The Road To Wigan Pier

George Orwell’s 1937 book The Road To Wigan Pier is part travelogue and part philosophical book. It starts off with the wealthy southerner Orwell’s tour of northern mining/industrial England at the pit of the Great Depression. Not only are the struggles of the lower classes shown in gruesomely accurate detail, but one sentence is very darkly prophetic. “We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will – unless another war breaks out – never have a real job this side the grave.”

Now as it turned out, another war did break out. And after that, and not denying the struggles and serious lagging of northern England to this day, things got better for people like them. A lot better. (How much is capitalism and how much is the postwar welfare state is not the point of this review). So while outdated in hindsight, you could see why Orwell was a fervent socialist: Because he understandably thought that things had gotten so bad that a radical change of society was needed.

Yet if the first section of the book is outdated, the second part, where he tears into his fellow socialists, could not be more relevant. Look around every wealthy hard-leftist (but I repeat myself) today and compare them to genuine working class people (even fervently liberal ones), and one can see how little has changed in that regard. Probably the most telling part is his observation that for all their supposed desire to break down classes, most capital-S Socialists Orwell had seen were the most class, prestige, and reputation-obsessed people around.