Commonplace 12 George & Demos Part One
Demos. A Story of English Socialism. It's important to use the full title. It's not a story about the corrupt nature of Socialism. In fact, it's not about Socialism at all.
After Born in Exile this is my favourite of George's novels. It is seen as a bitter attack on Socialism, but there are so many layers here, the politics covered is with a little 'p', and, as such, diffuses his argument. He set out to write a critique of Socialism, but actually shows it as being vitally important if workers are to be represented and not just left to the failings of oligarchs.
'The cause of the working classes seems so hopeless just because they are too far away to catch the ears of those that oppress them', says Richard Mutimer, in the age before mass media. This oppression should have formed the central theme but George knew nothing about the subject in any deep way - most of what he gleaned was from newspapers and the odd bit of creepy slumming he did on his psychogeographical wanderings. His father's shop in Wakefield would have been patronised by people well enough off to afford medications; the dirt poor would have suffered ill-health, untreated. George was probably stopped from socialising with working class children and kept indoors off the streets to play where they congregated. The seeds of his tremendous snobbery were sown here.
It's a sign of his superficiality on this topic that the poor of other countries did not being out the revulsion in him that the London poor did. Which I think says more about George than it does about Demos. But, this tale of Richard Mutimer is not really an attack on Socialism; it is not a piece of literary schadenfreude that sees a successful man who dared to get above his station dragged to destruction by his futile attempt at class mobility - and his own dishonesty; it is George's subconscious reprising his own rise, fall and comeuppance after the Owens debacle when his middle class peers who judged and condemned him without understanding his rationale for his crimes. Biographers would like you to think George was Arthur Golding (from Workers) or Osmund Waymark (The Unclassed) but Richard Mutimer is the better version of George; trust me. Punishing Richard Mutimer is George punishing himself.
Demos attempts to show that the English class system (of the 1880s) with its inequality is inevitable and a result of the natural order of evolution. George considered himself to be a 'fatalist' but his own actions were anything but fatalistic. Without his struggle against 'shopkeeperdom' he might have ended up behind a counter in Wakefield selling trusses and enjoying botany as a hobby. Without resisting his early training towards honesty, he might never have been a writer. If he hadn't abandoned his first wife, he never would have encountered Edith...
Being a fatalist lets you off the hook in life - you have something to blame for your failures, your mistakes. What about successes? Would you not want to explain those as autonomous and not a simple by-product of fate? Was Shakespeare just lucky? Or is George telling us failure is down to 'fate' and success, to 'genius'?! If existentialism has taught us anything, it is that morality is an internal discourse, and the buck stops in your own conscience - only the very extreme of circumstances offer single solutions to moral problems, and we are accountable for our choices. It is not worthy of George to claim to be a fatalist; this means he must deem himself unaccountable for several of his less than heroic decisions. In Demos, George seems to be asking us to believe Socialism fails because it is inherently wrong; but, it was the failings of individuals that let down the drive to a fairer social order. And, it was a man that threw the stone at Richard Mutimer, not an ideology.
Of course we can see that one of George's failures - as a writer; as a human being - is to think of the human race as a set of tribes varying in degree of worthiness, with himself as the sole arbiter of value. In his works, women, workers, young men who like bicycling and who own flimsy moustaches are all pitted against the big beasts of masculine dominance. Women only have validity as fulfillers of George's/the lead character's ideal of womanhood; these men only reach self-actualization as possessors of this 'ideal' woman. The working classes are faceless, lumpen and base, except for the shopkeeper son equivalents who manage to crawl out of the primordial slime. The tragedy of these sons of the slime is that they have to be eternally vigilant lest they slip back down. When provoked, Richard Mutimer - who hasn't had time to evolve any solid middle class ways - reacts like a common peasant and requires middle class Adela to drag some nobility our of him. What tosh! As if the English middle classes got their power by being inherently more noble than the proletariat! You set a thief to catch a thief - Britain didn't have an Empire because it sent out Sunday school teachers to subdue the nations. As if money buys you a conscience!!
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. Charles Dickens
Demos was written before the right to vote for everyone over the age of 21 (now 18) was established, at a time when no women could vote and only 60% of men were enfranchised. Everything Richard says in book 1 ch 6 about the exploitation of the working classes is as true today as it was in the late nineteenth century. The ruling class is never going to relinquish power willingly - it will have to be wrenched from their cold, dead hands. George knew from his study of Russian culture and politics, and from his knowledge of the the situation in Bismark-led Germany from Eduard Bertz, that the masses were not going to be content with their lot in life once the twentieth century arrived. George fails to see that poverty is the enemy of the working classes - by keeping wages low, the economy stagnates; take everyone off the bottom two rungs of Maslow's hierarchy and self-actualization can be the dream of us all.
To find out more about Maslow click
Progress (whatever that means and whatever your personal prejudice) is an unstoppable force, which George saw as largely negative. After all, how could his place as 'aristo by nature if not by birth' be assured if everyone had the option of an upgrade (or the possibility of a downgrade). No wonder he was so against it. How could this ruling elite (the crème de la crème of the middle classes) survive if the masses prevailed and reduced everything down to the feared 'one homogeneous lump'?
The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.
One thing George seems to get wrong in Demos is his notion that the English working class is essentially left-wing, all aching to overthrow the status quo. In reality, they are and always have been, as reactionary as the middle classes. The English are used to despotic leadership ruling them and until the proletariat stops being so complacent and complaisant there will be no change to a fairer system. Socialism, in England, is the world of the educated classes - brains, more than birth, determines grass roots political affiliation here. The rise of the right wing parties are evidence of this. Despite George's fears that Demos will take over and sack Rome, in England, if we revolt, we go to the right, not the left.
Demos. A Story of English Socialism. It's important to use the full title. It's not a story about the corrupt nature of Socialism. In fact, it's not about Socialism at all.
'The cause of the working classes seems so hopeless just because they are too far away to catch the ears of those that oppress them', says Richard Mutimer, in the age before mass media. This oppression should have formed the central theme but George knew nothing about the subject in any deep way - most of what he gleaned was from newspapers and the odd bit of creepy slumming he did on his psychogeographical wanderings. His father's shop in Wakefield would have been patronised by people well enough off to afford medications; the dirt poor would have suffered ill-health, untreated. George was probably stopped from socialising with working class children and kept indoors off the streets to play where they congregated. The seeds of his tremendous snobbery were sown here.
It's a sign of his superficiality on this topic that the poor of other countries did not being out the revulsion in him that the London poor did. Which I think says more about George than it does about Demos. But, this tale of Richard Mutimer is not really an attack on Socialism; it is not a piece of literary schadenfreude that sees a successful man who dared to get above his station dragged to destruction by his futile attempt at class mobility - and his own dishonesty; it is George's subconscious reprising his own rise, fall and comeuppance after the Owens debacle when his middle class peers who judged and condemned him without understanding his rationale for his crimes. Biographers would like you to think George was Arthur Golding (from Workers) or Osmund Waymark (The Unclassed) but Richard Mutimer is the better version of George; trust me. Punishing Richard Mutimer is George punishing himself.
Demos attempts to show that the English class system (of the 1880s) with its inequality is inevitable and a result of the natural order of evolution. George considered himself to be a 'fatalist' but his own actions were anything but fatalistic. Without his struggle against 'shopkeeperdom' he might have ended up behind a counter in Wakefield selling trusses and enjoying botany as a hobby. Without resisting his early training towards honesty, he might never have been a writer. If he hadn't abandoned his first wife, he never would have encountered Edith...
Being a fatalist lets you off the hook in life - you have something to blame for your failures, your mistakes. What about successes? Would you not want to explain those as autonomous and not a simple by-product of fate? Was Shakespeare just lucky? Or is George telling us failure is down to 'fate' and success, to 'genius'?! If existentialism has taught us anything, it is that morality is an internal discourse, and the buck stops in your own conscience - only the very extreme of circumstances offer single solutions to moral problems, and we are accountable for our choices. It is not worthy of George to claim to be a fatalist; this means he must deem himself unaccountable for several of his less than heroic decisions. In Demos, George seems to be asking us to believe Socialism fails because it is inherently wrong; but, it was the failings of individuals that let down the drive to a fairer social order. And, it was a man that threw the stone at Richard Mutimer, not an ideology.
Of course we can see that one of George's failures - as a writer; as a human being - is to think of the human race as a set of tribes varying in degree of worthiness, with himself as the sole arbiter of value. In his works, women, workers, young men who like bicycling and who own flimsy moustaches are all pitted against the big beasts of masculine dominance. Women only have validity as fulfillers of George's/the lead character's ideal of womanhood; these men only reach self-actualization as possessors of this 'ideal' woman. The working classes are faceless, lumpen and base, except for the shopkeeper son equivalents who manage to crawl out of the primordial slime. The tragedy of these sons of the slime is that they have to be eternally vigilant lest they slip back down. When provoked, Richard Mutimer - who hasn't had time to evolve any solid middle class ways - reacts like a common peasant and requires middle class Adela to drag some nobility our of him. What tosh! As if the English middle classes got their power by being inherently more noble than the proletariat! You set a thief to catch a thief - Britain didn't have an Empire because it sent out Sunday school teachers to subdue the nations. As if money buys you a conscience!!
The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. Charles Dickens
Demos was written before the right to vote for everyone over the age of 21 (now 18) was established, at a time when no women could vote and only 60% of men were enfranchised. Everything Richard says in book 1 ch 6 about the exploitation of the working classes is as true today as it was in the late nineteenth century. The ruling class is never going to relinquish power willingly - it will have to be wrenched from their cold, dead hands. George knew from his study of Russian culture and politics, and from his knowledge of the the situation in Bismark-led Germany from Eduard Bertz, that the masses were not going to be content with their lot in life once the twentieth century arrived. George fails to see that poverty is the enemy of the working classes - by keeping wages low, the economy stagnates; take everyone off the bottom two rungs of Maslow's hierarchy and self-actualization can be the dream of us all.
To find out more about Maslow click
Progress (whatever that means and whatever your personal prejudice) is an unstoppable force, which George saw as largely negative. After all, how could his place as 'aristo by nature if not by birth' be assured if everyone had the option of an upgrade (or the possibility of a downgrade). No wonder he was so against it. How could this ruling elite (the crème de la crème of the middle classes) survive if the masses prevailed and reduced everything down to the feared 'one homogeneous lump'?
The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.
One thing George seems to get wrong in Demos is his notion that the English working class is essentially left-wing, all aching to overthrow the status quo. In reality, they are and always have been, as reactionary as the middle classes. The English are used to despotic leadership ruling them and until the proletariat stops being so complacent and complaisant there will be no change to a fairer system. Socialism, in England, is the world of the educated classes - brains, more than birth, determines grass roots political affiliation here. The rise of the right wing parties are evidence of this. Despite George's fears that Demos will take over and sack Rome, in England, if we revolt, we go to the right, not the left.
Richard Mutimer knew he profited from the fact his benefactor was probably on the verge of writing a will leaving his estate to the Eldons (an actual will exists and is just mislaid). He lies to his betrothed, and to others about his intentions of marriage; he is desperate enough to behave fraudulently to maintain his position - only talked into the path of righteousness by his wife. Eventually, he comes a cropper after he totally underestimates the baseness of his peers - individuals, representative of a group. This is a book allegedly about Karma, but it carries the implicit message: Do not overthrow the status quo because any attempt to improve things will result in your comeuppance - a dire warning to would-be revolutionaries. Not being able to outrun one's base past - and regretting it - will always ruin your chances; your past will always catch up with you - your past sins will find you out. Or, so they say. George must have fretted his whole life about the Owens crimes being discovered and the prison sentence being exposed. Nowadays, we tend to have a more humane view of criminality but there are some offences no-one can forgive. Theft from pockets doesn't seem like much today, but where people are forced together to cohabit in large groups - like the armed forces and educational establishments - petty theft is treated severely. The lasting legacy for the amateur thief is that the crimes will haunt you and be a cause of shame. It took years for George to get over the idea he had to punish himself for what he did, and to regain his confidence about decision-making. Lifelong, he made some bizarre and unempowered daft decisions (Richard Mutimer was dynamic and assertive!) but I think this was because he doubted his own judgement - this is why he went to books to offer him counsel. Richard was presented with choices and he moves to behave badly and exploit his advantages - that is what is punished. Everything George writes about Socialism - if stripped of the character-drive narrative - stands sound: working class people are exploited and kept in penury; they are under-educated to keep them malleable and fearful of claiming their rights. They have no energy for revolution, which means when it erupts it will be mindless and bloody and not born of deep philosophy. A rich man is just a poor man with money. WC Fields | |
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| Richard Mutimer seems to be everything George despises yet they are often complements. Both treat their women badly; both dally with seamstresses; both fall out of love with Socialism; both try lecturing to the proletariat; both are lovers of books; both replace their own father as head of the household; both have great hair; both are not averse to lying; both despise journalists; both heartlessly sacrificed the lives of women who loved them; both wrongly assumed their wives were 'submissive'; both have a desire to try love with a lady and see that as their birthright; both had no 'pang of conscience' when it came to dumping their first girlfriend. Richard Mutimer was George killing that embarrassing Socialist guilty conscience side of himself because he couldn't kill his guilt over Owens. But he did not need fear the mob: it wasn't the working classes that destroyed this once fine nation's cultural heritage - it was the middle class's love of money. | |
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