6 End Class War

Numquam libertas gratior extat

Quam sub rege pio.

(If to sweet freedom you would cling, submit unto a righteous king.)

Claudian, AD 370–c. 404

When Adam delved and Eve span

Who was then the gentleman?

traditional slogan of the rebellious medieval peasant

Our contemporary class system roughly reflects the tripartite system that was developed in early medieval times. The three classes were the peasants, the clerics and the nobles, or the laboratores, oratores and bellatores. The peasants worked on the land, the clerics read, wrote, reflected, prayed and looked after the poor, while the nobles went off and fought. Now, I would have been quite happy to be a member of any of those classes. They all sound a lot better than the options we have today: working class, i.e. doing a boring job and getting into debt; middle class, i.e. doing a boring job and getting into bigger debt; or upper class, i.e. lounging around, arguing with members of your family and gradually selling off your land and property to pay tax bills.

Yes, I would have been happy to be a peasant, a cleric or a noble. I suppose I am closest to the cleric in that my main occupations are reading and writing, but I like to think that I am a bit peasant-like in that I enjoy working the land in the form of my vegetable patch, and also a bit noble-like in that I enjoy lounging around and doing nothing. In one person, then, I aim to bring together the best aspects of each class. I suppose this is what is meant by bohemian.

The funny thing about the medieval system is that there was actually more equality, not less, than there is today. When you look at Manor rolls from 1100 to 1500, what is striking is that, economically speaking, there was a high degree of equality. Apart from the Lord of the Manor, everyone else was on the same level. This is the peculiar paradox of the medieval version of authority: it created more freedom. The clerics, of course, inspired by Jesus, insisted on the point that all men were equal in God’s eyes; the prince was no better than the peasant. This idea was preached constantly to both noble and peasant, thereby bringing humility to the noble and nobility to the peasant. Certainly, says medieval historian Jacques Le Goff, there was a ‘halo’ over any activity connected with the land. To till the earth was to be close to God. And in the democratic Troubadour culture of the South of France, many poets argued that nobility was a matter of character not of birth, and was therefore available to the peasant, the burgher or the aristocrat. In England bondsmen would buy their freedom, and peasants became landowning yeomen, the class that Chaucer’s self-confident, prosperous and generous Franklin belonged to:

It snewed in his hous of mete and drynke,

Of alle deyntees that men koude thynke.

Bishops, even, were drawn from all social backgrounds. There was a good deal more social mobility than is generally ascribed to the period, particularly in the later Middle Ages. And the medieval middle classes, like Franklin, were of a different breed to today’s bourgeois, because they valued their freedom, as historian M. H. Keen writes: ‘The prosperity of solid men of middle rank had … a profound effect on the English national character. They were what enabled Englishmen to resist tyranny.’

These days, we all work too hard for other people, doing uncreative and boring things. We have submitted to the tyranny of the work ethic. Even some of the aristocrats have got jobs these days, and they seem quite proud of it. The rule of the bourgeois through Parliament is the rule of the strong by the bland and the weak and, through that terrible law whereby the weak can sometimes conquer the strong, the awful, mushy whirlpool created by puritanical middle-class parliamentarians threatens to suck us all into its hellish sludge. The working classes are encouraged to upsize and join the middle classes through hard toil, and the upper classes are encouraged to become dull democrats themselves, to take jobs, work and be boring!

Now, proper old-fashioned working-class attitudes, such as those described by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy, are positive: they are based on the importance in life of neighbourliness, fun and friends over work and career:

Whatever one does, horizons are likely to be limited; in any case, working-class people add quickly, money doesn’t seem to make people happier, nor does power. The ‘real’ things are the human and companionable things – home and family affection, friendship and being able to say, ‘Enjoy y’self’: ‘Money’s not the real thing,’ they say, and ‘Life isn’t worth living if y’sweating for extra money all t’time.’ Working-class songs often ask for love, friends, a good home; they always insist that money does not matter.

These values to me are good values, and they are the ones under attack from the middle-classification of everything. Hoggart also points to a laudable live-for-the-moment attitude which contrasts with the ‘sacrifice the now to the future’ pension-planning attitude of middle-class life (brilliantly expressed, by the way, in ‘She’s Leaving Home’ by the Beatles):

… in general, the immediate and present nature of working-class life puts a premium on the taking of pleasures now, discourages planning for some future goal, or in the light of some ideal. ‘Life is no bed of roses,’ they assume; but ‘Tomorrow will take care of itself’: on this side the working-classes have been cheerful existentialists for ages … Pleasure is given high importance, sheets will be mended rather than new ones bought but enough money will be left for drinking and smoking …

Yes, yes, yes! As long as there’s enough for beer and fags today, then tomorrow can look after itself. I would rather have torn sheets and a larder full of beer than be a teetotaller with new bedlinen. I also love the providential attitudes described here. And as for your plans for the future? Well: we all know the Jewish joke: How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans.

So, rather than class war, let’s have class harmony, class integrity, class respect, class peace. We have class but are not of a class. We can help each other and learn from each other. I happen to like posh people, in general. I like the aristocratic tradition simply because so many aristocrats are anti-bourgeois. They don’t like work or, at least, they don’t like what work has become. There is still room up there for eccentricity and difference. They look down on those who need to work and instead they give themselves up to lying around doing nothing – a noble pursuit, as I hope I have proved elsewhere – but they will also get people together and do useful work in the community, they will patronize artists, open their doors, hold festivals and be hospitable and charming, all of which are very important roles in a free society. I don’t resent for a millisecond their money or their houses, because I know that along with those houses and that money goes an awful lot of hassle. I am grateful to them for looking after the splendid houses and gardens and, if I can visit occasionally, then all well and good.

But our resentment makes it hard for us to escape. Resentment can be a barrier to freedom. Whenever I give a talk about the benefits of not working, a member of the audience always makes an enquiry, more or less politely put, about my class origins and whether I have a private income. The unspoken implication is ‘It’s all right for you to talk about being idle.’ I explain that I do not have, nor have ever had, a private income, and that all the money I live on is earned by my own efforts in the marketplace. But, is that really anything to boast about? And why should we disregard someone’s ideas if they do happen to have a private income? Many great intellectual breakthroughs and ideas and art and literature have come from the moneyed classes: Lord Byron, Marx and Engels, William Morris, Bertrand Russell – trustafarians all. Resentment of others – ‘It’s all right for you,’ the feeling that life is just that little bit easier for everyone else around you – is the first manacle that must be cast off in the quest for freedom.

While I am an enemy of oppression and exploitation, I am not remotely in favour of dissolving all class boundaries. In doing so, you are left with a dreadful Protestant meritocracy, as there is in the States, where there is no excuse for not being a Master of the Universe, as Tom Wolfe described so well in The Bonfire of the Vanities. In actual fact, equality is a nonsense. Where all is equal, and there are equal opportunities for all, there is no excuse for failure. A class system will give you a built-in excuse for not bothering to work and simply enjoying life – if you need an excuse. And if you don’t like the class you’re in, move. One peasant, famously, became Pope. And being of a different class to another is not the same as being inferior to another: I am quite happy to belong to a different class to others, but I don’t feel inferior to the upper classes or superior to the working classes.

It’s actually terribly easy to escape from your class background – whatever it is – by simply rejecting what the conventional, preprepared world has to offer and going off and creating your own world. This way, you will find like-minded comrades who are bound to you by their spirit rather than by their class background. There’s no excuse for sitting around moaning about your lot. Yes, it might be true that terrible injustices have been done to you and your kind, but the way to escape the manacles of those injustices and to prevent their return in the future is not to moan about past trespasses but to rise above the whole thing and concentrate on living well. Bohemia can offer a way out of the strictures imposed by working- or middle- or upper-class backgrounds: each class, in its way, could be argued to be limiting to our freedoms. And in bohemian circles, lords and robbers mix with drunks, poets and musicians, people who have broken free of the ties that bind (if we allow them to do so).

The problem is not that people are different but that they do not respect differences. This is the problem with governments which claim to be ushering in a class-free society: what they really mean is a society where we are all the same – all robots, work-droids, automatons, like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. It’s a society forged in their own tedious, colourless, gutless image.

Class difference adds colour to our lives. The knights and warriors and bishops have left wonderful works around the world for our delight: castles, gardens, churches. Children naturally seem to love kings and queens and stories of the knights of old. King Arthur was an aristocrat; he was not a Soviet bureaucrat. Monarchy can be fun. Robert Burton, in that brilliant seventeenth-century self-help manual and ramble Anatomy of Melancholy, outlines his own personal utopia, and he would actually keep class distinctions for the reason that it makes life more fun, varied and colourful. Burton attacks Plato’s Republic for being boring:

Plato’s community in many things is impious, absurd, and ridiculous, it takes away all splendour and magnificence. I will have several orders, degrees of nobility, and those hereditary, not rejecting younger brothers in the meantime, for they shall be sufficiently provided for by pensions, or so qualified, brought up in some honest calling, they shall be able to live of themselves … my form of government shall be monarchical.

My utopia would probably include three levels of society, rather like medieval days, with knights, clerics and peasants. The warriors would be the aristocrats, and it would be their job to sit around doing nothing except for creating and tending beautiful gardens, having parties and festivals in their big houses, acting as patrons of the arts, and being hospitable, giving away food and beer. This is what the Eliot family of Cornwall do today. They use their splendid house and grounds as a meeting place and centre of artistic activity. The clerics would be the writers, poets, artists and so on. They would live like peasants, freely and self-sufficiently. And the peasants would be the craftsmen, the stonemasons, shoemakers, woodworkers, ceramic-makers, potters, blacksmiths. All three classes would be involved in the creation of music and architecture. The money-spenders, the thinkers and the craftsmen.

We would be able to use the aristocrats’ libraries, wander round their gardens, swim in their pools. They would take over the role of the state and would do this in a personal way. No Arts Council, no Health and Safety inspectorate. We would bring back common land and common grazing. We would tear down the fences. We would need to de-enclose. Respect for difference would be the order of the day. There would be a prejudice against becoming robot-like, and we would pity efficiency and regularity. We would laugh at petty officials and drum them out of town. As Robert Burns wrote in ‘The De’il’s Awa’ wi’ th’ Exciseman’:

We’ll mak our maut, and we’ll brew our drink,

We’ll laugh, sing, and rejoice, man;

And mony braw thanks to the meikle black Deil

That danc’d awa’ wi’ th’ Exciseman

Federalism and respect. My way is not better than your way. No one thing is better than another. All things and all people are utterly different and utterly equal.

The real task is to find the enemy within, not without. As the beatnik thinker Alexander Trocchi put it, we need ‘to attack the “enemy” at his base, within ourselves’. Class struggle itself feeds the middle class, because when you fight against something, you merely make it stronger. The answer is simply to ignore the things you don’t like about the classes and concentrate on the things you do like about them. Class war is also a blind alley since it is a profoundly irresponsible attitude to life in that it says, ‘If only those bastards hadn’t screwed me, then everything would be OK.’ Well, to an extent you allowed them to screw you, and you can choose not to be screwed. That way lies freedom.

It is our own complicity with the present way of organizing things that we must question. When we talk about anarchy, we do not mean a dissolution of order, a Mad Max environment where the most violent survive. We mean a decentralization of power; power to the people. D. H. Lawrence wrote that it is not a question of smashing the system but of putting a more humane one in its place: ‘There must be a system; there must be classes of men; there must be differentiation: either that, or amorphous nothingness. The true choice is not between system and no-system. The choice is between system and system, mechanical or organic.’

It’s interesting that he uses the word ‘organic’, which is today such a buzzword in foodie circles and as such easily dismissed as a middle-class fad. But ‘organic’ is a powerful word and, when we oppose it, as Lawrence does, with ‘mechanical’, its meaning becomes absolutely clear. Down with the robot, up with the human. Down with sameness, up with variety. Down with dependence, up with self-reliance. And so on.

As an idler and an anarchist, I love people from all classes who are fighting to be free. I love the aristocrats, I love the underclass and I love the bohemian bourgeoisie (of which I am one). I love the criminals and the drug addicts. If you want to join the elect, the colourful, the creative, it is very easy. Create your own life. Cast off resentment. Reject the idea of ‘have-tos’. You don’t have to do anything. You have free will. Exercise it.

BE BOHEMIAN