The New Year—A New World?
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 theI 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.
S. R