Book Review: The Road to Wigan Pier
Book Review: The Road to Wigan Pier
George Orwell's 1939 study of the working class and the left remains as challenging and relevant today as it was at time of publication.
There are a number of authors whose influence on We Have Never Been Woke is super clear. Sociologists Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Shamus Khan spring immediately to mind. Or Bruno Latour, whose We Have Never Been Modern inspired the title of my own book, and whose symmetrical and charitable modes of analysis deeply informed my own approach (more on this point here).
Jean Baudrillard is rarely mentioned but looms heavily in the background. Foucault as well. Indeed, one of the main contributions of We Have Never Been Woke to the literature on the rise of the symbolic economy is its focus on power: who has it, how is it deployed, in the service of which ends and under what auspices?
George Orwell was a major influence too. I cite his essay “Why I Write,” in the introduction while explaining my own motivation to pen We Have Never Been Woke. Orwell’s advice in “Politics and the English Language” is a clear influence on my own style. However, the book by Orwell that most directly influenced my thinking on the Great Awokening(s) was The Road To Wigan Pier – a book that feels as timely as ever nearly 90 years after its publication.
Some Background
The Road to Wigan Pier was initially commissioned by the Left Book Club to document the plight of workers in Northern England during the interwar period. Orwell faced two core obstacles in helping symbolic capitalists in hubs like London understand the working class everywhere else:
Very few people in his target audience had ever held a non white-collar job. Most of his socialist readers had been born relatively well-off and were currently relatively affluent. The experiences of manual labor, chronic unemployment and poverty were totally alien to them.
His audience, despite their socialist leanings, tended to hold negative and inaccurate views about “those people” sociologically distant from themselves – limiting their sympathy to the plight of workers. They romanticized “the proletariat” in the abstract but detested the working class in practice.
In order to get over the first obstacle, Orwell provides a “thick” ethnographic description of workers and their lives. He stays at the kinds of hotels single coal miners sleep in; he treks through the mines (an extremely arduous journey each way), observes them at work, and reports on the risks they face. He describes workers’ living conditions, working conditions and lifestyles in great detail. He also stays at the homes of laborers who have families. He analyzes their income relative to expenditures. He surveys the size and conditions of their houses. He inquires about their physical health and psychological well-being.
In the process, he connects the labors and suffering of the workers to the lifestyles and comforts of the readers. He repeatedly draws lines to help readers understand how the conditions they take for granted are predicated on the exploitation of the working class. They could not enjoy their current standard of living without these “others” experiencing their standards of living. The abundant electricity they rely on isn’t (just) a miracle of industry, science or technology. It’s primarily a product of hard labor – “ghost work” -- that provides the means for all the other modern marvels that white-collar professionals take for granted. And this energy was affordable for city dwelling professionals because the working class was absorbing the costs. As Barbara Ehrenreich would later emphasize:
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on— when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently— then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health and her life. The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to every one else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, ‘you give and you give.’”
To get over the second problem — the negative views white collar professionals tended to have about those less educated, affluent or urban than themselves — Orwell surfaces and systematically dismantles common narratives about working-class people that were shared by many of his socialist contemporaries. For example:
For those who are unemployed or underemployed: why don’t they get a job? They could easily find consistent and good work if they weren’t so lazy.
“Those people” are struggling financially because they spend their money unwisely -- on luxuries and frivolous things -- without discipline. If they were more prudential, they could “save” their way out of poverty.
Living on the dole is easy and pleasant. People get everything they need without having to work. It’s the dream!
Working class people are happy and content with their situation – they don’t aspire to more or see any problem with their condition. This is a main cause for their lack of mobility: complacency and comfort with respect to their status quo.
Working class people have bad hygiene, and this is a product of the fact that they don’t want to be clean. They don’t like it. They don’t prioritize it.
Orwell talks about his own enculturation and how he, too, came to believe many of these things. In the process of explaining why such views are misguided, he highlights how these narratives are not just (incorrect) ideas about specific subsets of people. They “do work.” In particular, they help justify inequalities. They also help justify the social distance that white collar professionals enforce with respect to workers and the poor. And in a way that is lethal to the socialist project.
As a piece of sociological journalism, the first part of the book is exemplary. However, it is the second half of the book really elevates the text to a masterpiece.
While conducting the study he was commissioned to execute for the Left Book Club, Orwell grew preoccupied with the question of why it is that the working class – who would stand to benefit the most for socialism – generally rejected communism, socialism and reacted negatively to “the left” more broadly. This was a big problem because, according to Marxist analysis, the working class was pivotal to overthrowing capitalism. “The revolution” could not succeed without them.
Orwell’s answer to this question proved scandalous at the time – both within the organization that commissioned the work, and in socialist/ communist circles more broadly. Anticipating offense and blowback, the publisher originally insisted he would only publish the originally-commissioned study helping symbolic capitalists understand the plight of workers, while excluding the reflexive content on how workers view symbolic capitalists. Orwell gave an ultimatum that either the book be published in its entirety or not at all. Eventually the publisher relented – albeit only on the condition that the editor could append a lengthy rebuttal/ critique to preface the book.
And so, the final version of the text, published in 1937, has three components: an introduction attempting to prebut or distance the Left Book Club from many of Orwell’s arguments about social justice advocates, followed by seven chapters exploring the condition of the working class in northern England (Part I), closed out by six chapters analyzing the shortcomings of the (then) contemporary left (Part II).
Ironically, despite the excellence of Part I of the book, the part that the editor wanted to censor has proven to be the most enduring and influential aspect of the work. It’s the reason the text continues to be widely read and circulated nearly a century later. The second half of the book is what I’ll be focusing on for the remainder of this essay too.
The First Great Awokening
After 2010, there was a dramatic and rapid change in how symbolic capitalists thought about, talked about, and advocated for social justice. This period of rapid normative and discursive change – and increased activism, political engagement, and intolerance – reached a peak in 2021 and has been on the decline since.
As I show in We Have Never Been Woke, the post 2010 “Great Awokening” was actually a case of something. There were three previous Great Awokenings during the 20th century. The first of these took place throughout the 1920s and into the early 30s. Orwell was writing in the aftermath of this initial Great Awokening, which had run through England as well, and had devolved into a culture war followed by significant right-wing gains – as typically occurs in each of these episodes. In Orwell’s words:
“Those years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer to revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there was a running wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten, but which has left various deposits of sediment behind” (p. 138).
Reading Orwell’s text in the present moment, in a comparable moment of transition, can illustrate just how much these Awokenings have in common.
Some of the details are striking in their similarity. In the current Awokening, you have X. Kendi penning Antiracist Baby. In the first Awokening, you had Comrade X publishing Marxism for Infants (p. 135).
Likewise, since October 7, there has been a narrative that “kids these days” are having their perceptions warped by adopting a binary oppressor/ oppressed framework that purportedly has its roots in 1960s postcolonial theory and drives contemporary antisemitism. In fact, these modes of thinking go back roughly a century. As Orwell articulates:
“I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate… I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself. I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants… Once I had been among them and accepted by them, I should have touched bottom, and – this is what I felt: I was aware even then that it was irrational – part of my guilt would drop from me.” (pp. 148-150).
The concept of “intersectionality,” meanwhile, was coined and formalized by legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. However, Awokenings have always been deeply intersectional in practice – minus any meaningful awareness of class (then, as now) – pulling in all manners of vaguely ‘liberatory’ social movements:
“For several years it was all the fashion to be a ‘Bolshie,’ as people called it. England was full of half-baked antinomian opinions. Pacificism, internationalism, humanitarianism of all kinds, feminism, free love, divorce reform, atheism, birth control – things like these were getting a better hearing than they would get in normal times… At the time we all thought of ourselves as enlightened creatures of a new age, casting off the orthodoxy that had been forced upon us by those detested ‘old men.’ We retained, basically, the snobbish outlook of our class, we took it for granted that we should continue to draw our dividends or tumble into soft jobs, but also it seemed natural for us to be ‘agin the government.’ We derided the O.T.C., the Christian religion, and perhaps even compulsory games and the Royal Family” (pp. 138-139).
“One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist and feminist in England” (p. 174).
“We have reached a stage where the very word ‘Socialism’ calls up, on the one hand, a picture of aeroplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete; on the other, a picture of vegetarians with wilting beards, of Bolshevik commissars (half-gangster, half gramophone), of earnest ladies in sandals, shock-headed Marxists chewing polysyllables, escaped Quakers, birth control fanatics and Labor Party backstairs-crawlers” (p. 216).
We Have Never Been Woke demonstrates that the first Great Awokening in the United States operated much the same — oriented around antiwar activism, first-wave feminism, the New Negro movement, the first gay rights organizations, and more.
This “intersectional” approach has non-trivial risks and drawbacks, then as now. In trying to address all social problems at once, in trying to simultaneously support all the movements, the modal result is that nothing significant is achieved for any of the individual causes. Orwell, like Marx before him, was particularly concerned that the main cause people should be organizing around – socialism – was consistently supervened and derailed by all of these other niche agendas.
However, this issue, he thought was ultimately downstream from a handful of other problems that consistently crippled socialist movements in the UK.
Problem 1: Socialists, themselves, are deeply unappealing to most
Theologian Sheldon Vanauken once observed, “The best argument for Christianity is Christians: their joy, their certainty, their completeness. But the strongest argument against Christianity is also Christians--when they are somber and joyless, when they are self-righteous and smug in complacent consecration, when they are narrow and repressive, then Christianity dies a thousand deaths.”
Orwell makes the same point in The Road to Wigan Pier about socialism. Right or wrong, he argued, when people try to understand what socialism means for them, they don’t read theoretical tracts, nor do they imagine utopian or abstract possibilities. Instead, they look at actually-existing socialists, the institutions, organizations and communities they belong to, etc. to get a sense of what the ideology would look like “in the world.” In terms of community, he argues, socialism has always been tied to urbanity in a w ay that is off-putting to many. But the bigger stumbling block is that the kinds of people they typically encounter who broadcast themselves as “socialists” tend to be folks you wouldn’t want to sit in a train with for a couple hours, let alone launch a social movement with or entrust with power.
“Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially the working class, from whom he is of all people furthest removed… On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely capable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred – a queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs… the net effect is to give outsiders the impression that there is nothing in Communism except hatred.” (pp. 178-181).
“Sometimes when I listen to these people talking, and still more when I read their books, I get the impression that, to them, the whole Socialist movement is no more than a kind of exciting heresy-hunt, a leaping to and fro of frenzied witch doctors to the beat of tom-toms and the tune of ‘Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smel the blood of a right-wing deviationist!’” (p. 221).
“The really interesting thing about these people is the way they have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest details of life are involved” (pp. 177-178).
These impulses, he emphasized, tended to be in stark contrast with the working class people he observed:
“The working man… is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense…. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on a Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about… in my opinion he is the truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency” (p. 176).
Exacerbating the problem that many socialists seem to be driven more by resentment than compassion — and more by a desire to micromanage others than to set anyone free — social justice advocates also tend to be exceptionally weird (p. 174). Socialists, Orwell posited, seem to be almost constitutionally required to have something eccentric about them – some facet of their identity that they make sure others not only notice, but overtly acknowledge; some idiosyncratic set of identity-rooted demands that they try to compel others to accommodate at every turn. And to cap it off, social justice advocates tended to engage in bizarre forms of self-presentation too.
In practice, then, being among Socialists typically entailed comfort with being embedded publicly in a mélange of freaks, each of whom have idiosyncratic needs and professed preferences that you always have to account for, wherein normal forms of social interaction cannot be taken for granted and, in fact, can cause needless offense and conflict at any moment.
All of this, Orwell posited, is exhausting, alienating, and otherwise deeply unpleasant for normal people who found themselves in Socialist circles. It was so alienating that it turned many away from left activism altogether. In some cases, it even pushed people to actively resist the left. Then, as now, antiwoke sentiment served as an important pathway towards the extreme right. Orwell suggested that if socialists prove unwilling or unable to abandon their obsession with rules, dogmas and idiosyncrasies, their cause is probably lost, whatever its merits. They’ll never be able to get sufficient numbers of normies on board:
“It would help enormously if the smell of crankishness which still clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals and the pistachio-colored shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and every vegetarian teetotaler and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But I’m afraid that is not going to happen. What is possible, however, is for the more intelligent kind of Socialist to stop alienating possible supporters in silly and quite irrelevant ways. There are so many minor prigishnesses which could be so easily dropped… it is fatal to let the ordinary enquirer get away with the idea that being a Socialist means wearing sandals and burbling about dialectical materialism. You have got to make it clear that there is room in the Socialist movement for human beings, or the game is up” (p. 222).
“Socialism, as now presented, is unattractive largely because it appears, at any rate from the outside, to be the plaything of cranks, doctrinaires, parlor Bolsheviks, and so forth. But it is worth remembering that this is so only because the cranks, doctrinaires, etc., have been allowed to get there first; if the movement were invaded by better brains and more common decency, the objectionable types would cease to dominate it… It is so much easier to feel yourself a Socialist when you are among working-class people. The working-class Socialist, like the working-class Catholic, is weak on doctrine and can hardly open his mouth without uttering a heresy, but he as the heart of the matter in him. He does grasp the central fact that Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, and the ‘Marseillaise,’ if it were translated for his benefit, would appeal to him more deeply than any learned treatise on dialectical materialism. At this moment it is a waste of time to insist that acceptance of Socialism means acceptance of the philosophic side of Marxism plus the adulation of Russia. The socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors. You have got to attract the man who means business” (p. 220-222).
“Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types… drawn entirely from the middle class, and a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more unfortunately, it includes – so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of – the type of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoise, the more-water-in-your-beer reformers… the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists in five years hence, because it is all the go, and all the dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking to the smell of ‘progress’ like blue-bottles to a dead cat. The ordinary decent person, who is in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, is given the impression that there is no room for his kind in any Socialist party that means business. Worse, he is driven to the cynical conclusion that Socialism is a kind of doom which is probably coming but must be staved off as long as possible… The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight” (pp. 182-183).
“Fascism as it appears in the intellectual is a sort of mirror-image – not actually of Socialism, but of a plausible travesty of Socialism. It boils down to a determination to do the opposite of whatever the mythical Socialist does. If you present Socialism in a bad and misleading light – if you let people imagine that it does not mean much more than pouring European civilization down the sink at the command of Marxist prigs – you risk driving the intellectual into Fascism. You frighten him into a sort of angry defensive attitude in which he simply refuses to listen to the Socialist cause” (p. 212).
How social justice advocates conduct themselves is of great importance to whether or not others embrace or resist their causes. This is an inconvenient reality, but it is a reality. In Orwell’s time and today.
Problem 2: Socialists tend to be elites and elitist… and they aren’t as invested in change as they profess to be
Orwell argued that adherents to socialism tend to be relatively affluent, or “middle class” (by which he meant folks who were neither aristocrats nor commoners, neither workers nor capitalists. People who were highly educated and engaged in white-collar jobs. If he were writing the book today, he’d likely use a term like “professional managerial class” instead).
Despite their expressed egalitarianism, Orwell posited, these “middle class” socialists were deeply committed to maintaining their elite position. They wanted to achieve social justice goals… so long as doing so didn’t require any inconvenient changes. They were generally disinclined to make sacrifices with respect to their own lifestyles and aspirations, or to make compromises with respect to their own ways of navigating the world. If changes were required in order to build a cross-class coalition, they believed it was working class people who should think and behave more like them, not the other way around:
“A middle class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? …Is there any change in his tastes, his habits, his imaginative background – his ‘ideology,’ in Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes Labour or, when possible, Communist at the elections? Is it noticeable that is still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music, ballet, are still recognizably bourgeois tastes; most significant of all, he invariably marries into his own class” (p. 135).
“The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies like to imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting… most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige” (p. 173, 175).
“Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class distinctions. All my notions – notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful – are essentially middle class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honor, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy. When I grasp this I grasp that it is no use clapping a proletarian on the back and telling him that he is a good a man as I am; if I want real contact with him, I have got to make an effort which I am likely unprepared. For to get outside the class racket, I have to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well… what is involved is not merely the amelioration of working class conditions, nor an avoidance of the more stupid forms of snobbery, but a complete abandonment of the upper class and middle class attitude to life. And whether I say Yes or No probably depends upon the extent to which I grasp what is demanded of me. Many people, however, imagine that they can abolish class-distinctions without making any uncomfortable changes in their own habits and ‘ideology’” (pp. 161-162).
To make matters worse, most social justice advocates were not particularly reflexive about these realities. Orwell suggested that their faux radicalism seemed to blind them to their elitist tendencies. It also obscured the ways “middle class” socialists exploited and perpetuated the very social problems they decried. It lead them to believe their “activism” was a genuine threat to the system when, in fact, their behaviors (to include their tendency to drive normies away from the left) often served to reinforce the prevailing order:
“At the age of seventeen or eighteen I was both a snob and a revolutionary. I was against all authority… I loosely described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings. At a distance, and through the medium of books, I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness… looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus conductors” (pp. 140-141).
“Which ever way you turn this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather, it is not so much like a stone wall as the plate-glass plane of an aquarium; it is so easy to pretend that it isn’t there, and so impossible to get through it. Unfortunately, it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves. Not only the croyant et pratiquant Socialist, but every ‘intellectual’ takes it as a matter of course that he is outside the class racket; he, unlike his neighbors, can see through the absurdity of wealth, ranks, titles, etc., etc. ‘I’m not a snob’ is nowadays a kind of universal credo… And yet, all the while, at the bottom of his heart, everyone knows that this is humbug. We all rail against class distinctions, but very few people seriously want to abolish them.” (pp. 156-157).
“Every left-wing ‘intellectual’ is, as a matter of course, anti-imperialist. He claims to be outside the empire-racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the class racket… it is so easy to be witty about the British Empire. The White Man’s Burden and ‘Rule Britannia’ and Kipling’s novels and Anglo-Indian bores – who could even mention such things without a snigger? … That is the attitude of the typical left-winger towards imperialism, and a thoroughly flabby, boneless attitude it is. For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate? And at the bottom of his heart no Englishman, least of all the kind of person who is witty about Anglo-Indian colonels, does want it to disintegrate. For, apart from any other consideration, the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire… in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation – an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly willing to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together” (pp. 159-160).
“The left-wing opinions of the average ‘intellectual’ are mainly spurious. From pure imitativeness he jeers at things he actually believes in” (p. 165).
Social justice advocates often viewed mockery of religion, the military, nationalism and so on as proof that we have escaped the elite. In fact, Orwell argued, these “edgy” views were a signal of one’s elite background. Yet they weren’t well reflected in how these elites lived their lives. However, the hypocrisy and lack of awareness, while grating, was not the biggest problem. The worst consequence of denigrating God, country, and everything else was that these practices flew in the face of working people’s values, often alienating ordinary people from the cause.
Across the board, the core problem, Orwell argued, is that most social justice activists, in virtue of being elites, have no robust or organic connection to the people they purport to be championing or representing. They have no idea what ordinary people care about. They have little knowledge of workers’ lifestyles or challenges, to say nothing of their aspirations, preferences and priorities. They don’t know how others think, and as a consequence, don’t perceive how large the distance actually is between themselves and everyone else (the same holds true today).
As a result of this knowledge gap, Orwell argued, social justice advocates typically end up projecting their own personal preferences and priorities upon the working class. They make convenient assumptions of what “those people” do or should want, and then interpret any resistance as a sign of false consciousness on the part of the workers (rather than taking it as a sign that perhaps they, themselves, are out of touch).
Other times, they make more of an effort by consecrating members of less advantaged or underrepresented groups as spokespeople for their communities, and then trying to defer to them. However, this doesn’t really help their understanding, in practice. For one thing, these appointed ‘representatives’ tend to be, in fact, quite unrepresentative – and, owing to their origins, they tend to be even less aware of their contemporary elite class position and their elitist tendencies than typical elites (pp. 164-166). They tend to be deeply unpleasant too, and primarily interested in their own advancement. Worse, their path to “getting ahead” usually involves faux ‘radical’ preening – including often targeting the very people who are most eager to bond with and learn from them.
“He has been picked out to fight for his mates, and all it means to him is a soft job and the chance of ‘bettering’ himself. Not merely while, but by fighting the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois himself. And meanwhile, it is quite possible that he has remained an orthodox Marxist” (p. 177).
In adopting this posture, these representatives do not merely delude themselves, they also end up leading other elites astray about what less advantaged people believe, want, or need… In Orwell’s time and today.
Problem 3: Some aspects of socialism itself are genuinely unattractive
Although Orwell believed that socialism was necessary and possibly inevitable, he recognized that it also entailed some significant risks and costs. However, socialists were typically unable to recognize, let alone address, the concerns that people have about socialism because they reactively chalked up any resistance to deficits or pathologies:
“It is of no use writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove the distaste you have got to understand it, which means getting inside the mind of the ordinary objector to Socialism, or at least regarding his viewpoint sympathetically. No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing” (p. 172).
“Faced by the fact that intelligent people are so often on the other side, the Socialist is apt to set it down to corrupt motives (conscious or unconscious), or to an ignorant belief that Socialism would not ‘work,’ or to a mere dread of the horrors and discomforts of the revolutionary period before Socialism is established. Undoubtedly all of these are important, but there are plenty of people who are influenced by none of them and are nevertheless hostile towards Socialism. Their reason for recoiling from Socialism is spiritual or ‘ideological.’ They object to it not on the ground that it would not ‘work’ but precisely because it would ‘work’ too well. What they are afraid of is not the things that are going to happen in their own lifetime, but the things that are going to happen in the remote future when Socialism is a reality. I have very seldom met a convinced Socialist who could grasp that thinking people may be repelled by the objective towards which Socialism appears to be moving. The Marxist, especially, dismisses this kind of thing as bourgeois sentimentality. Marxists as a rule are not very good at reading the minds of their adversaries; if they were, the situation in Europe might be less desperate than it is at present. Possessing a technique which seems to explain everything, they do not often bother do discover what is going on inside other people’s heads” (pp. 186-187).
In reality, Orwell argued, it’s pretty easy to understand why many people are hesitant about socialism – not just in relation to its chief proponents, but also its likely consequences. Socialism is deeply tied to standardization and homogenization – with people having increasingly more stuff that is increasingly bland and uninteresting, lacking character, soul or distinctiveness. Socialism, moreover, seems hostile (and is often depicted by socialists as hostile) towards religion, tradition, rootedness and community. It also seems anathematic to many virtues that people hold dear.
“The unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion… the kind of person who most readily accepts Socialism is also the kind of person who views mechanical progress, as such, with enthusiasm. And this is so much the case that Socialists are often unable to grasp that the opposite opinion exists. As a rule, the most persuasive argument they can think of is to tell you that the present mechanization of the world is nothing to what we shall see when Socialism is established… The Socialist world is to be above all things an ordered world, an efficient world. But it is precisely from this vision of the future as a sort of glittering Wells-world that sensitive minds recoil” (pp. 189-190).
“How often have we not heard it, that glutinously uplifting stuff about ‘the machines, our new race of slaves, which will set humanity free,’ etc., etc., etc. To these people, apparently, the only danger of the machine is its possible use for destructive purposes; as, for instance, when aeroplanes are used in war. Barring wars and unforeseen disasters, the future is envisaged as an ever more rapid march of mechanical progress; machines to save work, machines to save thought, machines to save pain, hygiene, efficiency, organization, more hygiene, more efficiency, mor organization, more machines – until you finally land up in the by now familiar Wellsian Utopia, aptly caricatured by Huxley in Brave New World, the paradise of little fat men. Of course in their daydreams of the future the little fat men are neither fat nor little; they are Men Like Gods. But why should they be? All mechanical progress is towards a world in which nothing goes wrong. But in a world in which nothing went wrong, many of the qualities which Mr. Wells regards as ‘godlike’ would be no more valuable than the animal faculty of moving the ears. The beings in Men Like Gods and The Dream are represented, for example, as brave, generous and physically strong. But in a world from which physical danger had been banished – and obviously mechanical progress tends to eliminate danger – would physical courage be likely to survive? Could it survive? … As for such qualities as loyalty, generosity, etc., in a world where nothing went wrong, they would not only be irrelevant but probably unimaginable. The truth is that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty… a machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world – which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools… In tying yourself to the ideal of mechanical efficiency, you tie yourself to the ideal of softness. But softness is repulsive; and thus all progress is seen as a frantic struggle towards an objective which you hope and pray will never be reached” (pp. 193-196).
Socialists often advocate for what is today known as “fully automated luxury communism” – wherein machines have largely eliminated not just privation and disease but also obviated the practical need to work. Orwell argues that this state of affairs would not be a utopia. It would be hell. We can see this, he argued, in workers who are unable to work but have their material needs provided for: they aren’t happy. They’re often quite miserable. And the reason that they’re miserable is that the desire to be useful, to produce, to transform, to add value – these are fundamental human drives that people satisfy through various forms of labor.
“The truth is, when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games or merely lounging about – and these things will not fill up a lifetime – he needs work, and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work… Man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness. And now consider again those half-dozen men who are digging the trench for the water-pipe. A machine has set them free from digging, and they are going to amuse themselves with something else – carpentering, for instance. But whatever they do, they will find that another machine has set them free from that… There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon activities we now class as ‘art’… mechanize the world as fully as it might be mechanized, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working – that is, of living.” (pp. 197-198).
Socialists have long argued that, in this final state, people would be free to occupy themselves with labor if they want — to do things the ‘hard way’ should they desire — in much the same way that people are currently free to travel a great distance by horse if they’d like instead of by car or plane. But, Orwell posited, in practice almost no one would actually end up engaging in labor — certainly not genuinely productive labor. Instead, people would likely have a void in their life where there used to be meaning and purpose. They’d try to fill it getting high or getting drunk, through gluttony, sexual licentiousness, and other forms of hedonism, or by playing games or consuming ever-more entertainment just to fill up their hours. But spending one’s life just killing time in this way is a horrible way to live — empty and unsatisfying. Again, we can observe this readily in the contemporary world. We can see it in the fact that even people who are rich and don’t have to work typically do – and the ones that don’t often suffer with anxiety, depression, substance abuse and related problems despite (perhaps due to) their affluence.
The fact that many people would consistently choose the route of sitting alone in their homes entertaining themselves to death, Orwell argues, this isn’t proof that what people “really” want a life like that. Most would live that life despite not wanting it because people tend to conform with social defaults.
An awareness that we would likely find ourselves choosing the “bad” option if the socialist vision were ultimately realized is part of the reason people try to prevent that vision from ever coming into being to begin with:
“I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly, I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ t o return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense, I don’t ‘want’ to cut down my drinking, pay my debts, to take enough exercise, to be faithful to my wife, etc., etc. But in another and more permanent sense I do want these things, and perhaps in the same sense I want a civilization where ‘progress’ is not definable as making the world safe for little fat men” (p. 210).
This, Orwell argues, is part of the core appeal of fascism:
“Fascism is written off as a maneuver of the ‘ruling class,’ which at bottom it is. But this itself would only explain why Fascism appeals to capitalists. What about the millions who are not capitalists, who in a material sense have nothing to gain from Fascism, and are often aware of it, and who, nevertheless, are Fascists? Obviously their approach has been purely along the ideological line. They could only be stampeded into Fascism because Communism attacked or seemed to attack certain things (patriotism, religion, etc.) which lay deeper than the economic motive; and in that sense it is perfectly true that Communism leads to Fascism. It is a pity that Marxists nearly always concentrate on letting economic cats out of ideological bags; it does in one sense reveal the truth, but with this penalty, that most of their propaganda misses the mark. The spiritual recoil from Socialism… is very widespread, very powerful and, among Socialists, almost completely ignored” (pp. 187-188).
Orwell on Fascism
Famously, George Orwell was part of the anti-Stalinist left. Works like Animal Farm were intended to highlight how well-intentioned social movements often descend into tyranny. However, he was also deeply concerned with fascism, which seemed to be gaining strength even as many left-movements faltered. His final book, 1984, explored how fears about enemies within and abroad (exemplified by the “Red Scare” and the Cold War) could lead liberal democracies down a path towards totalitarianism.
Many of Orwell’s peers also railed against fascism. However, he argued, their behaviors did not seem to reflect a sincere commitment to preventing its flourishing. Most narcissistically focused on the left, often spending most of their political efforts on internecine squabbles and status competitions rather than reaching out to persuadable people in a manner that those people find persuasive, accessible or compelling:
“Socialists cannot afford to waste any more time preaching to the converted. Their job now is to make Socialists as rapidly as possible; instead of which, all too often, they are making Fascists” (p. 212).
Despite expressed terror about fascism, most socialists, it seemed to him, could not be troubled to exert meaningful effort to understand the appeal of fascism (in an accurate and non-prejudicial way) – nor were they willing to seriously explore why so many find their own movement distasteful. Instead, they engaged in self-serving narratives about the deficits and pathologies of “those people” who aren’t already on board, while taking part in indulgent symbolic politics that accomplished nothing positive “in the world” for the genuinely vulnerable, marginalized or disadvantaged in society – but which did tend to alienate the very people who needed to be integrated into the movement:
“In order to combat Fascism it is necessary to understand it, which involves admitting that it contains some good as well as much evil. In practice, of course, it is merely an infamous tyranny, and its methods of attaining and holding power are such that even its most adherent apologists prefer to talk about something else. But the underlying feeling of Fascism, the feeling the first draws people into the Fascist camp, may be less contemptible. It is not always, as the Saturday Review would lead one to suppose, a squealing terror of the Bolshevik boogeyman. Everyone who has given the movement so much as a glance knows that the rank-and-file Fascist is often quite a well-meaning person – quite genuinely anxious, for instance, to better the lot of the unemployed. But more important than this is the fact that Fascism draws its strength from the good as well as the bad varieties of conservativism. To anyone with a feeling for tradition and for discipline it comes with its appeal ready-made. Probably it is very easy, when you have had a bellyful of the more tactless kind of Socialist propaganda, to see Fascism as the last line of defense of all that is good in European civilization. Even the Fascist bully at his symbolic worst… does not necessarily feel himself to be a bully; more probably he feels like Roland in the pass at Roncevaux, defending Christendom against the barbarian” (pp. 213-214).
“We have got to admit that if Fascism is everywhere advancing, this is largely the fault of Socialists themselves. Partly it is due to the mistaken Communist tactic of sabotaging democracy, i.e. sawing off the branch you are sitting on; but still more to the fact that Socialists have, so to speak, presented their case wrong side foremost. They have never made it sufficiently clear that the essential aims of socialism are justice and liberty. With their eyes glued to economic facts, they have proceeded on the assumption that man has no soul, and explicitly or implicitly they have set up the goal of a materialistic Utopia. As a result, Fascism has been able to play upon every instinct that revolts against hedonism and a cheap conception of ‘progress.’ It has been able to pose as the upholder of the European tradition, and to appeal to Christian belief, to patriotism, and to the military virtues. It is far worse than useless to write Fascism off as ‘mass sadism,’ or some other easy phrase of that kind. If you pretend that it is merely an aberration which will presently pass off of its own accord, you are dreaming a dream from which you will awake when somebody coshes you with a rubber truncheon” (p. 214).
The path forward, Orwell suggested, is for social justice activists to abandon their snobbishness and parochialism, their moral grandstanding, their inclination towards abstraction over practice, their insistence upon off-putting eccentricity, and their tendencies to surveille, micromanage and paternalize others — to focus on what’s essential and important — in order to build a broad-based coalition that addresses people’s material concerns, yes, but not at the expense of their “ideal interests” (to borrow a concept from Weber). However, it was unclear to Orwell whether social justice activists actually cared about their professed causes enough to do what must be done in order to achieve their expressed ends. And so, the book ends on an ambivalent note. I’ll end this review the same way, with a final word from Orwell that rings as true to me today as it likely did in 1939:
“The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal ‘underlying.’ It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctrinaire priggishness, party squabbles, and half-baked ‘progressivism’ until it is like a diamond hidden under a mountain of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring out like a bugle across the world. For a long time past, certainly for the last ten years, the devil has had all the best tunes… Socialism, at least in this island, doesn’t smell any longer of revolution and the overthrow of tyrants; it smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win” (p. 216).