I highly recommend that everyone read this brilliant book!
Over the last year, I’ve been getting to know George Orwell and his works, as they relate to his time and ours. We all know the prophetic nature of Animal Farm and 1984. Similarly, there was a lot to take away from ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, an earlier work written in the 1930s between The Great War and the beginning of WWII.
The goal of this book was for Orwell to experience and report on how the poorest working-class Englishmen and women, mostly coal miners, lived in the 1930s. He observed the physical, economic, and psychological hardships they live through day in, day out… A poor diet of tinned meat and sweet candies is one example; and a condition that can still be observed today among the poor. He also astutely observed ‘several million men in England will – unless another war breaks out – never have a real job this side of the grave.’ Saddening that an economic boom is seen as a positive outcome of war… is there such a thing as a ‘positive’ outcome of war? (I grant that defeating Nazis was a positive outcome, but just wish that it had never gotten to that.) Also saddening to realize the military industrial complex continues to lobby governments to keep war going for their profits.
I never imagined Orwell could be wrong in his prophecies. But in ‘Road to Wigan Pier’, he perceived the logical end state of Socialism to be a great, efficient machinery (though to his dislike) and that capitalism as an impediment to innovation. However, with history now unfolded, we know Mao and Pol Pot drove people from the cities and forced them to work fields with barely any tools; whereas the free market has driven innovation as ‘an efficient machinery’. Orwell’s idea of Socialism at this time differed from how it played out in reality. He seems to have realised this later on, leading to his famous novels ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’. (He corrected his prophecy after all!)
Why he disliked the idea of an efficient machinery (regardless of whether it sprung from Socialism or Capitalism) is neatly summed up in these two passages: “…For a man is not, as the vulgarer hedonists seem to suppose, a kind of walking stomach; he has also got a hand, an eye and a brain. Cease to use your hands, and you have lopped off a huge chunk of your consciousness… Mechanise the world as fully as it might be mechanised, and whichever way you turn there will be some machine cutting you off from the chance of working – that is, of living.” Oh how true, even today!
Anudari Batjargal 