D.H. Lawrence's Willie Struthers on Aspirationalism

The Modernist D.H. Lawrence, like his colleagues T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, was in politics a man of the far right, and indeed, in his propensity for irrationalism and anti-rationalism, hostility to democracy and freedom, worship of subordination and of "powerful" leaders, essentially a fasicst. Still, if he was against the left through and through there was one time when he had a character rather articulately, even memorably, express some of the ideas of the left--not as the right satirizes them, but as they actually are--in one of his less well-known novels, Kangaroo (1923). The occasion is socialist Willie Struthers' monologue in which he characterizes the working class in a capitalist society as having "been brought up in a kind of fetish worship" ordinarily associated with "tribes of savages," with the latterday equivalent of "witch-doctors" the Establishment's propagandists.

Said witch-doctors "thump on their tom-tom drums and overawe us and tak[ing] us in" with the message of aspirationalism, of individuals lifting themselves up their bootstraps into the ranks of their "betters," which alas "educated men . . . see through," but which "[t]he working man can't see through." As Struthers points out, the reality is that the working class can't all do it because the wealth and privilege of each individual who enjoys wealth and privilege derives them from the exploitation of many others; because, as Struthers puts it, "for every one that gets on, you must have five hundred fresh slavers and toilers to produce" what he calls, very significantly, "the graft," because those who preach aspirationalism themselves know it, and use it to the System's ends. As Struthers explains, "[t]empt all men to get on, and it's like holding a carrot in front of five thousand asses all harnessed to your machine. One ass gets the carrot, and all the others have done your pulling for you." Thus does the whole graft go on and on, with perhaps one out of hundreds, or more, "getting on" and becoming the kind of success story of which the "witch-doctors" love to fuss so much, cynically holding them up as an example to the rest--and ignoring all those who did not get to live out the story of "rags to riches," who began in rags and after much struggle and striving remained in rags, those other four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine donkeys who did not get the carrot, who strained with all their might and as well as any other donnkey and in the process greatly profited their "betters" without receiving the reward, and left leading lives of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation by the fact.

One may quibble over some of the details, or at least their reelvance to our time. Struthers has college professors in mind when he speaks of the "witch-doctors." Today, if it seems undeniable that many a professor does just this, along with the quasi-professors of the think tanks and "educational foundations" and the rest, I think we might think of a great number of occupational categories before that--like the "self-help gurus" who befoul the bestseller lists with their drivel, or the pseudo-religious hucksters plying the same trade as they promise the success-chasing that, as Elmer Gantry put it, "God'll help you make good!"--and of course politicians who are not all of the tidily labeled right (and not just in America, with a Tony Blair or Keir Starmer of Britain's "New Labour" very much of this type). Still, Struthers' monologue seems to me to otherwise hold up very well as a succinct expression of the critical view of aspirational propaganda that a left-leaning person who actually thinks about the matter much for long can hardly avoid taking.