The Road to Wigan Pier

by George Orwell

The words were: The lower classes smell.

For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.

And in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty. Very early in life you acquired the idea that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body;

Everyone who has grown up pronouncing his aitches and in a house with a bathroom and one servant is likely to have grown up with these feelings; hence the chasmic, impassable quality of class-distinctions in the West.

So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.

But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings.

Moreover, they had been at war and were coming home with the soldier’s attitude to life, which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a lawless attitude. There was a turbulent feeling in the air.

When later on I got rid of my class-prejudice, or part of it, it was in a roundabout way and by a process that took several years.

was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear.

In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears—indeed, it is—benevolent and even necessary;

But it is not possible to be part of such a system without recognising it as an unjustifiable tyranny.

From the most unexpected people, from gin-pickled old scoundrels high up in the Government service, I have heard some such remark as: ‘Of course we’ve no right in this blasted country at all. Only now we’re here for God’s sake let’s stay here.’

Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. Thus in England we tamely admit to being robbed in order to keep half a million worthless idlers in luxury, but we would fight to the last man sooner than be ruled by Chinamen;

All over India there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part; and just occasionally, when they are quite certain of being in the right company, their hidden bitterness overflows.

But I was in the police, which is to say that I was part of the actual machinery of despotism.

Like most Nonconformist missionaries he was a complete ass but quite a good fellow.

I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.

now realised that there was no need to go as far as Burma to find tyranny and exploitation. Here in England, down under one’s feet, were the submerged working class, suffering miseries

I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then—it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter—that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters.

thought it over and decided what I would do. I would go suitably disguised to Limehouse and Whitechapel and such places and sleep in common lodging-houses and pal up with dock-labourers, street hawkers, derelict people, beggars, and, if possible, criminals.

was very happy. Here I was, among ‘the lowest of the low’, at the bedrock of the Western world! The class-bar was down, or seemed to be down. And down there in the squalid and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure,

But unfortunately you do not solve the class problem by making friends with tramps. At most you get rid of some of your own class-prejudice by doing so.

Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute.

Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone. Or rather it is not so much like a stone wall as the plate-glass pane of an aquarium; it is so easy to pretend that it isn’t there, and so impossible to get through it.

The same streak of soggy half-baked insincerity runs through all ‘advanced’ opinion. Take the question of imperialism, for instance. Every left-wing ‘intellectual’ is, as a matter of course, an anti-imperialist. He claims to be outside the empire-racket as automatically and self-righteously as he claims to be outside the class-racket.

For in the last resort, the only important question is, Do you want the British Empire to hold together or do you want it to disintegrate?

Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce

The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants.

He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people...

For to get outside the class-racket I have got to suppress not merely my private snobbishness, but most of my other tastes and prejudices as well.

Many people, however, imagine that they can abolish class-distinctions without making any uncomfortable change in their own habits and ‘ideology’.

‘Why must we level down? Why not level up?’

The middle-class ILP’er and the bearded fruit-juice drinker are all for a classless society so long as they see the proletariat through the wrong end of the telescope;

If you want to make an enemy of a man, tell him that his ills are incurable.

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.

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.

Len McCluskey

One of the analogies between Communism and Roman Catholicism is that only the ‘educated’ are completely orthodox.

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.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

According to Chesterton, tea-drinking is ‘pagan’, while beer-drinking is ‘Christian’, and coffee is ‘the puritan’s opium’.

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.

The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order.

what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something resembling a chess-board.

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.

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.

The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types.

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.

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.

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.

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 merely pointing to the fact that writers of genuine talent are usually indifferent to Socialism, and sometimes actively and mischievously hostile.