31.10.1996

Bosses turn to god

The overwhelming gush of hypocritical, empty cant over what passes for ‘morality’ continues to dominate the media.

The bourgeoisie has no answer to the decay which is gripping its society. It is at a loss for an explanation, let alone a solution, for crime, violence and indiscipline amongst adults and children. All result from the alienation that is endemic to capitalism. Thus, when the government’s curriculum advisers on the teaching of morality suggest that the guidelines should include “collective endeavour for the common good of society”, they have a problem.

The morality of class societies is not based on “the common good”. It is based on the interests of their rulers, who attempt to impose their values onto those they exploit and oppress, imagining them to be universal. There is no single set of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ standards which apply to all societies. Morality is merely a code of values which the ruling class attempts to impose on the whole of society.

Property relations are central to bourgeois morality. For example, it is ‘immoral’ to steal in order to feed a hungry child, but it is ‘moral’ for capitalists to impoverish workers. That produces increased efficiency, we are told, and is in the interests of us all. “The common good” is synonymous with capitalist exploitation.

For that reason Frances Lawrence’s call for schools to teach “citizenship” is also wide of the mark. It presupposes that all members of society have a common interest. No matter how often the establishment tries to persuade us that this is so, millions of individual actions prove its falseness every day.

In that sense Margaret Thatcher was correct when she said that there is no such thing as society - not when capitalism is its organisational form. The chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, has blamed the ‘breakdown of morality’ on Thatcher’s “over-individualistic” social order. But she was merely expressing the true nature of capitalism and stripping it of its hypocritical ‘caring’ pretensions. Today’s politicians want to continue that theme while bringing back the pretensions.

To conceal their own ideological bankruptcy, they are returning to that well worn banality, family values. Education secretary Gillian Shephard criticised her curriculum advisers because their proposals, she said, did not do enough to promote marriage and the family. There is nothing inherently ‘good’ about individuals organising themselves into small family units, but it is indeed a bastion of bourgeois stability. Placing upon it as much responsibility as possible for mitigating the effects of capitalism frees the hands of the ruling class to get on with the job of intensifying those effects.

None of this is new of course. But what is unusual about the present outburst of moral hypocrisy is the role played by the church. Stung by the attacks upon him by Cardinal Thomas Winning, the head of the Catholic Church in Scotland, Tony Blair rushed to defend his good Christian credentials. Winning had said that Labour could not claim to be a moral party if it did not oppose abortion and Blair almost fell over himself to stress his own opposition, as a committed church-goer. Not to be outdone, John Major announced that he too was a practising Christian.

For the past three decades admissions of agnosticism - even atheism - on the part of British political leaders have not been considered worthy of attention. Yet today, to be a believer is considered an advantage. With the failure of Thatcherism to regenerate ‘Great’ Britain and the marginalisation of any kind of working class ideology, it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that religion will again be needed to fill the vacuum.

For the moment we are swimming against the tide of hollow bourgeois morality. But we cannot make headway by making concessions to it. Whether it adopts the cloak of religion or not, we must stand firm against its pressure and continue to advocate the genuine working class alternative.

Jim Blackstock