens for looting replaceable commodities – valuing commodities over human life – was predictably criticized by several civil rights leaders.

As Karl Marx once said, history repeats itself ‘…the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce’. More than 50 years later, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, made the same statement regarding looting in various cities across the country due to George Floyd’s recent murder. After liberals had yet another field day of moral grandstanding, he tweeted to clarify his statement the next morning, but this was just an attempt to save face.

George Floyd was a former athlete, rapper, Christian, and proud father. Originally from Houston, Texas, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota around 2014 for a fresh start after serving four years in prison. Floyd was looking for another job after recently being laid off due to the pandemic, just like millions of other Americans. Shortly before his death, he’d purchased items at a local corner store with what the clerk believed was a counterfeit bill, which made them call the police. The police arrived, and the situation escalated to another unarmed black man being strangled in broad daylight as they repeatedly said, ‘I can’t breathe!’

This incident resembles far too many to name. Fatal police shootings have been rising every year, and the victims are disproportionately black. An estimated that 76.5 percent of Americans were white, and 13.4 percent were black in 2019, but victims of fatal police shootings were 36.85 percent white and 23.4 percent black that same year (the rest being unknown or Hispanic – Link). What’s worse, roughly 1,000 people are killed by the police every year, but only 98 officers were arrested and only 35 convicted for it from 2005 – 2019.

Outrage over these incidents happening so often without officers being held accountable understandably led to widespread protests. There are countless videos of protests happening peacefully until police officers with more gear than Robocop assaulted citizens first, agitating them and leading to riots. It’s hard not to question the government’s priorities when they’re more prepared to attack its citizens for condemning murder than to protect them against a pandemic – whether the equipment was a free military surplus or not. You’re forced to wonder why using tear gas against foreign armies is an international war crime, but somehow not illegal to use against American citizens – or why rubber bullets are being shot directly at them when they were initially intended to be bounced off the ground.

Trump unsurprisingly condemned the riots, but not the police brutality that sparked them, nor did he call for any of the officers who’ve committed recent murders to be convicted. He says it’s due to the looting, but he couldn’t care less about corporations looting the ‘Not-So-Democratic’ Republic of the Congo. He hasn’t called for any of their CEOs or members of their Boards of Directors to be shot, just domestic workers looting products made by other workers abroad. What’s more concerning is that he’s decided to blame most of the looting on ‘Antifa’ and called for them to be designated as a terrorist group.

We’ll set aside all the terrorist groups backed by the United States and pretend that matters to Trump. What’s important, for one, is that we currently only have laws that allow us to designate international extremist groups as terrorist organizations, so an entirely new law would need to pass to classify domestic extremist groups as terrorist organizations. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponsored_terroris). )The question would then be why that kind of legislation hasn’t been passed yet to designate at least the KKK as a terrorist group after all the murders they’ve committed – but it’s pretty clear once you realize that Trump’s dad was arrested at a KKK rally, although neither his exact charges nor the exact circumstances could be confirmed (Link). For two, and we’d argue most importantly, Antifa isn’t even a cohesive organization. Unfortunately, that could work in his favor. He probably knows this, but it could be incompetence at best or an excuse to charge dissenters as terrorists at worst.

Often people throw around the term ‘fascist’ too loosely and this waters down fascism’s actual meaning. Some might concede that Trump could be considered something of a ‘fascist-lite’. However, blaming a loose organization for the looters and calling for police to shoot them admittedly seems like he’s creeping into that sort of territory – especially once you consider the implications of the ‘EARN IT Bill’ (Link) and jokes he’s made about staying President for life.

The real question here is what we should do about this? In some ways protesting, signing petitions, posting on social media, etc. are all great activities to bring awareness to the issue. But we’ve done that countless times and know it’ll take much more than that to bring about any fundamental change. Attempts to hold law enforcement accountable have failed many times before, with two recent examples being a bill watered down in California and another blocked altogether in Utah. As Martin Luther King once said ‘…a riot is the language of the unheard’. Until justice is served, riots are guaranteed to continue happening. But the question is, can systemic racism and police brutality be prevented within our current system?

A fundamental change would require this system to work in the interest of the majority in the first place, which it doesn’t. It works in the interest of the capitalists. And we don’t mean your bootlicker, wage-slave Facebook friend that only comments on your statuses to defend Jeff Bezos. We mean the actual capitalists, the ones with mansions the size of Vatican City that still lobby to keep their taxes lower than anybody else’s. We’ve seen time and time again that, when it comes down to it, the state and the police won’t protect and serve the people; they’ll protect and serve the rich and their property. Police will hesitate to arrest their colleagues for murdering unarmed civilians, but if anyone peacefully protests in response? They’ll tear gas pregnant women in a heartbeat – knowing it’s been linked to miscarriages – arrest legal observers just for being there, then shoot people who riot or loot because of it. Police and the state only value your life if you’re part of the ruling class.

Private property, being different than personal property, inherently leads to competing classes. In the words of Adam Smith, ‘Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many’. Capitalism perpetuates systemic racism so well because it’s much easier to justify this inequality when those poor tend to be a particular race. It makes them easy to dehumanize, whether consciously or unconsciously. This perpetuation couples with the fact that private property requires a means to legitimize and protect it. In the quote mentioned above, Adam Smith also says, ‘The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days’ labour, civil government is not so necessary’.

That doesn’t mean it necessarily has to be democratic. Dictatorships have still been capitalist; all it needs is a monopoly of force. Even in an anarcho-capitalist dystopia where a traditional state wouldn’t exist, there’d still need to be private security forces. But once we understand that capitalism necessitates inequality and a defensive body and how that perpetuates racism, then we see why systemic racism would be a rampant problem and why trying to end it without ending capitalism is futile.

As long as we have private property, we’ll have trigger-happy, racist police hired to protect it at the expense of human life. I’m not saying never to speak out and protest against systemic racism, but to do that without keeping abolition of capitalism as the primary goal would be like hacking at a tree’s branches, rather than its trunk. To end police brutality and systemic racism for good, we need to establish socialism: an economic system based on common ownership of the means of production and production for use. Classes, class antagonisms, and systemic racism would thus be done away with once and for all.

Jordan Levi 

(World Socialist Party of the US)

Pathfinders: Look down there, and tell me what you see . . . (2008)

The Pathfinders Column from the May 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics involves, among other things, the art of retrofitting analyses onto past events which were incomprehensible to most people at the time. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the iconic May ’68 student protests in Paris the media will be full of articles, potted histories, personal accounts and think-pieces, all turning over the events of that tempestuous period and asking where it all ended up and whether it really changed anything.

Is there any sense in which the world really is different now? Certainly there have been changes, the fall of the Berlin Wall being the most significant. But whereas politics has for the most part gone round in circles, science has leapt off the starting blocks and disappeared down the track. 1968, it is worth recalling, was before humans landed on the moon. It was before the first microprocessor, the first home computer or the first email. It predated superstring theory, buckyballs and nanotubes. It was before Hubble, or Mars landers or photographs of Jupiter, Saturn, and the outer planets. It was before biotech, stem cells or Dolly the sheep. It was from an era, incredibly, when we knew – knew – that whatever happened to the dinosaurs would never be discovered. It was before we ever suspected that all the humans on the planet are descended from one female in Africa. In 1968 lodging houses could still display signs reading ‘No Blacks, No Pets, No Irish’, as racism and sexism formed part of the cheap post-war furniture we sat on as we watched Till Death Us Do Part on black and white TVs, just before turning off the boring news reports about strikes, civil rights, and some vague ‘police action’ in a place called Vietnam.

What nobody could really have imagined in 1968 was that scientists might one day hold centre-stage in a political debate that would encompass the interests of the whole of humanity. The 1960’s was the decade of black emancipation, which black people achieved after a fashion, in that flagrant discrimination is now technically illegal. The 1970’s was given over to ‘women’s liberation’, as it was called, something which seemed like a good idea at the time but is arguably not much further forward than it was then. Class politics in the UK seemed to have a little spell in the sun during the 1980’s thanks to the Miners’ Strike and the Poll Tax hoo-ha, though this was short-lived. After that the Wall came down and with it the last Grand Illusion. Then the Greens came, briefly, to the fore in the public consciousness before it was realised that, worthy though they may be, they didn’t possess the collective political wit to punch their way out of an ozone bubble. From then on, and with all sectional interests apparently exhausted leaving some nihilistic post-modernist torpor, some people started listening to the scientists.

All except America, under Bush, to whom scientists were the very worst kind of extremists, the kind you just can’t negotiate with. Elsewhere, and with a decade of freakish droughts, heatwaves, cold snaps, tornadoes, floods and crop failures to reinforce a justifiably growing sense of alarm, the world’s captains of capitalism were forced reluctantly to dine at well-stocked table after table in order to put aside their nationalist differences and ask how in blazes they were going to continue to stay in power when climate change was going to cause anarchy and they were all going to be murdered in their beds by starving rioting populations.

Is it good that politicians are listening to scientists? Yes, because scientists are the only people who cannot plausibly be accused of a political agenda, and who therefore have no incentive to lie or distort facts. But politicians are not really listening to everything scientists say, only that portion of it that they can conveniently do something about. And scientists, of course, like charities, have not been accustomed to addressing questions they considered outside their scope, such as global inequality. But as the weight of evidence mounts, that is changing. Increasingly, some scientists are putting the words ‘carbon’ and ‘capitalism’ together, if the normally reliable New Scientist is anything to go by (April 19), and asking searching questions about the market’s ability to do anything in the face of its own blind refusal to face facts and change its behaviour. The facts of world hunger and preventable disease no longer seem outside the purview of scientific examination either, and although capitalism itself is not yet in the dock, its representative governments are increasingly subject to cross-examination by a body of academics and researchers who have the facts at their fingertips and a disinclination to be put off by rhetoric and flim-flam.

Of course, governments don’t listen to radicals. Even though Nicholas Stern, the World Bank’s former chief economist, calls global warming ‘the greatest market failure the world has ever seen’, it will be dismissed in the corridors of power as mere panic-mongering by a former minion hungry for publicity. But it doesn’t matter. Governments aren’t going to create change in any case. The people who really need to listen to scientists are the people. They need to realise that it is no longer a question of race politics, as it might have seemed on the day, in 1968, when they shot Martin Luther King. It’s not a question of women’s politics, as it might have seemed to some on the publication of The Female Eunuch in 1970. Today’s battle for the Democratic leadership and the presidency of the USA is, after all, between a rich black man and a rich white woman, and no voter with a modest grasp of realities expects either result to change capitalism in any important way. It’s no longer about sectional interests within a given socio-economic framework. Today, it is a question of survival, and the framework itself is being challenged. The real obstacle to change is what it has always been, the same obstacle which blocks any real progress on the impending food or water crisis, on the biofuels controversy, on carbon capping, on the rampant waste of resources, and on global warming. It is class ownership, and the fact that the owning class are raping and destroying the world is increasingly being brought to the headlines by scientists with no axe to grind and no political cards up their sleeve. Workers should have learned by now never to trust a politician. Quite right. But let’s hope people start taking more notice of the back-room boffins, because they are asking questions which, until now, only socialists – and a certain German economist – have ever asked. The progress of scientific thinking along the socialist path has been cautious, but it is built on solid empirical foundations which have come a long way in the last forty years. The case for abolishing capitalism, the socialist case, is increasingly being backed by conservative science as well. And we certainly didn’t see that coming in 1968.

Paddy Shannon

Greasy Pole: Nothing New Millennium (2000)

The Greasy Pole column from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there was a sense of relief when the twenty-first century finally dawned it must have been partly because we would no longer have to endure those comments about society which unfailingly began with the words: “With the approach of the Millennium”. It seemed that any plans to do anything about the crisis in the NHS, or about making rail travel safer, or reducing pollution, were given an added urgency because we were approaching a new century. By the year 2000 we had to get it right.

This was irritating enough, especially as those making the comments were usually trying to impress us with the historical sweep of their intellects. It might have been hoped, that the first of January would have brought some relief, the nonsense would have stopped and we would be back in what is called normality, when social problems and deficiencies are described in more commonplace terms, without any added significance by the turning of another page in the calendar. But it was not to be. The celebratory fireworks had hardly died away when we were being assailed with comments which began with such words as “Now that we have entered the new Millennium . . .”

Perhaps enough people were deceived by this into thinking that the arbitrary process of passing from one year to another—or in this case one century to another—would really affect how the world is organised so that the new millennium would bring evidence that people were becoming safer, healthier, more optimistic about their future. If so, they were critically deluded. They would have forgotten that we are treated to the same kind of nonsense every December, when the first seconds of a new year are a time to assume that the next twelve months will be better than the last when reality encourages the conclusion that if anything they will be worse.

Harold Wilson 

We have been here before. As the year 1969 drew to a close the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson made several references to the approach of the 1970s, rather in the same style as all those hopes and plans for the 21st century. The Seventies, Wilson assured us, would be better than the previous decade. He was, in fact, in difficulties because by then his government, which had been elected on the promise to oversee the blossoming of a great new age in which technological advance and planning would solve problems like poverty, disease and poor education, had been largely discredited. Such was the disillusion among his supporters that at one stage it was reasonable to speculate on whether the Labour Party was about to disintegrate. Wilson was desperate; by encouraging us to look forward to a new decade of the Seventies he hoped to deter us from inconvenient memories of the Sixties.

Well of course it did not work out as he had hoped. The Labour government staggered from one crisis to the next. Soon after the dawn of the new decade they were ousted from power, then a few years later returned in the wake of Heath’s calamitous three-day week. By then the much vaunted technological revolution had faded into the disreputable history of politicians’ promises. It was replaced by Labour’s assurance that its special relationship with the unions could smooth the way for their policy of forcing down our living standards which, by some mysterious process, would make us all better off. A few of the party’s more deranged supporters believed this but a lot of them did not—particularly those trade unionists who got fed up with the constant struggle to prevent their standards declining and defended themselves with the strikes which were later damned as the Winter of Discontent. This was followed by glorious spring for the Tories, as Thatcher romped into power, consigning the Labour Party and all its blather about a new decade into the wilderness for almost twenty years.

NHS

And what about now, with a New Labour government and its promises of a new society with new values, new priorities, new achievements . . .? Well there is nothing new about the NHS being in crisis, with nurses and doctors worked into the ground and sick people having to wait for months just to be examined so that they can be allowed onto another waiting list. There is nothing new about this deplorable experience existing at the same time as the rapid and effective treatment available to anyone who has the kind of money needed to pay for a team of the best doctors and a stay in the most exclusive hospitals. There is nothing new in the situation recently summarised by Alistair Darling, whose job as Social Services Secretary is supposed to make him responsible for alleviating poverty: “. . . a child can still be born poor, live poor, die poor”. He did not also say that a child in another class will be born rich, live rich, die rich.

What about other ministers? How are they grappling with the problems of the new millennium? Well Home Secretary Jack Straw plans to prove how tough he is on crime by threatening the legal rights of people charged with minor thefts while he protects the welfare of General Pinochet, who is not one of those youths washing your windscreen at traffic lights without you asking for it but a man who, as dictator of Chile, oversaw the murder of thousands of people there. Straw has bent the rules on admissible immigrants to allow Mike Tyson into this country although he should be disqualified by reason of his prison sentences for rape and assault. The reason for Straw’s generosity was clear: Tyson was due to fight here and if anything was allowed to stop that happening a lot of money would be lost, particularly by the fight promoters and the owners of the TV rights, who are such close buddies of Tony Blair.

Sheffield Wednesday

And as Straw was engaged in grabbing the headlines for his battles for his version of a better life for us all in the 21st century he was in competition with Sheffield’s Labour MPs, among them Education Secretary David Blunkett. Since his days as leader of Sheffield City Council Blunkett has undergone something of a change. He is no longer the challenging left-winger but a man who wants to hound out teachers who display any human frailty in overcoming the difficulties of teaching kids whose extreme impoverishment has extended into their conduct in the classroom. Blunkett has begun the new century by showing that his zeal for sacking people will not stop at schools. With the other MPs, he has demanded the head of the manager of Sheffield Wednesday because the team are stuck at the bottom of the Premiership. Blunkett is pitiless to the idea that, after all, some team has to come last and it does not seem to have occurred to him, that campaigning against a football manager is hardly revolutionary activity for an ex-firebrand of the left.

Nothing new about poverty then, nor about avoidable sickness. Nothing new about class-related degrees of access to wealth. Nothing new about capitalism and how it degrades and represses the very people who are useful and productive while it nurtures its parasites. Nothing new about Labour ministers trying to hide their impotence in smoke screens of deceit.

Ivan

Is Britain being abolished? (2000)

Book Review from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘The Abolition of Britain’. By Peter Hitchens. (Quarter Books)

It certainly is according to rabid right-wing Daily Express columnist Peter Hitchens. Hitchens, who is critical of Mrs Thatcher and regards Michael Portillo as being too liberal, has set out his stall in a book which argues that the post-war period (especially since the 60s) has seen the gradual erosion of everything that once characterised Britain as a great independent Empire nation.

According to Hitchens, Britain’s political, economic and social institutions have been taken over by “cultural revolutionaries” whose clear aim has been the abolition of Britain by stealth. This has resulted in some of the following: the decline of religion, morality and family life; the ruination of a perfectly good education system with comprehensive schooling; the legalisation of homosexuality and the rise of permissive sexual practice, and the abolition of corporal and capital punishment. Underpinning all of the above has been the general decline in respect for authority and patriotism. For Hitchens, this has led to a Britain which is no longer at ease with itself and one which has closed its eyes to its own history which is held in contempt.

Needless to say, with the arrival of Tony Blair and New Labour on 1 May 1997 the final nail in Britain’s coffin was hammered home:

  “1st May 1997 really was the start of a new era. The new Prime Minister’s triumphal progress to Buckingham palace and Downing Street was filmed from the air by sycophantic broadcasters as if a dull cortege of motor cars were a rebel army finally emerging from the sierras to occupy a conquered city.”

And we are all aware of what has subsequently followed. Devolution for Wales and Scotland, House of Lords reform and of course plans to join the single European currency and merge Britain into a federal European super-state. For Hitchens, all this is tantamount to treachery.

For socialists, Hitchens’s entire concept of “Britain” is wrong. All capitalist societies are divided along class lines—capitalist and worker—therefore any talk of “nation” or patriotism is palpable nonsense. Capitalists and workers do not share a common identity nor do they share any interests in common.

Given this, it would be easy to dismiss Hitchens’s views as the ramblings of a mad reactionary “golden-age” theorist who presupposes that the 1950s represented the last bastions of a perfect society. Hitchens, however, has identified certain negative trends in society but has drawn the wrong, reactionary conclusions.

The real materialist backdrop to Hitchens’s entire argument is Britain’s comparative economic decline as a world power and the profound social and political changes that this has undoubtedly brought about. However, Britain’s decline started way before the second world war (as far back as at least the latter part of the 19th century) so there is a historical qualification to Hitchens’s argument. His basic error lies in his uncritical support for Britain’s imperial past whilst at the same time condemning Britain’s rivals for having similar ambitions. His understanding of the nature of capitalism is clearly inadequate.

Clearly there is much wrong with modern society but it is not the result of the so-called “Liberal Revolution” of the 1960s. It is due to the decline of capitalism and the subsequent social havoc which has been created. Of course, Hitchens is really on a Christian/moral crusade against homosexuality and the rise of sexual freedoms which has threatened the sanctity of the traditional nuclear family as society’s cornerstone.

It may be argued that Hitchens’s obsession with morality is a cover for the increasing gap between rich and poor with the obvious social consequences: poverty, frustration, alienation, family breakdown and violence. However, Hitchens is slightly more sophisticated than this. He decries not only both main political parties for presiding over Britain’s moral downfall but also the legacy of Thatcher:

  “The apparent rebirth of Conservatism in 1979 was a false dawn because the Thatcherite movement was not interested in morals or culture. It believed mainly in the cleansing power of the market, which has much to be said for it but which has no answers to many fundamental questions—and which cannot operate properly unless honesty and stability are enforced through both ethics and law. Worse, the Thatcher government unwittingly helped to destroy many of the things Conservatism once stood for. In eighteen years of power, an immense time, the Thatcher-Major government was unable to reverse a single part of the cultural revolution, not least because it barely tried, and did not understand it.”

There is always a certain irony when a staunch defender of capitalism starts to invoke a moral code for human behaviour but in a way it is quite refreshing. At the very least, Hitchens believes that humans are capable of behaving decently (although some of Hitchens’s views can hardly be described as decent). However, he is likely to be disappointed because a social system based upon production-for-profit instead of production-for-need is almost by definition anti-social and amoral.

Dave Flynn

50 Years Ago: Hippies: An abortion of Socialist Understanding (2019)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ever since the explosion of “Flower Power” in Summer 67, the world’s working-class has been aware of the Hippy movement, or as it is now more frequently called, “The Underground”. Attitudes to the hippies have varied from amused fascination to angry revulsion. Many people have grown more hostile to them over the past two years, as their emphasis on such harmless-sounding words as “Love” and “Beautiful People” has declined, and their tendency to smoke pot has become more widely publicised.

In Britain the occupation of 144 Piccadilly confirmed the hippies’ bad reputation—though the occupiers were not typical of the Underground by any means. TV news announcers put on their frowns for this item, were careful to identify the occupation with soccer hooliganism (both were “violence to property”), and equally careful to avoid dragging in irrelevant details like the fact of empty houses alongside homeless people.

A wave of horror swept the country at the realisation that there were people who not only wore long hair (and obviously smelt foul, as anyone could see by looking at their TV screens), but actually believed they had a right to live without working. In one television programme, David Frost, Hughie Green and Robert Maxwell—those highly productive labourers who toil so usefully to justify their existence—led an attack on the hippies for their conscientious objection to work. When Richard Neville (editor of the Underground magazine Oz) suggested that the idea of work as a duty hadn’t a very ancient historical pedigree, that work in the modern world was “really a form of slavery,” and that with today’s productive techniques there could easily be more than enough wealth for everyone, he was devastated by Frost’s crisply intelligent retorts: “Very high‑ flown I’m sure” and “I really am an old fuddy-duddy you know.”

The hippy phenomenon is a movement, a set of attitudes, a subculture or a nuisance, according to your point of view. It consists of several hundred thousand people, drawn mostly from the working class, in the advanced regions of Capitalism. It is vaguely defined, fuzzy-edged—no one can draw up a hippy manifesto; no one can specify who is a hippy and who isn’t.

(From the Socialist Standard, December 1969)

Easy Rider: Remembering Peter Fonda (2019)

From the September 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Transcript of a scene from the film in which Peter Fonda who died last month played Wyatt.

Billy: Oh, wow… what… What’s that, man. What the hell was that?

Wyatt: Huh?

Billy: No, man, like, hey man, wow! I was watching this object, man, like the satellite we saw the other night right and it was going across the sky, man, and then it just suddenly, yeah, it just changed direction and went whizzing right off, man. It flashed . . .

Wyatt: You’re stoned out of your mind, man.

Billy: Oh yeah, I’m stoned, man. But like, I saw a satellite, man, and it was going across the sky and it flashed three times at me and zigzagged and whizzed off, man, and I saw it.

George: That was a UFO beaming back at you. Me and Eric Heisman was down Mexico two weeks ago. We seen forty of them flying in formation. They’ve got bases all over the world now. They’ve been coming here ever since 1946 when the scientists started bouncing radar beams off of the moon. And they have been living and working among us in vast quantities ever since. The government knows all about them.

Billy: What are you talking, man?

George: Well, you just seen one of them, didn’t you?

Billy: Hey man, I saw something, man, but I didn’t see it working here, you know what I mean.

George: Well, they are people just like us, from within our own solar system. Except that their society is more highly evolved. I mean, they don’t have no wars, they got no monetary system, they don’t have any leaders, because I mean each man is a leader. I mean each man . . . Because of their technology they are able to feed, clothe, house and transport themselves equally and with no effort.

Wyatt: Wow!

Britain fifty years ago (2013)

Book Review from the May 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo by Richard Davenport-Hines. Harper Press, 2013. £20

It is 50 years since what was termed the ‘Profumo Affair’ rocked the Establishment and the ruling class in Britain, but particularly in England and London. Davenport-Hines asserts that it was ‘a nation on the brink of a social revolution.’ It was not that, but there was considerable change in the mores and life-styles of many workers compared to the pre-war period and for many years after that war.

Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister, was very much an old-fashioned Tory, dedicated to tradition, hierarchy, so-called Christian morality and, of course, a capitalist society not unlike before the war; although he realised that the sun was setting on the British Empire and Commonwealth. The working class, he felt, ‘had never had it so good.’ Many other Tories pretended to be much the same as Macmillan but, in fact, spent their time in nightclubs and at parties on estates such as Lord Astor’s Cliveden, where the osteopath, Stephen Ward, would bring young and attractive (mainly working-class) girls, such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, mostly for their sexual pleasure.

One such visitor to Cliveden was the Minister for War, John Profumo, the grandson of an Italian baron. Ward introduced Profumo to Keeler, who had been swimming naked in the pool. Also joining the party, which included the President of Pakistan and Lord Mountbatten and other establishment figures, was the Soviet assistant naval attaché Yevgeni Ivanov (actually a Russian spy known to MI5) brought to Cliveden by Ward. Following his return to London, Profumo phoned Keeler and arranged to meet her the next weekend, as his wife would be away. Subsequently, Profumo and Keeler had an affair which was furtive but known to many people including MI5. Christine Keeler also knew Ivanov, claiming to have had sex with him. The Cold War had been ‘hotting up’; and Ward became an unofficial go-between for the Soviets and some British politicians.

When challenged by government ministers, MI5 and others, including Parliament, John Profumo denied having sexual relations with Christine Keeler. But it was too late. It was common knowledge. Profumo resigned as Minister for War, and Stephen Ward was arrested on trumped-up charges of keeping and living off the earnings of prostitutes, and various abortion offences. During his trial, however, Ward committed suicide. The so-called popular press had a field-day, publishing lie after lie about Ward, Keeler and Profumo. Davenport-Hines has an interesting chapter (‘Hacks’, no.7), demonstrating that the ‘popular’ papers and their writers were just as bad as, if not worse than, the red-top papers of today.

The author of An English Affair is not a socialist, and his analysis has its faults, but it is a useful reminder of British society 50 years ago. It’s worth a read.

Peter E. Newell

The Extent of Poverty (1967)

From the February 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard

Let us get one or two ideas straight first of all. Poverty is a conditions from which all workers suffer to some extent or another. It is a basic factor of working class existence, whether you are comparatively high or low-paid. Take the word at its full meaning “want of means” and you will see that our claim is justified, for any person who has to depend on a wage or salary for a living must have a restricted access to the means of life, and can never broaden the access sufficiently to enable him to live without the need to work if he wishes. “If poverty is relative” said Professor Townsend recently, “standards are largely determined by the income, wealth, living standards and expectations of the rich.”

How right he was. Yet because of a mixture of ignorance, confusion and petty snobbery, this important fact has been overlooked. And matters have not been helped by the arrival of ‘social security’ schemes since the end of the second world war; to the popular mind, poverty has become synonymous with destitution. The Labour Party must take no small share of the blame for fostering such an attitude. Their policy statement Labour and the New Society, published in 1950, carried the claim, for example, that “Destitution has been abolished.”

Well let us see how such a statement stands up to examination in the capitalism of the sixties. The Board of Inland Revenue report for 1963-4 showed between six and seven million people with a yearly income, before tax, of less than £275. Another 4½ million received between £300 and £500, and ten million were in the £500-£l,000 range. At the other end of the scale, about ten thousand people enjoyed (there is no other word for it) a yearly income of £15,000 or more. In fact an appraisal of the Board’s figures made by The Economist (26.2.65), suggested that two thirds of Britain’s population had no wealth worth reckoning at all.

So much for the cold hard statistics after centuries of reform and a post-war national insurance scheme, the like of which we have never seen before in this country. Now what does it all mean in terms of human suffering and degradation? You can take your pick from a mass of material appearing in the national press over the past year or two, which seems to have touched on most aspects of the misery of being poor. Running like a thread through all these articles, incidentally, is an implied astonishment that such problems still exist. Only the Socialist does not share the astonishment. The Guardian (18.7.64) for example, spoke of ‘a surprising number' of schoolchildren in some areas needing free meals at school; it mentioned also an increasing demand for local authority handouts of free clothing and shoes. Taking the Don Valley area of Yorkshire as only one instance:

In 1958-59, 200 applications for clothing and shoes were granted; in 1963-64 the figure was 500. In 1961, 2,325 children were receiving free meals; in 1962 this figure rose to 2,500.

It has been found that many truancies from school have been because the children had no shoes to wear. Having grown out of their old ones, their parents were often too poor to buy them a new pair. This point was made in The Poor and The Poorest, a report published at the end of 1965 by Professors Townsend and Abel-Smith. They defined poverty as ‘less than 140 per cent of the basic National Assistance scale, plus housing and other costs' and on this basis, estimated the number of poor people at nearly seven millions —a rise of two per cent in the ten years ending 1960.

In a letter to The Guardian (22.11.66), Professor Townsend severely criticised government departments for the inadequacy of their surveys on the poverty problem, and mentioned specially the question of nutrition. He pointed out that in the lowest income group families (under £15 a week), there was a protein deficiency in their diets of ten per cent and a calcium deficiency of sixteen per cent. In down-to-earth terms, this means meals of baked beans and chips or bread and jam for your children, and virtually nothing for yourself, like the young mother mentioned by Jean Stead (Guardian, 2.2.66):

. . .  who is 28, looks as if she was once very pretty, but now she is worn and undernourished and her top teeth are missing. She lives on tea and cigarettes, like most mothers in poor families, and rarely has a proper meal. Cigarettes kill the appetite.

So we can begin to appreciate the all-pervasiveness of the poverty condition; there is not a single aspect of our lives it will not touch — and degrade — to some extent or another, depending on our particular position in the income scale. Food, clothing, housing, the bare necessities, and the amenities like holidays or a night at the cinema, nothing can escape. The whole quality of our life suffers.

There are those who have even let go of a once-tenuous hold on impoverished respectability and become ‘drifters’, homeless ones often sleeping rough, unable to compete in the struggle to make both ends meet. An official report published last November (which was criticised for being too low in its estimate) mentioned about 13,500 people who were without accommodation when they applied for National Assistance during a week at the beginning of December 1965. With a priggish disdain so typical of that paper, Guardian writer John Fairhall refers to them as ‘derelicts swilling about at the very bottom of the barrel.’

And having told us about the evil in no uncertain terms, what answer have the experts? The usual palliatives are offered and impertinently described as ‘fundamental’ by their authors; yet none of them could do other than keep the poor that way. For example: '. . .  more decent housing for low-wage families at rents they can afford’ (Abel-Smith, Weekend Telegraph, 25.11.66). The truth is that like so many of capitalism’s problems, this one is gigantic. Eighteen per cent of all households in the U.K. are said to be living below National Assistance levels, and such is the depth of their poverty, that it would cost about £500 millions a year just to relieve the effects on their children. In face of such terrifying facts, the “experts” have no answer.

As we said at the beginning, poverty goes hand in hand with wage slavery at whatever income level. True, not every worker suffers as much as those we have mentioned, but capitalism exerts a downward pressure on all of us and no government can do very much about it. Captured in the phraseology of Townsend (a long-standing Fabian and Labour supporter) the score reads something like this:

It will be one of the supreme paradoxes of history if social inequalities become wider instead of narrower, if poverty becomes more widespread, during the term of office of the present Labour Government. Yet the likelihood of this happening is far from remote.

Enough said.

Eddie Critichfield

The Whole Tragic Mess (1963)

Book Review from the May 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Britain in the Sixties—Housing, by Stanley Alderson (Penguin Special 3s. 6d.). 

Let us warn you right away. If you think that Mr. Alderson will provide you with a solution to this most pressing problem you are going to be very disappointed. This is quite a well written book, and informative, particularly when you remember that it spans only 174 pocket size pages. But having acknowledged the enormity of the housing scandal, Mr. Alderson gets bogged down in advocating the usual reformist measures to deal with it.

We are left with the awfully depressing feeling that if every one of his suggestions were put into action tomorrow, the housing problem would be just as bad the day after—and for many more days after that. Like all reformist writers, he cannot see that slums, overcrowding, homelessness—in fact, the whole tragic mess—is only part of a bigger general picture of private property society with its sordid profit motive. The emergence of council housing over the past few years does not invalidate this basic contention. Indeed, it is a clear illustration, if any were needed, of the essential indignity of being a member of the working class. The author gives us a hint of this when he tells us on page 94:

  The difficulty is in becoming a council tenant. The man who set about it efficiently would get an essential job, marry young, father a child a year, find himself a slum flat, share it with another family, and develop chronic ill-health. With all these qualifications, he could even expect to get a house before he was thirty.

Like many other writers on this subject, Mr. Alderson is in favour of “a national policy for housing." He has been groping his way towards it, he tells us in the last chapter; and stripped of verbiage, what is this policy? Why, spend more money on housing, of course. He forgets some of the snags mentioned earlier in the book, all of which arise from the profit motive. For instance, on page 11, we read:

   Some of the firms building houses in vast development schemes lose money. . . . Some of the biggest and most efficient firms in the industry refuse to touch housing at all.

And again on page 22:

   What do people want? What can they afford? These are the questions that have to be answered in determining future standards of houses, motor cars, washing powders, or anything else.

So whatever may be planned and intended (and housing is probably the biggest graveyard of scrapped plans that there is) the author admits that we shall get what we can afford, and we all know what that means as far as the working class is concerned. Here is the nub of it, the reason for the poor housing standards of the past, present and future, too, why ". . .  there are houses being erected now which will give dissatisfaction to their first occupants and in ten years will be regarded as sub-standard." It is the factor which plagues and hampers the slum clearance schemes, for as Mr. Alderson points out, lots of the poorer tenants cannot even afford to pay subsidised council rents. At the same time, “many of the old and decayed dwellings needing to be re-built are in areas where there is little or no profit in rebuilding."

It is no intention of ours to sneer at Mr. Alderson’s attempts to grapple with the vast and depressing housing problem. Perhaps it is to his credit that he has at least taken a look at it, for all too often it fosters an attitude of apathy and hopelessness. But when this has been said, there is nothing in his book to shake our conviction that bad housing is a product of private property society. The solution is no to tinker around with Schedule "A" tax reform and extensions of state power, but to institute a world of common ownership and production of goods for use. Houses will then be lived in not just out of necessity, but because they are worth living in, too.

Eddie Critichfield

Editorial: Where are you going? (1964)

Editorial from the January 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there is one idea which is firmly held by the majority of people in this country it is that they are now better off than ever before. In this, they are supported on all sides, by newspapers, television, and so on. The result of this, to take one example, is that the years between the wars are remembered as a time of hardship, unemployment and, in many countries, of political dictatorship. There is now a spate of books with the theme that the First World War was a futile, bloody business which cleverer, less avaricious leaders could have avoided. The obvious corollary of this concept of the past as a time of dark misfortune is that of the present as a time of bright opportunity. And this is now a very popular idea.

The first thing to be said about this idea is that it has always been popular. Whatever their conditions, people have always been convinced that they were a sight better off than in the past. The Twenties and Thirties were supposed to be years of enlightenment, in which the hardships and prejudices of Victorian England had been finally cast aside. Victorian England was itself supposed to be a place in which the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were coming to fruition. Society at large has always regarded itself as lucky to be living in its present and has been glad not to have been living in its past

The years since the war have been devoted to this idea. The commonest picture—the adman’s picture, perhaps—of a member of the working class, in England in the Sixties, is of a bright, smooth young man who lives in a gracious house in a leafy suburb, has a charming, intelligent wife and a couple of children who will obviously one day make a name for themselves at University. This young man has a smart car, the latest furniture and clothes. His tastes are impeccably up to date. He has a well-paid job, and one with prospects. He is a man with a background—and with a future. Every line on his face, every hair on his head, shrieks of a comfortable, secure, modern living free from the disabilities of a discredited past.

Well, what is the truth of this?

This issue of the Socialist Standard sets out to take a look, at the beginning of another year, at the working class. It examines their working conditions, their education, their health, the pace at which they live. It takes a look at the way in which they spend their time off and are entertained. It poses some facts and some questions on problems like crime, which are as much a part of the Sixties as the adman’s smooth talk. And it puts the question to the working class: Where Are You Going?

This question can be stated in many ways. Are working conditions really improving? What is happening to our health? Is modern education any good, and is it freely available to all of us? Can crime be eliminated, and if so, how? These questions, and many others, can be summarised into one enormous, overriding issue. Can capitalism give us the sort of life, the health, the abundance, the security, which all human beings should have? Can it offer the prospects of future security which a humane social system would take as a matter of course?

The so-called social surveys can never answer these questions, which probe into the very roots of private property society. Only a Socialist can ask whether the class ownership of society's means of wealth production is the best way of running human affairs, or whether it is wasteful and vicious and inhumane. It is by examining the lives of the people who work and suffer and, tragically, vote for capitalism that this question can be answered. This, within its limits, is what this month’s Socialist Standard offers. And behind the articles we publish is the biggest issue now facing the world working class.

Capitalism or Socialism? Where Are You Going?

Peggy Sue Got Married (1987)

Film Review from the October 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Peggy Sue Got Married, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

This is yet another film that attempts to cash in on the seemingly bottomless demand for nostalgic recreations of the 50s and 60s. The story line is a very thin excuse for a sentimental look at American teenagers in 1960. albeit with the benefit of hindsight.

Peggy Sue, played by Kathleen Turner, is the mother of two teenagers and is on the verge of divorcing the husband she met while still at high school. She collapses at a high school reunion party and regains consciousness to find herself miraculously transported back to 1960, when she is just eighteen once again but this time armed with the knowledge and experience gained from adult life. Will she or won't she play her life the same way the second time around?

At first she looks as if she might do things differently this time in order to avoid the painful marital breakdown she knows lies ahead. She takes up with the class rebel who is trying very hard to ape the beat poets by reciting pretentious poetry to her. But the wisdom acquired from experience leads her to turn down his offer of running away to Utah to raise chickens to support his literary endeavours. In the (very gooey) end, love will out. She marries teenage sweetheart Charley again and, as a result of a hilariously unconvincing attempt to resolve the dilemma of how to bring her back from the past, is transported to a hospital bed in the 1980s to find her repentant husband, Nicholas Cage, waiting to tell her that he can't live without her etc.

The director, Francis Coppola, gives the audience one or two nice moments which highlight the changes in social manners and mores that have taken place since the early '60s, such as the end-of-date session in the car when Peggy Sue, imbued with the more enlightened ideas of the 70s and '80s. is trying to persuade boyfriend Charley to make love to her and finally resorts to saying "You would if you loved me!” Charley is outraged: "Peggy Sue, what's gotten into you. That's the man's line!'' But apart from a few one-liners and nicely observed details (like layers of stiffened petticoats) this is an unlikely and cloyingly sweet piece of nostalgic nonsense.

Janie Percy-Smith

Mixed Media: Dennis Hopper (2015)

The Mixed Media Column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Four hundred black and white photographs taken between 1961 and 1967 by film director and actor Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) went on show last year at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. These photographs haven't seen the light of day since his first ever photography show in Fort Worth, Texas in 1970. Hopper used a 28 mm lens Nikon camera, and later said 'I didn't crop my photos. They are full frame natural light.' He turned to photography in the 1960s 'because the reality of the things going on around me was more interesting than the fantasies of the world I worked in.'

Hopper's photographs capture the Counter Culture and other historical, social and political events during the sixties. He carried his camera with him everywhere around his neck during this period.

The Sixties Counter Culture was inspired by Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, Wilhelm Reich, Norman O Brown's Life Against Death, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception, and Alan Watts' The Joyous Cosmology. Foucault described the era as a 'surge of libido modulated by the class struggle.' Hopper reminisced that 'it was an incredible moment. There was practically a revolution going on to stop the Vietnam war', and that 'I've always been political... I was with Martin Luther King and at the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. I was a hippie. I was probably as Left as you could get without being a Communist.'

Hopper is critically acclaimed for his direction of such films as Easy Rider, The Last Movie, and Out of the Blue, and outstanding acting in films like Tracks, The American Friend, and Blue Velvet.

He was trained in Stanislavski Method acting at the LeeStrasberg Actors School. Hopper got his directing start as second unit director on the LSD film The Trip.

His 1964 photograph The Trip is a psychedelic all-seeing eye of God with a homunculus in a Stetson. Hopper photographed the Human Be-In in San Francisco in January 1967 and photographs from this include Timothy Leary, Love-In, Hippies,Flower Children,andHippie Girl Dancing. He formed a close friendship with beat poet Michael McClure at this time. Hopper would later say 'We're a new kind of human being. We're taking on more freedom and more risk. In a spiritual way, we may be the most creative generation in the last nineteen centuries.'

He photographed the Hells Angels, outlaw motorcyclists who became notorious with the filmThe Wild Angels, and publications of Hunter S Thompson's Hells Angels, and Freewheelin' Frank by Frank Reynolds and Michael McClure. The exhibition includes Hells Angels San Pedro, Hells Angel Girl, and Bruce Dern as Hells Angel from the 1966film The Wild Angels.

The defining moment of the Civil Rights movement: the 54 mile march of 4,000 people from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama led by Martin Luther King in 1965 was captured by Hopper. He later recalled that 'Marlon Brando got me involved in the march.'

He photographed the street life of Harlem and Los Angeles. His 1961 Double Standard is a quintessentially LA image complete with convertible top and traffic. Seamstress, All Night Diner, Downtown LA, Working Man, Homeless guy & belongings in pram demonstrates Hopper's humane view of those on the margins of society subject to poverty and hard work. Hopper said 'I saw myself as a political artist at the time, or rather as one aiming to express social protest.'

Hopper's photography is influenced by Aaron Siskind, Robert Capa, and Cartier-Bresson. He is in the American tradition of photographers like Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks who were employed by the 'New Deal' Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and '40s. This was a rural rehabilitation programme to improve the lives of share-croppers, tenants, poor farmers, and included a program to purchase submarginal land and resettle farmers in group farms which was an experiment in collectivising agriculture. Hopper's photographs can be compared to Robert Frank's record of life on the road in The Americans (1958).

In the 1980s Hopper became a Republican; 'I read Thomas Jefferson, the idea of having less government, more individual freedom, is something that I liked' but in 2008 he supported Barack Obama saying his reason for not voting Republican was the selection of Sarah Palin as the Vice Presidential candidate.

Hopper's politics are essentially philosophical individualist anarchism drawing on Thomas Jefferson's belief that people needed to be vigilant against any laws that 'violates the rights of the individual' and 'that government is best which governs least.' He is also in the tradition of Emerson's 'Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well ... Wild liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strengthening law and decorum, stupefies conscience', and Thoreau's 'action from principle', and 'government is best which governs not at all' in Civil Disobedience. Both Gandhi, and Martin Luther King cite the huge influence of Thoreau's essay.

Ed Ruscha concluded 'Like me, Dennis's art grows out of alienation. Dennis always responded to city anxiety, graffiti, etchings on walls, expressing the frustrations of urban life.'

Steve Clayton