Chapter 26
SECTION 26 OF JOAN AND PETER CHAPTER XII. THE WORLD ON THE EVE OF WAR. VII. THE DISORDER IN THE WORLD OF WOMEN, THE DISSOLUTION OF MANNERS AND RESTRAINTS, WAS BUT THE MORE INTIMATE ASPECT OF A UNIVERSAL DRIFT TOWARDS LAWLESSNESS. the world of labor was seething also with the same spirit of almost aimless insurrection.
In a world of quickened apprehensions and increasing stimulus, women were losing faith in the rules of conduct that had sufficed in a less exacting age. Far profounder and more dangerous to the established order were the skepticisms of the workers. The pretensions of the old social system that trade unionism had scarcely challenged were now being subjected throughout all Western Europe to a pitiless scrutiny by a new and more educated type of
employee. The old British trade unionism had never sought much more than increased wages and a slightly higher standard of life. Its acceptance of established institutions had been artlessly complete. It had never challenged the authority nor the profits of the proprietor. It had never proposed more than a more reasonable treaty with the masters, a fairer sharing of the good gifts of industry, but, infatuated by the evil teachings of an extreme individualism, a system of thought
which was indeed never more than a system of base excuses dressed up as a philosophy. The directing and possessing classes had failed altogether to agree with their possible labor adversary quickly, while they were yet in the way with him. They had lacked the intelligence to create a sympathetic industrial mentality, and the conscience to establish a standard of justice. They left things alone, until the grit of a formless discontent had got into every cog
of the industrial machinery. Too late, the employers were now conceding the modest demands that labor had made in the 80s and 90s. They were trying to accept the offers of dead men. They found themselves face to face with an entirely less accommodating generation. This new labor movement was talking no longer of shorter hours and higher pay, but of the social revolution. It did not demand better treatment from the capitalist. It called
him a profiteer and asked him to vanish from the body politic. It organized strikes now not to alter the details of its working conditions as its predecessor had done, but in order to end the system by making it impossible. In Great Britain, as on the continent, the younger generation of labor was no longer asking to have the harness that bound it to the old order made easier and lighter. It was asking for a new world. The new movement seemed, to men of Oswald's generation,
to come as thunderstorms will sometimes come, as the militant suffragette had seemed to come, suddenly out of a clear sky. But it was far more ominous than the suffragette movement, for while that made one simple explicit demand, this demanded nothing short of a new economic order. It asked for everything, and would be content with nothing. It was demanding from an old habitual system the supreme feat of reconstruction. Short of that vague general
reconstruction, it promised no peace. Higher wages would not pacify it. Shorter hours would not pacify it. It threatened sabotage of every sort, and a steady, incessant, broadening antagonism of master and man. Peter, half sympathetic and half critical, talked about it to Oswald one day. They all say I'm a rebel, said Peter. Rebel is their cant word. Yes, but rebel against what? Oh, the whole system. They have votes. They get humbugged, they say. They do, you know. The party
system is a swindle, and everybody understands that. Why don't we clean it up? PR is the only honest method. They don't understand how it is rigged, but they know it is rigged. When you talk about Parliament, they laugh. But they have their unions. They don't trust their leaders. They say they are got at. They say they are old-fashioned and bluffed by the politicians. They are. Then what do they want? Just to be out of all this. They are bored to tears by their work, by the
world they have to live in, by the pinched, mean lives they have to lead, in the midst of plenty and luxury, bored by the everlasting dullness and humbug of it all. But how are they going to alter it. That's all vague, altogether vague. Cole and Mellor and those Cambridge chaps preach guild socialism to them, but I don't know how far they take it in, except that they agree that profit is unnecessary. But the fundamental fact is just blind boredom and the desire to smash up things,
just on the off chance of their coming better. The employer has been free to make the world for them, and this is the world he's made. Damn him, that's how they look at it. They are bored by his face, bored by his automobile, bored by his knighthood, bored by his country house and a snob of a wife. But what can they do? Make things impossible. They can't run things themselves. They aren't convinced of that. Anyhow, if they smash things, the employer goes first,
and he's the chap they seem to be principally after. Peter reflected. Then he gave a modern young Englishman's view of the labor conflict. The employers have been pretty tidy asses not to see that their work people get a better, more amusing life than they do. It was their business and their interest to do so. It could have been managed easily, but they're so beastly disloyal and so mean. They not only sweat labor themselves, but they won't stir a finger to save it from
jerry-built housing, bad provisioning, tallymen, general ugliness, bad investments, rotten insurance companies, every kind of rotten old thing. Anyone may help kill their sheep. They've got no gratitude to their workers. They won't even amuse them. Why couldn't they set up decent theaters for them and things like that? That's so stupid of them. These employers are the most dangerous class in the community. There's enough for everyone nowadays and over. It's the first business of employers
to see work people get their whack. What good are they if they don't do that? But they never have. Labor is convinced now that they never will. They run about pretending to be landed gentry. They've got their people angry and bitter now. They've destroyed public confidence in their ways. And it serves them jolly well right if the workmen make things impossible for them. I think they will. I hope they will. But this means breaking up the national industries,
said Oswald. Where is this sort of thing going to end? Oh, things want shaking up, said Peter. Perhaps, he added, one must break up old things before one can hope for new. I suppose the masters won't let go while they think there's a chance of holding on. He had not a trace left of the Victorian delusion that this might, after all, be
the best of all possible worlds. He thought that our politicians and our captains of industry were very poor muddlers indeed. They drifted. Each one sat in his own works, he said, and ran them for profit without carrying a rap whither the whole system was going. Compared with labor, even their poverty of general ideas was amazing. Peter, warming with his subject, walked to and fro across the Pelham Ford lawn beside Oswald,
proposing to rearrange industrialism as one might propose to reshuffle a pack of cards. But suppose things smash up, said Oswald. Smash up did not seem to alarm Peter. Nowadays, said Peter, so many people read and write, so much has been thought out, There is so big a literature of ideas in existence that I think we could recover from a very considerable amount of smashing. I'm pro-smash. We have to smash. What holds us back are fixed
ideas. Take profit. We're used to profit. Most business is done for profit still, but why should the world tolerate profit at all? It doesn't stimulate enterprise. It only stimulates knavery. And capital, financial capital, is just blackmail by gold. Gold rent. We think the state itself even can't start a business going or employ people without first borrowing money. Why should it borrow money? Why not, for state purposes, create it? Yes, no money would be any
good if it hadn't a state guarantee. Gold standard, fixed money fund, legitimate profits, and so on. That's the sort of fixed idea that gets in the way nowadays. It won't get out of the way just for reason's sake. The employers keep on with these old fixed ideas naturally because so it is they had been made, but the work people believe in them less and less. There must be a smash of some sort, just to shake ideas loose. Haswalt surveyed his ward. So this was the young man's
theory. Not a bad theory. Fixed ideas. There's something to be said for this notion of fixed ideas, he said. Yes, but isn't this I'm a rebel business, isn't that itself a fixed idea? Oh, certainly, said Peter cheerfully. We poor human beings are always letting our ideas coagulate. That's where the whole business seems to me so hopeless. End of section 26. Read by Eli Bishop, San Francisco, July 18, 2021.
