In the ‘Road to Wigan Pier’, Orwell wrote:
“To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.”
However, it is a starting point. A socialist in a pub on a Saturday night, and we agree that there is no better place to start although pubs are a diminishing venue to discuss socialism, can explain what a wage is and why employers resist higher wages and shorter working hours. And more importantly why, through the ownership of the means of production and distribution, workers are bossed about, told what to do, how and when.
Now Morris was prepared to explain to workers why they were imprisoned within the wages system, why they were exploited and what, politically, they could do about it. Orwell did not. Principally because he never knew the case for socialism to be in a position to make socialists. Politically, he was next to useless. His entire politics was negative.
The Road to Wigan Pier is a conservative tract. It offers no way out from capitalism for the working class. Orwell never defines what he meant by socialism and misuses the word ‘socialism’ by associating it with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the Communist Party and the Labour party. On his travels, Orwell may have lived in filthy boarding houses, observed coal miners at work, and scrutinized government statistics on unemployment. He made no effort to hide his sympathy for his subjects; coal mining is described as a “dreadful job”. Yet nowhere does he politically engage with the workers he meets. They are merely catalogued and transposed into his fiction writing as the passive proles in ‘1984’. Orwell does not want to make socialists he wants to keep workers in their submissive and exploited position under capitalism. In writing about socialists, he does not see us.
Does the working-class man or woman sitting in the pub believe that all socialism amounts to is improved living and working conditions under capitalism? If Orwell dug deeper, he would have found out that many workers in 1937 as they do now, erroneously associate socialism with nationalisation. It shows how little Orwell frequented pubs. He also believed that one reason why socialism is so unpopular is that it attracts a fair number of ‘cranks’ He wrote
“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.” (‘Road to Wigan Pier’ Penguin, 2020 ed. p. 168)
Orwell claimed socialism at its most basic meant “justice and common decency”. This is a rather abstract almost meaningless definition of socialism. Socialism is about free and direct access to what we all need to live on. And what prevents direct and free access and condemns workers to a life of poverty is the private ownership of property, raw minerals, factories, farms, transport, communication systems and distribution points. Under capitalism the private ownership of the means of production is to make more and more profit out of the exploitation of the working class. It is not about meeting need.
Why, then, is Orwell a sacred cow? He is put on a political pedestal and can do no wrong. He misrepresents class, seeing class in terms of stratification rather than as a social relation to the means of production and distribution. He has no socialist objective beyond ‘justice and decency’, characteristics he misleadingly sees inherent in the working class.
Orwell states without any evidence that William Morris was a ‘windbag’ but four tedious chapters in the second half of ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ the reader is confronted with shallow rhetoric, unsubstantiated claims, and crude and infantile name calling. Orwell never set out to make socialists but rather to muddy the waters of what class meant and undermining the definition of socialism by attributing it to all the shades of left-wing politics found in the late 1930s before a war Orwell was to support as a propagandist in radio broadcasts from the BBC and in his book ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’.
The Problems of the 1930s and still the problems of 2025
We have not left the world of Orwell. The poverty and human desperation he described in the first half of his book is still the poverty and desperation faced by the working class in 2025. In a recent article ‘Modern Slavery’ – why insecure jobs harm health’) December 16, 2024), the journalist Patrick Cockburn related the story of a waitress in a restaurant on a zero-hour contract who said that the worst aspect of her job was that “you cannot control your life, and you feel completely helpless”. Cockburn said that it was management – the employer – who decides whether or not she gets too little work or too much – or none at all. Cockburn said that she was one of 4.1 million workers in the UK in precarious employment – sometimes known as “the precariat”
We still have to endure austerity with its food banks, at least 1,172 independent food banks in the UK used by 3,12 million people (‘Statista’ July 8, 2024), heat deprivation and downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Child poverty is also high in the UK with 3.6 million children living in poverty after housing costs (Child poverty Action group 13 December 2024). In the 1930s it was the rise of fascism which was a serious concern of Orwell while today it is the rising trend of nationalism, and popularism and ‘progressive authoritarianism’ personified in Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. Political parasites feed off the misery of the working-class blaming others for unemployment, low wages, poor housing and declining standards of health care.
The cost-of-living crisis has seen many workers give their political allegiance to Reform. Reform and Farage are the toast of the media, never off the air or absent from the newspaper, blogs and other media outlets. If you go into pubs, workers poisoned by the likes of Farage will be blaming refugees, immigrants, Muslims, and others for their plight. They will not be giving an ear to socialist ideas and the necessity to abolish capitalism and establish socialism.
And workers are still bossed around. Now, post-covid, workers are being forced to return to their places of work with no more working from home. At the beginning of December 2024 Nationwide ordered their workers back into the office. Employers have the upper hand in keeping workers together in one building. The place of work is where discipline is exercised by management, where control takes place and where orders are given and expected to be obeyed.
Unemployment is still a fact of life. According to the BBC (November 12, 2024) unemployment is on the rise again while pay growth slows. The trade cycle is one of the consequences of capitalism which no government or economist can resolve.
Making socialists in a sea of capitalism is difficult. We can just about afford the stamp to propagate the socialist case while our political enemies have millions of pounds to spend on subservient and compliant, albeit well paid work force of client journalists, economists, academics, think tanks, civil servants and of course the coercive state of the police and armed forces. The capitalist class has all this to propagate and defend their profit system.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain and making socialists
Unlike Orwell, socialists have two contemporary problems to confront with, both historical. First the failure of the Labour Party to resolve poor housing, inadequate health care and other problems facing the working class. And, tragically, this failure being associated with socialism. The second problem is the Bolshevik dictatorship, established by a coup d’etat in 1917. misleadingly calling themselves socialist/communist which also dragged socialism in the dirt. We have to spend more time now explaining to workers what socialism is not rather than what it actually means. Some socialists have thrown up their hands in despair and wanted another word for socialism like ‘post capitalism’ or simply ‘X’. But why give in to our political enemies? The passing of time will show the baseness of the claims that the Labour Party and the Bolsheviks were ‘socialist’.
Fortunately, socialists do not have to rely on our own resources to make socialists. Capitalism does it for us. Capitalism and its politicians can never solve the problem of the working class. In 1937 Orwell was writing of misery of unemployment. Unemployment is still with us. The Labour government are about to get rid of 10,000 civil servants while the Vauxhall owner is to close the Luton factory. There were 28,000 business closures in 2024 (‘Accountancy Daily’ 13 December 20924). As time passes the socialist solution of abolishing capitalism and replacing the profit system with socialism will become clearer. It is the failure of capitalism to meet the needs of all society from one generation to the next that will force workers to realise that capitalism has nothing to offer them.
A criticism by the capitalist left is that the SPGB is ‘passive’ and ‘educative’ rather than an active revolutionary force. We are not passive but active in meeting with workers and persuading them to become socialists. Our socialist propaganda is active in showing workers time and time again that capitalism cannot work in their interests, that capitalist politicians cannot solve their economic and social problems. This criticism highlights the fundamental difference between the capitalist left whose political object is state capitalism or nationalisation, and socialists whose aim is the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society.
Socialists do not want to lead the working class anywhere. We want workers to think and act for themselves. We cannot impose world socialism. We take Marx’s principle that the establishment of socialism has to be the work of a socialist majority not a revolutionary minority of intellectual or professional politicians. The political action of the capitalist Left merely leads to a cul de sac of political failure.
Socialists have few and little outlets for making socialists. Socialists are very thin on the ground. We are the political equivalent of ‘The only gay person in the village’ a comedy sketch in ‘Little Britain’. At most social events a socialist find themselves in as the only socialist in attendance, often standing next to someone whose solution to the refugee boats crossing the Channel is for the Royal Navy to sink them. It is somewhat lonely being a socialist. Of course we have lectures, a magazine, a web site, the internet but against the Elon Musk’s, of the world owner of X (once Twitter) and distributor of a portion of his wealth to Trump’s Presidency and possibly via the billionaire property developer Nick candy, to Farage’s Reform Party. And against, for example, the Murdoch empire it seems that our socialist platform is limited in its range and scope. We do the best we can under very difficult circumstance.
So, it is back to capitalism as a global social system of class exploitation, d its anarchic and damaging trajectory in human history. It was Marx and Engels in ‘The Communist Manifesto’ who stated:
‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own grave-diggers’
We remain optimistic that sooner or later the working class will come to realise the practicality of common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution over the anarchy of capitalism and the profit motive. World socialism is the only rational framework in which the needs of all of society can be met. In the meantime, socialists will carry on educating workers and making socialists while capitalism continues to create its gravediggers.
