A Short Story from the
December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard
"I suppose", said Tomlinson, waving his
hand-rolled Old Holborn as if it were a large, expensive cigar, "you'll be
spending it at home with the family?" I looked at him with a wary
surprise; for three years in that office I had been working under, or perhaps I
should say had been terrified by, him — by the huge temper which sparkled
behind his pebble glasses, by the rage which he regularly turned on me when he
knew he had made a mistake. if I could find the courage, I would hand in my
notice. Now, on this Christmas Eve, I was unnerved by his unaccustomed
affability, with its hint that he saw me as a human being who might after all
live in a home with a family.
Without warning he lunged to grip my shoulder, bared orange
teeth and coaxed across his face, now very close to mine, an expression I had
not seen there before. This was it, I thought — the physical attack I had
feared for so long, and with wing-like gyrations of my elbow I tried to
dislodge his hand. But his grip was strong (he had once been an Olympic
gymnast) and for some seconds we writhed wordlessly at his desk until, as he
panted "Merry Christmas", it dawned on me that he was smiling.
Tomlinson was shipping manager to a small firm which had
begun its life in an office and warehouse in the City of London, importing and
selling chemicals. There was, to put it mildly, a resistance to change there;
the management was entrenched in a traditional formality which, among other
things, ensured that you had to work there for years before you could earn the
prefix "Mister" to your name. Nobody, of course, ever used their
first name and if one of the secretaries got married the rest of the staff
simply continued to call her by her maiden name.
The post-war property boom had blasted the firm out of the
high rents of the City into a modern, bleak building in a west-suburban
industrial estate. Quite a few of the employees lived in the East End and
beyond; before the move they had had a simple journey to work but now each day
they had to travel from one end of the Central Line to the other, reading their
Daily Express and telling each other jokes using their surnames/ Whatever the
reason for such loyalty, it could not have been that the firm were paying high
wages. I know that I was paid well below the going rate and, after one
fearfully sneaked look at his pay packet, I knew that Tomlinson, for all his
airs, was treated no better. Twice a year we got a bonus which was handed out,
after weeks of coy reminders from Tomlinson, as if the firm was swamping us in
generosity.
It was in this mood that Tomlinson approached me that day.
We had just received the Christmas bonus and I suppose he expected my usual
enmity would have been disarmed by gratitude. It was, he may have reasoned, the
season of good will (although there was never any celebration in that firm);
time to repair some of the damage he had done during the rest of the year,
perhaps to catch me off guard with an admission that the firm was a relaxed,
friendly, caring bunch and that Tomlinson was an impulsively warm and festive
personality.
In my gloomier, more penetrative moments I could see that
what might be called right was on their side. Far beyond the passages and
courts of the City, beyond the gimcrack suburbs, the popular christian festival
of Christmas is offered to us just as Tomlinson was offering his hand to me. In
the midst of a war, with thousands dying each day in unimaginable fear and
pain, Christmas is the time for monarchs and statesmen to place special
emphasis on their obscenities about peace and human dignity. A social system in
which an abundantly rich minority live off a grindingly poor majority is justified,
when Christmas comes, in soothing words about the good times which will come
when we have had a change of heart. As millions die each year in famine,
Christmas feeds us with its special brand of hypocrisy. Its festivity is a time
to try to escape an inexorable, horrible reality, for workers to disguise their
impoverished homes in tinsel and coloured paper and to anaesthetise their
tensions at the prospect of the exploitation process waiting to swallow them
again, when the holiday is over and the decorations are a dusty heap in a
corner.
Christmas exists on the delusion that capitalism need be as
it is — indeed, at times that it is not as it is. But this society is not a
matter of human defects. Poverty exists, not because the working class, who suffer
from it, are morally deficient and their masters morally perfect. War lays
waste to life, not through human aggression or acquisitiveness. Society is
blighted by repression, not because its people ignore moral instruction.
It cannot be said too often, or too emphatically, that the
effects of capitalism are unavoidable as long as the system endures. Capitalism
inexorably produces war, poverty and human degradation and these problems will
not be abolished by seeking a change in hearts but through a revolutionary
upheaval. Anything — like the Christmas interlude — which attempts to persuade
us otherwise is an episode in hypocrisy and delusion.
All of this was apparent, as it always was with me, as I
faced Tomlinson that Christmas Eve. I would like to be able to say that I shook
off his hand and told him what I thought of him, of the company he adored, of
the country he gave his loyalty to, of the social system he regarded as the
ultimate in human rationality. But I wasn't up to it so I muttered and shuffled
my feet. reached out for the bill of lading file and immersed myself thankfully
in what Tomlinson called work.
And yes, I did spend it at home with my family, where all
good wage slaves go at Christmas. But there was no escape there; for the family
is not, as the queen so often tells us, a haven of warm security. It may not be
too obvious, around the Christmas fireside, but the family has a role in
capitalism — to socialise us from childhood into an acceptance of capitalism's
privilege-based morality. There was no escape there nor anywhere; the Tories
were not long back in power and Suez lay in the not-too-distant future. It was
still possible before reality set in, for the media bandits to talk about a new
Elizabethan age. I gloomily contemplated capitalism's future and the immediate
fact that after Boxing Day everyone would stop being talkative and replete and
go back to the deprived and furtive personalities of wage-slaves.
I had a rotten Christmas.
Ivan
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