For plenty of workers 2002 will be a horrible year. Many will have jobs they hate, but are desperate not to lose. Others will have no job and will face another year of the hassle and hardship that entails. Some will have no homes. Thousands will be living in cold and damp conditions.
Those with mortgages may feel like serfs who keep a portion of what they earn and give the rest to the Bank or Building Society. There will be plenty of evictions through failure to be able to pay the rent or keep up mortgage payments. Personal debt will continue to rise. Workers will join the army, not because they want to kill, but because if you are young and unemployed, there is the promise of a wage and training. The same deprivation will drive others into career crime or prostitution. Workers will continue to be killed and injured on the job because of cost cutting in the pursuit of profit. And, of course, people all over the world will continue to suffer and die in warfare, as the battle of each capitalist state against all the others in the fight for raw materials, strategic territory, markets and trade routes causes ever more conflict and barbarism. Millions will starve to death while governments pay farmers not to grow food as there is no profit in it. Looking forward to a capitalist future is a bleak business then. Unless, of course, you are a capitalist. In which case you just keep on exploiting, taking more and giving less and praying to whatever god you've dreamt up that the workers will not rock the boat. In 2002 workers should rock the boat. We should not have waited so long to do it, but now is far better than never. Rocking the boat does not mean kicking out one government just to put another lot in their place. It does not mean looking for "kinder" forms of capitalism. It does not mean going to those who monopolise the world and asking for a bit more. It means taking the lot - deciding we don't want crumbs from the cake, but the whole bakery! We run the whole show for the capitalists already. Either the entire means and instruments for producing wealth become the common property of all of the world's people, or it's going to be more of the same this year. More of the same means capitalism, with all of its hideous problems. But capitalism's problems do not stay static. They develop rapidly and quickly get worse. New threats emerge. As war continues to stalk the earth ever more frighteningly, who's to say what will happen? In the face of this the only practical hope for the workers of the world is to stand up for our class interests and to see that we can refuse to go along with More Of The Same, and start to take control of our own lives. More Of The Same, or a new and better world? Barbarism, or socialism? It's up to us. Jt www.worldsocialism.org http://communities.msn.co.uk/RealWorldSocialism __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
