I.
PAIUISAN REVIEW
Independent of these sources of power but mingled with all of them
was a general revolt against convention, the resistance to the
oint>
teenth-century fatheI'-figure in
his
many guises, the revolt agaimt
sexual taboos and restrictions, the movement for the liberation of
women. With this one may connect the hatred of industrial civili–
zation which certainly moved many people and which sometimes
led to nostalgia for the apparent simplicity of the medieval world:
all
that poor Morris had in mind when he cried that "Shoddy is
king!" Consolation and promise were, however, to be found in the
sheer energy generated by the working men's associations themselves,
the discovery of active community and common purpose, the
warmth of proletarian solidarity. While common in some way to
almost all, and equally Christian, Marxist and anarchist in its
inspiration, was the vision of an ideal community in which work
would once again be creative and meaningful, and human brother–
hood would be restored; whereas now the working classes were
deracinate and disinherited, human nature both in them and
in
their masters mutilated and divided: all that could be summed up
in the Hegelian concept of "alienation." These--and the list could
doubtless be extended and the items subdivided in different ways–
were the complex and various ideals and motives of Socialism.
Nearly all this great accumulation of energy has now been
~
sipated, by the achievement of goals which satisfied the desires in
question, or by the achievement of something which made the
desires less sharp.
As
a result largely of the working-class movement
itself together with the development of new economic techniques
we have the Welfare State. Many of the most obvious injustices
and deprivations have been remedied. The rich are not so rich nor
the poor so poor, and there has been a serious attempt to create
equality of opportunity. The sense of exploitation has faded and the
struggle for equality tends to take the form of the struggle for higher
wages. It now seems possible that capitalism is not doomed after
all, or at least not doomed in the dramatic manner once envisaged.
'On both the theoretical and the practical plane economists have led
us to believe that capitalism can (perhaps) overcome its tendency
to periodic crises, and does not inevitably (and, as was thol,1ght,
increasingly) grind the faces of the poor: thus removing the sense
of impending cataclysm, destroying the attraction of the Labor
