Read Sir Herbert read's "To Hell with Culture".

TO HELL WITH CULTURE
by Herbert Read in World War Two. 1941.

When will revolutionary leaders
realise that " culture " is dope" a
worse dope than religion; for even
if it were true that religion is the
opiate of the people, it is worse to
poison yourself than to be poisoned,
and suicide is more dishonourable
than murder. To hell with culture,
culture as a thing added like a sauce
to otherwise unpalatable stale fish .

THIS pamphlet is to be about the place of "culture" in the Democratic
Order, so I begin with a quotation which gives me both a text and a
title. It comes from the writings of a man recently dead who was
both a true artist and a true socialist-Eric Gill.

What is culture? The Greeks hadn't a word for it. They had good
architects good sculptors, good poets, just as they had good craftsmen
and good statesmen. They knew that their way of life was a good way of
life and they were willing if necessary to fight to defend it. But it
would never have occurred to them that they had a separate commodity,
culture-something to be given a trade- mark by their academicians,
something to be acquired by superior people with sufficient time and
money, something to be exported to foreign countries along with figs
and olives. It wasn't even an invisible export : it was something
natural if it existed at all- something of which they were
unconscious, something as instinctive as their language or the
complexion of their skins. It could not even be described as a by-
product of their way of life : it was that way of life itself.

It was the Romans, the first large-scale capitalists in Europe, who
turned culture into a commodity. They began by importing culture-Greek
culture-and then they grew autarkic and produced their own brand . As
they extended their empire, they dumped their culture on the conquered
nations. Roman architecture, Roman literature, Roman manners- these
set a standard to which all newly civilised people aspired. When a
Roman poet like Ovid talks about a cultured man, there is already the
sense of something polished, refined, a veneer on the surface of an
otherwise rough humanity. It would not have occurred to a refined
Roman of this sort that the craftsmen of his time had any
contribution to make to the finer values of life. Nor had they- Roman
pottery, for example, may be cultured, but it is dull and degraded.

Culture, as we all know, disappeared in the Dark Ages, and it was a
long time before it came to the surface again. The next epoch, known
as the Middle Ages, is rivalled only by the Greek Age ; hut oddly
enough,it too was not conscious of its culture. Its architects were
foremen builders, its sculptors were masons, its illuminators and
painters were clerks. They had no word for art in the sense of our
"fine arts " : art was all that was pleasing to the sight : a
cathedral, a candlestick, a chessman, a cheese-press.

But the middle ages came to an end and with them the guild system and
the making of things for use. Certain clever people began to grab
things-church property common land, minerals, especially gold They
began to make things in order to acquire more than they could use, a
surplus which they could convert into gold ; and because they couldn't
eat gold, or build houses with it, they lent it to other people who
were in need of it and charged them rent or interest. And thus the
capitalist system came into existence, and with it the thing we call
"culture ".

The first recorded use of the word in it modern sense is I5I0, just
when capitalism began to get going. It is the time of the Revival of
Learning and the Renaissance and those two movements signify the very
essence of culture for all educated people, even unto the present day.
But it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century the
period of the Industrial Revolution, that culture became finally
divorced from work.

So long as people made things by hand, certain traditional ways of
making them persisted, and were good. It was only when things began to
be made by machines that the traditions inherent, as it were, in the
minds and muscles of the handworker, finally disappeared. To take
the place of this instinctive tradition, the industrialists introduced
certain new standards. They might be merely standards of utility and
cheapness-that is to say, of profitableness ; but since sensitive
people were nOt satisfied with these, the manufacturers began to look
back into the past, to collect and imitate the good things which had
been made by their ancestors. If you knew all about the things of the
past, you were recognised as a man of taste, and the sum of the
nation's " tastes " was its " culture ". Matthew Arnold, in fact,
defined culture as " the acquainting ourselves with the best that has
been known and said in the world".

And with Matthew Arnold, the Prince Consort and the Great Exhibition
we reach the peak point of the English cult of culture. After the
'sixties its self-consciousness became too obvious, and we entered a
period of decadence, Pre-Raphaelitism, the Yellow Book, Oscar Wilde,
and all that, until the First World War came and gave a final push to
the whole rotten fabric.

F or the last quarter of a century we have been trying to pick up the
pieces : we have had lectures and exhibitions, museums and art
galleries, adult education and cheap books, and even an International
Committee for Intellectual Co-operation sponsored by the League of
Nations. But it was all a beating on a hollow drum, and a Second World
W ar has brought us up finally against the realities of this question
as of so many others.

NAZI CULTURE

To hell with culture. Gill's curse finds an echo in a play by Hans
Johst, the most popular Nazi dramatist in Germany. There one of his
characters, the mouthpiece of the most violent Nazi doctrines,
exclaims: "When I hear the word culture, I release the safety-catch on
my Browning." The Nazis also hate the sauce on the stale fish,and they
prepare to change it- but to change the sauce, not the fish . They
complain that the sauce they have been served with is Jewish, or
Catholic, at any rate International, and what they want is an very
German sauce. So they go back to Wotan and the Nibelungs, to the
mythology which Wagner exhumed from their misty past, and they mix it
with mysticism and sentimentality and think they have got hold of the
elements of a new culture.
And a " culture" indeed it is, and being rather simple-minded and
slow-witted behind their bombers and brass-bands they are satisfied.
They have found a culture to match their agriculture and industry, an
autarkic culture made for home-consumption and not for export. We need
neither envy them nor imitate them. It is a culture anyhow, and when
we say with Eric Gill " To hell with culture", we mean to hell with
all forms of culture, ancient or modern, genuine or ersatz.

It is not that, Nazi-like, I want to burn heap of books or knock
down a lot of ancient monuments. All these things- -the glory that was
Greece and the grandeur that was Rome, medieval cathedrals and
Chippendale furniture, the works of St. Thomas Aquinas and Mr. Charles
Morgan, shall be preserve for those who can make any use of them but
they shall not be unduly reverenced made subjects for university
degrees. knowledge of them will no longer be a social certificate of
taste and refinement. Those qualities, which will still exist (more
than ever, we hope), will belong to the thins we make, and to the
people who make them. And the people who make the most efficient and
the most pleasing thin will be the people we shall honour as artists.

A democratic culture-that is not the same thing as a democracy plus
culture. The first important point that I must make, and keep on
stressing, is that culture in the Democratic Order of the future will
not be a separate and distinguishable thing-a body of learning that
can be put into books and museums and mugged up in your spare time.
Just because it will not exist as a separate entity, we had better
stop using the word " " culture ". We shall not need it in the future
and it will only confuse the present issue.

Culture belongs to the past : the future will not be conscious of its
culture.

THE NATURAL ORDER

Let us now get down to details. The he structure. of the universe and
of our consciousness of that structure. To argue this point fully
would carry us too far into the obscure regions of philosophy, and I
have written enough about it in my more technical books. But what I
mean, in simple language, is that we should not be pleased with the
way certain things look unless our physical organs and the senses
which control them were not so constituted as to be pleased with
certain definite proportions, relations, rhythms, harmonies, and so
on. When we say, for example, that two colours " clash", we are not
expressing a personal opinion; there is a definite scientific reason
for disagreeable impression they create, and it could no doubt be
expressed in a mathematical formula. Again, when the printer decided
to impose the type on this page so as to leave margins in the
proportion3 1/2 : 3 3/4 . . 7 1/2 : 8, he was trusting to his eye,
which told him by its muscular tensions that this particular
arrangement was easeful. These are very elementary examples, and when
large paintings or poems or musical compositions are in question, the
whole business is infinitely more complicated. But, in general, we
see that certain proportions in nature (in crystals, plants, the human
figure etc.) are " right", and we carry over these proportions into
the things we make-not deliberately, but instinctively.

For our present purposes that is all we need to know of the dreary
science of esthetics. There is a Natural Order and the Democratic
Order is a reflection of it, not only in our way of living, but also
in our way of doing and making. If we follow this Natural Order in all
the ways of our life, we shall not need to talk about culture. We
shall have it without being conscious of it.

But how are we to attain the Natural Order of making things, which is
my particular concern in this pamphlet ?

Obviously, we can't make things naturally in unnatural surroundings.
We can't do things properly unless we are properly fed and properly
housed. We must also be properly equipped with the necessary tools,
and then left alone to get on with the job. In other words, before we
can make things naturally, we must establish the Natural Order in
society . . we must establish the Democratic Order. It is useless to
talk about a democratic art or a democratic literature until we are in
fact a democracy. And we are a long way off that.

THE REAL GIST OF DEMOCRACY

Seventy years ago Walt Whitman wrote in his Democratic Vistas :
"We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too
often repeat that that word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite
unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests
out of which its syllables have come, from pen and tongue. It is a
great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that
history has yet to be enacted."

Democracy is still a great word, and in spite of many wordy prophets
who have used it since Whitman's time, its gist still sleeps, its
history is still unenacted. Nothing is more absurd, among all the
political absurdities committed by Fascists and Nazis than their
assumption that democracy is a system that has been tried and has
failed. Democracy has been promulgated and its principles endlessly
proclaimed ; but in no country in the world has it ever, for more than
the brief space of a few months, been put into practice. For
democracy requires three conditions for its fulfillment, and until all
three conditions are satisfied, it cannot be said to exist. It is only
necessary to state these conditions to show that democracy never has
existed in modern times :

The first condition of democracy is that all production should be for
use, and not for profit.

The second condition is that each should give according to his
ability, and each receive according to his needs.

The third condition is that the workers in each industry should
collectively Own and control that industry.

It is not my business in this particular pamphlet to defend the
conception of democracy underlying these conditions, but nevertheless
I would claim that it is the classical conception of democracy. as
gradually evolved by its philosophers-by Rousseau, Jefferson, Lincoln,
Proudhon, Owen, Rusk, Marx, Morris, Kropotkin, and whoever else was
democratic in his heart no less than in his head. But what I intend to
demonstrate here is that the higher values of life, the democratic
equivalent of the civilisation of Greece or of the Middle Ages, cannot
be achieved unless all these three conditions are satisfied.

THE CHAIR YOU ARE SITTING ON

I think it will be generally admitted that production for use and not
for profit is the basic economic doctrine of socialism. The opponents
of socialism might argue that only a lunatic would neglect to take
into consideration the needs of the public. But that is to miss the
whole point of the statement. Capitalists do, of course, produce for
use and even invent uses for which to produce- in their own language,
they create a demand. By their intensive methods of production and
their extensive methods of publicity, they have keyed up the machinery
of production to unimagined levels, and up to a point mankind has
benefited from the resulting plethora. Mankind would have benefited
much more if capitalism had been able to solve the problem of
supplying the consumer with sufficient purchasing power to absorb this
plethora.

Capitalism can produce the goods, even if it cannot sell them. But
what kind of goods ? It is here that we have to introduce our
aesthetic criterion- and don't let anyone be frightened by the word
aesthetic. Let us first note that the quality of the goods so lavishly
produced under capitalism varies enormously. Whatever you take-carpets
or chairs, houses or clothes, cigarettes or sausages, you will find
that there are not one but twenty or thirty grades-something very good
and efficient at the top of the scale, and something very cheap and
nasty at the bottom of the scale. And pyramid-like, the bottom of the
scale is enormously bigger than the top. Take the case of the chair
You are sitting on as you read this pamphlet. It may be one of three
things . ( I) a decent well-made chair inherited from your great-
great-grand- mother ; (2) a decent well-made chair which you bought at
an expensive shop . or (3) an indifferent, uncomfortable chair, shabby
after a year's use, which was the best you could afford. (There are
some subsidiary categories-expensive chairs which are also
uncomfortable,for example, and moderately comfortable seats in public
vehicles.) Production for profit means that at whatever cost to the
comfort, appearance and durability of the chair, the capitalist must
put chairs on the market to suit every kind of purse. And since the
chair will be competing with other needs-carpets, clocks and sewing-
machines-it must cost as little as possible even on the low scale of
purchasing power at which he is aiming. Hence the capitalist must
progressively lower the quality of the materials he is using. . he
must use cheap wood and little of it, cheap springs and cheap
upholstery. He must evolve a design which is cheap to produce and easy
to sell, which means that he must disguise his cheap materials with
veneer and varnish and other shams. Even if he is aiming at the top
market, he still has to remember his margin of profits. and as the
size of the market shrinks, and mass-production becomes less possible,
this margin has to be increased. That is to say, the difference
between the intrinsic value of the materials used and the price
charged to the consumer has to be bigger , . and the subterfuges
necessary to disguise this difference have to be cleverer.

It is then that the capitalist has to put on, among other things, a
bit of culture a claw and-ball foot in the manner of Chippendale, a
wriggly bit of scrollwork in papier-mache, an inlay of mother-of-
pearl. In extreme cases he must " distress " the piece-that is to say,
employ a man to throw bolts and nails at the chair until it has been
knocked about enough to look "antique".

Such is production for profit. By production for use we mean a system
which will have only two considerations in mind- function and
fulfillment. You want a chair to relax in-very well, we shall discover
what are the best angles to allow a man's limbs to rest freely and
without strain. We shall next consider which would be the most
suitable materials to use in the manufacture of such a chair, bearing
in mind, no only the purpose the chair has to serve, but also the
other furniture with which the chair will be associated. Then, and
then only, we shall design a chair to meet all these requirements.
Finally we shall set about making the chair, and when it is made to
our satisfaction, we shall offer it to you in exchange for the tokens
which represent the good work which, all the time we were making the
chair, you were doing for the community at your particular job.

That is the economic process under socialism. But I am supposed to be
writing about spiritual values- about beauty and all that sort of
thing, and where do they come in ? We have produced a chair which is
strong and comfortable, but is it a work of art ? The answer,
according to my philosophy art, is Yes. If an object is made of
appropriate materials to an appropriate design and perfectly fulfil
its function, then we need not worry any more about its aesthetic
value: it is automatically a work of art.

Fitness for function is the modern definition of the eternal quality
we call beauty, and this fitness for function is the inevitable result
of an economy directed to use and not to profit.

Incidentally, we may note that when the profit system has to place
function before profit, as in the production of an aeroplane or a
racing-car, it also inevitably produces a work of art. But the
question to ask is: why are not all the things produced under
capitalism as beautiful as its aeroplanes and racing-cars?

THE MAN AND THE JOB
The second condition of democracy is expressed in the Marxian slogan:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs."This condition is linked to the one we have already discussed.
To take the question of ability first. A profit system of production
subordinates the person to the job. In a rough-and-ready way it sorts
people out according to their ability : that is to say, it continues
to employ a man only so long as he is capable of doing the job
efficiently, and only so long as there is a job to do. It rarely asks
whether a particular man would be better at another job, and it gives
that man little or no opportunity of finding out whether he could do
another job better.

Capitalism is concerned with labour only as a power element, the
partner of steam and electricity. And since the cost of this power has
to be reckoned against the possible profits, capitalism does all it
can to reduce that cost.

One way of reducing the cost is to increase the quantity of work per
human unit. Capitalism (and State socialism as established in Russia)
introduces the time element into the calculation of results. The best
riveter is the man who can rivet the greatest number of bolts in a
given time. The best miner is the man who can excavate the greatest
quantity of coal in a given time. This time criterion is extended to
all forms of production, and it is always at war with the criterion of
quality. When the work is purely mechanical, the qualitative element
may not be compromised. A quick riveter may also be a good riveter.
But if the work requires any considerable degree of skill, care or
deliberation, then the quality will decline in inverse ratio to the
speed of production. This applies, not only to " artistic " work such
as painting and sculpture, but also to "practical" work such as
grinding the cylinders of an aero-engine or ploughing a field.

From each according to his ability can be replaced by another familiar
phrase- equality of opportunity. In the Democratic Order it should be
possible for people to sort themselves out so that every man and woman
is doing the job for which he or she feels naturally qualified ; and
if, in this respect, nature needs a little assistance, it can be
provided by schools and technical colleges which will enable young
people to discover themselves and their abilities.

That half of the slogan does not present much difficulty. . it is
obviously reasonable that the right man should have the right job, and
that he should do that job to the best of his ability. But then we
say: "to each according to his needs", and this is the more important
half, and the essentially democratic half, of the socialist doctrine.

Let us ask : what are the needs of each one of . us " Sufficient food
and clothing, adequate housing-a certain minimum of these necessities
should be the inalienable right of every member of the community.

Until it can provide these minimum necessities, a society must be
branded as inhuman and inefficient.

And that is perhaps all that early socialists like Marx and Engels
meant by the phrase to each according to his needs ". But the
underlying assumption of this pamphlet is that in any civilisation
worth living in, the needs of man are not merely material. He hungers
for other things- for beauty,for companionship, for joy. These, too,
the Democratic Order must provide.

We have already seen that by establishing a system of production for
use we shall inevitably secure the first of these spiritual needs-
beauty. To see how the other, spiritual values will be secured we must
turn to the third condition of democracy- workers' ownership of
industry.

FROM THE BoTTOM UPWARDS

This is a controversial issue, even within the democratic ranks.
Since that fatal day in I872 when Marx scuttled the First
International, the socialist movement has been split into two
irreconcilable camps. The fundamental nature of the division has been
hidden by a confusion of names and a multiplicity of leagues,
alliances, federations and societies. But the issue is simply whether
industry is to be controlled from the bottom upwards, by the workers
and their elected delegates ; or whether it is to be centralised and
controlled from the top, by an abstraction we call the State, but
which in effect means a small and exclusive class of bureaucrats.

The historical fact that everywhere in the north of Europe-Germany,
Scandinavia, France and Great Britain- the authoritarian or
bureaucratic conception of socialism triumphed should not blind us to
the still living issue, For this "" conceptual , triumph somehow has
not brought with it what we mean by the Democratic Order. Indeed, in
most of the countries named it has brought about just the opposite
phenomenon- the Anti-democratic Order of Hitler, Mussolini and their
satraps Petain, Franco, Quisling, Antonescu, etc .

Do not let us deceive ourselves in thinking that this New Order which
Hitler is trying to establish in Europe is merely a temporary phase of
reactionaryism. Reactionary it is, in the deepest sense of the word,
for it denies the advance of the human spirit ; and it offers sinister
accommodations to the industrial capitalists who have been democracy's
most bitter enemies - But in many of its features it is but a
development or adaptation of that authoritarian form of socialism
which Marx made the predominant form of socialism. It even claims the
name of socialism, and it is somewhat unfortunate that this fact is
disguised and forgotten in the popular contraction : Nazi. Hitler's
New Order is socialist in that it establishes a centralised State
control of all production. It is socialist in that it establishes a
system of social security guaranteed employment, fair rates of wages,
organised amenities of various kinds. It is socialist in that it
subordinates the financial system to the industrial system.

In many ways it is professedly socialist, but it remains profoundly
undemocratic. Because whatever it gives in the way of social security,
it takes away in the form of spiritual liberty. Every Nazi worker must
sell his soul before he can belong to this New Order.

"IN THE PLENITUDE OF FREEDOM"

The Nazis, as I have already said, are very culture-conscious-as
culture-conscious as Matthew Arnold and all our Victorian forefathers.
But the more conscious they become of culture, the less capable they
become of producing it. Nazi Germany, in the eight years of its
supremacy and intensive cultivation of the arts, has not been able to
produce for the admiration of the world a single artist of any kind.
Most of its great writers and painters- Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel,
Oskar Kokoschka and many others- are living in exile. A few great
artists who have remained in Germany-the composer Strauss, for
example-are too old to produce any new work of significance, and too
indifferent to the political order to want to produce anything at all.
There are a few writers of integrity and genius who remain in Germany-
I am thinking particularly of Hans Carossa and Ernst Robert Curtius-
but they must be living in spiritual agony. For this general impotence
the Nazi leaders may offer the excuse of war and revolution, but other
wars and revolutions have immediately inspired poets and painters. The
great Romantic Movement in literature, for example, was directly
inspired by the French Revolution and all the storm and stress of the
wars that followed could not diminish its force.

The position in Italy is exactly the same, and shows in addition that
the time factor makes no difference. It is eighteen years since
Mussolini and his blackshirts marched on Rome (or travelled there in a
railway carriage), but in all that time not a single work of art of
universal significance has come from that country-nothing but bombast
and vulgarity.

There is only one explanation of this failure of the Fascist and Nazi
Revolutions to inspire a great art, and I cannot describe it better
than in the words of Giovanni Gentile, a liberal Philosopher who sold
him-self to the Fascist regime. Speaking to an audience of teachers in
Trieste shortly after that city had fallen into Italian hands at the
end of the last war, he declared: " Spiritual activity works only in
the plenitude of freedom."

It was a fine moment for the Italian people, and this was a fine
sentiment to match the occasion. More than twenty years have passed,
and Gentile has served Mussolini as his Minister of Education for most
of that time, and has done as much as anyone to give fascism a decent
covering of intellectual respectability. As he surveys the tyranny he
has he]ped to establish and sees a]l around him a spiritual poverty in
keeping with an economic poverty, it is possible that this sad and
disillusioned man may still repeat, in a whisper which is only heard
in the secret recesses of his own mind : Spiritual activity works only
in the plenitude of freedom.

EXIT THE ARTIST
One thing must be admitted : the lack of any spiritual activity in
Germany and Italy is not due to a lack of official encouragement. In
Germany there is a vast organisation, the Reichskulturkammer, charged
with the specific task of supervising cultural activities of every
kind, and in Italy there is a similar display of State patronage.
Outside the Fascist countries there is a parallel activity in Russia,
and in the U.S.A. there is the Federal Arts Project. This latter
organisation has a different aim: to relieve distress among artists
rather than to encourage the production of a national type of art. But
all of our types of State patronage illustrate the same truth-that no
amount of sauce will disguise the staleness of the underlying fish.

You cannot buy the spiritual values which make the greatness of a
nation's art : you cannot even cultivate them unless you prepare the
soil. And that soil is freedom- not Freedom with a capital F, not an
abstraction of any kind, but simply "letting alone". " Letting alone"
is not the same as " laissez-faire". A person is not left alone if he
has a cupboard full of cares. He must be left alone with sufficient
food and shelter to safeguard his health" and he must be left alone
with sufficient material to work with. Then "laissez-faire" -then let
him do what he likes to do.

To keep a class of people in comfort and then let them do what they
please offends the sense of social equity- every dustman might then
set up as an artist. But that is not exactly what I propose. I have
said : To hell with culture ; and to this consignment we might add
another : To hell with the artist. Art as a separate profession is
merely a consequence of culture as a separate entity. In our
Democratic Order there will be no precious or privileged beings called
artists : there will only be workers. Or if you prefer Gill"s more
paradoxical statement of the same truth : in the Democratic Order
there will be no despised and unprivileged beings called workers:
there will only be artists. artist is xix~

man "but every man is a special kind of artist." 1

But among workers there are various degrees of ability. And the
people capable of recognizing this ability are the workers themselves
in their several professions. For example, the masons and stonecarvers
will know which few individuals among them carve stone so
superlatively well that they deserve, for the common good, to be
exempted from routine work and encouraged to devote their working
hours to those types of carving which are not so much utilitarian as
"creative" -that is to say, expressive of emotions, intuitions and
ideas.

It is the same with every other type of artist- the architect and the
engineer no less than the painter and the sculptor. The possible
exception is the poet, the "divine literatus" to whom Whitman gave
such a vital function in the Democratic Order.

There is no basic profession which stands in the same relation to
poetry as stone-carving does to sculpture. Writing is, of course "a
profession" and in the Democratic Order it will have its appropriate
guild or collective -as it has in Russia to-day. Once it is free from
the rivalries and log-rolling which accompany writing for profit (or
writing on the backs of advertisements, as Chesterton called
journalism), a Writers Guild might be entrusted with the economic
organisation of this particular kind of work ; but genius will often
elude its systematic survey. Against this eventuality there can be no
social safeguard. There are certain types of genius which are always
in advance of the general level of sensibility-even the general level
of professional sensibility. In the past such men have been frustrated
or have been starved. In the Democratic Order they will at least avoid
the second fate.

A CREATIVE CIVILISATION

Production for use, mutual aid, workers' control-these are the
slogans of democracy, and these are the slogans of a creative
civilisation. There is nothing mysterious or difficult about such a
civilisation ; indeed, some of the primitive civilisations still
existing in remote corners of the world, and many primitive
civilisations of the past, including that of prehistoric man, deserve
to be called creative. What they make, if it is only a plaited basket
or an unpainted pot, they make with instinctive rightness and
directness. It is impossible to compare such primitive communities
with our own highly organised modes of living but their social economy
in its simple way answers to our slogans. Production is for use and
not for profit ; and all work is done without compulsion for the
general benefit of the community . On their simple level of living,
there is ample social security, and no man sells his labour to a
middleman or boss : work is either individual or communal, and in
either case it is free from the dispiriting influences of slavery and
manumission.

But we are not a primitive society and there is no need to become
primitive in order to secure the conditions of a democratic order. We
want to retain all our scientific and industrial triumphs -electric
power, machine tools, mass production and the rest. We do not propose
to revert to the economy of the handloom and the plough- ideal as this
may seem in retrospect. We propose that the workers and technicians
who have made the modern instruments of production should control them
-control their use and determine the flow of their production. It can
be done. Russia has shown that the essential organisation can be
created, and we should not be blinded to the significance of that
great achievement by the perversion it has suffered at the hands of
bureaucrats. For a brief spell democratic Spain showed us that
workers' control could be an efficient reality. Workers' control can
be established in this country, and there is not much point in
discussing the finer values of civilisation until that essential
change has been effected .

The fundamental truth about economics is that the methods and
instruments of production, freely used and fairly used, are capable of
giving every human being a decent standard of living. The factors
which obstruct the free and fair use of the methods and instruments of
production are the factors which must disappear before a democratic
order can be established. Whatever these factors are- an obsolete
financial system, the private ownership of property, rent and usury-
they are anti-democratic factors, and prevent the establishment of a
democratic order and consequently prevent the establishment of a
creative civilisation.

Economics are outside the scope of this pamphlet, but I cannot avoid
them. Unless the present economic system is abolished, its roots
eradicated and all its intricate branches lopped, the first conditions
for a democratic alternative to the fake culture of our present
civilisation are not satisfied. For this reason one cannot be very
specific about the features of a democratic culture. Engineers and
designers can make the working drawings for a motor-car, and granted
the right kind of machinery, they can be sure that the type of car
they have designed will run when it is completed. But they cannot
predict where that car will travel. A democratic culture is the
journey a democratic society will make when once it has been
established. If it is well made we know that our democratic society
will travel far. And with the man for whom it was made at the wheel,
we can be sure that it will travel in the right direction, discovering
new countries, new prospects, new climates. We have already had brief
glimpses down these democratic vistas, and presently I shall describe
them more fully. But first let us take a backward glance at the dump
we propose to leave behind us.

THE STRAYED RIVETER

I write, not as a philistine, but as a man who could not only claim
to be cultured in the accepted sense of the word, but who has actually
devoted most of his life to cultural things-to the practise of the
arts of the present and the elucidation of the arts of the past. My
philosophy is a direct product of my aesthetic experience,and I
believe that life without art would be a graceless and brutish
existence.

I could not live without the spiritual values of art. I know that some
people are insensitive to these values, but before allowing myself to
pity or despise such people, I try to imagine how they got themselves
into such a poor state of mind. The more I consider such people, the
more clearly I begin to perceive that though there may be a minority
who have been hopeless]y brutalised by their environment and
upbringing, the great majority are not insensitive, but indifferent.
They have sensibility , but the thing we call culture does not stir
them. Architecture and sculpture, painting and poetry are not the
immediate concerns of their lives. They are therefore not sensibly
moved by the baroque rhetoric of St. Paul's, or the painted ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel, or any of the minor monuments of our culture.

If they go into a museum or art gallery, they move about with dead
eyes : they have strayed among people who do not speak their language,
with whom they cannot by any means communicate. Now the common
assumption is that this strayed riveter, as we may call him, should
set about it and learn the language of this strange country-that he
should attend museum lectures and adult education classes in the
little spare time he has" and so gradually lift himself on to the
cultured level. Our whole educational system is built on that
assumption, and very few democrats would be found to question it. And
yet a moment" s consideration should convince us that an educational
system which is built on such an assumption is fundamentally wrong,
and fundamentally undemocratic.

Our riveter has probably strayed from a cheerless street in
Birmingham, where he inhabits a mean little house furnished with such
shoddy comforts as he has been able to afford out of his inadequate
wage. I need not pursue the man's life in all its dreary detail :
there he stands, typical of millions of workers in this country, his
clumsy boots on the parquet floor, and you are asking him to
appreciate a painting by Botticelli or a bust by Bernini, a Spanish
textile or a fine piece of Limoges enamel. If drink is the shortest
road out of Manchester, there is a possibility that art may be the
shortest road out of Birmingham, but it will not be a crowded road,
and only a very odd and eccentric worker will be found to respond to
the aesthetic thrills that run down a cultured spine. There are
cultured people who, realising this fact, are honest enough to abandon
their democratic pretensions-they put up an impenetrable barrier
between the people and art, between the worker and "culture". It is
much better, they say, that civilisation should be retained in the
hands of those persons to whom it professionally belongs. Until they
are educated, and unless they are, it will be one worker in a million
who wants to read a modern poem. 1
Such people are right, and such people are wrong. They are right to
assume that an impenetrable barrier exists between their culture and
the worker : they are wrong to imagine that the worker has no cultural
sensibility. The worker has as much latent sensibility as any human
being, but that sensibility can only be awakened when meaning is
restored to his daily work, and he is allowed to create his own
culture.

Do not let us be deceived by the argument that culture is the same
for all time-that artist a unity and beauty an absolute value. If you
are going to talk about abstract conceptions like beauty, then we can
freely grant that

they are absolute and eternal. But abstract conceptions are not works
of art. Works of art are things of use -houses and their furniture,
for example ; and if like sculpture and poetry, they are not things of
immediate use, them they should be things consonant with the things we
use- that is to say, part of our daily life, tuned to our daily
habits,accessible to our daily needs. It is not until art expresses
the immediate hopes and aspirations of humanity that it acquires its
social relevance.

POTS AND PANS

A culture begins with simple things- with the way the potter moulds
the clay on his wheel, the way a weaver threads his yarns, the way the
builder builds his house. Greek culture did not begin with the
Parthenon :it began with a white-washed hut on a hillside. Culture has
always developed as an infInitely slow but sure refinement and
elaboration of simple things- refinement and elaboration of speech,
refinement and elaboration of shapes, refinement and elaboration of
proportions, with the original purity persisting right through.

A democratic culture will begin in a similar way. We shall not revert
to the peasant's hut or the potter's wheel. We shall begin with the
elements of modern industry-electric power, metal alloys, cement, the
tractor and the aeroplane. We shall consider these things as the raw
materials of a civilisation and we shall work out their appropriate
use and appropriate forms, without reference to the lath and plaster
of the past.

To-day we are bound hand and foot to the past. Because property is a
sacred thing and land values a source of untold wealth, our houses
must be crowded together and our streets must follow their ancient
illogical meanderings. Because houses must be built at the lowest
possible cost to allow the highest possible profit, they are denied
the art and science of the architect. Because everything we buy for
use must be sold for profit, and because there must always be this
profitable margin .between cost and price, our pots and our pans, our
furniture and our clothes, have the same shoddy consistency, the same
competitive cheapness. You know what a veneer is : a paper-thin layer
of rosewood or walnut glued to a framework of pine or deal.

The whole of our capitalist culture is one immense veneer .. a surface
refinement hiding the cheapness and shoddiness at the heart of things.

To hell with such a culture . To the rubbish-heap and furnace with it
all. Let us celebrate the democratic revolution with the biggest
holocaust in the history of the world. When Hitler has finished
bombing our cities, let the demolition squads complete the good work.
Then let us go out into the wide open spaces and build anew.

Let us build cities that are not too big, but spacious, with traffic
flowing freely through their leafy avenues, with children playing
safely in their green and flowery parks, with people living happily in
bright efficient houses. Let us place our factories and workshops
where natural conditions of supply make their location most convenient
-the necessary electric power can be laid on anywhere. Let us balance
agriculture and industry, town and country-let us do all these
sensible and elementary things and then let us talk about our culture.

A culture of pots and pans. some of my readers may cry
contemptuously. I do not despise a culture of pots and pans, because
as I have already said, the best civilisations of the past may be
judged by their pots and pans. But what I am now asserting, as a law
of history no less than as a principle of social economy, is that
until a society can produce beautiful pots and pans as naturally as it
grows potatoes, it will be incapable of those higher forms of art
which in the past have taken the form of temples and cathedrals, epics
and operas.

As for the past, let the past take care of itself I know that there
is such a thing as tradition, but in so far as it is valuable it is a
body of technical knowledge- the mysteries of the old guilds-and can
safely be entrusted to the care of the new guilds. There is a
traditional way of thatching hay stacks and a traditional way of
writing sonnets : they can be learned by any apprentice. If I am told
that this is not the profoundest meaning of the word tradition, I will
not be obtuse ; but I will merely suggest that the state of the world
to-day is a sufficient comment on those traditional embodiments of
wisdom, ecclesiastical or academic, which we are expected to honour.

The cultural problem, we are told by these traditionalists, is at
bottom a spiritual, even a religious one. But this is not true. At
least, it is no truer of the cultural problem than of the economic
problem, or any of the other problems which await the solution of the
Democratic Order.

EDUCATING THE SENSES
Let us now suppose that we have got our democratic society, with its
right way of living and its basic culture of pots and pans.
xx

How then do we proceed to build on this foundation ?

My belief is that culture is a natural growth-that if a society has a
plenitude of freedom and all the economic essentials of a democratic
order, then culture will be added without any excessive striving after
it. It will come as naturally as the fruit to the wel-planted tree.
But when I describe the tree as " well-planted ", I am perhaps
implying more than a good soil and a sheltered position-the conditions
which correspond to the political and economic provisions of the
Democratic Order. I am perhaps implying a gardener to look after the
tree, to safeguard it from pests, to prune away the growth when it is
too crowded, to cut outthe dead wood. I am. The wild fruit-tree is not
to be despised : it is a pretty thing to look at, and it is the
healthy stock from which all our garden trees have been cultivated.
But cultivation is the distinctive power of man, the power which has
enabled him to progress from the animal and the savage state. In his
progress man has cultivated, not only animals and plants, but also his
own kind. It is just this self-cultivation which wc call education,
and cultivation, when man directs it to his own species, naturally
includes the cultivation of those senses and faculties by means of
which man gives form and shape to the things he makes.

I cannot deal adequately with this aspect of my subject without going
into the whole question of education in the democratic Order, and that
subject is being dcealt with by another contributor to this series of
pamphlets. But I must state my point of view, becausc it is
fundamental.

Briefly, then, I cannot conceive education as a training in so many
separate subjects. Education is integral : it is the encouragement of
the growth of the whole man, the complete man. It follows that it is
not entirely, nor even mainly, an affair of book learning, for that is
only the education of one part of our nature-that part of the mind
which deals with concepts and abstractions. In the child, who is not
yet mature enough to think by these short-cut methods, it should be
largely an education of the senses- the senses of sight, touch and
hearing, in one word, the education of the sensibility. From this
point of view there is no valid distinction between art and science :
there is only the whole man with his diverse interests and faculties,
and the aim of education should be to develop all these in harmony and
completeness.

It was Rousseau who first realised this truth, and since Rousseau's
time there have been several great educationalists- Froebel,
Montessori, Dalcroze, Dewey- who have worked out the practical methods
of such an education of the sensibility. It is significant that the
last of these, John Dewey, has been led to the conclusion that there
is an intimate connection between the right kind of education and a
democratic order.

You can't have a good educational system except in a democracy- only a
democracy guarantees the essential freedom. Equally, you can't have a
real democracy without a true system of education ; for only by
education can a society teach that respect for natural law which is
the basis of democracy. "I cannot repeat too often that it is only
objects which can be perceived by the senses which can have any
interest for children, especially children whose vanity has not been
stimulated nor their minds corrupted by social conventions." This
observation of Rousseau' s should be the foundation of our educational
methods. A child learns through its senses, and its senses are
stimulated by objects-first by natural objects, and then by objects
which are the creation of man. Elementary education should teach
children how to use their senses-how to see, to touch, to listen -it
is far from easy to ]earn the full]] and exact use of these faculties.
Then having learned how to use the senses, separately and conjointly,
the child should learn how to apply his knowledge : how to judge and
compare the true reports which are rendered his senses: how to
construct things which give a true sensuous response and, finally, how
to construct things which express his growing awareness of the world
and its potentialities.

If we return to our pot and think of the delicate balance of the
senses of sight and touch which must guide the potter as the clay
turns between his finger- tips, we get some idea of the individual
factors involved in all creative activity. If we then remember that
the potter must direct the work of his senses towards some useful end-
for the pot must function- we get some idea of the social factor
involved in all creative activity. Substitute for the potter and his
clay any worker and his material, and you are at the heart of all
cultural activity : the same conditions persist, from the pot to the
poem, from the cottage to the cathedral, from the horse-shoe to the
aero-engine. Sensibility is the secret of success. There are degrees
of sensibility, just as there are degrees of skill, and education
cannot, nor should not, smooth them out.

But I do not think a democratic order should unduly honour the
possessor of exceptional sensibility. It is s gift he owes to the
chances of his birth, and the possibility of exercising his gift he
owes to the society in which he lives. So much of the world's
greatest art is anonymous, and is none the worse, or none the less
appreciated, for the fact. Art always inspires to the impersonal,
when every man is an artist, who should claim to be superman?

Which is only a modern version of the oldest and best of democratic
slogans: When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?

THE NEW VALUES

When once the Democratic Order is established, it will inevitably
lead to the creation of new values in art, literature, music and
science. In some distant time men will call these new values the
Democratic Civilisation, or the Culture of Democracy, and I believe it
will be the greatest and most permanent culture ever created by man.
It will have the universal values which we associate with the greatest
names in the culture of the past -the universality of AEschylus, Dante
and Shakespeare ; and it will have these values in a less obscure and
a less imperfect form.

AEschylus and Dante and Shakespeare are immortal, but they addressed
themselves to imperfect societies : to societies still full of moral
cruelty, social injustice and perverse superstitions ; their works are
"poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people,
the life-blood of democracy". The limitations of their audiences
hindered, in however small degree, the expression of their vision. A
perfect society will not necessarily produce perfect works of art ;
but in so far as it does produce works of art, the very fact that the
artist is appealing to a more highly developed form of society will
induce a higher degree of perfection. The artist has a more perfect
instrument on which to play. We should not be discouraged by the fact
that all hitherto consciously democratic art has suffered from having
to be produced within the framework of a capitalist society.

Hitherto not only has the democratic artist had to compromise with the
means of communication open to him as a member of a capitalist order-
the press, the cinema, the theatre, etc.-but he has had to use the
human material and dramatic situations incidental to that order of
society. His only alternative has been to stand self-consciously
aside, limiting himself. If to "workers" and their experiences- all
of which explains the dreariness and monotony of most so-called
"proletarian art". The artist cannot restrict himself to sectional
interests of this kind without detriment to his art : he is only "all
out," and capable of his greatest range when the society he works for
is integral, and as wide and varied as humanity itself It is only in
so far as he is simply "human" that he is wholly "great", and it is
only in a democratic society that the artist can address humanity and
society in the same terms.

THE GLITTERING PINNACLES

To this general rule we must admit certain rare exceptions. Certain
types of art are "archetypal". That is to say, though they may have a
limited range -indeed, by the nature of things, must have this limited
range- they are formally perfect. A song by Shakespeare or Blake, a
melody by Bach or Mozart, a Persian carpet or a Greek vase such
"forms", in the words of Keats' tease us out of thought as doth
eternity, They tease us out of our human pre-occupations -the theme of
epic and drama and novel -and for a few brief seconds hold us
suspended in a timeless existence. Such rare moments are beyond daily
reality, super-social and in a sense superhuman. But in relation to
the whole body of what we call] "art" they are but the glittering
pinnacles, and below them spreads the solid structure of human
ideals" human vision and human insight : the world of passion and of
sentiment, of love and labour and brotherhood.

THE FORERUNNER

The only other exception to the limitations that have inevitably
beset artists of the pre-democratic eras is a particular one- a poet
who, in spite of his evident weaknesses, is a prototype or forerunner
of the democratic artist- I mean Walt Whitman. The nineteenth century
America in which he lived was by no means a perfect democracy; but the
early Americans, especially Jefferson and Lincoln, had had a clear
vision of the requisites of a democratic order, and they inspired
Whitman with the ambition to be the first poet of this order. He was
inspired by a realisation of the tremendous potentialities of the New
World into which he had been born.

"Sole among nationalities, these States have assumed the task to put
in forms of lasting power and practicality, on areas of amplitude
rivaling the operations of the physical kosmos, the moral political
speculations of ages, long, long deferr'd, the democratic republican
principle" and the theory of development and perfection by voluntary
standards, and self-reliance."

But these potentialities could never be realised on the political
plane alone. "I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond
cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art,
poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been
produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences."

" the priest departs" the divine literatus comes". In these words
Walt Whitman sums up the whole argument of this pamphlet. But let the
reader turn to Democratic Vistas, that credo of Walt Whitman's from
which my quotations come, and let him find there in fullness the
essential democratic truths, and in particular those that relate to
the enduring values of human life, and to their expression in enduring
works of art. And from this prose work of the good gray poet, let the
reader turn to Leaves of Grass and see if he does not find there,
shining through the crudities and contradictions which Whitman himself
was the first to admit, the lineaments of our divine literatus, our
democratic poet and exemplar. Such may not be the form of the art of
the future, but it is its prophetic spirit-

Expanding and swift, henceforth,
Elements, breeds, adjustments, turbulent, quick and audacious,
A world primal again, vistas of glory incessant and branching,
A new race dominating previous ones and grander far, with new
contests,
New politics, new literature and religions, new inventions and arts.
These, my voice announcing - I will sleep no more but arise,
You oceans that have been calm within me! how I feel you, fathomless,
stirring, preparing unprecedented waves and storms.



1 I believe Gill took this paradox from the writings of another wise man, Dr.
Ananda Coomaraswamy, but it also sums up the teachings of William Morris and
the practice of the medieval guild system.

2 Sacheverell Sitwell, Sacred and Profane Love, p. 88.

Not so overstretched and understaffed, they have lots of cops and many new recruits...of course the police's main concern is NOT to fight crime as some may naively think, it is to control people. Any form of free expression, from a free rave to an art exibition, falls into the cathegory of challenging control, simply because it is a form of free expression, therefore attracts pigs. What would happen to all the brainwash that renders social control possible if people had spaces were to create their own art, culture and entratainement?
Wake up to the fact you cannot possibly get away from politics.
Solidarity,
Kathy

any further updates on what happened?

gosh theres a lot of repression at the moment.

respect to the TAA people for working so hard for what im sure was a great event before the police hassle. after reclaim the future getting busted a month a two or ago. i think its a real shame that TAA also had difficulties. crazy that its so difficult to do nice big underground events in london.

vive la resistance!