10.08.1995

Ghosts in the machine

THE MURDER of three children last weekend brought home the powerlessness of parents to guarantee their protection. Fortunately child murders, especially by strangers, are very rare - rarer in fact than when I was a child, possibly because of the great lengths parents go to ensure their children’s safety.

Guardian journalist Sally Weale wrote on August 1:

“Recent research has suggested that children growing up in a climate of parental paranoia about the threat of molestation and murder are being deprived of a sense of independence and essential social skills. They are increasingly unfit, as over-anxious parents ferry them in cars, when once they would have walked or cycled.”

The state restricts social provision wherever it is unprofitable, and childcare has become an isolated and obsessive task with all responsibility shifted onto the parents. Within capitalism human need can only be satisfied to the extent it contributes to the accumulation of wealth. It is not George Orwell’s 1984 Big Brother that terrorises us into unthinking obedience, but our own fears that bind us within a technological cocoon. For those who cannot afford cars the cocoon is no less restrictive, just more dangerous. Childcare is often an overwhelming burden, rather than a natural human activity.

Karl Marx raised the spectre of the world of things growing to dominate the world of people. Human inventiveness and initiative, he wrote, are not used to liberate humankind: “Every person speculates on creating a new need in another, so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence.”

Parents and children are being pushed down a path in which people are not to be trusted and only machines can be relied on. Poverty is not just about financial wealth. Fundamentally it is a question of freedom and human relations.

Arthur Lawrence