Do you want a smart and attractive “mother” for the evening ? If so, there is a London model agency which will supply you with “escorts for all occasions”; and this includes “mothers” as chaperons—at two guineas a night! Or would you like to adopt an elephant at the Zoo for a pound a week ? You can’t take the elephant home with you, but you can have your name inscribed on the cage. Perhaps you would like your favourite cigarettes monogramed for 24s. a hundred; or maybe, you’d like to take lessons at a swank dancing salon, in court manners—how to curtsy and open and shut doors in the correct way. Cost? Anything from a guinea upwards. Remember, you might meet a real live duke one day, and if you haven’t learnt to curtsy the right way you will be in the cart. You can also hire a butler for an evening’s booze-up (sorry, cocktail party); and if you are going to have dinner you can hire a cook, a kitchen full of waiters and flunkeys—and all the silver and gold plate. . . .
These are just a few of the things that our “betters ” and aspiring betters get up to, according to The Weekly Overseas Mail (April 23rd-27th, 1953). But it is not only the rich and not-so-rich who are smitten by this disease of snobbery. How many workers are there living in sweet suburbia who spend their lives trying to “keep up with the Joneses”? How many clerks and white-collar workers, earning about eight or nine pounds a week, are there who pretend that they belong to the “middle-class”? How many workers are there with T.V. aerials above “their” houses—and no television sets inside ? How many young fellows kid their girl friends that they have got “good” jobs, and then have to admit, after they are married, that their jobs are not so good, after all ? How many young couples are there who say that they don’t like kids, but are not prepared to admit that they cannot afford to have children ?
The world of to-day is a world of make-believe. Where the cash nexus and “getting on” is the “thing,” both workers and capitalists are forced to put on a show; where the vast majority of mankind live in perpetual poverty, insecurity, worry—yes, and loneliness—people are forced to pretend that things are not so bad as they are. If you are wealthy, but your relations or friends are wealthier, then you have to hire a butler, a cook and flunkeys—and the gold plate, for the evening party; if you are a worker you have to pretend you’ve got a television set or you own a house—even if its mortgaged to a building society.
Whilst this system—which we in the Socialist Party call capitalism—continues, people, both rich and poor, will continue this snobbery, pretence and make-believe. Unfortunately, most people do not yet see that only by getting rid of the existing social system and replacing it by a sane one, based on cooperation, equality and common ownership, will they not only get rid of the evils of poverty and insecurity, but also that of snobbery and pretence.
Peter E. Newell
1 comment:
In the early 1950s there was definitely a focus in the Standard on filling its pages with short articles - usually half a page long - which were quite light in tone. I wonder if it tied in with the Socialist Standard sales drive at the time, and the belief that the new readers they were reaching were not as clued up with the usual political jargon that peppers a political journal. (Easing them in gently.)
I'm not sure I'm a fan of such an editorial decision. I've seen it used in later decades with similar mixed results.
Post a Comment