A reply to Melanie Phillips (Boris Johnson, your turn will come!)

Dear Madam,
In response to “Forget the killer’s rights” article, I must first point out several flaws in your reasoning. You mention a series of “horrifying killings” by individuals who were diagnosed as suffering from “schizophrenia” or other “mental illnesses”. However, you then contradict yourself by claiming psychiatrists are blinded by an “ideological obsession” with treating lapses in people’s mental well-being. By definition, “psychiatric illnesses” are diagnosed by psychiatrists; if the purpose, or commitment, of psychiatrists is in question, then so are their diagnoses.

In 2005, there were 765 homicides in the United Kingdom: about fifty of these were carried out by an individual who had been diagnosed with a mental health problem. I live in Stoke-on-Trent. Every year fifty people commit suicide in my city, for reasons of their own. Extrapolating this figure to the whole of the country, as Stoke-on-Trent does not have a particularly high suicide rate, it is very likely that there are several thousand suicides every year in the UK. As one in four people is likely to experience a period of low mental ill health at some point in their lives, it is easy to see that an individual with these kinds of problems is a hundred times more likely to harm themselves than someone else. Considering the statistics, a “mentally healthy” individual is much more likely to kill someone than someone from the minority who do experience some kind of difficulty in this area.

The very point about freedoms, human rights and civil liberties is that people are “free” to kill if they are to enjoy freedom of action. It is up to the individual’s community or society in general to decide what to do when this freedom is abused. The minority of individuals who commit violent acts while experiencing lapses in judgement should be treated and not punished. These crimes are not acted out of greed or malice, unlike the majority of violent attacks, in which alcohol is often involved or the victim is known to the perpetrator.

For example, two women a week, on average, are murdered by their husbands or partners. In recent years, infanticide by a parent or guardian has been the most common cause of infant mortality for babies aged less than one year of age. It is unfair at best to discriminate against a minority of people who are often most unable to defend themselves by blaming them for violence towards others when they are more likely to be victims themselves.

The “Labour” Aristocracy and “Patronising”
the Working Classes


Or, “How to use the same critique for both Leninism and Class-Struggle Anarchism based on two articles I read recently”. Mouthful!

Its rather amusing to find Marxist-Leninists criticising the “Labour Aristocracy” for being bought off by the ruling classes when they continually harp on about the need for a vanguard party. I don’t particularly want to disagree or agree with the “Revolutionary Communist Group” article criticising “Solidarity-US” (sort of democratic socialist type group) for accusing the entire proletariat of all “Imperialist” (when S-US specify the global north as a whole anyway) countries of profiting from Third World exploitation, but the whole point of why “socialism in one country” isn’t feasible is because there may be complete equality in one country a) at the expense of others or the environment and b) if the citizens of that equal country are near the bottom income-wise globally, a minority can be bought off by those of richer nations. A “Labour Aristocracy”, if you will.

It also has to be pointed out that capital (may) survive with greater equalities of wealth, but these equalities of wealth bring sympathy for foreign and domestic victims of human rights abuses and the global poor anyway. It is no good for either of the above to just blame capital when the state often acts, directly or indirectly, to keep people at or near (the threat of) poverty.

Despite often seeing things from a “class struggle anarchist” perspective (i.e. more authoritarian policies affect the poor more than the rich etc), I’m often sick of the “they’re not (I presume “proper”) anarchists, they’re hippy, liberal pacifists etc” argument that is often given. This was repeated in “Now or Never”, which I’d also picked up over the weekend, to describe the political stance (or otherwise) of the punk band Crass. Crass were described as basically patronising “ordinary working class people” for, well, being bought out basically (sound familiar?) instead of living in hippy drop-out communes.

But, in a very real sense, this is the point about the positions of both articles. “Working class” communities/ estates are full of perfectly reusable furniture etc. It seems both petty and patronising to say this, but you get this everywhere: TVs, fridges, sofas, all clogging up alleyways and all could be reused by someone else with small effort, so you could say that at least an element of the working or under class exploits their own “surplus” by simply discarding or effectively destroying it.

This could all be part of the disposable society we’re apparently living in or maybe it is a kind of underclass mentality where everything is disposable or left to someone else to dispose. There is a lot of criticism of “Lifestylism” but maybe the people who need to be lifestylists are the marginalized under classes, who aren’t directly exploited by capitalists except by the fact of unemployment (in a sense their surplus is exploited by the remaining pool of employed, by quite a high amount if you compare income support levels to the average wage, who are again exploited by capitalists)

People need to work together with the resources they have at hand to support each other, instead of being suckered by statist individualism (oh my God he’s criticising the welfare state). Empty houses are easily do-up able and furniture etc can be re-cycled. So can food, either directly (long as its not rotten) through skipping etc or for compost. Ditto clothing, still, there’s charity shops for that. Maybe we need more hippies, goddamit, and less workerists (and Leninists), especially when people often haven’t a cat in hell’s chance of working but have the time to organise unlike people who do have to work for a living.

This analysis/ opinion/ short rant does show up the hypocrisy of any kind of analysis of revolutionary potential on class lines. You will probably either be disappointed or end up dismissing whole sections of society for being to dependent on the system. Or realising you cannot know anything really.