THE CLASS LIE
In the stage of economic evolution where the savage exchanges a fish for
a cocoanut, the balance of advantage in the trade may be equal. The
fisherman may need the cocoanut as badly as the cocoanut-gatherer needs
the fish. But as soon as we come to the stage where tokens are accepted,
there begins a shifting of the balance of advantage; for the reason that
the seller comes to specialize in the selling of one thing, whereas the
more complex the society, the more different things the buyer must buy,
and so he remains an amateur as to each. Moreover, the sellers learn to
combine; they form partnerships, firms, corporations, alliances,
leagues, associations, parties, classes; the buyer, on the other hand,
remains unorganized and helpless. He is the consumer, who takes what he
can get; he is the proletarian, who has only his chains to lose; he is
that plaything of the competitive process, that jest of the trader
through the ages, the general public. “The public be damned,” said a
great seller of railway transportation, and his phrase has become the
corner-stone of capitalist civilization.
Nineteen hundred years ago a revolutionary economist remarked, “To him
that hath shall be given; while from him that hath not shall be taken
away even that which he hath.” And this economic process is one which
tends continually to accelerate, multiplying itself by geometrical
progression. In present-day society, the sellers are nearly all
organized, while labor is only ten per cent organized, and the ultimate
consumer is not organized at all. We have thus the combination of a
monopoly price with a competitive wage, and the surplus wealth of the
world is drawn by automatic process into the hands of a small class. The
world’s selling power is now vested in combinations of capital, called
“trusts,” which present themselves in the aspect of enormous fortresses
of lies.
Merely to give a catalogue of the various trade-lies embodied in the
daily operations of such a “trust” would require a volume. There are so
many kinds of lies that no one man can know them all. There are lies
carried in the heads and embodied in the practice of petty chiefs of
departments. There are lies so generally accepted and conventionalized
that the very liars do not know them as such, and are amazed and wounded
in the feelings when their attention is called to the truth. There are
lies so complicated that highly trained lawyers have been paid millions
of dollars to contrive them. There are lies so cleverly hidden that it
would take the restoring of tons of burned account-books to prove them.
There are lies so blazoned forth on billboards and in newspapers that
they have become part of the daily thought of the people, and have given
new words and phrases to the language.
So comes the next stage in the evolution of the trade-lie. The owners of
trusts and combinations unite into parties, classes and governments for
the defense of their gains. They combine and endow and perpetuate their
trade-lies, making them into systems and institutions; and so we have
the Lie Wholesale, the Lie Sublimated, the Lie Traditional, the Lie
Classical; we have the Lie become Religion, Philosophy, History,
Literature, and Art.
Turn back to Chapter II, and read the list of the six great art lies;
you may now understand who made them and why. Lie Number One, the Art
for Art’s Sake lie, the notion that the end of art is in the art work,
is a trade lie of the art specialist, the effort of a sacred caste to
maintain its prestige and selling price. Lie Number Two, the lie of Art
Snobbery, the notion that art is for the chosen few, and outside the
grasp of the masses, is the same. Lie Number Three, the lie of Art
Tradition, the notion that new artists must follow old models, is a
self-protective device of those in power. Lie Number Four, the lie of
Art Dilettantism, the notion that the purpose of art is entertainment
and diversion, is a device of the culturally powerful to weaken and
degrade those upon whom they prey; just as the creatures of the
underworld get their victims drunk before they rob them. Lie Number
Five, the lie of the Art Pervert, the notion that art has nothing to do
with moral questions, is the same. Lie Number Six, the lie of Vested
Interest, is the sum of all the other lies, of all the infinite
cruelties of predatory, class-controlled culture.
The sarcastic critic will say that I make the artist an extremely
knavish and dangerous person. My answer is that he may be, and
frequently is, an amiable and guileless child. His knaveries are class
knaveries, collective cruelties, conventions and attitudes to life which
have been produced as automatic reactions to economic forces; the
individual acquires them with no more conscious thought than is involved
in the assimilation of his food. Ogi lies and pretends, he cheats, robs
and murders, imaginatively speaking, by the same instincts that cause
him to blink his eyes in a bright light.