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George Orwell's, The Road To Wigan Pier is an account of the life of industrial workers in the north of England in he 1930s and a scathing answer to socialism. In the 1930's George Orwell was sent by a socialist book club, known as The Left Book Club, to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. According to the publisher's note at the beginning of the book:
The aim of the club, according to one of its brochures, which reflects the temper of the time, was to "help in the terribly urgent struggle for World Peace & a better social economic order & against Fascism, by giving (to all who are determined to play their part in this struggle) such knowledge as will immensely increase their efficiency. ((The Road To Wigan Pier. "Publisher's Note" P. IX)
Orwell went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well. Not one to observe from the sidelines, Orwell shared the experiences of the coal miners, living in foul lodging, subsisting on a meager diet, and going down into the hellish, back-breaking mines. What he saw and recorded helped clarify his feelings about socialism. In this book he pointedly tells why socialism, the only remedy to the shocking conditions he had witnessed, repelled "so many normal decent people." His rebuke was so stinging that it brought a rebuttal from one of his sponsors, Victor Gollancz published as a forward to the original edition of The Road To Wigan Pier. Gollancz stated there were, "well over a hundred passages about which I thought I should like to argue with Orwell" (The Road To Wigan Pier. "Publisher's Note" P. X).
In The Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell criticizes socialism while also offering solutions and suggestions to the then current problems of socialism. Victor Gollancz writes in the foreword: What is indeed essential, once that first appeal has been made to "liberty" and "justice," is a careful and patient study of just how the thing works: of why capitalism inevitably means oppression and injustice and the horrible class society which Mr. Orwell brilliantly depicts: of the means of transition to a Socialist society in which there will be neither oppressor or opressed. In other words, emotional Socialism must become scientific Socialism--even if some of us have to concern ourselves with what Mr. Orwell, in his extremely intellectualist anti-intellectualism, calls "the sacred sisters" Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis. (Gollancz, Victor, Foreword, The Road To Wigan Pier, P.Xxiii)
Orwell's use of real characters to depict the horrendous conditions under which the workers in the North lived, draws empathy to their plight, much the same way Dickens drew attention to the plight of the poor and class based society one-hundred years earlier. If he had just written a book about the unemployed, without describing the conditions of the employed the book would not have the same power to move the emotions, and stimulate the intellectual. It is the scientific and intellectual members of society we must reach to bring about the type of social change Orwell wishes to achieve. In the end of his critique, Gollancz, praises Orwell for writing a book that draws attention to the problems of the workers, while rousing the empathy of the people. Gollancz writes:
What I feel in sum, is that this book, more perhaps than any that the Left Book Club has issued, clarifies--for me at least--the whole meaning and purpose of the Club. On the one hand we have to go out and rouse the apathetic by showing them the utter vileness which Mr. Orwell lays bare in the first part of the book, and by appealing to the decency which is in them; on the other hand we have so to equip ourselves by thought and study that we run no danger, having once mobilised all this good will, of seeing it dispersed for lack of trained leaders--lance corporals as well as generals--or even of seeing it used as the shock troops of our enemies. (P. xxiv)
The conditions Orwell describes are horrendous. No one should have to live in such poverty and squalor. In the beginning of the novel he discusses the problems they have just getting to work, and the vast amounts of time the coal miners spend travelling.
Here is this frightful business of crawling to and fro, which to any normal person is a hard days work in itself; and it is not part of the miner's work at all, it is merely an extra, like the City man's daily ride in the Tube. The does that journey to and fro, and sandwiched in between there are seven and a half hours of savage work. I have never travelled much more than a mile to the coal face; but often it is three miles, in which case I and most people other than coal-miners would never get there. (Orwell George, The Road to Wigan Pier, P. 29)
By comparing the plight of the coal miner to the daily life of the average city worker, Orwell plays the heart strings of all workers and draws empathy to their plight. He goes on to explain in depth the vast difference between the average workers ride in the Tube to the struggles of the coal miner crawling on hands in knees through the darkness into the depths of the mines where they work: This is the kind of point that one is always liable to miss. When you think of a coal-mine you think of depth, heat, darkness, blackened figures hacking at walls of coal, you don't think, necessarily, of those miles creeping to and fro. There is the question of time, also. A miners working shift of seven and a half hours does not sound very long, but one has to add an hour a day for "travelling," more often two or three. Of course, the "travelling" is not technically work and the miner is not paid for it; but it as like work as makes no difference. (Orwell George, The Road to Wigan Pier, P. 29)
The workers, therefore, actually work ten to eleven hours, but only get paid for seven and a half. Contrasting that with the relative luxury in which a City worker travels to their job adds to the feeling of empathy. It should also be pointed out, that the coal-miner still has to travel to the entrance of the mines everyday, before being allowed the privilege of traveling on all fours down into the dark holes.
In the ladder half of the book, Orwell criticizes capitalism for aiding the economic misery and states he believes that capitalism retards the development of new machinery to make the workers job easier. But, under our present economic system, whether he constructed them-- or rather, whether anyone else had the benefit of them--would depend upon whether they were commercially valuable. The Socialists are right, therefore, when they claim that the rate of mechanical progress will be much more rapid once Socialism is established. Given a mechanical civilisation the process of invention and improvement will always continue, but the tendency of capitalism is to slow it down, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected. (Orwell George, The Road to Wigan Pier, P. 238)
Considering the conditions the workers were subjected to work, Orwell makes a sound argument for reform. However, while it is true, mechanization will be ignored if it does not increase, profits, it's hard to imagine a machine which makes a job easier not increasing profits. If anything, it will increase profits by reducing the amount of workers needed to perform said task. For Orwell, commissioned to study unemployment, this is not a desirable outcome, but it is an intellectually sound and logical argument. There needed to be a happy medium, where machines were developed to make jobs easier to perform, while maintaining the workforce, and profit margins.
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