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
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