Well, really this is a review of Road to Wigan Pier, but since that title is supremely lame for the
book itself, I couldn’t use it as the blog title either.
Wigan is a city in England, northwest of Manchester. It is not on the coast, so the “pier” was
just a riverfront with no access to the Atlantic Ocean, much less any
beaches. The title really says almost
nothing about what the whole thing was about.
[All I knew about Wigan before this is that they have a soccer team.]
For those of you familiar with only 1984 and Animal Farm, let
me clue you in. Orwell had a substantial
volume of nonfiction as well, and remarkably, his non-fiction is at least as
entertaining as his fiction. Mainly it’s
because he had such a phenomenal way of describing things, a perpetual WTF
attitude, that he could describe paint drying and it would be interesting.
Up until this point I considered Homage to Catalonia, his “WTF” account of his brief experience in the
POUM (non-Stalinist, socialist militia) in the Spanish Civil War, to be his
best nonfiction. He was in Barcelona in
May 1937 when the various Republican factions – Fascists miles away – took shots
at each other. If you want to know about
the Spanish Civil War, read this one.
Anyhow. In Road, he goes up to northern England and
visits different cities, notably Wigan, but also Sheffield (home of Def Leppard,
not mentioned herein). In particular he
went into the coal mines to see what that was like. As a tall guy, he had a hard time. He came away with a much better understanding,
tactically, of what coal miners do. But
he also came away with a better understanding of the bigger picture of working
class relations in that part of the country.
There’s really no substitute for actually going somewhere to see with your
own eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your own nose, taste with your own
tongue, and feel with your own appropriate body part, what is actually going
on.
In the second half of the book, he takes issue with the contemporary
socialist movement. At that time – 1937 –
Hitler and Mussolini were well in power, but so was Stalin in the USSR. Capitalist democracies appeared helpless to
fight the two extremes (what he would say once the US entered the war, might be
something else). One thing he noticed
was that very few socialists were actually FROM the working class. Most were bourgeois. Another thing he noticed is that very few of these
bourgeois socialists had ever even met, much less associated with, any members
of the working class they professed to champion. To the contrary, they could not bring
themselves to shed their existing unease and contempt for these folk. Moreover, on the few occasions in which they
did, they could not resist acting as snobs, intellectual and otherwise, and
using Marxist jargon, and going on about how great Stalin was and what a
wonderful place the Soviet Union was. The perverse result was that too many workers, whose interests were served by the socialists and opposed by the fascists - and were often even able to recognize that for themselves - were driven into the enemy's arms by the spectacularly poor job the socialists did of selling their cause. Socialist Facepalm.
I recall a Nation
article ages ago written by Michael Moore.
Yeah, the fat “Roger & Me” guy.
He bitched about ivory tower socialist intellectuals who never come near
a factory worker, wrapped up in Marxist ideology and jargon – “proletariat”, “bourgeois”,
“class consciousness”, etc. – none of which means anything to the GM, Ford, and
Chrysler workers who the socialists are trying to reach. His advice (copying Orwell’s): “Hang out
with them, go to a hockey game, go hunting with them. Talk about how the company is screwing them
over. Whatever you do, don’t go on about
Marxism.” I assume Moore had read Road, as Orwell said the same thing to
his colleagues in England in 1937.
Orwell also reviews much of the contemporary socialist
literature, plus H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World). Again, I
found his analysis of the contemporary situation and his fellow socialists to
be riveting. What I find especially
refreshing is his ability to concede points and play devil’s advocate.
I’m not now, nor have I ever been a socialist, and I doubt
I ever will be. However, by far the most
persuasive case that can be made, is made by Orwell. His
closest contemporary equivalents are Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and Michael
Moore. Neither are very persuasive; both
are too arrogant, too stuck up, too self-satisfied. I’m not aware they were coordinating on the
same team, though Hitchens seemed to fight the more intellectual capitalists
while Moore focused on the trenches, as it were. I don’t consider either to be particularly
effective. Judging by the outcome last
November, Moore did a poor job getting the American proletariat to oppose
Donald Trump. What’s even more
remarkable, and what Orwell was noting in his own time, is that most of Trump’s
opposition, and Hillary’s support, came from people we’d describe as
bourgeois: upper class white
people. In fact, much of what Orwell
describes in 1937 could also apply to 2017 – a surprising amount. I have to wonder how recently Bernie Sanders
or Jill Stein have consulted Orwell. Not
recently, it seems…if at all. Then
again, I doubt Trump is even aware of Orwell’s existence, much less having read
any of his books.
As for my own readers, I would advise everyone, socialist
or not, to read this book if they haven’t already. Orwell’s analysis is superb. It’s witty.
It’s funny (far more so than 1984
or Animal Farm). Non-socialists will probably enjoy reading
Orwell take the piss out of his fellow socialists. And the socialists among you may well enjoy
Orwell’s wit and honesty.
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