The Communications Counter-Revolution (1997)

From the December 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

  We face a social crisis of communication. Not only do the means of mass communication not belong to us but they are being used against us.

As global media have developed, enabling words and images to be conveyed to millions of people in a matter of seconds, the words used have become increasingly more sloganised and contrived to delude, the imagery more tranquillising in its banality and stupefying in its detachment from historical context.

As the world becomes a global village, linked by newly accessible technologies from the mobile phone to the Internet, the most powerful use of these technologies has tended to promote the envelopment of mass consciousness by corporate ideology.

As the symbols of constitutional democracy come to dominate the globe, seemingly confirmed by newly-acquired voting powers from Moscow to Soweto to West Lothian, the empowerment of the ballot is insidiously undermined by the neo-feudal absolutism of the press barons and media moguls: the new stratum of the ruling class which controls the dogma of the news agenda. Rupert Murdoch’s News International, to exemplify the point by reference to the biggest and baddest, has global assets of $15 billion and now controls the major newspapers in Britain and Australia, the biggest news broadcast network in the USA and by far the most significant private media organisation in Asia.

As global literacy rates increase, and huge hopes are placed upon the potentiality of science as a method of liberation from disease and diminished opportunities, the lexicon of the communications industry has converged with the language of the manipulative advertising industry which has denuded language of depth or integrity and prostituted speakers and writers in the service of crude market targets.

The consequence of all this is a public which is increasingly bemused by and untrusting of the channels of mass communication; which finds itself the recipient of a monological, one-way conversation, presented as communication; which has come to regard truth as being either the monopoly of a mediating elite or else so relative that nothing can be really true; which has become so soundbitten by political messages delivered to fit the crass measurements of the tabloid headline that enthusiasm for such political babble has become as perverse as commitment to a brand of baked beans or loyalty to a fast-food chain.

For most people the world of politics (for, politics seems indeed to inhabit a separate, remote and misty planet) seems terribly drab and empty and meaningless and alienating and dishonest. Politicians are never useful, except as pawns who might drive away the even more useless. Political activity is seen as an obsession for the disturbed: the rule-bound, the myopic, the ones who get their kicks from power games. Politics is an irritation or a threat, but never a resource of strength or hope.

The language of politics, as it has become compressed to the point of sounding half like gibberish and half like fraud, is not taken very seriously except by those who deal in its currency and have come to realise that it is a code of impotence reflecting the timidity of statecraft before economic powers which operate only in the global language of numbers.

Soundbite culture

Why has the culture of the soundbite arisen? Firstly, because political leaders have come to realise, albeit gradually and with a conspicuous absence of humility, that they can lead nobody nowhere. The market leads; they follow. To dance to the tune of capital entails a minimum of choreographical creativity and to sing to the tune calls less for the oratory of Cicero than the verbal banality of Saatchi or Mandelson.

Secondly, because ideas have become detached from political life. What George Bush called ‘The Vision Thing’ was a recognition of what he lacked, not what he had. The words needed to convey the contemporary political visions of the future, fantasies of myopia as they are, are few and uninspiring. “Gahd Bless America !” “New Labour; New Britain” “One Europe; one people” “The Lady’s Not for Turning” “Things Go Better With Coke”? It is a world led by second-rate advertising copywriters.

When you have nothing to say there is much to be said for saying nothing. But in order for the political mime-show to become audible, for the sake of putting background noise, however disjointed, to the increasingly dominating imagery of the photo-opportunity, something, however brief and pointless, must be uttered.

Thirdly, there is a belief amongst those who produce the media and design the news, that the public is incorrigibly stupid, happy only when offered infantile distractions from reality and capable of taking in only the most simplistic and compressed smidgeon of sound before rubbing our eyes and demanding an appointment with the Page Three girls. The public are regarded as half-baked cretins. The workers are witless and best offered football reports and Royal fairy stories: the tabloid valium for the dispossessed.

And because the news producers worry that our attention spans will collapse under the strain of more than a few minutes of political discussion, they ensure that such unmanageable bites of sustained argument never reach us. In the 1964 General Election — the first in which the major political parties prepared themselves for a TV campaign — the average excerpt from a political speech on the television news was eighty-seven seconds. These days an eighty-seven second excerpt is unheard of. By the 1979 election the median length of speech extracts on the BBC News was 45 seconds and on ITN 25 seconds. In the 1992 election the average length was heard was down to 18 seconds. In the last US presidential campaign no contender was quoted for more than 7 seconds, except during the deadly boring presidential debates in which they recited their pre-rehearsed soundbites with the conviction of a waitress in an American restaurant telling you the day’s specials on the menu.

The problem is not, of course, simply people wants to hear politicians for more than twenty seconds. Fifteen seconds of John Major felt like a lifetime in a cell with him. The media producers are quite right: too much of this makes our heads ache and we run out into the street committing road rage. Faced with such intellectual vacuity and emptiness of vision there is much to be said for the most extreme brevity. The problem is quite simply that the most extreme brevity is fine when you are contrasting Coke with Pepsi or advertising baked beans which don’t make you fart or asking if you prefer Oasis or Blur, but it is inimical to and destructive of the kind of reasoned, scientific judgement required from people who are called upon to make serious democratic choices.

No time for reason

Reason — the capacity to exercise our unique human capacity to organise our thoughts — to remember — to envisage and plan — to think and speak conceptually — to share thought through words — to use words to differentiate the self from the outer world and experience from fantasy —these hugely potent, definingly human, boundlessly creative forces which comprise reason will only wither and die if they are constrained by the inane language and crass imagery which sells jelly babies and New Labour.

To exercise reason takes time. This need for time has always been a problem for the vast majority because, under capitalism it is precisely the theft of our time which leaves us exploited and unfree and weary. So, there is a paradox: to understand why we are weary, unfree and exploited we need the time to contemplate the cause of exploitation and the hope for freedom. For the Leninists and the social-democratic reformists the problem was easily addressed: the nature of life for the majority would never permit the luxury of such reasoned contemplation, so mass socialist consciousness could never occur. The wearied workers must be led or left to rot.

For socialists, who refused to accept that authoritarian logic, the only basis for our claim that workers could and would understand the case for a new way of organising society, was that given the time to think and make sense of experience, understanding would combine with desire to create an enlightened embrace of the socialist alternative. Give people time to think and to speak and to argue and they cannot but see it as we have seen it.

But if time itself is to be sapped away by a culture of hurried messages and commercial jingles, the fascistic anthems of the marketplace, then what hope is there for reason? If language itself, in an Orwellian rape of meaning and sequential logic, becomes not a means to know more but a weapon in the armoury of those who would prefer us to know less, then reason itself falls victim to a vandalising culture which dehumanises those left to dwell in the Brave New World of the Sun and the organisation of mass stupidity. We would be abandoned to a cultural wilderness of endless Happy Hours but no happiness, punch-drunk street parties and feudal funeral processions as repositories for the deeply repressed miseries of the bewildered; elections and referendums with no issues and no discussion. This is the dystopian future of a society bereft of reason.

The threat of a slide to such an historical catastrophe is a menace to the reason which makes us human and to the socialist vision which could enable us to live humanely. And we do face such a threat. That is why we are unmistakably in the midst of a profound crisis of communication. Not only is it the case that the means of communication do not belong to us — in a world where very little that is worth much belongs to most of us that is hardly a revelation. But these channels of communication are being used against us. They are The Enemy Within, which can brand strikers as The Enemy Within and socialists as loonies, utopians and the merely irrelevant. It is as well to know our enemy, for struggle for the tools and language of communication has become in the course of the twentieth century the predominant battle-ground within which the shape of our social future will be contested.

The war waged by the ruling class to silence the majority is not a new one, even though it has too often been neglected by liberal historians who prefer to bathe in the still waters of liberal ideology. The battle to stifle the voices of the working class is a long and bloody one, and in many parts of the world it still goes on leaving the silenced, the maimed, tortured and the butchered corpses in its wake. But in Britain and the so-called capitalist democracies the war against the right of workers to speak has changed. The strategy now is to tolerate ‘free speech’ and then drown it out with the megaphones of distraction and deceit. What we are offered is a democracy in which everyone has a right to be ignored, but only the rich and powerful can insist upon being heard.

Linguistic nihilism

What kind of intellectual climate is it that is allowing the communication of hope and the vivacity of human creativity to become so neglected? The answer lies in the current mood of counter-enlightenment which has come to dominate Western thought. The arid atmosphere of what has come to be known as postmodernism is precisely the environment within which the banalities of the soundbite and the soft-focus lens can triumph over the long-learned lessons of the Age of Reason. With their disdain for rational explanations the postmodernists argue that no cause is more important in producing an effect than any other. There is no rational analysis of history; there are no social systems; there can be nothing which is reducible to the clarity of scientific transparency.

So, within this hopelessly nihilistic chain of postmodernist discourse, everything is as meaningful as it is meaningless; rationality stands on a par with irrationality; no judgement must be prioritised over any other — genocide, death camps, avoidable mass starvation, the torture of political prisoners. These, according to the postmodernists, are all merely fragmented and inexplicable phenomena which operate each in their own separate world of autonomous values. So, if nothing general can be said, language becomes diminished as a civilising force. Words can mean anything or nothing or both. The postmodernists have celebrated the so-called Death of History: the death, in short, of that fundamentally liberating Age of Reason project, to which Marx contributed so greatly, to transform history from a passive force, in which humans are mere puppets, to a creative force in which our comprehension of the process allows us to actively direct the process of social movement. For the postmodernists all of this was ultra-optimism and must now be substituted by an inert, sullen, complacent pact with the present.

This veritable revolt against the Enlightenment derides scientific logic and the quest for the dialectical interrogation of complexity and surrenders abjectly to the lunatic’s logic of the marketplace and its attendant disorders. It gives rise to a notion of politics as being essentially about slogans rather than substance. For, if you really believe that there can be no substantial intervention in the making of history, what else is there to do but stand on the sidelines and pretend that your mandate is to carry out whatever happens to be taking place already?

At its worst, this is the climate in which the dark clouds of fascism can form. But not necessarily fascism in jackboots with Nuremberg rallies. It was hard to ignore a fascistic element within the mass hysteria which followed upon the recent death of a Princess. Such mass manipulation of human feeling and well-organised collective agonising of the repressed is precisely the kind of perverse waste of human emotion and energy made permissible in a society which has come to disdain popular reason.

The politics of reasoned thought requires the capacity to distinguish between the trivial inconsequences of our enemies and the historically vital events out of which history makes us and we can make history. It requires a rejection of the linguistic nihilism of contemporary journalism which asserts like Humpty Dumpty that words can mean whatever a headline-writer wants them to mean. It requires a respect for scientific logic which considers causes and effects rather than diminishing everything to the random agenda of ‘News Just In’.

Capitalism, because it would perish by the force of mass intelligence if enough people thought about it, cannot create an environment conducive to intelligent reflection. Indeed, the more it goes on, the more it will create more elaborate and sophisticated diversions from reasoned thought. And the more socialists will need to warn against those diversions and remind their fellow human beings: Your brain is the greatest weapon you possess; your ability to communicate is your tool of liberation; thinking, speaking and organising democratically and intelligently you are a force that cannot be defeated by the babble of a worn-out social system.

Steve Coleman

Brandt, cant and the banks (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

In October Margaret Thatcher went to Cancun, there to enjoy the Mexican sunshine, attend some splendid banquets, and make pious noises about the millions who starve to death in the Third World. Reagan represented the American capitalist class; Zhuo Ziyang, the Chinese dictatorship; and assorted Arab sheiks showed up to threaten their fellow exploiters with further oil price increases. As one dignitary after another arrived at the conference centre to talk about holding future talks, the victims of the poverty trap continued to perish, oblivious that the masters of the world had convened to talk about them.

The problems of the so-called developing countries are of a magnitude not easy to comprehend. Approximately two-thirds of their populations are malnourished, receiving less than the essential 2,500 calories a day. Thirty million people die of starvation each year, which on average means that one person starves to death every second. In Africa, one fifth of all children die before their first birthday and only a quarter of the population has access to clean water. Diseases in these countries are the direct result of squalid living living conditions and lack of adequate health services. In India for one, cholera and typhoid are widespread killers. Statistics can neither describe the suffering nor express the waste which are hallmarks of nascent capitalism in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

In February 1980, the Independent Commission on International Development presented to the United Nations a report entitled, North-South: A Programme For Survival. The report is a striking indictment of the poverty of capitalist thinking about the problems engendered by their system. The Commission, chaired by Willy Brandt, and including such sterile minds as Edward Heath and Olaf Palme, was accurate only in its depiction of the plight of the poor in the developing countries. They recognised that irrigation is desperately needed; that pure water supplies and pumps are required; that more energy resources are wanted; that new educational facilities are necessary. Having highlighted these needs, the report then proposes solutions within the inhibiting structure of the world-wide profit system.

Under capitalism, investment in production is dependent upon the expectation of profit. Food is produced if it is likely to be sold: if there are no buyers, then there is no “market demands". So, even though people are starving, they do not “demand” food unless they constitute a profitable market. To the simple mind it might seem obvious that if there is enough food to satisfy the starving and according to United Nations statistics, there is a capacity to feed the world’s population several times over — then they should be given access to the food. But such a solution would be too simple for the Brandt Commissioners, who realise that the present system is geared towards the profits of the few rather than the needs of the many.

Brandt and Co. are not in the charity business; the purpose of their mission is to open up new areas of the world to be exploited for profit. It is not the poor who will be better off at the end of the day, but the bankers and the industrialists (despite all the cant about the moral righteousness of overseas aid, which anyway constitutes only a small fraction of government expenditure in comparison with such “priorities” as the armed forces). More than two-thirds of financial loans to the developing countries since 1977 have been private bank loans with onerous terms and debt-servicing burdens. Between 1979 and 1981, debt-service payments for non-oil producing developing countries stood at 120 billion dollars, on top of rising trade deficits.

From a capitalist point of view, the Brandt report is progressive; it recognises the massive, largely uncultivated wastelands of Africa, Asia and Latin America as potential areas for rapid exploitation. With world capitalism in the midst of one of its periodic crises (and not looking like coming out of it soon), such a plan offers some hope. It should not be forgotten that the minority groups who own and control the developing countries are not starving themselves. They are generally affluent dictators who have had no electoral support from the people they rule. This however will not deter the “liberal” capitalists who support the Brandt proposals from sitting round conference tables with them and engaging in trade deals. By bringing the rulers of the developing countries into the international capitalist market, the “aid” agencies are helping to strengthen their own economic system:

  They (the aid agencies) are based on the upholding of the existing international and national framework of the developing world . . . The international agencies cannot accept changes in developing countries which might endanger existing patterns of international trade, foreign private investment, the regular servicing and repayment of debts, and other more or less general concerns of the capitalist developed or creditor countries. (Teresa Hayter, Aid As Imperialism, Penguin, 1971.)

Of course, the rival imperialist superpower, Russia, has long been engaged in precisely the same “aid” business as the West. Russian state capitalism has succeeded in “liberating*’ the rulers of developing countries from one gang of creditors to another. The Brandt report is seen by some Western bankers as a way for the west to compete with the Russian Empire in the bogus liberation game.

The real losers in all of this are the world’s poor. Poverty is by no means only a problem for “under-developed” countries — it is a worldwide working class phenomenon. Every single wage slave, whether he lives in the midst of advanced “free enterprise” or the relative backwardness of Bangladesh, is never free from the threat of being one of tomorrow’s hungry. The vast majority of the world's population, who do not own or control the means of producing and distributing. wealth, are only ever entitled to have access to what they can buy. It is a dangerously insecure existence and it is madness for the workers to look to the bankers to change it for them.

Steve Coleman

A Haunting Spectre (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Between 1976 and 1978 our comrade Sam Leight, of the World Socialist Party of the US, broadcasted regularly on a local radio station in Tucson, Arizona. He has now selected a number of these broadcasts and published them as a 230-page paperback book entitled World Without Wages. All the basic aspects of the socialist case — capitalism, socialism, class struggle, materialist conception of history, economics, trade unions, war, religion, racism — are covered in a style easy to read and understand, even if, inevitably in a selection of this sort, there is a certain amount of repetition. To give an idea of the book’s merit and style we publish below a broadcast on the question of war.

A spectre is haunting the world. Unfortunately it is not the spectre of communism which, like its synonymous term socialism, exists only within the minds of a small minority. The spectre to which we refer is the dread of world-wide nuclear warfare. The possibility of an “international holocaust” which can threaten the survival of the human race cannot, and should not, be ignored. New evidence is available daily, through the media, showing clearly how war and capitalism are inseparable; that the potential for World War III is ominously becoming more pronounced.

It becomes the social obligation of every adult to study the situation, not superficially but in depth. One should disregard the mind bending distortions of the defenders and reformers of the system. They invariably never focus attention on prime causes but are constantly creating false enemies and bogus issues. Meanwhile the real culprit, capitalism, is protected from proper scrutiny and deserved condemnation.

It is beyond the capabilities of political parties or individual leaders, irrespective of their talents or good intentions, to properly control the system they so staunchly defend. The emergence of one crisis upon another, in an unending stream, not only proves this point but is indicative of a society whose very core performs in an anti-social manner. The basis of capitalism is large scale production of commodities for sale and profit, through the employment of wage labour by the ruling, owning class. This is the foundation that determines a complex array of insoluble social phenomena, creating an environment unmistakably hostile to the welfare of those forced to survive in the labour market. And it is precisely in the market place of the capitalist that the seeds of war are implanted, eventually to reach their ultimate maturity.

Commodities must be sold in order for profits to be realised. Markets are forever imperative, both domestic and foreign; trade routes, spheres of influence and boundaries must be protected; and new areas of investment and exploitation are always being sought. Wars occur over these material issues when negotiations between states, each representing their own ruling capitalist class, reach an impasse.

The technology of modern nuclear warfare, together with its horrendous consequences, places the whole of mankind squarely within the same arena. To a degree this occurred in World War II; but with the subsequent development of atomic warfare the destructive capabilities that can be unleashed are monumental in comparison to all previous conflicts. A government report issued in January 1978, in its assessment of the impact of a major nuclear war between the two main superpowers, finds that at a minimum the United States would have 140 million fatalities and the Soviet Union 113 million.

You do not have to search beyond this point to find adequate cause for supporting, with your every fibre, the case for socialism. For the case for socialism is the case against capitalism. How can one logically justify at this stage of so-called social progress, when the fate of millions, if not of all humanity, hovers in precipitous balance, serious questions about the practicality of socialism, the bogy-man myth of human nature objections, or the impossibility of socialist comprehension by the majority, and so forth? We will naturally continue to deal with these arguments, as and when they are put forward, just as we have done for the past 70-odd years. But when a system actually creates its own gigantic coffin, which can at any time engulf us all, and when there awaits a logical alternative — socialism — then we say our case has been vindicated on this one score alone.

We have, of course, much more to offer when we urge for the speedy elimination of capitalism — all the major social evils are spawned by the system. But the war issue alone adequately substantiates our position; all the rest, this in no way detracting from their equal importance, just adds so much more grist to the mill.

The doomsday clock keeps ticking — only the establishment of socialism will cause it to stop.

The consideration of nuclear war creates a scenario which abounds in the complexities of military technology and political evaluations that combines present reality with future speculation. We can take inventory of the gigantic nuclear stockpile; review the past, and mourn the incineration of 200,000 Japanese at the end of World War II, acknowledging that nuclear warfare is no longer an academic issue but history. We can ponder on probabilities, formulate attitudes. One important fact should be recognised. Wars, whether they be termed conventional or nuclear, cannot be prosecuted without the support of the majority of the working class. It is true that a nuclear war could be instigated without formal working class approval; but working class acceptance of capitalism is a tacit authorisation, given by them to the ruling class and their representatives, to administrate the system. The consequences, whatever they may be, must be accepted as part of the deplorable political contract initiated at the voting booths, when the workers sanction capitalism's continuation.

The manufacture of nuclear warfare, together with its allied technological implementations, has for years preoccupied the two major superpowers. As each power produces some new horror, conveniently symbolized — ICBM’s, Minuteman III, the new MK-12A, or the Soviet SS 20, SS19, successors to the SS18 and SS 19, or the contemplated US mobile MX — one power vies with the other for equality or ultimate superiority. For fiscal 1979 the Pentagon proposed a $128 billion military budget; even if this is pared to $125 billion as has been counter-suggested, either figure would be a record. And the military of the United States and Soviet Union will unceasingly offer their own brand of “plausible” reasons for the continued madness, with seemingly no slackening of tempo. The very existence of such an arsenal, notwithstanding the popular, overly-optimistic theory of mutual deterrence, provides the constant risk of the destructive instruments being utilised.

Attitudes towards nuclear warfare can vary not only within governments but between governments. For example, it can be conjectured that at some time the Soviet Union’s self-appraisal of their capabilities of “winning” a strategic nuclear war might be at variance with those held by the United States. The deterrent perceived, and hoped for, by the United States may not be sufficient to dissuade an act of aggression by the Soviet Union against the United States, or for that matter vice versa. Many factors could influence such a decision: an evaluation, either rightly or wrongly, of substantial superiority in some given military area at any particular time; a calculated acceptance of limited casualties and destruction, which for example could be offset by new territorial gains in Europe, or elsewhere: an assessment by the Soviets of their advantageous civil defence capabilities, which apparently at present far exceed those of the United States; and lastly the always prevalent temptation of a first strike. These possibilities can be expanded, amended and debated. However, the mere fact that they are available for contemplation is in itself a social tragedy.

China must also be considered a nuclear power. They have already detonated nuclear bombs, have an extensive civil defence system, and the Soviet Union’s arms race takes cognisance of their so-called communist rivals. In addition approximately 35 other nations can be expected to have nuclear capability within the next few years, not to mention increasing hazards from terrorists and other maniacal movements.

The social significance of this deplorable example of capitalism’s threat to man’s security and survival cannot be under-estimated. We find ourselves threatened by obliteration from forces potentially uncontrollable, that are rapidly increasing with an alarming magnitude. Society is at present entrapped within a volatile system capable of unthinkable human massacre. All the antagonisms that capitalism produces, inclusive of, but not limited to, war can only be removed when the working class throughout the world recognise the cause and fully understand the solution.

One does not need to search far for supporting evidence to show that under capitalism war is inevitable. War is an integral part of the system, inescapable from its function, and society is guaranteed its presence as long as capitalism continues. The unknown factor is whether the violence will become world-wide and nuclear at any particular time. Certainly the history transpired since World War II would imply that this possibility is most strong.

The director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in May 1977, stated that since September 1945 there has not been a single day in which the world was free of war. In fact, 12 wars were being fought on any average day. The casualties, he said, since the end of World War II, run into the tens of millions with the armed forces of more than 80 states fighting on the territory of more than 70 states. His summary of the war situation was based on the research of Hungarian Professor Istvanhkende, who estimated 133 wars between 1945 and 1976, elevating to the status of a war guerrilla attacks that cover a considerable part of the country in which they operate. We suggest that this information, the validity of which we have no reason to doubt, coupled with public knowledge and experience, verifies beyond dispute that war and capitalism are bonded together in an unbreakable social mould that in the modern world cannot be separated, one from the other.

In September 1977 the prestigious Stockholm International Peace Research Institute released its annual report on the possibilities of a nuclear war. The institute concluded: “The probability of a nuclear war is steadily increasing". This depressing conclusion, reported the institute, “is virtually inescapable given, given the consequences of advances in military technology and the spread of nuclear capability”.

In a lengthy report by the Bookings Institution under contract to the Pentagon’s Advanced Projects Research Agency, as reported January 1977, the United States since 1946 has made 19 conspicuous nuclear threats, flexing its military muscles in more than 215 different incidents, often with notable success, to obtain foreign policy objectives. The most serious US nuclear threat came in 1962, over the Soviet missiles in Cuba. In 1973 the US put strategic forces on alert when it believed Russia was preparing to invade Israel during the Yom Kippur war. Again, in August 1976 the US alerted a variety of forces, including B52 nuclear bombers in an incident related to North Korea.

As reported in February 1977 some US intelligence experts believe the Soviet Union is spending about $1 billion a year on civil defence — 12 times the current US budget. This they say is cause for concern because they fear the “balance of terror”, a so-called psychological deterrent to nuclear war, would be toppled if the Russian population were protected and Americans were not.

The US Defence Civil Preparedness Agency, Department of Defence, in February 1977, published a pamphlet entitled Protection In The Nuclear Age. I quote from the introduction:

  Potential aggressors can deliver nuclear warheads accurately on targets up to 8000 miles away. Despite continuing efforts to achieve and maintain peace, a nuclear attack upon the US remains a distinct possibility.

 . . . I now imagine myself huddled in a Fallout Shelter. In the distance I hear ominous explosions. Some mad, quixotic notion, over which I have no control, impels me to engage an obstinate old friend, sitting beside me, in political banter. “You wouldn't settle for socialism, would you?” As the detonations grew louder and closer I could hear his reply. “Please don’t talk to me about socialism — certainly not now. And as I’ve told you before — it's not practical. Don’t you understand — it's not practical”. And at that precise moment the lights went out!

Samuel Leight

The socialist breakfast (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

  The King asked the Queen, and the Queen asked the Dairymaid: "Could we have some butter for the Royal slice of bread?” The Dairymaid she curtsied and went and told the Alderney: ”Don’t forget the butter for the Royal slice of bread." The Alderney said sleepily: ”You’d better tell his Majesty that many people nowadays like marmalade instead. ” The King said "Bother!” and then he said, "Oh, deary me!” The King sobbed “Oh deary me!” and went back to bed.

A. A. Milne’s king was not a typical royal. The present Queen is hardly likely to go back to bed in a sulk because there was no butter on her breakfast table, since she is one of the few people with a free choice of food and all the other material things of life. Many people in the world get no breakfast — 90 thousand die every day of starvation. The majority have a limited diet to survive on — a few mouthfuls of bread, cereal or rice. On the other hand, we in the more industrialised West are very much dependent on the availability of commodities like sliced bread or breakfast cereal and are brain-washed by advertising into wanting, say, Sugar Popsicles, regardless of their nutritional value or effect on our teeth. In a socialist society life would be very different and breakfast well illustrates how a free access society might be organised.

The key to a satisfying breakfast — as in any other area of consumption — will be communication. The consumer needs first to find out what would constitute a nutritionally satisfying meal for her or his normal daily activity and the choice of foods that could provide that balanced diet. Those caring for babies and young children will be concerned about their special dietary needs. The results of research into new foods — maybe plankton and seaweed porridge, rich in protein and minerals and with a delicious taste — will be of interest even if no one chooses to try it. Information and communication go hand in hand and the two can be achieved simultaneously.

In socialism each person will be free to choose not only what she or he consumes but how she or he registers that and gets delivery. Some may prefer to order by telephone or post and have delivery to the door. Others may like to help themselves from “shops” or “markets”. Whatever way is used, each person’s choice is detected or registered as it is made and then combined with everybody else’s. Thus the total requirement for bread, butter, marmalade, and so on is available to the food industry, so that fluctuations in demand are detected and accommodated day by day.

Having measured the demand for a particular foodstuff — and the same principles apply to other types of basic need — we encounter a further need for communication. Just as we have needs which in socialism we shall communicate directly, so each part of the productive system has its needs. The marmalade factory needs oranges and sugar, peeling and chopping machinery, glass jars, metal tops, and its share of power, water and transport. The marmalade factory’s demand for oranges, say, is added to the soft drink factory’s demand and to our demand for fresh oranges, and so on until a total demand for oranges is registered which has to be communicated to the orange growers. The same sort of merging of requirements throughout all industry forms a very complex network of information, extending world-wide. The network also extends through time since it has to accommodate planting as well as harvesting, replacement of machinery as well as its use and all the various stages of mining and processing of raw materials.

The network of requirement information is an ideal application for a computer system. The data and relationships are basically very simple while the volumes arc enormous. The network will hold a four-dimensional electronic mapping of the entire productive system with linkages established between associated data using a worldwide digitised telephone system. It will record and respond to the capacities and requirements of every unit of production factory, depot, dock, mine, farm — linking all consumption and demand through to raw materials, land and labour through every intermediate stage of distribution and processing.

The network consists physically of millions of small computers sited locally to information sources, all linked by telephone lines to form a “distributed” computer system. It is worth emphasising that this would not have a hierarchical structure with levels of control, nor would it require giant databases at administrative centres. Indeed, the function of the network would be communication and not control. It would enable people involved in production to know what needs to be done. It would not and could not instruct them to do it. So, for example, if the people at an orange plantation decided to have a week off instead of doing their estimate quota of picking and packing, the information system would register this fact and arrange for supplies to be got from some reserve stores set up for such contingencies.

The communication network would replace the money system as a means of regulating production levels. From “how many can we sell in competition with our trade rivals?” to “how many are needed?” means stability and an end to the expansion, boom, crisis, recession cycle. The saving of time and resources now wasted on administration, the law, marketing and in duplication of effort will free us all for more useful and stimulating activities. Associated with the network, and using the same hardware, would be an information system allowing anybody who was interested to see what was happening in the world. With helpful indexing and routing facilities and linked to television news and documentaries and to film archives and reference libraries, the system would provide a window on the world and unity and security for all its people.

There is nothing in this method of organising production that resembles management or government as we know it now. Having automated the routine decision-making, what remains of the planning process — the decision, for example, of where to establish a new orange plantation should it be needed — cannot be made automatically by a computer system. The information system can however make available to the people affected by the decision, or interested in it for some reason, all the relevant facts about alternative sites with suitable climate and soil, and the state of those sites at present. Then the decision would be made democratically by the people.

The ability to automate administration answers the reservations some people have about the reality of socialism. Fears that in socialism we would all be perpetually sitting on committees are groundless. Some people have argued that managers and foremen always be needed and that those people with organising ability — with analytical minds and loud voices — would have a useful contribution to but if we have reliable information about what needs to be done, everything can be organised on the basis of co-operative teamwork. Oscar Wilde in Soul of Man Under Socialism called democracy “the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people”, but in fact no bludgeoning is necessary. Democracy means freedom for the individual — freedom of choice, a say in all significant decision-making, and a secure and happy life.

  The Queen said, “There, there!” and went to the Dairymaid. The Dairymaid said, “There, there!” and went to the shed. The cow said, “There, there!” I didn’t really mean it : Here’s milk for his porringe and butter for his bread. ” 

Chris Marsh

Marxism, materialism and morality (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Human thought is spontaneous and involuntary. We think because we are conscious and our consciousness consists of active thought. The capacity to think cannot be switched on or off. When we make statements like “I’m trying to think” or “I can’t think because of the noise”, we don’t mean what we say—we are not really complaining of being unconscious, for if we were we could not think and therefore could not say anything about our state of non-thinking. What is really meant by “I’m trying to think” is “I’m trying to think about a certain object of thought”.

The object of the thought of conscious human matter is our environment. Quite literally, we think about that which is about us. The universe which surrounds us, of which we are all a small part and each an even smaller part, existed long before there was conscious human life. According to religious thinkers, the universe was the product of a supernatural consciousness, but as they cannot tell us whose consciousness created the supernatural consciousness their argument is not a very strong one. The evolution of human life from the natural environment means that Nature bore us and consciousness is determined by it. Primitive people, the infants of Nature, were highly dependent on natural forces, but maturity — which is the cultivation of consciousness — has enabled humanity increasingly to dominate Nature. Society is the coming together of humans to satisfy our needs by producing and distributing wealth — not just crude wealth, but wealth in the sense of our fullest economic and cultural desires. Society is not simply a reflection of consciousness; on the contrary, social existence determines our consciousness. The essential conflict between materialist and idealist philosophy is over this point. The idealists put thought first and say, in the words of Descartes, that Man thinks and therefore he is. Materialists say that we are and therefore we think as we do. A slave in Ancient Greece did not think as a slave and therefore was one, but was a slave and therefore thought as one. History is like a conveyor belt and what you see around, behind and in front of you is not determined by what you want to think (so-called Free Will), but by where you happen to be placed. To the idealists, however, there are such concepts as historical absolutes, notions of right and wrong or good and bad. Throughout history human beings have only adopted such notions when it has been historically practical to do so.

Human beings have capacity to think in three ways: as themselves (sensually and emotionally), as a reflection of their society (morally or ethically) and — in a more obscure and infrequent way — as agents of history (dialectically). All of us spend much of our time thinking in the first way: as ourselves. Man is a sensual animal; we feel the objective world and it registers upon our brains in a profoundly emotional way. The richness of human feelings — which are not just nervous impulses but potential controllable forces — differentiates us from our older animal relations. It is sometimes mistakenly thought that materialists are against examining the emotional side of human activity, that we are somehow frightened of exploring that which makes humans laugh, cry, love and hate as well as what makes them hunger, thirst and seek shelter. (This view is derived from the mechanistic writings of vulgar materialists, most of whom were as much inhibited by their own emotional repression as that of the people they were writing about.) For Marxist materialists, the first law of materialism is to recognise that the real needs of humanity have a sensual and emotional origin. When we allow ourselves to be guided by our sensual and emotional needs wc are being self-interested, for we can sense only our own senses and can only speculate about other people’s.

To act morally is to reflect the needs of others in ourselves. The commonly stated moral maxim, “Thou shalt not kill" reflects the need of other humans and animals, who want to live. A conflict arises when the lamb wants to live and I want to eat it. Or when one group wants land and another occupies it. It is at such times that moralists are brought in to explain that what they really meant was “Thou shalt not kill unless . .". Since the decline of primitive communism, society has been dominated by various minority classes. Their domination has been secured by their having a virtual monopoly of the means of life. Throughout class society the ideas of the ruling minority have always been the ruling ideas in society. In short, the masters make the morals; those who pay the piper call the tune. Because all morality is class morality and because class arrangements are historically transitory, there can be no moral absolutes. What we find sensually desirable and what we are told is morally permissible are often in conflict, because what we desire is a class interest which is in antagonism with the class interest of the moral-making class. When our senses tell us that it is time to eat and the boss’s morality says that only those with sufficient money shall have access to food commodities, we experience a clear example of senses versus morals; self- interest versus the status quo.

Morality concerns values: is A better than B? Should I do C or D? We are often told that we should not lose our values. Not losing our values means not abandoning the values of the ruling class. Socialists are totally hostile to the property-based values of the capitalist system, but that does not mean that we have our own set of moral values to impose upon people in their place. Indeed, the whole idea of devising a new set of moral values is extremely problematic. Before we could begin to establish a materialist morality we would have to embark on a definition of the term “good". Philosophers have spent immense energies in defining “goodness” and it is worth considering the difficulties they have encountered. Some of them have used “good" as a descriptive term, such as “This bed is good". This is to use “good” as a first-order property, like “This bed is soft” or “big” or “green”. In this sense, the term “good” is a value which can be defined in relation to the capacity of objects to satisfy needs. The definition falls down because different people have different needs at different times and no object is intrinsically needable, regardless of the subjective perception of whoever may need it. Utilitarian philosophers say that what is “good” is what gives people pleasure, but this is hardly different from saying that what is needed is good (because it is hardly likely that things which are not needed are likely to bring people pleasure). The Utilitarians attempted to devise an objective table of what causes pleasure and what causes pain, but the exercise was doomed to failure because things which some people find pleasurable others find painful. Moral philosophers have found this problem so difficult to deal with that many of them have given up trying to define “good" descriptively and have defined it intuitively: “good" is what ought to be. This intellectual cop-out, often labelled as the naturalistic fallacy, was written about by David Hume in his Treatise on Human Nature:

  In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find that instead of the usual copulation of propositions, is and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought or ought not expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable is how this new relation can be a deduction from others which are entirely different from it. (Book III, part ii, section i).

Hume was quite correct in stating that it is fallacious to derive an ought from an is. If “ought" propositions could be intuitively derived from observing what is, then everyone would agree about what is “good" and the term would become redundant — as would the moral philosophers.

It was Karl Marx who first constructed a theory of value which could help to solve the problem of moral value. In Capital, Marx was writing about political economy and the economic values, but this was intended by him to be but the beginning of a mammoth philosophical investigation into the entire sphere of capitalist relationships. It is unfortunate that Marx died before his task could be completed. But it would be wrong to assume that the Marxian definition of value has no application in the field of morals. In chapter one of Capital, Marx elaborates upon two conceptions of value which were first pointed to by Aristotle in his Politics:

  The value of every possession are two, both dependent on the thing itself, but not in the same manner, the one supposing an inseparable connection with it, the other not; as a shoe, for instance, which may be either worn or exchanged for something else.

Marx, who saw value as a social relationship between people, rather than between things, pointed to the dual nature of value: for utility and for exchange. Use value is based on the descriptive definition of value referred to above: it is both desirable and desired. Our senses tell us that we need things and our senses tell us that what we need is a use value. As for exchange value, which can only exist where there is property to be bought and sold, Marx refers to this as “a form of social labour". It represents what society has put into it — the socially necessary labour time. Exchange value is more than an economic symbol: it is the reflection of the production — the social history — of an object. In economics, we quantify commodities in terms of what went into them. Does it not follow that if we want to respect “goodness" we must do it by respecting the social efforts of others while they respect ours?

Such mutual respect and proper recognition is made impossible in a capitalist society which is based on a division between passive consumption (the main role of the capitalists) and active production (the main role of the workers). To value the product of society in this sense involves a recognition by humans of what it is to have a need and also what it is to produce for the satisfaction of needs. Capitalist philosophy only views need from the alienated angle of passive consumption. Marx points out in The German Ideology that

  If you proceed from production you necessarily concern yourself with the real condition of production and the productive activity of men. But if you proceed from consumption . . . you can afford to ignore the real living conditions and the activity of men (p. 164).

Moralists spend much time talking about values — from the angle of the consumer — but are rather less eloquent or logical when it comes to the question of the relationships of value production. To understand these relationships requires us to look at them historically, as objects which did not emerge as ready-made values, but which exist due to the conscious actions of human beings on the environment. Oscar Wilde once spoke of a society where we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. How accurately this describes the ethics of capitalism, where social parasites can talk with their cheque books and get the gold they want without ever thinking about — or valuing —the sweated labour of the goldminer who has toiled to produce it. And why should the capitalists care about the workers who create values for them? They have paid us the price of our labour power (always less than the values we create) and have no more concern for us beyond our function as profit-producing wage slaves. Marx was obsessively concerned about this consumptive conception of value which he described as “the fetishism of commodities". To see any phenomenon only as it is rather than as it once was or as it could be, is to fetishise a social relationship of the present — to turn it into a thing rather than a man-made relation. Working class acceptance of capitalism is a fetishism of the historical stage we are living in, which sees it not as an historically evolved system, but as an absolute and unalterable way of life.

In a property society ethics are based on the economic structure. Capitalism’s morals, which we are taught in schools, preached about in churches, and persuaded towards by the media, political leaders and the family, are predominantly related to commodity exchange. Rights are based on commodity contracts, not inalienable liberties. But the relations of production have for many years been in conflict with the forces of production — the way we organise ourselves does not harmonise with the productive possibilities of our world of abundance. Under such conditions morals weaken. As Engels wrote in the Preface to The Poverty of Philosophy:

  If the moral consciousness of the mass declares an economic fact to be unjust, as it has done in the case of slavery or serf-labour, that is a proof that the fact itself has been outlived, that other economic facts have made their appearance, owing to which the former has become unbearable and untenable (p. 13).

Is this not what is happening now, as young workers increasingly reject the morals of their bosses? What the ruling class calls a moral crisis, socialists see as the path to the emancipation from morals. Engels fully recognised how moral indignation can represent “the future interests of the oppressed" (Anti-Duhring, p. 109). This does not mean that Marx or Engels were moralisers. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx says that “communists preach no morality at all”. In short, Engels is saying that moral indignation and rejection of the ethics of capitalism are important prerequisites of socialist consciousness. (There are plenty of examples in history of people who have professed a socialist consciousness, but have in fact never rejected the sickening morals of capitalism.) But Marx is arguing that moral concern — concern for others — is not enough. Once moral outrage has been converted into socialist consciousness it will cease to be either purely selfish or sensual or purely caring or moral and will become dialectical, will be seen from both directions, from the angle of the historical process. Instead of workers saying “I wish I was better off than I am” or “I wish they were better off than they are”, the dialectical understanding of social values leads one to say “I wish that they were better off, for I am one of them and I wish I could do better for myself so that they would be better off.” Dialectical materialism means seeing the whole (society) rather than the part (oneself): it is genuinely selfish, selfless mutuality. In a socialist society mutual aid would become a practicality, not an imposed moral precept. In socialism we will all cherish what we are, what we make and what we could be. Until we create that society, harmony will remain an ideal and therefore socialists cannot preach to our fellow workers about being nice to one another. In a rat race the biggest, most vicious rats win. As Marx says about communists preaching no morality:

  They do not put to people the moral demand: Love one another, be not egoists, because they know very well that egoism is under certain conditions the necessary form of the individual’s struggle for survival.

The rotten morality of the profit system which justifies the production of weapons to blow us all up; which has herded millions into gas chambers and sold their flesh as soap: which lets millions starve while food rots; which robs every worker of the fruits of their labour; which leaves even the most apparently secure of wage slaves always but a short time away from propertyless destitution —provides socialists with countless reasons to shout our message to everyone and anyone who will listen. For we must urge workers to forget about their “brotherly love” for the capitalists and steal from them the world and everything in it and on it.

Steve Coleman

The joy of sex? (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Do you remember The Joy of Sex? — a best-selling book published a few years ago that aimed to tell people how to get the most out of their sex lives, on the assumption that they didn’t and would pay to find out how to. The assumption seems to have been correct. People did pay so much so that The Joy of Sex was quickly followed by More Joy of Sex.

What’s doubtful, however, is that many people’s sex lives improved after reading these books. In fact most must have come away feeling more joyless than ever, with sexual fulfilment still way out of their reach. Most resigned themselves to regarding sex as a bind, a symbol of failure, a source of fear, frustration or disappointment.

Anyone who doubts that sex is one or more of these things for many people need only look at the amount of problem solving literature about sex on bookshop shelves, the deluge of articles on sex in newspapers and magazines; and most people’s morbid curiosity, profitably exploited by the media, about how others “do it”. Further evidence is the number of people actively seeking help with their sex lives through channels ranging from agony columns and marriage counsellors to group therapy, yoga and ginseng aphrodisiacs.

The emotional turmoil that goes hand in hand with failed sexual relations can often be seen in the divorce rate, wife-battering and the popularity of vicarious sex through pornography. From America the recent Hite Report on Male Sexuality gives a picture of gargantuan sexual frustration and mixed-up emotions among both sexes as well as of immense difficulty experienced by men and women in communicating their feelings and problems to one another.

Why should a natural human function like sex be such a problem for so many people? Why is emotional and sexual harmony among partners so rare? Is it all part of being human? Or is it caused by the way we live at present, by the way society is organised?

Poverty and Pressures
The sex difficulties caused by basic material need are those most clearly attributable to the nature of society. Lack of money to feed a family, poor living conditions or anxiety about employment can only have a negative effect on a relationship. The most important sexual organ is the mind, and minds full of the tension and worry generated by poverty militate strongly against happy sex lives.

Yet even when the bread line or unemployment aren’t an immediate threat, few people seem to get sex right. One reason for this is that most people, even when they’ve no worries about the next meal, live their lives under various kinds of socially-induced pressures. Stress at work, the strain and fatigue of having to rush about or behave in ways that may be desirable for reasons of appearance but don’t really suit you as an individual, the harassment of looking after more children than you really wanted: all these things cause anxieties and tensions that can't be shaken off at will and can only inhibit the relaxation and emotional harmony needed to achieve togetherness.

Compounding this is the system of legal marriage which can make women financially dependent on their husbands and lays strong moral and social obligations on both partners. The feeling of being trapped for life can lead in many cases to resentment, mutual recriminations and worse. Divorce is a way out but a difficult (and for many women a financially impossible) one, in a society which posits monogamy as an ideal.

Artwork by George Meddemmen.

Family Life
But poverty and pressures are only part of the story. If they make a good sex life difficult once we become adults, the basis for sexual frustration is laid at an early age by the oppressive role that today’s society has assigned to the family.

The family under modern capitalism has in common with the family in previous forms of society the function of producing and rearing offspring to continue the species and of equipping them with the skills required for survival. Here however the capitalist family parts company with its predecessors. For, in a society based on wage labour, being equipped for survival means being equipped to sell one’s energies to an employer for a wage or salary. The acquisition of the skills that will enable children to do this is what the family must ensure takes place. If these skills aren’t acquired, a family is considered to have failed. We can see the drive towards this goal through the strong emphasis put on the question of what job children will do when they become adults. One of the most frequent questions children, even very young ones, hear from adults is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

This helps to explain why the environment in which most children and adolescents grow up is one that frowns on pleasure. It’s not for nothing that the word children most often hear from their parents when they first become mobile is “No!” The imperative of preparing children for the job market and the non-enjoyment adults associate with work, make parents view with suspicion or hostility a child’s tendency to behave as though life were something to be enjoyed rather than suffered. They often make their children miserable and resentful by imposing upon them seemingly irrational rules that restrict their pleasure. These include rules about sex. Young children are discouraged if they are seen to touch or take an interest in “naughty” parts of the body. When they reach adolescence, the rule of the system transmitted through the family is that they keep their sexual feelings under wraps for the time being and only take the wraps off later when they’re more “mature” and “responsible”—when they’ve found a job and resigned themselves to it.

After being denied the natural sexual outlet with the other sex that their newly-awakened feelings dictate, most young people, when they reach the social socially approved age for sex, lack the knowledge and confidence that earlier experience should have given them. They’ve not been able to experiment freely, openly and without guilt with a number of different partners and gain experience in this aspect of growing up as they may have gained it in others. Having also been denied, for the first fifteen or twenty years of their lives, the right to make decisions about so many aspects of their own lives (parents and teachers have done most of their thinking and taken most of their responsibility for them), they inevitably lack practice in making independent and responsible choices about things.

This makes for anything but the mutual consideration, give-and-take and sense of imagination necessary for happy sexual and emotional relationships. It makes rather for feelings of jealousy, lack of trust and honesty, and a profound incapacity to know your own and your partner’s needs.

Is it surprising then that, when people become adults physically, they often remain children sexually and emotionally? They haven’t been given the chance to sort themselves out in this field and, when they reach adulthood, this leads them into all kinds of tangles and frustrations. How many people —even the most apparently responsible and politically and socially aware among us — don't suffer from being stuck somewhere way back in their emotional and sexual development?

This is not to suggest that if society allowed us to live out our early sexual needs when we felt them we would all, as adults, be suited by a single contented relationship for the rest of our lives. Monogamy is no more or less a “natural” form of human behaviour than many others. It’s a mental mould that present-day property-owning society tries to force people into. The needs of individuals, in the sexual field as in others, vary enormously and while, in conditions of genuinely free choice, monogamy might truly suit some people, there is little doubt that it would not suit others. The point is not that monogamy could or should be the norm, but that the emotional confusion and irresponsibility of so many adults is rooted in the sexually repressed upbringing dictated by the needs of the wages system.

Sex and Profit
The problem is compounded by the fact that, while frowning on the practice of sexuality by young people, capitalism bombards them with sexual spectacle of all kinds. This contradiction arises from its seeking to make profit out of anything, even people’s problems — and indeed even to create problems out of which profit can be made. Cinema, advertising and books emphasise and inflate the importance of sex. They also often give a distorted view of what we should expect from it. The beautiful, sexually potent men and women flaunted by the media create in both young people and adults unjustified feelings of inadequacy and inferiority, a false idea of where sexual fulfilment comes from and unhealthy obsessions about sex in general.

Sex is of course an important part of life. But the whole point about it is that it needs to be integrated into the wider spectrum of human activities, not to stand obsessively above or apart from them.

In this respect many primitive communities not based on the sale of human energies for money have a much healthier attitude towards sex than more “advanced” societies. In communities such as described by Margaret Mead in her classic study, Coming of Age in Samoa, sex is practised much more openly and unashamedly by adults. Children see it as a natural part of life, and begin to learn about it and experience it much earlier, without the taboos and interdictions most of us take for granted. The “facts of life” don’t have to be told to children by their parents. They’re picked up naturally through living. They’re not half-learned at school through dirty stories or through the misleading suggestions of commercialised sex. The consequence is that people in such communities grow up with a less inhibited, less secretive attitude towards sex. Sex fits into their lives like other natural human activities. They don’t need guide books to tell them how to practise sex or what they’re missing in it any more than they need to be instructed on how to get the best out of eating, drinking, sleeping, working or playing. Sex isn’t an over-central preoccupation. It doesn’t — as it shouldn’t — come into a special, mystifying, frustrating category of its own.

Common Ownership
This is not to say that to get sex right we’ve got to go back to primitive society. It’s just to show that the evidence of sexual attitudes in primitive societies indicates that sexual problems, to the degree they’re experienced today, arise not from our nature as human beings but from the social conditions we live in. And there’s clearly something wrong with conditions that turn an essential natural function and a potentially pleasurable experience into a widespread source of misery, anger, guilt and frustration. Removing the conditions will remove the straitjacket on people’s emotions and make it unlikely that we will arrive at adulthood with little knowledge of how to enter into a mutually satisfying relationship with another person. New social arrangements based on common ownership, voluntary co-operation and economic and social equality will remove the conditions and create new ones that will offer free rein, as capitalism never can, to the development — mental, physical and emotional — of each individual’s potential. They will help sex to find a more secure, harmonious place among the whole range of activities that are natural to men and women.

Howard Moss

Medicine’s private parts (1981)

From the December 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

At this time of queues to the Bankruptcy Court there is very little cheer in the boardrooms of Britain where, as we all know, they can clink a sherry glass or two in salute to a pleasing balance sheet. Yet here is one chairman who can report in terms of glowing optimism:

  It is with pleasure I present the accounts for 1980 . . . most positive encouragement from the government . . . the service given to subscribers continues to be of the very highest standard . . .

The author of these self-satisfied, not to say smug, words is John Phillips, chairman of Private Patients Plan (PPP), one of the larger organisations providing insurance for medical treatment outside the National Health Service. Private treatment is currently a boom industry; PPP’s subscribers have risen from 10,000 in 1950 to 313,000 in 1980 and over the same period its “Excess of Income Over Expenditure” from £12,000 to £4,010,000. And PPP have only about 20 per cent of the market, which is dominated by the 75 per cent held by British United Provident Association (BUPA). Each week during 1980 an average of 15,000 people joined a private health insurance scheme and if this trend continues, by 1985 one in five of the population will be covered.

So if people are rushing in their thousands to be ill the private way, what of the National Health Service, once described by the author Alan Sillitoe as “ . . . probably the greatest single factor in this century in creating a new pride in the English working class”? The aims of the Service, when it was introduced in 1948, were set out in no less glowing terms by Aneurin Bevan, whose job as Minister of Health at the time made him a sort of midwife to its birth:

   Society becomes more wholesome, more serene, and spiritually healthier, if it knows that its citizens have at the back of their consciousness the knowledge that not only themselves, but all their fellows, have access, when ill, to the best that medical skill can provide. (In Place of Fear).

What was Bevan talking about? Before the National Health Act 1946 hospitals were run in a number of different ways, by local authorities or by charities. They held flag days or sold their wall space to the advertisers of patent medicines in order to raise money. Their standards, relying on local initiatives, varied widely from place to place. It was by no means the kind of efficiency a capitalist state might demand from its medical services. The Act effectively nationalised the hospitals, grouping them under Regional Boards appointed by the Minister. The declared intention was to achieve an overall adequacy at the highest level which could be afforded.

Like all other hospital employees, consultants were to be paid a wage but they were also allowed to keep some private beds in NHS hospitals. In other words, the Act by no means killed off private practice and these seeds have subsequently flourished. At the time there was hostility to this from some sections of the Labour Party but more serious by far was the opposition Bevan encountered from the doctors. At the end of it all, even with the many compromises he had had to make, Bevan was satisfied with what he later called ".  . . the most civilised achievement of modern government”.

The workers too were enthusiastic; believing that they had a genuinely free, all-embracing, super-efficient health service immediately available at need, they registered with it in their millions. By 1952 only a rich (or eccentric) 1.5 per cent of the population were still outside the Service.

Well it did not happen as Bevan promised. To describe the average experience of a National Health Hospital as civilised is sometimes to reshape the English language. In one of the newest hospitals, for example, people who have been referred to a consultant by their GP wait to be seen in an area which, as the morning wears on, comes to resemble a minor battlefield. Then the consultant has little time to treat the patient in a civilised manner; little time to discuss the problem, to give a prognosis, to present the options. Having pronounced on what should be done, the choice presented to the quivering mass of flesh and bones and blood under the probing hands is to take it or leave it.

If the consultant decides (it should be “advises” but let that pass) on some sort of in-patient treatment then there is the fearsome matter of the waiting list. For some operations this can run into months, even years, of discomfort, pain and disability. At the Congress of the British Medical Association last October a Glasgow doctor warned that the waiting list for psycho-geriatric patients is so long that “seventy-five per cent of (them) die before they are admitted.” (Among the wards, macabre jokers insist that that is a common method of cutting the waiting list.)

But for those who survive the wait the great day eventually dawns and the patient is, as they say, admitted. Already in some anxiety, they are at once submitted to a process of depersonalisation, rather like going into prison. To begin with, inmates are made immediately distinguishable from everyone else because they are only allowed to wear nightclothes. In fact—although only the paranoid would think this is to prevent them escaping—they are forbidden to keep their day clothes in the hospital. The patients’ day is pummelled into a shape to fit in with the hospital’s needs; the institution is far, far greater than the sum of the individuals it theoretically exists for. As the doctors sweep on their rounds though the wards, treatment is more or less imposed; there is no time for them to inform, still less to argue about it. It takes some courage for an inmate, half naked and supine, surrounded by white coats and silvered, spiky instruments, to insist on knowing what it is proposed to do with their body. And they might lose remission, if they don’t absorb those anonymous drugs regularly pumped into them.

Not all of this springs from any historical arrogance of the medical profession. The NHS does not directly make a profit but it is required to work within limits of cost and it is often under the axe of government economies. Hospitals are what is euphemistically called under-capitalised they often can’t afford the latest and the best equipment and have to rely on charitable efforts to buy civilised things like a body scanner. Staff levels are kept at a minimum, which means that nurses are worked to the limits of safety (and often beyond; it is common for a ward full of sick people to be overseen during the night by a single, unqualified nurse). A Professor of Geriatric Medicine told the BMA in October:

  We have old people in accommodation which would have been useful for dogs, cats or race-horses twenty years ago. It is still fashionable to put the elderly into hospitals which have been discarded.

Such standards of civilised treatment do not apply to the private patient. The same consultant who is offensively off-hand to his wretched queue of NHS patients in the morning is courteous and gentle in the evening when he conducts his private clinic. Everything—the necessary tests, medication, surgery—is described, sometimes with helpful notes and diagrams and the patient is helped to make their own decision about their own body. They leave, feeling not at all wretched, with the great healer’s hand reassuringly on their shoulder.

Private in-patient treatment usually takes place in a separate room with its own bathroom, TV, radio and telephone and it is lubricated by the attention of plentiful, ever-attentive nursing staff. There is rarely any delay in admission: having chosen the specialist, the patient also names the day for admission and almost always the consultant can miraculously fit this in with other commitments. Organisations like BUPA spell this out as if it were miraculous when in fact it represents what should be the very minimum standard of care and treatment.

So why isn’t it the minimum? The NHS was designed for the working class — a sort of Tesco Stores in contrast to the discreet, exclusive shops of Belgravia which admit the superior class of capitalist society. The first object of the NHS is to repair workers to the point at which they can be got back into the exploitation process and for that the crowded out-patients clinic, the large boisterous ward and the casualness of the doctors will suffice. For the rich — for the exploiters — there have always been havens where the very best is available for those who can pay places like the Harley Street Clinic (where it costs between £560 and £1029 a week just to stay in bed); the London Clinic (£770 to £973) or the Wellington Hospital (£1225 to £1750).

Of course anyone paying that sort of money is not going to be handled with any discourtesy; no mere consultant surgeon will make decisions about them without fully discussing the matter. Medical care, like all other services in capitalism, is a commodity. It is produced — that is to say, doctors and nurses are trained, hospitals are built, equipment manufactured — to be sold and in the process to contribute to the overall driving force of capitalism — the realising of profit and the accumulation of capital.

There is a mass of evidence — recently the Brenner study and the Report of the Working Group on Inequalities in Health — to point to the conclusion that illness is a matter of how we get our living, of where we live, what stress we are subjected to in the act of survival in property society. In summary, the evidence says that avoidable illness is a problem for the working class, who are forced to live by selling their abilities to work for a wage. It hardly matters to the class who buy those abilities — to the owning, exploiting capitalists. For the workers, sickness brings additional despair as the bills mount up and perhaps their job is in jeopardy; a recent report from the Office of Health Economics states that the level of unemployment may now act as an incentive for workers not to go sick.

The failure of the NHS to ease that despair has left a gap which the private insurance schemes are trying to fill. They offer sick workers the prospect of a little comfort at a time when it is needed and that is no bad thing. But that is the limit; it is rather like shopping in Sainsburys instead of Tesco. As the NHS goes into further decline and private medicine picks up some of the pieces, there will be pressure on this sector too and there is no reason to think that it will cope any better with it than has the NHS. It will be operating under the same inhuman priorities which leave little room for civilised standards. To see the problem as one of sick people is to start at exactly the wrong end of the stethoscope, for it is the basis of society which needs attention.

I

Ireland — they died for nothing (1994)

From the December 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why should I want to go back   

To you, Ireland, my Ireland? 

The blots on the page are so black  

That they cannot be covered with shamrock. 

I hate your grandiose airs, 

Your sob-stuff, your laugh and your swagger. 

Your assumption that everyone cares,  

Who is the king of the your castle.  

Castles are out of date, 

The tide flows round the children's sandy fancy; 

Put up what flag you like, it is too late  

To save your soul with bunting.

So wrote Louis MacNeice in his finely anti-nationalist Autumn Journal. The same sentiments of contempt for the futile excitement of national folly were echoed in great plays such as Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey and The Hostage by Brendan Behan (revived recently in a superbly anarchic production by the Royal Shakespeare Company).

Now that the Ulster dust is settling and, in the words of one Irish politician, inaction is speaking louder than words, it is surely time for some reckoning to be done. Was it worth it? The bloody years of furious castle-building, which have left few castle-dwellers and no shortage of occupants for the slums and the cemeteries, were either necessary or they were in vain. Socialists say that they were pointless: that for workers to die for flags and anthems is to die for nothing.

First, the accounts — the inventory of the dead and destroyed. Before the British Left sloganise about the IRA’s heroic struggle and Bostonian bar-room rebels play remote-control murder with their pocket books, let us do a few necessary historical sums. Who has died and for what? Since the commencement of the current “troubles” in 1969 over 3,200 Northern Irish people have been killed. This is in a population of less than a million. The proportional equivalent in American terms would have been half a million political murders: ten times the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. 37 percent of those killed were shot directly: another 30 percent were killed in gun battles, cross-fire and ambushes; 24 percent died in bombings; just over 5 percent of the catholic dead were victims of the British army. Nearly 35,000 Northern Irish people have been victims of serious injuries, ranging from lost limbs, blindness, bullet wounds and brain damage. This amounts to almost one in fifty of the population. Since 1973 1,500 kneecappings and so-called crucifixions (being shot in the elbows as well as knees) have been carried out by the IRA and their mirror reflections in the loyalist terror gangs. Those who were so punished had no court of appeal at which to defend themselves. Many of those escaping such attacks are now in exile in Britain and elsewhere.

Barbaric inhumanity has not been the preserve of the terrorists. The British army, assisted by the RUC, and backed up by the laws designed to facilitate freedom of the state against the people, have carried out vicious beatings, strip-searches, shoot-to-kill exercises and sustained torture in their political prison camp at Long Kesh. These crimes are not inventions, but have been exposed and condemned by bodies ranging from Amnesty International to International Court of Human Rights. How many workers have been pushed into the arms of futile terror gangsterism by anger engendered by the military arrogance of the British state? It should not be forgotten that the soldiers killed while serving in Ireland, whose deaths have been counted as victories in IRA pubs from Belfast to Boston, were exclusively working-class men, usually drawn from the dole queues, often Liverpool or Glasgow catholics.

Statistics can blind their magnitude and, anyway, the prejudiced will refuse to be confused by mere facts. So let us ask some searching questions which involve times, dates and human faces, not just numbers. What liberation was served by the murder of two boys in Warrington last year when an IRA bomb ended their short lives? What defence of Irish culture was served by such reckless vandalism as the bombing of the Linen Hall Library in Belfast (a famous repository of Irish social history) or the murder some years ago of an old man whose reputation as a maker of instruments for traditional Irish musicians was destroyed when two IRA men shot him dead because he was a protestant? What freedom was being canvassed when socialists in Belfast attended a Sinn Fein meeting on the Falls Road and, after asking a question which confronted the rhetoric of nationalism with the reality of class, were threatened and forced to leave?

We socialists opposed unreservedly the broadcasting ban upon Sinn Fein and Co, but what of their ban on the right to speak out against them which has led to threats, beatings and kneecappings in the name of liberation? These are questions calling for answers; We do not expect to hear them from the Irish-American know-nothings or the slogan-chanting SWPers whose logic-defying position throughout all of this has been to give “unconditional critical support” to the IRA. But let those who have any genuine belief that blowing up workers is a means to freedom tell us how they answer these questions, or how they seek to evade the historical commitment to do so.

Message from America
During the last presidential election Clinton, in a bid to win Irish-American votes, promised to send a peace envoy to sort out the little mess in Ireland. Perhaps Ireland should have responded by offering to send Gloria Honeyford to clear up the riots in LA. The entire US involvement in Ireland has been motivated by cynical vote-seeking. When Gerry Adams was first invited to visit New York in early 1994 politicians seeking their share of the 40-million odd Irish-American votes were falling over one another to shake hands with this fascist. When Adams and Kennedy shook hands perhaps they swapped notes on their respective victims. Then Bruce Morrison, a man defeated for political office, was sent over to Belfast with Clinton’s blessing, to carve out a deal with Sinn Fein. The deal involved a promise of hundreds of millions of dollars of US capital investment in the north-east of Ireland. But what will these American capitalists be investing in? Not folk music sessions and the leprechaun-making industry, that’s for sure; they will only invest their money where there is a low-waged, disciplined workforce to be exploited.

On this recent visit to America Adams was treated as if he should be compared with Mandela. The truth is that Adams and his party, Sinn Fein, do not represent very much at all. Over 98 percent of voters in the Republic of Ireland do not vote for Sinn Fein even though they are quite free to do so, while in the north 90 percent of voters in general and 70 percent of catholics do not vote for Sinn Fein. So, the principal significance of Gerry Adams lies not in his mandate, but in his capacity to murder and mutilate.

While in the USA Adams spoke in Cleveland where one member of the audience, John O’Neil, asked him whether he regarded consent as being fundamental to any democratic political settlement and whether Sinn Fein was prepared to oppose the Irish constitutional link between church and state. Adams declined to respond to the points raised, instead offering some empty rhetoric about how the Americans were to be praised for throwing off British imperialism. (He failed to utter a word about American imperialism.) One catholic-nationalist in the audience turned to another and was heard to declare, “That fellow O’Neil must be Protestant.” “Worse than that”, was the response, “he is a Marxist!” So much for the radicalism of Sinn Fein’s US supporters.

The American government pretends to reject terrorism. Of course, they carry out legalised campaigns when they see it as being in their national interest, but they claim to oppose unofficial and unelected political killers. But with what credibility can Clinton's government rebuke armed terrorists, be they Bosnian Serbs or Libyan hijackers, when they have made it clear that the best way to obtain a hero’s welcome in the USA is to bomb your way to credibility? Who will take seriously American bleating about the nasty bombers of the World Trade Centre when Bill Clintstone's Barney Rubble, Al Gore, was televised shaking the hand of a man whose sole claim to power rests upon his association with precisely such tactics?

As ever, the myth of the New World Order rests upon the miserly economic and sordid political interests of a rich and privileged minority. The catholic and the protestant slums of Ireland north and south will never be served by such political game-playing.

The futility of Nationalism
From its inception, Irish nationalism was motivated by a kind of stupidity (“the delirium of the brave” as Yeats called it) which workers should not have touched with a barge pole, let alone a flag pole. Consider the words of nationalist nutcase and IRA hero Padraic Pearse, a leader of the Easter 1916 rebellion, who rejoiced at the sacrifice of Irish lives in the great imperialist war of 1914-18:

  Ireland has not known the exhilaration of war for over a hundred years . . . The last sixteen months have been the most glorious of Europe . . . The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefield. Such august homage was never before offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for the love of country.

What benefit has any wage slave ever gained from a war grave? Even if there is to be a united Ireland, what possible gain does any worker expect to be offered by membership of a semi-clerical state in which citizenship amounts to no more than freedom to be exploited for a wage or a salary or unemployed and paid even less welfare money than is offered by the British state? This prospect might lead some fat New York catholic lawyers to dance a jig, but where will it leave the working class?

Both the IRA and the loyalist ceasefires are to be welcomed by all workers. Socialists want a situation under capitalism where we can operate to abolish the system in circumstances where bullets and bombs do not threaten us daily. But now comes the hard part. 600,000 Northern Irish protestants still think they are British and 300,000 Northern Irish catholics (give a few here or there) still think they are Irish. As long as these identifications are considered to be worth a candle there is a prospect of renewed conflict.

So, the merely negative achievement of ending the killing, much as it is to be seen as a step forward, is not where matters must rest. It is now time for workers to reach the realisation that their class identity, as used and robbed providers of profit to a supranational capitalist elite, is what really matters. To defeat this elite globally and not just in Ireland, calls for workers to exhibit the courage to transcend the identities inherited from capitalist history (Irish/British—catholic/protestant) and recognise that as workers who constitute the overwhelming majority of the population we have a world to win. It is on that basis that Irish history can proceed from the futility of national rebellion to the exciting opportunity of the social revolution by the many.

Steve Coleman