Socialism and the English Genius

Breaking Big Brother - Chapter 2

We know why Orwell committed himself to writing about politics (if you don’t, check out the first chapter of Breaking Big Brother: “Inside the Whale”).

What is less clear (or, at least, what seems less clear to us twenty-first century readers of Orwell’s work) is why he dedicated himself to the cause of ‘democratic socialism.’ It seems almost counter-intuitive—all of Orwell’s most notable works seem to work as persuasive arguments against socialism as I understand it.

In order to reconcile this, we need to understand how Orwell defined socialism—something which changed somewhat as his career progressed.

The book The Road to Wigan Pier was the first major work of Orwell’s to extensively discuss socialism. The book was commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz, the head of the socialist publishing agency the Left Book Club, as an exposé on poverty—a firsthand look into the lives of coal miners and unemployed people in northern England.

The first half of the book showcases Orwell’s investigative journalism at its best. Orwell lived with coal miners, shadowed them at work (a grueling process—just getting into the mine required a miles-long crawl through a short, dark tunnel where a man couldn’t stand upright, an intensely physically-demanding exercise which exhausted Orwell before the day even began).

However, much to Gollancz’s surprise, Part 2 of The Road to Wigan Pier took a sharp turn, going from a harrowing expose of the grueling working conditions of coal miners and the unemployed to a harsh criticism of socialism as it was practiced in England at the time. Orwell was deeply critical of the socialist movement in England. He (quite comically) stated that the movement was largely made up of “vegetarians” and “cranks,” and criticized them for being out-of-touch and unpersuasive, having created no good literature to speak of.

It’s kind of ironic, actually—Orwell would go on to write extensively about how toxic totalitarianism is to literature (“Inside the Whale” was one of numerous essays dedicated to this subject).

However, considering what Orwell was up against, it becomes clear why he might have been drawn to the socialist cause. In The Road to Wigan Pier, he argues against the apparently pervasive idea that poor people were a separate breed of human from rich people, a race separate from the aristocracy that was designed specifically to work. He argues against an apparently deeply-rooted belief that poor people were dirty by choice, and that if they had the means to bathe regularly (which most did not), they’d still choose not to.

Orwell was educated among the British aristocracy. He details in Wigan Pier how much of his early education was designed to instill in him a type of loathing for the lower classes. It is possible that, at this stage of his life, Orwell was drawn to socialism as a rebellion against these egregiously false beliefs.

In 1936, when The Road to Wigan Pier was first published, Orwell’s understanding of socialism seemed unsophisticated—naive, even. Despite the fact that the entire latter half of the book was dedicated to improving the socialist cause in England, Orwell fails to posit a comprehensible definition of what socialism would actually look like if put into practice.

He was also sympathetic to the common Marxist belief that technological advancements would make socialism possible. The argument goes something like this: Social classes evolve out of necessity. In order for a civilization to enjoy the bare necessities of life, there are people who need to perform the labor that makes this possible (farming, working in coal mines, etc.). However, as technology advances, there will come a point in which people do not need to work anymore, as machines will be able to create a world so prosperous that humans will no longer need to compete for resources. In the absence of scarcity, true equality can exist, as people will no longer feel the need to have more than anyone else.

Of course, it did not pan out this way (and a lot of thinkers at the time could’ve probably predicted this—a major element of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is the question of how to keep the population distracted when they no longer needed to work twelve hours a day). However, it is a belief that Orwell held onto, even after his life experience provided him evidence to the contrary.

When Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he witnessed the city of Barcelona take on an entirely socialist organization for a time before eventually going back to the way things were before. This brief period of ‘government by the people’ seemed to convince Orwell that such a thing was possible.

Then World War II broke out, marking the next major evolution of Orwell’s socialist thought. In 1941, Orwell published The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a pamphlet detailing the position that England was in during this stage of the war, and urging Englishmen to turn the war into a socialist revolution.

“Revolution” seems a harsh word, but it is, in fact, Orwell’s own—he calls for the necessity of revolution in The Lion and the Unicorn, defining the word as “a fundamental shift in power,” and positing that “Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place.”

Orwell thought that this was desirable—necessary, even. One of the main arguments in The Lion and the Unicorn was that laissez-faire capitalism simply wasn’t working. In addition to the problems that had been going on for some time in England’s capitalist system (unemployment, extreme wealth inequality, etc.), it simply didn’t seem possible for an economy based on supply and demand to compete militarily with ‘planned economies’ like Nazi Germany (i.e. economies in which the government rather than the free market determined what to produce).

Orwell wrote about this extensively in essays and letters. He considered it an absolute certainty that a planned economy was going to take over England, because a capitalist economy was simply not as good at waging war as a fascist or socialist one. A free market economy would simply continue to produce luxuries despite England’s need for military equipment, which would ultimately lead to military defeat. Faced with the threat of a German invasion, England’s choice seemed to be between succumbing to the Nazis or adopting a planned economy of its own to combat them.

Orwell believed this planned economy would be either fascist or socialist, and that socialism was the desirable outcome because, unlike fascism, “Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal beings” (a quote from The Lion and the Unicorn). Fascism and socialism were similar in that they put production power in the hands of the government, but fascism was “socialism without the morals” (a quote that I swear Orwell wrote somewhere, but which I can’t find for the life of me).

The Lion and the Unicorn was also the first (and as far as I know, the only) time in Orwell’s career that he spelled out a plan for what exactly English socialism should look like:

“I suggest that the following six-point programme is the kind of thing we need. The first three points deal with England’s internal policy, the other three with the Empire and the world:

1.     Nationalization of land, mines, railways, banks and major industries.

2.     Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one.

3.     Reform of the educational system along democratic lines.

4.     Immediate Dominion status for India, with power to secede when the war is over.

5.     Formation of an Imperial General Council, in which the coloured peoples are to be represented.

6.     Declaration of formal alliance with China, Abyssinia and all other victims of the Fascist powers.

The general tendency of this programme is unmistakable. It aims quite frankly at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy.”

From 1941 to 1946, Orwell wrote a series of articles, titled “London Letters,” to the American left-wing magazine Partisan Review. His earlier ones expressed the same sentiment that was contained in The Lion and the Unicorn: that there were only two possible options for England’s future, fascism or socialism.

Obviously, this did not happen. England did move away from laissez-faire capitalism, but socialism did not take its place. In one of his “London Letters” written in 1944, Orwell admits he was “grossly wrong in [his] analysis of the situation”:

“In 1940 I had written, “Either we turn this into a revolutionary war, or we lose it”, and I find myself repeating this word for word as late as the middle of 1942. This probably coloured my judgement of actual events and made me exaggerate… the socially leveling process occurring in Britain as a result of the war. But what really matters is that I fell into the trap of assuming that “The war and the revolution are inseparable.” There were excuses for this belief, but still it was a very great error. For after all we have not lost the war, unless appearances are very deceiving, and we have not introduced Socialism. Britain is moving towards a planned economy, and class distinctions tend to dwindle, but there has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own all the property and usurp all the best jobs... When we look back at our judgements of a year or two ago, whether we “opposed” the war or whether we “supported” it, I think the first admission we ought to make is that we were all wrong.”

Orwell would only live for another six years after this admission, and in that time, he became much less optimistic that they would ever be realized in England. Instead of socialism taking the place of capitalism, a different type of economy was emerging—one that was explained by American writer James Burnham in his 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution.

Burnham wrote of a new type of economic system emerging, in which a class of ‘managers’ would take the place of wealthy capitalists at the top of the social ladder. What he described was essentially an elaborate bureaucracy. He was, of course, not right on all counts, but he was absolutely correct that this bureaucratic future was the one toward which most Western countries were heading.

In 1946, Orwell wrote an article titled “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” in which he addressed Burnham’s predictions. I bring it up not only because Burnham’s prediction managed to get closer to the truth than Orwell’s, but because in this essay, Orwell revisits the idea of technological advancement bringing about socialism.

“So long as methods of production were primitive, the great mass of the people were necessarily tied down to dready, exhausting manual labour; and a few people had to be set free from such labour, otherwise civilization could not maintain itself, let alone make any progress. But since the arrival of the machine the whole pattern has altered. The justification for class distinctions, if there is a justification, is no longer the same, because there is no mechanical reason why the average human being should continue to be a drudge. True, drudgery persists; class distinctions are probably re-establishing themselves in a new form, and individual liberty is on the down-grade; but as these developments are now technically avoidable, they must have some psychological cause which Burnham makes no attempt to discover. The question that he ought to ask, and never does ask, is: Why does the lust for naked power become a major human motive exactly now, when the dominion of man over man is ceasing to be necessary? As for the claim that “human nature” or “inexorable laws” of this and that, make Socialism impossible, it is simply a projection of the past into the future. In effect, Burnham argues that because a society of free and equal human beings has never existed, it never can exist. By the same argument one could have demonstrated the impossibility of aeroplanes in 1900, or of motor cars in 1850.”

As you can see, Orwell still believes in the possibility of a future in which technological advancement eradicates inequality. However, he is not oblivious—he sees that this is not happening, and wants to figure out why this is the case.

This is the character of Orwell’s writing throughout his entire career.

He was an optimist, but not so much so that he would ignore what was happening right in front of him. He was a socialist, but not in the same way everyone else was. Orwell followed nobody. Despite his left-wing leanings, he was fiercely independent, unafraid to speak his mind.

It is because of this unique character that the spirit of Orwell's work rings true, despite everything he got wrong.

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Thanks for reading. 

I’m not an expert—if I’ve gotten anything wrong, or if there’s something you have to add, please leave a comment.

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Chapter Three: