The year 2021 fast approaches, and the fact it isn’t the year 2020 seems sufficient reason to welcome it!

This year really has been something of an annus horribilis on a global scale.

Kicked off by horrific wildfires in Australia, 2020 has been dominated by COVID-19, a deadly pandemic unprecedented since the ‘Spanish Flu’ tore through a war-weary world in the late-1910s.

Millions of people have lost loved ones to this ghastly disease. So many wonderful lights have been snuffed out.

Humanity has met this coronavirus with courage and solidarity, and it seems there may now be a vaccine-shaped light at the end of the tunnel.

Nevertheless, it’s a relief to see the back of 2020.

But there’s more to look forward to about 2021 than what it isn’t…

It’s going to be a year full of anniversaries from our radical past!

Next month will be 130 years since the birth of the Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), who gave his life as a political prisoner in one of Mussolini’s jails.

March will be the 110th International Women’s Day – the first having been established and celebrated by the socialist movement in central Europe, especially Germany, in 1910.

June 2021 is 150 years since the Trade Union Act was passed in Britain, legalising labour unions for the first time. This was the fruit of decades of struggle by the working class in the country, fighting, dying, and being deported for their right to organise and exert their power collectively.

There are also a few centenaries coming up, including what would have been the 100th birthday of the great Welsh radical – a compatriot of our Company founders! – Raymond Williams (1921-88).

As he used to say,

It’s also set to be a busy year for us at the Radical Tea Towel Company, with our portfolio of radical designs wider than ever (and widening by the month!), and our expansion into Canada going forward in good spirits and with a deepening interest in the richness and diversity of Canadian radical history.

We’ll all need radical history in 2021, more than ever.

The problems we lived through in 2020 – climate catastrophe, Trumpism (if not Trump himself, thankfully), immense global inequalities of wealth and power – won’t end with the Gregorian calendar year. 

It was Gramsci who memorably wrote in 1916 that,

As relieved as we are to be done with such a peculiarly disastrous year, let’s not forget that many of the fundamental problems we lived with during 2020 remain unsolved – climate, racial, gender, and economic justice, to name but a few.

In these struggles for a truly better world, the stories from our radical past will always be a source of resolve, defiance, and inspiration. Nourishment for the soul.

With that promise of much more radical history to come, all that’s left is to do is, at last, bid farewell to 2020 – and a Happy 2021 to you!