George Walford: Interested in Being Alive?

The party pamphlet Questions of the Day (1978) tells us that “in Britain about 90 per cent of the adult population are workers, retired workers or the dependants of workers” (p. 5). That amounts to something over forty million people. The same pamphlet says capitalism “can never be made to work in the interests of the workers” (p. 8). Since capitalism obviously does work in a way that enables these forty plus million people to live, the party is saying it is not in their interest to be alive.

Perhaps we have misunderstood what they mean when they claim that socialism will solve social problems. The dead have no problems.

from Ideological Commentary 19, July 1985.