Monday, March 23, 2015

If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich?

From “Small World: An Academic Romance” (1984) by David Lodge. In the novel, Morris Zapp is a professor of English at an American university. Fulvia Morgana is an Italian leftist:
“There’s something I must ask you, Fulvia,” said Morris Zapp, as he sipped Scotch on the rocks poured from a crystal decanter brought on a silver tray by a black-uniformed, white-aproned maid to the first-floor drawing-room of the magnificent eighteenth-century house just off the Villa Napoleone, which they had reached after a drive so terrifyingly fast that the streets and boulevards of Milan were just a pale grey blur in his memory. “It may sound naive, and even rude, but I can’t suppress it any longer.”
Fulvia arched her eyebrows above her formidable nose. They had both rested, showered, and changed, she into a long, loose flowing robe of fine white wool, which made her look more than ever like a Roman empress. They faced each other, sunk deep in soft, yielding, hide-covered armchairs, across a Persian rug laid on the honey-coloured waxed wooden floor. Morris looked around the spacious room, in which a few choice items of antique furniture had been tastefully integrated with the finest specimens of modern Italian design, and whose off-white walls bore, he had ascertained by close-range inspection, original paintings by Chagall, Mark Rothko and Francis Bacon. “I just want to know,” said Morris Zapp, “how you manage to reconcile living like a millionaire with being a Marxist.”
Fulvia, who was smoking a cigarette in an ivory holder, waved it dismissively in the air. “A very American question, if I may say so, Morris. Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege”—here Fulvia spread her hands in a modest proprietorial gesture which implied that she and her husband enjoyed a standard of living only a notch or two higher than that of, say, a Puerto Rican family living on welfare in the Bowery—“we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not by the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ’istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role that we know ’ow to perform with a certain dignity. Whereas to be poor with dignity, poor as our Italian peasants are poor, is something not easily learned, something bred in the bone, through generations.”
(via WSJ)

4 comments:

  1. What a load of rationalized crap.

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  2. Like everything else in liberal la la land, someone else will handle it; thinking through the guilt and coming out clean on the other side.

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  3. Someone's got to be the privileged bourgeois elite that provoke the masses to revolution. Might as well be us, huh?

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  4. The nature of Marxism is a tiny, wealthy, entitled political class ruling over a huge, docile, impoverished underclass. Of course, all the Marxists in the world believe they'll be parr of that ruling, political class, which is why they espouse Marxism in the first place. What they don't realize is that the Marxists don't want or need that many people at the top, so most of them will be purged or hurled into the underclass.

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