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Chapter 13
And finally, is there anything one can do about it?
In the first part of this book I illustrated, by a few brief
sidelights, the kind of mess we are in; in this second part I have been
trying to explain why, in my opinion, so many normal decent people are
repelled by the only remedy, namely by Socialism. Obviously the most urgent
need of the next few years is to capture those normal decent ones before
Fascism plays its trump card. I do not want to raise here the question of
parties and political expedients. More important than any party label
(though doubtless the mere menace of Fascism will presently bring some kind
of Popular Front into existence) is the diffusion of Socialist doctrine in
an effective form. People have got to be made ready to act as Socialists.
There are, I believe, countless people who, without being aware of it, are
in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, and who could be won over
almost with-out a struggle if only one could find the word that would move
them. Everyone who knows the meaning of poverty, everyone who has a genuine
hatred of tyranny and war, is on the Socialist side, potentially. My job
here, therefore, is to suggest--necessarily in very general terms--how
a reconciliation might be effected between Socialism and its more
intelligent enemies.
First, as to the enemies themselves--I mean all those people who
grasp that capitalism is evil but who are conscious of a sort of queasy,
shuddering sensation when Socialism is mentioned. As I have pointed out,
this is traceable to two main causes. One is the personal inferiority of
many individual Socialists; the other is the fact that Socialism is too
often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of 'progress' which
revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an
aesthetic sense. Let me take the second point first.
The distaste for 'progress' and machine-civilization which is so
common among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It
is not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an
alternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object to mechanization
and standardization--therefore I object to Socialism', you are saying in
effect, 'I am free to do without the machine if I choose', which is
nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the machines
stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the machine-
civilization, probably you are right to hate it, but for the present there
can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The machine-civilization
is here, and it can only be criticized from the inside, because all of us
are inside it. It is only romantic fools who natter themselves that they
have escaped, like the literary gent in his Tudor cottage with bathroom h.
and c., and the he-man who goes off to live a 'primitive' life in the
jungle with a Mannlicher rifle and four wagon-loads of tinned food. And
almost certainly the machine-civilization will continue to triumph. There
is no reason to think that it will destroy itself or stop functioning of
its own accord. For some time past it has been fashionable to say that war
is presently going to 'wreck civilization' altogether; but, though the next
full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previous ones
seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop to mechanical
progress. It is true that a very vulnerable country like England, and
perhaps the whole of western Europe, could be reduced to chaos by a few
thousand well-placed bombs, but no war is at present thinkable which could
wipe out industrialization in all countries simultaneously. We may take it
that the return to a simpler, free, less mechanized way of life, however
desirable it may be, is not going to happen. This is not fatalism, it is
merely acceptance of facts. It is meaningless to oppose Socialism on the
ground that you object to the beehive State, for the beehive State is here.
The choice is not, as yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is
simply between Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism
with the virtues left out.
The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism
but to make up his mind to humanize it. Once Socialism is in a way to being
established, those who can see through the swindle of 'progress' will
probably find themselves resisting. In fact, it is their special function
to do so. In the machine-world they have got to be a sort of permanent
opposition, which is not the same thing as being an obstructionist or a
traitor. But in this I am speaking of the future. For the moment the only
possible course for any decent person, however much of a Tory or an
anarchist by temperament, is to work for the establishment of Socialism.
Nothing else can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of
the future. To oppose Socialism now, when twenty million Englishmen are
underfed and Fascism has conquered half Europe, is suicidal. It is like
starting a civil war when the Goths are crossing the frontier.
Therefore it is all the more important to get rid of that mere nervous
prejudice against Socialism which is not founded on any serious objection.
As I have pointed out already, many people who are not repelled by
Socialism are repelled by Socialists. Socialism, as now presented, is
unattractive largely because it appears, at any rate from the outside, to
be the plaything of cranks, doctrinaires, parlour Bolsheviks, and so forth.
But it is worth remembering that this is only so because the cranks,
doctrinaires, etc., have been allowed to get there first J if the movement
were invaded by better brains and more common decency, the objectionable
types would cease to dominate it. For the present one must just set one's
teeth and ignore them; they will loom much smaller when the movement has
been humanized. Besides, they are irrelevant. We have got to fight for
justice and liberty, and Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the
nonsense is stripped off it. It is only the essentials that are worth
remembering. To recoil from Socialism because so many individual Socialists
are inferior people is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you
dislike the ticket-collector's face.
And secondly, as to the Socialist himself--more especially the
vocal, tract-writing type of Socialist.
We are at a moment when it is desperately necessary for left-wingers
of all complexions to drop their differences and hang together. Indeed this
is already happening to a small extent. Obviously, then, the more
intransigent kind of Socialist has now got to ally himself with people who
are not in perfect agreement with him. As a rule he is rightly unwilling to
do so, because he sees the very real danger of watering the whole Socialist
movement down to some kind of pale-pink humbug even more ineffectual than
the parliamentary Labour Party. At the moment, for instance, there is great
danger that the Popular Front which Fascism will presumably bring into
existence will not be genuinely Socialist in character, but will simply be
a manoeuvre against German and Italian (not English) Fascism. Thus the need
to unite against Fascism might draw the Socialist into alliance with his
very worst enemies. But the principle to go upon is this: that you are
never in danger of allying yourself with the wrong people provided that you
keep the essentials of your movement in the foreground. And what are the
essentials of Socialism? What is the mark of a real Socialist? I suggest
that the real Socialist is one who wishes--not merely conceives it as
desirable, but actively wishes--to see tyranny overthrown. But I fancy
that the majority of orthodox Marxists would not accept that definition, or
would only accept it very grudgingly. Sometimes, when I listen to these
people talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the
impression that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a
kind of exciting heresy-hunt--a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch-
doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of 'Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell
the blood of a right-wing deviationist!' It is because of this kind of
thing that it is so much easier to feel yourself a Socialist when you are
among working-class people. The working-class Socialist, like the working-
class Catholic, 's weak on doctrine and can hardly open his mouth without
uttering a heresy, but he has the heart of the matter in him. He does grasp
the central fact that Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, and the
'Marseillaise', if it were translated for his benefit, would appeal to him
more deeply than any learned treatise on dialectical materialism. At this
moment it is waste of time to insist that acceptance of Socialism means
acceptance of the philosophic side of Marxism, plus adulation of Russia.
The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical
materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the
oppressors. You have got to attract the man who means business, and you
have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed Liberal who wants foreign Fascism
destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends
peacefully--the type of hum-bug who passes resolutions 'against
Fascism and Communism', i.e. against rats and rat-poison. Socialism means
the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as abroad. So long as you keep
that fact well to the front, you will never be in much doubt as to who
are your real supporters. As for minor differences--and the profoundest
philosophical difference is unimportant compared with saving the twenty
million Englishmen whose bones are rotting from malnutrition--the time to
argue about them is afterwards.
I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials,
but certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would
help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still
clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals
and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and
every vegetarian, teetotaller, and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn
Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, is not
going to happen. What is possible, however, is for the more intelligent
kind of Socialist to stop alienating possible supporters in silly and quite
irrelevant ways. There are so many minor priggishness which could so easily
be dropped. Take for instance the dreary attitude of the typical Marxist
towards literature. Out of the many that come into my mind, I will give
just one example. It sounds trivial, but it isn't. In the old Worker's
Weekly (one of the forerunners of the Daily Worker) there used to be a
column of literary chat of the 'Books on the Editor's Table' type. For
several weeks miming there had been a certain amount of talk about
Shakespeare; whereupon an incensed reader wrote to say, 'Dear Comrade, we
don't want to hear about these bourgeois writers like Shakespeare. Can't
you give us something a bit more proletarian?' etc., etc. The editor's
reply was simple. 'If you will turn to the index of Marx's Capital,' he
wrote, 'you will find that Shakespeare is mentioned several times.' And
please notice that this was enough to silence the objector. Once
Shakespeare had received the benediction of Marx, he became respectable.
That is the mentality that drives ordinary sensible people away from the
Socialist movement. You do not need to care about Shakespeare to be
repelled by that kind of thing. Again, there is the horrible jargon that
nearly all Socialists think it necessary to employ. When the ordinary
person hears phrases like 'bourgeois ideology' and 'proletarian solidarity'
and 'expropriation of the expropriators', he is not inspired by them, he is
merely disgusted. Even the single word 'Comrade' has done its dirty little
bit towards discrediting the Socialist movement. How many a waverer has
halted on the brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched self-
conscious Socialists dutifully addressing one another as 'Comrade', and
then slid away, disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar! And his
instinct is sound; for where is the sense of sticking on to yourself a
ridiculous label which even after long practice can hardly be mentioned
without a gulp of shame? It is fatal to let the ordinary inquirer get away
with the idea that being a Socialist means wearing sandals and burbling
about dialectical materialism. You have got to make it clear that there is
room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up.
And this raises a great difficulty. It means that the issue of class,
as distinct from mere economic status, has got to be faced more
realistically than it is being faced at present.
I devoted three chapters to discussing the class-difficulty. The
principal fact that will have emerged, I think, is that though the English
class-system has outlived its usefulness, it has outlived it and shows no
signs of dying. It greatly confuses the issue to assume, as the orthodox
Marxist so often does (see for instance Mr Alee Brown's in some ways
interesting book. The Fate of the Middle Classes), that social status is
determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt, there are only two
classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of
classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood
are not only very different but--this is the essential point--generally
persist from birth to death. 'Hence the anomalous individuals that you find
in every class of society. You find writers like Wells and Bennett who have
grown immensely rich and have yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class
Nonconformist prejudices; you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their
aitches; you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of
the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are
considered) the bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys
ruling Indian provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If
social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification,
the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income
dropped below L200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately
becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old
School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire, though
sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and leams a B.B.C. accent, seldom
succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in
fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you
have been born.
As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow commoner. You don't get
more aitchless millionaires, but you do get more and more public-school men
touting vacuum cleaners and more and more small shopkeepers driven into the
workhouse. Large sections of the middle class are being gradually
proletarianized; but the important point is that they do not, at any rate
in the first generation, adopt a proletarian outlook. Here am I, for
instance, with a bourgeois upbringing and a working-class income. Which
class do I belong to? Economically I belong to the working class, but it is
almost impossible for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the
bourgeoisie. And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with,
the upper class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the
working class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I
personally, in any important issue, would side with the working class. But
what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in
approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class,
running into millions this time--the office-workers and black-coated
employees of all kinds--whose traditions are less definitely middle class
but who would certainly not thank you if you called them proletarians? All
of these people have the same interests and the same enemies as the working
class. All are being robbed and bullied by the same system. Yet how many of
them realize it? When the pinch came nearly all of them would side with
their oppressors and against those who ought to be their allies. It is
quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of
poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working-class in sentiment; this
being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.
Obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited
middle class before it is too late; above all it must capture the office-
workers, who are so numerous and, if they knew how to combine, so powerful.
Equally obviously it has so far failed to do so. The very last person in
whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or a commercial
traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the 'proletarian' cant
with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order to symbolize the
class war, there has been set up the more or less mythical figure of a
'proletarian', a muscular but downtrodden man in greasy overalls, in
contradistinction to a 'capitalist', a fat, wicked man in a top hat and fur
coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no one in between; the truth
being, of course, that in a country like England about a quarter of the
population is in between. If you are going to harp on the 'dictatorship of
the proletariat', it is an elementary precaution to start by explaining who
the proletariat are. But because of the Socialist tendency to idealize the
manual worker as such, this has never been made sufficiently clear. How
many of the wretched shivering army of clerks and shopwalkers, who in some
ways are actually worse off than a miner or a dock-hand, think of
themselves as proletarians? A proletarian--so they have been taught to
think--means a man without a collar. So that when you try to move them by
talking about 'class war', you only succeed in scaring them; they forget
their incomes and remember their accents, and fly to the defence of the
class that is exploiting them.
Socialists have a big job ahead of them here. They have got to
demonstrate, beyond possibility of doubt, just where the line of cleavage
between exploiter and exploited comes. Once again it is a question of
sticking to essentials; and the essential point here is that all people
with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting
on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about'
capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the
robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending
that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought
home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class
man who has 'come down in the world', the village grocer, the lower-grade
civil servant, and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat,
and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and
the factory-hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is
between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't; for if they
think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches.
I am implying that different classes must be persuaded to act together
without, for the moment, being asked to drop their class-differences. And
that sounds dangerous. It sounds rather too like the Duke of York's summer
camp and that dismal line of talk about class-cooperation and putting our
shoulders to the wheel, which is eyewash or Fascism, or both. There can be
no cooperation between classes whose real interests are opposed. The
capitalist cannot cooperate with the proletarian. The cat cannot cooperate
with the mouse; and if the cat does suggest cooperation and the mouse is
fool enough to agree, in a very little while the mouse will be disappearing
down the cat's throat. But it is always possible to cooperate so long as it
is upon a basis of common interests. The people who have got to act
together are all those who cringe to the boss and all those who shudder
when they think of the rent. This means that the small-holder has got to
ally himself with the factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the
schoolmaster with the garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them
to do so if they can be made to understand where their interest lies. But
this will not happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are
at least as strong as any economic consideration, arc needlessly irritated.
There is, after all, a real difference of manners and traditions between a
bank clerk and a dock labourer, and the bank clerk's feeling of superiority
is very deeply rooted. Later on he will have to get rid of it, but this is
not a good moment for asking him. to do so. Therefore it would be a very
great advantage if that rather meaningless and mechanical bourgeois-
baiting, which is a part of nearly all Socialist propaganda, could be
dropped for the time being. Throughout left-wing thought and writing--and
the whole way through it, from the leading articles in the Daily Worker to
the comic columns in the News Chronicle--there runs an anti-genteel
tradition, a persistent and often very stupid gibing at genteel mannerisms
and genteel loyalties (or, in Communist jargon, 'bourgeois values'). It is
largely hum-bug, coming as it does from bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois
themselves, but it does great harm, because it allows a minor issue to
block a major one. It directs attention away from the central fact that
poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a
fountain-pen.
Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of
about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would be
better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a Fascist.
But if you are constantly bullying me about my 'bourgeois ideology', if you
give me to understand that in some subtle way I. am an inferior person
because I have never worked with my hands, you will only succeed in
antagonizing me. For you are telling me either that I am inherently useless
or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is beyond my power. I
cannot proletarianize my accent or certain of my tastes and beliefs, and I
would not if I could. Why should I? I don't ask anybody else to speak my
dialect; why should anybody else ask me to speak his? It would be far
better to take those miserable class-stigmata for granted and emphasize
them as little as possible. They are comparable to a race-difference, and
experience shows that one can cooperate with foreigners, even with
foreigners whom one dislikes, when it is really necessary. Economically, I
am in the same boat with the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand; remind me
of that and I will fight at their side. But culturally I am different from
the miner, the navvy, and the farm-hand: lay the emphasis on that and you
may arm me against them. If I were a solitary anomaly I should not matter,
but what is true of myself is true of countless others. Every bank clerk
dreaming of the sack, every shop-keeper teetering on the brink of
bankruptcy, is in essentially the same position. These are the sinking
middle class, and most of them are clinging to their gentility under the
impression that it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to start by
telling them to throw away the life-belt. There is a quite obvious danger
that in the next few years large sections of the middle class will make a
sudden and violent swing to the Right. In doing so they may become
formidable. The weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact
that they have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into
combining against you, you may find that you have raised up a devil. We had
a brief glimpse of this possibility in the General Strike.
To sum up: There is no chance of righting the conditions I described
in the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from Fascism,
unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence. It will
have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will
have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we offer
an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize as desirable.
Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda. Less about
'class consciousness', 'expropriation of the expropriators', 'bourgeois
ideology', and 'proletarian solidarity', not to mention the sacred sisters,
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty, and the
plight of the unemployed. And less about mechanical progress, tractors, the
Dnieper dam, and the latest salmon-canning factory in Moscow; that kind of
thing is not an integral part of Socialist doctrine, and it drives away
many people whom the Socialist cause needs, including most of those who can
hold a pen. All that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public
consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the
same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.
As for the terribly difficult issue of class-distinctions, the only
possible policy for the moment is to go easy and not frighten more people
than can be helped. And above all, no more of those muscular-curate efforts
at class-breaking. If you belong to the bourgeoisie, don't be too eager to
bound forward and embrace your proletarian brothers; they may not like it,
and if they show that they don't like it you will probably find that your
class-prejudices are not so dead as you imagined. And if you belong to the
proletariat, by birth or in the sight of God, don't sneer too automatically
at the Old School Tie; it covers loyalties which can be useful to you if
you know how to handle them.
Yet I believe there is some hope that when Socialism is a living
issue, a thing that large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about, the
class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable. In
the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist party that
we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism is
coming; probably a slimy Anglicized form of Fascism, with cultured
policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of
the swastika. But if we do get it there will be a struggle, conceivably a
physical one, for our plutocracy will not sit quiet under a genuinely
revolutionary government. And when the widely separate classes who,
necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have fought side by side,
they may feel differently about one another. And then perhaps this misery
of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of the sinking middle class--
the private schoolmaster, the half-starved free-lance journalist, the
colonel's spinster daughter with L75 a year, the jobless Cambridge
graduate, the ship's officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil
servants, the commercial travellers, and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the
country towns--may sink without further struggles into the working class
where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful
as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.
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