ANARCHIST UTOPIA
MR. READ, like Mr. Middleton Murry, is publicly engaged in a difficult and confused pilgrimage. Again like Mr. Murry, he is now completely disillusioned about orthodox com- munism. But here for the present the resemblance ends : Mr. Read has joined with Mr. Orwell in adding some feathers to the other left wing, the anarchist-syndicalist movement in Spain. His objection to Stalinism is that it retains much of capitalist ideology, in the forms of bureaucracy, inequality, repression and the " leader-dictator " psychology ; and he proposes a more " essential " communism, a syndicalist architecture enriched with surrealism and the remains of his interest in Social Credit. He is trying to move still further to the left, with a theoretical abandon and a practical innocence that have probably not been seen in this country for three hundred years. It is to the extreme nonconformists of the Commonwealth that we must look for a parallel to the thoroughgoing and censorious utopianism of Mr. Read. He is, in fact, a typical theorist of the revolutionary aftermath, sincere, uncompromising and devoted to the abstract purity of an untempered ideal. Admittedly Mr. Read affirms that
he is " not concerned with the practicability of a programme," but I should not like to hold him to that. It would be gratuitously unkind to invite us to contemplate the impossible.
Mr. Read's anarchism " seeks to recover the system of nature. . . . It denies the rule of kings and castes, of churches and parliaments." It is opposed to all whole-time government officials. Every " delegate " must be a " worker." The end to be achieved, which is also described as " inevitable," is a " classless society . . . without a bureaucracy, without an army . . . a world of electric power and mechanical plenty when man can once more return to the land, not as a peasant but as a lord."
It is a pretty dream to sustain our sadder moments. I sometimes wonder if our closet-thinkers ever consider the kind of resistances that face the man who proceeds to objective action. Mr. Read makes considerable play with ideas of " nature " and the natural man innately good, who in spite of present distortions is proceeding to an " inevitable " utopia. I suggest that Mr. Read should discover a hundred living examples of this Rousseau-ist paragon ; and that if that is impossible he should then point to one historical period where the species was visible to the naked eye. Coupled with his dauntless faith in the " nature " of man, Mr. Read has an unrelieved contempt for him in his present millions—the brutal lovers of " sentimental tunes, doggerel verse, pretty ladies on chocolate-box lids." In other words, the material from which the " natural " utopia is to be . constructed. is hopelessly corrupt and unnatural (in Mr. Read's sense). This is a, discovery which is forced upon the Stalins. and Mussolinis and . Cromwells of this world ; only a theorist can escape it, and only a Flood (with Mr. Read as Noah steering for a clean start) could provide the prerequisite conditions for a " natural " economy. And even given that miracle, it is still a matter of controversy whether the pair of survivors would be as free of Original Sin as Mr. Read requires. " We are the victims of an historical process," according to Mr. Read, but it is difficult to see how history can be detached from man and driven out as his scapegoat.
The crux of the matter is the nature of human capacity. Is it the compound of good and evil that we know as history, or is it—as Mr. Read suggests—a potential and indeed inevit- able perfectibility which has unaccountably fallen into a state of almost unrelieved degradation ? Is man born free, but everywhere in chains ? Mr. Read speaks with caution of Progress and with something like dislike of humanism ; nevertheless he is peddling the basic heresy which goes with those things, and in its most naive and rationalist form. It is a matter for ironical reflection that it was Mr. Read who edited the works of T. E. Hulme. I suggest he might re-read
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