Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry - Christopher Caudwell

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other the causes which demand expansion. The productive forces strain at the productive relations. There is a final crisis of “over-production”. The falling rate of profit, unavoidable fruit of the self-contradiction in the heart of capitalism, becomes apparent in mass unemployment, a world crisis, a general slowing-down of capitalist expansion, war and revolution. And this final movement, in which the bourgeois finds his charter of freedom the very bond that seals him slave to necessity, is reflected also in his poetry, in the poetry of Imperialism and Fascism.

      The very destruction of all direct social coercion—which was the condition of bourgeois pre-eminence and therefore freedom—is the condition of slavery for the exploited and expropriated, because it is the means of maintaining the indirect coercion of capital, and for this uses the openly coercive machinery of the State. Therefore in the latter part of capitalist development, the bourgeois finds himself confronted by a class, the means of whose freedom is an organisation into trade unions, which alleviate the rigour of the free market These can only secure freedom for themselves by imposing coercive restrictions on him. This class is the class of wage-labourers or proletarians. Organising themselves first as Chartists, then in the trade unions, and finally led by a conscious political party, they impose on the capitalist coercive restrictions, such as the Factory Acts, social insurance and the like, which are the conditions of such liberty as they can obtain within the categories of bourgeois economy. But each class’s freedom secures the un-freedom of the other—that is the contradiction which now comes nakedly to light.

      Bourgeois production imposes on this class the means of organisation. Bourgeois economy groups its members in towns and factories and makes them work in co-operation. The bourgeois class temporarily buried the competition of men and appealed to the brotherhood of men whenever it required their alliance to overthrow feudal restrictions; and this gave the wage-labourers a political education and led to the formation of their political party.

      This new class finally secures its own freedom by a complete executive organisation of itself as a ruling class—the Soviets of workers’ power—and imposes on the bourgeoisie the final “freedom” of release from ownership of private property, thus exposing the lie on which the bourgeois notion of freedom was based. But with the disappearance of the bourgeoisie the last coercive relation rooted in the necessities of economic production disappears, and man can set about becoming genuinely free.

      This proletarian revolution is accomplished in circumstances which necessarily uproot and proletarianise numbers of the bourgeoisie themselves.

      “Just as therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole. They thus defend not their present, but their future interests; they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”1

      This desertion of the bourgeois ideologists to defend their future interests, in the final movement of capitalism, is also reflected in English poetry.

      We cannot therefore understand the fundamental movement of capitalist poetry unless we understand that the self-contradiction which drives on the development of bourgeois poetry so rapidly and restlessly is the ideological counterpart of the self-contradiction which produces the increasing movement of capitalist economy and is the cause of the growth of constant capital, the falling rate of profit, and the recurrent capitalist crisis. What the bourgeois encounters in real life necessarily moulds his ideal experience. The collective world of art is fed by the collective world of real society because it is built of materials which derive their structure and emotional associations from social use.

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      To the bourgeois, freedom is not the consciousness of neces sity but the ignorance of it He stands society on its head. To him the instincts are “free”, and society everywhere puts them in chains. This is the reflection, not only of his revolt against feudal restrictions, but of capitalism’s continual revolt against its own conditions, which at every step drives it forward to evolutionise its own base.

      The bourgeois is a man who believes in an inborn spontaneity which secures man’s free will. He does not see that man is only free in so far as he is conscious of the motive of his actions—as opposed to involuntary actions of a reflex character, like a tic, or imposed actions of a coercive character, like a shove in the back. To be conscious of the motive is to be conscious of the cause, that is of the necessity. But the bourgeois protests against this, because determinism seems to him the antithesis of free will.

      To be conscious of one’s motives is to will freeh—to be conscious of the necessity of one’s actions. Not to be conscious is to act instinctively like an animal, or blindly like a man propelled by a push from behind his back. This consciousness is not secured by introspection but by a struggle with reality which lays bare its laws, and secures to man the means of consciously using them.

      The bourgeois refusal to acknowledge this is paralleled by his attitude to society, in which he thinks he is free if he is free from overt social duties—the restrictions of feudalism. But at the same time the conditions of capitalist production demand that he enter into an increasingly complex series of relations with his fellow men. These, however, appear as relations to art objective market controlled by the laws of supply and demand. He is therefore unconscious of their true nature and ignorant of the real determinism of society that has him in its grasp. Because of this he is unfree. He is ruined by blind forces; he is subject to crises, wars, and slumps and “unfair” competition His actions produce these things, although he is undesirous of producing them.

      In so far as man understands the laws of outer reality—the determinism or necessity of dead nature as expressed by science—he is free of nature, as is shown by machines. Freedom here too is the consciousness of necessity The bourgeois is able to attain to this freedom, which is lacking in earlier class societies. But this freedom is dependent not on the individual but on associated men. The more elaborate the machine, the more elaborate the association needed to operate it. Hence man cannot be really free of nature without being conscious of the laws of association in society. And the more the possibility of being really free develops with the development of machinery, the more rudely he is reminded of the slavery of ignorance

      In so far as man understands the nature of society—the determinism which connects the consciousness and productive relations of men—he can control society’s impact upon himself as an individual and on nature as a social force. But the very conditions of bourgeois economy demand that social relations be veiled by the free market and by the forms of commodity production, so that relations between men are disguised as relations to things. The bourgeois regards any demand that man should control economic production and become conscious of determinism as “interference with liberty”. And it is an interference with liberty in this respect, that it interferes with, his status as a bourgeois and his privileged position in society—the privilege of monopolising the products and therefore the freedom of society.

      Thus the root of the bourgeois illusion regarding freedom and the function of society in relation to the instincts, is seen to spring from the essential contradiction of bourgeois economy—private (i.e. individual) property in social means of production. The bourgeois ceases to be bourgeois as soon as he becomes conscious of the determinism of his social relations, for consciousness is not mere contemplation, it is the product of an active process. It is generated by his experiments in controlling social relations, just as his consciousness of Nature’s determinism is generated by his experiments in controlling her. But before men can control their social relations, they must have the power to do so—that is, the power of control the means of production on which social relations rest. But how can they do this when these means are in the power of a privileged class?

      The condition of freedom for the bourgeois class in a feudal society is the non-existence of feudal rule. The condition of the freedom of the workers in a capitalist society is the nonexistence of capitalist rule. This is also the condition of freedom for a completely free society—that is, a classless society. Only in such a society can all men actively develop

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