Issue 184 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published March 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review
As someone who always enjoys Pat Stack's spot-on articles I was disappointed with his analysis of disabled oppression (February SR), in particular his failure to explain why disabled people are segregated from the rest of society and the unnecessary stress he puts on the difference between their oppression and racism and sexism.
Unlike now where the disabled are often hidden away in so called special schools, workplaces and homes, before capitalism they lived as part of the community. This changed with the development of the poorhouse/workhouse system and the Tory ideology of the deserving/undeserving poor. The deserving disabled working class received charitable relief in the poorhouse while the able bodied were put to work. As time went by the oppressive poorhouses were replaced by equally oppressive hospitals and institutions.
Pat says, 'the way in which capitalism treats the disabled is not key to the development of and well being of capitalism', but yet this poorhouse charity was used by the ruling class to justify the exploitation of the able bodied majority: it did have a key function.
Disabled oppression is different from the other oppressions but we shouldn't forget that the way women are oppressed is not the same as the way black people are oppressed.
Instead of dwelling on such comparisons we should be discussing disabled people's history and their fightback, for example how a mass movement won anti-discrimination legislation in the US.
The increasingly militant rights movement is important for two reasons. Firstly it is exposing the lie of the classless society. How can you get to the top when you can't get up the stairs? When disabled activists chain themselves to buses demanding access to public transport even many working class people with right wing ideas will support them. The injustice stares you in the face. Secondly it is showing that even the people at the very bottom can fight back.
As socialists we need to fight alongside disabled activists in campaigns such as those calling for anti-discrimination legislation while insisting that genuine liberation is only possible in a socialist society. To do this effectively we will have to sharpen our analysis.
Luke Stobart
Spain
I think a useful adjunct to the issues Pat Stack raised in his article on disability rights (February SR) is the theory of the social model of disability which is current in the disability movement.
This theory states that disability itself is not the problem for most disabled people; it is the way that society is structured that makes disability so disabling. Hence, my disability virtually disappears when buildings and the underground have lifts, buses wait until I sit down, kerbs are dropped, non-competitive games are played at school, people do not stare at the way I walk. These are some of the things which make being disabled oppressive for me.
I have worked in the disability field for a number of years and I have very rarely heard from disabled people a complaint about their disability. Instead, what people find disabling is their poverty and isolation and the attitudes of other people who think they are ugly, frightening or funny because their bodies work differently.
Fighting for a society where it does not matter what your body can or cannot do will benefit everyone. We all suffer from a society which discards those people who look different, who find their environment inaccessible, and who do not appear economically viable. A fight for disability rights is a fight for the rights of elderly people, of people with children, of everyone who does not fit in with the economics of the capitalist system.
Becky Shtasel
Hove
Matt Staples is wrong on the animal protests (February SR). The expression 'animal rights' is a convenient slogan. It means there is unnecessary suffering and it should be stopped. Philosophical debate about who does and does not have 'rights' is pedantic and irrelevant. It is enough that large numbers are mobilised around the slogan.
The same goes for debate about whether this or that animal test is necessary. Capitalism makes the question meaningless. Profit drives the system therefore profit drives the cruelty. Only under socialism will we be able to make rational decisions about whether any animal testing is necessary.
Nor does it matter a jot whether animal rights appear on Matt's private priority list. The class struggle does not follow his or any other personal priority list. That, of course, is the tragedy of the sectarian, ever lamenting the workers' failure to get their priorities right.
Serious socialist politics begins with an understanding that there are no predetermined priorities, programmes and timetables. Struggles erupt unexpectedly. The job of socialists is then to intervene--to build the struggle, to make the links, to draw the general lessons, to win the best activists to socialism.
Refusing to support animal rights protests does not, as Matt implies, leave socialists free to concentrate on reducing human suffering and building a revolutionary party. It simply leaves them on the sidelines.
You build a general fightback and a socialist tradition by intervening in the struggles actually taking place alongside the militant minority. You don't do it by standing back and making snide remarks--claiming the issue is silly, the slogans are wrong, and the whole campaign rotten because some Tories support it. This should be ABC. To forget it simply because animals are the issue is to relapse into sectarianism. I propose Comrade Staples for the 3am paper sale at Brightlingsea!
Neil Faulkner
Essex
In his review of John Saville's book on the capitalist state (February SR), Mark Thomas spews out genuine 100 percent bourgeois nonsense. He says in April 1848 the authorities prevented the planned march from Kennington Common to parliament and consequently Chartism collapsed.
But this is a myth, deliberately peddled in orthodox history textbooks.
What actually happened was that, after the Kennington Common demonstration, the government's position grew increasingly precarious. Economic conditions worsened. Links between Irish nationalists and Chartists were forged. Numerous revolutionary conspiracies were hatched. Around Whitsun, the threat to the ruling class reached its height.
Mark Thomas will find this if he turns to my book. Dealing with Chartism and trade unionism, I use the life of WP Roberts, a firebrand lawyer active in both movements, as a peg around which to weave the account. Alternatively, he could read David Goodway's excellent book, London Chartism.
Both these works are written from a revolutionary standpoint, in the tradition of Reg Groves. So many of the other history books are besmirched with a reformist-Stalinist porridge.
Raymond Challinor
Whitley Bay
What on earth are you trying to say about Ireland? 'Heading for Divorce' by Goretti Horgan (January SR) presents Ireland as some religious and sexually repressed nation. The comments would not be out of place as an editorial in the Times following the recent scandal of the Catholic priest involved in child abuse. Indeed it would be even better placed as an editorial in the Belfast Telegraph to justify the Tory/Unionist demand for partition. How could they possibly want to be involved with the tragic and pathetic picture painted of Ireland by Goretti Horgan?
But surely half of this is what the English want to see in Ireland. A former colony that has broken away from the empire cannot be truly based on self interest. The constant reference to tenant farmers, without reference to who the landlords are, leaves the reader with an incomplete picture.
Goretti Horgan did not tell us that when the Irish gained their independence by force of arms (led by many socialists including James Connolly) Britain maintained an economic blockade against Ireland just as the US currently has against Cuba. The new Irish government had, in those days at least, no alternative but to turn to the church and volunteer Republican teachers for help in running the schools and even more importantly the hospitals.
The new republic with its faults would not have lasted very long without the politically motivated and religiously motivated help of those working for the new republic. We seem to expect that out of the turmoil of working class revolution, and that is what it was, there will arise some kind of perfection.
Revolution and reaction existed side by side. The revolutionary side carried the day, perhaps not in the shape we would all desire. Sure Ireland is a Catholic country. So are Italy, Poland, France and many others. They all have their problems but they are not Britain's problems. They are the problems of that particular country.
Ireland fought for its independence against the strongest empire in the world. It won that independence. Ireland is a sovereign state. Nobody in the current government went to Eton. There is no House of Lords. The judges are not called right honourable or lords. They speak the same as everybody in the street.
The class system does not exist like it exists in Britain. Ireland still has the potential to complete the unfinished revolution.
Britain for its part is still a monarchy. It still has a House of Lords and it still has an upstairs and downstairs mentality. Perhaps the imperial mentality still exists and perhaps Goretti Horgan is catering for this dream of lost empires.
Peter Mulligan
Northampton
I am writing in response to your book review of Margaret Humphreys' Empty Cradles entitled 'Cruel Cargo' (December SR).
The Fairbridge Society was indeed one of the organisations responsible for some of the child emigration. However, whilst atrocities certainly did take place, it is inaccurate and unjust to clump all organisations operating at that time into the same bracket, as borne out by John Andrews' letter to the Daily Telegraph of 6 October 1994, telling how Fairbridge enabled him to 'break free of the spiritual and economic poverty of postwar Britain'.
Margaret Humphreys approached Fairbridge during the course of her research and spoke to our president, who had been involved with the Fairbridge Society for 30 years, and was invited to meet with us at any time to discuss any concerns or issues--hardly being 'met with a brick wall'. Margaret Humphreys failed to make contact again.
Nigel Haynes
Fairbridge
London
Howard Medwell makes some valid criticisms of Michael Rosen's review of The Lion King (February SR) but he does seem to be missing the point, namely that within the most mainstream aspects of bourgeois culture, personified here by the Disney empire, there may nevertheless exist a number of contradictory messages.
Another Disney film, Tim Burton's animated children's musical The Nightmare Before Christmas, perhaps illustrates the point better. On the one hand this is a fairy tale with a happy ending, yet here the hero is a rather unusual character, Jack Skellington, of Halloween Town.
Jack is bored with organising Halloween so he decides to kidnap Santa and take over Christmas instead. Of course it all goes badly wrong. Instead of presents the children receive all manner of ghoulish surprises and eventually the US army is called in to stop the impostor.
Interestingly, Burton was originally rejected by Disney because his ideas were 'too weird'. Obviously it was the commercial success of earlier films like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands--both of which mocked commercialism and bourgeois conventions--which made the difference. Even Disney must take on new and challenging work if they are to keep on pulling the crowds in.
In this context, I think it is unfair to claim that Michael is saying Disney films can be progressive simply because they irritate Daily Telegraph readers.
Having said all this, Michael is at fault in counterposing Disney to 'traditional' children's literature. The latter is not so one dimensional in its message as he makes out. Take Alice in Wonderland for instance. Not only is it full of the most contradictory and disturbing underlying imagery. More importantly, it differs from much of the children's literature of the time in that it does not moralise but actually shows up some of the contradictions of 'adult' (Victorian middle class) logic as they might appear to a child.
That it took a repressed paedophile to produce such a view says as much about Victorian society as it does about the author.
John Parrington
North London
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