Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great BritainRuskin, John
General
Fors Clavigera (Volume 1 of 8): Letters to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain
Ruskin, John
Aesthetics; Conduct of life; Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems; Working class -- Great Britain
Then the next bit of new coinage in the way of notion which I have
picked up in Paris streets, is the present meaning of the French word
'Ouvrier,' which in my time the dictionaries used to give as 'Workman,'
or 'Working-man.' For again, I have spent many days, not to say years,
with the working-men of our English school myself; and I know that,
with the more advanced of them, the gathering word is that which I
gave you at the end of my second number--"To do good work, whether we
live or die." Whereas I perceive the gathering, or rather scattering,
word of the French 'ouvrier' is, 'To undo good work, whether we live
or die.'
And this is the third, and the last, I will tell you for the
present, of my new ideas, but a troublesome one: namely, that we
are henceforward to have a duplicate power of political economy; and
that the new Parisian expression for its first principle is not to be
'laissez faire,' but 'laissez refaire.'
I cannot, however, make anything of these new French fashions of
thought till I have looked at them quietly a little; so to-day I will
content myself with telling you what we Communists of the old school
meant by Communism; and it will be worth your hearing, for--I tell you
simply in my 'arrogant' way--we know, and have known, what Communism
is--for our fathers knew it, and told us, three thousand years ago;
while you baby Communists do not so much as know what the name means,
in your own English or French--no, not so much as whether a House of
Commons implies, or does not imply, also a House of Uncommons; nor
whether the Holiness of the Commune, which Garibaldi came to fight
for, had any relation to the Holiness of the 'Communion' which he
came to fight against.
Will you be at the pains, now, however, to learn rightly, and once
for all, what Communism is? First, it means that everybody must work
in common, and do common or simple work for his dinner; and that
if any man will not do it, he must not have his dinner. That much,
perhaps, you thought you knew?--but you did not think we Communists of
the old school knew it also? You shall have it, then, in the words
of the Chelsea farmer and stout Catholic, I was telling you of,
in last number. He was born in Milk Street, London, three hundred
and ninety-one years ago, (1480, a year I have just been telling my
Oxford pupils to remember for manifold reasons,) and he planned a
Commune flowing with milk and honey, and otherwise Elysian; and called
it the 'Place of Wellbeing' or Utopia; which is a word you perhaps
have occasionally used before now, like others, without understanding
it;--(in the article of the Liverpool Daily Post before referred to, it
occurs felicitously seven times). You shall use it in that stupid way
no more, if I can help it. Listen how matters really are managed there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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