Centrepiece
Peasants and bankers
Colin Welch
In his latest book, The Criminal History of Mankind, Colin Wilson devotes a chapter to Karl Marx and his followers. On a wireless programme he declared that `Marx was the archetypal criminal', adding that Leftism was a 'germ in society'. For this he was pronounced 'out of his pram' by the New Statesman, which of course didn't think it necessary to explain the joke — ob- vious, isn't it? Ha, ha.
My own connection with Mr Wilson is tenuous and fortuitous. At a party the delightful Mrs Gaitskell (as she then was I mean then Mrs, not delightful, which she still is) misheard when I was introduced. Our conversation proceded amiably, but on square wheels. 'It must be very cold on Hampstead Heath at nights,' she said. I hesitantly agreed. 'I greatly enjoyed your novel,' she continued. My jaw dropped; my only attempt at a novel had been im- prudently lent incomplete in manuscript to an Irish professor and never seen again. The likelihood of his having passed it on to Mrs Gaitskell was remote. 'Er, er.' Light descended slowly, with rueful mirth. Mrs Gaitskell, it emerged, was not under one misapprehension but three: that I was Colin Wilson (who was then said to sleep rough on Hampstead Heath); that The Out- sider was a novel; and that she had read it, and with pleasure. Anyway we parted most amicably, and I rush with alacrity to help my momentary alter ego back into his pram.
What is Marxism in principle, after all, but systematised theft, and in practice much worse: robbery with violence, wrongful imprisonment, torture and murder? If these are not crimes, what are? Marxists, of course, regard them not as crimes but as the redress of long-standing injustices. But then, don't many burglars consciously or unconsciously justify their activities by reference to an unfair world?
Crime prospers; so does Marxism. Its reek, like that of spilt paraffin, nowadays pervades everything, getting into our hair and clothes, carpets, curtains, butter, sugar, bread. Indefatigably and relentlessly it extends its sway over more and more remote territories — the theatre, music, opera, art and art criticism. Shall we soon have a Marxist cookery book, in which the relationships between the various ingre- dients are analysed in terms of class, with the meat alienated from its own juices, the proletarian bones cruelly exploited by the stock which extracts surplus value from them before they are exhausted like workers and thrown away, with flavours struggling for supremacy as in the class war, with rich dishes demonstrating the baneful power of the expropriating class and all dishes ex- emplifying the injustice of the social struc- ture which produces them?
Marx genially proclaimed that everyone under communism should do not a regular job, but a little of whatever he fancied — a bit of hunting or cultivation in the morning, an hour or two in a factory, perhaps drama criticism in the evening. Asked who would do the accounts under communism, Lenin answered 'the armed workers'. Cooking under communism will thus presumably be done by anybody and everybody in turn, or by 'the armed workers', who may indeed already be responsible for the grim filth now served in Moscow restaurants.
The infiltration of Marxism and its little sisters into art criticism seems to me special- ly striking. The catalogue for a recent Richard Wilson exhibition was couched in Marxist terms, the paintings analysed in terms of property and class relationships. Watching a recent Open University pro- gramme on BBC 1, I chanced on a talk about Camille Pissarro. It was given by a chap called Clark, not, alas the great Lord of Civilisation but much more polytechnical. Kropotkin was quoted, to the effect that in order to understand the peasants one must live among them. This advice was dear to Pissarro, a gentle anar- chist who lived among and painted them, with results memorably ravishing and mov- ing. To examine his charming peasant girls with pleasure or even with warm sympathy is no longer, it seems, enough. We are bid- den by people like Mr Clark in a way to in- terrogate them, to extract from them evidence about Pissarro's social awareness and correctness. Did he really, fully live among the peasants? Did he really under- stand them, become one of them? Or did he remain, even when among them, a bourgeois surveying them from outside, ex- pressing not so much their own feelings shared by him as his own sentimental and condescending feelings: affection, love of beauty, even pity — emotions singularly in- appropriate to a Marxist, who should love a `Let me through — I'm a shuttle diplomatist!' peasant no more than a lord, both being symbols of inequality, the former of 'the idiocy of rural life' to boot?
Unless I misundertstood him, Mr Clark implied that Pissarro remained a bourgeois, thus an outsider. I am sure he was right, not least because the mere activity of painting separated him from the peasant girls he painted. He could no more fully understand them than they him, just as Constable and the cow he depicted at Stratford Mill were presumably sundered by veils of mutual in- comprehension. But by how much more than Pissarro is a young 20th-century Leftist, lecturing at the Open University, separated from those Pea" sant girls! Pissarro must have known much of their lives, hopes, dreams, loves, unhall" pinesses, religious faith. We should learn humbly from him, rather than supPosIng that some grey theory will supply a better insight into them than his. In fact theory may gravely mislead us, by imputing to the peasant girls quasi-political aspirations and class resentments which Pissarro didn't paint, not because he was an outsider, but because they weren't there. And doublY damned is any theory which limits or, qualifies our appreciation of a masterpiece' Returning to old Kropotkin, I wonder why it was always peasants, or later perhaps workers, who had to be lived among and understood? Why did no one ever suggest that in order to understand, say, banker!, we ought to live among them? The banker s traditional mode of life, thought and opera- tion is at least as alien and inscrutable to most of us as that of any peasant, or more so. Accounts, computers, double-entry
—are
not graphs and statistics ____re not chickens and haystacks far less baffling to most of us? Only to the socialist does banking present fewer problems. Fie simplifies the banker to a mere caricature. The banker's only motives are greed', rapacity and avarice, motives incidentally' not unknown to peasants. His role in life Is purely parasitic. He abstracts surplus value created by others, diverts into his pockets wealth not his own. He consumes much produces nothing. He is worth no ni°re than the fat man in the socialist songbook; `the very fat man who waters the workers beer'. The office boy thinks his boss doe. s nothing except sign a few papers. Lola, thought accounts could be done by artneu, workers. Like them, socialists despise Nvha; they can't understand. Surely they shall" go to live among the bankers, as or did among the peasants, seeking for foil did They should share their JOY' and sorrows, smiles and tears, the sunnY days and the grey. With loving care they should, if appropriately talented, pain them at their immemorial toil or at their MI. nocent feasts and merrymakings, paint their serene grannies, matronly wives and musing daughters, striving to lay bare their minds' hearts and very souls. Full understanding may yet elude them. But sympathy, a Pissarro shows, is a good start.
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