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Editorial

Moral panic in the U. K.

This summer has seen a moral panic grip the UK media. The death in Liverpool of Rhys Jones, the 11-year old boy killed by a bullet from a teenage gang was preceded by a number of gang-related murders, and resulted in much circulation-driven hyperbole about “what sort of society we live in”.

Why people behave the way they do is of course a hugely complex and multi-faceted subject. World socialists don’t lay claim to any specialist understanding in this respect, suffice to say that how people behave is usually down to what they have learnt, be that formally or informally. This learning may be psychological (e.g. secure emotional attachment and nurturing with a parent in the first few years of life), or it may be material, in terms of (for example) the physical environment, or nutrition during childhood.

Much has been made of the fact that gang-members dripping with “bling” (an average teenager on the street may wear close to one thousand pounds-worth of digital accessories) don’t appear to fit the traditional image of impoverished and desperate members of the working class.

However, in a world that increasingly only looks at the price tag, the outward display of some sort of wealth masks perhaps a desperate cry for some sort of recognition. For the market system a pair of training shoes accords status and belonging. This skewed perspective is a measure of just how warped capitalism is. But in any case, world socialists have never just viewed poverty as being about the absence of things, such as cars or money. Increasingly in the older capitalist nations at least, poverty may owe more to an absence of less concrete – but no less critical – human needs such as self-esteem, a sense of belonging or a purposeful, creative and productive life.

It is likely then, that membership of a gang provides its members with some of the things that this society denies them outright. However warped or misplaced, a gang may provide some sort of shared experience and common purpose, a little excitement and a lot of status. After all, the apparent cause of most of these gang murders is not usually down to drug-related battles, but appears to be summed up in one word: respect.

The market system allows us only limited access to wealth. At the same time it bombards us with images and messages of what we could be having. It pressures us into valuing ourselves against everyone else, then offers an arbitrary set of rules to be followed to access wealth.

Certainly it would be churlish to ignore that a lot of the gangs are commercially-focussed, profit-driven drugs operations. According to Assistant Commissioner Tarique Ghaffur, head of the specialist crime directorate, this is an expanding economy. “It is a huge growth industry and it has not peaked. The challenge is when you do a big operation there are people, gangs, ready to replace and replace and replace".

Predictably, less media attention was given to the death – only a few weeks after the killing of Rhys Jones – of 18-year old Ben Ford, who was the youngest soldier to die in Afghanistan. Perhaps if we want to genuinely try and understand what sort of society we are bringing our children into we could start by asking why a youth with a gun in his hand defending “his” turf in Moss Side or Brixton is viewed so very differently from the uniformed youth in Afghanistan or Iraq with an Army issue rifle.

  Introducing The Socialist Party

The Socialist Party is like no other political party in Britain. It is made up of people who have joined together  because we want to get rid of the profit system and establish real socialism.  Our aim is to persuade others to become socialist and act for themselves, organising democratically and without leaders,  to bring about the kind of society that we are advocating in this journal.  We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism.  We are not a reformist party with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism. We use every possible opportunity to make new socialists. We publish pamphlets and books, as well as CDs, DVDs and various other informative material.  We also give talks and take part in debates; attend rallies, meetings and demos; run educational conferences; host internet discussion forums, make films presenting our ideas, and contest elections when practical. Socialist literature is available in Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Esperanto, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish as well as English.  The more of you who join the Socialist Party the more we will be able to get our ideas across, the more experiences we will be able to draw on and greater will be the new ideas for building the movement which you will be able to bring us. The Socialist Party is an organisation of equals. There is no leader and there are no followers. So, if you are going to join we want you to be sure that you agree fully with what we stand for and that we are satisfied that you understand the case for socialism.