Free Rotting Hill by Wyndham Lewis Page B

withering.
        “Various explanations of this curious fact have been advanced. There may, of course, be several secondary interests involved. I am concerned exclusively with the major and essential impulse.”
        “Good! Gooood! ” sang Rymer with bantering patronage.
        “The complete emergence of the working class from underneath the possessing class (which it abolishes—or which is abolished for it) is perhaps meaningless. Fifty, or a hundred million people cannot rule. What would they rule? They can only be told that they are ruling, which is another matter; and meanwhile of course they go on labouring just the same as before. The people who tell them they are ruling, those people are in fact the rulers. As we see in Russia, the majority must always toil. It is an age in which paper takes the place of bullion, and the verbal of the physical.”
        “It is a different thing working for yourself and being exploited by some boss,” Rymer interjected. “That is solid enough.”
        “There is always a boss. They have a different line of talk, that is all. And the abolition of the middle class is a disservice to the working class, it seems to me. The classless society has been proved a myth. If class we must have, then a trinity of classes is preferable to two classes. The natural class-arrangement is to have a middle class, involving the perpetual individual emergence and ascent of manual workers, passing into the middle sphere, the reverse constantly occurring too, duds dropping out of the middle class into the working class. This individual emergence should be facilitated. Complete ‘emancipation’ would signify everybody being relieved of the necessity to work, when they could divide their time between the football-field, the dog-track, and the cinema: which is absurd. In the last analysis, for one man to be slaving down in a coal-mine, and another man to be passing his time between august Downing Street and luxurious Checquers, is unjust: which is emotionally true but otherwise absurd.
        The present theoretic eminence of the working class is a piece of illusionism. It is pure Maskelyne and Devant. The situation today speaks for itself. Workers’ wages, after spectacular rises, are frozen in order to enable the devalued pound to push up the cost of living, so that the workers will be economically where they started, before the honeymoon. In the end all they will have gained is millions of free dental plates and pairs of spectacles. Even these retrospectively they will be made to pay for.”
        Rymer cleared his throat, and the new National Health Service dental plate stirred indignantly about. “The working class is no better off than it ever was then?” said he with mild derision.
        “I did not say that. The Socialists have not improved upon the Liberal achievement, that is the point.”
        “Give them time. And besides the advance has in fact been enormous. Ask them!”
        “A bogus inflationary advance, and a supply of ideologic stimulants. But the idea of a Glorious Working Class World has to be paid for and it costs billions of pounds. The actual workman has to pay for the advertisement of his imaginary self.”
        “The view of most people of course,” said Rymer, “is that the working man is over-privileged, is spoilt.”
        “Everybody, not only the manual worker, is taken in by the advertising, that is all. His prestige but not his pocket has benefited. It is the same as with Culture and the Arts. So much money is spent in advertising how artistic and cultivated we are that there is no money left for artists or for real culture. All the money goes in the salaries of officials, public relations men, promoters, and in official publications, large buildings, educational activities, entertainment, and so on. There are now millions of political administrative parasites on the back of the working class, and their numbers multiply