“Extra! Extra! Socialist dystopia to follow Covid 19, in a new world order great reset!”… “Stasi State to usher in the dawn of Covid Crisis”
Or so run the bourgeois ‘free press’ or free market run press, as it should be labelled.
From the Telegraph, to the Mail, to the Guardian, all media fingers have been pointing to socialist countries such as Cuba and China as to what Britain should not become in the aftermath of this crisis, despite their superb management of Covid 19 and low death rate compared to capitalist countries such as the U.S.A and Britain.
The lies, the slander, the typical spiel of hypocritical finger pointing is nothing new in Britain. As a matter of fact, as far back as 1915 socialist hero Robert Tressell was pointing out the effectiveness of capitalist media on the working class in his novel ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists”.
The archetypical conservative character ‘Crass’, in the book, never sees hope in entertaining thoughts of the possibility of a better fairer world and his hatred of socialism, something which he never really understood, came directly from his exposure to the conservative rag ‘The Obscurer’. Nearly any mainstream media rag could be renamed ‘The Obscurer’ in 21st century Britain.
The job of these rags, we are told, is to provide the ‘news’. However, as we know, nothing in capitalism comes without a price. They may call it the ‘news’, but what is dressed up as news is often lies or advertisements focused on selling you the idea of freedoms, democracy and choice whilst capitalism actually provides you with none of these things.
Recently there has been a saying that has become rather popular : “They are trying to take our freedoms away”. This saying is often thrown at anything which may be perceived as a threat to the existing order. However, we now see it thrown against the British government. Us communists appreciate this statement and sentiment against the British government which we know care nothing for our standard of living. However, we have to ask: What freedoms could they possibly be taking away that they haven’t already taken? Wage slavery is the basis of class society in capitalism. We are free to be slaves of the rich, we are free to choose representatives of the rich, we are free to starve, we are free to make someone else rich from an office or from home, we are free to protest but also free to be beaten to a pulp whenever these protests become too threatening to the ruling class (these police/state beatings are nothing new as many may think).
We have been shackled by poverty and oppression for generations. Covid 19 isn’t going to ‘reintroduce’ poverty and oppression, simply because: poverty and oppression never went away! What we will see in the aftermath of Covid 19 is the heightening of these things. Far from turning into a ‘Stasi State’, we were already living under mass supervision and not from a state determined to weed the fascists out, but a state determined to keep the fascists in and weed the socialists out. A practice that the Labour Party is fully committed to.
Under capitalism there is no compromise, there is the way of the ruling class and there is the flexing of their boot heel upon the neck of the working class. That is the essence of capitalist social democracy.
In the ‘Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ our hero is Frank Owen who tries his best, despite the poverty in which he lives and an illness from which he suffers, to convince his fellow work colleagues of the science of socialism and working-class unity. We must follow his example, we must tear down the rags of the obscurer and show that far from a ‘socialist dystopia’, we were actually living in a capitalist nightmare, a nightmare that will very soon turn to disaster and chaos. By revealing and constantly repeating these things, that to many of you may seem self-evident, by educating ourselves and sharing our knowledge and extending our comradely hand to others even when they may seem to turn us away, we will begin to gaze upon the “golden light that will be diffused throughout all the happy world from the rays of the risen sun of Socialism”.