That settled the
question
once and for all.
Orwell
What had happened?
What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong
thing with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to
be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial
network, drawing interest and profits and spending them — on what? It was fair to say that
life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty,
with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and
unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely
benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge
together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and
technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living
on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose
photographs you can look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always supposing
that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They
were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were
aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their
usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was
not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by
bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition,
they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is
laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one
escape for them — into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by
being UNABLE to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was,
they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the
changes that were going on round them.
There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to
the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land.
It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the
eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and
again startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has
started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people
comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the
aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would
have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of
the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the
Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of
thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely
useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular anny. But the navy is only
partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling
class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However
unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or
haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever
been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed
men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and
looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the British ruling class
had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists.
But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from
the outside.
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand
them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a
serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the
theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system
by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact
that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry
generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns — by ignoring it. After years of aggression
and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to
Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-
drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M. P. s wildly cheering the
news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been
bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was
dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of
making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the
time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be
acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result
would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had
given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political
ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers,
ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the
‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as
bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think
that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic
doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their
side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than
from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for
nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural
instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with
Hitler. But — and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep
sense of national solidarity, comes in — they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this
without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England.
Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our
conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their
incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do
anything but make the worst of both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY fairly
sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several
dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not
happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to
be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions.
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity,
unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not
wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money
and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are
living in.
V
The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but
it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class.
One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and
the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic
opposites — the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur,
the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck — are mentally linked together
and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable
extent into the same families.
Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families
celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and
navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the
Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph.
In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less
room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no
place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the
colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark
suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were
imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and
deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over
the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently
under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to
impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And
what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly
companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life
in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist
sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the
job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if
there was any way of avoiding it.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British
morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing
intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’.
Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone
describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing
order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an
Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an
England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be
suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any
important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary
reviews and the left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen
weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their
generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive
suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have
never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic
is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact
with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935,
shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were
most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying
this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their
severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their
cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the
country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great
country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is
always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it
is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a
strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel
more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English
morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes
violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this
had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real
weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and
that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly
responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out
against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible.
Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it
harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the anned forces.
Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any
case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as
purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class
stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion
to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for
granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and
intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE and publicly
thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the
Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this
preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his
mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot
afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is
the fact that we are lighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this
possible.
VI
One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has
been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a
scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit
bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete.
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few
hands. Few people in modern England OWN anything at all, except clothes, furniture and
possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper
is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same
time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of
managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large
salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers,
teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to
enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among
the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than
they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly
to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather
narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real
wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly
society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole
community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A
millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for
other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads,
genn-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind.
Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless
improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading
has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor
read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio
programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-
production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance
goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than
they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are
a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely
by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is
smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which
the fann labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate
is likely to be — indeed, visibly is — more middle class in outlook than a person who has
grown up in a slum.
The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced by the fact that
modem industrial methods tend always to demand less muscular effort and therefore to
leave people with more energy when their day’s work is done. Many workers in the light
industries are less truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits,
manners and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together. The
unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences diminish. The old-style ‘proletarian’ —
collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by heavy labour — still exists, but he is
constantly decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of
the north of England.
After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before:
people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be
‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case.
Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap
motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs of the
future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough,
Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes — everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great
towns — the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new
wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its
slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no
longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is
being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete
roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless,
cultureless life, centring round tinned food, PICTURE POST, the radio and the internal
combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate
knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization
belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely OF the modern world, the
technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio
experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the
indetenninate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.
This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges.
There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as
the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of
Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a
change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with
the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it
Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the
thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of unifonns will remain, along with
the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as
prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock
Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country
houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be
forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the
future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of
recognition and yet remain the same.
PART II: SHOPKEEPERS AT WAR
I
I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second chapter in the
added racket of the barrage. The yellow gunflashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are
rattling on the housetops, and London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are
beaten or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will. But at
this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been brought there by
follies which we are still committing and which will drown us altogether if we do not
mend our ways quickly.
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalismthat is, an economic system in
which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for
profit — DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to
millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real
urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be
impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The
lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best.
Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War,
for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip
machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.
When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years
as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like
all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments.
Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddlesteamer of
equal horse-power stem to stern and set their engines running.
That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and
of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a
planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-
abused words, Socialism and Fascism.
Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”.
Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a
State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such
as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines,
ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale
producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is
certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption.
At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there
is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea
etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in
producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to
making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State
simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.
Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal
purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or
ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be
available at the moment.
However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means
of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the
following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate),
political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education.
These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a classsystem.
Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living
roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The
State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and
privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
But what then is Fascism?
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from
Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally,
Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been
abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and — this is the important point, and the
real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism — generally
speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi
revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of
everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages.
The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the
status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very
greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and
obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the
world has ever seen.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies
Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It
takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The
driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the
superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Gennany to rule the world. Outside
the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have
“proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the
idea that nonnordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore,
while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards
conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles,
French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just
as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably
be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The
Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes
corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi
party, second come the mass of the Gennan people, third come the conquered European
populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler
calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.
However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a
planned system geared to a definite purpose, worldconquest, and not allowing any private
interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not
work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main
objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the
interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense industrial plant and its
unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To
prepare for war on the modern scale you have got to divert the greater part of your
national income to armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A
bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor cars, or eighty
thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can’t have
MANY bombing planes without lowering the national standard of life. It is guns or
butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in Chamberlain’s England the transition could
not be made. The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still
visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either. Moreover, so long as
PROFIT was the main object the manufacturer had no incentive to change over from
consumption goods to armaments. A businessman’s first duty is to his shareholders.
Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor cars. To
prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest
market is a business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were
tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Gennany tin, rubber, copper and
shellac-and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week
or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it
was “good business”.
And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After
1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was
merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British
anny was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way
desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with
bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the
officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There
had even, previously, been a shortage of unifonns — this in one of the greatest woollen-
goods producing countries in the world!
What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a change in their
way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism and modem war. And false
optimism was fed to the general public by the gutter press, which lives on its
advertisements and is therefore interested in keeping trade conditions nonnal. Year after
year the Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO
WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothennere was describing Hitler as “a
great gentleman”. And while England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of
every war material except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor
cars, fur coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone
pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public necessity is not still
continuing? England fights for her life, but business must fight for profits. You can
hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two contradictory processes happening side
by side. On the very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the
seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good
for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig, Pond’s Face Cream and Black
Magic Chocolates.
But one thing gives hope — the visible swing in public opinion. If we can survive this war,
the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one of the great turning-points in English
history. In that spectacular disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section
of the business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before
that the case against capitalism had never been PROVED. Russia, the only definitely
Socialist country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself against the rat-
trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha!
Where’s the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their
seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came something that could not
be laughed away, something that neither chequebooks nor policemen were any use
against-the bombing. Zweee — BOOM! What’s that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock
Exchange. Zweee — BOOM! Another acre of somebody’s valuable slum-property gone
west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London
laugh on the wrong side of its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were
uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there was something wrong. It
was a great step forward. From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince
artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in
which the worst man wins-that job will never be quite so ghastly again.
II
The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of
technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a
new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in
positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New
blood, new men, new ideas — in the true sense of the word, a revolution.
I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the patriotism that
runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had
eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment
has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast
changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to happen.
England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed
by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if
any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a
class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory. They could not do it, even if their
material interests did not constantly trip them up. As I pointed out earlier, they have been
artificially stupefied. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we
shall be governed largely by the old — that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age
they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was more desolating at the
beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired
to pretend that it was the war of 1914-18 over again. All the old duds were back on the
job, twenty years older, with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the
troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Baimsfather
drawing cartoons. It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that state of affairs has barely
altered. The shock of disaster brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in
general we are still commanded by people who managed to live through the years 1931-9
without even discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the unteachable is
hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
As soon as one considers any problem of this war — and it does not matter whether it is
the widest aspect of strategy or the tiniest detail of home organisation — one sees that the
necessary moves cannot be made while the social structure of England remains what it is.
Inevitably, because of their position and upbringing, the ruling class are fighting for their
own privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled with the public interest. It is a
mistake to imagine that war aims, strategy, propaganda and industrial organisation exist
in watertight compartments. All are interconnected. Every strategic plan, every tactical
method, even every weapon will bear the stamp of the social system that produced it. The
British ruling class are fighting against Hitler, whom they have always regarded and
whom some of them still regard as their protector against Bolshevism. That does not
mean that they will deliberately sell out; but it does mean that at every decisive moment
they are likely to falter, pull their punches, do the wrong thing.
Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to the process, they have done
the wrong thing with an unerring instinct ever since 1931. They helped Franco to
overthrow the Spanish Government, although anyone not an imbecile could have told
them that a Fascist Spain would be hostile to England. They fed Italy with war materials
all through the winter of 1939-40, although it was obvious to the whole world that the
Italians were going to attack us in the spring. For the sake of a few hundred thousand
dividenddrawers they are turning India from an ally into an enemy. Moreover, so long as
the moneyed classes remain in control, we cannot develop any but a DEFENSIVE
strategy. Every victory means a change in the STATUS QUO. How can we drive the
Italians out of Abyssinia without rousing echoes among the coloured peoples of our own
Empire? How can we even smash Hitler without the risk of bringing the German
Socialists and Communists into power? The left-wingers who wail that “this is a
capitalist war” and that “British Imperialism” is fighting for loot have got their heads
screwed on backwards. The last thing the British moneyed class wish for is to acquire
fresh territory. It would simply be an embarrassment. Their war aim (both unattainable
and unmentionable) is simply to hang on to what they have got.
Internally, England is still the rich man’s Paradise. All talk of “equality of sacrifice” is
nonsense. At the same time as factoryworkers are asked to put up with longer hours,
advertisements for “Butler. One in family, eight in staff’ are appearing in the press. The
bombed-out populations of the East End go hungry and homeless while wealthier victims
simply step into their cars and flee to comfortable country houses. The Home Guard
swells to a million men in a few weeks, and is deliberately organised from above in such
a way that only people with private incomes can hold positions of command. Even the
rationing system is so arranged that it hits the poor all the time, while people with over
£2,000 a year are practically unaffected by it. Everywhere privilege is squandering good
will. In such circumstances even propaganda becomes almost impossible. As attempts to
stir up patriotic feeling, the red posters issued by the Chamberlain Government at the
beginning of the war broke all depth-records. Yet they could not have been much other
than they were, for how could Chamberlain and his followers take the risk of rousing
strong popular feeling AGAINST FASCISM? Anyone who was genuinely hostile to
Fascism must also be opposed to Chamberlain himself and to all the others who had
helped Hitler into power. So also with external propaganda. In all Lord Halifax’s
speeches there is not one concrete proposal for which a single inhabitant of Europe would
risk the top joint of his little linger. For what war-aim can Halifax, or anyone like him,
conceivably have, except to put the clock back to 1933?
It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free.
Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of
power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and
place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who
grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined
to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among
them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency,
class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of
government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people,
and if we alter our structure from below we shall get the government we need.
Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist
are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public.
Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion
that a half-witted public-schoolboy is better fitted for command than an intelligent
mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest INDIVIDUALS among them, we have
got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real
shape. The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the
newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own
destiny.
In the short run, equality of sacrifice, “war-Communism”, is even more important than
radical economic changes. It is very necessary that industry should be nationalised, but it
is more urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers and “private incomes”
should disappear forthwith. Almost certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic
could keep up the fight for two and a half years against impossible odds was that there
were no gross contrasts of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all suffered
alike. When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general had not one either. Given
equality of sacrifice, the morale of a country like England would probably be
unbreakable. But at present we have nothing to appeal to except traditional patriotism,
which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not necessarily bottomless. At some point or
another you have got to deal with the man who says “I should be no worse off under
Hitler”. But what answer can you give him — that is, what answer that you can expect him
to listen to — while common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day, and fat
women ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing Pekineses?
It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will mean cruel overwork, cold dull
winters, uninteresting food, lack of amusements, prolonged bombing. It cannot but lower
the general standard of living, because the essential act of war is to manufacture
armaments instead of consumable goods. The working class will have to suffer terrible
things. And they WILL suffer them, almost indefinitely, provided that they know what
they are fighting for. They are not cowards, and they are not even internationally minded.
They can stand all that the Spanish workers stood, and more. But they will want some
kind of proof that a better life is ahead for themselves and their children. The one sure
earnest of that is that when they are taxed and overworked they shall see that the rich are
being hit even harder. And if the rich squeal audibly, so much the better.
We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is not true that public opinion has
no power in England. It never makes itself heard without achieving something; it has
been responsible for most of the changes for the better during the past six months. But we
have moved with glacier-like slowness, and we have learned only from disasters. It took
the fall of Paris to get rid of Chamberlain and the unnecessary suffering of scores of
thousands of people in the East End to get rid or partially rid of Sir John Anderson. It is
not worth losing a battle in order to bury a corpse. For we are fighting against swift evil
intelligences, and time presses, and
history to the defeated
May say Alas! but cannot alter or pardon.
What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong
thing with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the moneyed class had long ceased to
be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial
network, drawing interest and profits and spending them — on what? It was fair to say that
life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the
Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty,
with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and
unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely
benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge
together into large ones robbed more and more of the moneyed class of their function and
turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and
technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living
on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the ‘idle rich’, the people whose
photographs you can look at in the TATLER and the BYSTANDER, always supposing
that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They
were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
By 1920 there were many people who were aware of all this. By 1930 millions were
aware of it. But the British ruling class obviously could not admit to themselves that their
usefulness was at an end. Had they done that they would have had to abdicate. For it was
not possible for them to turn themselves into mere bandits, like the American
millionaires, consciously clinging to unjust privileges and beating down opposition by
bribery and tear-gas bombs. After all, they belonged to a class with a certain tradition,
they had been to public schools where the duty of dying for your country, if necessary, is
laid down as the first and greatest of the Commandments. They had to FEEL themselves
true patriots, even while they plundered their countrymen. Clearly there was only one
escape for them — into stupidity. They could keep society in its existing shape only by
being UNABLE to grasp that any improvement was possible. Difficult though this was,
they achieved it, largely by fixing their eyes on the past and refusing to notice the
changes that were going on round them.
There is much in England that this explains. It explains the decay of country life, due to
the keeping-up of a sham feudalism which drives the more spirited workers off the land.
It explains the immobility of the public schools, which have barely altered since the
eighties of the last century. It explains the military incompetence which has again and
again startled the world. Since the fifties every war in which England has engaged has
started off with a series of disasters, after which the situation has been saved by people
comparatively low in the social scale. The higher commanders, drawn from the
aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would
have had to admit to themselves that the world was changing. They have always clung to
obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of
the last. Before the Boer War they prepared for the Zulu War, before the 1914 for the
Boer War, and before the present war for 1914. Even at this moment hundreds of
thousands of men in England are being trained with the bayonet, a weapon entirely
useless except for opening tins. It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air
force, have always been more efficient than the regular anny. But the navy is only
partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit.
It must be admitted that so long as things were peaceful the methods of the British ruling
class served them well enough. Their own people manifestly tolerated them. However
unjustly England might be organized, it was at any rate not torn by class warfare or
haunted by secret police. The Empire was peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever
been. Throughout its vast extent, nearly a quarter of the earth, there were fewer armed
men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state. As people to live under, and
looking at them merely from a liberal, NEGATIVE standpoint, the British ruling class
had their points. They were preferable to the truly modern men, the Nazis and Fascists.
But it had long been obvious that they would be helpless against any serious attack from
the outside.
They could not struggle against Nazism or Fascism, because they could not understand
them. Neither could they have struggled against Communism, if Communism had been a
serious force in western Europe. To understand Fascism they would have had to study the
theory of Socialism, which would have forced them to realize that the economic system
by which they lived was unjust, inefficient and out-of-date. But it was exactly this fact
that they had trained themselves never to face. They dealt with Fascism as the cavalry
generals of 1914 dealt with the machine-guns — by ignoring it. After years of aggression
and massacres, they had grasped only one fact, that Hitler and Mussolini were hostile to
Communism. Therefore, it was argued, they MUST be friendly to the British dividend-
drawer. Hence the truly frightening spectacle of Conservative M. P. s wildly cheering the
news that British ships, bringing food to the Spanish Republican government, had been
bombed by Italian aeroplanes. Even when they had begun to grasp that Fascism was
dangerous, its essentially revolutionary nature, the huge military effort it was capable of
making, the sort of tactics it would use, were quite beyond their comprehension. At the
time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be
acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result
would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had
given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. This vein of political
ignorance runs right through English official life, through Cabinet ministers,
ambassadors, consuls, judges, magistrates, policemen. The policeman who arrests the
‘red’ does not understand the theories the ‘red’ is preaching; if he did his own position as
bodyguard of the moneyed class might seem less pleasant to him. There is reason to think
that even military espionage is hopelessly hampered by ignorance of the new economic
doctrines and the ramifications of the underground parties.
The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their
side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than
from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for
nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up. The natural
instinct of men like Simon, Hoare, Chamberlain etc. was to come to an agreement with
Hitler. But — and here the peculiar feature of English life that I have spoken of, the deep
sense of national solidarity, comes in — they could only do so by breaking up the Empire
and selling their own people into semi-slavery. A truly corrupt class would have done this
without hesitation, as in France. But things had not gone that distance in England.
Politicians who would make cringing speeches about ‘the duty of loyalty to our
conquerors’ are hardly to be found in English public life. Tossed to and fro between their
incomes and their principles, it was impossible that men like Chamberlain should do
anything but make the worst of both worlds.
One thing that has always shown that the English ruling class are MORALLY fairly
sound, is that in time of war they are ready enough to get themselves killed. Several
dukes, earls and what nots were killed in the recent campaign in Flanders. That could not
happen if these people were the cynical scoundrels that they are sometimes declared to
be. It is important not to misunderstand their motives, or one cannot predict their actions.
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physical cowardice, but stupidity,
unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing. They are not
wicked, or not altogether wicked; they are merely unteachable. Only when their money
and power are gone will the younger among them begin to grasp what century they are
living in.
V
The stagnation of the Empire in the between-war years affected everyone in England, but
it had an especially direct effect upon two important sub-sections of the middle class.
One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and
the other the left-wing intelligentsia. These two seemingly hostile types, symbolic
opposites — the half-pay colonel with his bull neck and diminutive brain, like a dinosaur,
the highbrow with his domed forehead and stalk-like neck — are mentally linked together
and constantly interact upon one another; in any case they are born to a considerable
extent into the same families.
Thirty years ago the Blimp class was already losing its vitality. The middle-class families
celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and
navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the
Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph.
In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less
room for individual initiative. Men like Clive, Nelson, Nicholson, Gordon would find no
place for themselves in the modern British Empire. By 1920 nearly every inch of the
colonial empire was in the grip of Whitehall. Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark
suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were
imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay.
The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and
deeper under mounds of paper and red tape. In the early twenties one could see, all over
the Empire, the older officials, who had known more spacious days, writhing impotently
under the changes that were happening. From that time onwards it has been next door to
impossible to induce young men of spirit to take any part in imperial administration. And
what was true of the official world was true also of the commercial. The great monopoly
companies swallowed up hosts of petty traders. Instead of going out to trade
adventurously in the Indies one went to an office stool in Bombay or Singapore. And life
in Bombay or Singapore was actually duller and safer than life in London. Imperialist
sentiment remained strong in the middle class, chiefly owing to family tradition, but the
job of administering the Empire had ceased to appeal. Few able men went east of Suez if
there was any way of avoiding it.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British
morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing
intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.
It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense ‘left’.
Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was T. E. Lawrence. Since about 1930 everyone
describable as an ‘intellectual’ has lived in a state of chronic discontent with the existing
order. Necessarily so, because society as it was constituted had no room for him. In an
Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an
England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be ‘clever’ was to be
suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T. S. Eliot or the
theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any
important job. The intellectuals could find a function for themselves only in the literary
reviews and the left-wing political parties.
The mentality of the English left-wing intelligentsia can be studied in half a dozen
weekly and monthly papers. The immediately striking thing about all these papers is their
generally negative, querulous attitude, their complete lack at all times of any constructive
suggestion. There is little in them except the irresponsible carping of people who have
never been and never expect to be in a position of power. Another marked characteristic
is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact
with physical reality. Many intellectuals of the Left were flabbily pacifist up to 1935,
shrieked for war against Germany in the years 1935-9, and then promptly cooled off
when the war started. It is broadly though not precisely true that the people who were
most ‘anti-Fascist’ during the Spanish Civil War are most defeatist now. And underlying
this is the really important fact about so many of the English intelligentsia — their
severance from the common culture of the country.
In intention, at any rate, the English intelligentsia are Europeanized. They take their
cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow. In the general patriotism of the
country they form a sort of island of dissident thought. England is perhaps the only great
country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is
always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it
is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a
strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel
more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a
poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English
morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes
violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British. It is questionable how much effect this
had, but it certainly had some. If the English people suffered for several years a real
weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and
that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly
responsible. Both the NEW STATESMAN and the NEWS CHRONICLE cried out
against the Munich settlement, but even they had done something to make it possible.
Ten years of systematic Blimp-baiting affected even the Blimps themselves and made it
harder than it had been before to get intelligent young men to enter the anned forces.
Given the stagnation of the Empire, the military middle class must have decayed in any
case, but the spread of a shallow Leftism hastened the process.
It is clear that the special position of the English intellectuals during the past ten years, as
purely NEGATIVE creatures, mere anti-Blimps, was a by-product of ruling-class
stupidity. Society could not use them, and they had not got it in them to see that devotion
to one’s country implies ‘for better, for worse’. Both Blimps and highbrows took for
granted, as though it were a law of nature, the divorce between patriotism and
intelligence. If you were a patriot you read BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE and publicly
thanked God that you were ‘not brainy’. If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the
Union Jack and regarded physical courage as barbarous. It is obvious that this
preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his
mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot
afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is
the fact that we are lighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this
possible.
VI
One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has
been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a
scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit
bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete.
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few
hands. Few people in modern England OWN anything at all, except clothes, furniture and
possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper
is being destroyed, the small businessman is diminishing in numbers. But at the same
time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of
managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large
salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers,
teachers, artists, etc. etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to
enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among
the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than
they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly
to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather
narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real
wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly
society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole
community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A
millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for
other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads,
genn-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind.
Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless
improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading
has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor
read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio
programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-
production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance
goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than
they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are
a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely
by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is
smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which
the fann labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate
is likely to be — indeed, visibly is — more middle class in outlook than a person who has
grown up in a slum.
The effect of all this is a general softening of manners. It is enhanced by the fact that
modem industrial methods tend always to demand less muscular effort and therefore to
leave people with more energy when their day’s work is done. Many workers in the light
industries are less truly manual labourers than is a doctor or a grocer. In tastes, habits,
manners and outlook the working class and the middle class are drawing together. The
unjust distinctions remain, but the real differences diminish. The old-style ‘proletarian’ —
collarless, unshaven and with muscles warped by heavy labour — still exists, but he is
constantly decreasing in numbers; he only predominates in the heavy-industry areas of
the north of England.
After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before:
people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be
‘placed’ in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case.
Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap
motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs of the
future England is in light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough,
Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes — everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great
towns — the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new
wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its
slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no
longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is
being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete
roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless,
cultureless life, centring round tinned food, PICTURE POST, the radio and the internal
combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate
knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization
belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely OF the modern world, the
technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio
experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the
indetenninate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.
This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges.
There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as
the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of
Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a
change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with
the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it
Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the
thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of unifonns will remain, along with
the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as
prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock
Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country
houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be
forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the
future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of
recognition and yet remain the same.
PART II: SHOPKEEPERS AT WAR
I
I began this book to the tune of German bombs, and I begin this second chapter in the
added racket of the barrage. The yellow gunflashes are lighting the sky, the splinters are
rattling on the housetops, and London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down.
Anyone able to read a map knows that we are in deadly danger. I do not mean that we are
beaten or need be beaten. Almost certainly the outcome depends on our own will. But at
this moment we are in the soup, full fathom five, and we have been brought there by
follies which we are still committing and which will drown us altogether if we do not
mend our ways quickly.
What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalismthat is, an economic system in
which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for
profit — DOES NOT WORK. It cannot deliver the goods. This fact had been known to
millions of people for years past, but nothing ever came of it, because there was no real
urge from below to alter the system, and those at the top had trained themselves to be
impenetrably stupid on just this point. Argument and propaganda got one nowhere. The
lords of property simply sat on their bottoms and proclaimed that all was for the best.
Hitler’s conquest of Europe, however, was a PHYSICAL debunking of capitalism. War,
for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip
machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.
When the nautical screw was first invented, there was a controversy that lasted for years
as to whether screw-steamers or paddle-steamers were better. The paddle-steamers, like
all obsolete things, had their champions, who supported them by ingenious arguments.
Finally, however, a distinguished admiral tied a screw-steamer and a paddlesteamer of
equal horse-power stem to stern and set their engines running.
That settled the question once and for all. And it was something similar that happened on the fields of Norway and
of Flanders. Once and for all it was proved that a planned economy is stronger than a
planless one. But it is necessary here to give some kind of definition to those much-
abused words, Socialism and Fascism.
Socialism is usually defined as “common ownership of the means of production”.
Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a
State employee. This does NOT mean that people are stripped of private possessions such
as clothes and furniture, but it DOES mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines,
ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale
producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is
certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption.
At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there
is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea
etc etc) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in
producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to
making a profit out of it. In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State
simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them.
Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal
purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or
ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be
available at the moment.
However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means
of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the
following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate),
political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education.
These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a classsystem.
Centralised ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living
roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The
State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and
privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
But what then is Fascism?
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from
Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally,
Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been
abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and — this is the important point, and the
real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathise with Fascism — generally
speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi
revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of
everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages.
The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the
status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very
greatly. The mere EFFICIENCY of such a system, the elimination of waste and
obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the
world has ever seen.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies
Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It
takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The
driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human INEQUALITY, the
superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Gennany to rule the world. Outside
the German Reich it does not recognise any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have
“proved” over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the
idea that nonnordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore,
while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards
conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles,
French, etc is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just
as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably
be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The
Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes
corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi
party, second come the mass of the Gennan people, third come the conquered European
populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler
calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.
However horrible this system may seem to us, IT WORKS. It works because it is a
planned system geared to a definite purpose, worldconquest, and not allowing any private
interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not
work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main
objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the
interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense industrial plant and its
unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To
prepare for war on the modern scale you have got to divert the greater part of your
national income to armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A
bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor cars, or eighty
thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can’t have
MANY bombing planes without lowering the national standard of life. It is guns or
butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in Chamberlain’s England the transition could
not be made. The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still
visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either. Moreover, so long as
PROFIT was the main object the manufacturer had no incentive to change over from
consumption goods to armaments. A businessman’s first duty is to his shareholders.
Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor cars. To
prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest
market is a business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were
tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Gennany tin, rubber, copper and
shellac-and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week
or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it
was “good business”.
And now look at the results. After 1934 it was known that Germany was rearming. After
1936 everyone with eyes in his head knew that war was coming. After Munich it was
merely a question of how soon the war would begin. In September 1939 war broke out.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER it was discovered that, so far as equipment went, the British
anny was barely beyond the standard of 1918. We saw our soldiers fighting their way
desperately to the coast, with one aeroplane against three, with rifles against tanks, with
bayonets against tommy-guns. There were not even enough revolvers to supply all the
officers. After a year of war the regular army was still short of 300,000 tin hats. There
had even, previously, been a shortage of unifonns — this in one of the greatest woollen-
goods producing countries in the world!
What had happened was that the whole moneyed class, unwilling to face a change in their
way of life, had shut their eyes to the nature of Fascism and modem war. And false
optimism was fed to the general public by the gutter press, which lives on its
advertisements and is therefore interested in keeping trade conditions nonnal. Year after
year the Beaverbrook press assured us in huge headlines that THERE WILL BE NO
WAR, and as late as the beginning of 1939 Lord Rothennere was describing Hitler as “a
great gentleman”. And while England in the moment of disaster proved to be short of
every war material except ships, it is not recorded that there was any shortage of motor
cars, fur coats, gramophones, lipstick, chocolates or silk stockings. And dare anyone
pretend that the same tug-of-war between private profit and public necessity is not still
continuing? England fights for her life, but business must fight for profits. You can
hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two contradictory processes happening side
by side. On the very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the
seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good
for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig, Pond’s Face Cream and Black
Magic Chocolates.
But one thing gives hope — the visible swing in public opinion. If we can survive this war,
the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one of the great turning-points in English
history. In that spectacular disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section
of the business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before
that the case against capitalism had never been PROVED. Russia, the only definitely
Socialist country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself against the rat-
trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha!
Where’s the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their
seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came something that could not
be laughed away, something that neither chequebooks nor policemen were any use
against-the bombing. Zweee — BOOM! What’s that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock
Exchange. Zweee — BOOM! Another acre of somebody’s valuable slum-property gone
west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London
laugh on the wrong side of its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were
uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there was something wrong. It
was a great step forward. From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince
artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in
which the worst man wins-that job will never be quite so ghastly again.
II
The difference between Socialism and capitalism is not primarily a difference of
technique. One cannot simply change from one system to the other as one might install a
new piece of machinery in a factory, and then carry on as before, with the same people in
positions of control. Obviously there is also needed a complete shift of power. New
blood, new men, new ideas — in the true sense of the word, a revolution.
I have spoken earlier of the soundness and homogeneity of England, the patriotism that
runs like a connecting thread through almost all classes. After Dunkirk anyone who had
eyes in his head could see this. But it is absurd to pretend that the promise of that moment
has been fulfilled. Almost certainly the mass of the people are now ready for the vast
changes that are necessary; but those changes have not even begun to happen.
England is a family with the wrong members in control. Almost entirely we are governed
by the rich, and by people who step into positions of command by right of birth. Few if
any of these people are consciously treacherous, some of them are not even fools, but as a
class they are quite incapable of leading us to victory. They could not do it, even if their
material interests did not constantly trip them up. As I pointed out earlier, they have been
artificially stupefied. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we
shall be governed largely by the old — that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age
they are living in or what enemy they are fighting. Nothing was more desolating at the
beginning of this war than the way in which the whole of the older generation conspired
to pretend that it was the war of 1914-18 over again. All the old duds were back on the
job, twenty years older, with the skull plainer in their faces. Ian Hay was cheering up the
troops, Belloc was writing articles on strategy, Maurois doing broadcasts, Baimsfather
drawing cartoons. It was like a tea-party of ghosts. And that state of affairs has barely
altered. The shock of disaster brought a few able men like Bevin to the front, but in
general we are still commanded by people who managed to live through the years 1931-9
without even discovering that Hitler was dangerous. A generation of the unteachable is
hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
As soon as one considers any problem of this war — and it does not matter whether it is
the widest aspect of strategy or the tiniest detail of home organisation — one sees that the
necessary moves cannot be made while the social structure of England remains what it is.
Inevitably, because of their position and upbringing, the ruling class are fighting for their
own privileges, which cannot possibly be reconciled with the public interest. It is a
mistake to imagine that war aims, strategy, propaganda and industrial organisation exist
in watertight compartments. All are interconnected. Every strategic plan, every tactical
method, even every weapon will bear the stamp of the social system that produced it. The
British ruling class are fighting against Hitler, whom they have always regarded and
whom some of them still regard as their protector against Bolshevism. That does not
mean that they will deliberately sell out; but it does mean that at every decisive moment
they are likely to falter, pull their punches, do the wrong thing.
Until the Churchill Government called some sort of halt to the process, they have done
the wrong thing with an unerring instinct ever since 1931. They helped Franco to
overthrow the Spanish Government, although anyone not an imbecile could have told
them that a Fascist Spain would be hostile to England. They fed Italy with war materials
all through the winter of 1939-40, although it was obvious to the whole world that the
Italians were going to attack us in the spring. For the sake of a few hundred thousand
dividenddrawers they are turning India from an ally into an enemy. Moreover, so long as
the moneyed classes remain in control, we cannot develop any but a DEFENSIVE
strategy. Every victory means a change in the STATUS QUO. How can we drive the
Italians out of Abyssinia without rousing echoes among the coloured peoples of our own
Empire? How can we even smash Hitler without the risk of bringing the German
Socialists and Communists into power? The left-wingers who wail that “this is a
capitalist war” and that “British Imperialism” is fighting for loot have got their heads
screwed on backwards. The last thing the British moneyed class wish for is to acquire
fresh territory. It would simply be an embarrassment. Their war aim (both unattainable
and unmentionable) is simply to hang on to what they have got.
Internally, England is still the rich man’s Paradise. All talk of “equality of sacrifice” is
nonsense. At the same time as factoryworkers are asked to put up with longer hours,
advertisements for “Butler. One in family, eight in staff’ are appearing in the press. The
bombed-out populations of the East End go hungry and homeless while wealthier victims
simply step into their cars and flee to comfortable country houses. The Home Guard
swells to a million men in a few weeks, and is deliberately organised from above in such
a way that only people with private incomes can hold positions of command. Even the
rationing system is so arranged that it hits the poor all the time, while people with over
£2,000 a year are practically unaffected by it. Everywhere privilege is squandering good
will. In such circumstances even propaganda becomes almost impossible. As attempts to
stir up patriotic feeling, the red posters issued by the Chamberlain Government at the
beginning of the war broke all depth-records. Yet they could not have been much other
than they were, for how could Chamberlain and his followers take the risk of rousing
strong popular feeling AGAINST FASCISM? Anyone who was genuinely hostile to
Fascism must also be opposed to Chamberlain himself and to all the others who had
helped Hitler into power. So also with external propaganda. In all Lord Halifax’s
speeches there is not one concrete proposal for which a single inhabitant of Europe would
risk the top joint of his little linger. For what war-aim can Halifax, or anyone like him,
conceivably have, except to put the clock back to 1933?
It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free.
Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of
power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and
place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who
grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined
to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among
them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency,
class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of
government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people,
and if we alter our structure from below we shall get the government we need.
Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist
are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public.
Right through our national life we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion
that a half-witted public-schoolboy is better fitted for command than an intelligent
mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest INDIVIDUALS among them, we have
got to break the grip of the moneyed class as a whole. England has got to assume its real
shape. The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the
newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own
destiny.
In the short run, equality of sacrifice, “war-Communism”, is even more important than
radical economic changes. It is very necessary that industry should be nationalised, but it
is more urgently necessary that such monstrosities as butlers and “private incomes”
should disappear forthwith. Almost certainly the main reason why the Spanish Republic
could keep up the fight for two and a half years against impossible odds was that there
were no gross contrasts of wealth. The people suffered horribly, but they all suffered
alike. When the private soldier had not a cigarette, the general had not one either. Given
equality of sacrifice, the morale of a country like England would probably be
unbreakable. But at present we have nothing to appeal to except traditional patriotism,
which is deeper here than elsewhere, but is not necessarily bottomless. At some point or
another you have got to deal with the man who says “I should be no worse off under
Hitler”. But what answer can you give him — that is, what answer that you can expect him
to listen to — while common soldiers risk their lives for two and sixpence a day, and fat
women ride about in Rolls-Royce cars, nursing Pekineses?
It is quite likely that this war will last three years. It will mean cruel overwork, cold dull
winters, uninteresting food, lack of amusements, prolonged bombing. It cannot but lower
the general standard of living, because the essential act of war is to manufacture
armaments instead of consumable goods. The working class will have to suffer terrible
things. And they WILL suffer them, almost indefinitely, provided that they know what
they are fighting for. They are not cowards, and they are not even internationally minded.
They can stand all that the Spanish workers stood, and more. But they will want some
kind of proof that a better life is ahead for themselves and their children. The one sure
earnest of that is that when they are taxed and overworked they shall see that the rich are
being hit even harder. And if the rich squeal audibly, so much the better.
We can bring these things about, if we really want to. It is not true that public opinion has
no power in England. It never makes itself heard without achieving something; it has
been responsible for most of the changes for the better during the past six months. But we
have moved with glacier-like slowness, and we have learned only from disasters. It took
the fall of Paris to get rid of Chamberlain and the unnecessary suffering of scores of
thousands of people in the East End to get rid or partially rid of Sir John Anderson. It is
not worth losing a battle in order to bury a corpse. For we are fighting against swift evil
intelligences, and time presses, and
history to the defeated
May say Alas! but cannot alter or pardon.
