It will never happen

"Socialists are always warning people; they are always prophets of gloom and doom. Surely life is grim enough without being continually reminded about all the suffering. It might never happen! Why not just try and forget the problems and get on with living."

These are the sorts of things that people sometimes say to us. Even worse, many of those who listen to us and accept the validity of our arguments, show by their failure to get involved in the necessary political action we say is needed for solving our problems that they, too, take refuge in the hope that "it" will never happen. Sometimes, even when "it" has already happened to them - when they have lost their job or have been affected by any of the other miseries that are exclusively visited on members of the working class — rather than confront the problem, they take refuge in the pious hope that "something will turn up".

“It” can be unemployment or bad housing; it can be illness or debt or the problem of an elderly and dependant relative; it can be worry about the kids, about their education or the possibility of them getting into bother with the law; it can be insecurity, anxiety about work or, indeed, any of the other myriad problems that most workers experience.

Few workers escape all of these problems but some manage to escape things like unemployment and slum housing. None, however, can escape some concern for the wider problems that affect the society in which we live. Imbued with the personal survival values of capitalism, some of us may be unconcerned at the fact that about eighty thousand human beings die every day because they, or those responsible for them, can not afford to buy food. No more may we be concerned about the millions who die every year of curable illnesses or from the ravages of hypothermia. If one of the wars that go on every single day is not on our doorstep, it may be easy to forget the victims and the refugees. All the distant problems that we hope might never affect us may be put out of mind but, still, outside the personal problems that we might have so far escaped, there are the very real social problems right here where we live. And they concern all of us.