Press Poems, 30p.
[illegible] the main functions within the economy of men and women in our society, are, for the man, to work, to produce surplus-value for his bosses by his labour, and, for the woman, to re-produce the means of reproduction—in other words to bring up more children within the home to join the labour force. Once these functions are over, once people are too old to do either, then as far as capitalism is concerned they are useless. Flowing from this, the state has no interest in caring for their needs adequately (they are no longer profitable or potentially profitable) and they themselves in turn have no economic weight to fight for a better standard of living. Given all this, we can understand why their social situation is so desperate.
Chris Searle has compiled this short anthology of poems (with some evocative black and white photos) written by these human beings thrown on the scrap-heap of our society. What comes over vividly from the collection is the sharp awareness by many of the writers of the oppressive social relationships which determine their lives. There's the woman whose whole week, her whole life, is defined by the cycle of washing, drying and ironing her clothes. There is the woman whose extreme loneliness has erected the barrier of 'me' and 'they' between her and everyone else in the world—for a concrete exposure of what Marx meant by alienation between man and man, read this poem. And there is the poem by the man who suddenly realises that social benefits, etc. are not the re-distribution of wealth but simply the re-circulation of the working class's share of it.
This collection exhibits a fragmented, partial but extremely moving picture of how the old, because of their oppression, see the world around them, and their position in it. It is a condemnation of the present—a collection which cries out for remedies which only socialism can begin to offer. Pensioners will obviously not be in the front ranks of the barricades, neither will their social weight be decisive in any revolution. Nevertheless the working-class as one of its revolutionary tasks must surely offer them a programme which gives them, and the old of the future, some hope of escaping from the degradation and misery into which capitalist society plunges them.
Lastly, in case one might think that no political lessons can be learnt from the old, one poem is worth quoting in full, for those who still have doubts about the slogan 'No platform for fascists'. It's called October 1936 by Milly Harris:
We stood at Gardiner's corner,
We stood and watched the crowds,
We stood at Gardiner's corner,
Firm, solid, voices loud,
Came the marching of the blackshirts,
Came the pounding of their feet,
Came the sound of ruffians marching
Where the five roads meet.
We thought of many refugees
fleeing from the fascist hordes,
The maimed, the sick,
the young, the old,
Those who had fought the fascist lords.
So we stopped them there at Gardiner's,
We fought and won our way.
We fought the baton charges,
No fascist passed that day!
The book is available from Centreprise, 34 Dalston Lane, London E8, and all the profits will go to the London Trade Union and Joint Old Age Pensioners Committee.
Carl Gardner