Editorial: New year, same shit . . . (2026)

Editorial from the January 2026 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year, 2025, could only be considered a success story for capitalism in the sense that the world didn’t end in total destruction. For many though, it was a disaster. Think Gaza, where survivors starve among the ruins after a genocidal slaughter that will only cause further wars. No wonder states don’t want to pay to rebuild Gaza, just to see it levelled again. Think Darfur and South Sudan, with massacres committed by the Rapid Support Force using weapons purchased by the United Arab Emirates from western states including the UK, and allegedly donated as part of an arms-for-gold deal. The gold mines of Darfur have been a ghastly resource curse. The locals have paid with their lives so that capitalist deals get done.

Two corrupt power blocs on the European landmass continued putting human beings into the meat grinder of war, while the very people elected or appointed to serve the Ukrainian people instead trousered over a hundred million dollars intended to protect energy infrastructure and keep the winter lights on. This is what nationalism gets you. Workers die in trenches while the bosses find ways to get rich out of it.

Many other wars got less media coverage, including the ongoing multi-sided slaughter in Myanmar, a real-world example of the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’. When a big earthquake struck the country in March, killing around 5,000 people, some rebel groups called for a ceasefire as they sent aid workers into affected areas. The military junta, according to reports, had no such humanitarian concerns and instead bombed and strafed the aid workers.

Despite glimmers of hopeful news as Generation Z protesters overthrew a brutal regime in Nepal, world politics in 2025 seemed to be all about tearing up of the rules-based order, led with orgiastic zeal by Donald Trump and his coterie of talentless sycophants. Seeing the world’s politicians cravenly kissing this man’s feet in the hope of favours was stomach-turning, and it didn’t work anyway. The far-right in almost every country has been given a huge boost as this deluded Caligula lays waste to every human principle of fairness and decency, merit and reason, equality and environmental safety. No capitalist politician is ever going to ‘fix’ capitalism, but some seem determined to make it worse. The name of Trump may come to be spat on by posterity as a loathsome icon of narcissism, ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ sexism, and kleptocratic greed. He’s already being sued over his stupid ballroom, so maybe that will be demolished too.

But in a way Trump has done the world a favour, by ripping off the civilised veneer and showing everyone what capitalism really is, instead of what it pretends to be. It was never a rules-based order. It’s always been ‘might equals right’ and screw the little guy.

Meanwhile over in the UK, the fractured left try once again to unite around a vague wish-list of reforms aimed at making capitalism just a tiny bit less awful. What they should be doing is calling for the end of capitalism, because that’s the only thing that will work. Instead they clamber back on the carousel horse of reformism to go round one more time, learning nothing, changing nothing, in a perpetual triumph of hope over experience. This year, if you can find a way, help us get the message across: end capitalism, before it ends us.

Socialist Sonnet No. 175: New Old Year? (2024)

From the Socialism or Your Money Back blog

 

New Old Year?

Backward facing Janus covers those eyes

That cannot look away from the grim sights

Blighting far, far too many days and nights,

The common realisation of lies,

Told about the military murder

Of expendable civilians

For what will prove to be mere pyrrhic gains.

Then those wild firestorms and floods that occur

As climate changes but policies don’t.

And, so it was, yet another year went,

With capitalism seeming content

And secure in its pursuit of profit.

From the threshold of the old and the new,

Does Janus hold a more positive view?

 

D. A.

Editorial: 1907. (1907)

Editorial from the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Another year with all its opportunities gone. Another year with all its possibilities opening upon us. And—”a happy new year” comes lightly from the tongue in conventional salutation. “A happy new year”—and doubtless behind the greeting there is still some measure of real concern for the materialisation of the wish in the person addressed. “A happy new year”—why not ? Why should not happiness be in the constant experience of all? Why should not happiness be the normal condition of everybody? Why should it not be as natural for everybody to exult in the joys of living as it is for them to breathe—why is it not ?

Because—happiness is conditioned by the available supply of the necessities of life. Deny these to a man and he cannot be happy. And the barest of these necessities are unobtainable (upon capitalist authority unobtainable) by at least a third of the people of this, the most prosperous of nations, while the rest of its working population—the population that builds up the “national” prosperity—only just manage, with infinite labour and anxiety, to maintain themselves in a condition of working efficiency.

That is the reason why happiness is not the normal condition of the working population. That is why they have not been happy in the dead year. That is why they cannot be happy in the year just commenced. To wish them “a happy new year” which we know they will not get is therefore rather dreary humour and about as useful as wishing the moon were green cheese.

____________

The Might Have Beens.

And yet—it might have been otherwise had capitalist development been a few more years advanced. We might have given our new year’s greeting to our neighbour from out of a glad certainty that the happiness we wished was easy of attainment to every worker—had economic conditions ripened a little more rapidly. For between the working class of all countries and those things upon which their happiness depends the barrier is weak enough to-day to be broken through with ease and swiftness. All that is required to-day is an understanding by the working class of their own strength and the fragility of the opposition set against them no more than that. Economic development has reached a point when, for all practical purposes production, is being carried on by associated wage workers exclusively, with a minimum of waste. The capitalist has served his purpose in the concentration and organisation of industry, he is now merely the recipient of the wealth produced and is only able to maintain his position by virtue of his ownership and control of the machinery of production and distribution. The working class have but to understand that and determine upon the appropriation for themselves of the wealth, they produce themselves and their happy new year’s greeting to one another partakes no longer of the grotesque.

____________

The Work Before Us.

Well. The important thing seems to be to emphasise that single, simple fact. We can do no more. To pretend that we can would be to delude and confuse; just as it would be a confusion and a delusion to affirm that a happy new year is possible to the working class before they have eliminated the capitalist. As the organ of The Socialist Party of Great Britain, it has been our purpose to drum into the minds of our fellows of the working class the simple fact referred to. We claim that we have done that consistently, refusing to permit the introduction of any element calculated to weaken the effect of our insistence or confuse the object of it. We can do no more in the new year and we will do no less.

We start with the same enthusiasm that has carried us on from the commencement. We have no new resolutions to make, no new leaves to turn over. We have no delusions for ourselves or for others— and as the British wing of the International Socialist Army we shall continue to relentlessly fight all those, however they may label themselves, who attempt to delude or whose work has that effect. We know that we are right, that our methods are sound ; that our cause must triumph, and we are content.

Editorial: Happy New Year? (2002)

Editorial from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Happy New Year” we all said to one another on New Year’s Eve. Even though we meant it sincerely what are the chances of it becoming a reality?

Looking back to the year just passing, 2001 will be remembered for one really major and horrific event (11 September) plus others whose significance is only now dawning, such as the beginning of what appears to be an economic downturn. Is it likely 2002 will be any better?

If you are one of the unfortunate billions living in much of Asia or Africa then the obvious answer is very likely to be no, these being continents where war and famine stalk the land as habitually as the jungle predators. In most of the rest of the world the bulk of the population may not face the same harsh realities of grinding absolute poverty and destitution, but insecurity and fear are never far away. The fear of losing our jobs. The fear of being mugged or attacked. The fear of family break-up and the escapism of drugs and drink which has become a feature of so many lives. In other words, the fear of falling victim to the ruthless, competitive society that is capitalism, with all its attendant social pressures.

This is why 2002 is unlikely to be any better than 2001. Even at a subliminal level, the majority have chosen to put up with capitalism and the misery it causes them rather than seek an alternative to it. They are victims, and as victims they “muddle through” and hope there is light at the end of the tunnel. But as the office joke goes, when the light eventually appears it is only the boss with his torch, bringing more work for those “fortunate” enough to have it.

As socialists, we argue that we should stop being the helpless victims in society, prey to the mercenary forces of the market, and instead get up off our knees.

History shows that capitalism won’t go away if we shut our eyes to it, it will merely attack us all the more mercilessly. That is why unless we do something about it, there will be more recessions, more crime and more terrorist atrocities committed by misguided, power-hungry and disgruntled fanatics. The market system is nothing if it is not relentless.

Because of the problems and suffering it causes, we have to put capitalism out of its misery, and in so doing, we will help lift ourselves out of our own. Nobody else is going to do it for us, that’s for sure – all the leaders and politicians are part of the problem itself not the solution. They are the ultimate representatives of the system that will have to be swept aside if the bulk of the population are to be free of the shackles imposed by money and the market.

But what is the next step as we enter the new year?

The next step is to organise – to organise for change. In groups and meetings and on the internet we need to band together to fight against the reason most of us fell fearful or miserable – the market economy itself and the politicians who oversee its operation. Without this, “Happy New Year” will be the empty platitude it usually becomes every year. If we democratically organise for change, so that we can build a society based on co-operation, respect and peacefulness, then next time we utter that phrase it may, for once, carry some real meaning. Until then, it will be devoid of resonance, and as relevant and useful as the deflated balloons and discarded party poppers are when we trudge back into work when the parties are over.

So let’s do something positive and organise to make 2002 a truly happy new year – and that of course means a year worth remembering for the right reasons, and not, like 2001, all the wrong ones.

and three . . . (1983)

From the January 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

New Year. Recover from the hang-over in time to confront the lingering stench of capitalist reality. Another twelve months of 1982, but in a different wrapper.

What will dominate the news in 1983? Hollywood romances; Chelsea fashions; Labour does the splits; wars in unpronounceable cities; SDP debates its fisheries policy; cabinet reshuffle; Miss World contest; Mary Whitehouse complains about too much reality on TV; someone who is someone dies; Princess drops a baby parasite; more Hollywood romances. 1983 will be one of those years that could have been a month if it was made by a skilled worker.

What will not dominate the news in 1983? Grown men crying because they’ve lost their jobs and rents/mortgages need to be paid; the last shiver of a dying pensioner who is too old and too poor to keep warm; children looking in shop windows and knowing what they cannot have; thirty million deaths by starvation, with corpses rotting in the shadow of potential plenty; frightened kids dressed up as uniformed men fighting senseless battles for complacent parasites; the silent suffering of the lonely and alienated; the slam of thousands of prison cell doors; the endless grinding of poverty — the left-overs of 1982's poverty being made to last for 1983.

The year ahead will see success for some. New jobs; scouting badges; holidays in Benidorm; new hats; promotion; marriage; cats having kittens. It will also see success for others. Increased profits; evictions of “unreliable" tenants; new weapons of murder; six month holidays, anywhere but Benidorm; multi-million pound inheritances.

January is a deceptive month. It is like the first day of school or the first night of the proms. Everyone anticipates; everyone knows what it will be like. They know what to expect, but go through the ritual of hoping for something different: "Well, that’s bloody 1982 over . . . now let’s . . . er . . . do it all over again”. The ongoing march of pathetic history.

Resolutions made — and broken. "In 1983 I will not . . . drop crumbs on the carpet, watch Blankety Blank, steal staples from the office, disobey the Ten Commandments". For most wage slaves the resolution is unstated: "I resolve to be a good worker, not think too much about the society I live in, and produce the profits which keep my exploiters in idle comfort". Then there are the fraudulent and the naive: Margaret Thatcher — "I resolve to make all Britons free, happy and prosperous like they used to be in the good old Nineteenth century”. Ken Livingstone — “I resolve to turn London into a nuclear-free, fully-employed, semi-demi-socialist zone”. Arthur Scargill — “I resolve to run the system of exploitation to the benefit of the exploited".

1983 need not be this way. Just as the horrors of the past were not inevitable, so the horrors yet to come need never trouble us beyond our imaginations. To stop them, though, we need more than resolution; to stop them requires revolution. Beyond wishful thinking there is a need for practical political action. The revolution must be a conscious one, carried out by men and women who oppose the system of capitalism, where needs come second to profits, and understand and want socialism. We need a revolution

BECAUSE the present world social system, capitalism, is based on the ownership of the means of living (land, factories, offices, mines, farms) by a minority elite and the consequent enslavement of the working class by whose labour alone wealth is produced.

BECAUSE there is an antagonism of interests within capitalism, manifesting itself as a class struggle, between those who possess but do not produce, and those who produce but do not possess.

BECAUSE the class struggle can only come to an end when the working class is emancipated from the domination of the capitalist class, by the conversion into the common property of society of the means of production and distribution, and their democratic control by the whole people.

BECAUSE, if you are a worker the present system can never run in your interests. You are just one member of a class whose energies and talents are sacrificed to the needs of the profit system.

Reality is for people to make, turning dreams into weapons. Let’s create a good reason to be happy: not the new year, but a new stage in human history — world socialism.

Steve Coleman

New Year Party (2024)

From the January 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Unusually for an article in this magazine we are going to begin by consulting a god, Janus being the deity in question. Having the supernatural capacity to look backwards and forwards at the same moment he seems a worthy informant.

Actually, it does not require omniscience or 20/20 hindsight to see that 2023 was not a great year for humanity. Most recently an armed group of self-styled martyrs and freedom fighters demonstrated their military prowess by storming a pop festival and randomly killing teenagers before moving on to kill and kidnap across a wide area.

This provoked regressive nationalist ideologues into their brutal response, a protracted arbitrary slaughter of children, and civilians in general. In the insane gamble of war, atrocity is all too often matched and raised by greater atrocity.

In Britain this moved political leaders of the main parliamentary parties to declare their unwavering support for this ‘self-defence’. Does this mean that if you’re assaulted by your neighbour it’s legitimate for you to burn his house down with his family in it?

Meanwhile young, and perhaps not so young, Ukrainians and Russians continued to kill each other on behalf of their respective capitalisms. NATO countries seemingly have whole orchards of money trees allowing them lavish expenditure on the arms industry to continually supply weaponry freely to Ukraine.

Although the money trees of the USA are seemingly becoming less abundant as politicians of one wing of capitalist government refuse to endorse further funding. This is driven by the search for populist appeal in the forthcoming presidential election. Firm, unwavering support is suddenly trumped (forgive the pun) by pragmatic expediency.

In Britain also there seems to be rather less cash available from the fiscal orchard for growing numbers of families struggling with serious poverty, amassing rent/mortgage arrears along with other debts, becoming dependent on food banks even as actual banks continue to profit massively.

Similarly, the NHS is severely restricted from using technology that could prevent so many premature deaths and cure conditions or, at least, alleviate suffering caused by treatable ailments. With such advances being increasingly expensive in a profit-driven world, cost-effectiveness not diagnosis becomes the deciding cynical, clinical factor.

Climate change continues to demand attention. Wild fires flare, there’s drought and flood, storms rage as never before and the death toll rises. There seems no sense of irony amongst national leaders who fly around the world to attend climate change conferences. And it turns out many of the delegates are actually representatives of fossil fuel industries.

Through the natural instinct for self-preservation, people, individually or as families, flee from hot spots of war, extreme poverty and environmental degradation. At this point, of course, they stop being people and become migrants.

Migrants are subdivided into legal and illegal. Legal migrants can be just about tolerated as long as they accept being cheap labour doing jobs few others are willing to do for such poor wages. Illegal migrants though are anathema.

Underlying all this misery is capitalism that went its merry way unhindered, other than by its own contradictions, throughout yet another year. For a system now long since past its sell-by date, it persists despite the stench of its rottenness, but only because the great majority of world’s population, the workers who create the wealth, have yet to choose to dispense with it.

Our consultation with Janus as to forthcoming prospects is not encouraging. Looking forwards it doesn’t take a futurologist to foresee that radical change does not appear likely, at least in the short term.

There will be a general election which could be at least an indicator of an upsurge of enthusiasm for and interest in breaking with the established political pattern. The problem is there will be no clear way for such a change of consciousness to be clearly marked.

A significant vote for the few Socialist Party candidates would be a start. Mass spoiling of ballot papers, just writing ‘Socialism’ or ‘SPGB’ across them, would be a positive act, rather than just not voting which could suggest apathy rather than engagement.

It is often argued, correctly, that the right to vote is valuable and many people in the past suffered and fought for it, therefore it should be used. Indeed it should, but simply voting for one of the main parties, or one of their left/right-wing outliers, is truly wasting the vote as nothing will fundamentally change.

If you really consider your vote to be valuable then seriously consider to whom you will entrust it. How can it become the means to bring about significant and profound change? Capitalism lies at the root of the all the misery outlined above as experienced throughout 2023.

The alternative is a worldwide democratic commonwealth in which production is to meet everyone’s needs, not a small minority’s profit. A society without national borders and armies to defend or attack them. A world that can face up to climate change unencumbered by the need to continually produce commodities for sale.

Politics will no longer be split into rival factions of left and right. Despite the postures of many groups, sects and parties who misappropriate the word, socialism is not a left- wing cause. The left/right split is very much part of the politics of capitalism, originating in the national assembly of the late eighteenth-century French Revolution.

Socialists intend society to move beyond such notions as divide people, rather hoping to unite them in common cause to take control, and thereby improve, their economic, political and social prospects.

The New Year Party is the one that presently stands up and holds out for this change, this revolution including via the ballot box, understanding that it cannot be achieved through compromise. It is clear that people must develop the means to bring this about because no party can do it for them.

No small task to be sure. It will require a New Year resolution of the majority to actively work towards the realisation of socialism. Will it be this year? Next year? Sometime? Never? That depends entirely on what people decide. True democracy.

Or is Janus doomed to find his double vision blurred by tears shed for the suffering of the world at every turn of the year in perpetuity?

Dave Alton

Editorial: Sweep away capitalism (2023)

Editorial from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

At the beginning of another new year we in the Socialist Party express our solidarity with all those striving to resist the attacks and cuts from capitalism.

Working people are bearing the brunt of capitalism’s multiple crises around the world. Time is running out for the planet and there could be a risk to human civilisation itself. Capitalism divides people rather than unites them — worker from worker, men from women, blacks from whites. It teaches competition not cooperation.

The world has a capacity to bring forth riches beyond the wildest imagination of people. Instead, this prospect has been used primarily to bring death and destruction. As in Ukraine, where capitalism has set workers to fight workers, to kill, maim and destroy in order to determine which set of bandits should prevail and rule over those living there.

Our use of terms like ‘production for use’, ‘moneyless society’, ‘abolition of the wages system’ and ‘free access’ may sound like a word-salad to people. But all we are trying to do is to describe the society we are aiming to see achieved. While we can accept that for some people it may sound somewhat abstract, we would be remiss if we did not make it absolutely clear what our objective was. But the question is not what words to use to describe what is needed, but how to put it into practice.

Workers possess the potential to change the world and the ability to run it in the interests of humanity where freely-associated men and women share the means of wealth production and use them to supply the needs of all, freeing everyone from the source of their sorrows.

We wish to see a mass socialist party but we reluctantly acknowledge that our own limited attempts can’t hope to make a great impact. But the development of socialist consciousness does not depend solely on our small numbers but more generally on the conditions people live under in capitalism and the need to change those.

We do not submit to the notion that it is impossible for workers to reason for themselves about where their interests lie. How did ideas of socialism develop in the first place at a time when they were illegal and savagely suppressed?

We are socialists because we hold that socialism is the sole hope of working people. Our New Year’s commitment is to take revolutionary politics to workers everywhere and to do what we can to hasten the coming of the socialist world cooperative commonwealth. That is our New Year message to all our fellow workers. Is that so hard to understand? It is in fact the very essence of simplicity.

So, we deliver this New Year message as we have done before to say to working people that they can control their destinies once they have shed their delusions about capitalism, and cast off the burden they have carried upon their backs for so long.

The New Year—A New World? (1942)

From the January 1942 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Another year is being added to the history of human existence and travail. As is usual, many will look to the corning year with a new hope, forgetting, if only for a moment, the trials and worries of the old—the fountain of human zest is truly inexhaustible. Dominating the thoughts and schemes of all is the war; a war that has inevitably swept its flaming way across the whole world, destroying black, brown, yellow and white alike in its fiery grasp. Thus another link is forged between the workers of the world, for capitalism bestows upon them all, “without distinction of race or sex,” the privilege of perishing on its behalf.

Total war, with its horrible outrages upon civilians, including children, as distinct from the armies engaged in combat, is not the hellish invention of a few individuals; it is the logical expression of present-day capitalism in military conflicts. ”War,” said Clausewitz, “is a continuation of politics by other means.” And politics, we would add, are a continuation of economic conflict by other means.

Preliminaries having been disposed of, the five great Powers enter the scene of conflict in order to contend in the final stages of the struggle for world-domination. The United States, Britain and Russia, the Grand Alliance, versus the challenging axis, Germany and Japan.

The position of the U.S.S.R. is particularly interesting. Having been promised “that they would not pull the chestnuts out of the fire for anybody” (Stalin’s speech to the Soviets in March, 1939), the Russian people have yet had to bear the full weight of attack from Germany. As a consequence, Russia has taken her place with the Western democracies, disproving once and for all the Communist fairy tale of a capitalist world in arms against “the one Socialist country,”

It is to be expected that this alliance, already close as shown by repeated conferences between Stalin and leading spokesmen of the British ruling class such as Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Eden, will be knit even firmer by the exigencies of the war and continue after the conclusion of hostilities.

As a result of the unparalleled battles across the vast spaces of Russian territory, the German armies appear to have sustained their first serious setback of this war. The Fuehrer, claiming infallibility, has taken over supreme command from his military chiefs, and signs are not wanting that this egomaniac is planning fresh assaults and more graveyards for his “beloved soldiers.”

We cannot tell how much longer the German masses will be content with their role of dumb or willing instruments for wealthy and ambitious cliques but a day of reckoning seems not far distant. Perhaps the military caste of junkers who have provided the real motive-force for German military adventures will not get off so lightly as they did in 1918. Then they found a convenient “front,” the Social-Democratic Party, which it repaid by helping to crush when military rehabilitation was nearing success. May the fate of the once powerful German Labour Party be a warning and a lesson for the future.

Whilst Nazi speeches are betraying uneasiness, having descended down the scale from the bombast of victory to pleas and threats, the lords of the British Empire have almost recovered their normal level of self-assurance. Confidently they tell their loyal subjects behind the benches and the guns to be ready to take the offensive in 1943. Alluring prospects! Further evidence of our capitalists’ measure of working-class intelligence can be obtained. They do not find it necessary even to explain how they are able to spend more than £12 million a day on the war alone when only ten short years ago this very same ruling class declared they would be bankrupt unless they took the margarine off the bread of the unemployed to the amount of a mere £5 million a year.

This sorry tale of working-class deception could be continued ad nauseum. Its success can only be explained by the workers’ misunderstanding of social problems; it provides a crushing answer to those who sneer at our insistence on education in Socialist principles.

On the other side of the world—in the Pacific Ocean—total war has descended with murderous suddenness on a number of islands which, with their natural beauty, fertility, and sub-tropical climate, must have provided their people with idyllic conditions of life before the appearance of capitalism. Unfortunately for the present inhabitants, their neighbourhood is the source of much of the oil and rubber that feeds the capitalist wheels of war and peace. Japan, with its modern industry and feudal politics, has chosen the proverbial “gambler’s throw” in an endeavour to seize these vital depositories and with them an empire in the East. Yet even in politically backward Japan working-class ideas have already made their appearance, and the Japanese proletariat may yet surprise their masters before very long. A political structure which refuses to be modified according to the needs of a more advanced economy, that factor plus a war-weary proletariat has often spelled trouble for a ruling class in the past.

Indeed, when we look at the world in the pages of the press or through the other avenues, all of them controlled by groups of capitalists, we only see little more than the comings and goings of the “Great Ones,” the statesmen and the generals, the industrial magnates and other so-called “personages.” But behind these ceremonials, these speeches trumpeted through the ether to the four corners of the earth, behind the head-lines of the day, there looms a shadow—the working-class of the world with its own problems. These problems the grandiose strategy of war does not touch. True, at present this shadow is not very big—-no bigger, perhaps, than a man’s fist, as the saying goes. But then a working-class can be troublesome at times. That is why, during odd moments between labouring on schemes for new and more gigantic battles, there are being concocted in the cabinet-rooms and chancellories of our rulers new and magic potions—not, however, to be administered until after the job of war is done and victory gained.

The finest ingredients only are being used. There is a “charter” containing “freedom” and “social justice”; competing with it is a “new world order” and even an “asiatic co-prosperity sphere.”

So far there are no signs anywhere of the working-class being dazzled by these verbal rays of “sunshine in the future.”

On the contrary, whilst workers are generally in support of their rulers at conflict, their reactions to these promises of a better world after the war are largely negative. They fight more out of a feeling that they would be worse off should they be defeated than the belief that victory will bring a “quasi utopia.” At the present time the workers are not given much to speculation about the future. The personal problems which the war has brought into every working-class home are intense. Like the shadows they are, shadows of a dark age, they cloud the worker’s mind; only the immediate issues are his concern.

But that mood will pass. When it does, he will ask of himself, of his fellow worker: “Must this go on, this world of wars, of poverty and worry? Is it not possible for humanity to find a different plan for living, one that would give us security and peace?”

Then may it be that Socialism will take its rightful place in the consciousness of the workers.

Sid Rubin

50 Years Ago: Happy New Year? (1957)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 1957 issue of the Socialist Standard

Happy New Year?

Another year with all its possibilities—gone.

Another year with all its possibilities—opening upon. us. And—“a Happy New Year” comes lightly from the tongue in conventional salutation: “A Happy New Year and doubtless behind the greeting there is still some measure of real concern for the materialisation of the wish in the person addressed “A Happy New Year”.—Why not? Why should not happiness be in the constant experience of all? Why should not happiness be the normal condition of everybody? Why should it not be as natural for everybody to exult in the joys of living as it is for them to breathe—why is it not?

Because—happiness is conditioned by the available supply of the necessities of life. Deny these to a man and he cannot be happy. And the barest of these necessities are unobtainable (upon Capitalist authority—unobtainable) by at least a third of the people of this, the most prosperous of nations, while the rest of its working population—the population that builds up the “national” prosperity—only just manage, with infinite labour and anxiety, to maintain themselves in a condition of working efficiency.

That is the reason why happiness is not the normal condition of the working population. That is why they have not been happy in the dead year. That is why they cannot be happy in the year just commenced. To wish them “A Happy New Year” which we know they will not get is therefore rather dreary humour and about as useful as wishing the moon were green cheese.

(From the January 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

New Year Resolution. (1927)

From the January 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

On the first of January each year, mankind is afflicted with an attack of a mild epidemic. It breaks out in a rash of New Year Resolutions. It views the soiled and speckled pages of the past and, stricken with remorse, resolves that the clean white page of the future shall incur no blots whatever. Usually some pet affliction is selected for treatment and the penitent resolves that henceforth in that respect he will be blameless. Alas ! Usually in less than a week, the strong chain of habit has settled down into its accustomed place, and the “victim” feels more comfortable. The result is not necessarily a dead loss. He will at least have had the satisfaction of making the resolution, and the added satisfaction of breaking it. There is just the further possibility that if the effort of retrospection is long enough, and intense enough, a train of thought is started that may profoundly modify one’s habits, especially of thought. Most of us are content to let the past sink as rapidly as may be into oblivion, and let that portion of the future that we daily call “the present” flow over us in the easy channels of habit. And yet, consciously or otherwise, we have continually to refer to the past, for it is the past that has made our habits, and it is only there we find experience. It is only by comparing the past with the present that we become aware of change. It is only by this comparison that we discern the lines of change and endeavour to use them to our advantage.

The farther we go back in the past, the greater is the contrast with the present, and the more we examine the interval the more are we made aware of the linked nature of the sequence of events we call history. The uninformed, unimaginative man, the mere creature of habit, is unaware of this process. He views the changes around him as mere waves that at one time seem to tower above him, the next to sink below him, the net result leaving him much at the same level. Events seem disconnected and unrelated. He is the sport of his fears and the slave of the power of suggestion. Change disturbs him and the unfamiliar has simply to be described to him as hurtful, and he flings judgment to the winds and gets panicky. Witness the present use of the words “Moscow” and “Bolshevism.” But had he information and imagination, together with the habit of thought we call judgment, he would not be afraid of foolishly used names. He would discern that events were not simply up and down movements of waves on a surface. He would discover they had direction, a current, a definite line. It is this progression, this linked emergence of the present out of the past, that we call Evolution.

It is not the purpose of this article to go over the events of history and shew their inter-connection. That, however sketchily done, would require a book. In its briefest form, it is doubtful if it has been better done than in our little pamphlet “Socialism,” a miracle of condensation. Here we would simply direct attention to a few events of the past year. It may not be altogether inapplicable to start with an occurrence at the Lord Mayor’s banquet in November, 1925, when A. Chamberlain drank from the “loving cup” with the German Ambassador. Though not in itself an “event,” it was an indication of the point we wish to emphasise—the speed with which contemporary history is moving. Only seven years previously the Germans were so abominably vile as to be outside the pale of all civilised intercourse. At that time the only good German was a dead one. A phrase like “never again” was the least adamant of the slogans for the future. And yet within seven short years Mr. Chamberlain and the “Huns” have their noses in the same trough. Then followed Locarno, a subject we dealt with in our May issue. Perhaps the most significant comment on Locarno from a Capitalist standpoint was contained in the Financial News of October 23rd. It said :

“But the ultimate aim of German producers has been to draw other European countries into international agreements to prevent ruinous competition for the reduced world demand. This aim blossomed out after the Locarno treaties had given the stamp of respectability to agreements between former enemies.”

Particularly note that last sentence. Locarno was the first time it was considered expedient the general public of Europe should know how intimate the relations of international capital had become.

Possibly the General Strike was the next in order of sequence, when the workers once more demonstrated the futility of fighting capitalism with the weapon of passive starvation. But next in order of significance was the formation of the European Steel Trust. This was followed by the meeting—the very secret meeting—of German and British capitalists at the house of Colonel Wilfrid Ashley. Or did the meeting precede the Steel Trust? However, it does not matter much, for the £65,000,000 chemical combine was the next thing to occupy attention, followed by the huge newspaper deals of Berry Bros, and the incorporation of the White Star Line in a huge Shipping Trust.

We submit that these huge agglomerations of capital, and especially those of international capital, are intensely significant. Their most significant feature is the speed at which they are being consummated. We suggest that it is a possible indication of the fact that capitalism is entering upon its last phase. Pursued far enough it can have but one effect upon the international working class. The same or a much greater quantity of goods can be produced with a less expenditure of labour-power. This will mean an intensification of the unemployed problem and, as was shewn in our article on “Mass Production” last month, a worsening of working class conditions generally.

As we have indicated, the present is the child of the past, and, as the Financial News says in the issue mentioned :

“The Cartel movement must be regarded as the economic expression of a tendency that is at work also in politics and social matters : the tendency towards international co-operation.”

Naturally the Financial News means capitalist co-operation. After mentioning that Great Britain is inextricably bound up with the Continent, it says :

“In any case, this country must hasten the centralisation of the organisation of her industries. This is essential, whether we co-operate or compete. Happily, there are signs that our industrial statesmen realise the necessity. In some cases British industries have taken the lead in forming agreements with the Continent; examples are the International Explosives agreement, brought about by Nobels, and the artificial silk agreements between Courtaulds and the Glanzstoff Fabriken. The British chemical combine may soon be included in a Continental agreement.”

Now, to the working class, the lesson of all this should be clear. Unless they organise to take and control these great social forces, they will soon be the hopeless serfs of gigantic monopolies embracing whole continents. The huge numbers of them that still find employment through the waste of competition will be slowly relegated to the more or less permanently unemployed.

What are the workers doing about it? Here are their masters swiftly but calmly organising into larger and still larger combines, nationally and internationally. They speak quite refreshingly of the growing hindrance of tariffs and frontiers. They pause in their task of unveiling war memorials to their slaughtered serfs, and have a friendly little chat with their late enemies as to sharing the loot. We are faced with the greatest aggregations of capital the world has ever seen. It is here, now, growing with a speed that yesterday was thought inconceivable. It is for the workers to decide, and at once. This New Year they must make a resolution that they will break at their peril. The peril will be there even if they do not make the resolution. They must resolve that Socialism is a live issue, to be decided now, in the immediate present. They must drift no longer. Those who are convinced of the truth of our position must realise that there is but one place for a logical Socialist—inside our ranks. Only the direct reasons should prevent him joining us. If Socialism is worth anything, it is worth the utmost we can give it. If we only acutely visualise the world this can be under Socialism, we shall count nothing we give, no service we render, too great a sacrifice, if it serves our glorious aim. We have but to imagine our present world, intensified by the events foreshadowed, to nerve ourselves for the task. Come, then, the cause is worthy. Who will help?

W. T. Hopley

Editorial: What of the future? (1926)

From the January 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialism and Present Tendencies.

It is usual at this season of the year to review the past and see what hopes the future holds out for us. There is no particular reason for doing this beyond the fact that it is customary. The problems with which we are grappling; confront us at all seasons of the year, whether the date be the first of January or the 1st of July.

For the moment we need not worry about the Locarno Pact, which promises Europe peace and larger and more deadly armaments ; nor need we worry about the great Irish Agreement which has brought a “settlement” at last to the difficulties of that benighted land, and a civil war between the Northern Government and its Special Police; nor even need we stop to ponder over the Lloyd George Land Scheme, which bids fair to be nipped in the bud by the cheap trips to Canada and Australia, arranged by our benevolent Government which, evidently quite rightly, believes that one can starve as comfortably abroad as at home. These matters can be fittingly discussed in another place.

A disinterested observer, if such could exist, would surely marvel that a proposition, so simple in its main features, as Socialism, receives such scanty attention from the disinherited—the very people to whom it offers so much.

Socialism offers to the hungry the means to fill their stomachs, to the idle congenial work, to the overworked abundant leisure, to those in tatters sound and comely raiment, and to the homeless a roof, society and laughter. Yet the bulk of the people to whom it offers these things treat it with derision or apathy. Why? What are the main obstructions that hinder the majority from accepting the Socialist outlook?

The first important difficulty is that Socialism is something new, it demands a break from the traditional ways of looking at things and it is therefore disturbing to most people. All new ideas and outlooks are disturbing, and that is why they make such slow progress at first. Times are so hard, life is so burdensome, to the majority of people that they desire to escape from its hardships every moment they can. Socialism signifies thinking over these hardships, and consequently it is distasteful, A drink, a heart-to-heart talk, a listen-in, a dance, a football match—these are distractions, moments during which the wear and tear of life are forgotten, consequently they are sought after as the opium of the toiler. The modern worker uses up so much of his mental and manual energy in the service of the employer that he avoids, as much as possible, whatever calls for the exertion of serious thought after the work of the day is done. When once a worker is persuaded to think seriously about his social position, and made to see that there is a gleam of hope, a possible pathway out of his troubles for ever, then the disinclination to consider the new point of view disappears. The difficulty is to get him to start, to overcome the particular form of mental inertia that prevails.

The masters, who have a privileged position to lose, are made well acquainted with these facts, and see that whatever means are available shall be used to throw dust in the workers’ eyes. From press, pulpit, and platform the workers are taught that things have always been much as they are to-day, and it is divinely ordained that they will remain so for the future.

The paid advocates of the present order of slavery steer, more or less skilfully, among such disturbing influences as wars, peace treaties, strikes, and the like, with the basic object of keeping secure the profits of the employers and retaining the blind allegiance of employed. Much money and effort is spent in developing welfare schemes, arranging fruitless commissions of enquiry, and providing amusement and entertainment to absorb harmlessly energies that might otherwise be directed towards the abolition of a privileged class.

For many years a standing menace to capitalist states has been the growing army of unemployed. In England, however, they have at the moment met the difficulty in a way that takes the edge off the menace and spikes the guns of the disgruntled. The much-discussed “dole” at least minimises the danger of bread riots, and its qualifying clauses serve to intimidate many who might otherwise endanger the stability of the System.

Along with this there is a boom in certain of the sciences just now, and knowledge is increasing in the ranks of the intelligentsia (who conduct affairs on behalf of the masters) of the best way to deal with men, individually and in groups, not only for the purpose of increasing the amount of wealth produced per man, but also for the purpose of blinding and misleading the wealth producers as to their true interests.

So far has this latter idea progressed that it has induced, in at least one man of science, a profound gloom. Bertrand Russell in “Icarus” expresses himself as follows on the future outlook :—

“The effects of psychology on practical life may in time become very great. Already advertisers in America employ eminent psychologists to instruct them in the technic of producing irrational belief; such men may, when they have grown more proficient, be very useful in persuading the democracy that Governments are wise and good. . . .

More sensational than tests of intelligence is the possibility of controlling the emotional life through the secretions of the ductless gland. …. assuming an oligarchic organisation of society, the State could give to the holders of power the disposition required for command, and to the children of the proletariat the disposition required for obedience. Against the injections of the State physicians the most eloquent Socialist oratory would be powerless.”

Such is the outlook for the future according to one professor.

But Bertrand Russell is not the only one who is gloomy and full of foreboding.

In the latter days of the war and in the period immediately following the Armistice there was a boom in “Red Revolution.” Pamphlets were poured out in abundance, and mass meetings were held all over the country. In fact many thought the “revolutionary moment” had come and the day of emancipation was at hand.

Since then there has been a gradual downward tendency. One by one the “heroic” figures, that loomed large in the eye of labour, have stepped off the stage and quietly vanished. The names that are now writ large are not the names of yesterday. Most of the men of yesterday are now completely forgotten, although the false flags they waved have been taken up by those that have stepped into the shoes of the departed. But the doleful cry of “what is the good of it all?” has found favour with multitudes of enthusiastic but misguided people, and there is desertion from the camp of the “Reds” and the whitey Reds.

At the end of the war the promises in the Labour movement were fair, but the accomplishments have been foul.

On the one side the advantages gained whilst labour was at a premium during the war have one by one been given up under the guidance of leaders who took the side of the masters, urging and cajoling workers into accepting lower wages and working harder on the plea of “saving the country from bankruptcy.”

On the other side the “success” of Russia was held up as an example of what would be accomplished in this country by methods such as “Soviets of the Streets,” strikes, and other action outside of Parliament and in face of a parliamentary majority pledged to support the present state of affairs.

But opportunism, whether of the pale or the lurid red, alike lands us in the quagmire, or the shambles; and the successors of those who promised a “world revolution” by 1921 are now languishing in jail for indulging in wild talk at trade union rates !

Whatever value the work of the Russian Communists may have had in Russia, its general effect upon the movement outside has ultimately been disastrous to the movement towards Socialism, and the full extent of the evil has probably not yet been reached. It was and is a deadening power on educative propaganda. Its failure to redeem its promise has armed the opponents of Socialism with a false argument that they have not been backward in using to the utmost. Russian propaganda has put back the clock of revolution many years. It has accomplished this in five different ways. It has helped the capitalist to maintain an iron dictatorship over the workers. It has spread widely false ideas as to how to accomplish the Social Revolution. By the failure of its methods, both in Russia and outside, it has driven into despair and apathy some of the most active and valuable elements in the ranks of the working class ; it has placed in the hands of our enemies a powerful weapon — illustration — to use against us; and finally it has cleared the ground for the progress of those capitalist hirelings—the labour leaders—whose position was previously being rapidly undermined. Since the Russian Upheaval the reformist Labour Parties have made rapid strides almost everywhere.

But the wave that recedes returns with redoubled force when the tide is coming in— and come in the tide of Revolution surely will and must.

Need we be unduly disturbed then at the apparently slow pace of progress? Not at all. The battle is to the strong, and the strong are they who have the patience to persist in the path that alone leads to victory. It is not enough to have a burst of enthusiasm that fades away if the harvest does not come in a few short years of effort. It is necessary to know that however long and hard the road, it is the only road, and there is surely the promised land at the end.

When looking back at past revolutions, one is apt to forget that they were the product of years of preparation, and that the forces preparing them were nearest ripening at the moment when the future looked darkest. This was true particularly of the English and French Revolutions, which appear on the surface to have been the sudden and spontaneous uprising of popular passion.

The question so often put by people in moments of pessimism, when bad health or social stress blacken their outlook, “Shall we see Socialism in our time?” is really a superfluous question. One complete answer to it is that the progress towards Socialism is in direct ratio to the amount of effort put in by those who understand and desire it. Another answer is that the unborn generations will have little sympathy for those who abandon the struggle on the slender grounds of their own immediate feelings. Yet another answer is that the servile crew who abandon the struggle under the influence of such a consideration deserve the kicks that are the recompense of slaves. And, finally, who is there with such prophetic vision that he can foretell, with any degree of accuracy worth consideration, how long the mass of the people will groan under the yoke of slavery in face of a spreading tide of education that neither pulpit, press, platform nor police can stem? Just as a close-kept secret will out some day, so a view such as Socialism, however harshly it may be surpassed, will take root and flourish, often flourishing all the more strongly on account of that very suppression.

In conclusion, we would like to address a few personal remarks to you, who belong to the unconverted. What do you want? Do you love slavery? Do you want your children and your children’s children to be born into slavery, making the means for others enjoyment while they toil in poverty and misery? What is the use of toiling, week in and week out. for the sake of a smoke, a drink, and a football match? You make the earth fruitful, the mine and the factory belch forth their riches. But these are not for you who have gained them by the power of your muscles and the fertility of your brains. These riches belong to those who live upon you and bleed you of the product of your labour. They twist your intelligence into channels favourable to their welfare and your ill, and you let them enjoy the things that you have made because they have taught you some great natural law or some unscrutable power has decreed that it shall be so. There is no power outside of custom and the things born of the economic organisation of society, and these are things that you can alter when you will. But to achieve alteration you must rid yourselves of false notions of others superiority, false ideas of a natural order of social privilege, and the pessimism which keeps the servile mark of slavery upon your brow.

Past, Present, Future: Happy New Year! (1963)

From the January 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have all come across the old joke (and some of its more doubtful variations) about a Happy New Year To All Our Readers. Well, ask the Socialist Standard whether it joins in this wish and our answer is No—and then again, Yes.

Because “Happy New Year” has become for many workers something more than a wish—almost, in fact, a prayer. The turn of the year is for them something of a mystic moment, charged with superstitious undertones, when something wonderful happens which changes their fortunes for the next twelve months. They have a simple faith that the New Year will see the end of what they call their Bad Luck. (How many times is poor old Luck blamed for something which is nothing to do with him? It is Bad Luck when a worker is redundant or when he can't get a house or when he cops one in the army in the war.)

The New Year, many workers hope, will usher a new rhythm into their lives, will bring success, security, happiness—even riches, perhaps. So if they wish each other a Happy New Year—and silently reserve the same wish for themselves—it is as a supplication to the mystic moment.

We have no desire to be churlish. It is a pleasant enough thing that we should wish each other, at any time, happiness in the future. And perhaps we might as well do this at the arbitrary moment when one year changes to another as at any other time. But we should also think a little more deeply about the wish and ask ourselves one or two questions about it. Most of all we should ask what we are doing to give it some chance of becoming more than a wish, of becoming reality.

For most people, the answer to this question is: Nothing. Each January they trot out the same formal, meaningless sentiments which they coyly call the Compliments of the Season, with never a thought for what the compliments are worth. Wanly, confusedly, they hope that the wish will change something.

But nothing changes—nothing, at any rate, that matters. Year by year capitalism produces the same problems and continues to provide excuses for the wish-mongers to exercise their mysticism. Let us go back, for example, over the recent files of the Socialist Standard to see what we had to worry and to wish about in Januarys past.

Take 1958. We were urging our readers to Get It Straight and to realise that the reformists' schemes had failed miserably to improve our lot. “The Labour Party,” we said, “ is back where it started, looking for another cure for the housing problem within capitalism.” Housing! How many workers pin their hopes for a better 1963 upon getting out of the prefab, or the furnished room, or the accommodation centre, and moving into a house? How many hope that they will not still be living in a slum this time next year? Yet all the efforts of capitalism’s reformers, all the promises and all the wishes, have no effect on the problem of bad housing.

The slums increase faster than new housing—some of it the slums of the not so distant future—can be put up. The tragic figure of homeless families in London climbs higher month by month. The politicians talk on. The promises are heaped one upon the other, like a bricklayer laying his bricks. Last November 1st, Sir Keith Joseph, the latest Minister of Housing, was promising again to speed up slum clearance and to accelerate the progress of most elements of the housing programme and to keep the pace up until “the housing of the entire nation is decent.” (Sir Keith, of course, already lives in a pretty decent house himself, in the posher part of Chelsea.)

We have seen housing ministers come and go and we have heard many, many promises. We shall be hearing them this time next year and the year after that, and so on, until we have a world in which homes are built for humans to live in and not as a source of profit for somebody who would not want to be found dead in them.

Take 1961. Then, we were exposing the myth of high wages for the working class—the myth which is trumpeted almost every day from the capitalist press —and pointing out that the coming year, like many before it, was an uncertain one for capitalism's economy. For many industries uncertainty was in the air, as they anxiously asked themselves whether they would be able to sell as much of their products as they needed to during 1961. The Selwyn Lloyd budget in July of that year bore out some of the newspapers' predictions that such measures were on the way—at the same time as it showed up those who expected a bumper year for the British economy. The workers who had been earning the mythically high wages found them under attack in the wages pause. There is some reason to think that the government realised that the pause.could have only a limited usefulness—to hold down some wages for a comparatively short time—and that this object was achieved. This may or may not be true. What we should be concerned with here is the fact that wages never live up to the dreams which many workers have for them. They are never free of restriction.

Wage restraint

If we consider only the post-war history of this country, for example, we can see that whichever party has been in power has had a consistent policy of holding down wages. Sometimes this has been tried by exhortation, by appeals to the T.U.C., and so on. Sometimes it has been tried by measures like the Lloyd pause, with its deliberate going-back on the arbitration machinery which the government once said they held in such high regard. Sometimes it has been by a disguised cut in wages, as happened when the Labour government devalued the pound in 1949.

Wages are never all that workers wish them to be. They can never provide more than the wherewithal to recharge our energies so that we are ready for another bout of profit-making. If any of us look back on our lives and consider the wages which we have earned and spent, and if we look forward to the wages we expect to earn in the future, we shall know it is true that over a period of time the money we earn is generally just about enough to get us a living. This remains a fact as much for the times when there is not much chance of successful wage-pushing (such as before the war) as it does for the times when wage claims have a fair chance of success, such as we have had for most of the time since the war.

Yet how many workers' hopes for a brighter 1963 rest upon their expectations of a rise? And how many will be disappointed, by the inevitability of capitalism fighting rises, by the fact that their wages actually fall because they are on short time or are redundant, or because they get their rise and find that like so many which they have had before it is swallowed by rising prices?

Take now last January's Socialist Standard, which was largely devoted to the Common Market. To many people—including some of capitalism's economic experts—the Common Market is the key to many problems. If Britain goes in, they argue, her industries will have access to an immense market into

which they can pump their goods. Factories over here will have to go full out to satisfy the demand. Everybody wilt be working which means, to most workers, that everybody will be happy. To those who take this view the future, if British capitalism joins, is rosy.

Last January we pointed out the falseness of this rosy outlook. “. . . those who think that the Common Market will end the workers' troubles are equally in error,” we said, “. . . The European Common Market is not a different kind of capitalist entity—only a larger one." Perhaps some of our readers thought that we were crying sour grapes. Now read on.

Last December, Ministers of the twenty member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which covers North America and Western Europe, were meeting in Paris to discuss the prospects for the coming year. Were they absorbed in the problems of containing a great surge of prosperity during 1963? Did they find that they had to chew over the prospects of abundance and happiness flooding across Europe and America during the next twelve months? They did not. Reported The Guardian on 23rd November: "Experts agree that there may be a recession on both sides of the North Atlantic in 1963.” If the experts are right (which has been known) we may be sure that the Common Market countries will feel the force of the slump. For, as we wrote last January, the European Economic Community has not been able to solve the serious unemployment problem of at least one of its members. Italy then had 1,350,000 out of work—nearly seven per cent. of its working population, after having exported hundreds of thousands of its workers to other countries.

None of the economic organisations with which capitalism tries to sort out its muddles can have any effect upon the system's basic anarchies. The Common Market cannot stop slumps and unemployment. Neither can the other organisations like OECD, one of whose members—Canada—currently has seven per cent. of its labour force out of work. Yet how many hopes for a happier 1963 are based on the expectation of a secure job and the trust that capitalism can somehow provide this?

Prospects for 1963

Bluntly, the prospects for 1963 are no better than ever. We know that capitalism will give workers all over the world insecurity and unemployment. It will grind out poverty and restriction and condemn millions of people to live, drab, inadequate lives. It may even give us frights like Cuba. Whatever it brings, we know that when the next New Year comes around we shall still be hearing the same meaningless wishes. Perhaps, if we stretch a point, we can say that there is nothing so wrong in the wish in itself. The danger lies in its escapist implications, in the fact that although they may wish each other good fortune, the majority of workers solidly act all the time against their own interests—against, in fact, their own good wishes. It would be far better if they all began to work for what could be a really happier future.

Socialism will finish the insecurities and the anomalies which blight our lives from one end of the year to another. The best we can wish ourselves is that the world working class will get enough understanding of society to throw off the system which restricts and condemns them and replace it with one in which happiness and plenty are no longer an empty dream.

The inadequacies of capitalism will play their part in bringing them to this. So to our readers in the slums and the prefabs and in the other drab, poky working class homes; to the unemployed and to those who know that their living is insecure; to those who hate and fear war: to all those who wish and work for a world fit for humans to live in; and to those who will not misunderstand the wish; to all of these—a Happy New Year.

Ivan

Editorial: Twenty twenty-two (2022)

Editorial from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

Why do we in the Socialist Party frequently focus upon events outside Great Britain?

It is because we endeavour to express the interests of the worldwide working class. Anything that harms or helps our fellow workers anywhere is the concern of socialists everywhere.

Our New Year Resolution is to continue our work to get workers everywhere to reject capitalism, abandon the illusion that a broken system can be fixed, and aspire to work for genuine change by building a society rooted in relationships of reciprocity with one another while respecting the planet. This world and its laws are set up to protect property owners and commerce, not the people or the planet.

More and more people are becoming aware that the current capitalist system works against them with government austerity and a rightward drift of politics bringing many issues that have existed for years out into the open where they are more difficult to deny or dismiss. The growing oligarchy and the power of the plutocrats will hopefully stir and ignite working people to take action and to demand change. But such progress will only occur if we prepare to educate and organise for it.

What is needed is to tackle the economic system itself – based as it is on class ownership and production for profit and which is at the root of all our problems – and not just the thousands upon thousands of injustices that are symptoms of it. The workers’ movement must connect the dots to a real solution. Everyone has to be all-in for rebuilding society. There is much to do – but change is possible. More people have grown active and started to make links, and many of these are seeds of change that socialists can nurture and grow.

We in the Socialist Party have no illusions that this work will be easy. Those in power will do all that they can to misdirect the workers’ efforts. Our task is to maintain the focus on our end goal and not to be side-tracked by false or partial solutions but to connect all the single-issue movements into one unified, powerful force.

Otherwise, 2022 will give us more of the same that we experienced the year before and the year before that: wars, disease, hunger, economic crises, poverty, senseless tragedies, intolerance, hatred and apathy.

New bosses will prove to be much the same as the old ones. The rich will get richer, the poor will stay poor. Workers will hate other workers, driven by fear and prejudice.

The power to change things for the better rests with working people, not the politicians. There is a tremendous amount of wilful ignorance of political ideas because there are a great number of people who would rather fight about politics than think about it. Don’t contribute to that problem.

A Happy New Year ! Its empty meaning for the workers. (1925)

From the January 1925 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is usual at this time of year for each of us to greet all and sundry, friends, relatives, acquaintances, and the rest, with a wish that the ensuing year will be a happy one. One can read several lessons in this little practice. One can deduce the overwhelming power of custom which impels whole nations to utter the same commonplaces at the same time. One can be cynical and sneer at the empty meaningless formula that is so easy to utter and so divorced from actuality. One can also be fatuous, and jovially join in the universal quacking whilst also sharing in the universal forgetting which usually follows. But there is another attitude. Our lives are dotted with many such harmless and essentially useless little customs, and we can take advantage of them in just such measure as we can turn them to practical use. The phrase, ”A Happy New Year to you” dies as it is born, for it is just a wish. Few or none ever follow it by a single thought on what would constitute a happy year or on how such a period could be established. There are difficulties, of course.

Happiness is a condition which almost defies definition. Millions have sought it; in fact it might be described as man’s chief pursuit. Of those who claim to have been successful we are in grave doubt. Some have seen in the amassing of worldly goods the clearest road to happiness. Having achieved it scores of them tell us it was not worth the trouble. Others have held that happiness consists in making the fewest possible demands on life; on limiting one’s needs to the most frugal necessities. This view is always suspect. One always wonders if they are cutting their philosophic coat according to their very material cloth. Others speak of a via media, a middle road, perfectly level, and only mildly eventful. From its even surface one benignantly surveys the unhappy rich on the surrounding heights, burdened with great possessions ; and one gazes pityingly into the valley below, where struggle the millions not so burdened. Philosophers, teachers, orators, and preachers, all down the ages have counted their lives well spent in telling mankind how to be happy. Yet mankind is not happy. Like children, mankind usually imagines happiness to consist in the immediate satisfaction of some momentary need. That need satisfied, a short interval finds the elusive bird of happiness has again taken flight, and the eternal chase begins anew. One meets people to whom Fortune has dealt the most stunning blows, and who yet seem to find life a huge joke. One knows others to whom Fate has never been unkind, and who are profoundly miserable.

This is not the most scientific way of examining the question of happiness. One can multiply individual instances until the brain reels, and draw no valid conclusion whatever. So far as one can offer a formula at all, happiness would seem to consist in a frame of mind, varying with individual temperament, wherein it feels good to be alive, born of good health and nourished by good conditions. Complete happiness is too near ecstasy to be possible or even desirable, but we can at least examine the conditions that make or mar our lives, and render them reasonably happy, or the reverse.

First, being living beings, it is essential to happiness that primary necessities should be available for all. These prime needs are self-evidently food, shelter and clothing. Now without following any of the philosophers into obscure discussions on the nature and pursuit of happiness, let us see to what extent we are supplied with the first, elementary ingredients of creative comfort and existence. The columns of this journal have groaned with official figures, giving the numbers of those of us perpetually on the verge of starvation. There is no need to give them again. The daily Press gives constant illustration of wide-spread permanent poverty, and it is a commonplace that millions of Great Britain’s workers have but a nodding acquaintance with a square meal. Food, the first physical requisite of life, is scarce, adulterated, and of doubtful quality.

What of shelter ? Here the situation is more obvious. An empty house is more easily visible than an empty stomach. Our civilisation cannot properly shelter its people. It simply refers to their sorry condition as a “Housing Problem,” and speaks of gradually overtaking it in some 30 or 50 years. The “problem” is tacitly attributed to the war, but the festering slums of Hanley, Ancoats or Sheffield, of Glasgow, Lanark, or Belfast, existed long previous to the war. Just the same terrible tales of big families occupying one room, of verminous tenements, of crime, and immorality due to overcrowding, of dilapidated dwellings, of people living in cowsheds—just the same florid facts used to decorate the daily papers before the war as since. And they had just as much effect. Enough was done to keep capitalist society secure, and little more. The facts are not obscure. Even the Daily Express (Dec. 19), that staunch upholder of things as they are, gives its readers the thrill they love in a column describing present-day conditions in Southwark.

  “Those who travel by tramcar or omnibus along Blackfriars Road or through Stamford Street, or the main roads leading from Blackfriars and the Elephant to London Bridge have no conception of the network of hovels, the jig-saw of warrens on either hand, in which thousands of people exist.

  Warrens ! A rabbit would not live in them. Some of them are nothing more than sewer abodes for human rats.

  Here is a court eight feet wide, with twelve so-called houses in it. No backs to the houses. Each house, two rooms. No place to wash, no place to cook.

   At one end of the court are three open lavatories. At the other end one, and another in the centre. Men, women and children, tenants paying rent that should ensure good cottage accommodation, all use them. Tramps from the alleys, lewd women, anybody could have access. One was locked up. That left four to the whole colony of, say, 100 people.

  “We women dare not approach these places after dark,” said one young wife whose life has been utterly damned in this network of misery.

  “Look at my home,” she added in an agony of despair.

  There were eight beings existing in the two small dismal rooms.

   “If only I could get out of it!” she cried.

ALL THE SAME.

   I went into house after house. There was no sign of alleviation anywhere. I was in miseryland. It was blank tragedy. One of the people spoke quietly in tones of utter despair. Others raved against landlords. Some cursed life itself.”

And so on for a column. And the remedy? None was mentioned.

And then clothing. No figures are needed here. One simply uses one’s eyes and supplements that by personal experience. Is it an exaggeration to state that the vast majority of workers are inadequately clothed and shod, and that most of what they do wear is shoddy?

Then with a perpetual paucity of the three primal necessities, would we not be better employed in searching for the root cause of this simple misery than searching for abstract definitions of happiness. Has there been a great natural famine? Is Mother Nature a niggard? Has some great catastrophe dried up the fountains of well-being? There is no evidence of it. Rather the contrary. We read about a month since of enormous catches of fish in the North Sea. We read also of boat-loads being thrown away so as not to spoil the market. We are told further that millions of acres of food-growing land have gone out of cultivation. We learn also that the Lancashire and Yorkshire textile workers are standing idle, waiting for their cloth to be saleable. Some time back the bootmakers of Kettering, Leicester, Northampton, were starving because of “overproduction,” that is, they had made too many boots. There seems to be something wrong somewhere. Nature appears to be doing her part. It is evidently in this “market” where lies the trouble. Obviously instead of goods being produced to supply human necessities, this can only be done through the medium of a sale. And if a sale cannot be effected the goods remain where they are and the would-be recipient goes without. Evidently, therefore, it is not sufficient for the farmer, the fisherman, the fruit-grower, the cattle-raiser, to know that hungry humanity needs their produce. The builder will not build simply because people want houses. The weaver will not weave solely because we shall perish without clothing. These needs must exist, certainly, but their satisfaction depends entirely upon a sale taking place. But is this not a reasonable state of things ? Do we advocate a system where goods are given away? We do not ! But we say a better system of supplying ordinary physical needs can be evolved than one that introduces starvation as a consequence of plenty. Than one that compels the producers of wealth to hire out their one possession—their power to labour—for the cost of their upkeep. Than one that condemns them to starve in the midst of the plenty they have created because they cannot buy back the whole of their product. We say that human society could be and should be a coherent whole. That all should take part in the necessary work of production, and that all should share in the common result. Can it be done? Let us conclude with an illustration.

Some few months back our astronomers directed their telescopes upon our beautiful celestial neighbour, the planet Mars. Several claimed to have discovered overwhelming proof of the existence thereon of sentient beings. Their difficulties were recognised even at a distance of hundreds of millions of miles, and they had overcome them in a highly ingenious way. Their great enemy, drought, had been met by the construction of tremendous canals that conducted the melting polar snows to the more fertile, warmer regions near their equator. Even the fact that the incidence of sunshine varied in the two hemispheres over a period of thousands of years had been provided for. But one significant thing seemed to escape the reflections of our astronomers. All their observations implied that the Martians viewed their planet as a coherent whole, a common possession. None was guilty of the lunacy of suggesting that the Martians were divided into separate, jealous, warring gangs, each gang subdivided into toilers and parasites. It is not impossible, of course, but all our scientists’ suggestions tacitly recognised that works of such magnitude, directed to a common end, would naturally be the work of beings who had risen superior to the stupid divisions with which we are familiar. Then let us take a celestial leaf from their (possibly nonexistent) book, and view our earth as a common heritage. Let all take part in the winning of wealth from Mother Nature’s storehouse. Then let all share in the result of a co-operative mutual effort. Let us banish slavery, poverty, ignorance and wretchedness to the limbo of forgotten things. You have nothing to lose but your chains : you have a world to win.

W. T. Hopley