What is the common good?

Apologists for the radical revolution of wage slavery argue that the worker should indeed glory in a system of free contracts, voluntarily undertaken. To them, Shelley had a response two centuries ago, in his great poem Masque of Anarchy, written after the Peterloo massacre, when British cavalry brutally attacked a peaceful gathering of tens of thousands calling for parliamentary reform.

We know what slavery is, Shelley wrote:

’Tis to work and have such pay 

As just keeps life from day to day 

In your limbs, as in a cell 

For the tyrants’ use to dwell,

. . .

’Tis to be slave in soul 

And to hold no strong control 

Over your own wills, but be 

All that others make of ye.

The artisans and factory girls who struggled for dignity and independence and freedom might well have known Shelley’s words. Observers noted that they had good libraries and were acquainted with standard works of English literature. Before mechanization and the wage system undermined independence and culture, Ware writes, a workshop would be a lyceum. Journeymen would hire boys to read to them while they worked. Their workplaces were “social businesses”, with many opportunities for reading, discussion, and mutual improvement. Along with the factory girls, they bitterly complained of the attack on their culture. The same was true in England, a matter discussed in Jonathan Rose’s monumental study of the reading habits of the working class of the day. He contrasts “the passionate pursuit of knowledge by proletarian autodidacts” with the “pervasive philistinism of the British aristocracy”. I am old enough to remember residues among working people in New York, who were immersed in the high culture of the day during the depths of the Great Depression.

Noam Chomsky