Orwell Quote

Friday January 17, 2003 17:14

by Janus

Remind anyone of certain political parties?

"The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes.

"The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its
developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical
Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies 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 teetotaller 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. This
last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has
perhaps been taken over en bloc from. the old Liberal Party. In addition to
this there is the horrible ? the really disquieting ? prevalence of cranks
wherever Socialists are gathered together. 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. One day this summer I
was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two dreadful-looking old
men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and
chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long
grey hair bobbed in the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in
pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into which their huge bottoms were
crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their appearance created
a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial
traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and
murmured ?Socialists?, as who should say, ?Red Indians?. He was probably right
? the I.L.P. were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is
that to him, as an ordinary man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist
meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt, could be counted on to have
something eccentric about him. And some such notion seems to exist even among
Socialists themselves. For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ?whether
my diet is ordinary or vegetarian?. They take it for granted, you see, that it
is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient
to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for
the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human
society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a
person but of touch with common humanity.

To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists,
while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their
miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my sensations of horror on
first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in London. (It might have been rather
different in the North, where the bourgeoisie are less thickly scattered.) Are
these mingy little beasts, I thought, the champions of the working class? For
every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit,
for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been
embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled
holding their noses. You can see the same tendency in Socialist literature,
which, even when it is not openly written de haut en bos, is always completely
removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought. The Coles,
Webbs, Stracheys, etc., are not exactly proletarian writers. It is doubtful
whether anything describable as proletarian literature now exists ? even the
Daily Worker is written in standard South English ? but a good music-hall
comedian comes nearer to producing it than any Socialist writer I can think of.
As for the technical jargon of the Communists, it is as far removed from the
common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook. I remember hearing a
professional Communist speaker address a working-class audience. His speech was
the usual bookish stuff, full of long sentences and parentheses and
?Notwithstanding? and ?Be that as it may?, besides the usual jargon of ?ideology? and ?class-consciousness? and ?proletarian solidarity? and all the
rest of it. After him a Lancashire working man got up and spoke to the crowd in
their own broad lingo. There was not much doubt which of the two was nearer to
his audience, but I do not suppose for a moment that the Lancashire working man
was an orthodox Communist.

For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine
working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically
consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets the
chance, but his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the,
book-trained Socialist higher up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you
would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than
better wages and shorter? hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more
revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by
employers, the word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, no
genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my
opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does
remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and
common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed
down to mere economic justice? and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to
work immense changes in our civilization and his own way of life. His vision of
the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left
out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present ? family
life, the pub, football, and local politics. As for the philosophic side of
Marxism, the pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities,
thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the
faintest interest in it. It is of course true that plenty of people of
working-class origin are Socialists of the theoretical bookish type. But they
are never people who have remained working men; they don?t work with their hands, that is. They belong either to the type I mentioned in the last chapter,
the type who squirms into the middle class via the literary intelligentsia, or
the type who becomes a Labour M.P. or a high-up trade union official. This last
type is one of the most desolating spectacles the world contains. 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. But I have yet to meet a working
miner, steel-worker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy, or whatnot who was
?ideologically? sound."