---
title: "The Road to Wigan Pier"
author: "George Orwell"
languages: [en]
shelf: "Literature"
section: 11 of 13
url: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/11/
cite: "George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, section 11. Scriptura (scriptura.si), https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/11/"
---

# The Road to Wigan Pier

*George Orwell*

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> Title: The Road to Wigan Pier
Date of first publication: 1937
Author: George Orwell (1903-1950)
Date first posted: Aug. 21, 2018
Date last updated: Aug. 21, 2018
Faded Page eBook #20180878

> This eBook was produced by: Delphine Lettau, Howard Ross
& the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net

> GEORGE ORWELL

> _The Road_
                            _to Wigan Pier_

> First published by Victor Gollancz 1947
     Uniform Edition published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd 1949
                    Published in Penguin Books 1962

> Copyright 1937 by Eric Blair

> TRANSCRIBER NOTES

> Hyphenation of words has been made consistent.

> The abbreviation WC has been capitalised.

> [The end of _The Road to Wigan Pier_ by George Orwell]

## 11. XI

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/11/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/11/#p-N

[¶0] Meanwhile, what about Socialism?

[¶1] It hardly needs pointing out that at this moment we are in a very
serious mess, so serious that even the dullest-witted people find it
difficult to remain unaware of it. We are living in a world in which
nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost
impossible to be honest and to remain alive. For enormous blocks of the
working class the conditions of life are such as I have described in the
opening chapters of this book, and there is no chance of those
conditions showing any fundamental improvement. The very best the
English working class can hope for is an occasional temporary decrease
in unemployment when this or that industry is artificially stimulated
by, for instance, rearmament. Even the middle classes, for the first
time in their history, are feeling the pinch. They have not known actual
hunger yet, but more and more of them find themselves floundering in a
sort of deadly net of frustration in which it is harder and harder to
persuade yourself that you are either happy, active or useful. Even the
lucky ones at the top, the real bourgeoisie, are haunted periodically by
a consciousness of the miseries below, and still more by fears of the
menacing future. And this is merely a preliminary stage, in a country
still rich with the loot of a hundred years. Presently there may be
coming God knows what horrors—horrors of which, in this sheltered
island, we have not even a traditional knowledge.

[¶2] And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a
world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. It would at least
ensure our getting enough to eat even if it deprived us of everything
else. Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary
common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established
itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with,
potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must
all co-operate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the
work and gets his fair share of the provisions, seems so blatantly
obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it
unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
Yet the fact that we have got to face is that Socialism is _not_
establishing itself. Instead of going forward, the cause of Socialism is
visibly going back. At this moment Socialists almost everywhere are in
retreat before the onslaught of Fascism, and events are moving at
terrible speed. As I write this the Spanish Fascist forces are
bombarding Madrid, and it is quite likely that before the book is
printed we shall have another Fascist country to add to the list, not to
mention a Fascist control of the Mediterranean which may have the effect
of delivering British foreign policy into the hands of Mussolini. I do
not, however, want here to discuss the wider political issues. What I am
concerned with is the fact that Socialism is losing ground exactly where
it ought to be gaining it. With so much in its favour—for every empty
belly is an argument for Socialism—the _idea_ of Socialism is less
widely accepted than it was ten years ago. The average thinking person
nowadays is not merely not a Socialist, he is actively hostile to
Socialism. This must be due chiefly to mistaken methods of propaganda.
It means that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented to us,
has about it something inherently distasteful—something that drives
away the very people who ought to be flocking to its support.

[¶3] A few years ago this might have seemed unimportant. It seems only
yesterday that Socialists, especially orthodox Marxists, were telling me
with superior smiles that Socialism was going to arrive of its own
accord by some mysterious process called 'historic necessity'. Possibly
that belief still lingers, but it has been shaken, to say the least of
it. Hence the sudden attempts of Communists in various countries to ally
themselves with democratic forces which they have been sabotaging for
years past. At a moment like this it is desperately necessary to
discover just _why_ Socialism has failed in its appeal. And it is no use
writing off the current distaste for Socialism as the product of
stupidity or corrupt motives. If you want to remove that 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. Therefore, rather paradoxically, in order to defend Socialism
it is necessary to start by attacking it.

[¶4] In the last three chapters I tried to analyse the difficulties that are
raised by our anachronistic class-system; I shall have to touch on that
subject again, because I believe that the present intensely stupid
handling of the class-issue may stampede quantities of potential
Socialists into Fascism. In the chapter following this one I want to
discuss certain underlying assumptions that alienate sensitive minds
from Socialism. But in the present chapter I am merely dealing with the
obvious, preliminary objections—the kind of thing that the person who
is not a Socialist (I don't mean the 'Where's the money to come from?'
type) always starts by saying when you tax him on the subject. Some of
these objections may appear frivolous or self-contradictory, but that is
beside the point; I am merely discussing symptoms. Anything is relevant
which helps to make clear why Socialism is not accepted. And please
notice that I am arguing _for_ Socialism, not _against_ it. But for the
moment I am _advocatus diaboli_. I am making out a case for the sort of
person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of Socialism, who
has the brains to see that Socialism would 'work', but who in practice
always takes to flight when Socialism is mentioned.

[¶5] Question a person of this type, and you will often get the
semi-frivolous answer: 'I don't object to Socialism, but I do object to
Socialists.' Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with
many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for
Socialism is its adherents.

[¶6] 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 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 onto 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 ILP 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 onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch
with common humanity.

[¶7] To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class
Socialists, while theoretically pining for a classless society, cling
like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my
sensations of horror on first attending an ILP 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 bas_, 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.

[¶8] 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 man better wages and shorter
hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the
type who is a hunger-marcher and is black-listed 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 civilisation 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
MP 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, steelworker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy or
whatnot who was 'ideologically' sound.

[¶9] One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that
only the 'educated' are completely orthodox. The most immediately
striking thing about the English Roman Catholics—I don't mean the real
Catholics, I mean the converts: Ronald Knox, Arnold Lunn _et hoc
genus_—is their intense self-consciousness. Apparently they never
think, certainly they never write, about anything but the fact that they
_are_ Roman Catholics; this single fact and the self-praise resulting
from it form the entire stock-in-trade of the Catholic literary man. But
the really interesting thing about these people is the way in which they
have worked out the supposed implications of orthodoxy until the tiniest
details of life are involved. Even the liquids you drink, apparently,
can be orthodox or heretical; hence the campaigns of Chesterton,
'Beachcomber', etc., against tea and in favour of beer. According to
Chesterton, tea-drinking is 'pagan', while beer-drinking is 'Christian',
and coffee is 'the puritan's opium'. It is unfortunate for this theory
that Catholics abound in the 'Temperance' movement and the greatest
tea-boozers in the world are the Catholic Irish; but what I am
interested in here is the attitude of mind that can make even food and
drink an occasion for religious intolerance. A working-class Catholic
would never be so absurdly consistent as that. He does not spend his
time in brooding on the fact that he is a Roman Catholic, and he is not
particularly conscious of being different from his non-Catholic
neighbours. Tell an Irish dock-labourer in the slums of Liverpool that
his cup of tea is 'pagan', and he will call you a fool. And even in more
serious matters he does not always grasp the implications of his faith.
In the Roman Catholic homes of Lancashire you see the crucifix on the
wall and the _Daily Worker_ on the table. It is only the 'educated' man,
especially the literary man, who knows how to be a bigot. And, _mutatis
mutandis_, it is the same with Communism. The creed is never found in
its pure form in a genuine proletarian.

[¶10] It may be said, however, that even if the theoretical book-trained
Socialist is not a working man himself, at least he is actuated by a
love of the working class. He is endeavouring to shed his bourgeois
status and fight on the side of the proletariat—that, obviously, must
be his motive.

[¶11] But is it? 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 the devil his motive really _is_.
It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody,
especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the
furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe,
is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs
offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes
freedom impossible, but because it is untidy; what they desire,
basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chess-board.
Take the plays of a lifelong Socialist like Shaw. How much understanding
or even awareness of working-class life do they display? Shaw himself
declares that you can only bring a working man on the stage 'as an
object of compassion'; in practice he doesn't bring him on even as that,
but merely as a sort of W. W. Jacobs figure of fun—the ready-made comic
East Ender, like those in _Major Barbara_ and _Captain Brassbound's
Conversion_. At best his attitude to the working class is the sniggering
_Punch_ attitude, in more serious moments (consider, for instance, the
young man who symbolises the dispossessed classes in _Misalliance_) he
finds them merely contemptible and disgusting. Poverty and, what is
more, the habits of mind created by poverty, are something to be
abolished _from above_, by violence if necessary, perhaps even
preferably by violence. Hence his worship of 'great' men and appetite
for dictatorships, Fascist or Communist; for to him, apparently (_vide_
his remarks apropos of the Italo-Abyssinian war and the Stalin-Wells
conversations), Stalin and Mussolini are almost equivalent persons. You
get the same thing in a more mealy-mouthed form in Mrs Sidney Webb's
autobiography, which gives, unconsciously, a most revealing picture of
the high-minded Socialist slum-visitor. The truth is that to many
people, calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a
movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it
means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose
upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake
to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely
incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection
for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—a sort
of 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 of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he
himself invariably belongs. Sometimes the hatred of bourgeois habits and
'ideology' is so far-reaching that it extends even to bourgeois
characters in books. According to Henri Barbusse, the characters in the
novels of Proust, Gide, etc., are 'characters whom one would dearly love
to have at the other side of a barricade'. 'A barricade', you observe.
Judging from _Le Feu_, I should have thought Barbusse's experience of
barricades had left him with a distaste for them. But the imaginary
bayoneting of 'bourgeois', who presumably don't hit back, is a bit
different from the real article.

[¶12] The best example of bourgeois-baiting literature that I have yet come
across is Mirsky's _Intelligentsia of Great_ _Britain_. This is a very
interesting and ably-written book, and it should be read by everyone who
wants to understand the rise of Fascism. Mirsky (formerly Prince Mirsky)
was a White Russian _émigré_ who came to England and was for some years
a lecturer in Russian literature at London University. Later he was
converted to Communism, returned to Russia, and produced this book as a
sort of 'show-up' of the British intelligentsia from a Marxist
standpoint. It is a viciously malignant book, with an unmistakable note
of 'Now I'm out of your reach I can say what I like about you' running
all through it, and apart from a general distortion it contains some
quite definite and probably intentional misrepresentation: as, for
instance, when Conrad is declared to be 'no less imperialist than
Kipling', and D. H. Lawrence is described as writing 'bare-bodied
pornography' and as having 'succeeded in erasing all clues to his
proletarian origin'—as though Lawrence had been a pork-butcher climbing
into the House of Lords! This kind of thing is very disquieting when one
remembers that it is addressed to a Russian audience who have no means
of checking its accuracy. But what I am thinking of at the moment is the
effect of such a book on the English public. Here you have a literary
man of aristocratic extraction, a man who had probably never in his life
spoken to a working man on anything approaching equal terms, uttering
venomous screams of libel against his 'bourgeois' colleagues. Why? So
far as appearances go, from pure malignity. He is battling _against_ the
British intelligentsia, but what is he battling _for_? Within the book
itself there is no indication. Hence the net effect of books like this
is to give outsiders the impression that there is nothing in Communism
except _hatred_. And here once again you come upon that queer
resemblance between Communism and (convert) Roman Catholicism. If you
want to find a book as evil-spirited as _The Intelligentsia of_ _Great
Britain_, the likeliest place to look is among the popular Roman
Catholic apologists. You will find there the same venom and the same
dishonesty, though, to do the Catholic justice, you will not usually
find the same bad manners. Queer that Comrade Mirsky's spiritual brother
should be Father —— ——! The Communist and the Catholic are not
saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things,
and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted;
but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

[¶13] The fact is that Socialism, _in the form in which it is now presented_,
appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand
you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist, the typical
working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not
always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the
intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is
necessary to throw our present civilisation down the sink and is quite
willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from
the middle class, and from 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 kind of people I have
been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the
more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom Shaw is the prototype, and the
astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they
will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go, and all
that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded
fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of 'progress'
like bluebottles 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. Of course, as I have suggested already, it is not
strictly fair to judge a movement by its adherents; but the point is
that people invariably do so, and that the popular conception of
Socialism is coloured by the conception of a Socialist as a dull or
disagreeable person. 'Socialism' is pictured as a state of affairs in
which our more vocal Socialists would feel thoroughly at home. This does
great harm to the cause. 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. There is a
widespread feeling that any civilisation in which Socialism was a
reality would bear the same relation to our own as a brand-new bottle of
colonial burgundy bears to a few spoonfuls of first-class Beaujolais. We
live, admittedly, amid the wreck of a civilisation, but it has been a
great civilisation in its day, and in patches it still flourishes almost
undisturbed. It still has its bouquet, so to speak; whereas the imagined
Socialist future, like the colonial burgundy, tastes only of iron and
water. Hence the fact, which is really a disastrous one, that artists of
any consequence can never be persuaded into the Socialist fold. This is
particularly the case with the writer whose political opinions are more
directly and obviously connected with his work than those of, say, a
painter. If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything
describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad.
Consider the situation in England at the present moment. A whole
generation has grown up more or less in familiarity with the idea of
Socialism; and yet the high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist
literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling,[1] and the even
feebler poets who are associated with him. Every writer of consequence
and every book worth reading is on the other side. I am willing to
believe that it is otherwise in Russia—about which I know nothing,
however—for presumably in post-revolutionary Russia the mere violence
of events would tend to throw up a vigorous literature of sorts. But it
is certain that in Western Europe Socialism has produced no literature
worth having. A little while ago, when the issues were less clear, there
were writers of some vitality who called themselves Socialists, but they
were using the word as a vague label. Thus, if Ibsen and Zola described
themselves as Socialists, it did not mean much more than that they were
'progressives', while in the case of Anatole France it meant merely that
he was an anticlerical. The real Socialist writers, the propagandist
writers, have always been dull, empty windbags—Shaw, Barbusse, Upton
Sinclair, William Morris, Waldo Frank, etc. etc. I am not, of course,
suggesting that Socialism is to be condemned because literary gents
don't like it; I am not even suggesting that it ought necessarily to
produce literature on its own account, though I do think it a bad sign
that it has produced no songs worth singing. I am merely pointing to the
fact that writers of genuine talent are usually indifferent to
Socialism, and sometimes actively and mischievously hostile. And this is
a disaster, not only for the writers themselves, but for the cause of
Socialism, which has great need of them.

[¶14] This, then, is the superficial aspect of the ordinary man's recoil from
Socialism. I know the whole dreary argument very thoroughly, because I
know it from both sides. Everything that I say here I have both said to
ardent Socialists who were trying to convert me, and had said to me by
bored non-Socialists whom I was trying to convert. The whole thing
amounts to a kind of _malaise_ produced by dislike of individual
Socialists, especially of the cocksure Marx-quoting type. Is it childish
to be influenced by that kind of thing? Is it silly? Is it even
contemptible? It is all that, but the point is that _it happens_, and
therefore it is important to keep it in mind.

[¶15] -----

[¶16] [1] Orwell somewhat retracted this remark later. See 'Inside the Whale',
_England Your England_, p. 120 (note added to Seeker & Warburg Uniform
Edition).