Editorial: Nineteen eighty-two . . . (1983)

Editorial from the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

However 1982 is remembered, it will not be as a time when the human race progressed towards a resolution of any of its problems. It opened, as does every year, to a fanfare of wishes and prayers that it might be a period of prosperity, peace and happiness. It closed, as does every year, leaving memories of only poverty, fear and misery.

It was the year when unemployment in Great Britain topped the three million mark. There are very few politicians now who are eager to offer the Norman Tebbit explanation for unemployment — that it is nourished by the workers’ lack of will to find an employer. In that total of three million are young people fresh out of school or college, trained and conditioned to take their place in the galleys of wage slavery. To them, viewing their prospects, life on the dole is now as natural as life in employment is to their parents. Unless, that is, their parents are also out of work. The three million include a significant and growing number who have abandoned all expectation of ever again finding a job. Many have accumulated an impressive library of letters of rejection. The conclusion they draw, along with those economists who, mistakenly, argue that high unemployment is structural to capitalism, is that they will spend the rest of their life scrimping a miserable existence on the dole.

It is however important not to lose sight of the reality of this sorry situation. Unemployment is not the scandal which so many ambitious politicians, for example in the Labour Party, would have us believe. It is not some unnatural curse, to be exorcised by the high priests in a future Labour government. It is in fact quite natural to capitalism, a part of the system’s anarchic-cycle of boom and slump. Labour’s record in this is no better than that of the Tories; they have been no more successful in ordering the chaos of capitalist society.

The Labour Party’s present campaign on the issue seeks to gain from the popular belief that plentiful employment means security and prosperity. This belief is a long way wide of reality. Workers suffer poverty of varying intensity throughout their lives; it is an inescapable feature of their social status as members of the class which needs to sell labour power in order to live. There are times when this is easier than at others — in the heyday of a boom, for example, workers can exert more effective pressure in wage negotiations. At other times wages may be forced down, as is happening in many cases now, under the pressure of unemployment in a recession. But all such variations, up or down, do not affect the basic standing of the working class.

1982 was the year of the Falklands war— the year when anyone who thought that the bigotries, the bombast and the phraseology of Victorian imperialism were dead, fit subjects only for the satirist, had to readjust their ideas. The mindless jingoism which the government, supported by the official spokespeople of the Labour Party in parliament, was able to stimulate was soberly instructive to anyone who looks for signs of a developing enlightenment among the working class. The Falklands war showed that the crasser notions which prop capitalism up are alive and well and at their noxious business.

And by crass we do not just refer to the jingoism of Thatcher and her crew. The bombers were at work in Great Britain again in 1982, provoking a response as nasty and illogical as the theories which energise the bombers. The Irish nationalists, in their outdated bigotry and historical redundancy, are a prime example of those who, ignoring all reality and reason, insist that capitalist society would be more tolerable if some slight adjustments were made to it. In their case, Irish workers are recruited to kill and terrorise other members of their class in order to persuade the British government to withdraw their troops and to help organise Ireland into a single capitalist state. No working class interests are involved in such conflicts, although it is workers who pay for them with their blood.

There was, lest we forget, one event in 1982 which, we were informed by the media, was positively joyous. While millions throughout the world starved, two famous members of the parasite class, having first got married, together produced yet another parasite. Expensive doctors were there to ease the parasite into life and the great organs of public opinion (for such they like to regard themselves) rolled out their carpets of words in frantic celebration of the event. Socialists stand aside from all this; the birth of this new prince emphasised the class divisions of capitalism, the superiority in riches of the one class and the humiliation in poverty of the other.

And how, in 1982, did those humiliated workers react to the poverty, the fear and the degradations of capitalism? When they gave their verdict, it was depressingly hopeless. At each by-election there was solid support for the system to continue. The votes may have been redistributed a little from one capitalist party to another — from Conservative to Labour or Scottish Nationalist with the SDP picking up a few thousand from people under the delusion that they were voting for a fresh, original approach to politics. But the votes never threatened the theory that the society of class ownership of the means of life is logical, essential, efficient and therefore eternal. The security of the ruling class remained untouched.

Disappointing though this is, it does not weaken the socialists’ resolve to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a social system based on the communal ownership of the means of wealth production and distribution. We work for this not because we are blind optimists nor because we are inspired with a religious faith in an Armageddon of the intellect. The case for socialism rests on the evidence of history, that people bring social systems to an end as they outlive their historical purpose. Typically, the events of 1982 gave much support to the socialist case that capitalism is no longer of use in the process of social evolution and is now a bar to human progress. It is time for the revolution to establish socialism and the need grows more urgent with each passing day.