The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell

We may take it, therefore, that any world in which Socialism was a reality would be at least as highly mechanised as the United States at this moment, probably much more so. In any case, no Socialist would think of denying this. The Socialist world is always pictured as a completely mechanised, immensely organised world, depending on the machine as the civilisations of antiquity depended on the slave. So far so good, or so bad. Many, perhaps a majority, of thinking people are not in love with machine-civilisation, but everyone who is not a fool knows that it is nonsense to talk at this moment about scrapping the machine. But the unfortunate thing is that Socialism, as usually presented, is bound up with the idea of mechanical progress, not merely as a necessary development but as an end in itself, almost as a kind of religion.