They’d like us all to be social ostriches
Nuttall’s Standard Dictionary gives this as its chief definition of the word Democracy: “Government by all classes for the benefit of all classes.” This sounds like a condensed blueprint for a Fascist Utopia: it is in any case an invaluable contribution to the grand art of teaching people how not to learn (about realities, anyway). It has long been recognised by the master class that one of the best ways of keeping their masterhood secure is to induce all other people to believe in “class co-operation.” That is, co-operation by all the legion of underdogs to keep the top-dogs on top. Government by robbers and robbed for “the benefit of both” . . . . Only Walt Disney could do justice to such a subject! Suave gents in polished Fleet Street offices like us to think of “class” as meaning nothing more serious than whether we aspirate our H’s and make sucking noises when we drink. Inequality is “natural”; you must have masters “to lead.” As a matter of fact, the anxiety of the master class to have us believe that there ain’t no such animal as the opposition of class interests, is a direct admission that they know there is all right, and they fear the day when enough of us will recognise the fact so clearly, in all its naked hideousness, that we’ll use the power that is ours to put an end to the division of society into two classes.
TWO classes: Let us emphasise the number. They like us to think of society being split up into a large number of sections, each determined, not by the way we get our living, but by such qualities as ability, intelligence, assiduity, etc.: Every soldier with a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack, every office boy with a managing director’s fountain pen sprouting in his waistcoat pocket. The way up is hard, but everyone has the chance; go to it, my boy, go to it!
Church, cinema, press, all preach the doctrine that the way to Paradise is open to all. It is our own fault if we sin and botch it. And so kind is our social system, that for those who fall by the wayside, there is always charity and reform. . . . No, we’ve even gone one better than that: instead of charity, which stinks a bit, we’re going to have Beveridge, or some other brand of “social insurance,” so we won’t go getting dangerous ideas about the social system being fundamentally at fault and Socialism being the only solution.
But we are so perverse that we persist in thinking for ourselves, despite the contemporary machinery for the mass-production of ready-made ideas that surrounds us from the cradle up. We persist in discovering that there are only two classes—the owners and the workers, and all other sections of society, such as the “middle class,” have but a tenuous, perilous hold on independent existence: just one serious slump-crisis of the system which makes (and is made by) the two-class division, and your “middle class” manager, secretary, technician, etc., soon discovers that he is in the working class.
Similarly, if a member of the working class, by unusual good fortune, becomes possessed of the means for what used (in less polite and more realistic days) to be called an independent existence, he automatically climbs out of the working class, into the master class, and it is as much in his interest as it is against that of the working class to seek to preserve the capitalist system.
JOHN JENNINGS