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
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