XIII

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 without 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-civilisation which is so commonamong sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It isnot valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes analternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object tomechanisation and standardisation—therefore I object to Socialism', youare 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 themachines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate themachine-civilisation, probably you are right to hate it, but for thepresent there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. Themachine-civilisation is here, and it can only be criticised from theinside, because all of us are inside it. It is only romantic fools whoflatter themselves that they have escaped, like the literary gent in hisTudor cottage with bathroom h and c, and the he-man who goes off to livea 'primitive' life in the jungle with a Mannlicher rifle and fourwagon-loads of tinned food. And almost certainly themachine-civilisation will continue to triumph. There is no reason tothink 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 presentlygoing to 'wreck civilisation' altogether; but, though the nextfull-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previousones seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop tomechanical progress. It is true that a very vulnerable country likeEngland, and perhaps the whole of western Europe, could be reduced tochaos by a few thousand well-placed bombs, but no war is at presentthinkable which could wipe out industrialism in all countriessimultaneously. We may take it that the return to a simpler, freer, lessmechanised way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going tohappen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It ismeaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to thebeehive state, for the beehive state is here. The choice is not, asyet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply betweenSocialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with thevirtues left out.

The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism but to make up his mind to humanise 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; 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 humanised. 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, is 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 a 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 humbug 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, butcertainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It wouldhelp enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which stillclings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandalsand the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, andevery vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to WelwynGarden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, isnot going to happen. What is possible, however, is for the moreintelligent kind of Socialist to stop alienating possible supporters insilly and quite irrelevant ways. There are so many minor priggishnesseswhich could so easily be dropped. Take for instance the dreary attitudeof the typical Marxist towards literature. Out of the many that comeinto my mind, I will give just one example. It sounds trivial, but itisn't. In the old Worker's Weekly (one of the forerunners of theDaily Worker) there used to be a column of literary chat of the 'Bookson the Editor's Table' type. For several weeks running there had been acertain amount of talk about Shakespeare; whereupon an incensed readerwrote to say, 'Dear Comrade, we don't want to hear about these bourgeoiswriters like Shakespeare. Can't you give us something a bit moreproletarian?' etc. etc. The editor's reply was simple. 'If you will turnto the index of Marx's Capital,' he wrote, 'you will find thatShakespeare is mentioned several times.' And please notice that this wasenough to silence the objector. Once Shakespeare had received thebenediction of Marx, he became respectable. That is the mentality thatdrives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement. You donot need to care about Shakespeare to be repelled by that kind of thing.Again, there is the horrible jargon that nearly all Socialists think itnecessary to employ. When the ordinary person hears phrases like'bourgeois ideology' and 'proletarian solidarity' and 'expropriation ofthe expropriators', he is not inspired by them, he is merely disgusted.Even the single word 'Comrade' has done its dirty little bit towardsdiscrediting the Socialist movement. How many a waverer has halted onthe brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watchedself-conscious Socialists dutifully addressing one another as 'Comrade',and then slid away, disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar! Andhis instinct is sound; for where is the sense of sticking onto yourselfa ridiculous label which even after long practice can hardly bementioned without a gulp of shame? It is fatal to let the ordinaryenquirer get away with the idea that being a Socialist means wearingsandals and burbling about dialectical materialism. You have got to makeit 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. Theprincipal fact that will have emerged, I think, is that though theEnglish class-system has outlived its usefulness, it has outlived itand shows no signs of dying. It greatly confuses the issue to assume, asthe orthodox Marxist so often does (see for instance Mr Alec Brown's insome ways interesting book, The Fate of the Middle Classes), thatsocial status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt,there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there isa whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned byeach class in childhood are not only very different but—this is theessential point—generally persist from birth to death. Hence theanomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You findwriters like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and haveyet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices;you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find pettyshopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer andwho, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) thebricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indianprovinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If socialstratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, thepublic-school man would assume a Cockney accent the day his incomedropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediatelybecomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to theOld School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire,though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a BBC 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 intowhich you have been born. As prosperity declines, social anomalies growcommoner. You don't get more aitchless millionaires, but you do get moreand more public-school men touting vacuum cleaners and more and moresmall shopkeepers driven into the workhouse. Large sections of themiddle class are being gradually proletarianised; but the importantpoint is that they do not, at any rate in the first generation, adopt aproletarian outlook. Here am I, for instance, with a bourgeoisupbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to?Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossiblefor 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 upperclass which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the workingclass whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that Ipersonally, in any important issue, would side with the working class.But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are inapproximately the same position? And what about that far larger class,running into millions this time—the office-workers and black-coatedemployees of all kinds—whose traditions are less definitely middleclass but who would certainly not thank you if you called themproletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the sameenemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by thesame system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearlyall of them would side with their oppressors and against those who oughtto be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crusheddown to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterlyanti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-madeFascist 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 symbolise 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 idealise 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 co-operation and putting our shoulders to the wheel, which is eyewash or Fascism, or both. There can be no co-operation between classes whose real interests are opposed. The capitalist cannot co-operate with the proletarian. The cat cannot co-operate with the mouse; and if the cat does suggest co-operation 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 co-operate 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, are 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 humbug, 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 antagonising 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 proletarianise 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 these miserable class-stigmata for granted and emphasise them as little as possible. They are comparable to a race-difference, and experience shows that one can co-operate 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 shopkeeper 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 recognise 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 Anglicised 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 £75 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.

THE END