A HOUSE OF THiORY
n
we see as wrong, and our ability to express what
is
wrong
in
a
profound, subtle and organized way, will influence our conception
of .a solution as well as providing us with the energy to seek it.
We have not mended our society since its mutilation by nineteenth–
century industrialism. There is less poverty but no more
(in
some
ways less) true community life. Work has become less unpleasant
without becoming more significant. The
gulf
remains between the
skilled and creative few and the unskilled and uncreative many.
What was formerly called the proletariat has lost what culture
it
once had, and gained no true substitute. A stream of half-baked
amusements hinders thought and the enjoyment of
art
and even
of conversation. Equality of opportunity produces, not a society of
equals, but a society in which the cla$ division is made more sinister
by the removal of intelligent persons into the bureaucracy and the
destruction of their roots and characteristics as members of the mass.
In short, a proletariat in the fundamental sense intended by Marx
still exists: a deracinate, disinherited and excluded mass of people.
Only this mass is now quiescent, its manner of life largely suburban
and its outlook "petty bourgeois," and it increasingly lacks any
concept of itself as deprived.
This
list of grievances, whose items would be regarded as obvious
in some quarters and eccentric in others, suggests to me the follow–
ing, which again will seem obvious to some. The Socialist movement
should most explicitly bring back into the center of its thinking its
original great source of inspiration and reflection, the problem of
labor: the problem, that is, of the transformation of labor from
something senseless which forms no real part of the personality
of the laborer into something creative and significant. To do this
would involve a rethinking and regrouping on the theoretical plane
of concepts such as "exploitation" and "alienation" which were for–
merly gathered about the Labor Theory of Value. The familiar ideas
of "equality," "democracy," "freedom" need to be understood anew
in the light of the problem of labor and not treated as independent
"absolutes" whose meaning is taken for granted. To treat them so
is ultimately to imperil them. Theory is needed to refresh the tired
imagination of practice. Our available techniques seem uninteresting
because we lack the vision to grasp their possibilities. A line of
thought such as I have
in
mind leads very
directly
to problems
