What will you be doing on the morning after? Will your life be radically changed? Will you wake up and detect a new freshness in the air, a new sense of hope oozing out of the environment? Or will you feel terrible, like a person who has just lost everything as a result of someone else's incompetence? Will it make any difference to you? Will life be just the same? Might it just as well have never happened?
No, we are not talking about a nuclear war. You will notice that alright. It will transform your life — probably in the most profound sense: by terminating it. And if it does not kill you. you will probably wish it had.
But the morning after the election will be another story. No mushroom clouds, cities reduced to rubble, panic in the shelters. The morning after the general election all that there will be is the fading enthusiasm of the TV pundits trying their hardest to stay awake until the final result and the isolated groups of party activists nursing hangovers induced either by success or failure combined with the cheap price of booze in the Town Hall bars next to where the ballot papers are counted.
For most people — workers who run society from top to bottom by sweeping the streets and driving the buses and operating the computers and looking after the sick — the morning after the general election will be very much like the day before it. It will be wage or salary slavery as usual.
For workers the same problems will exist the day after the election as the day before it. Most of us do not like working for bosses and paying the bills and living in a stressful and dangerous society and fearing the possibility of war. Not one of those problems will be gone the day after the election. Not one of the politicians in the election will have even promised to attend to those problems. That is working-class life and those are its problems. According to the politicians there must always be working-class life; capitalism in one form or another must always exist. And so it will, the morning after the election.
Of course, there will be some workers who will wake up the next morning (if their excitement ever allowed them to sleep) full of joy because their chosen party has won. Tory voters will be dancing all the way round the nearly-paid-for mock-antique furniture as they read in the Mail or the Express how Maggie swept home like a horse in the Derby. Five more years of good old Tory capitalism. Labour or Alliance voters might be doing equally pointless victory dances: ' Hooray, we've ousted Maggie". Now what? A deal between Labour and some or all of the Alliance? Roy Hattersley administering the capitalists' Treasury instead of Nigel Lawson?
But most workers will not be dancing or cheering or even smiling. Even most of those who voted (and millions will not have even done that) will have only done so in the knowledge that it will make little difference — or that it might at least keep the other lot out — or because of family tradition. Most voters in elections are far less stupid than they might be thought to be: they are not taken in by all the nonsense spewed out by politicians. Many workers know that capitalist elections will not change their lives.
The morning after the election try finding a politician to discuss your problems with. Of course, you might find the odd few sleeping in the streets after the booze-up the night before. In some cases there will even be an election office still open while the furniture is moved out and the posters ripped down. But let us imagine that you contact your prospective MP the morning after the election. You invite him or her around to discuss their ideas or examine your problems or just to meet the family. S/he will be nowhere to be seen. The day after the election the leaders who were so anxiously seeking your attention, who told you that you were the most important people in the world, will not be seen for dust. If you manage to approach them they will tell you to get lost — or, if they have won. to make an appointment to see them at their convenience. The morning after the election one thing will be crystal clear: you do not matter any more. You have spent your political power and that's it for five more years — four if you're lucky.
So, the morning after the election the homeless will still be unhoused and the unemployed still on the social scrapheap and the hungry still too poor to buy food and the millions who are being robbed daily by the wages system will still be having their lives stolen away from them. The day after the election will be a bloody miserable day. And for none will it be more miserable than for those who know how easy it would be to change the whole rotten set-up and establish a society fit to live in.
Steve Coleman
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