Letters
Confused?
If SKS sought to identify confusion on the question of sexual consent, he certainly didn’t do much other than add to it (Letters, September 17). SKS correctly states that it is the wish of the ‘child’ which is crucial here (in quote marks because clearly we are not talking necessarily about actual children, only state-designated ‘children’). The state and SKS ignore the actions and wishes of the ‘child’ themselves on sexual matters.
The law insists that whatever voluntary or clearly consensual action the ‘child’ has taken must be held to be a non-action and non-consensual, by virtue of the fact that they are ‘children’. The whole tone of SKS’s letter is that ‘children’ are all helpless little victims who can’t make their own decisions, so any sexual engagement they make, especially with an adult, must be non-consensual.
All this mumbo-jumbo about unequal parties denies the fact that an unequal party - in age, size, wealth, weight, height or whatever - can still actually consent to have sex with the older, richer or whatever party. The case has to be judged on its specific merits and not prejudged simply on dogma. Yes, a poorer, younger, less strong person could be coerced into sex - that is properly called rape. However, likewise an unequal party on any scale can in many cases voluntarily consent and that isn’t rape: it’s consent.
The big danger here, however, is not the question of actual children, but young adults, as in the Helen Goddard case, that the state has deemed children and thereby denied them their freedom and sexual liberty. In Britain, the age of consent is ostensibly 16, though everywhere under attack. The law and the government have since the advent of Blair/Brown deemed everyone under 18 a ‘child’ and there are a whole range of restrictions now on what a 16-year-old can do ... including, incidentally, leaving school and starting work. The law as it applies to partners from abroad lays down that anyone under 21 is not legally entitled to consent to marriage or allowed to come and live here with their wife or husband. Is the 20-year-old from outside this isle now a child too?
It will take one stroke of pen to make sex with anyone under 18 illegal because they are children in the eyes of the law and state. Will SKS then start trotting out the same justification about power relationships, unequal parties and abuse when looking at cases where adults have sex with 16 or 17-year-olds? If so we can see then that he is ready to concede that the state can deny sexual freedom to anyone it wishes, no matter how irrationally, simply by extending ‘childhood’ to anyone. We surely aren’t that confused, are we?
Willie Hunter
Berwick Upon Tweed
Sex security
I have read with interest the responses (September 24) to my original letter (September 17).
I thank Arthur Lawrence for not assuming gender in this case, and see this as a good thing. That said, I do not understand what he finds confusing about my previous letter: I stated that due to space limitations I was not going to provide an in-depth analysis. I did touch upon some of the issues and Mr Lawrence seemed not to have been confused about them at all. He disagrees with some, and agrees with others, but is not misrepresenting them.
I did, however, omit to take sides in the debate on what the age of consent should be, as correctly pointed out by both Mr Lawrence and Vicky Starr, and I didn’t elaborate on a concrete proposal of my own. For this I apologise. I agree that these are complex questions with no easy answers - and that the simplification of the topic in the public discourse is worrying.
In my view, a draconian age of consent law is one that doesn’t provide for context and treats all cases as criminal and with criminal consequences. In particular, a law that emphasises punishment and maximum sentences, and that ties the hands of judges and juries to see each case in context. I also find it draconian that all violations of age of consent laws are automatically considered for the sex offenders register (which I do not consider in itself draconian - I have exactly zero sympathy for rapists and recognise the protective value of the register in allowing potential victims to organise self-defence). I also think arbitrary definitions of age of consent, like a line in the sand, are draconian.
I advocate the following: the creation of four age zones: pre-pubescent, pubescent, young adult and adult. These should be based not upon chronological age, but scientific examination of given criteria, which include psychological and physical examination. To avoid issues of legal wrangling, the criteria would be specific and clinical, and age guidelines, rather than hard lines, would be included (a recognition of the reality of the borders not being hard ones in real life). Sex between members of a given group would be legal. Sex within adjacent groups would be subjected to review using the criteria set forth, with all sex between non-adjacent groups banned and subjected to criminal prosecution. An exception would be sex between adults and young adults, which would be based on mutual consent as the sole criteria, as they are adults.
I agree that mutual consent is the best regulator of human relationships. Of course, this being among equals in equal conditions: adults in situations where there is no power or coercion certainly deserve to be left alone with their sexual choices. Let adults consent to engage in whatever permutation of consensual sex they want. No legal limits should exist - legally enforced monogamy and straight-only marriage should be abolished - and let everyone decide freely how to organise their love life. No quarrel there.
Yet this is a red herring: the issue is not consent among equals, but ‘consent’ among unequals. In other situations outside of sex, such as labour, we have laws that regulate and mediate behaviour among unequals. Free marketeers argue that mutual consent is enough to mediate the contractual relationship between employer and employee, and see workplace laws as attempts to undermine this freedom. I see many problems with labour laws under the capitalist state, but I defend each one as gains: minimum wage laws, workday limitations laws, health and security laws, and so on. All represent great advances over what the mutual-consent labour regime offered, which was starvation wages and Dickensian working hours and health conditions. Mutual consent fails when the mutuality is compromised by a power relationship that is inherently unequal, such as the relationship between employer and employee, between a teacher and a student, or between a child and an adult.
As I pointed out in my previous letter, only under a singular - and rather convenient for some - definition of children as full equals with adults can we argue with a clear conscience that mutual consent is a fit umpire of sex between children and adults. The fact that children and adults are not equal is scientific, not moral. To claim otherwise is like claiming that the sky is green and we breathe carbon dioxide.
In the case of Helen Goddard, both Mr Lawrence and Ms Starr are confusing the need to reform consent laws with her separate crime of breaking the trust and responsibility inherent in being a teacher and an adult responsible for the well-being of her student. She betrayed this trust - to her students, to the educational system and to society in general. As such, I do support banning her from teaching a child again. A life-ban is perhaps a little harsh, but it is less arbitrary than, say, a one-year suspension.
I do agree, however, that under a consent system that was rational, being branded a sex offender and jailed for such a long time for what appears to be non-violent and non-coercive (beyond the circumstance of her being a teacher) sexual contacts seems draconian. We need to reform consent laws, but this is not the best example: someone who used her job as a teacher as a dating opportunity has no space teaching anyone anything and deserves not our approval, but our unequivocal condemnation.
Ms Starr admits that Ms Goddard made an error of judgment. Well, so have all of those who violate any law, no matter how horrible their crimes. And, in particular, the one thing we should demand from all teachers is to possess the self-restraint and sound judgement not to have sex with their students, regardless of age. The power issues are simply too strong to control even in the most well-intentioned situation.
Ms Starr also surveys the wide array of age of consent laws worldwide. This is useful to illustrate the arbitrary nature of these laws, and I thank her for it. We agree that sex between youth, even what is currently criminalised, should be allowed in the context of comprehensive sexual education and free access to contraceptives and healthcare related to their sexual activities.
Yet her claim that age of consent issues as discussed are part of “the communist programme” is ludicrously reductionist. In any case, there are many communist programmes, not just one. She might be arguing for one that I have not seen, but certainly not for the communist programme to which I, as a communist, subscribe. This totalitarian reductionism stands in sharp contrast with the ‘empowerment’ being claimed for the youth as part of a “comprehensive set of demands”. Surely, demands are organically developed by youth themselves, taking into account their actual aspirations and needs, and in no way ‘guided’ by adults, with their views on what is correct or incorrect for such a programme.
The day I see thousands of children marching on the streets and fighting the police for their right to have sex with adults will be the day I believe such programmes are not thinly-veiled tools for adult oppression of children. Empowerment always comes from within; it never comes from without. It is the basis of self-determination, the most important of all freedoms.
My youth is not that far away for me not to remember with disgust how we were treated by lecherous adults, how we viewed them as ‘creepy’ and how those of us who had such relationships felt somehow coerced into them. Not to mention the pain, impotence and alienation of seeing friends in abusive situations far from any semblance of consent, sometimes on the part of the very authorities we were told to trust, such as teachers, counsellors and police. And as a young communist, also seeing how our budding political views, however immature, were shaped by earnest cadre who knew what we as youth needed for our ‘empowerment’.
Communists should defend the oppressed from oppression as defined by the oppressed, not come to the oppressed with ready-made programmes for their liberation. We should talk less and listen more. Any ready-made programme for youth empowerment that includes sex with adults was not written with any input from youth. It is at best an earnest portrayal of what adults view youth wanting (an exercise of age oppression); at worst a justification of the prurient fetish of certain adults with certain power dynamics in place that disallow them from engaging in consensual sex with other adults (a “paedophiles’ charter”, to use Ms Starr’s own formulation).
Ms Starr goes on to claim that “Sections of the left, it seems, share the irrational, anti-sex attitudes and prejudices of the rightwing moral crusaders.” This is facile, degendered, moralistic crap. I am as sex-positive as they come - the type of person who rather than laughing at people’s fetishes, celebrates them as a great part of the human experience. Yet, this recognition cannot be had without a profound analysis of how gender, power relations, race, class and age affect our sexualities. The struggle against “rightwing moral crusaders” cannot be countered by the “leftwing moral crusaders” who uphold abstract points on supposed liberty, while in reality promoting the oppression of children on the part of adults, of women on the part of men, and of students on the part of teachers. Freedom in the abstract includes the ‘freedom’ to oppress.
As a communist, I would push for a plan that emphasises community control, the involvement of the unions, and provision for a system of check and balances, rather than one that relies solely on the repressive apparatus of the state. The security of children in the public sphere is not only a criminal matter, but an educational and labour matter as well.
SKS
New York
Vetting vaccine
Lawrie Coombs admits not having “studied in detail the recent plans to vet the approximately 11 million adults who work with children” (Letters, September 24).
If he had, he would know that people who work with children already are vetted. The latest proposal goes far further and seeks to vet anyone who comes into casual, voluntary contact with children - people who volunteer to drive their own kids and their friends’ kids to the local youth club or organisation, people who arrange to deliver kids to the baths or whatever.
Just this week we have seen two female police officers charged with having broken ‘child protection laws’ because they had an arrangement to look after each other’s children whilst on anti-social shifts. They aren’t ‘authorised’ to take charge of children, even though it is with complete and mutual consent.
This is not ‘work’; it is just human activity that takes them into contact with young people. The decision to put them all through a records check is a truly draconian step down an already authoritarian road. It might surprise Lawrie to know that parents are quite capable of judging for themselves whether or not they trust their neighbours and friends with their kids. We don’t need a state vetting ‘service’ to make the judgement for us.
Incidentally, people who are caught in such checks are not those previously found guilty of some law they have broken either. One only needs to be accused of having done something they didn’t like, whether there was a charge or not, and never mind whether you were ever found guilty or not. So, having never been convicted or even charged with any offence doesn’t mean you are then clear. Not likely. You’re still on that list and would still be banned from work or free activity with children. So you’re guilty if you’re guilty and you’re still guilty even if you’re not guilty.
Aside from everything else, this is a mini-version of the identity card scheme. If you can run a regular extensive check on a quarter of the population as a first start to further checks down the road, you already have your surveillance of the population on file, on record - logged and recorded without the need for actual cards. But don’t be too surprised if those checked are given a card to establish if they are ‘clean’ or not.
How long before adults visiting a park, baths or beach where there are children will have to surrender to such checks too? I’m waiting for the new law on ‘unauthorised contact with a child’, which will allow only those ‘authorised’ by the state to play, talk or be with a child on pain of prosecution. It’s a short step from banning unvetted guest speakers and authors from schools, banning volunteers from driving their neighbours’ kids or their children’s friends to activities, and banning all associations and friendships between adults and children.
I’d like to see all the shadowy characters that come up with this paranoid terrorism - the vetting authorities, the social work departments and government think-tanks - put through a vetting procedure themselves. I seriously consider many of them are quite dangerously mad and suffering some form of inverted sexual repression-induced paranoia. The added danger is that, with the help of the panic-driven press, it seems to be highly contagious. The only vaccine would seem to be solid working class common sense and scepticism.
Malcolm Stace
email
Quiet life
Tony Clark says that ‘socialism in one country’ was not a mistake because it was to be employed as a tactic under conditions when international revolution was impossible, and not as a strategy (Letters, September 24).
But this is the whole point: ‘socialism in one country’ was employed as a strategy! The whole objection is that the interests of the world working class movement were made subsidiary to the building of ‘socialism’ in the USSR. Instead of being the means by which, under difficult conditions, international solidarity and world revolution could be fought for, the Third International was turned instead to being simply border guards of the USSR.
Time and again the interests of workers in class struggle around the globe were subordinated to that end. In its support for Chiang Kai-shek, in its attacks on socialists in Spain and so on, Stalinism demonstrated that it would act as the hangman of the workers in order to maintain the favour of the bourgeoisie, in the hope of staving off an attack by imperialism on the USSR. The most blatant examples of that were the Hitler-Stalin pact, and the agreements between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt at the end of World War II.
Of course, no socialist objects to the idea propounded by Lenin, that they could not just sit still and wait for imperialism to overwhelm them, that they had to hold on to the gains as long as possible and attempt to develop the productive forces within the USSR as rapidly as they could.
But it was never a part of Lenin’s view that socialism could be built in one country. He argued vociferously against it. In fact, even as late as 1924, Stalin himself dismissed the idea as utopian and reactionary. The arguments were straightforward. For a Marxist, socialism is about taking the productive forces at their highest capitalist development and developing them further. In Russia, the productive forces were far from being at the highest level that capitalist development could achieve. Only by utilising the support of more advanced capitalist states could those productive forces then be developed, and that required revolutions in those states. Moreover, it is the division of labour that enables the productive forces under capitalism to develop so much. In an age of imperialism, and an international division of labour, it is impossible to rise above that level of productive forces by going backwards into national rather than international economic development.
Secondly, even though the existence of a workers’ state, nationalised property and planning enabled some sectors of the economy to grow more rapidly than would have been the case under capitalism (though by no means all, hence the New Economic Policy, Lenin’s attempt to encourage foreign investment, and also the eventual collapse of the economy due to its inability to meet consumer needs or to plan), the initial low level of production meant that the USSR could not grow fast enough to be able to out-produce the west in any kind of time span that would give it the breathing space to avoid both internal degeneration and external intervention. Whilst the USSR’s heroic feats in World War II have to be applauded, this was a manifestation of that fact because, although the war did not result in the overthrow of the property relations, it did have a serious effect on the USSR’s potential, which placed it at a severe disadvantage as against US imperialism in particular.
I think, however, that many ‘Trotskyists’ have a wrong conception of ‘socialism in one country’ as simply an invention of Stalinism. It’s likely that such a strategy was welcomed by the Russian working class - just as many workers welcome protectionism in the west. It is an easier option to look after what appear to be your own immediate interests, even if as Marxists we know that such action is in fact detrimental to workers’ interests and divisive. That Russian workers in particular, given their experiences from 1914 and before, should simply want a quiet life is to be understood. Stalinism was able to push forward its programme on precisely that weariness of the Russian workers.
Arthur Bough
email
Eco-obsession
I agree with Phil Kent that capitalism’s large CO2 emissions are a big problem facing humanity (Letters, September 24).
The way I see it, the ruling class have made a big mistake by instigating a system that is unplanned and therefore can easily create unforeseen consequences. In a society where the economy was consciously planned, environmental problems would surely be less. However, production would still need to take place, as over six billion people’s needs have to be met. Capitalism only feebly meets these needs, if at all.
This might suggest production ought to be increased, which might entail an increase in the ‘carbon footprint’. Therefore, geoengineering will surely be necessary to - yes - ‘mop up’ the mess. Of course, carbon neutral technologies like nuclear power are a possible way to minimise the initial damage, but strong economies are required to get to this stage.
My fear is that the ecological outlook, which has more in common with rightwing clerics than modernist Marxism, criticises capitalism for the wrong reasons. We have to concede that capitalism raises technological levels - albeit not in order to meet human need more efficiently, but so that individual capitalists can temporarily gain the market edge over their rivals.
Capital does have to manage the environment to the degree that it can continue to be utilised in production - hence soil erosion in the US is six times lower than in Africa, fish stocks get regulated by the state, and even forests regrow. I agree that short-termism is often at play, which can create environmental problems, but capitalism does sort that out too. This is why, for example, every oil spillage gets cleaned up. The system manufactures but then solves its own problems.
Environmentalism expresses the anxiety that occurs in between, but it is a false critique. I think capitalism should be chastised only for its human failures; its eco-crimes (as some people call them) are a red herring. Finally, if you get too obsessed with the ecological view, it leads to viewing humanity as a plague on the planet - something that amplifies the already anti-human character of the system.
Barry Curtis
Chelmsford
Left out
Steve Wallis believes that I have written off the two Militant candidates in the 1992 general election, Dave Nellist and Terry Fields (Letters, September 24).
The candidates mentioned stood in fact as ‘Independent Labour’ candidates, and not under the name of a political party, be it Militant Labour or the Labour Party. I concede that, if we were to include their vote in 1992, the average vote for the left in that election would jump to an impressive 1,370 per candidate.
In compiling the data, I was at pains to make sure that the candidates included were standing for identifiable and recognisable political parties, and not under the vague term ‘Independent Labour’, which could cover any disaffected Labourite - left, right or centre. It was, though, clearly a mistake not to include Nellist and Fields.
John Masters
Hertfordshire
Illuminating
Ben Lewis’s ‘English Defence League stunts and the real lessons of the 1930s’ (September 24) was a really illuminating article - with some persuasive arguments I will be employing in the future!
Manjit Dhillon
email
Afghanistan
You rightly struggle for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Afghanistan.
However, as the Taliban are medieval-minded reactionaries, withdrawal would lead to a bloody civil war. Do you think that the freedom-loving people of the world could ethically watch such a horrible scenario?
Danial
email
Language tool
Much of Chris Knight’s article revolves around the origins and development of human thought, consciousness and language (‘Sex and the human revolution’ September 24).
So I was surprised Chris makes no mention of Vygotsky and his colleagues, which to me seems a cardinal sin. It fails to take account of the extensive contributions from Marxist neuroscientists and psychologists in the young Soviet Union, prior to their work being suppressed by Stalin in the 1930s - inexcusable from one purporting to present a Marxist overview. (Vygotsky’s texts, many readily available on the internet, are littered with quotations from Plekhanov, Bukharin and Trotsky - no surprise they were to fall foul of the Stalinist dictatorship!)
Vygotsky published books on psychology and art, together with more than 180 papers devoted to reformulating psychology around Marxist methodology. He focused on questions of human development and learning, always relating his work to developing concrete ways for dealing with the pedagogical tasks facing the young Soviet Union. Throughout his work, he stressed the importance of social context - based not on Marxist theory, but on observations of children learning language and interacting with adults.
He claimed originally children only use speech for social reasons, but eventually ‘internalise’ it; the newly developed ‘inner speech’ not only improves thought processes, but ‘abstract thought’ becomes a natural acquisition. In Vygotsky’s day, these ideas were revolutionary - today they are broadly accepted by the majority of those working in the field.
Perhaps his major contribution concerned the importance of culturally devised tools - counting systems, measuring tools, navigational aids (and today computers), Vygotsky’s argument being that these tools, whether practical or symbolic, are initially ‘external’: used outwardly on nature or in communicating with others. But tools affect their users: language, used first as a communicative tool, finally shapes the minds of those who adapt to its use. Our language becomes a tool for our thinking. Marxists generally agree that the invention of primitive tools marked the onset of human history and triggered a whole set of biological and psychological developments, such as a more thumb-dominated hand and the expansion of the human brain.
However, concurrent with these developments came the development of external sign systems - and here the early humans had (by chance) developed a more appropriate physiological structure, allowing the articulation required for a more varied speech function. For those like Vygotsky, seeking to reconcile the Darwinian account of human evolution with the image of man central to Marxist philosophy - as the self-conscious creator of his own destiny - his developing theory neatly fitted the required bill. To Vygotsky, the human mind is literally created through the participation in and internalisation of social-cultural-historical forms of activity - our language being an essential tool used in this process:
In an earlier letter to the Weekly Worker, I reminded readers of the Marxian paragraph (from Capital), distinguishing the “worst architect from the best of bees” in that the architect imagines his creation before he ‘actualises’ it. This well known quotation delineates (rather badly!) what Marx took to be the distinguishing characteristic of human as opposed to animal labour - the danger being Marx can be erroneously perceived as arguing that labour per se distinguishes mankind from the animal kingdom.
If the structure is ‘raised in imagination’ before it is ‘erected in reality’ (ie, it’s a linear process), where is the dialectic in this human process? If, as Marx teaches, ‘life precedes consciousness’, how is it that imagination precedes an actualisation? To be fair to Marx, I am misrepresenting what he believed (my queries are answered by Marx on many occasions elsewhere!), but this provides a good illustration of Vygotsky’s revolutionary understanding of thought, language and meaning as revolutionary activities.
The uniqueness of human labour is not in the realisation of preconceived purpose, but in the meaningfulness of human activity. Possibly, the bee has something ‘in mind’ before it commences work, while today’s human worker, operating a computer, may have nothing in mind. But the bee knows and cares nothing about meaning. For humans, however, meaning can be located in the human capacity to alter historical totality - making meaning is a fundamental expression of revolutionary activity.
We are, to plagiarise Vygotsky, the ‘tool makers’, using tools (including language, as we write letters such as this!) … and the ‘tools of mind’, to organise revolt.
Bob Potter
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