CHRISTMAS comes but once a year, we are endlessly told by our rulers to encourage us to make the most of a welcome break from a year of work, for those of us who still have a job, and to make the most of it for those struggling to survive on our miserable benefits regime in the midst of the worst slump since 1929.
The great and the good will make their annual obeisance to the birth of the Jesus, whom they all claim to uphold but whose teachings they ignore for the other 364 days of the year while encouraging the masses to celebrate the “Prince of Peace” in an orgy of eating, drinking and consumer spending.
For a week or so we can put our feet up to live a life that the rich enjoy every day of their parasitical lives. We will be told to think about those needier than ourselves and many of us, will indeed, give generously to beggars or charities. But what we should be thinking about is those much wealthier than ourselves and the rotten capitalist system they uphold and how they’ve got the money to spend every day of the year like Christmas, living off the backs of workers forced to make do with the miserable crumbs left at the rich man’s table.
For some the “needy” now include the worthless banks, whose executive bonuses are at long last are facing a modest increase in income tax. For others “goodwill to all men” is reduced to respect for our “betters” and certainly for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan struggling against imperialist occupation. Meanwhile over in Copenhagen, the masters of imperialism can wring their hands at the plight of global warming while trying to avoid any serious contribution to reversing climate change and attempt to pin the blame for it on the struggling nations of the Third World.
But all’s not well for the bourgeoisie. Their end- of-decade prophesies are full of gloom and doom. Gone are the days of the neo-cons who said that communism was finished and that this was going to be the “New American Century”. Gone are the gurus of capitalism who preached the greatest virtue was the possession of the largest amount of money, argued that socialism was finished and that capitalism was the only game in town. They still defend capitalism but cannot point to a single capitalist country where it does work and turn to neo-Keynesianism and talk about “quantitative easing” as they scrabble around trying to head off financial collapse.
Capitalism, of course, does work for those at the top. That, in the final analysis, is all it is, a system designed to perpetuate the rule of the landowners, industrialists and capitalists. And so it will continue until we end the system altogether.
The entire wealth of the world comes from workers in factories and peasants tilling the land. Yet outside the remaining socialist countries working people only receive a miserable fraction of the wealth they produce through their labour. At the same time the ruling elite live the lives of Roman emperors through the capitalist system that guarantees them ease, health and everything money can buy – all off the backs of the workers. Socialism will end this rotten system once and for all. The sooner the better!
