CLASSLESS SOCIETY ?
By DR. C. K. ALLEN,- K.C.
THE Housing Act, 1936, gave local authorities power, in certain circumstances, " to acquire any land . . . as a site for the erection of houses for the working classes." In a recent case falling under this Act, Mr. Justice Denning observed: " Much has been said in this case as to the meaning of ' working classes.' The Act does not contain a definition. These words, ' working classes,' have appeared in a number of Acts for the last hundred years. I have no doubt that a hundred years ago the expression had a meaning which was reasonably well understood. ' Working classes' fifty years ago denoted a class which included men working in the fields or the factories, in the docks or in the mines, on the railways or on the roads, at a weekly wage. The wages of people of that class were lower than those of most of the other members of the community and they were looked upon as a lower class. That has all now dis- appeared. The social revolution in the last fifty years has made the words ' working classes' quite inappropriate to-day. There is no such separate class as the working classes. The bank clerk or the civil servant, the school teacher or the cashier, the tradesman or the clergyman, do not earn wages or salary higher than the mechanic or the electrician, the fitter or the mineworker, the brick- layer or the dock labourer ; nor is there any social distinction between one or the other. No one of them is of a higher or a lower class."
With very great respect to the learned Judge, the term "working classes," far from having lost all meaning, has lately acquired far more than ever before. There are many ways of reclassifying our new society, but the principal distinction is between the working classes, or just workers, and the parasites. The point is put to me forcibly by an unknown correspondent in Bristol. (I had brought him, and others, on myself by what I had hoped was a very mild letter to The Times.) " Are you aware," he writes, " that there are 35 millions of people in Gt. Britain who do not produce the value of a crust of bread from January 1st to December 31st? They perform services (99 per cent. not required) which are a tax upon productive labour whether by legalised enaction (?) or exaction. These services have been paid the best salaries, pensions and hours of labour. This rape of industry (work which ends in the production of food or the tangible articles of use and commerce) is the cancer in the evolution of mankind, and responsible for the economic penal servitude and • slavery which working men like myself have had to undergo."
This is perhaps a somewhat extreme statement of the case and a little fanciful in mathematics. Thirty-five millions of exploiters leaves only a residue of about eleven million toilers, and when the infants, the aged and the incapables have been deducted, the remain- ing productive labour force for the country is alarmingly small. It shrinks still further when we remember that only the organised, or trade union, portion of it is worth a tinker's cuss. However, some rhetorical hyperbole may be forgiven to one who has suffered all his life from the malicious conspiracy of the vast majority of his fellow- citizens. This poetic licence allowed, his grievance and his social philosophy appear to be those of a very large number of the victims of "economic penal servitude and slavery," even though, as the learned Judge remarks, they are considerably better off than many of the non-productive bourgeoisie.
The large species of drones may be sub-divided into many genera of noxious insects. -There are, for example, the Spivs. Nobody seems to know exactly who and what they are. Mr. Isaacs, ranging fancy-free over the realm of nature, is uncertain whether they are drones, eels or butterflies ; but, whichever they are, they and their indolent ways come in handy for justifying the direction of labour. The only characteristic of the Spiv on which everybody seems to be agreed is that he is arrayed in a form-fitting suit of gay 'design and hue, with narrow waist and padded shoulders. He has, how- ever, more permanent qualities than these charms of fashion, and there is no mystery about him, for he has existed since pithecan- thropoid times. He is simply one of the " wide " people who find it less exhausting (as they suppose, often wrongly) and more fun to live outside than inside the law. He abounds today, and will continue to abound, because infinite stimulus is given to his in- genuity and his sporting instincts by the controls which govern everything in our lives except innocent pastimes like football pools and dog races. He is, in short, a very ordinary type of criminal, but his new-fangled title is useful in adding opprobrium to the general class of parasites by identifying them with his evil ways.
Then there is the sub-division of the rentiers. These, as every- body knows, are people who live on increment which is both un- earned and undeserved—unless, of course, the increment comes from Government securities, in which case they are patriots (though paupers). Rentiers draw dividends, sit back and have a good time. They are not even absentees, because they have nothing to be absent from. It is true that very many, perhaps most, of them are persons who- have saved strenuously all their lives to guard against the horrors of a destitute old age. By prodigious efforts and sacrifices they may have accumulated a capital sum which to their fathers would have been a fortune, but which to them means annually two or three hundreds of a unit called a pound, in purchasing-power worth about eight shillings and reduced to, say, five shillings when taxation has finished with it. Many of these excrescences cannot even claim the virtue of frugality, since they are merely the widows or maiden daughters of hoarders and cheeseparers. Not even my Bristol friend would contend that they live in affluence, and, indeed, without their unearned increment they would just starve ; but they are manifestly unproductive and I am afraid they must go into the incinerator with the Spivs.
Tories are another genus of the drones, probably the worst of all, because they add to idleness a large variety of self-interested and unscrupulous motives. Not content with 'being rentiers and Stock Exchange gamblers, they sometimes even sink to being directors. Their sole idea of industry is to work in the sweat of somebody else's broW. Most of our present distresses are due to their past efforts to exploit their weaker brethren ; and it is perhaps poetic justice that at present it does not look as if their wickedness has paid very well after all. Anything more unproductive it is difficult to imagine, and so—away with them to the scrap-heap !
I am not sure whether my correspondent's eleven million includes our two millions of trouser-polishers, or bureaucrats. Are they workers or parasites ? Nobody could call them unproductive, but I doubt whether their products can be described as " the tangible articles of use and commerce." At all events, that is not the name which is usually applied to them.
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