Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in   various  ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
[P&P Bulletin Publications,PO Box 50, London SW17 9NL]  [Post Office Regd]
No 920 Tuesday September 30 1997                                                                                                            10p

New Labour disciplines will double the damage capitalism is doing to families anyway. Let the bourgeois behavioural experts look to their own class's degeneracy and to their own system's crimes. Fatal mistake expecting the hypocrisy and violence of the capitalist court system to sort out working-class problems. Shame on feminist sectarianism, falling for ludicrous 'reformist' non-events. Blaming workers for their own plight is fascist, not socialist. Capitalist crisis is decisive in everything - solve that.

Labour's new threat to punish the working class for capitalist society's failings via family condemnation courts is outright fascism. Even Nazi Germany would have envied these powers to force parents of unruly children to accept compulsory "responsibility counselling" or go to jail.

It immediately raises the question: Who in present-day Britain have such exemplary personal and family lives that they can threaten to imprison workers families for not coming up to their standards? 

The monarchy? The messed-up lives of their children and near relations are an international joke, - alcoholics, shopaholics, sad divorcees, damaged children, and generally screwed—up people in all directions.

The aristocracy? Their children are all cokeheads. Their star offspring, Diana, was a completely wrecked human being who died a violent and sordid death. They send their sons to all-male public schools to be buggered stupid. They kill themselves in mindless accidents or even more degenerate suicides with alarming frequency.

The professional classes, - judges, MPs, and the like? All of the above applies to them and their children just as much if not more so, with adultery and family abandonment being a renowned 'occupational hazard' of life at Westminster, and alcoholism and opportunist corruption even more endemic. And their children? Any amount of dysfunctional behaviour, just the same as in any other section of capitalist society, - crime, degeneracy, hooliganism, drug abuse, etc, etc.

So who are these paragons of family virtue who are going to sit in judgement on working-class families and jail them because of their offsprings' failings? Sectors of the population whose families exhibit all the same problems themselves.

In other words, what is proposed is some routine new tyrannical authority for state powers which amounts to more of the same total humbug and hypocrisy that has always been imposed on the working class to try to keep it in its place, - down.

In other words this is the arbitrary power of the capitalist state used with maximum viciousness and deception for more scapegoating, - i.e. Fascism.

Listen to this New Labour stooge for the ruling class and the property status-quo in Britain, Jack Straw, giving his Goebbels-smooth propaganda to the capitalist press:

"What I am trying to break is this excuse culture that has developed, where a young offender seeks to excuse their behaviour," said Mr Straw. "None of us should evade our responsibilities for our children. You have got to get parents to accept their responsibilities. The earlier you get to these parents and children the better. That's why two of my proposals actually affect children below the age of criminal responsibility."

One of the main ways envisaged by the Home Secretary is through a large expansion of parent education classes, now attended by about 40,000 people a year. The proposed legislation, to be introduced later this year, envisages the courts ordering parents of convicted child offenders who "wilfully refuse to accept their responsibilities" to go to "counselling and guidance sessions" once a week for three-month courses.

This will also cover the parents of persistent school truants.

They may also face a court order lasting up to a year spelling out how they must control their children — by ensuring, for example, they are at home at certain hours or accompanied to and from school by a responsible adult.

Parents who fail to comply face a rising penalty of fines and possible jail terms.

Mr Straw also indicated for the first time that the police cautioning system will be replaced by a reprimand for first  offences followed  by  a final warning for a second offence which will trigger "an intervention package" by a youth offender team. If that fails, accelerated court action will follow.

Harry Fletcher, of the National Association of Probation Officers, doubted that enforcing child curfews and using compulsion and threats of fines and imprisonment would change the behaviour of many parents.

Half the working-class families in the country could be liable to this draconian policing if these posturing 'reformist' lunatics get away with such monstrous punitive social engineering which even Hitler did not dream of, - such is the spread of petty crime and truancy and hooliganism among modern teenagers.

And what effect will it all have? Absolute zero, as the Probation Officer Association indicated.

Why? Because it is capitalist society which is sick, not the people who have to suffer it.

And what great changes do these New Labour 'reformists' propose for all the routine relationships of the capitalist system which make that society what it is? None whatever.

And so what are Straw & Co up to? Its the oldest dirty reactionary trick in the book, - exploiting the known anxieties and frustrations, surging up relentlessly in society, to turn the hatred not on the causes of the problems, but on its victims, by finding a scapegoat.

'Scroungers' are a popular target, beloved by the capitalist press for ages. Poorer working-class families, ethnic minorities, people with a record, - anyone against whom prejudice can be turned with some skilful propaganda. 

The 'excuse-culture' is singled out here, - 'those wilfully refusing to accept their responsibilities', etc.

With such Goebbels-speak, the big question of who or what really is 'responsible' for the disaffection among modern teenagers, throughout society, is quietly buried without trace.

Marxist science, of course, long ago explained how the essential ethics of capitalism, - exploit or be exploited; profiteer or be profited from; be cut-throat competitive or have your throat cut by competition; use disciplined trade-union power or be forever done down by management; win the trade-war or get hammered in the trade war; bankrupt your rivals or be bankrupted yourself; get to the top of the tree or be forever an also-ran; - etc, etc, could not possibly avoid ending up with wholesale corruption and nepotism on one side, dominated by an ever-more select group of all-powerful monopolists; - and seething resentment and a sense of injustice among the masses on the other side.

Total alienation is the final product of capitalist society, with revolution equally inevitable as its only solution.

Such a communist view of the world is temporarily making only slow headway in some parts of the globe; but interestingly in Britain, a leading psychologist Oliver James has just published a new book, rapidly gaining enormous popularity, which traces every aspect of dysfunctional behaviour in British families to......capitalism and
its rotten frustrations and insoluble contradictions:

Depression, aggression and compulsion have all been shown to correlate with low levels of the brain chemical serotonin — this is the chemical that is raised by taking modern anti-depressants like Prozac (see box below). But levels of serotonin in animals and human brains reflect what is happening around them, socially and emotionally. If you are feeling lousy or in urgent need of a drink or a fix or a fling or a fight, you probably have low serotonin levels caused by the way we live now. And the system by which we live — advanced capitalism — as currently organised, creates low serotonin societies.

Studies of animals show that serotonin is highly sensitive to changes in status in those species where hierarchy is a key organising principle — such as humans. The importance of social status to serotonin levels has been definitively demonstrated in studies of vervet monkeys. In a series of experiments, changes were made to the status of vervets, so that previously subordinate ones became dominant and vice versa. Sure enough, seratonin levels tracked these status changes. When dominant vervets were removed from their group, after a couple of weeks a battle for dominance ensued among the previously subordinate. The winner had a higher level of serotonin once he had established his new status: becoming dominant caused the increase.

Successful human students have been shown to have higher serotonin levels. The fact that those who are subordinate or have low status, such as women and people of low income, are more prone to low serotonin problems (depression and compulsion in women, aggression in men) strongly suggests a link between low serotonin and status.

But why have such problems increased? Why should there be more low serotonin people when more of the population has become wealthier and middle class, and women's opportunities, status and real wealth have increased? The explanation is twofold: advanced capitalism fails to meet our evolved need for status; and it is destructive of the stable attachments to which we are instinctively drawn — it drives a wedge between mother and father, parent and small child and elderly parents and their families. It makes us feel like losers.

A primary cause of these changes is the rise of individualism and the increase in our  aspirations. Previously oppressed people have come not only to believe they can enjoy unimaginable status and wealth, but to regard them as an entitlement, even though society is unable to deliver them.

When expectations outstrip real outcomes, we feel either aggressively resentful or depressed. If reality falls short of our high hopes, we blame the system or ourselves, but either way, rates of depression and violence rise and we feel like losers — with low status and low serotonin. Until reality can catch up with the aspiration of equality, relative deprivation continues.

In developed nations, women particularly suffer. These societies have raised female expectations sky high, but have been unable to deliver, creating huge disappointment. Depression, eating disorders and plea-for-help suicide attempts are three times more common in women than men.

Diana, Princess of Wales, suffered from all these problems, as well as a loveless marriage and acrimonious divorce. Like millions of her peers, she fought to be taken seriously, to be seen as neither mad nor just a pretty face; 80 per-cent of those signing the remembrance books for her at St James' Palace are women.

It is possible that the grief that we have seen was a conduit for the suffering and anger of the many millions of low serotonin, subordinated people. They had the enormous collective consolation of being able to gather together around a single issue and feel solidarity.

Extremely damaging and subordinating patterns of social comparison have developed since 1950, in all aspects of our lives. Beautiful models happen to suit advanced capitalism, but the way they are used damages our mental health. The media has played an important role in making men and women dissatisfied with their bodies and with their real partners.

Whose interests are being served by these, and associated changes? Crudely, the answer is that advanced capitalism makes money out of the disappointment and depression, the dissatisfaction and rage engendered by overheated aspirations and unreal comparisons. It encourages us to fill the consequent psychic void with material goods and drugs of solace (alcohol, illegal drugs, food, nicotine). It profits from fostering spurious individualism by encouraging us to define ourselves through our purchases, with ever more precisely marketed products intended to create a concern to have this rather than that, even though there is often no significant practical or aesthetic difference.

Advanced capitalism requires continual economic growth, and this is only possible if needs are constantly diversifying to create new markets. There is a demand for ever more needs, so that ever more specific new products can be devised to meet them. Money can be made from restoring the chemical imbalance in our brains which results from these ambitions and false identities, by selling pills and therapeutic services, advanced capitalism has evolved, in such a way as to do very nicely at creating and curing misery; with our inner lives footing the bill.

Advanced capitalism is currently out of fashion as an explanation. But it explains much more of what has gone wrong since 1950 than any emphasis on the breakdown of morality and communities. 

Advanced capitalism exploits our instinctive animal tendency to overeat fats and sugars, when what most of us need is plenty of roughage and a lot less calories. Having overeaten, we come to hate our shape and to resent our ponderous bodies, and so we can be sold diet products. Or we may starve ourselves.

Together with the relentless images of thin, beautiful models, now of both sexes, the result is an unceasing sense of failure, of a losing battle against overweight That we have beaten one of the most enduring challenges to human life — starvation — has become a threat to our mental health.

This is just one example of the way the combination of advanced capitalism and our basic instincts can leave us feeling like losers. To acknowledge that these problems afflict women more than men is not a backlash against feminism. What we are seeing is the classic pattern when the previously oppressed begin to see a chance of improvement: expectations outstrip reality in the early stages, creating the disappointment and depression of relative deprivation.

For the low serotonin individual, there are pills, therapy and alternative approaches to raise levels. But to change the low serotonin society causing these problems, something far more radical is required:

Serotonin: comfort chemical
•First identified in the 1940s, serotonin is one of thousands of chemicals found at the place in the brain where physics and chemistry meet, the synapse. The synapse is a gap between the neurones down which electrical impulses pass.
• When the current reaches the end of a neurone, it causes a chemical reaction in the synapse. Chemical messengers, including serotonin, are despatched and pass the information on to the next neurone, and so on.
• Many people unconsciously medicate their low levels using modern drugs of solace. Alcohol raises levels in the short term, lowering them subsequently. MDMA, the key ingredient in Ecstasy, leads to a temporary flooding of serotonin in the short term, but at least in animals, it kills the serotonin receptors, causing permanent damage.
• Smokers are twice as likely to be depressed, and therefore to be low serotonin, than non-smokers.

James's concentration is on the cheating frustrations of shallow consumerism as it affects the individual, creating depressed introspective responses; and his 'solution' is either a tongue-in-cheek coded joke, or just plain daft. He calls for an advanced capitalism that works for, rather than against, people's mental health.

But in getting close to a description of how capitalism is obliged to make saleable commodities and a profit out of everything it touches, making us all zombies in the process, James presents a psychological version of what Marxist science explained long ago would happen to capitalism, - total alienation, and a breakdown of society.  

Even this quite simple science, however, - well aired even in bourgeois society, - is beyond the wits of these appalling New Labourites. In considering the problems of capitalism's body politic, Straw gets no further than its arsehole. 'Low serotonin' is his learned conclusion. 'Punish them for it'. 

But like all punishment under capitalism, if these New Labour Nazis get away with it, - hammering working-class families even more because they have become victims in various ways of the increasing breakdown of society, can only possibly lead to them becoming even more disgruntled and dissatisfied, and even more likely to start lashing out against the authorities and the whole system. Criminality and dysfunctioning will increase, in the long run.

And this is the message too from the very services and institutions of capitalist society into whose 'care' Straw & Co wish to force an even greater number of unwilling and resentful working-class families.

It seems scarcely credible that these New Labourites have been so engrossed with their own opportunist and careerist self-satisfaction that they have not even noticed the astonishing debacles for the bourgeois-minded family courts and social services departments that Orkney, Rochdale, and Cleveland represent, to name but few. In sweep some self-righteous, 'do-gooding' 'specialists' in this, that, and the other dismal 'social science' discipline, solely designed as a complete cover-up for the rotten contradictions of the capitalist system, - police, child 'welfare' officers, psychiatrists, politicians, family probation experts, etc, etc, - seeking to
root out 'satanic practices' (if their number includes a crazed Christian fundamentalist or two) or some such artificially isolated concept, - and they leave in their wake a score or more utterly devastated working class families, scores of totally traumatised children at the state's own hands, - and nothing whatever to show from the raid.

In the Orkney and Nottingham cases, the 'investigators' so spooked themselves up that their attempts to brainwash the 'child-victims' into admissions of non-existent 'practices' became far more barbaric and criminally terrorising than most of the barmy cultural depravity that the children were supposed, to have been subjected to.

But of course, no action at all has been taken against all these bourgeois practitioners of the 'excuse culture', - petty-bourgeois careerist shitebrains who have no intention at all to "accept their responsibilities" for what they have inflicted on wretched working-class families, often too deprived to effectively hit back at their tormentors.

And this terrifying horror-story of how the potential depravity of human relations under capitalism can reach its worst excesses precisely when the 'legal' provisions of the bourgeois state are let loose on working-class family problems, - is sickeningly confirmed by the current inquiry into child-welfare arrangements throughout the North Wales region and beyond, going on for decades:

In a former council chamber in a small village near Chester, dozens of men and women are stepping forward to speak in public. Some are the grown-up survivors — nearly 300 of them — recalling childhoods of unmitigated violence and exploitation: "It was a completely different world ... You could smell the fear... So cold, the place, so horrible". Others are the men and women who are accused of tormenting them — 148 of them, skewered to the truth by ranks of lawyers. It is a little Nuremberg.

This is the tribunal of inquiry into abuse in children's homes in North Wales.

For eight months now, it has been; unravelling one of the darkest scandals in Britain, day after day. And no one is listening.

Right now, for example, a 27-year-old woman in a cream suit is sitting at the microphone in the far corner of the room, gripping her elbows in her lap, rocking with emotion, struggling to describe how it felt, as a seven-year-old girl in a residential home, to be locked in a dark cupboard by the staff who were supposed to care for her; or what it was like when she was sent to a foster homes where she was hung out of a top-floor window by her ankles and, sometimes, thrashed by her foster parents and, sometimes, taken into the cupboard under the stairs so that they could put their fingers inside her. She cries as she tells how she was anally raped by her foster brother and how, back in a children's home, she saw a boy being buggered by a teacher.

Lawyers start to cross-examine her on behalf of the police or the foster parents or the local authority. Some say she is lying. She stands by her story, she cries, she walks out, she comes back, she gets angry and cries some more. "We never had a childhood,'' she says. "We didn't know what childhood was about." 

Then she is finished. The chairman of the tribunal, Sir Ronald Waterhouse, thanks her gently. 

The herd of lawyers fidget with their papers and their computers. The woman walks away with a handkerchief to her mouth, back to a world that is none the wiser for her ordeal.

By the standards of the inquiry, her story is nothing special. Since it was set up on the orders of the last prime minister, the tribunal has uncovered the most vivid accounts of the two central allegations that it is studying — that children in 39 of the 82 homes in North Wales became playthings for paedophile staff, and that the authorities who should have been there to help them failed to do anything and, in some cases, allegedly even colluded.

Within the hearing, some of the abusers have taken on an almost legendary status: John Allen, the former caterer, who bought a farm near Wrexham where he housed delinquent boys, the prettiest of whom he raped with obsessive regularity; Peter Howarth, the former accounts clerk, who became deputy headmaster at the now notorious Bryn Estyn home where he teamed up with a housemaster named Stephen Norris for a paedophile orgy of huge self-indulgence; and Paul Wilson, who appears to have had no sexual interest in children and was content instead to kick and punch his way through the boys in Bryn Estyn like a drunk in a brawl.

All four have now been convicted of serious offences against children. Others who are still alive and have not been convicted have been granted anonymity by Sir Ronald. These unnamed men and women figure just as powerfully in the stories that are told in the chair by the microphone.

One witness after another describes how they grew up in a world of threats: "We were treated like animals, creatures, rubbish... there was a fear that one day perhaps someone was going to kill you and perhaps this was the time it would be done." 

Some of the threats were petty cruelties — being made to cut the lawn with a pair of scissors or to scrub the loos with a toothbrush or to eat soap. Some struck at the children's greatest fears — losing their home leave, or being transferred somewhere even worse. Most often, however, the threat was simply that they would be beaten black and blue. One man described how as a child he had been made to strip naked by a care worker who had then attacked him with a belt. "He was like a lunatic, he lost all sense of control." Another described a woman worker who could be gentle and kind and then suddenly explode, slapping and beating and using her wooden shoe as a weapon. "One girl used to get totally hammered, dragged by the hair screaming through the dining room."

The power of the adults was complete. One woman told how as a 12-year-old she had been made to serve tea in a maid's uniform and to kneel down to lick her master's feet and be sexually assaulted.

Without power to resist, the children were utterly vulnerable to the paedophiles who had infiltrated the homes. They became sex objects — in the dormitory and in the sick bay, in Peter Howarth's flat and in Stephen Norris's room, in the showers, in the staff room, in the bath, in cars, in sheds, in tents, on the towpath of a canal; with men, with women, with residential workers, social workers and with anyone else who wanted them. On the evidence of these survivors, in these children's homes no paedophile ever failed to get his or her way.

One man — now dead — made a statement in which he described how he had been sent to Bryn Estyn when he was 12 and had run away after Peter Howarth, with drink on his breath, had tried to tear off his clothes. He had slept rough around Wrexham railway station for several months before, inevitably, being taken back to the home where, one night, Howarth cornered him, pushed him face down on the floor, knelt on him, stripped off his pyjama trousers and raped him. The pain was terrible," he said, "but I could not struggle any more."

Another described how he had arrived at Bryn Estyn to be greeted by Howarth who informed him immediately: "I'm going to fuck you tonight." In his first statement, the man described how he had managed to evade Howarth's frenzied lunges' but later he agreed to make another statement in which he conceded that, in truth, Howarth had succeeded. More than that, he had invited a friend to join in, both of them raping him at the same time, one orally, the other anally. He said he never knew who the second man was.

The paedophiles became quite casual. Peter Howarth, said witnesses, would line boys up in the corridor outside his room and pick a weak one for his entertainment One care worker is said to have wandered into the dormitory one or two nights a week, like someone in a supermarket. He would choose a boy, call out his name and take him away. They were normally gone for half an hour to an hour," the tribunal was told in one statement.  "When they returned, they went back to bed and I often heard them sobbing."

The infection of violence spread from the adults to the older children, who started to collude. "We were encouraged by staff to beat up the smaller lads," one sombre man recalled. "We did the job for them and when we couldn't do the job for them, they did it.”

Some children tried to fight. Once or twice there were riots, unseen by the outside world, when they smashed windows and used fire hoses before they were subdued and punished. Some ran, always to be returned, usually to some extra torment. One said he had gone out deliberately to commit enough offences to be sent to a detention centre to escape. Another described how after being abused several times a week in one home, he had taken a motorbike and driven it straight into a brick wall. He had failed to kill himself, but he was dead inside. "I have lost my dignity," he told the tribunal. Many simply buckled and did everything they could to comply, searching for favour from their tormentors. One man described how he had been anally raped with such violence that his backside had bled for days. He was afraid that someone would be cross with him for having blood on his pants and so, several times, he had secretly taken them and flushed them down the loo.

Somewhere in the background — on the other side of the high brick wall — there were social workers and councillors and policemen whose job it was to protect these children. Few of the children dared to approach them. One man described how he had been overheard once saying he was going to make a complaint: he was marched into the dining room and thrashed in front of 15 other children.

Those who did have the courage to speak out were almost always frustrated. One boy who described a particularly long and vivid catalogue of abuse said he had grabbed hold of the jacket of an executive from social services, Geoff Wyatt, who was visiting the home. He had pleaded with Wyatt to do something. "He just wouldn't listen. He wasn't having any of it."

Two girls ran away and were picked up by police who told them they were lying about conditions in the home. Once the police had left them, one of the women recalled, a care worker punched her in the stomach while her friend was taken into a side room-from which she emerged later with a bruised eye and a split lip. On at least 27 occasions over the years police were asked to investigate allegations of violence or paedophilia in the homes but, almost always, their inquiries came to nothing.

Adults who complained did little better. A local taxi driver, Ian Griffiths, told the tribunal how nine years ago he used to drive a young girl from a foster home to her school each day and he had been horrified to hear her say that her foster father was doing rude things to her. When she repeated the claim, he made up his mind to take action and called social services. Within an hour, he said, the foster father was on the phone to him, denying everything and threatening to sue him. The taxi driver said that no one from social services ever contacted him. No action was ever taken. The foster father was Roger Saint: in May this year he was jailed for six-and-a-half years after being convicted of a catalogue of indecency with his foster children.

The tribunal has heard from a parade of people who went into the homes and saw nothing: the Pentecostal minister who admitted he had heard rumours but thought  that the boys were liars; the doctor who examined their bodies and never noticed a thing; the colleague of Peter Howarth who had heard there were "fun and games" in his flat but decided it was not his place to criticise a senior member of staff; the councillors who visited, reported that all was well, and went home with their expenses. "That's reassuring," said Sir Ronald drily, "that they got their expenses."

Sir Ronald wondered out loud to one of Howarth's defenders how it could be that so many children from so many different parts of the country all told the same stories about him. "What do you say? Some deep-laid plot?" The former care worker replied by asserting the innocence not of Howarth but of the man he was really trying to defend — himself: "When 1 was there, I never heard any rumours. I never heard anything. I never saw anything."

Behind Sir Ronald's screen of anonymity, scores of men and women have been accused by the survivors. Sir Ronald says that he wants none of them named for fear that it will discourage witnesses from giving evidence, though he may name some of them in his final report. He says he will tackle head-on the persistent allegation that children from the homes were fed to paedophiles who belonged to a wider, national ring.

Reading about such institutionalised disgusting tyranny should alert even the most naïve 'reformists' to the dangers of actually encouraging extensions of bourgeois 'legality' to interfere further and further into working-class family affairs.

The National Women's Section of the Socialist Labour Party is currently advocating allowing the bourgeois law to extend its state authority over working-class families to the extent of declaring it a matter for the police if parents should smack their children!!!, - the very same police who systematically beat up or brutalise 'suspects' whenever they feel like it, and always get away with it, - the very same police who used fascist terror to help break the 1984-85 miners strike for the right to work, - the very same police responsible for routine nazi persecution of all blacks and ethnic minorities.

To call under capitalism for the prohibition of smacking is to invite the same bourgeois-state forces responsible for all the above atrocities to inflict even more tyrannical abuse on the working class and to get away with it.

Since when has any capitalist state machine had one scrap of genuine interest in the human rights of the working class? The state is nothing more than the legalised and institutionalised 'democratic' cover for the bodies of armed men which will always finally ensure that capitalism continues to rule whatever 'democracy' decides, - until it is overthrown by superior bodies of armed men called the revolution. 

Any 'rights' which the capitalist state is supposed to be bound to protect will get protected only to the extent that such duties do not interfere with the state's main function which is to maintain surveillance over the working class, and to keep control over it, - undermining, framing, or routing out 'subversive' individuals, thoughts, and deeds as ruthlessly as necessary, using every dirty stratagem in the book, including legal provocations against a 'subversive's' family affairs if necessary.

It is the greatest mistake of all 'reformist' attitudes, - that the routine daily activities of the capitalist state (the welfare state during most of this century) are 'the norm', while the Gestapo police activities of MI5 and the Special Branch are merely 'sad, bizarre, occasional nonsense which invariably goes hopelessly and bureaucratically wrong anyway', etc.

This is the silliest of illusions. It is its security, - its guaranteed continuation and survival, - which is the bedrock of all capitalist state/ruling class thinking and action. 'Liberal' reforms are merely the endless 'democratic' smokescreen with which the working masses are continuously diverted and hoodwinked, forever manipulated back and forth, up and down, depending on what the economy is supposedly able to 'afford' for wages, welfare, social services, jobs, etc.

Between crises, the pacification of the working class goes on non stop.

When it matters to the ruling class, the entire might of the capitalist state will be used ruthlessly to undermine and crush socialist revolt by every means possible.

To ever agitate for 'reforms' in ways which play into the hands of a bigger interventionist role for the capitalist state in workers lives, or which give a further lease of life to illusions in the 'neutrality' of family courts, or other welfare agencies, or any aspect of the state in general, - is a disastrous own-goal for socialism. Inviting bourgeois courts to have intimate jurisdiction over how working-class families can bring up and discipline their own children is suicidally self-damaging for the cause of socialism.

And all of this on top of the fact that the proposition "smacking is bad for children" is highly debatable anyway, to put it mildly. Many excellent parents will swear that it is frequently more unkind to not give a child a smack than to do so.

Citing Scandinavian countries as shining examples of great human and socialist benefits from allowing 'progressive' bourgeois governments to tell working-class families how to bring up their children is just ludicrously out-of-touch.

In the first place, Scandinavia is as much a capitalist hell-hole, from the point of view of the sort of unhappiness Oliver James is clinically describing and recording, as anywhere else in the 'free world' with comparable culture, — just as many alcoholics, just as many broken families, just as much depression, just as many suicides, just as many tranquilliser pills being swallowed, etc, etc.

In the second place, Scandinavia is currently reeling in shame and universal guilt about state-enforced compulsory sterilisation programmes which 'social-democratic' governments inflicted on the masses from the 1950s to the 1970s, all hidden from public view until now. They were part of an entire eugenics social-engineering mentality which wanted racial improvement by forbidding anyone deemed socially incompetent from ever having children. This affected people with poor school records, criminal convictions, anti-social behaviour, or just for being 'different' in any way.

This is the fascist mentality which the self-righteous Blairites are into, who all, of course, admire the 'Scandinavian socialism' models ecstatically.

It is alarming that the SLP is being agitated to take the road of capitalist Scandinavia's depraved social-engineering, so admired by the Blairites who equally feel uncomfortable (not angry) about continuing poverty and backwardness that they have a dozen gimmicks on the go to 'eliminate' capitalism's human casualties (the unemployed, single mothers, the disabled, anti-social or criminal families, etc) by a mixture of punishments, make—work schemes, or simply re-classifying them out of existence.

This SLP agitation wants to make up its mind once and for all: Are people basically inadequate in various ways because they wallow in an 'excuse culture'? Or are they backward and dysfunctional because capitalist society will always create similar proportions of such casualties for as long as it exists?

The essential truth of the latter completely supersedes the importance or value of any truth in the former. It is a sick 'reformist' joke to make elaborate provisions to pin the blame for dysfunctional working-class families on their own fecklessness or brutality when ongoing capitalism is inevitably creating more and more of such backwardness all the time that the 'cure' or 'improvements' are being painstakingly constructed.

Telling the bourgeois courts to intervene to 'prevent working-class families from brutalising their children by smacking them' (the Blairite implications of the SLP agitation) is utterly reactionary.

Capitalism brutalises people, - not whether they were smacked or not as children; and not even whether or not they had good parents regardless of smacking, (- which is a far more crucial cause to agitate for when seeking to promote the idea of a better deal for everyone under socialism.) 

Calling on bourgeois courts to outlaw smacking will merely help sow enormous political confusion into the working class, deluding them that they are responsible for their own brutalisation under capitalism, and that the capitalist state machine is going to kindly and magically intervene to make much nicer people of all working class families. What incredible gobshite"!

The women's movement in general, - i.e. its bourgeois ideology, - is bad for socialism. 

Reactionary feminists have made complete idiots of themselves over this ludicrous Diana business.

Diana was certainly a victim of a rotten system. But we are all a million times more victims of the very elitist system which she was such a big part of, - a glittering showbusiness parade of mindless nonentities, endlessly promoted by the capitalist press to provide the 'bread and circuses', which ruling classes have used throughout history to keep the exploited masses pacified.

Diana loved every minute of jet-set skiing holidays endlessly; phenomenally expensive and lavish grooming; non-stop glamorous high-society functions; about 40 contemptible afternoons per year on inane 'charity' appearances; helicoptering up to Derbyshire on a whim to consult some soothsayer; etc, etc.

At the death, she had just finished her third luxurious Mediterranean cruise in as many weeks, her children nowhere in sight. Her end was sordidly appropriate, - an ostentatious dinner at the Ritz in Paris, followed by some completely stupid and irresponsible hurtling around Paris at midnight in entirely ill-considered circumstances, playing silly games with the showbusiness photography world of which she was such a part.

But of all this disgusting reactionary mess, all that a prominent 'progressive' feminist columnist in the Guardian could screech was:

To the Left, the people are in the grip of what Marxists call false consciousness, from which only correct ideas can free them. Any display of emotion must be a moist drip from the Oprah Winfrey Show. But it was the transforming influence of feminism which has insisted, from the very beginning, that the personal is political. Politics makes strange bedfellows and none stranger than the sneering, elitist condescension of the Left between the sheets with those frozen sticks of fossilised shit that are the Court which branded Diana hysterical and mad for her eating disorders and her post-natal depression and her recourse to the attentions of Susie Orbach.

And why, oh why, the Left asks, does the media devote so much attention to Diana's death? The past week's events have allowed us to shine a powerful searchlight on ourselves and on the state of the nation. We now must ask ourselves what socialism is actually about. Is it class conflict or inclusion? If it is the former then of course it must be wrong to grieve for a member of the royal family or acknowledge that one of that tribe could ever do anything important or useful.

Tony Blair's address at the funeral, amended from Corinthians, gave us a clue about the public mood: "And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing." If the Left thinks that there might ever come a day when it will win the hearts as well as the minds of the people, it will have to work out just what that word love actually means and why even Guardian readers could apply it to a Princess.

A healthy proportion of Guardian letter writers in fact expressed nothing but contempt for the whole media circus surrounding the Diana death phenomenon, - but what is illustrated by this diatribe is how disorienting the extremely sectarian politics of feminism can be. They are always an appallingly shallow, unbalanced, and misleading philosophy to guide politics by.

All the nonsense over Diana has even got other feminist columnists to begin admitting this:

ONE OF THE great mantras for women in the Seventies was 'the personal is the political'. Women wanted to breathe air into an arid and bureaucratic political system, and graft it on to the everyday lives of ordinary people.

They wanted politics to apply to complicated, messy life as well as to dusty and constricting laws. They insisted that the way people behaved in bed or at the kitchen sink was as, 'political' as the way they behaved at union meetings or conferences.

We have wished to personalise politics and our wish has come true. The personal is almost all that there is now. Politics has become a sentimental pageant, a glittering and facile procession of gestures and postures. After the death of Diana, commentators claimed a rebirth of the society that Margaret Thatcher did not believe in.....

crowds outside the Palace protesting' at their monarch's failure to cry in public, hailed all the while by onion-eyed commentators. But from where I unworshipfully stood, it looked less like the rebirth of society than its dissolution in a delirious flood of tears and self-grief. The personal has washed the political clean away.

The last few weeks have already been called Tony Blair's Falklands. So this is how a politician succeeds in the confessional, millennial, self-obsessed, astrologically-credulous, aromatherapeutic Nineties. Not with a war. Not by honouring election) pledges. Not by lessening the gulf between the rich and the poor. Not by putting money into education. Not by trudging the slow road of economic reform and social restructuring. No, it's done with a speech to the cameras, fists clenched in emotion, shadows under the eyes. The voice low and halting with emotion. The grief and pain, but oh, he was strong enough not to break down and weep.

And in another political arena, the same kind of emotional scrabbling for the moral high ground is also going on. The discussion among feminist writers is no longer about issues but about emotions; not about what to do but how to be.

Joan Smith's opinions about Diana are perceptive, unsentimental and hard-headed. Hard-headed is what you are not allowed to be any more. After all, Diana, as we have been told over and over, was all heart over head and heart on her sleeve, the Queen of Hearts, while Charles hid his heart long ago, until he didn't know where to find it. In a recent review of Joan Smith's book of essays, Different for Girls, Beatrix Campbell penned a furious attack against her. She started off by asking if Smith's publishers had not considered pulping this 'raggy and rageful' anthology, a concern which seems slightly beyond her responsibility, like those magazine distributors who rang up Private Eye and asked if they had 'cleared' their cover with the Palace.

Campbell then got to the point, and the point is really Smith's insufficiently reverent attitude to Diana. For Campbell, still reeling in the wake of the funeral, the Diana story is about 'pain, power and protest' and about a woman who 'got' a self. Diana becomes, then, the Ur-feminist, the great and shining symbol of women's victim-hood, courage and enduring strength; of women's ability to think feelingly.

And if you disagree or only half-agree, or even feel that you have more important things to worry about, then you are told that you cannot actually be a feminist (which is more or less the accusation that Campbell levels against Smith). It has always been hard to say what feminism means, but now we have a new definition: it doesn't mean believing in equality, but believing in Diana.                    

This internalising of feminism did not happen overnight. Well before Diana, there were other dim symbols of feminism as a state of mind. There was Madonna and her post-modern pointy breasts and her slippery identities. And there were the Spice Girls and their advertising slogan of 'girl power' (as if we all didn't know that the Spice Girls, like the Monkees, were dreamt up as a concept, recruited through advertisements). There was self-esteem and, imported from America, the child within. There were shelf-fulls of self-help books, urging us to look inside ourselves for the answer to our unhappiness. These things were all forerunners to the death of Diana and the collective grief of the nation.

It is just as Oliver James partly described it, - unsatisfactory advanced capitalism giving women a particularly rotten deal in terms of the bitter disillusionment and frustrations that the false promises of the shallow 'feminist revolution' will meet; - as much disappointment as every other deluded dream people have under capitalism.

Blairite 'reforms' will change nothing either, and the entire approach of introducing 'more humane' regulations and requirements is nothing but a giant confidence trick on the working class, likely only further to enslave and frustrate it.

Getting rid of capitalist society is the only sensible perspective, not illusions about 'reforming' its sum total of human happiness and decency, which can only prolong working-class suffering and disadvantage, - especially that of women. Roy Bull

Blair and Brown speeches fall flat for New Labour middle class, as time to really start clobbering the working class approaches. Blairite Labour is preparing a fascist stitch-up against the working class.

The threat to make all who get benefits work for them and earn them has behind it the philosophy that capitalism is neutral, and only people are bad.

This is Nazi idealism. It is a triumph of Will that is all important. Class circumstances are held to be irrelevant.

Students from the working class are being told: Carry the burden of £12,000 debt cheerfully; when you finish, you will be able to pay it back easily.

Meanwhile, upper class students will have all their debts paid off for them by Mummy and Daddy.

This is a very serious threat to ending working class places at university.

Single mums are soon to be told: You can no longer stay at home with your children living off benefits. 'No one can get something for nothing any longer'.

The Wisconsin work-fare experiment, making benefit-dependent single mothers perform virtually Community Service punishments for at least a couple of hours each day, - is now being intensively studied by Harriet Harman's ministry.

Blair is ecstatic about "the bold new initiatives being taken in Bill Clinton's America", aiming to get everyone "into work".

But this is not even the 'Arbeit macht frei' (work makes you free) slogan of Hitler Germany.

This New Labour obscenity starts out with the self-righteous cringe that "we all owe a duty to society", - i.e. capitalist society on capitalism's terms, - and "those who don't work, don't eat".

But what might be temporary considerations for a workers state in Britain, hard-pressed by imperialist encirclement as Cuba is currently, are not remotely relevant to a society of capitalist exploitation where the privileged ruling class in their millions lead a life of absolute Riley.

And the mentality of these New Labour stooges for the continuing Fat-Cat Society in Britain is, of course, a million miles from the perspectives of a fully communist society of abundance where maximum whole-country education will produce people whose prime necessity will be the opportunity to do as much freely-volunteered creative work as time allows for.

Blairism is talking about putting the entire nation on Community Service, - mildly punitive tasks or otherwise you don't get a square meal.

To impose this on the working class which still has to live under the total inequality of watching the luxurious wasteful lifestyle of the ruling-class millions is called fascism.

Student grants are to be abolished completely. Living and studying is deemed to be not working. Therefore "you can live and study now, but you can work for it in the future and pay us then for what we are effectively paying you now by letting you not work".

The unemployed are forced to spend their entire time looking for non-existent or unsatisfactory work, otherwise even a pittance is denied them. And if they leave some terrible job of their own accord or get sacked at the whim of some grasping boss, - then they lose even that pittance.

Single mums are next in the firing line. In Wisconsin, USA, they go round wiping down local city fire-hydrants, or other such useless 'work' in order to conform to the new nazi work ethic.

And if they fail to turn up because they could not organise a babysitter to be with their children at home, then their benefits are stopped, and they are at the mercy of local charities.

And the next target after the single at-home mums will be the disabled, believe it or not:

A DRIVE to coax many of the two million long-term sick and disabled back into the labour market will be announced this week by the Social Security Secretary, Harriet Harman.

She will model her approach on her scheme to invite one million single mothers for counselling by the Employment Service.

Ms Harman believes that the Tories did little to stem the doubling in the number of long-term sick and disabled of working age. The largest socially excluded group in the country costs £25 billion a year in benefits — a quarter of the Social Security budget. Pilots will start in April.

A department official said: 'The system focuses on people's incapacity to work; it does not identify whether they could work or wish to work.'

Naturally, this is all being dressed up as a service to the disabled who are supposedly being deliberately 'socially excluded' by employers. And what's in it for capitalism to change its ways?

Blair's conference speech became almost constipated with semi-religious nonsense about "Make this the giving age. We can do more together than we can do alone. Fear itself was defeated on May 1. Britain head and heart. I care about Britain because Britain cares about me," etc, etc, etc, etc.

This unending stream of timeless worthy-sounding clichés, straight from the age-old political pulpit of mind-numbing hypocrisy and cant, - almost set off hot-air warnings in the hall and raised doubts about the sanity of this Blairite public-relations blitz which makes the Goebbels 'big lie' technique look amateurish.

The contradictions were breathtaking. "Education for all. No more elites" he trilled. Really? So working-class students will now start life £12,000 in debt. Upper class students will start life with all debts paid off by their parents. Working-class student numbers, already a ridiculous minority compared to the size of the working class relative to the whole population, will diminish even more. No elites? This is the biggest liar not in captivity.

"Don't live on tick" Blair even had the nerve to come out with, - referring, of course, to why Tory public spending cuts supposedly have to be adhered to.

But how does this old Christian virtue apply to future working-class students then? They are going to be forced to start life monumentally in debt, mind-numbingly in debt, so much in debt that thousands of working-class students are giving up university already because they simply cannot cope with the intolerable strain at a very young age of starting their life up to their necks in debt, and anticipating being in debt for decades to come.

And where Blair was not paraphrasing the Biblical Ten Commandments of basic virtues, he was banging his Union Jack drum for cheap-and-nasty British chauvinism, - again a leaf right out of fascism's book.

"Britain will be the best in the world, and the leader of Europe" he boasted embarrassingly. What a complete dickhead. Cut-throat trade-war competition is the only realistic future, and the whole of capitalism will suffer the jingoistic unpleasantness of this philistine inter-imperialist greed and aggression. What a sick prospect.

The realities of the capitalist system disappear from Blair's speeches by amnesia. He simply doesn't mention the reality that we live in a capitalist world, -just like any other barmy Sunday-school preacher that Blair is increasingly resembling.

Significantly, the only signs of real enthusiasm from this middle-class 'reformist' fantasy world came when Blair warned all lawbreakers and criminals that they were going to face zero tolerance in his new Britain.

The New Labourites really like the idea of coming down hard on anyone falling into crime by want, or backwardness, or resentment against capitalist society.

"Don't worry about infringing their democratic rights," Blair said to thunderous applause. "It is our civil liberties that are being threatened, - by women not being able to walk out safely alone at night".

Which is true, but why is capitalism only ever able to show relentlessly increasing crime rates of every description? Under whatever harshness of regime, anywhere in the world?

And how will crime decrease through more state harshness? Especially when forcing mums out of the home will leave children more unsupervised than ever. Prison populations will keep on growing.

Blair's new conference structure means only one hymn-sheet henceforth for New Labour, no dissent.

Livingstone's victory over Mandelson for the NEC is meaningless, for it is within a New Labour party now so rampantly middle-class that it cannot hope to avoid a head-on clash between this New Labour government and working-class interests in the very near future. Build Leninism. RB

Don't pulp the MI5's secret police files. Open them up.

Mandelson calls for MI5 records to be pulped. Socialists, however, call for these records to be opened up to the scrutiny of the working class, so workers can read for themselves what the capitalist secret police and all their friends in big business, the media and "democratic" politics have been up to all this time.

Such scrutiny might usefully be turned on Mandelson's own files, claimed by Shayler to contain a photo of his communist party membership card from the early '70s. Shayler claimed this as "fairly conclusive proof that he was a member", then added the curious rider: "He wasn't really a communist. Most of what he was doing was the people he was associating with. He was very interested in student politics." 

So what exactly HAS motivated Mandelson's great interest in "left" politics all this time? Let's at the least save THAT file from the shredder.

It was New Labour that put a gagging order on the revelations in the first place (to "protect" MI5), and it's New Labour that now want to bury the evidence for good. And press reports make it plain that if New Labour really do want a "new" M15, it is to be on the basis of yet GREATER vindictiveness against the working class. Yet another New Labour "review body" has been set up, this time (says Jack Straw) to "address questions about the appropriate role of the Security Service in the post-cold war world, and the proper focus of its activities." And what might that be? The Guardian reports (22/9/97):

MI5 has persuaded ministers that social security fraud is a legitimate area for the agency which already has privileged access to personal information held by government departments through its responsibility for monitoring computer security across Whitehall.  

It argues that social security and housing benefit fraud come under MI5's new role to combat "serious crime", defined extremely broadly in the 1996 Security Service Act. The Conservative government indicated last year that MI5's expanded role would be limited to helping the police combat mafia-type gangs and drug barons.

AGENTS from MI5 are targeting large-scale benefit cheats under an initiative agreed between the Security Service and the social security ministry.

Ministers at the Department of Social Security have approved the appointment of M15 to oversee an audit of the 5.000 staff running the benefit fraud operation.

Significantly, the most recent exposures of MI5's dirty tricks have come as a direct consequence of Establishment humiliation at imperialism's forced retreat from Ireland.

What made the embittered ex-spook break ranks and spill the beans on his former employer was his anguished realization that all the criminal viciousness of the MI5 bullies and snoops had in the end proved incapable of defeating the disciplined and resolute Irish national liberation struggle. He told his BBC TV interviewer: "I think, there was a real chance in 1993 after MI5 took over primacy for Irish investigations on the mainland that they could really have finished off that [bombing] campaign if they'd taken the advantage when they had it...If they'd really gone for it, they could have finished them [the IRA] off."

This is the unmistakable whine of imperialist defeat, buttonholing all and sundry with tales of what might have been, if only, if only...   

As always when the ruling class is in retreat and disarray (as the British bourgeois state is over Ireland), voices are heard bitterly explaining how "it could all have been different if they'd listened to ME" - just like the Spencers haranguing the Windsors on how THEY could save the Monarchy, given the chance, or like New Labour trying to show the Tories the NEW way to make Britain "sellable" for another millennium. Fat chance.

Turn the spotlight on the snoopers. Open the files. Dominic Hull

World Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Reactionary stunt by US imperialist bullies to maintain intimidation of socialist Cuba.

ACCORDING to sources in the U.S. press, the U.S. armed forces is currently studying the possibility of installing modern anti-aircraft defense missile systems in Florida, principally on the keys located in the south of that state.

A commission specializing in theater-of-operations missile defense recently visited the zone to carry out a feasibility study for the installation of missile sites in the area of the Florida keys.

Presently they are inspecting basically three areas: one facing the Boca Chica Naval Air Station; another on Cudjoe Key; and a third on a key located between these two islands.

Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the Florida peninsula has housed the assassins and thieves that fled together with dictator Batista, some of whose descendants are today "illustrious" legislators, businesspeople, and professional terrorists.

Also located there are "training camps" for armed groups that hope to take action in Cuban territory. 

From Florida came the terrorists who time after time violated Cuban air space and who provoked the incident of February 24, 1996.

But in addition to this, and as a part of the military mechanism that the United States has maintained in dealing with Cuba, in the past few years Florida has become one of the states with the most troops and military installations.

In spite of the reductions that have been made in the U.S. armed forces and the closing of dozens of bases and other installations within the U.S. borders, no major military installation has been closed in the state of Florida, not even Homestead Air Force Base, which was practically destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Currently the U.S. armed forces has around 84,000 troops stationed in Florida. In addition, some 90 combat planes are based there; of them, several dozen F-16s are at Homestead, to the extreme south of the peninsula, and another few F-15s are at Elgin Air Force Base. Furthermore, at McDill AFB there are more than ten type KC-135 planes, whose principal mission is the mid-flight refueling of combat planes heading south from other bases in the north.

All of these military planes train just a few kilometers from the coasts of Cuba (more than 100 flights per week). In previous years, there have been actual rehearsals for massive air strikes against the city of Havana, coming dangerously close to our air space at high speeds.

As proof of the importance that U.S. strategists give to Florida, the Southern Command headquarters, currently located in Panama, will soon be located in Miami, the refuge par excellence for the majority of the counter-revolutionaries who, with a few honorable exceptions, live for a military confrontation between the United States and Cuba. This Command, as of July 1997, will include the Caribbean within its range of responsibility.

What is certain is that the U.S. authorities are suspiciously preparing to reinforce the military mechanism that currently exists in the state of Florida. This, despite the fact that both the CIA and the U.S. Department of Defense have declared that Cuba no longer constitutes a "military threat" for the United States. According to these agencies, their computers have demonstrated that, due to the fall of socialism in Europe, Cuban aviation is experiencing a profound crisis and the agencies themselves call it practically nonexistent.

This time they will not be able to say that the anti-aircraft defense missiles are being installed for the fight against the "powerful airplanes" used by drug traffickers.

Any intelligent and objective analyst might wonder, who are they afraid of?   At whom are the missiles directed? Is there a new, as of yet unannounced, threat? Why spend taxpayers' money, if it is not an aggressive action against a southern neighbor? Who would that southern enemy be?

Since Washington's latest effort to "buy" Cuba and democratize it in its own way and install a prefabricated national government which has been sanctified by the White House is condemned to fail, perhaps some feel that Cuba should receive an even stronger punishment and are now preparing conditions for the strike.

Luckily, there are still sensible minds and voices within the U.S. government and even in the Department of Defense who recognize that this path leads nowhere. Almost 40 years have demonstrated that covert and deceitful actions fail time and again, while their darkest predictions about Cuba have been proved completely ridiculous, as the Cuban Revolution Continues to thrive •