The road to Wigan Pier.

This book is split into 2 parts. If we are being completely honest, they do not belong with one another at all. One a description, the other a speculation, neither of them calling upon the other in any meaningful way.

The first part of the book is an extremely sterile description of working-class life in England's 30s. It is so straightforward that you almost feel like you are reading for class or out of some newspaper. If you need to truly feel what it is like to live that sort of life, you are far better off reading Down and Out in Paris and London written by the man himself, the very same, George Orwell.

The second part of this work is far more insightful. I was surprised at how relevant it still is, almost a whole century later. The socialists of Orwell's era never went away, that is to say, socialists of today have seemingly learned nothing from history. If you ask an average man if he is a socialist, he will likely take it as an insult and might get into a fight with you. That is quite a problem for an ideology that fundamentally rests upon populist ideals. What is socialism if the working man is not a socialist? Well, it is largely an aesthetic that middle and upper class youth appropriates. Some do it because they find Marxist philosophy to be reasonable. Some do it because they want to fit in and there is an age at which a lot of people find it cool to be a socialist. Some do it because they want to feel righteous, to dedicate life to some cause larger than themselves, and it is always easier to claim you are fighting for someone else, someone oppressed, unable to fight for themselves, rather than to own up to your own selfish aspirations. Finally, we come to those few, which might understand the theory, but do not care for it, for they are in it all to truly help. They are the types to actually go out and do something. They are rare, worse still, they rarely come to mind when one mentions the word socialism. The sad reality is that even the socialists themselves upon hearing the label most likely think of the self-important, self-serving types I have first mentioned. Unfortunately, this does not only diminish any appeal socialism might have, it actively bolsters fascist thinking and pushes people further to the right. For a fascist is an opportunist. Pick your struggle, he will listen to you and tell you that you are right. He can always appeal to the idea that there is a group of people working on making a common man's life harder, and his solutions will be familiar and soothing to the ears of an average individual. Whether one is for progress or against it, to a leftist, it should not matter. No matter how many reasoned opinions you hold, no matter how many truths you have discovered, until you can convince the common man that they are worth pursuing, you have failed as a leftist. What Orwell is talking about in the second part of this book is well worth taking in, if for no other reason, but for a reality check. The leftist movement has wrecked itself from within. The movement tends to be either full of out-of-touch theorists that love the aesthetic or people with no clear demands and objectives. This will have to change, or we are all condemned to suffer under fascism.

[a:George Orwell|3706|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1175614486p2/3706.jpg]’s [b:The Road to Wigan Pier|30553|The Road to Wigan Pier|George Orwell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168078094s/30553.jpg|1034643] was published by a left-wing propaganda outfit during the frightening expansion of fascism in Europe, and Orwell intended it to make a sort of desperate case for Socialism as the necessary and only likely remedy for that coming plague.

The book starts with an apology by the publisher for Orwell’s ideological carelessness and political incorrectness, for the sometimes insulting things he has to say about the holy proletariat, and for his attacks on the Socialist movement. To the modern reader, this is a sales pitch, not an apology: good old Orwell doing his cantankerous bunkum-smashing act — just what I was hoping for!

The first part of Orwell’s book is a first-hand investigation of the lives of coal miners and of the unemployed in northern England. Solid, evocative journalism, though Orwell speaks for his subjects rather than letting them speak much (except to point out how they drop their “aitches”).

Following this is a discussion of the state of the Socialist movement in England, and Orwell’s analysis of why it is losing ground. By Socialism (which he capitalizes throughout), he means a top-down, centrally-planned, world-spanning thing — and he doesn’t show any evidence of having considered other models (he seems to have remedied this soon after, judging from some of the admiring comments he made about Spanish anarchism as he viewed it during the Civil War). He doesn’t have much patience for Socialist theory or for its dreary and off-putting terminology — bourgeois this, proletarian that, expropriate the expropriators, comrade — but sees Socialism as just a simple matter of getting the exploiters off of the backs of the exploited… we’ll work out the details later:

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 cooperate 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.