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

# 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]

## 13. XIII

Source: https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/13/ · cite a paragraph as https://scriptura.si/works/orwell-wigan-pier-fp20180878/13/#p-N

[¶0] And finally, is there anything one can do about it?

[¶1] In the first part of this book I illustrated, by a few brief sidelights,
the kind of mess we are in; in this second part I have been trying to
explain why, in my opinion, so many normal decent people are repelled by
the only remedy, namely by Socialism. Obviously the most urgent need of
the next few years is to capture those normal decent ones before Fascism
plays its trump card. I do not want to raise here the question of
parties and political expedients. More important than any party label
(though doubtless the mere menace of Fascism will presently bring some
kind of Popular Front into existence) is the diffusion of Socialist
doctrine in an effective form. People have got to be made ready to _act_
as Socialists. There are, I believe, countless people who, without being
aware of it, are in sympathy with the essential aims of Socialism, and
who could be won over almost without a struggle if only one could find
the word that would move them. Everyone who knows the meaning of
poverty, everyone who has a genuine hatred of tyranny and war, is on the
Socialist side, potentially. My job here, therefore, is to
suggest—necessarily in very general terms—how a reconciliation might
be effected between Socialism and its more intelligent enemies.

[¶2] First, as to the enemies themselves—I mean all those people who grasp
that capitalism is evil but who are conscious of a sort of queasy,
shuddering sensation when Socialism is mentioned. As I have pointed out,
this is traceable to two main causes. One is the personal inferiority of
many individual Socialists; the other is the fact that Socialism is too
often coupled with a fat-bellied, godless conception of 'progress' which
revolts anyone with a feeling for tradition or the rudiments of an
aesthetic sense. Let me take the second point first.

[¶3] The distaste for 'progress' and machine-civilisation which is so common
among sensitive people is only defensible as an attitude of mind. It is
not valid as a reason for rejecting Socialism, because it presupposes an
alternative which does not exist. When you say, 'I object to
mechanisation and standardisation—therefore I object to Socialism', you
are saying in effect, 'I am free to do without the machine if I choose',
which is nonsense. We are all dependent upon the machine, and if the
machines stopped working most of us would die. You may hate the
machine-civilisation, probably you are right to hate it, but for the
present there can be no question of accepting or rejecting it. The
machine-civilisation _is here_, and it can only be criticised from the
inside, because all of us are inside it. It is only romantic fools who
flatter themselves that they have escaped, like the literary gent in his
Tudor cottage with bathroom h and c, and the he-man who goes off to live
a 'primitive' life in the jungle with a Mannlicher rifle and four
wagon-loads of tinned food. And almost certainly the
machine-civilisation will continue to triumph. There is no reason to
think that it will destroy itself or stop functioning of its own accord.
For some time past it has been fashionable to say that war is presently
going to 'wreck civilisation' altogether; but, though the next
full-sized war will certainly be horrible enough to make all previous
ones seem a joke, it is immensely unlikely that it will put a stop to
mechanical progress. It is true that a very vulnerable country like
England, and perhaps the whole of western Europe, could be reduced to
chaos by a few thousand well-placed bombs, but no war is at present
thinkable which could wipe out industrialism in all countries
simultaneously. We may take it that the return to a simpler, freer, less
mechanised way of life, however desirable it may be, is not going to
happen. This is not fatalism, it is merely acceptance of facts. It is
meaningless to oppose Socialism on the ground that you object to the
beehive state, for the beehive state _is here_. The choice is not, as
yet, between a human and an inhuman world. It is simply between
Socialism and Fascism, which at its very best is Socialism with the
virtues left out.

[¶4] The job of the thinking person, therefore, is not to reject Socialism
but to make up his mind to humanise it. Once Socialism is in a way to
being established, those who can see through the swindle of 'progress'
will probably find themselves resisting. In fact, it is their special
function to do so. In the machine-world they have got to be a sort of
permanent opposition, which is not the same thing as being an
obstructionist or a traitor. But in this I am speaking of the future.
For the moment the only possible course for any decent person, however
much of a Tory or an anarchist by temperament, is to work for the
establishment of Socialism. Nothing else can save us from the misery of
the present or the nightmare of the future. To oppose Socialism _now_,
when twenty million Englishmen are underfed and Fascism has conquered
half Europe, is suicidal. It is like starting a civil war when the Goths
are crossing the frontier.

[¶5] Therefore it is all the more important to get rid of that mere nervous
prejudice against Socialism which is not founded on any serious
objection. As I have pointed out already, many people who are not
repelled by Socialism are repelled by Socialists. Socialism, as now
presented, is unattractive largely because it appears, at any rate from
the outside, to be the plaything of cranks, doctrinaires, parlour
Bolsheviks and so forth. But it is worth remembering that this is only
so 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. For
the present one must just set one's teeth and ignore them; they will
loom much smaller when the movement has been humanised. Besides, they
are irrelevant. We have got to fight for justice and liberty, and
Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped
off it. It is only the essentials that are worth remembering. To recoil
from Socialism because so many individual Socialists are inferior people
is as absurd as refusing to travel by train because you dislike the
ticket-collector's face.

[¶6] And secondly, as to the Socialist himself—more especially the vocal,
tract-writing type of Socialist.

[¶7] We are at a moment when it is desperately necessary for left-wingers of
all complexions to drop their differences and hang together. Indeed this
is already happening to a small extent. Obviously, then, the more
intransigent kind of Socialist has now got to ally himself with people
who are not in perfect agreement with him. As a rule he is rightly
unwilling to do so, because he sees the very real danger of watering the
whole Socialist movement down to some kind of pale-pink humbug even more
ineffectual than the parliamentary Labour Party. At the moment, for
instance, there is great danger that the Popular Front which Fascism
will presumably bring into existence will not be genuinely Socialist in
character, but will simply be a manoeuvre against German and Italian
(not English) Fascism. Thus the need to unite against Fascism might draw
the Socialist into alliance with his very worst enemies. But the
principle to go upon is this: that you are never in danger of allying
yourself with the wrong people provided that you keep the essentials of
your movement in the foreground. And what are the essentials of
Socialism? What is the mark of a real Socialist? I suggest that the real
Socialist is one who wishes—not merely conceives it as desirable, but
actively wishes—to see tyranny overthrown. But I fancy that the
majority of orthodox Marxists would not accept that definition, or would
only accept it very grudgingly. 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 'Fee fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood
of a right-wing deviationist!' It is because of this kind of thing that
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 has 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 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, and you have got to drive away the mealy-mouthed
Liberal who wants foreign Fascism destroyed in order that he may go on
drawing his dividends peacefully—the type of humbug who passes
resolutions 'against Fascism and Communism', i.e. against rats and
rat-poison. Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as
abroad. So long as you keep _that_ fact well to the front, you will
never be in much doubt as to who are your real supporters. As for minor
differences—and the profoundest philosophical difference is unimportant
compared with saving the twenty million Englishmen whose bones are
rotting from malnutrition—the time to argue about them is afterwards.

[¶8] I do not think the Socialist need make any sacrifice of essentials, but
certainly he will have to make a great sacrifice of externals. It would
help enormously, for instance, if the smell of crankishness which still
clings to the Socialist movement could be dispelled. If only the sandals
and the pistachio-coloured shirts could be put in a pile and burnt, and
every vegetarian, teetotaller and creeping Jesus sent home to Welwyn
Garden City to do his yoga exercises quietly! But that, I am afraid, 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 priggishnesses
which could so easily be dropped. Take for instance the dreary attitude
of the typical Marxist towards literature. Out of the many that come
into my mind, I will give just one example. It sounds trivial, but it
isn't. In the old _Worker's Weekly_ (one of the forerunners of the
_Daily Worker_) there used to be a column of literary chat of the 'Books
on the Editor's Table' type. For several weeks running there had been a
certain amount of talk about Shakespeare; whereupon an incensed reader
wrote to say, 'Dear Comrade, we don't want to hear about these bourgeois
writers like Shakespeare. Can't you give us something a bit more
proletarian?' etc. etc. The editor's reply was simple. 'If you will turn
to the index of Marx's _Capital_,' he wrote, 'you will find that
Shakespeare is mentioned several times.' And please notice that this was
enough to silence the objector. Once Shakespeare had received the
benediction of Marx, he became respectable. _That_ is the mentality that
drives ordinary sensible people away from the Socialist movement. You do
not need to care about Shakespeare to be repelled by that kind of thing.
Again, there is the horrible jargon that nearly all Socialists think it
necessary to employ. When the ordinary person hears phrases like
'bourgeois ideology' and 'proletarian solidarity' and 'expropriation of
the expropriators', he is not inspired by them, he is merely disgusted.
Even the single word 'Comrade' has done its dirty little bit towards
discrediting the Socialist movement. How many a waverer has halted on
the brink, gone perhaps to some public meeting and watched
self-conscious Socialists dutifully addressing one another as 'Comrade',
and then slid away, disillusioned, into the nearest four-ale bar! And
his instinct is sound; for where is the sense of sticking onto yourself
a ridiculous label which even after long practice can hardly be
mentioned without a gulp of shame? 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.

[¶9] And this raises a great difficulty. It means that the issue of class, as
distinct from mere economic status, has got to be faced more
realistically than it is being faced at present.

[¶10] I devoted three chapters to discussing the class-difficulty. The
principal fact that will have emerged, I think, is that though the
English class-system has outlived its usefulness, it _has_ outlived it
and shows no signs of dying. It greatly confuses the issue to assume, as
the orthodox Marxist so often does (see for instance Mr Alec Brown's in
some ways interesting book, _The Fate of the Middle Classes_), that
social status is determined solely by income. Economically, no doubt,
there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is
a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by
each class in childhood are not only very different but—this is the
essential point—generally persist from birth to death. Hence the
anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You find
writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and have
yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices;
you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find petty
shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and
who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the
bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indian
provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social
stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the
public-school man would assume a Cockney accent the day his income
dropped below £200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately
becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the
Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire,
though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and learns a BBC accent,
seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to.
It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into
which you have been born. As prosperity declines, social anomalies grow
commoner. You don't get more aitchless millionaires, but you do get more
and more public-school men touting vacuum cleaners and more and more
small shopkeepers driven into the workhouse. Large sections of the
middle class are being gradually proletarianised; but the important
point is that they do not, at any rate in the first generation, adopt a
proletarian outlook. Here am I, for instance, with a bourgeois
upbringing and a working-class income. Which class do I belong to?
Economically I belong to the working class, but it is almost impossible
for me to think of myself as anything but a member of the bourgeoisie.
And supposing I had to take sides, whom should I side with, the upper
class which is trying to squeeze me out of existence, or the working
class whose manners are not my manners? It is probable that I
personally, in any important issue, would side with the working class.
But what about the tens or hundreds of thousands of others who are in
approximately the same position? And what about that far larger class,
running into millions this time—the office-workers and black-coated
employees of all kinds—whose traditions are less definitely middle
class but who would certainly not thank you if you called them
proletarians? All of these people have the same interests and the same
enemies as the working class. All are being robbed and bullied by the
same system. Yet how many of them realise it? When the pinch came nearly
all of them would side with their oppressors and against those who ought
to be their allies. It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed
down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly
anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made
Fascist Party.

[¶11] Obviously the Socialist movement has got to capture the exploited middle
class before it is too late; above all it must capture the
office-workers, who are so numerous and, if they knew how to combine, so
powerful. Equally obviously it has so far failed to do so. The very last
person in whom you can hope to find revolutionary opinions is a clerk or
a commercial traveller. Why? Very largely, I think, because of the
'proletarian' cant with which Socialist propaganda is mixed up. In order
to symbolise the class war, there has been set up the more or less
mythical figure of a 'proletarian', a muscular but downtrodden man in
greasy overalls, in contradistinction to a 'capitalist', a fat, wicked
man in a top hat and fur coat. It is tacitly assumed that there is no
one in between; the truth being, of course, that in a country like
England about a quarter of the population is in between. If you are
going to harp on the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', it is an
elementary precaution to start by explaining who the proletariat _are_.
But because of the Socialist tendency to idealise the manual worker as
such, this has never been made sufficiently clear. How many of the
wretched shivering army of clerks and shopwalkers, who in some ways are
actually worse off than a miner or a dock-hand, think of themselves as
proletarians? A proletarian—so they have been taught to think—means a
man without a collar. So that when you try to move them by talking about
'class war', you only succeed in scaring them; they forget their incomes
and remember their accents, and fly to the defence of the class that is
exploiting them.

[¶12] Socialists have a big job ahead of them here. They have got to
demonstrate, beyond possibility of doubt, just where the line of
cleavage between exploiter and exploited comes. Once again it is a
question of sticking to essentials; and the essential point here is that
all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought
to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less
talk about 'capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the
robbers and the robbed. But at any rate we must drop that misleading
habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It
has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial
traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the
village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant and all other doubtful
cases that they _are_ the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair
deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must
not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce
their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will
join in on the side of the aitches.

[¶13] I am implying that different classes must be persuaded to act together
without, for the moment, being asked to drop their class-differences.
And that sounds dangerous. It sounds rather too like the Duke of York's
summer camp and that dismal line of talk about class co-operation and
putting our shoulders to the wheel, which is eyewash or Fascism, or
both. There can be no co-operation between classes whose real interests
are opposed. The capitalist cannot co-operate with the proletarian. The
cat cannot co-operate with the mouse; and if the cat does suggest
co-operation and the mouse is fool enough to agree, in a very little
while the mouse will be disappearing down the cat's throat. But it is
always possible to co-operate so long as it is upon a basis of common
interests. The people who have got to act together are all those who
cringe to the boss and all those who shudder when they think of the
rent. This means that the small-holder has got to ally himself with the
factory-hand, the typist with the coal-miner, the schoolmaster with the
garage mechanic. There is some hope of getting them to do so if they can
be made to understand where their interest lies. But this will not
happen if their social prejudices, which in some of them are at least as
strong as any economic consideration, are needlessly irritated. There
is, after all, a real difference of manners and traditions between a
bank clerk and a dock labourer, and the bank clerk's feeling of
superiority is very deeply rooted. Later on he will have to get rid of
it, but this is not a good moment for asking him to do so. Therefore it
would be a very great advantage if that rather meaningless and
mechanical bourgeois-baiting, which is a part of nearly all Socialist
propaganda, could be dropped for the time being. Throughout left-wing
thought and writing—and the whole way through it, from the leading
articles in the _Daily Worker_ to the comic columns in the _News
Chronicle_—there runs an anti-genteel tradition, a persistent and often
very stupid gibing at genteel mannerisms and genteel loyalties (or, in
Communist jargon, 'bourgeois values'). It is largely humbug, coming as
it does from bourgeois-baiters who are bourgeois themselves, but it does
great harm, because it allows a minor issue to block a major one. It
directs attention away from the central fact that poverty is poverty,
whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or a fountain pen.

[¶14] Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of
about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would
be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a
Fascist. But if you are constantly bullying me about my 'bourgeois
ideology', if you give me to understand that in some subtle way I am an
inferior person because I have never worked with my hands, you will only
succeed in antagonising me. For you are telling me either that I am
inherently useless or that I ought to alter myself in some way that is
beyond my power. I cannot proletarianise my accent or certain of my
tastes and beliefs, and I would not if I could. Why should I? I don't
ask anybody else to speak my dialect; why should anybody else ask me to
speak his? It would be far better to take these miserable class-stigmata
for granted and emphasise them as little as possible. They are
comparable to a race-difference, and experience shows that one _can_
co-operate with foreigners, even with foreigners whom one dislikes, when
it is really necessary. Economically, I am in the same boat with the
miner, the navvy and the farm-hand; remind me of that and I will fight
at their side. But culturally I am different from the miner, the navvy
and the farm-hand; lay the emphasis on that and you may arm me against
them. If I were a solitary anomaly I should not matter, but what is true
of myself is true of countless others. Every bank clerk dreaming of the
sack, every shopkeeper teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, is in
essentially the same position. These are the sinking middle class, and
most of them are clinging to their gentility under the impression that
it keeps them afloat. It is not good policy to _start_ by telling them
to throw away the life-belt. There is a quite obvious danger that in the
next few years large sections of the middle class will make a sudden and
violent swing to the Right. In doing so they may become formidable. The
weakness of the middle class hitherto has lain in the fact that they
have never learned to combine; but if you frighten them into combining
_against_ you, you may find that you have raised up a devil. We had a
brief glimpse of this possibility in the General Strike.

[¶15] To sum up: There is no chance of righting the conditions I described in
the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from Fascism,
unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence. It will
have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will
have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we
offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognise as
desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda.
Less about 'class consciousness', 'expropriation of the expropriators',
'bourgeois ideology', and 'proletarian solidarity', not to mention the
sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis and synthesis; and more about
justice, liberty and the plight of the unemployed. And less about
mechanical progress, tractors, the Dnieper dam and the latest
salmon-canning factory in Moscow; that kind of thing is not an integral
part of Socialist doctrine, and it drives away many people whom the
Socialist cause needs, including most of those who can hold a pen. All
that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public
consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the
same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.

[¶16] As for the terribly difficult issue of class-distinctions, the only
possible policy for the moment is to go easy and not frighten more
people than can be helped. And above all, no more of those
muscular-curate efforts at class-breaking. If you belong to the
bourgeoisie, don't be too eager to bound forward and embrace your
proletarian brothers; they may not like it, and if they show that they
don't like it you will probably find that your class-prejudices are not
so dead as you imagined. And if you belong to the proletariat, by birth
or in the sight of God, don't sneer too automatically at the Old School
Tie; it covers loyalties which can be useful to you if you know how to
handle them.

[¶17] Yet I believe there is some hope that when Socialism is a living issue,
a thing that large numbers of Englishmen genuinely care about, the
class-difficulty may solve itself more rapidly than now seems thinkable.
In the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist party
that we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism
is coming; probably a slimy Anglicised form of Fascism, with cultured
policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead
of the swastika. But if we do get it there will be a struggle,
conceivably a physical one, for our plutocracy will not sit quiet under
a genuinely revolutionary government. And when the widely separate
classes who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have
fought side by side, they may feel differently about one another. And
then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of
the sinking middle class—the private schoolmaster, the half-starved
free-lance journalist, the colonel's spinster daughter with £75 a year,
the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship's officer without a ship, the
clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers and the
thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns—may sink without further
struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we
get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we
have nothing to lose but our aitches.

[¶18] THE END