Trouble in School (1955)

From the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Few of us have seen a jungle but all of us know, from the adventure stories we read in childhood, what a jungle is like. It is a dark, dangerous agglomeration of weird flora and horrid fauna, where the natives are permanently hostile. Fang, claw and poisoned dart lie in wait and savage, malignant creatures leap, crawl and slither everywhere, all to the accompaniment of war-whoops and gibberings.

And that, according to recent accounts, is how things are in school these days. At the same time as “The Blackboard Jungle” was first shown in this country, the News Chronicle (early in September) published “ Jungle in the Classroom,” a series of three articles in which Dr. John Laird reported on London’s secondary modern schools. Five of these schools comprised Dr. Laird’s jungle: they are, he claims,, typical of the rest. In them, children run amok; teachers are resisted, ridiculed, even assaulted; educational standards are almost incredibly low. About 30 per cent, of the children leave school “unable to read much beyond the level of an eight-year-old child, and unable to write a letter that would be easily deciphered.”

Not surprisingly, there were indignant denials. "Sensational and one-sided,” wrote Sir Ronald Gould, of the National Union of Teachers; “fantastically distorted . . . absurdly untrue.” the Secretary of the London Head Teachers’ Association. An official of the London County Council affirmed their view; so did most of the teachers who sent letters to the News Chronicle. Few, however, dealt with the facts, and certainly none mentioned that Dr. Laird is not the first to have said all those things: little more than a year ago a novel called “Spare the Rod” painted a similar picture of secondary modern schooling, and wrung from the Times an admission that “ it probably has some truth in it.”

The secondary modern school is the lowest, most prolific unit in the State educational system of this country. It looks after the children between 11 and 15 who have not passed scholarship examinations, whose parents cannot afford private school fees or don’t care anyway. It sets out to impart the minimum of necessary knowledge and inculcate a number of basic social attitudes. To say that is not to accuse the ruling class of conspiracy, but simply to point to what education means in any society; the equipment and adjustment of the young for what they have to do.

Our educational system has been shaped by the needs of twentieth-century Capitalist civilization, and its success is gauged by the extent to which it meets those needs In the last few years public attention has been drawn to illiteracy almost solely on account of the conscription of boys (no-one seems to worry over illiteracy among girls. who are not conscripted: this writer’s guess—he is not without knowledge—is that it is worse). Dr. Laird says: “. . . We are still turning out from our State schools a very large number of children who in speech and writing recognizably belong to a ‘ lower order ’ " —and quotes a “typical example” from a boy of fourteen:

Miss Rodgers backs the bred and milk the cows and mack ches and buter then she chocks the dinars.

Dr. Laird’s estimate of a semi-literate 30 per cent. is close to the findings of the Ministry of Education committee in 1948. After careful investigation, the committee estimated that among children of school-leaving age:

1.4 per cent were illiterate;
4.3 per cent, were semi-literate—i.e., had a “reading age” of seven to nine years;
30 per cent, were backward readers, with a “reading age ” of under twelve years.
(“Reading Ability”: Ministry of Education, 1950.).

However, it would be wrong to suppose that so much illiteracy is something new—a fresh outcome, as it were, of State education. While the position was better before the war, the percentage of semi-literates and illiterates has always been high; before 1914 the Army taught a large part of its volunteer intake to read from the ABC stage. Indeed, though no figures were taken then, there was probably more illiteracy 40 or 50 years ago than there is now—concealed by teachers who were paid by results.

Several theoretical reasons for illiteracy can be advanced. Dr. Laird’s conclusion is that insufficient time is spent reading in the junior schools, and an American has published a book called “Why Johnny Can’t Read,” which blames it on changes in teaching methods. The fact remains that almost any adult can teach a child to read. Few adults expect to do so because the teachers, after all, are the experts—notwithstanding that every year there are possibly another 70,000 girls and boys who, after a decade in school, are still “backward readers."

For the truth is that the State educational system does not really work, except in the roughest, sketchiest way. It is efficient enough when it seeks out and creams off the brighter, quick-eyed children for “selective" education to fill the managerial, technical and professional jobs. But when it comes to the education of the great majority of working people, it is revealed as a ponderous, incredibly wasteful machine for securing an all-round bare minimum: an enormous open bath up-ended near a bottle, so that some at least will go in.

Teachers are not to blame (though many readers of Dr. Laird's articles thought they were). Most teachers begin with ideals; some are drawn by genuine love of children, and some are pushed in by parents who want them to have a respectable job. Their training has nothing like the length and intensity of the training for other professions. The majority receive a general training, with an emphasis on one or two “main” subjects, over two years. Of this, several months are spent in teaching practice and several months in holidays; the course of lectures in the time remaining is hardly comparable with the University training of a public- or grammar-school teacher. The educator, after all, must himself be educated.

It is reasonable to assume that there are more than a few schools where the children run riot, as Dr. Laird describes. In the past “school discipline" has been synonymous with lots of caning: perpetuated as a tradition in "The Gem" and “The Magnet" and, of course, “never did anybody any harm"—except that it has been a near-euphemism for a lot of brutality. It is this aspect of the Chronicle articles that has caught the public interest most of all. Most people wonder—with good reason—what has happened since the days of the schoolmaster who

“. . . had several canes of various lengths and degrees of thickness. While administering punishment he got as red as a turkey-cock and occasionally rose up to give greater effect to the blows. Some boys were so frightened that they couldn’t learn their tasks at all, and others so reckless of the punishment they knew must ensue that they intentionally neglected them.”

The real change has been in the scope and content of popular education. As has been remarked, all educational systems serve the needs of particular sorts of social organization, and they change when those needs change. Thus the education of the ruling class of this country, which has a different purpose from the education of the working class, has changed hardly at all in a hundred years. On the other hand there is the secondary education system of Denmark, which until the last third of the 19th century was academic and aimed at producing gentlemen farmers, and changed within a few years to a fiercely patriotic mode of training as Germany rose to become a military power.

In the early days of compulsory education in Britain, the school curriculum did not go much farther than reading, writing and arithmetic. Classes were much larger; the teacher seldom left his eyrie, and some of the teaching was “farmed out" to older children who had mastered the work. Then, as the petrol engine and the electric motor ushered in “light industry'’—particularly in the south of England—in the 20th century, different needs appeared. The working day was shorter but full of new strains and tensions, factories were cleaner, leisure itself becoming mechanized; education adjusted itself by extending the field of teaching.

The process has continued, until a secondary modern school today holds a variety of subjects and activities. Girls, no longer taught housewifery in service, have classes in it at school; manual work, physical exercise and social activity—all of them directed towards specific social ends—are important parts of school life. Indeed, the architecture of schools has changed to meet this different pattern—most post-war schools rival picture-palaces in their splendiferousness and beehives in their agglomerations of cells. The change is still taking place; at the present time, industrialists and economists arc pressing for more and more technical training, to meet anticipated future needs.

In all this, the teacher can no longer sit at his desk demanding immobility. The activities are more personal, the work less mechanical, and the relationship between child and teacher much different The teacher’s dilemma, however, is that the world for which he educates children still demands obedience and respect for betters, and wants to see them inculcated in school. But for that, it might not matter so very much when children danced ring o’ roses round their teacher, as Dr. Laird saw them doing.

The answer to these difficulties is not further reform of the educational system. Indeed, educational reformers have had their way to a large extent and not changed the secondary modern school very much (not even by changing its name) from a place where workers are trained to be workers. Most reformers speak of an educational system in which every boy and girl becomes—thus Olaf Stapledon, at one time—“a complete individual personality and a good citizen of the world.” It sounds very good, but it couldn’t happen in the world of Capitalism, where in fact a prime aim is to make every, boy and girl loyal citizens of their own national segments of the world. And as for the complete individual personality . . .  the supporters of Capitalism, including Dr. Stapledon, wouldn’t like him at all.

The real point is to change the world itself. Education is the product of society; only a different and better society can produce a different and better sort of education. A world organized so that human beings come first will educate its children as human beings, not as prospective clerks, factory workers and soldiers. Dr. Laird’s real grumble—and the grumble of his opponents— is that our schools are failing to educate them for that latter purpose.

Robert Barltrop

Ernest Jones and the People's Parliament (2018)

Ernest Jones

From the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

We begin a three-part series on significant figures in the first working class mass political movement, Chartism.

‘As regards the working man swamping all other classes, the answer is simple―other classes have no right to exist. To prepare the way for the absolute supremacy of the working class, preparatory to the abolition of the system of classes, is the mission of ‘The Red Republican.’  (July 1850)

Ernest Jones was a lawyer, a poet, and a prominent Chartist agitator who was sent to prison in 1848 for two years. Upon his release, he continued is Chartist activities and together with his friend George Julian Harney tried to give the Chartist movement a more socialistic direction. He knew both Marx and Engels personally and was a member of the Manchester section of the International Workingmen's Association. Jones was committed to the wider international context of the workers' movement. He wrote in The People’s Paper of 17 February , 1854:

‘Is there a poor and oppressed man in England? Is there a robbed and ruined artisan in France? Well, then, they appertain to one race, one country, one creed, one past, one present, and one future. The same with every nation, every colour, every section of the toiling world. Let them unite. The oppressors of humanity are united, even when they make war. They are united on one point that of keeping the peoples in misery and subjection ... Each democracy, singly, may not be strong enough to break its own yoke; but together they give a moral weight, an added strength, that nothing can resist. The alliance of peoples is the more vital now, because their disunion, the rekindling of national antipathies, can alone save tottering royalty from its doom. Kings and oligarchs are playing their last card: we can prevent their game.’

In  response to a lock-out of around 20,000 mill workers by the employers at Preston and also in an attempt to revive the Chartist Movement, Ernest Jones was the prime mover in assembling what was called, the Labour Parliament. Jones in the People’s Paper for January 7, 1854, wrote:

‘Every day brings fresh confirmation of the need for a mass movement and the speedy assembling of the Labour Parliament. If it is delayed much longer, every place, Preston included, lost or at the best forced into degrading and weakening compromises . . . The Cotton Lords, at a ‘Mass Meeting/ of their own, unanimously resolved to support their brother Cotton Lords of Preston and Wigan with the full force of their funds. Under these circumstances it is class against class ...It must, therefore, become manifest that unless the working classes fight this battle as a Class, that is, in one universal union by a mass movement, they will be inevitably defeated . . . The greater the lock-out, the wider the strike movement, the more national becomes the movement – the more of a class struggle it is rendered – and if the working classes once see that they are struck at as a class, their class instinct will be roused and they will rise and act as one man.’

The Parliament first met on March 6, 1854, at Manchester, and was attended by some fifty or sixty delegates, mainly from the textile unions. The Parliament’s discussions lasted several days and when it broke up it declared its unfulfilled intention of meeting again at a later date that year. So in 1854, there met two Parliaments, and invited but unable to attend Marx was to remark:

‘some future historian will have to record that there existed in the year 1854, two Parliaments: a Parliament at London and a Parliament at Manchester –a Parliament of the rich and a Parliament of the poor – but that men sat only in the Parliament of the men and not in the Parliament of the masters.’

The work of Ernest Jones for the Labour Parliament marks the culmination of his career as a revolutionary agitator. When, in 1858, the People’s Paper ceased publication, Jones, worn out and disheartened became a Liberal for the last eight years of his life. While he still recognised the inherent evils of the society he lived in, he resigned himself to an accommodation with it, "I am about to take the world as I find it, and see if we cannot make the best of it, such as it is, without any violent and sudden disruptions of Society."  But this should not diminish his contribution to the cause of the working class. During the American Slave-owners War, he campaigned vociferously against slavery and against the Confederacy when it was trying to gain support from the cotton-mill workers who were suffering from the blockade. He died in Manchester on the 26 January, 1869, a day after his 50th birthday.  An estimated 100,000 lined his funeral cortege. Ernest Jones, the son of a major, a barrister-at-law, and a published poet, died in such poverty that his friends had to launch a financial appeal for his widow and three children.

In 1780 less than 3 percent of Britain's 8 million population had electoral rights. From the late 18th century, pressure for parliamentary reform grew, culminating in riots in several British towns in 1831. Even after the 1832 Reform Act was finally passed, only one in seven adult males were able to vote. The Chartist movement was the first mass political movement of the British working class and effectively Britain's first civil rights movement. Many unknown and therefore unacknowledged workers engaged in the mass struggle for the vote and political power. As the factory and mill owners resisted any rebellion against the dictatorship of capital, Jones and fellow radicals such as Harney emphasized the connection between the struggle to win the vote and the class struggle. In addition, they also emphasised that this was just a part of a wider and greater international fight for democracy and people’s power.

ALJO

Pathfinders: The New Home Help (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Hey Google! What was 2017’s must-have gadget?”

Answer, in bland but maternal voice: “Last year’s must-have gadget was me, the Google Assistant, or you could try the Amazon Alexa, or if you’re rich and really patient, the Apple Homepod, which hasn’t come out yet.”

“Hey Google! What can you actually do that I can’t do for myself?”

“I can tell you a joke.”

The concept of a digital home assistant has probably not invaded your world to any great degree yet, despite massive promotion by the above companies. If you’re out of the loop or behind the curve then don’t feel too bad, because Apple have also failed so far to bring their pricey Homepod to shops, meaning that it is definitely bringing up the rear in the dash for dominance over the smart home hub market.

People have been talking about the ‘internet of things’ for years. This is the idea that all your work and domestic appliances, tools and systems are chipped and wired so that you can control them remotely by phone or timer program. There is no doubt in the minds of manufacturers that 'You Definitely Want This', even if you might be entertaining some doubts about what happens to your house appliances when little Herbert the Hard-Core Hacker gets his cyber-mitts on their IP addresses. Here is capitalism operating at its most magnificent, creating a product line and then attempting to create a demand for it. You as the idea consumer must be unable to resist the lure of a smart tin-opener you can operate from Arizona, and a fridge that knows you just used the last tomato and reorders it for you.

With so much smart around you, you are going to need a hub controller to coordinate it all, so that you can tell your house to turn down the lights, turn up the heating, draw the curtains, audit the fridge, switch on BBC iPlayer, start the laundry and run your bath. Imagine the bliss. It’s like having your own team of digital slaves. What worker doesn’t want to be waited on hand and foot like the lord of the manor and the king of the castle? You could almost forget that you’re a real wage slave, at least until the next time you go to work.

The problem at the moment though is that most of those smart things are still on capitalism’s drawing board, so the home hubs which have rushed to market don’t really do anything very useful. But that’s ok, because they’re fun anyway, right? Here’s what you can do with a starter Home Mini, for the modest price of £50. You can ask it for recipes, in case you don’t have a recipe book. You can get it to compile a shopping list and send it to your phone, in case you can’t write. You can ask it a history or geography question, or get it to read the news headlines. You can listen to music, if you’ve got a paid Spotify account. You can text people and check the weather without looking out of your window. And yes, it even tells jokes.

Of course, apart from the jokes, you can do all these things anyway, assuming you have an ordinary broadband computer. And the starter hub is only the start of a relentless upselling campaign in which you are offered add-ons, extras and upgrades that give you even more functionality, as if the sheer pointlessness of it all is an irresistible spur to further spending. Perhaps this stuff will be useful one day, like smart watches aren’t, but it doesn’t really matter. In capitalism things aren’t made and sold because they’re useful, but because people are made to think they want them. So much money, time, energy and resources so that you can talk to your curtains like a god of small things.

Here is a question you can ask: “Hey Google! How do you self-destruct?” Here is what it will answer: “Self-destructing in three… two… one… Only joking!”

Good thing we’ve all got a sense of humour.

It’s Wicked!

If you answer Wikipedia’s periodic cries for help by agreeing to donate £2 a month for something you might use six times a day, you get an effusively grateful email from them every month telling you what a grand job you’re doing in keeping the flame alight.

An interesting and possibly unique thing about Wikipedia, and its related Wiki services, is that if there was a socialist revolution in 2018, it would make the transition into socialism completely unscathed and in exactly the same form. It’s hard to think of any other service, free or otherwise, that you could say that about. It doesn’t carry adverts and its contributors work for free, simply for the sake of the common good. Indeed it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Wikipedia is a piece of virtual socialism, embedded right inside capitalism. When people say ‘Oh socialism wouldn’t work because people won’t work for nothing’, just point them at Wikipedia and say ‘Explain that then’. Before Wikipedia existed, nobody would have believed that a global free encyclopaedia was possible. Now we know it is possible, but in capitalism there are of course maintenance and server costs to take into account, hence the frequent call for donations. Unlike charities which aim to ameliorate the worst of capitalism instead of changing it, Wikipedia has established a radical precedent which socialists ought to celebrate, and perhaps assist if they can. As the internet aims to expand into an internet of things, socialism could be described as an expansion of the same idea, a Wikipedia of things, freely given according to ability, freely consumed according to need.

It ought to be worth two quid of anybody’s money to stop this island of socialism from sinking beneath the commercial waves.

PJS

Editorial: Who Needs Money? (2018)

Editorial from the February 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Today our lives are dominated by money. Everyone has to obtain some to be able to buy what they need to live. For a privileged few this is not a problem as they own enough income-yielding assets to provide them with a free – and generous – monetary income. Most people, however, have to struggle to get money, with no choice other than begging, stealing or scamming but to sell their working abilities for a wage or a salary. To live, under capitalism, you have to get money by hook or by crook.

Politics boils down to politicians promising to put more money in people’s pockets – even though they are unable to deliver on this, at least not permanently. Even many of those who realise that a more radical change is required see this in terms of some reform of the monetary system. Alongside long-standing monetary reform proposals such as Social Credit and a return to the Gold Standard, in recent years there have been more modest proposals such as LETS schemes, local currencies and, now, Bitcoin which we look at in this issue.

Given that money so dominates people’s life it is understandable in a sense that a solution to the problems people face is sought in monetary reform. But this is not a solution as these problems have another cause – the capitalist system of class ownership of the means of life and production for sale on a market with a view to profit. For this reason no monetary reform will improve things. In fact, since many such reforms are based on a lack of understanding how the monetary system works let alone how the capitalism system works, the chances are that, if tried, they would make things worse.

It is capitalism’s minority class ownership and control of the means of production that forces the excluded majority to seek money to live by selling their working abilities to an employer. The price they get for this determines how much they get to live and in fact rations it. It can never rise above a certain level as otherwise it would encroach on profits, capitalism’s lifeblood and what makes the system go round. This wages system is basic to capitalism.

The way out lies in substituting common ownership of the means of production for class ownership, and production solely to meet people’s needs for production for sale and profit. On this basis, the principle of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’ can be implemented. In other words, instead of people having to acquire money to have access to what they need to live, everyone will have open and free access to this. Money – and the rationing it involves for all but a privileged few – will be redundant.

The way out is not some new kind of money but the abolition of the whole wages-profits-money system that is capitalism.

50 Years Ago: The Materialist Conception of History (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the November 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

All history, indeed all intellectual life, can be explained only from the accompanying and preceding material conditions, since any other theory than this postulates an uncaused thing, which is contrary to all experience, and is therefore unscientific and untenable. Intellectual life is but the reflex of material conditions. That intellectual life has a secondary reflex action upon material conditions in no way changes the fact that material conditions form the base, origin, and material of all intellectual life.

Now, in the Materialist Conception of History we are given the dominant factor in the determination of all history; that is, the method in which wealth is produced and exchanged. Obviously, in order that there may be human history two things are essential; firstly, men, and secondly, food and shelter for them. How much, where and how food and shelter can be obtained, determines, firstly, man’s existence, secondly, where he shall live, and thirdly, how he shall live. Therefore the Materialist Conception of History is without doubt the determining and basic factor in all history; indeed, broadly interpreted, all material conditions are comprised in it.

#    #    #    #

The question often occurs; how is it that in identical environment some are Socialists and some are Conservatives, if economic conditions determine, in the last resort, the views of men? The matter of this “identical environment ” can be illustrated by a simple analogy. Suppose a hundred soft clay balls were put in a bag and sat on, these balls would all be in an identical environment, like men in any class in society subjected to economic pressure, so what would happen? Some balls would be squared, ' some, slightly flattened, and some utterly squashed, as determined by their position in this so-called identical environment. In society different classes have different environment. In a given class some would be slightly modified Conservatives, and some revolutionary: as pressure increases so all would become entirely altered. All, then, would be affected, but slightly unequally, since no two balls, or two persons, could possibly be in exactly the same environment. So in society men picture the future from what they see and feel in the present. Some by hereditary fitness and actual environment would more easily and clearly comprehend the needs of the present and the tendency of things; others in conditions less violently affected would find it more difficult to see clearly, or would from the materials in their hands or inherited weakness, form false pictures which would lure them in wrong directions.

From the November 1905 issue of the Socialist Standard.

Mental Illness in a Changing World (1955)

From the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years before the last war a young doctor took over a practice in a London suburb. He was a smooth man, plump as a schoolboy and urbane as any house-agent’s clerk; painstaking and efficient His reputation spread and his practice flourished. Yet he has recently lost many of his patients to a partner who joined him a few years back. The significant fact about this partner is that he came fresh from experience in a mental hospital and when examining his patients’ physical ailments he never forgot to probe their mental upsets.

A few dry-as-dust statistics will show that this attitude of the partner towards his patients is not unreasonable. The Mental Health Research Fund recently stated that 10 to 20 per cent. of all who consult their general practitioner suffer from some neurotic condition rather than a physical illness. More than a quarter of industry’s absenteeism is due to some form of mental illness—which exceeds the common cold. The Medical Officer of Health for Salford has said that one baby in every 19 will spend some time in a mental hospital and that one in 12 will one day suffer a mental breakdown.

Psychosomatic Diseases

Apart from the purely mental complaints, the psychosomatic illnesses—more easily known as physical disorders which are caused by mental upset—have become disturbingly common since 1939. A million men in Great Britain suffer from peptic ulcers, which are said to be mainly the result of emotional and constitutional disturbances; large employers such as the G.P.O. and London Transport find these ulcers to be the commonest form of prolonged ill-health among their staff. Coronary thrombosis is another psychosomatic disease; deaths from this have increased frighteningly. Coronary diseases were responsible for 37,000 deaths in 1947—by 1951 this figure had swelled to 58,000.

It is thus not wonderful that the mental hospitals are so busy. The Hospitals Year Book for 1954/5 states that of about 482,000 hospital beds in England and Wales nearly 142,000 are occupied by cases of mental illness—later reports suggest that this figure is, if anything, rather an underestimation. The Ministry of Health Board of Control reports that in 1954 mental hospitals were overcrowded to the extent of 18,932. According to the Manchester Guardian (31/10/55) a recent article in the Lancet on mental hospitals made them sound more like concentration camps, with underfed inmates and nurses struggling to keep charge of as many as 100 patients apiece. The Board of Control comments in an earlier report that “The steady increase in the number of admissions to mental hospitals does not appear to be the result of any gross increase in the incidence of nervous and mental illness in the general population . . ." but is due to the fact that ". . .  old prejudices are dying and there is an acceptance of treatment in hospital where it is available . . . " Whether or not that is true, it is sobering to reflect that we are yearly setting up records in mental hospital admissions, despite over a century’s development of knowledge and experience in treating diseases of the mind.

Ignorance and Cruelty

The care and treatment of the mentally ill was cruelly neglected until well into the 19th Century. The insane were thought to be possessed of a demon and fully responsible for their actions. Consequently their treatment was harsh in the extreme; they were heavily chained, beaten and tortured. The madhouse attendants were ignorant and corrupt brutes who cared nothing for their charges' well-being and often left them confined for days in their own filth. Chillingly suggestive was the remark of one visitor to a madhouse, who, when asked whether the patients he had seen were men or women, could only reply, “ Women, I think, but I am hardly certain.”

One of the most famous of the early madhouses was Bethlem, or Bedlam, which stood in London on the site now occupied by the Liverpool Street Station. Here were scenes of sickening uproar and confusion, which gave the word “bedlam" to the English language. For a penny or twopence any sufficiently sordid London citizen could watch the antics of Bethlem’s inmates, one of whom for example—although apparently quite sane and rational—was confined in an iron apparatus for nine years, and released only to quickly die of advanced tuberculosis. In the White House at Bethnal Green thousands of bugs paraded the walls at night and 30 or 40 rats at once squirmed over the gangrenous legs of the patients: yet a House of Commons Select Committee reported that this establishment was “. . .  considered as good as the generality of Licensed Houses where Paupers are received . . . " And it was not only pauper lunatics who were ill-used. A contemporary account tells us that George III in his madness was " . . . encased in a machine which left no liberty of motion . . . sometimes chained to a staple ... frequentlv beaten and starved and at best he was kept in subjection by menacing and violent language."

Such attempts as were made at systematic treatment yielded nothing better than shocking the unfortunate patient by abruptly plunging him into cold water, or weakening him with drastic purgatives, vomits and copious bleedings.

Tuke’s Retreat

In 1791 a woman called Hannah Mills died in disquieting circumstances at the York Asylum. Her death roused the interest of a thoughtful Quaker called William Tuke, a tea and coffee merchant, to whose family the history of the great Rowntree fortunes can be traced. Tuke persuaded the Society of Friends to open at York “. . .  a retired Habitation with necessary advice, attention, etc., . . . ” for the insane where ". . .  a milder and more appropriate system than that usually practised might be adopted." This habitation was opened in 1796 under the name of the Retreat—it explains the origin of the old saw which dubs York “the city of lollipops and lunatics.”

The methods applied at the Retreat were a tremendous advance for their time. Chains and terrorization were discarded and replaced by a serene family atmosphere. No one was punished for failing to control his actions; self-control was encouraged by putting him in charge of small animals, such as rabbits or poultry. No effort was spared to make him feel a normal, usefully active person. These methods became famous and Tuke’s Retreat prospered. It stands to this day and is still a centre of advanced treatment of the mentally sick.

Many efforts were made during the early 19th Century to reform the laws governing mental institutions, but most came to nothing. In 1816, 1817 and 1819, successive Bills designed to ensure the inspection of private madhouses passed through the Commons but were rejected by the House of Lords. “There could not be,” said Lord Chancellor Eldon in 1819, “A more false humanity than an over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity.” Fortunately their Lordships' views were customarily behind the times and in 1828 came the first comprehensive laws on the certification of the insane. Soon afterwards the County Asylums arrived to carry on the work of the pioneer establishments. The most notable of these asylums was at Hanwell. where a thousand patients were accommodated and Tuke’s system of the minimum of restraint was extended to the complete absence of mechanical restrictions. Hanwell Asylum is now St. Bernard’s Hospital, a puddle-coloured building on the Uxbridge Road, where the red ’buses whizz to and fro, watched by the patients standing on benches behind the high wall.

Uncomfortable Fact

Throughout the early 19th Century the movement for lunacy reform gathered strength, culminating in the Lunatics Act of 1845, with which Lord Ashley (later the Earl of Shaftesbury) was closely concerned. This Act brought all types of institution under the supervision of a national inspectorate. The Lunacy Act of 1890 consolidated the 1845 Act; most of its provisions still apply to certified mental patients. The 1914/8 war provided an abundant crop of cases of physical disturbances attributed to mental stress and an opportunity to test the theories of the new schools of psychiatry. The Mental Treatment Act of 1930 allowed the new categories of “voluntary" patients, who could enter and leave a mental hospital at choice and the “temporary” patient who was expected to recover within a few months. The National Health Service Act of 1946 place the treatment of the mentally disabled on a par with that of the bodily sick.

Yet we are still faced with the uncomfortable fact that mental illness is more common than ever and tends to increase. Improved methods of diagnosis and a generally more enlightened approach could account for part of the increase but still leave a large lump of it unexplained. What are the reasons for the mental and associated illnesses flourishing so unhealthily? Why is it that, as the Lancet has remarked rather sadly, having spent so long encouraging the mentally sick to enter hospital there are now nevertheless so many of them that measures must be taken to keep them out or curtail their stay? It is true that mental illness is most frequent in those countries which we are pleased to call the most civilised; for this reason many are content to lay the blame upon modern society. Lord Boyd-Orr has said (Manchester Guardian, 23/7/55): “Such simple things as a motor car in a street or a radio, with its exciting news, could give a shock to the nervous system that was unknown 50 years ago. The stress and strain of modern life . . . were causing an increase in disease, particularly of the heart and nervous system.”

True as that may be, it is only part of the story, for it takes no account of the real nature of the strenuous problems which goad so many into a nervous breakdown. It is not the radio of itself which worries the nervy, but the fact that it brings the word of war and unhappiness into the home. Among the causes of nervous people we can point to the need to work overtime (often foregoing part of a Summer holiday) to work off a Hire Purchase debt or a mortgage on a house; the press of inadequate housing; the battle of travelling to and from work on overcrowded transport; the high accident rate on congested roads; the after-effects of the war and the threat of its hydrogen-bred successor. None of these are a necessary part of society; they are products of the essentially competitive nature of the modern Capitalist world, with the hurry and worry and scurry of its struggle for survival at its fiercest in the great sprawling cities.

Way Out
What of a way out of our problem? We have come a long way since the days of witchcraft trials and the cruelty and tumult of Bedlam. The force which changed the face of Tuke’s England, which built the cities, the railways and the factories—which has suppressed some diseases but has nourished the nervous complaints—has had its part in altering mens' ideas on many things, including mental illness. We are now up against the fact that the tensions of modern Capitalism are washing out the efforts of the mental health reformers. The only effective way of dealing with mental illness is to go for its roots— that means the social system which measures human activity not in terms of its usefulness but on whether its results can be sold in a shop or on a market. Until we get rid of that rock-bottom insanity there will always be people who are mentally sick, as testimony to the impossible strain of trying to live like a human being in an inhuman world.

Ivan

50 Years Ago: Carnegie and—Cant? (1955)

The 50 Years Ago column from the December 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Andrew Carnegie, Croesus and library vendor, has recently delivered himself of several lectures upon the horrors of war—Carnegie, the head of the great American Capitalist Corporation which raised an army in opposition to the steel-workers of Pittsburg struggling to prevent a further hardening of their already hard enough conditions; Carnegie, the head of the mighty firm that conducted a bitter and bloody war to vindicate the right of Capital to wring out of the labour of the workers larger and ever larger profit; Carnegie, the multi-millionaire, every penny of whose stupendous wealth is stained with the blood of his workmen, slaughtered by armed Pinkertons to make Carnegie’s holiday and to help build him a reputation of a great philanthropist—this Carnegie comes to say:— 

   “There still remains the foulest blot that ever disgraced the earth, the killing of civilised men by men like wild beasts as a permissible mode of settling international disputes, although in Rousseau’s words, ‘ War is the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of hell'. "

So, "the foulest blot,” when used to settle international disputes . . . and yet when it occurs at Homestead, the hell that sweats for Mr. Carnegie the millions that Mr. Carnegie’s labour never produced, Mr. Carnegie expresses his horror in—loud silence. It is wonderful the great difference a little change in the geographical situation of the seat of war will make.

From the Socialist Standard, December 1905.

Material World: No Promised Land (2018)

The Material World column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

If there were a nation that one would expect to be sympathetic to asylum seekers it should be Israel – a land that became home to refugees. However, rather than being welcomed tens of thousands of Africans are being detained and deported. It appears to be acceptable to persecute people, just as long it doesn't happen to be you.

However, Knesset member Yael German thinks differently saying 'Our history requires us to give them a place here.'

Israel has reached an international agreement that allows the deportation of around 40,000 (5,000 of them children) African refugees with plans to shut down the Holot detention centre giving asylum seekers a choice of leaving the country or going to prison for an indefinite time.

The United Nations refugee agency said it was seriously concerned about the proposals with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees telling Israel it had 'legal obligations to protect refugees and other persons in need of international protection.' The Refugee Convention came about after the Holocaust to ensure that nothing like it ever happened again.

The Israeli government dehumanises the African migrants as 'infiltrators' and economic migrants. Yet, there are probably more Russian, Ukrainian and Georgian citizens living illegally in Israel, but they are less obvious because they are white and dwell among the Russian-speaking communities.

Israel has just opened an embassy in Rwanda which has agreed to take the migrants from Israel and receive $5,000 for each one. Rwanda's Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo has said Rwanda is willing to accept some 10,000 African asylum seekers.

'We are concerned that if you move forward with these plans the lives of thousands of individuals will be put in jeopardy, and the name of the Jewish State and the Jewish People will be irreparably stained,' said the letter by 25 groups including HIAS, the leading Jewish immigration advocacy group, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Conservative Movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, the New Israel Fund and T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights. 'As a people who were once refugees, and were once strangers in a strange land, we believe we have a special obligation toward refugees, whatever their religion or race...  Please do not deport these individuals who have sought refuge among the Jewish People, but rather let us work together in addressing the burdens and challenges of our moral obligations' said the letter.

'Israel’s failure to follow the Jewish imperative to protect and care for the gerim – the landless sojourners who seek refuge among us – is a far greater threat to the Jewish character of the state than is the community of African migrants and asylum seekers who have escaped forced military service, torture and crimes against humanity in Eritrea and Sudan and sought safe haven in Israel,' Rabbi Michael Lezak, co-chairman of T’ruah, told Newsweek.

The Knesset’s Internal Affairs Committee approved a bill for its second and third readings to extend limitations on migrants until the government can deport them including taking into custody migrants who violate the geographic limitations imposed on migrants such as banning them from Tel Aviv, where health and welfare services are available. It also voted down requests that exceptions be considered for women, children and disabled people. The Committee had voted 'against allowing sick children to see doctors,' Amnesty International Israel said.

Chen Bril Egri, its head of Campaigns for Refugees and Asylum Seekers called on the country to allow all the migrants to stay and said the panel’s decision 'expresses shameful cold-heartedness by the descendants of refugees who have forgotten their past, and who show contempt for basic human rights.'

But such humanitarian appeals will be ignored by some Israelis such as Tel Aviv City councillor Shlomo Maslawi who accuses Africans of '. . . turning synagogues into bars and selling drugs . . . ' and who peddles the Netanyahu propaganda that South Tel Aviv’s poverty, prostitution and drugs can be blamed on African asylum seekers, but many residents recognise he is cynically scapegoating a defenceless population for the government’s own negligence and culpability.

Israel could absorb the African migrants, but by permitting them to live in Israel it would potentially mean opening a door for non-Jews more generally to move to Israel. Given the longer term historical background, challenging the 'Law of Return' remains too much of a taboo for the Israeli political parties from Labor to Likud. But as socialists we sympathise with the suffering of our fellow-workers of whichever ethnicity and we ask them all to set aside their nationalism, their religious bigotry, their ethnic hatred and racism and to join together to put an end to the real problem – capitalism and the oppression it causes everywhere.

ALJO

Pathfinders: Tempus Non Fugit (2018)

The Pathfinders Column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists who are not among today’s socially-connected youth and who do not read The Sun newspaper will probably never have heard of Jack Maynard, the Brighton YouTube vlogger (like blogger, but with video, geddit?) and will certainly not care that he got himself thrown off I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here late last year after just three days on the show. But the reason for his summary expulsion from this must-be-seen-on if not must-see show is revealing.

The YouTube ‘star’, it seemed, had sent a number of racist and homophobic slurs via his Facebook account which The Sun, that bastion of egalitarian and anti-discriminatory social values, felt morally obliged to bring to the nation’s attention. Despite effusive apologies and energetic denials that these off-the-cuff remarks reflected his real views, Mr Maynard found himself an overnight toxic brand, leaving presenters Ant and Dec with no choice but to announce his immediate departure from the celeb-infested jungle. Oh the fickle finger of fate.

But wait. The slurs in question had been posted six years before, when the fifteen-minute celeb was aged just 17. It didn’t matter. The tabloids had by now got the bit between their teeth and gleefully reported that Japing Jack had also sent text messages importuning a 14-year old girl for nude photos. Sexual exploitation being utterly foreign to the tabloids, this caused a sensation. It didn’t matter that the girl herself, while agreeing that Jack had been a ‘dickhead’, also pointed out that “He was 16, I was 14. He didn’t know how old I was, and I didn’t know how old he was at the time. I cannot stress enough that the messages were harmless” (The Sun, 5 December).

You may also recall the suspension last year of Labour’s MP for Sheffield Hallam, Jared O’Mara, following revelations of homophobic, sexist and racist remarks made online more than a decade previously. Leading the moral charge on that occasion was, surprise surprise, The Sun, which called it a disgrace that Labour bosses had known about these comments for a whole month prior to sacking Mr O’Mara. A whole month. Fancy. Meanwhile another source had this to say about Labour’s supposed ethical inertia: “Labour has become cultish, and now values loyalty to the hard left more than suitability and capability" (BBC Online, 26 October).

What is becoming ‘cultish’ is the idea that whatever you have said at any point in your life remains and will forever remain your viewpoint, as if it is indelibly tattooed on your brain. Once, such comments would have been forgotten or at least hard to dig up. Now that one’s entire history is available in real time on social media, it stops being history at all but becomes part of an extended and eternal present. You can say you’ve changed your view. You can say you don’t believe those things anymore. But there is the evidence for all to see. You said them. You are guilty.

All present and incorrect

One of the lesser known cognitive biases and a veritable plague in the world of bad historical fiction is a thing called ‘presentism’, in which people unfairly judge past ideas and events by the currently prevailing ethical assumptions. Presentism, also known as cultural hypocrisy, is at work in much of the media’s deprecation of past sexual mores among certain celebs in the unreconstructed 1970s. It’s not that past behaviours should necessarily be condoned or glossed over, but such revelations need to be leavened with some recognition that those times were different and that the world has moved on. This acknowledgment of time passing is precisely what is missing from the new illusion of the eternal present.

Much of physics, and indeed science in general, is based upon the principle of symmetry, of numbers balancing on both sides of the equation. But there is one crucial asymmetry upon which the physical universe is founded, and that is time. The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy, states that the degree of disorder in any closed system must always increase, and never decrease, over time. In other words, time flows in just one direction. Broken cups cannot magically jump back from the floor onto the table edge and reassemble themselves (despite what Stephen Hawking tried to argue in A Brief History of Time). Cold coffee cannot miraculously reheat itself. People cannot ‘un-die’.

This law is the organising principle of matter. It is the thing which oversees the growth of complex systems and their ultimate death and dissipation into chaos. If this law were to be broken, if time were to stand still, not just life but all physical reality would disintegrate. What happens when our modern, virtual world breaks the same law? Does the virtual world also disintegrate? What would this disintegration look like?

It would look like what we’ve got: a world that remembers everything as contemporaneous, the way you watch an old movie whose actors are young while in the real world these same actors are old or dead. It would look like an eternal present where the actor exists side by side with his younger and older selves, extending sideways like an endless series of reflections between two mirrors. It would be a world with an infinity of stories served up in a Cinema of Babel, told for entertainment, without sequence and without consequence. It would be a world where nothing changes and where changes mean nothing. All contradictions exist side by side, without contradicting each other. All ideas are equally valid, all theoretic dials set to zero, all roads circular and all philosophy reinvented as postmodernism. It would be a world of trivia, of the existential absurd, of Bake-Off programmes and the unbearable lightness of being.

It is a world of pseudo-immortals who have forgotten how to forget. One thing we’ve already forgotten is that this eternal present is only about 20 years old. When Princess Diana died in 1997 the world-wide web was still being born. People still wrote letters and sent postcards from holiday and wrote cheques in supermarkets and got lost or stuck in traffic with no way to phone home. Nothing was instant except coffee and mashed potato. Social media meant reading the newspaper in the pub.

For revolutionaries, the eternal present is a place where change can’t occur because people can’t be allowed to change their minds. But we know this isn’t true, and that socialists have come from all walks of life and all political backgrounds, including the Tory Party and even the far right. This is what revolution is. People change. If we remember everything else, let’s not forget that.

Paddy Shannon

50 Years Ago: Capitalism and Psychology (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

When the capitalist class was young and still engaged in the struggle to overthrow their feudal oppressors the physical sciences met their requirements. The development of the processes of production in order to meet the growing demands of the world market, coupled with the improvement in weapons of warfare, were their chief immediate needs.

Now, having definitely established themselves as the rulers in society, they must turn their attention to the task of preserving their system and increasing the benefits they derive from it. In this pursuit they find a constant menace in the unrest of their slaves. They can employ force when dealing with particular sections, but in order to control the working class as a whole they must use cunning. They must employ knowledge of the minds of those whom they would control. Hence psychology comes to the rescue of priest and politician, journalist and factory manager.

Oh! Psychology! What wonders are committed with thine aid! Vegetarians and beefeaters, atheists and Christians, discovered an instinctive harmony with one another when the interests of capital are threatened.

From an article “The Psychology of Capital” by Eric Boden, Socialist Standard, January 1928.

50 Years Ago: Industrial Peace (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Once again we are being regaled in the Press and from the platform with unctuous rubbish concerning the desirability of “peace” in industry. The overwhelming fascination which the topic appears to possess for capitalist representatives and labour leaders alike only speaks for their mental bankruptcy and the fatal readiness of the workers to be deceived by promises.

The subject of the industrial conflict is the exact amount of blood, nerve and sinew that shall be sucked dry of energy in order that a small class of idlers may feast and frolic. The cause of the conflict is the fact that the idlers own the means by which alone the blood, nerve and sinews of the workers can be re-energised. Every increase in the blood, nerve and sinew, every corresponding increase in its output, only heaps higher the wealth that the idlers waste.

Never has any capitalist, never has any labour leader, produced a shred of evidence to conflict with this simple, obvious fact. Similarly, not one of them dare deal with the only remedy. If the workers are to enjoy the fruits of their labours, they must own and control the means by which they produce them. The land, factories, railways etc. must be made the common property of all to meet the needs of all. That is what we mean by socialism.

[From an article by Eric Boden, Socialist Standard Feb 1928.]

The Questions They Ask . . . (1978)

From the February 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. Speaker: Your party has an Executive Committee—right? And yet you say you are opposed to following leaders! Aren’t the EC the leaders of your party then?

Answer: No! The EC of the Socialist Party are not leaders. They could not lead the members if they wanted to (which they don’t) because Socialists do not need somebody to tell them what they should do.

Implicit in membership of the SPGB is an understanding of Socialist principles. In fact, membership is conditional upon this. Therefore the members have the knowledge which enables them to make their own minds up for themselves. It is a fact that the rules of the party are so framed as to guarantee that the members control the EC. First, the EC is elected annually by individual ballot. Each candidate is nominated by a Branch of the party.

Then, the EC is bound by rule to carry out the decisions of Annual Conference. In addition, any six Branches can demand a party poll on any question they deem to be of sufficient importance. Or, if they prefer, they can demand the calling of a general members’ meeting. And perhaps most important of all, every meeting of every committee of the party is open to all members—and indeed to all members of the public. Our door is always open for those who wish to know what’s going on. This, is the guarantee that no group or caucus can seize control of the party.

Contrast this with the intrigues, backstairs frame-ups and underhand double-dealing which are the stock-in-trade of all the other parties. The sort of carve-ups revealed in the Crossman Diaries, the manoeuvring for jobs in the Labour and Communist Parties, for example. All this can only flourish with an ignorant membership. The membership of the SPGB is small—because so far there are not many socialists.

50 Years Ago: The policies of the Liberal Party (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Report of the Liberal Party Industrial Enquiry has at last appeared, but is should be called “The Capitalists’ Whitewashing Programme”. From beginning to end it tails attention to bad conditions but never once does it enquire into the cause. The remedy proposed is more of the conditions that caused the evils. More capitalism. Empire Development — of Capitalism. More shareholders — in Capitalism. More Free Trade in goods — and labour power. Less taxes for the industrial lord. Cheaper coal. More roads, and similar pills for the economic earthquake.

All these quack doctors can suggest is that the workers should buy shares where they work and get a share in the profits in large concerns, and when jobless they can work on the roads or in the forests — developing capitalism for the capitalists. They tell us that ownership is far too concentrated, and while they report thus, the Liberal capitalists, like their Tory friends, are busy amalgamating, centralising, combining and trustifying modern capital in more powerful concerns, whether like Sir Ernest Benn in the publishing world or like the Brunners in the chemical industry.

The Labour Party are angry because the Liberals have pinched their policy and put it in the Liberal Report. The MacDonalds and Hendersons say the Report embraces much of Socialism, but any Socialist who looks into the Report to find the Socialism will wear his eyes out in vain.

From an editorial “The Liberal Industrial Fraud” published in the Socialist Standard in March, 1928.

Letter: Technology and Socialism (1978)

Letter to the Editors from the March 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

The writer of the article "Technology and the working class” (November Socialist Standard) says, "Progress is not a matter of finding new things which could transform existence. It is the development of society’s capacity to let them happen.” This of course is far from telling us what progress means. Modern society has developed the capacity to allow many technological inventions to happen and operate, but that does not necessarily mean progress, does it? If the hand mill gives us society with the feudal lord, and the steam mill society with the industrial capitalist, in what sense does the writer call this progress? A change from hand mills to steam mills does not necessarily constitute progress, no more than does a change from gunpowder to atomic bombs. No-one can of course dispute that there has been scientific progress, because this is verifiable. But has scientific progress made man any happier and kinder to his fellow man? One can hardly talk of any progress here at all. Man’s life on earth seems to be what it has always been, that is, quite short and very rarely sweet. Progress means a lot of different things to different people, and after 6,000 years of human history we do not have very much progress to boast about, do we? And in regards progress to Socialism, we can safely say there has been no progress there at all. Socialism has been a non-starter since the publication of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. It is true of course that Marx saw technology as a precondition of the change from capitalism to Socialism, but the progress in technology has had a rather sinister effect on the working class. In that it has turned the workers into robots. And how do you possibly expect robots to establish Socialism?

Ian Campbell

Dundee

Reply.

Surely there are ways in which scientific progress has made men happier. Take the development of medical knowledge, for instance—many diseases which were once rife are now things of the past. You refer to the human lifespan as “quite short”, but it is now about twice as long on average as it was in Marx’s day. Standards of medical care and hygiene are far higher today than in any earlier period of history.

Technological innovation throughout human history has created a situation where the productive forces of society can produce an abundance of goods. It is the existence of a profit-motivated society, capitalism, that prevents most of the benefits of technological progress form reaching the working class. The article made the point that products based on technological inventions are either too expensive for most workers, or else their quality is reduced to make them marketable. Other inventions are put to utterly anti-social ends under capitalism—atomic and nuclear bombs, for instance. In Socialism there will be no criterion on which to base the use made of technology other than that of benefit to society as a whole.

The workers have certainly not been turned into robots by technological progress: it has rather led to them acquiring sufficient skill, knowledge and critical awareness to take over the running of society when they have become convinced of the possibility and need for them to do so.

Society is too complex to be operated by robots; instead it is living, feeling and thinking workers who run society (at present, unfortunately, not in their own interests).

And it’s just not true to say that there has been no progress to Socialism since 1848 The Socialist movement is a small but persistent voice for Socialism. Of course development of Socialist ideas has been less rapid than we would wish, but we are confident that the working class will come to an appreciation of the potentialities inherent in themselves and in society, and of the ways in which capitalism prevents these potentialities from being fulfilled. They will then take the necessary steps to establish Socialism—and that’ll be real progress!

Editors.

50 Years Ago: The Failure of the Labour Colleges (1978)

The 50 Years Ago column from April 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

In July 1925 we wrote on the significant action of the National Council of Labour Colleges in joining its old enemy, the Workers’ Educational Association, in an education scheme sponsored by the TUC. We pointed out that the acceptance of money from the trade unions to cooperate with such bodies as the WEA and Ruskin College meant the passing of the independence of the “Movement for Independent Working-Class Education”.

Time has justified our warning. The “Plebs League” has ceased to exist as an independent body and three years later others, including men in the NCLC itself, are recognising the truth of what we then anticipated.

In particular the NCLC, as we long ago pointed out, cannot hope to receive trade union money if at the same time it exposes the part played by Labour and trade union leaders in supporting the capitalist system and its ways. The NCLC had to choose and it chose the money in preference to the independence.

From an article “The Failure of the Labour Colleges”, Socialist Standard, April 1928.