Letter: Three questions (1975)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three questions

Since the late ’forties when I listened to Socialist policy and principles at Lincoln’s Inn Fields or at Hyde Park Corner, I have considered the propositions of the SPGB. I find myself in agreement with the political theory you set forth, but there are three points which I have never been able to resolve.

The hypothetical situation of a Socialist party coming in as an administration in any country in which you have a connection would mean that it would, as a Socialist entity, probably find itself alone in a capitalist world. Would not the maxim of Lenin that “socialism is impossible to sustain in one country alone” apply? (I agree that Lenin’s conception of Socialism was erroneous but the doctrine would, I think, just as truly apply to any of your sister parties.)

As I understand the Socialist position there would be no police or law-enforcement body in a Socialist society. It is agreed that most crime stems from existence in a capitalist society, but I cannot think that all crime would disappear under Socialism. Rape, for example, would probably exist in any society. How does one deal with violent anti-social acts which, so far as one can tell, are not the product of capitalism?

I cannot accept that Socialism and religion are incompatible. True, the way in which the capitalist establishment uses religion for its own ends obscures the issue and prolongs the coming of Socialism, but it seems to me that contemplation of the possibility or otherwise of a life after death is purely a matter for the individual, and to insist that one’s opinions in this matter should be declared before being considered as a member of the SPGB appears high-handed if not dictatorial. After all, if one were regularly to consult a psychiatrist (for which, for many people, religion is a substitute), would this too preclude membership?

E. Morley 

London S.E.5.

Reply

For convenience we have numbered our correspondent’s questions. The replies are:

1. Socialism will be world-wide because the system it will replace is itself world-wide. The establishment of Socialism in one country alone is impossible because the means of production are operated throughout the globe. You appear to assume that political ideas cannot cross political boundaries. This is not so. Even in the nineteenth century when communications were much slower and more laborious than today, ideas spread very quickly. Even repression and censorship by the ruling class could not prevent ideas spreading. Remember that 1848 was called “the year of revolutions” when uprisings occurred all over Europe. Indeed, there was an often-quoted saying which sums this up admirably — “When France sneezes, Europe catches a cold”.

2. See the reply to another correspondent on the “problem” of crime.

3. Socialism and religion are incompatible. The former explains man’s development and his social relations in material terms which we can verify. Religion on the other hand “explains” the world by reference to the existence of an unprovable entity, i.e. God. The belief in a possibility of life after death is a soporific which prevents the action that is urgently needed to solve present- day problems being taken now.

4. Undergoing psychiatric treatment is no more a bar to membership of the Socialist Party than is undergoing treatment for corns.

Editors.

World Socialism or World Violence? (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

A little over a year ago the television programme A Man Called Ironside, presented an episode entitled “The Armageddon Gang”, which depicted a mad scientist who came within seconds of firing H-bomb rockets and starting World War III. This was presented as entertainment and it was accepted as such. The conditioning that has taken place to make the prospect of total world annihilation acceptable, is surely the ultimate obscenity. There was no outcry from the Longford-Whitehouse camp. This scientist was “mad”. The capitalist system which produces H-bomb stockpiles, is “normal”.

A few days later a TV documentary on mugging was shown. This centred on Brixton in South London. They interviewed a police chief, Commander Marshall, who made the point that the police can never solve the problem alone; society as a whole has to realize it is a part of wider issues, housing, education and employment. This aspect of violence is still very much in the news, being endlessly debated, like other social problems, but with no end in sight.

In Brixton, some 79 per cent. of mugging is said to be carried out by black people; mainly youths. If you are black, live in a slum, failed by the “education” system and unemployed, you may become a mugger. If you are white and in similar circumstances you too may turn to mugging or other forms of crime. To say this is a product of poverty, is to say it is a product of capitalism. Because of its property relationships, capitalism has always failed to integrate human beings with society. The profit motive is a completely dehumanized driving force.

Some young black people who had been involved in mugging were interviewed during the programme. They said their motive was to get money, to buy clothes and to be like other people. They were asked if they felt anything for their victims and replied in the negative. Again, the hostility between the individual and society is socially generated. People are not naturally anti-social, as the police chief said; you have to look at housing, education and employment. You have to look at the system.

Capitalism sets no higher standard. It is a violent society preaching a phoney morality. While its pundits talk of “law and order” out of one side of their mouths, out of the other they urge young people to train as professional killers. Every newspaper carries recruitment advertisements for the army, navy or air-force which invite young people to learn a trade— and become professionals in the sophisticated refinements of modern mass-murder and destruction.

A generation has grown up knowing nothing but wars. Since the end of the second “war to end war” in 1945, there has been an endless succession of wars all over the world. Some of these wars may be in distant places but, with modern means of communication, they invade every living room and are part of the violent environment. The war in Korea slaughtered more than a million people. The war in Vietnam, which raged for nearly thirty years, was started by a Labour government, and a Labour government carried on conscription in so-called peace time.

Throughout its existence the Socialist Party of Great Britain has maintained the position re-stated in the 1950 edition of our pamphlet The Socialist Party and War:

  War can solve no working-class problem. It cuts across the fundamental identity of interest of the workers of the world, setting sections of this class at enmity with each other in the interest of sections of the capitalists. It elevates force into the position of arbiter in place of the common human desire for mutual peace and happiness. Its effect is wholly evil. It depraves all the participants by forcing them to concentrate upon the best methods of producing misery and annihilating each other. It elevates lying, cheating, disabling and murdering opponents into virtues, confers distinctions upon those who practise these means most successfully, and inaugurates training courses on a vast scale to produce efficiency. Young men and women, in their most impressionable years, have the vile methods of warfare impressed upon them so thoroughly that they lose a balanced outlook on life and are impregnated with the idea that force, with all its baseness, and not reason, is the final solution in all problems. Many of those who have been subjected to the atmosphere of war remain addicted to violence when war has come to a temporary end.

Around the world selling armaments is big business. America, Russia, China, France, Czechoslovakia and Britain are selling massive quantities of arms and military equipment. The morality of capitalism never gets in the way of profits or commercial, strategic and vested interests. When the icy fact is understood that these major capitalist powers have the means to wipe out all life on earth, the mugger becomes small beer in comparison. But then muggers are illegal and lack the “dignity and bearing” of statesmen.

Practically all organized violence is aimed at gain. The possession or retention of wealth, money, resources or territory. Violence therefore derives overwhelmingly from the class-property basis of existing society.Violence used in power-struggles for so-called national independence comes in this category. It means the replacement of one gang of thieves by another. Violence is the final sanction of all ruling classes. The modern state-machine is a virtual monopoly of violence. As much as violence maims or murders those on whom it is practised, it brutalizes and degrades those who advocate and practise it, whether society labels them as muggers or soldiers, terrorists or politicians.

It is important to realize that violence is not an exceptional thing practised by an anti-social few. It is accepted and frequently applauded by the vast majority of “ordinary” people. They accept the spurious justifications of the Stalins, Wilsons, Nixons, Heaths, Fords and Brezhnevs. “We” need H-bombs and militarism, because “they” have them.

Those organizations such as IS, WRP, IMG, the anarchists and the CP, which see the class struggle in terms of barricades, street fighting, confrontations and smashing the state, are all anti-Socialist and anti- working-class. Political power gained by desperate minorities through armed insurrection can only lead to state capitalism and dictatorship and reflect working-class unreadiness for Socialism. In condemning all this as Socialists always have, we also condemn the bombings, brutality and blood-letting of the self-styled guerillas, whether they be for Black Power, Palestine Liberation or the IRA. All such movements whether racists, nationalist or religious, are anti-working class. They all help to sustain an atmosphere of hatred and foster the notion that violence is a rational arbiter in settling disputes and influencing attitudes. The SPGB and its Companion Parties reject this. We reject the standards of capitalism. We promote UNDERSTANDING as the mainspring of social change.

All other political parties have a prior commitment to violence as part of the power-structure of the system they ALL seek to run. Every party seeking power to maintain capitalism (in whatever guise) has to build and preserve the coercive state apparatus. The SPGB and our Companion Parties have no prior commitment to violence. Neither do we have any record of support for war. Our commitment is to Socialist understanding and to the democratic process of majority decision.

In order to strip the capitalist class of their ownership of the means of production and distribution, and to usher in common ownership, a world-wide majority of the working class with Socialist ideas will use the vote to gain control of the state machine This will take the armed forces and police out of the hands of the political agents of capitalism, and so remove the coercive threat to the triumph of the politically-conscious working class. There is no way to gain possession of the means of production for the whole of society, without first capturing political power. Just as the armed forces and police function to protect private property institutions whilst the state is in the hands of the capitalists, so the capitalists are powerless to preserve their ownership once the state is taken from them.

Any violent minority seeking to get back to capitalism, will be seen to be acting against the will of the great majority and can only further isolate themselves. They could not reverse the irreversible process of history which has led to the decision to change society.

Socialism will end the long and terrible history of violence. Having been established democratically it will continue to be run democratically. When there are no longer any classes of owners and non-owners, there will be a common interest in the happiness and welfare of everybody. Humanity will have come of age.

Harry Baldwin

Criminal convictions (1986)

From the June 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Very little mention is made in the recent ample publicity given to rising crime figures, that this is happening when for the last seven years we have had a government committed to "law and order". The Tories, like any other party in power, have no realistic policies for eradicating crime or its causes but are merely intent on dealing with its perpetrators more punitively.

If we are to look for a cause of crime, we first need to ask what crime actually is. In the most stark terms, the word crime simply means an act punishable by law. So how do laws originate? They are Acts of Parliament — rules instituted by the Members of Parliament to facilitate the smooth running of society, ostensibly for the protection of all the nation's citizens. The reality is different.

Most laws relate to the protection of property and wealth. Since the working class possess very little of either, these laws affect them in positive terms only fleetingly — even though they need some form of protection for home and hard-earned cash. Look a little closer at the interminable legislation committed to the Statute Books and it becomes apparent that laws are actually there to protect the interests of governments themselves and of those they represent that is the owners of substantial property and the means of production and distribution. Any effects on the workers are in fact purely coincidental.

Laws can be described more accurately as the rules of capitalism. As we live in a capital accumulating, property owning society, it is essential that there exists a comprehensive framework of protection for the rights to money and possessions. These rules exist primarily to prevent workers from getting their hands on the goods and services they produce, apart from what they are permitted to obtain through the system of rationing known as wages and salaries. This rationing does not apply to the capitalists' access to commodities and services because they have sufficient capital invested and accumulated to fulfil their desires without having to do a stroke of work.

Is it any wonder then that members of the working class, knowing that the fruits of their toil are yielding profits of which they receive none, now and again decide to help themselves to a little extra? After all, there is a myriad of attractive and desirable goods displayed in every High Street, all designed to persuade us to part with our meagre allowance and our attentions are solicited by television and the press in the hope of awakening the idea that we need ever larger quantities of "consumer goods'" to render our oppressed lives marginally more bearable.

The problem is that wages don’t stretch very far and as the law hammers home the doctrine that under no circumstances can goods be claimed without paying for them, many workers feel hard done by when the media displays the wealthy and privileged shamelessly enjoying their affluence. Restraint can easily be weakened by the influence of temptation.

The media love to chew on the real meaty bone of violent crime in preference to the tit-bits of petty larceny and trespass. "Mindless violence isn't confined to soccer matches" declared one local rag gravely. There is indeed an abundance of mindless violence outside football grounds, much of it executed quite legally and acceptably by the police and armed forces; it wasn’t so long ago that a deal of mindless violence broke out in the Falkland Islands. But far from condemning it our rulers positively encouraged it.

What emerges from this is the paradox of a society that condones the mindlessness of war and yet throws its arms up in horror when workers commit acts of violence independently and without the prior consent of their rulers. These workers may be unemployed, or working six days a week to live in conditions of abject poverty, overcrowding and deprivation. We are expected to accept such conditions as inevitable; though it may seem slightly unfair that we have virtually nothing in this world of plenty, we are taught from the blooming of memory to keep our noses clean and to the grindstone, to take our exploitation and domination lying down. If we're good boys and girls we won't be thrown in gaol and may even get to go to heaven.

No account is taken of the possibility that the present economic system breeds dissatisfaction. envy, contempt, unrest and aggression. And it isn't merely coincidence that those on the lowest incomes and from the most deprived communities are most likely to be convicted of crime. In America a labourer is fourteen times more likely to go to prison than a "professional" and a black male is twenty-eight times more likely to be gaoled than a white female (What Is To Be Done About Law And Order?, Lea & Young. 1984)

As aggression and violence are inherent in the competitive, ruthless, uncaring capitalist system and romanticised on television and at the cinema, it is hardly surprising that violence will also manifest itself in the form of crime. But people don't suddenly become home-made Rambos over night. We learn to be violent; right from childhood, as well as being fed a staple diet of cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians and war stories, we're taught to be competitive, to stick up for ourselves. along with patriotism and the justification of war. Violence is in fact just another aspect of everyday capitalist life; it's ingrained into us and can't be removed and replaced at society's convenience.

In a socialist society, money and private property would no longer exist and all the means of production and distribution would be democratically controlled by the entire community in the interests of need instead of profit. There would be no such crimes as theft or trespass because everything would belong to everyone. There would be nothing to gain by "stealing", from someone else because all needs would be provided for without consideration of cost, value or ability to pay. So it follows that if there was no such thing as theft, there could be no violent theft; if there was no such thing as trespass, there could be no forced entry or aggravated burglary; and as for assault, it follows that if there was no property, no competition, no oppression, exploitation or deprivation but instead freedom for all to pursue peaceful, uncorrupted and useful existences, then there would be no violence.

As it is. while condemning violence on the part of the criminal, capitalist society virtually ignores the sometimes more subtle violence of poverty and oppression which plagues this mindless system. In the words of the playwright George Farquhar: "Tis still my maxim that there is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty".

Nick Brunskill

What can we do about crime? (1983)

From the May 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

First things first: the law exists to defend the capitalists not the workers. Laws are social rules to ensure the dictatorship of King Capital. By voting, in a majority, for the continuation of the profit system, workers hand social control on a plate to the class which exploits us. Law equals coercion for the defence of capital — but such coercion could not exist for one minute if the victims refused to go along with it:

There is not today any force in Britain capable of maintaining indefinitely a government not enjoying the support or tolerance of the overwhelming majority of the people. (The Police We Deserve, Sir Robert Mark, 1972.)

They talk about law and order as if it was such a desirable state of affairs. But what does law and order mean? It means hungry people starving without daring to take food from the supermarket shelf; it means homeless families — tens of thousands of which exist in this “property-owning democracy" — being refused access to empty houses and flats, many of which are the second or third homes of affluent parasites; it means locking people up for being too poor to pay rents, rates or other debts; it means "Keep Out" signs surrounding the vast private lands owned by the parasite class; it means keeping frustrated kids with toy guns away from the Queen, while making sure that she is surrounded by medalled thugs who carry real guns which they fire at anyone to order. Law and order means deferential wage slaves. Law and order means the morality of working class inferiority. Law and Order means that those who work are usually poor and those who exploit are rich. It is capitalism's law and order: law to defend the social disorder which puts their profits before our needs. The Tory. Alliance and Labour parties are all concerned to preserve law and order because they are all in the dirty business of keeping the profit system intact.

In a capitalist Utopia everyone would obey the law. Indeed, everyone would be so stupidly submissive that law enforcement would not be necessary. Tory politicians appear on TV and bemoan the fact that their Utopia has not arrived: why can’t the proles behave themselves and do as they’re told? Let us try to consider why the perfect law-abiding society does not exist.

The most common form of criminality is petty theft. The worker who has never stolen a pencil from school or some note pads from the office or some goods from the factory is a statistical exception. Without having the slightest conception of Marx’s theory of legalised robbery (the appropriation of surplus value), most workers know that the employer is getting as much as he can squeeze out of us and, if it is safe, we are going to get back some of that stolen wealth from the bosses. The transport services lose millions of pounds each year as a result of "fare frauds": why pay their price to travel if you can get away with less? Some workers — although far less than is implied by the gutter press — defraud the DHSS. As a fraction of the money fiddled by the capitalists in "tax evasion", social security frauds are negligible. But who needs the money most, the millionaire who saves hundreds of thousands of pounds by not paying a share to the state, which exists to protect private property, or the claimant whose schemes provide a few quid to which there is no legal entitlement? Most working class theft is petty — negligible inroads into the massive property-holdings of the capitalist class. More often than not petty theft involves more risk than gain. Socialists certainly do not recommend workers to obtain a ticket to the local prison by engaging in such piecemeal expropriation. But in a society in which workers have no real stake in the wealth surrounding them, and in which deprivation breeds the temptation to take whatever you can get “by fair means or foul", petty transgressions against the law of property are inevitable.

More serious than petty theft is "mugging” — assault and robbery. There are arguments about whether muggings are on the increase (as the sensationalist media claims) or whether "mugging" is simply a new statistical category to cover a crime which has existed for years. Regardless of the rate of muggings, nobody living in the streets and council estates built for wage slaves will deny that the fear of being mugged affects millions of people, restricting the times when they can walk the streets and the areas they can visit. Many old people in the poorer areas of London speak of the inadvisability of walking out alone at night. There is clearly something very wrong with a society that is too unsafe to walk in. Needless to say, in the capitalist Utopia muggers would be as rare as contraceptives in a nunnery. So, why mugging? The hard fact is that in the law of the jungle the most ferocious brute wins. In international war the superpowers boot the smaller nations in the metaphorical groin; in business, the multi-nationals wipe the floor with the struggling “small business man". Mugging simply reflects the vicious competitiveness of a society which condones violence and robbery when it is carried out on behalf of the ruling class. Many of the old-established titled landowners obtained their wealth and power by a process of “mass muggings” which over the centuries have become glorified in the name of heroic military conquest.

In the jungle of capitalism worker will attack worker in order to survive. Mugging is a rejection of the principle of class solidarity and, in the end, it is a game for mugs. After all, to transfer poverty from one worker’s pocket to another’s, by means of callous violence, is pathetic and undignified. Nevertheless, dignity does not fill an empty belly and it is not for socialists to moralise against those politically ignorant workers whose only way of responding to their poverty is to steal the crumbs from members of their own class.

The existence of mugging does not prove that "man is naturally aggressive, predatory and anti-social”. The despicable moralists of the profit system blame mugging on to the myth of “human nature". No: mugging is a product of property society. For approximately 40,000 years, prior to the emergence of private property or the state, there were no muggers. If “human nature” managed without muggings for four hundred centuries, we may expect that society would be able to exist without them in the future. Mindless racists say that muggings are caused by blacks. In fact, both black and white workers exist and the factor which unites them is not the colour of their skin, but their particular poverty. (Ever seen an Arab prince convicted of mugging?) Muggers tend to come from the most deprived sections of the working class. That is why the street crime figures for the poorest urban areas are always noticeably higher than those for the more affluent suburbs. Sociologists and criminologists tend to see mugging in terms of justice: either it is unjustified because it is morally anti-social or else it is justified because muggers are impoverished. Morality has nothing to do with it: mugging is an effect of poverty which is an effect of property and there is no point complaining about the effects while the cause is ignored.

What about the more “serious" crimes — in capitalist terms — like house burglaries, bank robberies and raids on Securicor vans? Capitalism only regards these crimes as being more serious because the value of wealth involved is greater than the petty theft of workers’ property. In general, the police treat the latter cases as being insignificant and unworthy of much of their time:

  In Bromley a uniformed policeman will turn up, but unless the crime is out of the ordinary the householder will merely be handed a form to complete for claiming against the insurance company. As in Kent, the reason is a lack of policemen and the need to concentrate on more serious crime — although a special unit will try to pick up habitual thieves. At present fewer than one in ten burglaries is solved. (Sunday Times, 6 July 1975.)

Sometimes there are guns used in “serious crimes" and the defenders of property are killed. But how can a class which uses trained armies and nuclear weapons in order to expand their property ownership object to “criminals" who are merely seeking the same end, but by relatively less violent means? The only difference between the Mafia and the American government is that the latter passes laws to justify its activities, whereas the former survives despite the law. Big crime, which is often controlled by men who are themselves capitalists, is a way into the property-owning class. Those who succeed in the underworld of illegal robbery can then graduate into legalised exploitation; for those who fail, capitalism has its “penal dustbins” (the term used by the ex-Governor of Wormwood Scrubs prison) to lock away those who offend against its “order”.

Penal dustbins

The smooth rule of capitalism depends on the constant threat of punishment. Britain has more people in prisons, being punished by the state, than most other European countries. The vast majority of prisoners are incarcerated for crimes relating to property. Even prison officers now admit that the “penal dustbins” are dangerously overcrowded. Criminologists generally agree that prison sentences do not tend to prevent people from committing further criminal offences — on the contrary, as most prisoners will testify, prisons are “schools of crime” wherein the naive first-time offender can pick up the more sophisticated skills of the trade. Any society which makes even the pretence of being civilised could not tolerate the continuation of institutions like Wandsworth, not to mention even more horrific establishments like Broadmoor and Long Kesh. Prisons can only survive in a society which cannot face up to the consequences of its own structure.

The capitalists’ crimeless Utopia is unrealisable because crime arises inevitably from capitalism. Those who disrupt the orderly robbery of the working class by the exploiters, which is legalised as the very basis of the wages system, are labelled as criminals. In many countries criminality extends to the realm of ideas, and those whose thinking conflicts with the state are imprisoned, tortured, murdered or, as in Russia, labelled insane. Thought policing is not confined to the state capitalist countries or to the “free enterprise" dictatorships, such as Chile, Argentina or South Africa. In Britain there are hundreds of laws which exist solely to enforce moral conformity and to punish behaviour considered deviant by the old feudal relics of the judiciary whose job is to defend the system for the master class. The fact that the law of Britain cannot tolerate freedom of thought is proved by the imprisonment of socialists who refused to be conscripted to kill their fellow workers during the last world war. In the event of a nuclear war civil servants would be given legal powers, including shooting on sight, which demonstrate the ultimate force that would be used by the capitalists in a civil emergency.

The hard task of enforcing the law is not carried out by the class for whom the law exists; it is the workers who guard the property, chase the (illegal) thieves and smash up the picket lines when ordered to do so. Quite a few of these “law-enforcers” are attracted to the job because they are vicious thugs who enjoy throwing their weight around. It is not only in South Africa that innocent people are killed by over-zealous police and prison officers — and it is not only in South Africa that the murderers walk free and well rewarded for their brutal work. There was a time when police recruits had to learn by heart the following principles of duty:

  . . . the constable will be civil and obliging to people of every rank and class. He must be particularly cautious not to interfere idly or unnecessarily in order to make a display of his authority: when required to act he will do so with decision and boldness . . . There is no qualification so indispensable to a police officer as perfect command of temper, never suffering himself to be moved in the slightest degree by any language or threat; if he do his duty in a quiet and determined manner, such conduct will probably excite the well-disposed bystanders to assist him if he requires them. (Quoted in A Force For The Future, Roy Lewis. 1976.)

One only has to recall the notorious television interview of a rape victim by detectives from the Thames Valley Police in a BBC documentary series to understand how outdated the above quoted passage is. Wage slaves in the police force do a hard, dirty and dangerous job and it must be recognised that, in general, the offensiveness of their activities is not because the individuals in it are nasty people, but because the law is an instrument of class oppression. Many police think that they are doing a good job; some join in the belief that they are going to be uniformed social workers, making society orderly so that decent folks can live in peace. In a different social context such aspirations could be put to good use. Hatred against the police as individuals is like hating the workers in the DHSS because the system of public charity stinks.

Reformists confine their criticisms of the law to the effects of the capitalist state machine. Their targets are bent coppers, sadistic screws, the Special Patrol Group, plastic bullets, SUS laws: if only we could organise laws, police, courts and prisons without these unappealing extras the reformers would be satisfied. The latest reformist outcry is against the Police Bill which gives police powers resembling those enjoyed by the law enforcers in fascist regimes. The power of the state to coerce the majority is growing with frightening rapidity, but that trend will not be reversed by Labour MPs calling on the police to act like gentlemen or Trotskyist fantasists demanding the creation of a People’s Militia. Like the reformists, socialists oppose the brutality of capitalism’s law and order. But our aim surpasses the reformist Wonderland in which the police lock workers up “without distinction of race or sex", the judges wear denim jackets and the prisons have one man to a cell rather than three.

Socialists stand for the abolition of a social system which requires laws and coercion in order to survive. The alternative to all that — a revolutionary one, to be sure — is the establishment of a system based on conscious social co-operation. This will only be achieved when the earth and its resources belong to its inhabitants and not to a privileged minority. Abolish property, in all its forms, and you end the need to protect wealth, which is owned by those who do not produce it, from those who do. In a society of common ownership and democratic control, where everything belongs to everyone, who could — or would want to — steal from whom?

But surely, it will be claimed, even a propertyless system will need some laws and some police and some prisons. People will still need to be kept in order. No: in a socialist society the people will democratically keep themselves in order or there will be no genuine socialism. Anti-social individuals will still need to be punished, will they not? Let us consider these “anti-social individuals". Let us assume that there are going to be people in a socialist society who insist on defying the will of the community. It will be the community itself, within whatever area is affected, that will have to deal with such anti-social behaviour. How it responds will be entirely up to the people at the time to decide. There will certainly be no need for a special, permanent force of men and women to ensure that the common will is respected. It is often said that there are certain crimes which will always exist. Are there? We can agree that some murders are committed by sick people, as are many acts of rape, child molestation and gratuitous violence. Psychiatric knowledge regarding the origin of mental disorders which cause such behaviour is presently under-researched and confused. It is doubtful whether such characteristics would exist in a society freed from the repressive psychological conditioning of capitalism. However, it is possible that there will be homicidal lunatics in a socialist society. If there are, they will require compassionate help, not punishment. You do not need prisons to deal with major personality disorders. Of course, those who believe that “human nature" is inherently anti-social will say that conscious social control is a dream. If they are correct, then the uncontrollable violence of the profit system will be with us forever. But all of the available evidence — psychological, biological, anthropological, historical — points to the fact that human behaviour is not natural, but adaptable and, given a different social environment, the thugs of today could be the consciously co-operating social beings of tomorrow.

Conservative minds will be filled with trepidation at the thought of a lawless, policeless, prisonless social order. How could they sleep safely in their beds at night without the prisons being full of frustrated men and women and the streets patrolled by human guard dogs? How, we might ask them, can they sleep safely with potentially devastating nuclear missiles aimed at all parts of the globe? We have law, but it does not protect the millions of people across the world who are mugged, burgled and beaten up each day. The conservative answer is to have more laws. The reformist answer is to have softer laws. The only practical alternative is to have no laws.

Conservative minds may rest contented that Law and Order will be preserved for ever more. But there are others who are becoming aware that the existence of crime has something to do with the kind of society we have. In his Annual Report for 1974, Laurence Byford, the Chief Constable of Lincoln, stated that

  All the signs are that there will be an even greater increase in violence, terrorism, industrial unrest, and crime in the future . . . this may sound pessimistic and even alarmist, but I prefer to think of it as a realistic forecast . . . and in my view anyone who seriously considers the position is bound to have at least some apprehension of where society is going.

The authorities are getting worried. They know, perhaps more than most workers do, that a movement to oppose the status quo could never be crushed by the force of minority-class law. It is up to us, the wealth producers of this society, to decide “where society is going". Conflict or co-operation; police or peace; the world run by us for them or by us for us?

Steve Coleman

Editorial: A Crime Against Humanity (2001)

Editorial from the January 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent murder of 10 year old Damilola Taylor on a south London housing estate has shocked and outraged the public, the politicians and the press alike. The manner of his death–slashed with knives and bottles and then left to bleed to death in the stinking stairwell of a condemned council housing scheme–serves as a metaphor for the current state of modern capitalism. Not that the press and politicians realise this of course, but it is worth us pointing it out all the same.

Capitalism is a sick society and we do not hesitate to say so. Nor do we hesitate to say that Tony Blair and Jack Straw (or alternatively William Hague and Ann Widdecombe) could double the number of police on the streets and quadruple the number of people “stopped and searched” under current legislation without it having any noticeable effect on the violent crime and disorder eating away at the fabric of society. New Labour came to power famously promising to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime” but if you are seemingly unaware of what the causes of crime really are how can you be “tough” on them?

It does not take a leader-writer for the Daily Mail to know that serious crime is at the highest levels it has been in living memory, and pretty much right across the “developed world” too. Neither do you have to be a seasoned criminologist to be aware that where the lawless American inner cities and ghettos have led, so have London, Manchester and a whole host of other cities followed.

Catching criminals in modern capitalism is like the labours of Sisyphus, a never-ending task. This is because crime is overwhelmingly committed by the poor, the disenfranchised, and the cynical, in short the people without a stake in society. And it is capitalism–the system which commands the unwavering support of Blair and Hague alike–which creates such people by the bucketload.

All social systems adopt a code of morals, laws and regulations commensurate with the economic structure of that system and capitalism was no different. The codes that developed alongside the market economy were those entwined with notions of the sanctity of private property, the value of “enterprise”, and the importance of a stable hierarchy in society. Unfortunately for the system, it is the spread of the competitive buying and selling relationship into every aspect of human existence together with the “every-man-for-himself” culture that this promotes that has undermined the basis of the social stability that capitalism has previous been able to claim for itself. Nowhere is this expressed more obviously than in the nihilism and lack of respect for “authority” and “convention” in all its forms that has been a developing feature of youth culture, in particular, over recent years.

When community relationships break down, when individuals treat one another as stepping stones to social advancement rather than as equals, and when drugs to numb the pain of the daily rat race become the norm, then society is in serious trouble. Indeed, as it eats away at the fabric of its own existence, capitalism is in especially deep trouble because it knows no other way out of this problem other than more of the same. This means more competition, more rampant individualism, more big sticks and gang warfare (of both the legal and illegal varieties) and more social dislocation as a result.

The dispossessed youth of the inner cities and sink council housing estates are right to think there is no hope within the present system, but wrong to sit back and wallow in its excesses. Socialists say that society can be better than it is. The Damilola Taylors of this world needn’t be its unwilling and repeated victims. But to change things people have got to organise and organise with a purpose–to overturn the relationships and values that capitalism so ruthlessly and cynically promotes.

In other words we need to create a society where a real community exists once again that is truly fit for humans to live in. That can only mean a society of equality, built upon participation and mutual respect. And we contend that in turn that can only mean socialism, where a real community of interests based upon common ownership and democratic control can be established to eradicate most crime and anti-social activity at root, to be established with agreed rules and regulations necessary for resolving any hangovers from the destabilising and dehumanising days of capitalism.

We argue that today we stand at a juncture in history where only socialism can provide the framework for the eradication of the current malaise society finds itself in. For without socialism, tackling the “causes of crime” will mean nothing other than more empty words and broken promises, fuelling another, destructive, cycle of cynicism.

Knife Crime : Violence and Youth (2019)

From the November 2019 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why knife crime flourishes

Hardly a day goes by without hearing about someone being stabbed or shot in the UK. More often than not it will be a young person, usually a teenager. According to government sources, in the year ending March 2019, there were 43,516 offences involving a knife or sharp instrument, in comparison with 40,215 in the previous year. 32 percent of this violent crime has taken place in the London area (‘Knife crime in England and Wales rises 8 percent over year’, Guardian, 18 July). Although there has been a drop in gun crime during this period, it is still high in comparison to previous years. What is going on here? Why is there is so much bloodletting on the streets of Britain?

There is no shortage of explanations. Street gangs that peddle drugs and the ensuing turf wars between rival gangs. Online squabbles on social media that blow up into deadly disputes. The prestige of handling a weapon. Police claim that young people think it is ‘trendy’ to carry a weapon (Yahoo News UK, 13 April, 2017). Fewer police officers on the beat and the decline in the use of stop and search. The fact that a disproportionate number of workers from an ethnic minority are affected has led some to focus on so-called ‘black on black’ crime.

Others cite cuts in youth services, the closure of Sure Start centres, reduced funding for youth clubs as a consequence of the government’s ‘austerity’ drive, that is in its attempts over the past few years to restore the profitability of British capitalism and improve the latter’s competitiveness in world markets in the wake of the economic downturn of 2008/2009 by reducing the cost of running the state machine.

What all these explanations miss is the root cause. Capitalism is based on minority ownership of the means of living and production for profit. Wealth is accumulated in the hands of the few and the majority is left in various degrees of relative or absolute poverty. In the poorer areas with high levels of social deprivation, young workers face a bleak future with low paid insecure work and high unemployment. As an escape from this drudgery, the allure of gang life is tempting. For these young people, the lucrative drug trade promises the lifestyles that capitalism encourages workers to aspire to, but at the same time denies them. Gangs are seen to provide protection and a sense of belonging in a tough and alienating environment. Some young people feel that the possession of a weapon provides some sort of protection in a threatening world. Poverty is the fertile ground on which crime flourishes.

There is no doubt that the increase in poverty and deprivation in the aftermath of the 2008/2009 economic downturn, exacerbated by cuts in public services, has fuelled higher levels of violent crime. However, knife and gun crime is a problem that predates the 2008/2009 economic crisis. The years of 2006/2008 witnessed a large spate of shootings and stabbings, which included the high-profile murder of Ben Kinsella in an unprovoked knife attack in Islington in June 2008.

There have been calls for more police patrols and the government has authorised an increase in the use of stop and search. There is little evidence that these measures will reduce crime in any meaningful way, and have, in many instances, only served to sow distrust of the authorities and have heightened tensions between young workers and the police. In addition, longer prison sentences, another demand, do not act as deterrents. On the contrary, they are more likely to turn out hardened and more savvy criminals.

In August, the Home Office launched its anti-knife scheme, in which thousands of takeaway boxes are supplied to chicken shops with stories written on them about young people who have given up knives and have gone on to pursue successful careers in sport and music. This is supposed to dissuade young people from carrying knives. As well as being ridiculous, it is racist in that it assumes that knife crime is a black people’s issue and that young black people spend a lot of time visiting chicken shops. As has been shown, crime is a social issue involving poverty and dispossession, not a racial one.

Restoring public expenditure on youth services may ameliorate the problem, but it cannot eradicate it. Expanding the powers of the state over the working class and initiating silly gimmicks will not solve the problem of knife and gun crime either. Only the working class can do this by organising consciously and politically to get rid of capitalism, a social system that generates human poverty and misery, and establish socialism, where the production for the profit for the few gives way to producing for the needs of the many and crime, in all its forms, can become a thing of the past.

Oliver Bond

Capitalism — The Violent Society (1969)

Editorial from the May 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Think about it. Violence and conflict, whether in strikes, demonstrations, crime, or war, are an accepted part of modern society. Think about it, and ask why and what can be done about it.

Every large industrial concern—and small ones as well—has its disputes over wages, hours, and conditions of work and all that goes with them—disputes often coming to a head in a strike or a demonstration, perhaps a scuffle with the police.

Every big city — and many a small town—has its gangs, whether they are the frustrated youngsters of some new town or the deadlier adult gangs who organise their rackets in places like London and Glasgow. It is the same story abroad; in some American cities, for example, people live in continual terror of violent crime.

The level of crime has been rising steadily since the war, and despite the many theories on how to deal with it, none of the experts seems to have the answer. According to the Cambridge lnstitute of Criminology, on present figures about a third of the population will be convicted of an indictable offence some time during their lifetime. In some cities crime has increased over the past fifteen years by over 300 per cent.

At no time, since peace was officially declared in 1945, has the world been free of war. Sometimes it has been a minor clash, like the battles on the Indo-Chinese borders; sometimes a bigger affair like Korea or Vietnam. Sometimes, as in the case of Berlin and Cuba, the world has stood on the brink of a nuclear war.

All of these problems—and there are many others like them—are symptoms of violence—not the violence of people or of human society but of one particular type of social system. Many people who are concerned about these problems think that they are caused by some ‘original sin’ which has left in all of us an instinct for violence and cruelty. But human beings are as ready to be kind as to be cruel, and to co-operate with each other as to fight each other. The fact is that human behaviour is largely conditioned by the environment we find ourselves in. And what sort of an environment does capitalism offer—what sort of behaviour does it encourage?

Capitalism is a society of privilege, in which one class owns the means of wealth production and employs the other class to work for it. Here is one cause of dispute, for the employing capitalists have interests opposed to those of the workers they employ. Strikes, lock-outs, and so on are the battles in a war which is continually going on between capitalists and workers over the division of the wealth which the workers produce.

Capitalism subjects its unprivileged class—the working class—to a degrading life of employment, poverty, and frustration. A worker's life is not simply a battle to make ends meet; there are also the warping influences of life in soulless new towns or neurotic suburbs, or in the slums of the big cities. Here there is little chance for human beings to grow up freely and naturally; childhood and adolescence are often times of torture. This is how a Glasgow youth leader sees the problems of the young gangs in the Easterhouse housing estate:

  They are almost totally asexual . . . This is the most overt cause of the violence; they lack the greatest outlet for human energy and emotion. (The Guardian, April 10, 1969.)

Capitalism draws some of its most hopeless and vicious ciriminals from places like these. At the same time, the system is itself a standing incentive to crime. Since it is a society of private property, it denies the vast mass of its people abundance or even security; they are reserved for a minority. But of course some people, perhaps in especially desperate circumstances, try to find a short cut out of the frustrations and humiliations of the unprivileged; they try crime in preference to the humdrum existence of the wage slave in the office or factory. That is why something like 90 per cent of crime consists of offences against property, some of which are accompanied by ruthless violence with cosh or pickaxe handle or gun.

Capitalism, in this field and in others, sets its own pattern. The same spokesmen who condemn the violent criminal have no hesitation in using force in the disputes of the capitalist class. That is why the states of capitalism keep up massive armed forces, and the few most powerful have their armouries of all-destructive nuclear weapons. This year, British arms spending will go up by £100m. to a record of nearly £2,400m.

Capitalism’s international disputes arise because it is a competitive society, whether it is competition between one firm and another in the High Street or between nations over access to markets or sources of raw materials. The Middle East, for example, is a sensitive area because of the rivalry between the capitalists of so many states for the oil there. As long as capitalism lasts war is either a threat or a reality.

Capitalism, then, is a world of violence, dispute, and frustration. It cannot provide its people with safety, or plenty, or happiness. None of its religions, none of its philosophers, none of its political parties, has any solution to its problems. They all operate on the assumption that capitalism will continue. What if we assume the opposite—that capitalism is abolished and replaced by Socialism?

Socialism is a society in which the means of wealth production are commonly owned. The wealth which is produced will not belong to any class; it will be a common pool to which all human beings will have free access. Thus Socialism will end class divisions, it will end privilege, and it will end poverty.

Socialism is a society in which all humans will have a unity of interests — to co-operate in the production of the world’s wealth. There will be no competition between one group and another for economic supremacy.

Socialism will make its wealth for use and not for sale. This will release society from the restrictions of having to turn out cheap goods for a market. Everything that is produced will be the best we are capable of—we shall not build slums, we shall not make shoddy clothes, we shall not grow sub-standard food.

Socialism is a world without nations and frontiers. It will have one people working together for the common wealth. The crimes and disputes of capitalism will fade into history.

Socialism is necessary now—and we can have it now. All that is needed is for the working class to realise the viciousness and futility of capitalism and to appreciate that it can be ended only by a fundamental social change. Socialism will come after a revolution, as the conscious, democratic act of the world working class.

Sting in the Tail: Life Wish (1996)

The Sting in the Tail column from the March 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life wish

Michael Winner, producer of such gore-fests as the Death Wish movies, now writes for the News of the World.

Surprisingly, he made a reference to Marx in his column (24 December). Unsurprisingly, he made the foolish assumption that Marx had something to do with the Soviet Union:

  "Communism contains a vast, almost religions appeal. Its principal slogan from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs' is actually a wondrous idea . . . But it fails to take into account a crucial element. Human beings. They just aren't up to it."

Winnie’s view of “human nature” is best illustrated by his film hero, Charles Bronson “blowing away” muggers in the New York Subway. This is the view of a pathetic money-grubber and not the view of anyone who has studied human behaviour.

To Winner, any concept of human cooperation must indeed seem a “wondrous idea”.

A tale of two mums

The Duchess of York is feeling the pinch these days. Reputed to owe £3 million, she recently changed her Concorde trip to New York to first class on a scheduled flight. She and the kids had to rough it with the plebeian hordes.

Not on the trip was Maureen whose plight was reported in the Observer (21 January):

  “Maureen is bringing up her eight-year-old son alone in her former council flat in Devon on £77.97 state benefit a week . . .  "I might go two days without a main meal—I just eat, like, a sandwich at lunchtime or supper if we have enough bread. Tuesday is my best day. I collect my Giro cheque then. I usually buy something like mince and we’ll have spaghetti or something . . .  Sometimes when he has said to me he's hungry I just feel very desperate and alone . . . and a bit of a failure really. "

Maureen is not a failure. She is a worker who feeds and clothes her child on state “benefits”. Maureen is not a failure. Capitalism is. The gap between the Duchess and Maureen is proof of that.

The big knife farce

What a farce the amnesty on knives was. 40,000 were handed in, but this is a tiny fraction of the number of knives in circulation, and the fact that one individual contributed 3,000 proves that.

Indeed, Watchdog (BBC1, 22 January ) showed that there are hundreds of shops and mail-order firms all selling knives.

Of course, the politicians have their “solutions”, among them labour’s call for a ban on the sale of knives to anyone under the age of 16, but similar bans on the sale of lottery tickets, alcohol and tobacco arc simply ignored by many retailers. If there’s money to be made then there will be illegal sales.

Years ago, when the use of knives was considered un-British, razors, lead piping and bicycle chains were in vogue, and even if knives were eliminated then some other weapon will take their place. Capitalism’s poverty, tensions and conflicts guarantees that.

Arthur’s dead duck 

The launch of Arthur Scargill’s new Socialist Labour Party provided him with another chance to demonstrate what a political muddle-head he is. This was evident when, having accused the Labour Party of abandoning socialism, he admitted it never had been socialist anyway.

Even worse was his absurd claim that unemployment could be eradicated “even within a capitalist society” (Guardian, 15 January). Incidentally, his promise that the SLP will “support all the ‘single issue campaigns’” in order to gain recruits, should mean that the various Trotskyists and anarchist groups will face more competition there!

Left-wing breakaways from Labour have never lasted: the Scottish Labour Party headed by Jim Sillars MP in the late 1970s is an example, and Scargill’s lot will no doubt follow them into oblivion.

Going for the Big One

We are often asked why we don’t join in campaigns for reforms of capitalism. To begin with, reforms rarely achieve their aims—for example, laws against racism haven’t reduced discrimination, assaults, abuse, etc.

And reforms which do benefit workers will inevitably provoke demands for them to be scrapped when capitalism’s economic situation worsens, and an example of this is provided by Warwick Lightfoot of the think-tank Politcia, who urges the Tories to

  ". . .  repeal existing rules on redundancy payouts and unfair dismissal, arguing that they damage the labour market" (Guardian, 8 January).

What kindly Mr Lightfoot and many others want is a “flexible labour market” where employers can do whatever they like with workers.

Of course, this would depend ultimately on whether the working class would accept it, but the fact is that even the crumbs we get at present are under threat, hence our insistence that socialists must demand the bakehouse and nothing less.

Living it up in Palm Springs

A party member had occasion to rush to the hospital where his mother had been admitted only to be informed that there was a ten hour wait until a bed became available (in the event it was only six-and-a-half hours).

Whilst perusing the usual jumble of magazines in the waiting room, he happened to pick up a colour supplement which features a grizzled, old chimpanzee, and revealed that this was none other than the original “Cheetah” who could be seen swinging through the trees with Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s.

Now aged 63, this hirsute thespian is apparently living the life of Riley in a retirement home in Palm Springs!

It wasn’t lost on our comrade that in capitalism, even elderly animals, with the right financial credentials, are treated with greater regard than poor members of the working class, retired or not.

Gun and knife crime (2007)

From the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent spate of gun and knife crime has been taken as evidence that the country is descending into a chaos of uncontrolled violence

There are lies, damn lies and statistics. And beyond that  there are the criminal statistics, which are supposed to tell us how much of which crimes have been committed during whatever period but which are so beset by misreporting, faulty mathematics and at times political manipulation as to be pretty well worthless. For example, some offences are not reported because the victim sees no point in doing so; ask someone who leaves home in the morning to find their car has been broken into whether they will tell the police and you are likely to be treated to the kind of pitying smile usually bestowed on the stupefyingly naive. Or ask the same question of someone who has picked up a black eye in a Saturday night fight at the pub and prepare for the scorn at such a slur on their resilient stoicism. Examples like these are drawn together in some of the statistics; between 1995 and 2005 reported serious wounding incidents in England and Wales rose by 50 per cent but some 70 per cent of that type of offence are not reported.

The recent spate of gun and knife crime – including high profile murders such as that of the 11-year-old Rhys Jones in Liverpool, apparently by another young person – has been taken as evidence that the country is descending into a chaos of uncontrolled violence, overwhelmingly the work of gangs of young feral psychopaths hiding their faces under hoods and escaping on mountain bikes while their victim dies on the street – or, in some cases, in their own home. “There is no doubt” said Enver Soloman, Deputy Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies recently, “there are more kids carrying knives, but it’s not clear why”. In the first eight months of 2007 no less than 17 teenagers were shot dead in London alone, six of them between February and August.  The response has been predictable, from the tabloids and from opposition politicians: the government must shake themselves out of their apathy about crime, employ more police officers and encourage courts to send more people to prison for longer terms (a suggestion which the courts have eagerly taken up). In fact New Labour can hardly be accused of complacency about crime; since they came to power in 1997, energised by Blair’s promise to be tough on crime they have added some 3000 offences to the statute book – which means that behaviour which was recently legal will now land you in trouble with the law. At the same time the choice of sentences available to the courts has been extended, for example there is the Indeterminate Sentence which in theory can result in someone doing life for an offence which once attracted a term of imprisonment of only months. And as a result the prisons are crammed and inmates are forced to spend time in emergency cells in police stations and court houses.

Cameron

This is the kind of mess likely to cost some politicians a lot of votes and to win lots for others. Hoping to be among the latter is Tory leader David Cameron. It is only just over a year ago - in July 2006 - that, in his efforts to establish himself as a new breed of boss of the nasty party, he drew on the insight into the struggles of working class life instilled in him by an Eton education and a posh address in Notting Hill to declare that everyone else had misunderstood the problem of youth crime and that we have to show a lot more love to the people who commit it: “ hoodies are more defensive than offensive. They’re a way of staying invisible in the street. In a dangerous environment the best thing to do is keep your head down, don’t stand out. For some, the hoodie represents all that’s wrong about youth culture in Britain today. For me, adult society’s response to the hoodie shows how far we are from finding the long-term answers to put things right. So when you see a child walking down the road, hoodie up, head down, moody, swaggering, dominating the pavement – think what brought that child to that moment ”. Having spent the last year or so reflecting on this slice of wisdom and spurred on by the latest news of violent youth crime, Cameron has decided that a different approach would be more voter-attractive: no longer in favour of understanding hoodies, on 22 August  he lashed out at what he called the rising tide of youth violence and anti-social behaviour: “Common sense suggests that with young  people you need to hit them where it hurts most: in their life style and their aspirations” was how he revealed his conversion to a more traditional style of vote chasing with a proposal that young offenders, apart from any other penalty imposed on them, be disqualified from applying for a driving licence. He is apparently under the impression that seasoned practitioners of anti-social behaviour would be impressed enough by such a restriction to persuade them to do as the court and a Tory leader wanted.

Apart from its other defects, Cameron’s suggestion does not have even the merit of being original; in fact it has been in the law since 2004. The same is true about his other proposal, that magistrates courts be able to impose a maximum of twelve months imprisonment instead of six as they are at present. His other views are also stale and impotent, such as his ranting about “moral decline” and a “broken society”, but we must excuse him on the grounds that he also needs a lot more love as a politician desperate to keep his fragile control of his party, knowing that an election defeat would probably see him go the same way as Hague and Howard. The assumption that tougher laws must reduce crime is based on confusion between punishment and an orderly, controlled society, as if putting a new law on the statute book will discourage some types of behaviour and stimulate others – which is not supported by what has been happening over gun and knife crime. There is no doubt that this is a serious problem, which makes life in some places even uglier than it is at present. But apart from the bogus, unhelpful media outrage the reality is that children and young people are the human product of the society they are born into; when so many of them behave so destructively  there must be questions about the nature of that society, why it works as it does and the effect on its people.

Poverty

What is the attraction for young people in gangs (according to the police there are 18 in London alone)? In numerous interviews with reporters and others it has emerged that the gang offers safety, a sense of belonging, of rank and of inviolability – which are obviously missing in the lives of many who are facing the prospect of growing up in a class society where they must reconcile their own denial with the privileges of the other class. A police schools officer operating in the territory of two Liverpool gangs put it: “A lot of them see that life has just left them by+Most of them can’t even read or write+” So far none of the interviewers has pointed out that the values of the gang – loyalty and invulnerability maintained with aggression against those outside – are invaluable requirements in the armed forces, for example among the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan or wherever they are at arms in the defence of the interests of the ruling, privileged class. The analysts, commentators and experts probe for presentable stratagems to repair what they define as gaps in social morality but they pay little useful attention to some of the real hard facts about violent crime.

When, as has happened recently, there is an incident of a gun or a knife being used to kill in a place like Letchworth or Bishop’s Stortford the shock and anger is mixed with bewilderment that something like that can happen in places with a reputation for being green and tranquil. That was a response to the fact that such offences flourish in areas like the West Midlands, Greater Manchester, Liverpool and London  - where the population is concentrated and the pressures of urban capitalism are especially acute. Within London, for example, the boroughs with the highest levels of gun and knife crime include Hackney, Lambeth and Newham and those with the lowest include Bromley, Sutton and Richmond on Thames. A Council report (Mind The Gap — Strategy To Reduce Inequalities And Poverty 2005) from Hackney, which is about the poorest borough in the United Kingdom, described high rates of infant mortality, cancer, heart disease and mental illness. A Public Health Report from Newham Council for 2006 said the borough has the lowest male life expectancy in England, that 64 per cent of the children there were officially in poverty and 41 per cent of the population were “economically inactive”. Lambeth’s Economic Development Strategy for 2006/10 described it as “among the most socially and economically deprived local authority districts in the country” and set out the link between such conditions and youth crime: “The social and economic pressures faced by young people in a world city can create tensions in some local communities where high levels of crime exist alongside a growing informal economy”.

Chindamo

Does all this matter? Can’t people simply drag themselves up from the deeper levels of poverty, go to evening classes, get a degree, end up as Chairman of one of the Big Five banks? Take the case of Learco Chindamo, who as a 15-year-old gang leader killed head teacher Philip Lawrence outside his school in Maida Vale, when Lawrence was defending 13 year old William Njoh from attack by Chindamo’s gang. There was a great deal of unhelpful media froth about the crime and more recently when the government was legally prevented from deporting Chindamo at the end of his sentence, which obscured the fact that, when he killed Lawrence, Chindamo was unable to read or write and all that was known about his absent father, a hardened and ruthless criminal, was that he was either in prison or on the run from Interpol. The intended victim of the attack, Njoh, subsequently dropped out of school and committed crimes such as robbery and possession of a pistol and ammunition, which brought him long custodial sentences. It is evident that the background to Chindamo’s offence was one of widespread poverty, hopelessness and alienation – and that Philip Lawrence paid for it with his life.

Challenging the popular notion that, in face of the evidence of an increasing incidence of knife-related robberies there is a policing or punishment solution, Richard Garside, Director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, insisted that the problem will require an approach which recognises that  “the social antagonisms caused by poverty and inequality are the key”. This a valid comment but it needs to be taken further. The key to social antagonism, poverty and inequality is in the fundamentals of this social system, in the class monopoly which secures and enriches a minority and impoverishes the majority. Politicians who are preoccupied with their next vote will take care not to emphasise that reality – it is more advantageous to stimulate and exploit the latest hysteria. And as long as such a superficial attitude is allowed the problem will endure and there will continue to be blood on the streets.

Ivan.