called for. Sir Frederick ushered me into his study, apparently assuming that the natural way to reach Roke’s Tining was on foot. No doubt some of the members of the co-operative and the heartier visitors did so.
He wanted the Kelmscot News from Nowhere saying that he had not read it since youth but had always remembered Morris’s prediction that under socialism the dustman and other labourers in hard and dirty trades would have to be paid more than the intellectual in order to attract them into the unpleasant work. He had found that prophecy impossible to believe, yet had lived to see it come true.
I replied that personally I would prefer to shift garbage and at the day’s end feel that I had used my muscles, solved simple problems and completed something of value to the community rather than work on a production line turning out needless goods the only value of which was to make money for the producer.
‘That’s been put very well by the chap who was gaoled for bombing politicians and escaped,’ he said. ‘What the devil was his name? My memory, Mr Johns, is going while the rest of my old body can still praise its Maker. Despard, of course! “The Twopence off Syndrome” he called it.’
It was a curious sensation to find myself suddenly transformed back into Julian Despard. I knew very well that I need not fear recognition, but for the moment I was a trinity with all parts of me in action simultaneously. It actually produced a slight feeling of nausea.
When I had pulled myself together I said – in order to open the way for more conversation – that I had read it and found it too slight and satirical for so urgent a problem. So I do. At the time of writing I had not considered it possible to promote actively the collapse of society. I merely thought collapse desirable, and was attacking the spiritual squalor and material greed of mass democracy by way of one example which man and woman on a London bus could understand. Proof of the final degradation of the bourgeois society is that it can be enticed by an offer of twopence off to buy an unwanted article the whole value of which does not reach twopence apart from packaging and the costly narcotics of advertising.
Is it fair to call such an insignificant human folly the final degradation? Yet degradation it is, and insignificant it is not. Twopence Off Nothing lies at the base of all the economics of the developed world. It will be plain enough when food, warmth and work at last begin to fail.
I asked him if he had always been attracted by socialism.
‘Once upon a time, Mr Johns! Once upon a time! I now see that it is unworkable, demanding one unproductive apparatchik to every ten citizens. I therefore must call myself an anarchist.’
‘Bombing politicians like your Julian Despard?’
Despard did not, but I am never sorry that the politicians thought he meant to.
‘A Christian Anarchist, sir! I believe in example, not violence. You will understand if you come and see what we are doing, and perhaps you will have a meal with us afterwards.’
Indeed I was anxious to understand, but to my regret I could not risk the much wanted meal and made my excuses. Apparently several members of the co-operative lived in the house beside those whom I had seen going home. It was better not to show myself. So far I had only been seen by him and the housekeeper who opened the door.
The industrial wing was all of a hundred yards long, a third of it of the same date as the house, the rest an addition in Cotswold stone. It was, I felt, what a place of work should look like – a Utopian impossibility but to be kept in mind as an ideal. Gammel opened the doors of the empty workshops. Among the crafts was the usual damned pottery, cabinet-making using beech and oak from the estate and, as Ian Roberts had said, spinning and weaving all the way from the fleece to a finished serge which would have stopped a knife thrust let alone the wind. Sir Frederick told me that the
He wanted the Kelmscot News from Nowhere saying that he had not read it since youth but had always remembered Morris’s prediction that under socialism the dustman and other labourers in hard and dirty trades would have to be paid more than the intellectual in order to attract them into the unpleasant work. He had found that prophecy impossible to believe, yet had lived to see it come true.
I replied that personally I would prefer to shift garbage and at the day’s end feel that I had used my muscles, solved simple problems and completed something of value to the community rather than work on a production line turning out needless goods the only value of which was to make money for the producer.
‘That’s been put very well by the chap who was gaoled for bombing politicians and escaped,’ he said. ‘What the devil was his name? My memory, Mr Johns, is going while the rest of my old body can still praise its Maker. Despard, of course! “The Twopence off Syndrome” he called it.’
It was a curious sensation to find myself suddenly transformed back into Julian Despard. I knew very well that I need not fear recognition, but for the moment I was a trinity with all parts of me in action simultaneously. It actually produced a slight feeling of nausea.
When I had pulled myself together I said – in order to open the way for more conversation – that I had read it and found it too slight and satirical for so urgent a problem. So I do. At the time of writing I had not considered it possible to promote actively the collapse of society. I merely thought collapse desirable, and was attacking the spiritual squalor and material greed of mass democracy by way of one example which man and woman on a London bus could understand. Proof of the final degradation of the bourgeois society is that it can be enticed by an offer of twopence off to buy an unwanted article the whole value of which does not reach twopence apart from packaging and the costly narcotics of advertising.
Is it fair to call such an insignificant human folly the final degradation? Yet degradation it is, and insignificant it is not. Twopence Off Nothing lies at the base of all the economics of the developed world. It will be plain enough when food, warmth and work at last begin to fail.
I asked him if he had always been attracted by socialism.
‘Once upon a time, Mr Johns! Once upon a time! I now see that it is unworkable, demanding one unproductive apparatchik to every ten citizens. I therefore must call myself an anarchist.’
‘Bombing politicians like your Julian Despard?’
Despard did not, but I am never sorry that the politicians thought he meant to.
‘A Christian Anarchist, sir! I believe in example, not violence. You will understand if you come and see what we are doing, and perhaps you will have a meal with us afterwards.’
Indeed I was anxious to understand, but to my regret I could not risk the much wanted meal and made my excuses. Apparently several members of the co-operative lived in the house beside those whom I had seen going home. It was better not to show myself. So far I had only been seen by him and the housekeeper who opened the door.
The industrial wing was all of a hundred yards long, a third of it of the same date as the house, the rest an addition in Cotswold stone. It was, I felt, what a place of work should look like – a Utopian impossibility but to be kept in mind as an ideal. Gammel opened the doors of the empty workshops. Among the crafts was the usual damned pottery, cabinet-making using beech and oak from the estate and, as Ian Roberts had said, spinning and weaving all the way from the fleece to a finished serge which would have stopped a knife thrust let alone the wind. Sir Frederick told me that the
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