The Salvation Army and the Working Class III. (1910)

From the May 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part II.

The Social Scheme.

 The indirect features of the scheme must not be such as to produce injury to the persons whom we seek to benefit.

While assisting one class of the community, it must not seriously interfere with the interests of another. In raising one section of the fallen, we must not thereby endanger the safety of those who with difficulty are keeping on their feet. . . . It is no use conferring six pennyworth of benefit on a man if, at the same time, we do him a shillings worth of harm.

—”In Darkest England,” page 81.

The Book that Made a Stir.

General Booth, when launching onto a sea of controversy his now celebrated book : “In Darkest England and the Way Out,” told his readers that, from calculations he had made himself and from the figures supplied by various authorities on the subject, in these islands fully one-tenth of the population was hopelessly submerged. Hopelessly that is, so far as all previous efforts on their behalf were concerned. This section of the people he nicknamed with his cant phrase “the submerged tenth.”

The purpose of his book was to arouse the public interest in these “lost ones,” and to obtain financial support for the starting of his “social scheme.”

We were shown at great length how hopelessly inadequate to cope with the evils of want and destitution had been the efforts of well-meaning reformers who worked in connection with various “charitable” agencies.

“It is no use trying to bale out the ocean with a pint pot,” said he (“In Darkess England,” page 253). What was wanted, we were told, was an all-embracing plan. “This scheme changes the circumstances of those whose poverty is caused by their misfortune. To begin with it finds work for the unemployed. This is the chief need.”

The Legion of the Lost.

The way in which our octogenarian professor of philanthropy proposed to go to work may best be set forth in his own words :

“The Social Problem presents itself before us whenever a hungry, dirty and ragged man stands at our door asking if we can give him a crust or a job. That is the social question, what are you to do with that man? He has no money in his pocket, all that he can pawn he has pawned long ago, his stomach is as empty as his purse, and the whole of the clothes upon his back, even if sold on the best terms, would not fetch a shilling. . . He asks for work, which he will set to even on his empty stomach and in his ragged uniform, if so be that you will give him something for it, but his hands are idle, for no one employs him. What are you to do with that man ? . . . To deal with this man is the problem of the unemployed. To deal with him effectively you must deal with him immediately, you must provide him in some way or other with food, and shelter, and warmth. Next you must find him something to do, something that will test the reality of his desire to work. This test must be more or less temporary, and should be of such a nature as to prepare him for making a permanent livelihood. Then, having trained him, you must provide him wherewithal to start life afresh. All these things I propose to do. My Scheme divides itself into three sections, each of which is indispensable for the success of the whole. In this three-fold organisation lies the open secret of the solution of the Social Problem.

The Scheme I have to offer consists in the formation of these people into self-helping and self-sustaining communities, each being a kind of cooperative society, or patriarchal family, etc. 

These communities we will call, for want of a better term, Colonies. 

There will be

(1) The City Colony,

(2) The Farm Colony,

(3) The Over-Sea Colony.”

(Before proceeding to our dissection of results we have troubled to quote Booth at some length, in order that those of our readers to whom ”Darkest England” is inaccessible may gain a clear and definite idea as to what his main object was when he set out to conquer “the powers of evil” and bring about “a new heaven and a new earth.”)

The “City” Colony.

By the phrase “City Colony” was meant a number of institutions which were to act as “Harbours of Refuge.” Into these havens were to be gathered all who had been “ship-wrecked.” Food and shelter were to be provided in return for work. Employment found for him, the mariner wrecked on life’s stormy sea was to be rescued and “reformed.” He was then to be restored to the joyful bosom of his happy family, or (in case the wild happy family were not having any) he was to be passed on to the Colony of the second class.

The second stage in this new Pilgrim’s Progress was intended to work out as follows :

Farms for the Famished.

The Salvation Army would buy land near some great city (the neighbourhood of London being chosen for the first experiment). Buildings would be erected and a farm stocked. The “wretched outcast” having passed through the refining fires of the city shelter and workshop, was then to be dumped down into a real live farm—there to be taught the whole art of husbandry.

In fine a regular “Garden City” would arise wherein our friend the W.O. would work out his economic and moral salvation.

Just here we may note a significant remark of the General’s when discussing the prospects of this portion of his scheme. (“In Darkest England,” page 249.)

“As the scheme progresses, it is not irrational to expect that Government, or some of the varied Local authorities will assist in the working out of a plan which, in so marked a manner, will relieve the rates and taxes of the country”.

(The last passage was not originally italicised.) 

In our examination of the actual, every-day working of this famous scheme, we shall have occasion to again refer to this pious hope that the “authorities” would patronise the concern. He then goes on to say: “From the Farm, as from the City . . . large numbers would be restored to friends up and down the country. Some would find employment in their own callings” (thereby pushing others out and lowering the rate of wages), “others would settle in cottages on a small piece of land that we should provide, or on Co-operative Farms which we intend to promote ; while the great bulk, after trial and training, would be passed on to the Foreign Settlement, which would constitute our third class, viz., the Over Sea Colony.”

As the last-named section of the Scheme has up to the present failed to materialise, we shall not let it worry us.

The Return of the “Golden Age.”

The Scheme, in its entirety, was, in the General’s own words :

“To draw up these poor outcasts, reforming them, and creating in them habits of industry, honesty, and truth . . . forwarding from the City to the Country, and there continuing the process of regeneration, and then pouring them forth on to the virgin soils that await their coming in other lands . . . Why not ?”

And Echo—after twenty years of scheming and planning, with money poured out like water ; after twenty years of “food and shelter depots,” Elevators, City and Farm Colonies, et hoc genus omne ; after twenty years of bluff and brag in the capitalist Press, self-denial weeks and special collections—shouts across this awful waste of time, “WHY NOT?”

The Answer.

The answer must be because the whole “Darkest England” Scheme from top to bottom has proved a gigantic fraud and failure. In our detailed examination of the actual working of the Scheme, reviewing the various divisions in their due order as set forth by Booth in his Vade-mecum, much damning evidence in support of our statement will come to light.

At the base of the “Social Scheme” were to be the food and shelter depots of the City Colony.

It was proposed to establish in connection with every Food and Shelter depot a workshop or labour-yard (ominous term) in which any person who came destitute and starving would be supplied with sufficient work to enable him to earn the 4d. needed for his bed and board.

The Salvation Army’s official figures for 1908 tell us that nearly six million meals were supplied at cheap food depots, and over two million cheap lodgings for the homeless were provided.

Specious and Misleading Advertisements.

Judging from the advertisements which appear under the “Army’s” aegis daily in the papers—of which the subjoined taken from the Westminster Gazette is a fair sample—anyone not in the know would naturally imagine that the 6,000 poor referred to had only to present themselves in all their abject misery at a Shelter, and lo and behold—they would be welcomed with open arms.

“STARVATION AND MISERY

are found on every hand among the Poor and Outcast by the Officers of the SALVATION ARMY who live among them, and are qualified to help them in the most economical and able manner. PRAY SEND HELP for so needy a work. £150,000 annually needed for the Army’s Central Funds alone. Over 6,000 Poor sleep in the Homes nightly. 170 Branches of Social and Relief work; are in operation.

Please address cheques (crossed “Bank of England, Law Courts Branch”) to GENERAL BOOTH, 101, Queen Victoria-street, London. Balance-sheets forwarded.”

In reality nothing of the kind takes place. “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Yes, but there’s an if. The tune they play at the door is “The Absent Minded Beggar” with its haunting refrain of “Pay ! Pay ! Pay !” There is no work test applied at these “poor men’s hostels,” and the “crowd of hungry, desperate wretches, without even a penny in their pouch, demanding food and shelter”—over whose woes twenty long years ago William the saintly waxed so tearfully eloquent—unless they can furnish the needful coin of the realm, are met with that sternest of all arguments on a winter’s night, a closed door !

Fritz.

(To be continued)

The Salvation Army and the Working Class. (1910)

From the June 1910 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to the last issue.

III—Continued.

(B) The true story of the "Elevators." 

Mr. F. A. McKenzie (the Army’s official trumpeter for 1908-9) in his Booth-inspired work of fiction : “Waste Humanity” writes as follows :

“Let us trace what becomes of the man anxious to leave the streets, who appeals to the Salvation Army for aid. He first goes to the Social Headquarters in Whitechapel-road, where he states his case. . . The Army’s officials say to him. Here is a chance for you to rise again. Make the best of it. Do what you are told. Put your heart and back into the work given you. . . . This is not a place of worship—it is a place of work. God bless you !

The man who appears to be genuine, etc., etc., . . . is sent, if there is room, to one of the City Colony Elevators in Spa-road, Bermondsey.”

The process of “Elevation” is both curious and instructive. The “out-of-works” are put to sorting waste paper and refuse. This the Army collects for nothing, under the plea that souls are thereby to be saved and wastrels (!) “elevated.” As no wages are paid, the luckless inmates experience all the refined tortures of an elaborate “truck” system.

Tickets are given them with which to obtain food and shelter. “At Spa Road and Old Street waste paper sorting elevators, the man, whether on the barrows or at the screens, are lucky if, in addition to their keep (valued at 7s.) they get more than a money grant of 6d. or 1s. for a very long week’s work. Many of the inmates remain for years, without showing any sign or seeing any prospect of Elevation.

“It is only natural that many men leave from dissatisfaction after trying the system long enough to learn that, instead of raising them, it is designed to keep them in perpetual submersion.” (“The Salvation Army and the Public,” p. 66.)

Until recently one of the principal industries connected with these depressors (beg pardon, “Elevators”) was the manufacture of firewood. So keen was the Army on getting orders for elevated firewood that many of the ordinary makers were forced to engage fewer hands.

Picture to yourselves these aforesaid hands turned on to the street owing to the operation of this precious schema, there to make their way to the nearest Shelter, thence to find work at an Elevator, pushing more hands out, and so on ad infinitum !

In 1892 the average earnings of an Army wood chopper were 1s. 2½d. per day, paid in tokens thus : Breakfast 3d, Dinner 4d., Tea 3d., Bed 2d., and 2½d. reserved as money grant and to cover cost of Sunday meals.

The average wage (!) paid was therefore 7s. 3d. par week, while the highest possible was 11s. per week—7s. of it being in “truck.”

As regards underselling, whilst on the one hand the officials make loose and vague statements to the effect that “no underselling takes place,” on the other hand we have the definite declaration of certain firewood makers that they have lost orders and contracts through being undersold by the Army, and were compelled to employ fewer hands owing to the capture of their trade by the Army.

When confronted with these definite pronouncements (full data being supplied) the Army found a safe refuge in discreet silence. In au interview published in the Blackburn Times, Aug. 3rd, 1907, General Booth said :

“We have practically no firewood-making now. It raised so much prejudice and silly opposition that we gave it up.”

Doubtless the touching pictures in the Social Gazette of March 21st 1908—”Wood-Chopping” and “Preparing Firewood”—were directly the result of “giving it up” !

IV

Concerning Hanbury Street.

There is no discipline so brutal as that of the sweater ; there is no slavery so relentless as that front which we seek to deliver the victims.”In Darkest England,” p. 166.

Although our factories will be permanent institutions they will not be anything more than temporary resting places to those who avail themselves of their advantages.—Ibid, p. 109.

One of the most famous—or rather, infamous—of the Salvation Army’s social institutions is the Joinery Elevator in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Every man who goes into this den has to sign an agreement. From this agreement—a copy of which we have been fortunate enough to obtain—a few quotations will prove very instructive.

CLAUSE 1. “I declare that, being unable to find work elsewhere, and being homeless, friendless, and destitute, I have been admitted to the City Colony, to work only for my subsistence and shelter, and that everything allowed me beyond this will be so allowed by the kindness of the Governor.”

CLAUSE 5. “I understand that no payment of any kind is promised beyond food and lodgings, etc.”

CLAUSE 6. “I agree to give my clothes over to the Officer on entrance, and if, in the opinion of the Officer, they are incapable of further use, the Colony to supply me on loan with the necessary clothes, for which I am prepared to give a receipt, with the distinct understanding that should I on leaving the Colony take these clothes with me without written authority for my so doing, I render myself liable to be charged with embezzlement.”

CLAUSE 7. “I understand that in the event of my giving the Officer cause for dissatisfaction by bad behaviour, or for any other reason, I am liable to instant dismissal, and also to the forfeiture of my reward promised for industrious work.”

From sixty to eighty men are usually employed at these “works.”

Except in the case of a very few outside or “paid hands” taken on from time to time, all the men taken in are “out-of-works.”

“The joinery works,” says Mr. Manson, “are well equipped, the machinery being driven by electricity. Practically every kind of work is undertaken—inside doors and front doors, windows, office partitions, flights of stairs, benches for halls, kitchen tables, and train indicators. To do such work at all competently a man must be a very good joiner. No inexperienced man could do it.”

The hours worked at this “Labour Hospital” are from 6.30 a.m. to 6 p.m. (except on Saturdays). Three-quarters of an hour is allowed for breakfast, and one hour for dinner, both of which are supplied at Quaker Street (a sort of soup kitchen run by the Army) half a mile away.

The working week is 53½ hours, with frequent overtime. And an 11¾ hours’ working day is not uncommon.

The work done is rated by time or by piece. 2s. a day or 12s. a week is the wage or allowance given for time or day work.

9s. a week is deducted as the cost of board and lodging, thus leaving an average of 3s. a week by way of money grant.

Much light from various sources was from time to time thrown upon these “elevating” methods. Forthwith the Salvation Army officials made strenuous efforts to excuse their damnable practices by depreciating and vilifying the quality of the men’s work. “Piece-work” was flatly denied.

Apropos of this last some comparisons of official statements will prove amusing as well as most instructive:

COMMISSIONER STURGESS. (Memorandum July 22nd, 1908.)

“Hanbury St. is not a piecework shop

COLONEL JACOBS

(Commissioner Sturgess’ assistant.)

“When a man becomes experienced we put him on piecework.”

————————

(Agreement signed by men.)

“In the case of task work,” etc.

————————-

(An Army official to a representative of the Times. “It is all piecework.”

——————————–

(War Cry, May 1st, 1909.)

“We said that the majority of those provided with employment had lost their skill, and could only do the commonest class of work, and little of that.

Salvation Army Year Book, 1908. Page 43. “The majority are accomplished hands, and are able to do any hind of work usually carried on in the trades.” (Carpentry, joinery, and painting).

——————————–

A knowledge of what the Army professes to pay its hands for piecework is of great importance, because we can then discover, with a fair degree of accuracy, how these prices compare with those paid outside for exactly the same work. The work-tabs which have—unfortunately from the Army’s point of view—come to light, show this clearly.

These tabs supplied to the men for each job give the price to be paid to the man for making, and bear the signature of the officer in charge.

“Comparisons are odorous,” as the old lady said in the play, but the following list (by no means a complete one), showing the prices paid by the Army for certain work, and the prices estimated by a master-builder as those which he would have to pay for the same work, is positively damning.

No amount of plausibility can possibly explain away these stubborn facts.

——————————–

Fritz.

(To be continued)

Capitalism, poverty and child abuse (1991)

From the June 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

The allegations of satanic rituals involving children in Rochdale and the Orkneys, and the life sentence passed on David Hammond in November 1989 for the brutal murder of his five-year old daughter Sukina have provided the national newspapers with a lot of sensational material in the last two years.

The NSPCC estimates that between 50 and 100 children are killed by their parents each year and that a further 16,000 are abused. Child abuse cases reported to them have risen by 20 percent in the last year (Guardian, 19 March) and 7 of their 66 teams claimed to have evidence of Satanic rituals involving children (Daily Telegraph, 19 March).

The murder of children by their parents is not new. Infanticide was used to control the population and to prevent children born with defects becoming a burden on the community. In China even today baby girls are sometimes killed, where boys are preferred in families limited to one child.

In 19th century London 80 percent of illegitimate babies put out to nurse in the notorious "baby farms" died. Some died of childhood diseases associated with poverty. because their mothers could not afford to pay for their children to be looked after properly. Others were murdered for gain after the fees had been collected.

P. T. Resnick, writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1969, listed various reasons why parents murder their children: altruistic killing to relieve the victim’s realistic or delusional suffering, whether or not followed by suicide; acute psychosis; elimination of an unwanted child (as when paternity is in doubt or the child would be a financial burden); accidental or unconscious motivation; and spouse revenge—the so-called Medea Syndrome (after Medea in Ancient Greek mythology who, following desertion by her husband, killed their two children, saying: "Thy sons are dead and gone, that will stab thy heart").

Children are frequently warned by parents, teachers and public information films not to talk to strangers. This deliberate inculcation of a suspicious and fearful attitude to strangers is probably more harmful than helpful as at least 88 percent of child murders are carried out by members of the victim’s own family. The same mistrust of strangers is instilled into children to "protect" them from sexual abuse. But children are far more likely to be abused by relatives.

Poor get the blame

Commenting on the strong link being being abused as a child and anti-social behaviour, including child abuse, later in life, Sir Keith Joseph when Minister of Health and Social Security coined the phrase “cycles of deprivation". His argument was that parents brought up in deprived circumstances were responsible for bringing up their children in similarly deprived circumstances.

The political right-wing favours this type of “victim-bashing" approach because it avoids the pressure for social change. To blame the poor for their poverty ignores the fact that capitalism creates the wretched conditions in which many workers live. Capitalism fosters inequality and workers brought up in deprived circumstances have great difficulty in making economic progress. The worst schools, the worst social amenities and the worst job opportunities are all the very poor have access to. Children from poor families are under greater pressure to leave school as soon as possible in order that they can work and contribute to the family income. In addition, some housing estates have such bad reputations that it is difficult for workers living on them to borrow money or obtain mortgages. This has more to do with the continued deprivation from one generation to the next than any moral deficiency or lack of ability on the part of the workers.

Internal stresses within a family, personality clashes, sibling rivalry, incompatibility, worries about health, and misunderstandings between the different generations are similar for rich and poor alike. But the external stresses caused by poverty, unemployment, bad housing, overcrowding or homelessness only affect those who have to work for wages. It is these external stresses, and the fact that workers will have faced many of these problems during their own childhood that makes physical abuse more likely to happen in poor homes.

Poverty is violence

Social workers have failed to protect children because under capitalism their function is social control:

We have seen that the ruling class cannot maintain its exploitive domination simply by the direct repressive apparatus of the army, police, courts and prisons. Its legitimation has to be engineered through a range of ideological mechanisms. Social work operates primarily as part of these mechanisms.

(P. Leonard, Poverty Consciousness and Action, 1975).

Capitalism distorts relationships. By putting a price on everything and subordinating all activities to the need to make a profit it has made us all rivals. It is no surprise that children have been regarded as their parents’ property, because capitalism prizes property above everything else.

Hypocritically, individual acts of cruelty are condemned by politicians while children are allowed to starve in underdeveloped countries to maintain profits. In the Phillipines children work long hours in what amounts to little more than slavery without much condemnation from European reformers, some of whom are happy to reap the profits that are made.

In the case of Sukina Hammond the Daily Star carried huge headlines “Whipped to Death" and gave lurid details of the child’s suffering. But only a handful of cases are reported in this way. The majority of children killed by their parents will not be mentioned because they are not newsworthy enough. Even in death Sukina Hammond was exploited for a headline.

Workers owe it to themselves, their children and to future generations to remove the profit motive, the property tag and all the rivalries and suspicions which are inherent in competitive societies. Perhaps then children like Sukina Hammond will not have died in vain.

Carl Pinel

Imperialism Part 2: Super-profits and the labour aristocracy (2020)

From the September 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

We continue our series debunking the view that workers in the First World live off the backs of those in the Third World by examining in further detail Lenin’s mistaken theory.

Link to Part 1

Lenin’s theory of the ‘weakest link’ led him to believe a ‘socialist proletarian revolution’ would most likely occur first in parts of the world still transitioning towards full capitalism, not the advanced capitalist countries themselves. Partly, this arose from his belief that a stratum of workers in the latter – the ‘labour aristocracy’ – had been ‘bribed’ into supporting capitalism out of imperialist ‘super-profits’ produced by a super-exploited colonial workforce.

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Lenin quotes the arch-imperialist, Cecil Rhodes, reminiscing about a meeting of the unemployed he once attended. The discontent he encountered there convinced Rhodes that Britain should expand its empire, thereby improving the economic prospects of British workers, in order to avert a civil war.

Yet, incongruously, Lenin states elsewhere in his book (Ch. 4) that if capitalism could ‘raise the living standards of the masses, who in spite of the amazing technical progress are everywhere still half-starved and poverty-stricken … it would not be capitalism’. This prompts the question – why then would the capitalists go to such lengths to raise the living standards of some workers by ‘bribing’ them?

Lenin’s definitive statement on the subject appears in the 1920 Preface of Imperialism:

 ‘Obviously out of such enormous super-profits (since they are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country) it is possible to bribe the labour aristocracy. And the capitalists of the “advanced” countries are bribing them, they bribe them in a thousand different ways, direct and indirect. This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labour aristocracy, who are quite philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labour lieutenants of the capitalist class, real vehicles of reformism and chauvinism’.

Prior to the First World War, as Eric Hobsbawn notes, Lenin did not really make a connection between the ‘labour aristocracy’ and imperialist ‘super-profits’ as an explanation for the reformist outlook of workers. Rather, he seems to have attributed this to the influence of certain ‘petty bourgeois’ tendencies becoming more prominent due to a changing occupational structure and the development of a purely ‘economist trade union movement fragmenting the working class into ‘selfish’ (“petty bourgeois”) segments each pursuing its interest at the expense of others’ (Monthly Review, December 2012).

It was the impact of the First World War and Lenin’s profound sense of shock induced by the various Social Democratic parties (comprising the Second International) abandoning all pretence of international solidarity and aligning themselves with their respective capitalist governments in the cause of an imperialist bloodbath, which jolted him into further developing his idea of the labour aristocracy. That War, he reasoned, was the quintessential expression of the capitalist rivalries inherent in imperialism. By supporting it, the parties of the Second International betrayed their own inadvertent support for the imperialist project.

Imperialism had been condoned on the grounds that, by imposing capitalist development on the newly colonised countries, this would hasten the advent of socialism. However, behind the superficial rationalisations portraying imperialism as some kind of objectively ‘civilising’ and progressive project there lurked ulterior motives.

Lenin argued that by materially benefitting from the imperialist project, by increasing their living standards at the expense of the colonial workforce, the labour aristocracy comprising the ‘principal prop of the Second International’, found their appetite for socialist revolution had been considerably dulled if not altogether extinguished. Thus did they succumb to the politics of ‘opportunism’ – or reformism – and, in their leadership role as representatives of the wider working class, they set about persuading the latter to adopt this course of action as well, in the process abandoning their earlier commitment to socialist revolution. Indeed, reformism itself could likewise be construed as a form of bribery insofar as it held out the prospect of workers improving their circumstances within the framework of capitalism itself, thereby shoring it up.

Earlier theories

The term ‘labour aristocracy’ was originally coined by the anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, in 1872. Bakunin felt it was not the organised and more skilled workers within the proletariat that were its most radical elements but, rather, those lower down the labour hierarchy: ‘To me the flower of the proletariat is not, as it is to the Marxists, the upper layer, the aristocracy of labor, those who are the most cultured, who earn more and live more comfortably than all the other workers’ (On the International Workingmen’s Association and Karl Marx,1872).

This, in a way, anticipated Lenin’s view that revolution was more likely to break out first in the poorer countries of the world. In both instances, the underlying (and rather mechanistic) assumption seems to have been that the more intense the poverty experienced, the more likely are people to revolt.

However, this raises the question – what are the people supposedly revolting for? A violent uprising, however understandable, does not of itself constitute a social revolution if all it does is to replace one ruling class with another. Social revolution means a fundamental change in the basis of society irrespective of how it is achieved.

Bakunin’s basic argument has been endorsed by others – like Frantz Fanon, whose seminal work The Wretched of the Earth (1961), contended that it was the lumpenproletariat and Third World peasantry who, precisely because of their social distance from the capitalist mainstream and its dominant ideology, embodied the greatest revolutionary potential within modern capitalism. Similar sentiments have been expressed with regard to the newly-identified ‘precariat’ of more recent times.

Marx’s opinion of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ contrasted starkly with Bakunin’s. Living largely outside of the constraints of formal wage labour and subject to the vagaries of desperate poverty, the lumpenproletariat, by virtue of its very life situation, was more likely to become a ‘bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’ rather than a force for revolution. This was a reference to elements of the lumpenproletariat being employed by the French state within its armed forces for the purposes of maintaining order during the social upheavals of the mid-nineteenth century – the bribe in question being a soldier’s wage rather than something received in addition to this wage (The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850).

Marx’s reference to the lumpenproletariat being ‘bribed’ is ironic, given Lenin’s insistence that it was labour aristocracy, instead, that was the beneficiary of capitalist bribery.

However, this may be a case of over-theorising on both sides. One’s own circumstances – be one a lumpenproletarian or labour aristocrat – need not be particularly decisive as far as one’s receptivity to socialist ideas are concerned. Indeed, Marx and Engels themselves in the Communist Manifesto speculated on the possibility of even some capitalists (Engels himself, being a prime example), cutting themselves adrift from their class and seeking common cause with the workers.

Nevertheless, the weight of historical evidence suggests that the more militant elements within the working class (particularly those who have embraced revolutionary socialism) have, indeed, tended to be drawn from the ranks of semi-skilled and skilled workers.

There is a further irony in Lenin’s depiction of the labour aristocracy as a force for conservatism since it was precisely this segment of the Russian working class that formed the social base from which the Bolsheviks primarily drew their support – skilled machinists in the large factories whereas ‘Lower paid workers, such as the predominantly female textile workers, were generally either unorganized or apolitical (until the beginnings of the revolution) or supported the reformist Mensheviks’ (C Post, Solidarity Sept-Oct 2006).

Engels, before Lenin, had suggested a link between capitalist monopoly and the labour aristocracy, in a letter to Kautsky, concerning the political situation in England: ‘There is no workers party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s Monopoly of the world market and the colonies’ (12 September 1882).

However, unlike Lenin, Engels held that the tendency for capital to penetrate everywhere would eventually break down England’s global monopoly (and, by extension, undermine the super-profits it derived from such a monopoly), thereby reversing the ‘embourgeoisement’ of the English proletariat.

Bribery but how?

For all Lenin’s talk of how the capitalists bribe the labour aristocracy in ‘a thousand different ways, direct and indirect’, it is difficult to envisage even a single way in which this might happen – not if we are to remain faithful to the meaning of the term ‘bribe’ as a premeditated act to materially induce the other party to the transaction to do your bidding. For Lenin’s concept of a bribe to make any sense, and to work on its own terms, it would need to imply something given in addition to the wages received – meaning one would need to transparently disaggregate the income of the labour aristocracy into a ‘legitimate’ wage and ‘illegitimate’ bribe component. This obviously did not happen; all workers received was a wage so any alleged bribe would be hidden within this wage.

This raises multiple problems. If the capitalists of the imperialist countries were so amenable to surreptitiously sharing the proceeds of their investments abroad with (some of) their workforce at home, one might surmise that they would be less resistant to pressure from the latter for better wages than was the case. As Tony Cliff noted: ‘No capitalist says to the workers: “I have made high profits this year, so I am ready to give you higher wages”’ Socialist Review, June 1957). Workers always have to struggle for higher wages. Indeed, Lenin rather contradicted himself by suggesting that super-profits are obtained over and above ‘the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of their “own” country’ – implying a systemic need, arising out of market competition, for these capitalists to exert a constant downward pressure on wage levels.

If Lenin’s thesis was correct we would expect income differentials between the labour aristocracy and other workers to vary in proportion to a country’s level of colonial investment. However, the evidence suggests otherwise. According to Cliff, wage differentials between skilled and unskilled workers were higher in a country like Rumania which had very little foreign investment compared to, say, Britain – in Lenin’s time by far the world largest source of foreign capital.

Moreover, though wage differentials in Britain did widen significantly between, roughly, 1850 and 1890 because of the growth of craft unions (e.g. the Amalgamated Society of Engineers) dominated by ‘labour aristocrats’, these differentials narrowed towards the end of the nineteenth century with the appearance of the ‘new unionism’ which sought to reach out and organise unskilled and semi-skilled workers. The point is that it was precisely then when the age of imperialism commenced (as Lenin saw it) that these differentials started narrowing, thus contradicting what his theory predicts.

There are other grounds on which one might question the theory. For instance, it overlooks that what might theoretically be in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole to collude in bribing workers to achieve some nebulous political objective, may not be a sufficiently persuasive reason for individual capitalists (in competition with other capitalists) to become involved in this stratagem. Meaning it may never take off as a stratagem.

Likewise, workers succumbing to such bribery and seeing themselves as indebted to their employers would probably be less likely to militantly struggle for better wages and conditions. This would probably more than wipe out the value of any hypothetical bribe they might have received.

There are other problems with Lenin’s theory which we will consider later in the context of a ‘post-colonial’ world. While Lenin fondly imagined ‘national liberation struggles’ would serve to undermine imperialism and thereby strike a blow against ‘monopoly capitalism’ the outcome of such struggles, as we shall see, has been quite the opposite of what he hoped for.

Robin Cox

(To be continued)

Pie in the sky (2006)

Book Review from the May 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

‘What Price the Poor? William Booth, Karl Marx and the London Residuum’. By Ann Woodall, (Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2005)

Booth and Marx arrived in London in 1849. Their reactions to the London poor, variously referred to as “the submerged tenth”, “the dangerous class” or “the residuum” were very different. Booth, inspired mainly by evangelical Christianity in his home-town of Nottingham, set up the Salvation Army and offered them pie in the sky when they died. Yet in its early years the “Sally Army” was militant in its defence of the poor. “The Salvation Army”, Engels noted, “revives the propaganda of early Christianity, appeals to the poor as the elect, fights capitalism in a religious way, and thus fosters an element of early Christian class antagonism which one day may become troublesome to the well-to-do who now find the ready money for it”. But it never did become a problem for the well-to-do. As Roy Hattersley wrote in his biography of Booth, his social policy “was intended to ameliorate the worst features of the existing order rather than to change it”. Early the next century, in George Bernard Shaw’s play Major Barbara, the capitalist Undershaft responds to the accusation that he did not understand what the Salvation Army did for the poor: “Oh yes I do. It draws their teeth: that is enough for me as a man of business”.

Marx refereed to the residuum as the “relative surplus population” which was comprised of both the “reserve army of labour”, who could be employed, and the “lumpenproletariat” who could not. Woodall does a good job of explaining Marx’s viewpoint on the necessary role of poverty under capitalism and the revolutionary socialist alternative.

Lew Higgins

The Stretcher Bearers (1972)

From the May 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

At a time when it is still the professed policy of the Heath government that we should all learn to stand on our own feet, the social services, which are seen as a crutch for social cripples, are expanding at an unprecedented pace.

In fact over the past couple of years social service has become one of the great growth industries. In local government it is already a powerful factor, with budgets which can run into several millions of pounds a year, which puts it second (although a long way second) to education. The prospect is that the power and influence of social service departments will grow and that they may become dominant at most Town Halls throughout the country.

This makes a job in social service an attractive proposition. One Director of Social Services in a London borough remembers that when he was at Oxford none of his fellow students would have dreamed of going to work in social service. Now, when he goes back to the university to lecture about his job, he finds many undergraduates prepared to consider it as readily as they would the law or industry. (A Director of Social Services in a large, busy borough can earn £10,000 a year.)

Most of this has come about after the Seebohm Report of 1968, which suggested sweeping changes in the structure and organisation of the social services. The Seebohm Report came as another stage in a long, typical development. For centuries the state has had to take some sort of an interest in social casualties like the sick, the aged, the mad. The Industrial Revolution, with its increase in population and the concentration into towns, brought its own particular problems as well as the machinery to administer them. At first government interest was comparatively slight but here, as in so many other fields, the ruling class have now accepted the economy of state intervention and after Seebohm this is here to stay.

Until the Second World War social work was often considered the field of the amateur or the part time do-gooder. It has been really discovered during the past twenty-five years, as local authorities have taken over more and more responsibilities in the field. But it all tended to happen piecemeal, with the scope of the service varying from area to area and with separate departments springing up as problems came to light, with little overall strategy or communication.

Imagine a family where the father is out of work and behind with the rent, where there are a lot of children and the mother in hospital having another. Before the Seebohm reorganisation, this family might have been attended to by an army of social workers, all coming from the same Town Hall — Education Welfare, Childrens Department, Housing, Family Welfare, Home Help, Medical Social Worker.

Now this would never do, in the age of rationalisation, in which capitalism has so diligently sought out those jobs being done by two people where one would do. Seebohm was in this tradition, something of a hatchet job. It proposed that each local authority set up a Department of Social Service responsible for such work as child care, mental welfare, home helps, the elderly and the handicapped; a few fields such as those attached to hospitals were excluded. The report described this reorganisation, in established social work jargon, as providing “. . . a community based and family orientated service, which will be available to all.”

The stated aim was to set up a service which would take care of every problem which could conceivably afflict a worker from the cradle to the grave. In each case, this service would be applied through, just one social worker instead of, perhaps, five or six as before. The Seebohm Report also gave support to social work as a profession with the status and authority of a separate department and no longer as an adjunct to the medical and education services. The result has been the mushroom growth of the powerful departments, the career structure in social work, the death of the old image of the do-gooding spinster in her flowered hat and dress.

As might have been expected, Seebohm was widely welcomed among social workers. The Report’s recommendations were largely passed into law in the Local Authority Social Services Act 1969 and now it needs only a ’phone call to suck us into the great, caring, organising, providing machinery of modern social service.

All of this sounds very comforting but what of the snags? One of these is the enormous power which social workers can exert over the lives of the people they call their clients. A social worker can exercise — or choose not to exercise — influence which can affect a family’s chance of rehousing or of help with cash grants. When a child has been ordered by a court into the care of a local authority it is the social services department which decides — without reference to anyone else — whether the child remains at home or is taken away, perhaps to what was once called an approved school but which is now known as a community home.

So this is a good time to ask what it is all about. Why does a social system which is so clearly uncaring spend so much resources on apparently caring for us? All capitalist parties, whatever incidental differences they might have, support the idea of social services. In wartime, social services have expanded and established themselves in many fresh fields. It is, of course, at such times that the ruling class place special importance upon keeping their workers as healthy and as contented as possible; hence schemes like welfare food, controlled rents, subsidised prices. These guidelines lead us to the conclusion that social service can be an effective method of keeping the working class docile, of defusing their discontents and dampening their problems by giving them the impression that capitalism cares about them.

It is no coincidence, that so many social workers are to be found in courts and town halls, the very places where capitalism is administered by its laws of privilege and suppression. When the social worker comes tripping through the front door of the problem family she does not bring only material help or emotional support (if she even brings those) but also a whole lot of advice and counselling aimed at conditioning the recipient to accepting life as a misery of denial and repression in the slum, on a worker’s poverty income.

Sometimes this counselling is mashed up with a fair measure of psychoanalysis, which qualifies it for the description of casework. This can be a fascinatingly complicated and skilful process in which the elements of a dialogue may be played backwards and forwards like an endless game of tennis which is very entertaining except that the ball becomes increasingly battered and misshapen. The really dedicated (let us not say bigoted) caseworker can move in on a family living in a rat-infested slum, where everyone is sick and apathetic, and tell them in the kindest possible way that their material problems are irrelevant. What such a caseworker would really like to toy with are the parent/child relationships in the family, whether they have all passed adequately through all the Oedipal phases, whether they were successfully pot-trained.

Help with material problems can in any case have only the limited object of helping the family tolerate the intolerable. If the electricity has been cut off because the last two bills are unpaid the social worker may try to arrange the instalment of a prepayment meter, which deals with the temptation to get behind with the bills but not with the urge to break open the coin box when times are hard. In the 19th century voluntary social workers would organise mothers’ meetings where the women were taught needlework, simple cookery and the cheapest ways of making nourishing soup. Now, there are homes where women can stay with their families while they receive expert (and it really is expert) instruction on how to survive on Social Security payouts. It is all rather like the army training shock troops to exist on iron rations in the desert.

Although most social workers accept the present order of priorities, there are many who are becoming increasingly frustrated at their function in capitalist society. Some of these have supported groups like the squatters and Claimants Unions, which has the disadvantage for them that these groups tend to become respectable with time, like the squatters who have been tamed into another office of the council housing department, with their own allocations of dwellings to find tenants for. Other social workers have set up their own underground, with its own magazine — Case Con. There are Case Con groups in many parts of the country, angrily but confusedly questioning the established concepts of social work. They are aware that capitalism needs social tranquilisers and angry at their own part in providing them; at present they have no better answer than what they call “revolutionary social work”. Despite their discontent, the Case Con adherents have yet to realise that social work is essentially aimed at meddling with the problems of capitalism and that it cannot be revolutionary because it does not operate in the political field where the revolution, which will end social work just as it will end the problems of capitalism, must be carried out.

Capitalism is a social system of privilege and repression in which insecurity, bad housing, acute poverty, are continuing symptoms of a basic condition. With some perseverance and luck a worker may survive the pressures upon him and die without too many debts or other handicaps. But in the nature of the system there must be plenty of casualties from capitalism’s assaults upon us and it is these that social workers are supposed to pick up and attend to.

It is not difficult to snipe at them, as they pick their way through the battlefield with their stretchers and bandages. Yet there are positives in their situation; like the stretcher bearers, they accept that there is need and that the condition of the people they pick up is not their own fault but that of conditions outside their immediate control. Social workers accept the concept of unconscious motivation; they accept that our behaviour has been largely fashioned for us by the situation in which we find ourselves. They also accept that social casualties should not be left in distress, that they are a communal responsibility.

Because of this, social workers have something to offer in terms of tolerance, co-operativeness and concern. Is it too optimistic, to see hope in the fact that these will be the accepted attitudes in the society of the future, when the social carnage of capitalism is an ugly memory.

Ivan

A badly crumpled man (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

A thick skin is necessary to all politicians and this government abounds in rhinoceros figures. Some of them revel in an acknowledgement of their popular caricature — Thatcher the quick-tempered autocrat, Tebbit the parliamentary bovver boy, Howe the dead sheep of Westminster. But there is an exception; a minister who functions rather like a problem child, plastering its family into a false unity through itself carrying the burdens of their fractious confusions. Sir Keith Joseph, Secretary for Education, is liable to flog himself publicly with statements like: “You can't possibly blame Geoffrey Howe, he’s been marvellous. And the prime minister too. It’s me. It’s people such as me who are to blame.” Demonstrators who are unable to impress ministers like Tebbit sense that with Joseph they are close to a kill and they do not spare his feelings. "Sir Keith," read a placard which greeted him in South Wales. "You are mad and we hate you."

So it should be remembered that Joseph emerged as a government minister to a mixture of wonder and gratitude that so clever a man should spare us the time to take over a ministry and solve all our problems. (One hack was so excited that he likened Joseph's carefully argued opinions to fine sherry.) He came into the world with his mouth crammed with silver cutlery. His family, owning the Bovis building firm, were rich enough to send him to Harrow and Oxford University, where he so impressed everyone that he became a Fellow of All Souls. In Oxford, this is very significant; there are no undergraduates in All Souls, which is inhabited by Fellows who are reputed to be very superior people, the highest authorities on law, history and the social sciences. After a short spell being superior as a barrister. Joseph got into Parliament and was eventually given some inferior jobs in the government until in 1959 Macmillan made him Minister of Housing. A few years ago he was regarded as at least a future Chancellor of the Exchequer, possibly the next Conservative Prime Minister — a man who had left the most cloistered environment to put to rights a few trivial matters like slums, war and poverty.

Joseph made a consciously impressive start at the Ministry of Housing by going to look at some slums and then making a speech about them, even mentioning one — London’s notorious Cable Street — by name to show how he had got to grips with the problem. Perhaps in an effort to expand his knowledge, some people who actually lived in slums called round to Joseph’s expensive Chelsea home to tell him what the dirt and the drains and the rats were like. To the sound of Fleet Street’s busily clicking cameras, a bravely smiling Lady Joseph admitted a few scruffy children. One result of Joseph's investigations, for which Cable Street should not be held responsible, was the encouragement of local authorities to build a lot of new slums in the form of tower blocks, although Joseph did not actually intend to avail himself of this remedy for the housing shortage. Councils who followed his policy soon regretted it; the economics did not work out as Joseph had assumed and they found they had erected concentrations of neurosis, disease, crime and drug misuse.

There were few mourners for Joseph, when his time at the Ministry of Housing was ended by the Labour Party victory in the 1964 election. So anguished were the Tories by that defeat that they decided not only to ditch their leader, the amiable, aristocratic buffoon Alec Douglas-Home, but to elect another by ballot. This was an historical change since up to then the Tory leader had been expected to emerge after a bout of vicious in-fighting which Harold Macmillan called "the customary processes of consultation". Joseph was a Heath supporter and was rewarded for this, when the Conservatives came back to power in 1970. Through another customary process Joseph, having failed to make any impression on the housing problem, was given the rather more demanding job of abolishing sickness and poverty. He was put in charge of the Department of Health and Social Security, where he soon got down to an investigation which was to lead him to a discovery even more startling than the slums in Cable Street.

In June 1972 Joseph announced his suspicion that children born into poor, deprived families stood a good chance of growing up into parents of their own poor, deprived family.

  Much deprivation and maladjustment persisted from generation to generation. Many of today’s deprived children were doomed not only to stunted lives themselves but to become, unless they could be helped, the parents of a further generation of doomed children. (The Times, 30 June 1972.)

Joseph called this “the cycle of deprivation" and social workers and teachers were excited at the prospect of lavish official research into a problem which they had been despairingly aware of for a very long time. But the excitement died, when Joseph decided the research showed the cycle of deprivation did not exist, that he had invented it and the whole thing was. in his words, "a pretty negative piece of analysis". It was difficult to decide whether it was more worrying to have a Minister for Social Security who was surprised to find that impoverished families produced impoverished children than one who thought this didn't happen. A year later a positive piece of analysis by the National Childrens' Bureau reported that one million children who were living in squalor and deprivation, educationally crippled from birth, were “doomed to failure".

Sir Keith

Joseph lost his job when the Heath government went down to defeat in the disarray of the Three Day Week. He had made some elegant speeches, as befits a former Fellow of All Souls, he had made some promises and, as is expected of government ministers, he had juggled the figures a bit — in his case by introducing reforms like the Family Income Supplement which are supposed to substantially reduce poverty. Lord Carrington was annoyed with him because he had “given away a lot of money” without securing any benefit for the Conservative Party and the poor might have been annoyed with him because there had not been much benefit for them either; as the Heath government left office there were nearly four million people depending on Supplementary Benefit and nearly one and a half million living at or below the official poverty line.

Nobody expected that Joseph’s inability to introduce social security to the people of Britain would harm him in the Tory Party and when, in their bout of anguish after their 1974 defeat they threw out the leader they had chosen in the last bout, he became a strong candidate for the leadership. He might be sitting in Number Ten now, except that he made yet another memorable speech. The occasion was at Birmingham in October 1974 and his audience of Conservatives received an early warning of what was to come. “Let us,” Joseph advised them, “take inspiration from that admirable woman. Mary Whitehouse . . .” He then moved relentlessly on, to the kernel of his speech:

  The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened . . . a high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5 . . . Some (of the mothers) are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters . . . Why do I talk about birth control for the unmarried girls in socio-economic groups four and five? Because . . . this group makes far less use of birth control than the other social classes. (Daily Telegraph, 21 October 1974.)

Whatever had once been expected of his theory of the cycle of deprivation, it was not that it would resurface in the form of a crude, class-biased blunder into the perilous field of amateur eugenics. His louder opponents compared Joseph to Hitler; perhaps more damaging was the sort of quieter dismay expressed in Cecil King’s Diaries: “. . . surprising that what was obviously meant to be a major affair was not more carefully considered”.

As he could no longer expect to be Tory leader himself, Joseph threw his support behind Margaret Thatcher, who gratefully foisted him on to the Department of Industry after the 1979 election. It was here that Joseph began to show the first clear signs of serious disintegration. The Tory defeat of 1974 had converted him to the conviction that the happiest way of running capitalism was to ensure that the market, shaped by the profit motive, should be allowed to operate in simple purity. If an industry or a company were not profitable then it should not survive, like a brainless human body on a life- support machine, through financial aid from the government:

  If the government were to put money into industries that are losing jobs, the result would simply be that an equal number of jobs would be lost in other industries. All we would do would be to wreck other industries that arc doing moderately well by overtaxing them or their workers.

Few people expected Joseph actually to believe this argument and any who did expect him to would have had problems explaining what he did as Secretary for Industry. He decided to double state support for companies like British Leyland; he sanctioned £1.5 billion a year in subsidies to industry and £3 billion a year to state industries. One example was in March 1981, when he announced a government guarantee for a £200 million loan facility for ICL. This state-backed computer company had just announced a three-month loss of £20 million, which qualified it to have Joseph switch off the life support machine. To the dismay of the Tory Dries, he kept it going; a home-based computer industry is too vital, for economic and military reasons, to British capitalism to allow it to be damaged by draughts of intellectual sherry from All Souls.

Joseph is now Secretary for Education, which he says he regards as the peak of his career but where he does not have a happy time. He has a reputation as the Mad Axeman of the schools and the universities and everywhere he is hounded by angry demonstrators, who perhaps thought his “cycle of deprivation" speech implied a commitment to step up investment in education. In a recent White Paper he declared his intention to turn the screw on the teachers, as the demand for them falls, by stiffening the qualifications required of them and to make it harder for the teacher who is not up to scratch to keep a job. Joseph’s plans were not well received; a failing teacher may be due to sickness or a weariness with decades of struggling with educational, personal and social problems and in any case Joseph himself does not rate high in the efficiency tables: a chairman of the National Enterprise Board once described him as “hopeless” and in May 1981 the Bow Group journal Crossbow condemned him as “. . . by universal consent the most dismal disappointment of this administration". At uproarious meetings Joseph hears what people think of him, standing as if on the gallows, unable to make himself heard, unable to understand why these clamorous tormentors obstinately refuse to accept the crystal logic of his policies.

But the fault is not in his personality (in private, he is said to be kindly and witty); if he has crumpled it is under the strain of trying to do the impossible. His famous brain has not protected Joseph from the delusion that this social system can be made to work to the benefit of us all. Other politicians, who wear better than Joseph, are under the same delusion and so are the demonstrators. They are all looking for a missing ingredient through which capitalism’s ailments can be put to rights — the demonstrators say this ingredient is human compassion while Joseph says it is cerebral power and purity. All are driven by a common madness which sets experienced reality at nought. The choice is not to bury the likes of Joseph or to praise them. If we are to defeat what he represents we must not only know him for what he is but why.

Ivan

Merde in France (2005)

From the December 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Wednesday 16 November was a quiet day in France. Only 163 cars were burnt by urban rioters in the whole of France and the state of emergency was lifted in some places and re-imposed in others. The urban unrest of the last two weeks is fading away, leaving some dead – the guy attacked for trying to defend his area from arsonists; some injured – the disabled woman set on fire in a bus by thugs, the 18- month-old baby who received a rock on the head and a whole lot of mindless vandalism: cars burnt, schools burnt, buses burnt, kindergartens burnt, shops smashed and so on.

  

The death of the two young lads who were accidentally electrocuted when they ran into an electricity sub-station in Clichy-sous-bois north of Paris following an all too routine police identity check in the area was not in itself the trigger to these events. The trigger was the reaction of the Interior Minister, Sarkozy, (France’s answer to Blunkett, marital problems included) who called the unruly young people in the suburbs “riff-raff”, thus confirming a tendency towards the blanket stigmatization of the population who live there.

The equation suburbs = immigrants = delinquents, is, of course, the kind of brainless reasoning favoured by members of the National Front, and by some police officers, particularly those who “know” the immigrant population largely through their experience of the dirty Algerian war of independence. But the “immigrant” population in the suburbs have been there for three generations and as such they walk around with French identity papers.  Unfortunately for them, they have Arab names and/or black faces and thus face discrimination in employment.

  

Their problems are a concentration of those faced by French workers as a whole and have nothing to do with their level of “integration” into the French nation. After all, those Arabs who fought for the French during the Algerian war of independence (the so called “harkis”) have themselves vegetated in ghettoes, the victims of post-colonial benign neglect. Even these Arabs haven’t been allowed to integrate.

Can of worms

The background to this can of worms is not the state of the housing in the sink estates (“cités”) in the suburbs of the major towns in France. Some of the housing, admittedly not all, is of fairly good quality having been built in the mid-1970s. British sink estates are a lot worse. Nor is the problem that of the absence of public services, education, health care, public transport and all the rest. These public services are present in these areas to an extent which could only be dreamt of in an equivalent American or British ghetto. Let’s not get things mixed up. No, the main problem of these sink estates is precisely the social and ethnic homogeneity of these areas or the concentration of people with  profound social problems there. Family breakdown, sole parenting, low self-esteem, educational  difficulties, problems of employment co-exist with an often violent social environment where young people grow up surrounded by delinquent gangs.

To make matters worse, the French police force is mainly installed in the quiet small towns, the spatial deployment of the flics having stayed largely unchanged since the Vichy epoch. The police trade unions have resisted all attempts at redeployment. As a rule then the cops only come to thump people they don’t know in areas they get lost in. Calm “middle-class” areas have a plethora of police stations. Earlier experiments with community policing  (“police de proximité”) undertaken by the “socialist government” of Jospin succeeded in calming the suburbs but were abandoned by the super-cop Sarko on the ground that this allowed the proliferation of a parallel drug economy (true). In these terms, the more testosterone-propelled policing of the current administration is believed to be more effective (not true). As a result policing in the suburbs has taken on the “wham bang and thank you mam” style with lots of media attention.

Funds going to the associations in the suburbs have been cut and job-creation schemes suspended. This is guaranteed to worsen community relations with little payoff in terms of the fight against thugs whose activities do, after all, provide some cash-flow in these areas where youth unemployment often hits 45 percent – the highest rate in Europe. No wonder then that the government has decided to park the riot police (CRS) on a semi-permanent basis in these estates. Although country bumpkins with a well-deserved reputation for brutality, they do at least know how to react  when they get lost in an area they don’t know.

“Arab work”

  In strictly capitalist terms nothing can nor perhaps will be done to change this sorry state of affairs. The current population of the suburbs largely consists of the sons and daughters of black Africans and Arabs brought over in the 1960s and 1970s to do the shit jobs in the factories that the French didn’t want to do. (A reality which was brought home to me when I saw an entire train full of exhausted workers returning from a night shift at the Peugeot works in Poissy. They were all Arabs.) Whilst this earlier generation now subsists on microscopic pensions and social benefits, the new kids on the block are showing a distinct tendency towards underemployment and delinquency. When mass unemployment hit these areas in the 1980s what complacent sociology calls the “visible immigrants” found themselves trapped and underemployed in the suburbs as the earlier (“invisible”?) immigrants of Spanish, Italian, Polish or Portuguese origin had succeeded in getting the hell out. Integration after all is not so much a question of religion as it is a question of timing.

  Then came the trendy do-gooders who in  the mid-1980s launched the windy humanistic movement “Touche pas à mon pôte” (“don’t touch my mate”) with the help of heavy public subsidies from the Mitterrand government, “the Sphinx” having abandoned all pretence to defend working class interests sometime early in the 1980s. Ostensibly a worthy movement aimed at overcoming the problems faced by those French citizens who were unfortunate enough to have Arab or black parents, this current of thought succeeding in convincing gullible people that the real problem faced by people in the sink estates was the entrenched racism of the French and not simply shit jobs, unemployment and a brutal and ignorant police force: problems faced by workers everywhere.

Vomitorium 

The other side of the political rainbow has seen the development of a far-right extremist party, the National Front, from out of the moribund Poujadist organisation of the 1950s. Led by Jean Marie Le Pen, an ex-paratrooper involved in dirty business during the Algerian war of independence, this outfit provides a convenient bogey-man for lefties who have got lost in the banality of left/right capitalist politics. The party, generously staffed by disaffected former colonists from Algeria (the so-called “pieds noirs”), has heavily underlined the failure of integration of the French citizens of Arab origin many of whom, incredibly, still don’t know how to conjugate the subjunctive of the imperfect in French and this after so many grammar lessons. The party even has a radio station called, curiously, “Radio Courtoisie” (Right wing French thugs have always had impeccable manners) to beam out its Christian message of hatred and prejudice. Fortunately, only bored housewives and retired colonels listen to this drivel. Ordinary French workers have proved over and over again that they are not on the whole racist bigots, though they can be a bit xenophobic.  Nonetheless the party continues to garner votes in constituencies where it doesn’t even have a local branch or even any kind of grass-roots existence. For the party exists in fact, as a convenient way for workers to express their disaffection with the French political establishment which is all too clearly in cahoots with capitalist interests. It’s a kind of gigantic publicly-subsidized vomitorium into which people spew their bile with Le Pen’s ugly mug providing a convenient emetic. In doing this, however, French workers have clearly been playing with fire Now they’re getting burnt.

Urban pariahs

Thus doubly confirmed in their status as urban pariahs, many of the young people in the suburbs have continued to study quietly and find work despite an ill-adapted educational system, material difficulties, postcode discrimination, the useless condescension of the politicians and crap jobs. The educational priority areas (“zone éducation prioritaire”), modelled on the earlier British fiasco, have been starved of resources and have thus done little to erode the inequalities of an overtly elitist educational system. They receive a piddling 8 percent more than the mainstream schools, hardly enough to compensate for the learning difficulties encountered by people from poor backgrounds, not to mention those from non-French speaking backgrounds in a country where national arrogance places on premium on speaking proper.

Despite the difficulties there are some fine, dedicated teachers in these areas whose efforts have been

hampered by a sordid social environment and poor logistic support. In the final analysis then, 62 percent of French working-class people find their offspring back in the working-class background which they came from (the highest proportion in Europe) in a country which presents itself as secular and meritocratic. And that’s before we put the peculiar problems faced by the denizens of the ghetto into the balance.

So the real problem is the inability of people in these areas to escape from a highly stigmatizing spatial set-up. The association suburb = immigrants = delinquency is criminal stupidity. The Arab and black populations who live in areas in close proximity to mainstream French life do not riot. Nor did the Arabs who live in the centre of Marseilles. (In the same way quiet Alsatian villages with no Arabs vote National Front.) Where the sink estates did not riot is more important than where they did but no television cameras go to these areas. In fact, the vast majority of the third generation immigrants in the suburbs took no part in the disorders and many were as terrified by what went on as the French population in general.

The problem should not be thought of simply in terms of spatially delimited sink estates. The wider trends of the whole of French society should be taken into account. To a significant extent, the troubles should be seen as a reflection of the growing geographical segregation of the French population partly due to the booming housing market and the continuous rise in rents in the private sector.  And the doings of the affluent in France should also be mentioned. The rich are beginning to privatize the French republic for their own ends. Rich ghettoes, like Sarko’s own constituency of Neuilly to the west of Paris has only 2 percent of council housing when the legal obligation is for 20 percent. The same is true of neighbouring Levallois and the pattern is repeated all over France. Clearly the rich are having some difficulty integrating into the Republic, perhaps they don’t want to.

After all, they send their kids to private, often catholic schools, where they learn how different they are from everyone else. Thereafter they take advantage of higher education facilities to propel their horrendous offspring into the better jobs. A short sojourn in the States completes the picture. More importantly, recent events have allowed the government to sneak through controversial tax breaks for the super-rich whilst introducing more tax free enterprises into the sink estates – but then again, perhaps, this was what was really at stake in the first place.

MM (Paris)

It's the Poor What Gets the Blame — Official (1974)

From the December 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

One way of assessing Sir Keith Joseph’s comments on “whole groups and classes of people” is to imagine a speech he would have made if Britain were at war. Would he then have said a large section of the working class was moronic, lecherous and irresponsible, and should be stopped from breeding the criminals and lowlifes who are its heirs? Ah, no. “Social classes 4 and 5” would be the bulwark of civilization, and their babies — however many — deserve orange-juice and vitamin pills. These kinds of bombast are exchangeable as an organ-grinder’s tunes, though the underlying contempt remains the same.

Joseph’s speech was made to Conservatives on 19th October. He suggested they put aside economic affairs —“never really the main thing”—and instead aim to “remoralize our national life”. His case was that present- day society is a decadent morass. It has been made so by “socialist intellectuals” and “permissiveness” and, in particular, letting the working class into universities. As an example of the ruin these tendencies have led to, “our human stock is threatened” by the persistent breeding now from parents unsuitable to have children:

   Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most are of low educational attainment . . . They are producing problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons, hostels for drifters. Yet these mothers, the under-twenties in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births.

It may be useful, before going further, to say what is meant by “classes 4 and 5”. The groupings are made by the Government on the basis of the job of the family breadwinner, and these two divisions comprise semi-skilled and unskilled workers If they are assumed to be about two-fifths of the population, Joseph’s protest because they have one-third of the births is absurd. Summaries from the 1971 Census, given in the Sunday Times on 27th October, show that family size is practically the same in all five groups—about three-and-a- quarter persons.

Capitalist Hacks Unanimous
The central point of Joseph’s attack might have been, had it come from a more thinking person, a demonstration of the uselessness of social — including “moral” — reform as tried equally by the Tory, Labour and Liberal parties.

  Real incomes per head have risen beyond what anyone dreamed of a generation back; so have education budgets and welfare budgets; so also have delinquency, truancy, vandalism, hooliganism, illiteracy, decline in educational standards.

But he was only reviving his political forefathers’ dictum that if you give the undeserving poor money they only get into trouble, and if you teach them to read they write rude words on walls. The working class is used to this sort of thing, and being told it is to blame when capitalism has problems. Indeed, Joseph was being unfair to his Labour opponents: they share that standpoint. Following the Budget on 12th November the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey, announced on TV that if he failed to stop a slump or inflation it would be the fault of “the British people”:

  The choice is yours. If you really prefer mass unemployment and rising prices you can always have it.

To add more, practically no-one in the chorus of critics of Joseph denied his thesis. Other Conservatives thought it “a sad mistake . . . which would inevitably cause serious doubts about his political judgement”. Frank Field of the Child Poverty Action Group acknowledged Joseph’s “problem” of breeding by sub-standard people, and “blamed this on the failure of the family planning system and suggested that the solution was to give women more incentive to limit their family size”. (Both quotations from The Guardian, 21st October.) The Bishop of Southwark put it down to “Conservative policies of 50 years ago” (Observer, 20th October) and “human nature” (News of the World, 27th October).

Official Labour replies were on the same lines. Ian Mikardo, the party chairman

  appeared to accept the gist of what Sir Keith Joseph said in his controversial weekend speech on the nation’s morals, but he neatly turned it to Labour’s advantage . . . he blamed individualist, self-centred Conservative doctrine.

(Guardian, 25th October)

Mrs. Castle, the Secretary for Social Services, accused Joseph of wrong statistics and expressed herself as equally anxious over the problems named. And Renee Short, another Labour MP, spoke of the need for a minister to deal with population problems and said:

  It is absolutely right for Sir Keith to say we need considerable extensions of education about family planning, but it is not only needed in the fourth and fifth social groups.

All agreed that the working class must be kept decent, and sneered at one another for legislation having failed to do so.

Class and Intelligence

None of the critics appears to have noticed one extraordinary implication of Joseph’s speech. Like the Victorian moralists, over human behaviour he wants to have things both ways—people are born bad but also influenced to be bad: the teaching of Eric, or Little by Little. But, in addition, Joseph was propounding what looks like Lysenko’s theory that acquired characteristics can be transmitted. Given mothers of “low educational attainment” who have learned immoral attitudes, there will be babies destined to be illiterates and criminals. Since reform cannot change heredity, the prevention of birth is the only answer — “the lesser evil”, he said.

This kind of rubbish was exploded long ago. However, there is a more cogent answer to Joseph’s contentions. Being in classes 4 and 5 — or any of the others — has nothing to do with intelligence or probity. People are in these “classes” because of their relationship to the means of production: specifically, because they own nothing and have to work as capitalism allows them. In fact the groupings are not social classes at all, but lists made for administrative purposes. The only two classes are of owners and non-owners of the means of living. People are born not into “free choice” but into one or the other class and all the implications of its position.

If intelligence were a factor, we should like to be told the intelligence quotients of, say, shareholders in big companies; the royal family; or politicians who have their speeches written for them. Would Joseph say that breeding by any number of these who were of “low intelligence” was a threat to human stock? Of course not. There are, in any case, different answers for them. The slow-learning or recalcitrant offspring of the well-to-do are put out to private tutors in country vicarages to get them in shape for Oxbridge. The idea of intelligence is irrelevant to that sort of life. It is a yardstick-concept by which the ruling class picks over the working class for its own purposes; the working class insults itself by accepting it.

Different Meanings

Joseph spoke about “responsibility”. The fact is that the capitalist system which he represents and upholds depends on irresponsibility. To hand over control of one’s life, have its activity appropriated and accept the say-so of leaders and rulers, is irresponsible. Yet that is precisely what Joseph requires, the “choice” he wants exercised. It is not a question of Doublethink, but of class terminology. For his class, following its interests, the working class acts “responsibly” by not following its own!

If you look at the occupations which make up groups 3, 4 and 5, the matter becomes clearer still. They are nearly all useful occupations — manufacture, building, mining, transport, the essentials for social existence. Not so most of the occupations in groups 1 and 2. A few are; the majority are about as useful as a tapeworm. What do “intelligence” and “educational attainment” mean when they are put to the non-uses generated by capitalist society? A former drama student has remarked to the writer that when he sees acquaintances on TV it is always in commercials: singing the praises of canned soup, zooming through space with packets of Tasty Morsels. For this, they studied Shakespeare and toiled at voice and movement—now, humans behaving like idiots.

Let us tell Sir Keith Joseph and the co-diagnosers of his “problem” the truth. The working class is the intelligent, educated class which makes the wonders, and competently carries out the humdrum tasks, of the world we live in. Without that being so, there would be no electronic marvels or university buildings. Nor would there be the sumptuous dinners from which capitalist politicians rise to make their self-important speeches. Or dividends for the shareholders of Bovis Ltd., of which Joseph is vice-chairman.

Moral Humbug

The so-called moral questions can be put in perspective by referring to the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population. This was concerned with finding ways to induce people of all groups and grades to have more children: to maintain the work force, for "military strength and security”, and for “the maintenance and extension of Western values and culture”. There was no talk then of threatening the human stock, or the immorality of girls under twenty having babies.

Of course the family as a socio-economic unit has largely broken down, but Joseph’s conception of why this happens is extremely naive. Apparently he believes a currency of “immoral” ideas is the cause of such a breakdown, whereas the opposite is true. The family’s life and functions were disrupted by the extension and intensification of the division of labour; following that, fresh ideas of morality were generated — without, however, affecting the existence of capitalism.

But what kind of society are we living in? Sex and reproduction are the strongest of human instincts and pleasures. The tragedy for the poor is being swindled out of enjoyment and fulfilment by poverty, inadequate housing, worry, and living on the edge of a high-priced culture. Many girls in that situation, said Joseph, are unmarried or deserted or divorced: how nice of him to point it out, from the comfort of Class 1. How nice of Mrs. Castle too, to deny that “socialism is synonymous with permissiveness”. Indeed, she is right. “Permission” means condescending to allow, and that has nothing to do with the free, responsible world Socialists envisage: Mrs. Castle’s “socialism” is not synonymous with Socialism.

It will not be too long before the working class demonstrates its intelligence, and its contempt for the Josephs and Castles, by getting rid of the system they stand for.

Robert Barltrop