Hope Lies in the Proles

George Orwell and the Left

John Newsinger

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745399287
• eBook ISBN: 9781786802194
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

George Orwell was one of the most significant literary figures on the left in the twentieth century. While titles such as 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia are still rightly regarded as modern classics, his own politics are less well understood. Hope Lies in the Proles offers a sympathetic yet critical account of Orwell's political thinking and its continued significance today. John Newsinger explores various aspects of Orwell's politics, detailing Orwell's attempts to change working-class consciousness, considering whether his attitude towards the working class was romantic, realistic or patronising - or all three at different times. He also asks whether Orwell's anti-fascism was eclipsed by his criticism of the Soviet Union, and explores his ambivalent relationship with the Labour Party. Newsinger also breaks important new ground regarding Orwell's shifting views on the USA, and his relationship with the progressive Left and feminism. Focusing on the enduring interest in Orwell and his influence on current political causes, the book is ultimately a unique, nuanced attempt to demonstrate that Orwell remained a committed socialist up until his death.

1

‘Until They Become Conscious They Will Never Rebel’: Orwell and the Working Class

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, while pondering the overthrow of Big Brother, inevitably confronts the dilemma that all socialists who believe in the agency of the working-class have sooner or later to face up to. The moral case for democratic socialism is overwhelming. Certainly, the only worthwhile political objective, as far as Orwell was concerned at the time he wrote the book, was the establishment of a classless society where the ruling class, whatever its particular make-up, had been overthrown, deprived of its wealth and power forever, and the working-class was ‘in the saddle’. This would make possible the introduction of a real democratic system rooted, as it had to be, in the achievement of genuine social equality. The working-class were oppressed and exploited, ground down both at work and at home, the victims of a system of privilege and of the most gross, indeed positively obscene, social inequality. And yet they had the strength to bring that system crashing down if only they recognised their situation, embraced the socialist cause, and acted in concert to remedy it. Nothing could stand in their way. Not even Big Brother. But they don’t act. The problem, as Smith puts it, was that ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious’. Smith is clearly speaking for Orwell here, rehearsing problems that he confronted himself. Nineteen Eighty-Four does not, of course, resolve the dilemma. Indeed, before his arrest, Smith goes through moments of both hope and despair. As he puts it: ‘ . . . if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith’.¹ We shall return to Nineteen Eighty-Four and the working-class, but first: how did George Orwell, an Old Etonian and a former colonial policeman, come to this commitment both to socialism and to the working-class as agency?

Looking back on his teenage years, Orwell remembered himself as a public school radical in the immediate post-war years. This was a period when, as he puts it, ‘the English working class were in a fighting mood’. He describes himself as being ‘a Socialist’ at this time, but only ‘loosely’, without ‘much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings’. He was both ‘a snob and a revolutionary’ whose knowledge of the working class came from books such as Jack London’s The People of the Abyss. He could ‘agonize’ over the sufferings of the poor, but ‘still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them’. As he puts it, ‘I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus conductors’.² How this schoolboy radicalism would have developed if he had gone on to University from Eton, we can only conjecture, but instead, he took a different path and joined the colonial police. This was, of course, a pretty decisive repudiation of even the loosest idea of socialism. He sailed for Burma in October 1922. He was to spend the next five years in the service of the Empire.

On his own testimony, when he gave up his career as a colonial policeman and returned home from Burma in the summer of 1927, he came back bearing ‘an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate’. In Burma, he had been a ‘part of the actual machinery of despotism’ and still had ‘a bad conscience’ about it. He had faithfully served the interests of British Imperialism, one of those charged with imposing British rule, by force when necessary, on the native population. He later recalled ‘the women and children howling when their menfolk were led away under arrest’ and ‘the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos’. And this violence was all-pervasive, inherent in the colonial relationship. He guiltily remembered ‘the servants and coolies I had hit with my fists in moments of rage’ at their clumsiness and supposed laziness. He had come home ridden by guilt and determined ‘to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants’ as a personal recompense. It was at this point that ‘my thoughts turned to the English working class’.³ This particular trajectory is, of course, dependent on Orwell’s own testimony. Nevertheless, it does identify a concern to both take the side of and to be accepted by the working class that remained with him for the rest of his life. With whatever reservations and doubts for George Orwell, ‘if there was hope, it lay in the proles!’⁴

The Road to Socialism

Although Orwell was to later claim that he only really became a socialist sometime around 1930, there is evidence of an earlier commitment when he lived in Paris in 1928–29 and wrote a number of articles for the left-wing press. Moreover, according to Gordon Bowker, at this time, his aunt, Nellie Limouzin and her partner, Eugene Adam, became, informally at least, ‘his political tutors’.⁵ Adam was a former communist, now fiercely hostile to the Stalinist takeover of both the Russian Communist Party and of the Communist International. Orwell argued the issues of the day with him, with Orwell actually defending the Soviet Union at this time, and he provided Orwell with contacts on the French left, including Henri Barbusse. Certainly, Orwell’s time in Paris gave him the opportunity to experience, if only briefly, life at the bottom of the employment market, experience that he duly recounted in Down and Out in Paris and London, but he also encountered a left-wing culture that is missing from that book although he acknowledged it elsewhere. In a review that he wrote for The Adelphi magazine and that appeared in May 1932 (before Down and Out was published), he described a massive demonstration he saw in Marseilles when on his way home to England from Burma. There was ‘an immense procession of working people . . . bearing banners inscribed “Sauvons Sacco et Vanzetti.” ’⁶ This was ‘the kind of thing that one might have seen in England in the eighteen forties, but surely never in the nineteen twenties’. Britain had experienced ‘a century of strong government’ that now kept public disorder in check. Whereas in Britain, public protest ‘seems an indecency . . . in France everyone can remember a certain amount of civil disturbance, and even the workmen in the bistros talk of la revolution – meaning the next revolution, not the last one’.⁷ He chose not to explore this particular aspect of French working-class life. Instead, he tells the reader of his reluctance to write for the Communist press in France for fear of the police. A detective had seen him coming out of the office of a Communist newspaper on one occasion and this had caused him ‘a great deal of trouble with the police’. They were ‘very hard on Communists, especially if they are foreigners’. Other than that his account covers only some ten weeks of his time in Paris, the period during which he was near starvation, working as a plongeur,⁸ and, of course, this is the experience that he set out to explore in the Down and Out.

Back in Britain, Orwell had famously gone on the tramp. He had first begun these explorations in late 1927 and 1928, before moving to Paris, and continued them after his return to Britain in 1930–31. What they show is his determination, not just to sympathise with the poor and destitute but to actually get some first-hand experience of how they experienced life and to get to know them as individuals. He was going to show his middle-class readership, to the best of his ability, what their lives were like from the inside. His intention was to turn the tramping poor from a faceless mass who were to be both pitied and feared into human beings; to humanise them, acknowledge them as individual men and women. To be able to do this he had to become one of them. What even the well-meaning middle class had to realise is that the only real difference between them and the poor is income. As he puts it, the average millionaire is only ‘the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit’.⁹

For Orwell himself, of course, there was more to it than just humanising the poor for a middle-class readership. It was all part of expiating the guilt that he felt at having been part of an oppressive Imperialist system in Burma. Identifying with the poor, being one of them, even if only temporarily, was something that was to concern him throughout his life and that his middle-class friends often commented on. One moment that captures this is when he ventures out dressed as a tramp in Lambeth. He sees another tramp walking towards him and then realises it is himself reflected in a shop window. Already he looks dirty, indeed it seems as if dirt leaves you alone ‘when you are well dressed, but as soon as your collar is gone it flies towards you from all directions’. Now that he is dressed as a tramp, everyone he passes responds differently. And then there is a moment of epiphany: ‘I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. “Thanks, mate”, he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life – it was the clothes that had done it’. Of course, as soon as he spoke Orwell’s accent was to identify him as someone well-to-do who was, for whatever reason, down on their luck, but such individuals were common enough for this to not occasion too much surprise or cause suspicion from the other tramps. The same was not true when he ventured into working-class communities in the North of England. There he was always an outsider.

By the time Orwell went north, under contract to Victor Gollancz to write a book on his experiences and investigations, he had been associated for some time with The Adelphi, a literary magazine that had moved to the left under the impact of the Great Depression and the collapse of the Labour government in 1931. It was edited by John Middleton Murray, assisted by Richard Rees, Max Plowman and the working-class novelist Jack Common, with all of whom Orwell became friendly. After the collapse of the Labour government and the break away of the left-wing Independent Labour Party (ILP) from the Labour Party, Murray had joined the ILP. The Adelphi was to become to all intents and purposes the ILP’s theoretical journal. It reduced its price to 6d so that in the words of an editorial written by Richard Rees, ‘we may reach the greatest possible number of socialist readers’. And according to one account it did succeed in building up ‘a regular following of working-class people’ in the Midlands and the North.¹⁰ Orwell wrote for it regularly and was very much under its influence. From this point of view The Road to Wigan Pier can be seen as a product of his interaction with the more radical and revolutionary elements within the ILP. As we shall see further on, this was particularly true of the book’s determined rejection of the politics of the Popular Front.

Orwell kept in touch with Jack Common by letter during his visit to the North. On one occasion, he mentioned how he had visited the Adelphi offices in Manchester where there were what he described as ‘fearful feuds and intrigues’. A fortnight later, safely back down South, he again wrote to him, explaining that one of the reasons for the squabbling seemed to be people from different parts of the North ‘declaring that theirs is the only genuinely distressed area and the others don’t know what poverty means’. One suspects this was a Yorkshire – Lancashire dispute! There were also problems between the magazine’s working-class and middle-class supporters, with working-class people complaining of the ‘patronising airs’ put on by some of the middle-class socialists.¹¹

More seriously, towards the middle of April 1936, he wrote to Common about how ‘this business of class-breaking is a bugger’. He blamed the problems on the middle-class socialists who gave him ‘the creeps’. Not only don’t they want to eat with a knife, but they were ‘still slightly horrified at seeing a working man do so’. Many of these people were of ‘the sort of eunuch type with a vegetarian smell who go about spreading sweetness and light and have at the back of their minds a vision of the working class all T. T., well washed behind the ears, readers of Edward Carpenter or some other pious sodomite and talking with BBC accents’. He thought working-class people were ‘very patient’ under all this provocation and in his own case he ‘was never once socked on the jaw and only once told to go to hell, and then by a woman who was deaf and thought I was a rate-collector’.¹² Orwell was, of course, to discourse at some length on the problems caused by some middle-class socialists in the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, something to which we shall return.

What of The Road to Wigan Pier? It was written very much as a political act, intended to show middle-class readers in the South, where economic recovery was underway, that there was still considerable unemployment in the North with all that entailed in terms of human misery and that this was being forgotten. It was also a political statement in support of the miners who were only now beginning to recover from their defeat in the Great Lockout of 1926. This was particularly important because the miners were still the decisive force within the labour movement. It was also a political act in another more personal sense because it saw Orwell nailing his colours to the socialist cause in a way that he had not so far done. This was particularly the case once Gollancz decided to publish The Road as a Left Book Club choice.

In the book, Orwell celebrates the work of the miner. They did an essential job: one that he thought would have killed him off in a couple of weeks, and yet they were underpaid and subjected to humiliating and dangerous conditions at work. One in six miners suffered a serious accident every year and one in 900 was killed. It was a casualty rate equivalent to a small war. They did the most dangerous job in the country. Watching them at work, he wrote, ‘you realise momentarily what different universes different people inhabit’. Indeed, the whole world of the ‘superior person’ like himself rested on ‘the poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel’. He singles out one particular instance of petty injustice to exemplify the position these men found themselves in: a disabled miner ‘kept waiting about for hours in the cold wind’ for his pension, an afternoon wasted, completely helpless in the face of the arbitrary whim of the company, even though the pension was his by right. As Orwell points out, not even ‘a down-at-heel’ member of the bourgeoisie like himself would have to put up with such treatment.

Orwell would, of course, be completely unsurprised by the workings of the benefits system in Britain today. He would recognise it immediately for what it was. He would also have immediately recognised the zero-hours economy for what it is and the role of employment agencies, indeed in The Road, he actually discusses the vicious impact of casualisation on the working class. He singles out a Professor Saintsbury who recommended casualisation as ‘the very secret and safety-valve of a safe and sound labour system generally’. He thought unemployment a positive good, helping to discipline the workers, but ‘only so long as the unemployed are made to suffer as much as possible’. As far as the Professor was concerned the dole was both ‘demoralising’ and ‘ruinous’ for the unemployed worker who, as Orwell observes, he presumably thought should either ‘sleep in the street’ or go into the workhouse. Anyway, the government, according to Saintsbury, was under no obligation to ensure the ‘continuance of life’ of the unemployed. A lot of people thought as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Introduction: Discovering Orwell
• 1. ‘Until They Become Conscious They Will Never Rebel’: Orwell and the Working Class
• 2. ‘Why I Join the ILP’: Orwell and the Left in the Thirties
• 3. ‘Giants are Vermin’: Orwell, Fascism and the Holocaust
• 4. ‘A Long Series of Thermidors’: Orwell, Pacifism and the Myth of the People’s War
• 5. ‘It is Astonishing How Little Change Has Happened’: Orwell, the Labour Party and the Attlee Government
• 6. ‘Ceaseless Espionage’: Orwell and the Secret States
• 7. ‘2+2=5’: Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the New Left
• Conclusion: ‘Capitalism has manifestly no future’ – Orwell Today
• Notes
• Index