through the capitalist stage into the co-operative stage, the next step in social evolution. Let me emphasize this point, since it is the most vital one in this whole discussion. From a hundred points Capitalism presents a hostile attitude toward all efforts to restore the conditions of healthful, pleasurable, beautiful workmanship. Competition denies the product entrance to the actual social market, and compels it to circulate within a limited, unnatural, subsidized market. Wage slavery deprives the producer of all desire to improve his product, or of the possibility of individual initiative did he desire it. Exploitation deprives the over-whelming majority of the hope of ever possessing anything of actual beauty or artistic merit. An environment of greed develops the coarseness of the parvenu among the bourgeoisie and the coarseness of a debased animality among the proletariat. Under these conditions any movement toward the revival of the beautiful, the pleasant, and the good—in short, of the artistic—which does not connect itself
