John Ruskin Vs. the Paris Commune

Contemporary Marxists may not care much for John Ruskin, but it may behoove us to give the old social reformer a second consideration.
Paris Commune Barricades
(Photo: Bruno Braquehais / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Amidst the panegyrics marking the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune, which began its short life on 18 March 1871, ending two months later in bloody defeat on 28th May, we heard a lot about the lessons it offers radicals today. As an experiment in popular democracy it elicited considerable praise, as did its spirit of self-emancipation. We heard a lot less, however, about its brutalities (the twenty three clergymen, for example, summarily executed during the so-called “bloody week”). And, to my knowledge, we heard nothing about the English art critic and social reformer John Ruskin’s reaction to the uprising in France.

It is hardly a strange omission—Ruskin isn’t exactly a popular figure among millennial socialists, or socialists of any generation for that matter—but it is regrettable that Ruskin’s appraisal of the event should have been overlooked. For Ruskin’s letter on the subject in Fors Clavigera, his collection of letters addressed to the working people of Britain, offers a perceptive critique of the communism of both his day and ours. From the perspective of a Tory communist, the Paris Commune wasn’t all sweetness and light.

Provoked by the Communards’ attempted arson of the Louvre, Ruskin expressed contempt for the French fashions of thought that gave shape to the uprising in Paris. Describing himself as a “Communist of the old school”—citing Thomas More and alluding to Plato—as opposed to the “Parisian notion of Communism” which showed such disdain for France’s cultural heritage, Ruskin sidestepped laying out the detail of his antagonists’ views. Instead, he set out what communism ought to mean, implicitly attacking the revolutionary beliefs of the Communards. 

Thoughtful Labour

According to Ruskin, the first law of the old communism was that all must work in common. Ruskin was famously critical of a system which manufactured everything but human beings. Under capitalism, he observed, it was not so much labour that was divided, but the workers themselves. Ruskin complained that when you excise intelligence from labour, you make a machine of the person who undertakes it. To be an “animated tool” is to lose one’s essential humanity. But not all labour, Ruskin insisted, is alienated. Work can be pleasurable too.

“For Ruskin, work is not always morbid and miserable. It is healthy and ennobling when it is inventive and useful.”

For Ruskin, work is not always morbid and miserable. It is healthy and ennobling when it is inventive and useful. Everyone, he suggested, ought to be a handicraftsman of some kind. Ruskin pointed to the example of gothic architecture, embodying the individualities and Christian spirituality of its workers, as an expression of his labour idyll. What was so beautiful about it was not simply its form, but the mental tendencies realised in its design: above all, its thoughtfulness, precisely the quality the Paris Communards seemed to lack. 

Charitas

Besides working in common, communism meant a “Common-Wealth.” Yet, according to Ruskin, the Communards, in their actions, betrayed a gross ignorance of what true wealth comprised. Ruskin defined wealth as both the possession of a useful article and, centrally, the capacity to use that article appropriately. In attacking the Louvre, the “baby communists” of Paris demonstrated that they were, as yet, incapable of “wise consumption.” They strove only for a “Common-Illth,” the term Ruskin used to describe mere accumulation.

Ruskin, to be sure, was not proposing a community of goods. Elsewhere, he remarked that the “division of property is its destruction.” Nonetheless, in Ruskin’s communism the fortunes of private individuals would be small, while the common treasure of the nation would be vast. This was inevitable, since, when the “valuable” is in the hands of the “valiant,” the impulse to share is strong; the more precious a possession is, he argued, the more “we dark-red Communists” want to divide it with others. For his title Ruskin took the word “Charitas,” drawing his readers’ attention to Giotto’s painting of the same name. There, the figure of charity tramples on bags of gold, gives out corn and flowers and is rewarded in turn with a heart by an angel. That was what Ruskin meant by wealth. It was synonymous with Life.

Invidia

If communists of the old school believed that “our property belongs to everybody, and everybody’s property to us” (“I thought the Louvre belonged to me,” Ruskin lamented, “as much as to the Parisians”), they also believed in virtuous living. Like the French philosopher Simone Weil, who echoes Ruskin in various ways, Ruskin argued that virtue “diminishes in honour and force” in proportion to income. Thus vice ought to be punished accordingly, not on an equal basis but in line with social rank and responsibility, the rich faring worse than the poor. What Ruskin fervently rejected, however, was invidia, or envy. As a source of political motivation it is noxious, he claimed, however seemingly justified it might at first appear. 

While Marx invoked the dissatisfaction experienced by the formerly satisfied householder when a palace is erected next door, Ruskin spoke of “the healthy delight of uncovetous admiration.” One’s house does not become a hut when it faces Warwick Castle, he wrote. With a proper relationship to place, hierarchy and tradition, its value, on the contrary, augments. Which is to say, one ought to be infinitely happier to live in a small house and “have Warwick Castle to be astonished at” than to live in Warwick Castle and “have nothing to be astonished at.” 

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Attentive to the individualities of both people and place, Ruskin did not patronise the proletariat by romanticising it. The majority in society, high and low alike, were “greedy of their neighbours’ goods, land, and fame.” Such envy was the source of all wars, within nations and between them, he claimed. Ironically, perhaps, in the light of his deeply Christian mindset, there is not a trace of ressentiment in Ruskin. “Seek to revenge no injury,” he counselled. Seek, instead, to live, to live fruitfully, joyously, and admiringly.

Occult Theft

That is not to say that Ruskin advised turning the other cheek. He recognised that a class war was raging throughout Europe. “Occult Theft”—theft which is “legal, respectable, and cowardly” and which even “hides itself from itself”—was perpetrated against the working classes by the class of capitalists day in and day out. However, justice was not served by revenge. It was served by punishment where punishment was merited, and good laws and good leaders. 

A self-proclaimed “violent Tory” as well as an old communist, Ruskin eschewed the notion that people are equal. Equality, he believed, is a fiction. In reality, wisdom and virtue and talent is distributed highly unevenly among human beings. That being so, it was the responsibility of society not to vainly maintain the pretence of equal aptitude in ruling but to delegate power to the wise and virtuous and talented. Only once people had learnt to obey good laws, he concluded, should they suggest how to go about altering bad ones. Which is to say, before one considers mastering others, one ought first to have mastered oneself. 

Power, Paradox, Honesty

Whether or not all of this makes Ruskin a socialist is debatable. If he was a socialist, it was ethical socialism he propounded, as his immense influence on the fledgling British Labour Party attests. Similarly, the extent to which Ruskin’s critique of the Communards accurately reflected their views and actions is also open to question. Certainly, they were not the homogenous group of iconoclasts that Ruskin depicted. But what is not debatable is that there is value to be extracted from Ruskin’s views on work, wealth, and envy. 

Ruskin understood that a socialism born of negativity could lead only to destruction. In such instances, it was power rather than justice which was sought. A thinker of paradox, Ruskin had no problem with combining liberty with obedience. For him, it was not contrary to the spirit of freedom to “yield reverence to another” when that reverence is earned. Just as private property was compatible with collective property, hierarchy was compatible with respect. What Ruskin could not abide was dishonesty. The thinly disguised desire for domination dressed up as idealism he identified in the new communism was no more honest than the Occult Theft of laissez faire. What he saw in the Commune, rightly or wrongly, was “laissez refaire,” the appetite for acquisition among those who had little. 

Socialism With a Soul

Of course, Ruskin’s repudiation of ressentiment closely mirrored that of his contemporary, Friedrich Nietzsche. But when he censured the new industrial elite for its renunciation of honour and obligation Ruskin’s thought is most resonant of the American conservative socialist Christopher Lasch. Both he and Lasch regretted the incapacity for wonder and respect which accompanied the victory of industrial capitalism. They both lamented the waning of the sense of historical time. And Lasch is perhaps our most apposite critic of performative radicalism, chastising the stock individual of the modern liberal Left who extols cooperation, tolerance, and decency while, at the same time, regarding everyone as a rival to contend with for the spoils bestowed by capitalism and the paternalist state.

Certainly, if Ruskin were around today he would be scornful of the luxury beliefs and self-interest which masquerades as solidarity among the affluent liberal Left. The mere outward appearance of virtue, virtue ostentatiously displayed, is not virtue itself, it is hypocrisy. Characterised not so much by the will to power but the will to punish the contemporary Left’s puritan spirit would also doubtlessly irritate him: “Don’t worry about the speck in your friend’s eye,” he might suggest, returning to the strictures of another ancient communist he never ceased to admire.

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Unlike the cancellers and inquisitors of the modern Left, Ruskin believed in redemption. We are imperfect, he argued, and all the better for it, too. For in confessing our imperfection, we simply do what we can and forgive the imperfections of others. “We thorough-going communists,” he wrote, “make it a part of our daily duty to consider how common we are.” A utopian of the first order, Ruskin was also a realist. While he did not interrogate others, he did interrogate the internal consistency of his own beliefs. Thus, in contrast to the communists of today who discern no conflict between ends and means—the use of machines and the production of beautiful things, the destruction of the past and tradition and a future worth having—Ruskin solicitously thought matters through.

Sensitive to the fragility of the past, Ruskin sought to preserve it. He wanted to live in a country which treated its art and architecture like treasures to be carefully guarded, not to be trashed as if nothing is irreplaceable. Ruskin wanted socialism with a soul, not a new iteration of the “ossifiant theory of progress” advanced by the political economists who believed that human beings were no more than skeletons, creatures with no spiritual needs. In this, he anticipated Orwell, who also feared that socialism would mean a world of “enlightened sunbathers” whose only topic of conversation would be “their own superiority to their ancestors.”

An anniversary marking the termination of the Spanish Civil War which did not mention Orwell is unthinkable. Quite obviously, Ruskin’s brief and imprecise discourse on the conflict in France is not remotely comparable to Orwell’s physical and literary contribution in Spain. Still, it ought not to be forgotten: a Left with room for Ruskin on it is immeasurably more intelligent than a Left with room only for Foucault and Marx.

Author
Seamus Flaherty is a writer and researcher in the UK.
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