• James Keir Hardie (1856–1915), a pioneer of the British labor movement, served as the first Socialist member of the British Parliament and helped to found the British Labour Party. He consistently fought for working class rights, women’s suffrage, a graduated income tax, abolishment of the House of Lords, fair elections, international socialism, the end of colonialism, and racial equality. A passionate pacifist, he opposed Britain’s participation in World War I. His intention in the 1907 book from which this excerpt is taken was to make a “. . . brief unadorned statement of the case for Socialism, easily understandable by plain folks.” In 1936–1937 the English writer George Orwell (1903–1950), famous for his novels 1984 and Animal Farm, lived in Wigan, a mill town in a coal-mining district near Manchester in the industrialized, economically depressed north of England. Here he studied the living and working conditions, wages, and health of the workers and their families. In 1937 he published his observations in The Road to Wigan Pier, in which he also tried to answer the question of why socialism did not have more support among the workers he studied.

James Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism

“In Great Britain two sets of influences are at work bringing the more intellectually minded of the middle-class over to Socialism. There is the increasing tension required in the conduct of business which so saps a man’s energies as to leave him little of either time or inclination for the cultivation of any other than the business faculty. A tendency to revolt against this is a well-marked feature of the social life of our time. Of what use is it, ask these slaves of the ledger, to spend the greater part of a lifetime in acquiring a competency only to find after it has been acquired that its acquisition has taken all the savour of enjoyment out of life? It is surprising the charm which Socialism has for men and women of this type. Others come to Socialism through intellectual conviction and humanitarian promptings. The terrible lot of the people, from which there is no way of escape, harries their feelings and overrides all consideration of their own selfish material interests. Kinship with their fellows is more to them than their rent-rolls or their scrip, and these too, in gradually increasing numbers, are boldly championing the Socialist cause. . . .

But it is to the working-class itself that we must look for changing the system of production and making it a means of providing for the healthy human need of all the people. This is so not only because of their numbers but also because unless they consciously set themselves to win Socialism it can never be won. It is, in the fullest sense of a very much abused phrase, a People’s Cause. When it has been won it will be their fight which has won it; should it never be won, and should our Western civilisation totter on until it falls into the depths of a merciful oblivion, that too will be their doing, and be due entirely to their not having had the courage and the intelligence to put up a fight strong enough to save it and themselves.

Hitherto the workers have been content to ask for small reforms; now they are realising that private property is the enemy they have to encounter. . . . Somewhat dimly at present, but with growing clearness of vision, the worker begins to see that he will remain a menial, outcast and forlorn, until he has made himself master of the machine he tends and the soil he tills. Hence the growth of Socialism.”

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

“Socialism . . . is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking workingman with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. . . . In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks. . . . 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. . . .

A working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist. . . . Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets the chance, but his conception of Socialism is quite different from that of the book-trained Socialist. . . . To [him] . . . Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. . . . No genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. . . . His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with . . . the same things as at present — family life, the pub, football, and local politics. As for the philosophic side of Marxism, the pea-and-thimble trick with those three mysterious entities, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, I have never met a working man who had the faintest interest in it. It is of course true that plenty of people of working-class origin are Socialists of the theoretical bookish type. But they are never people who have remained working men. . . . They . . . either . . . [squirmed] into the middle class via the literary intelligentsia, or [became] a Labour M.P. or a high-up trade-union official. This last type is one of the most desolating spectacles. . . . He has been picked out to fight for his mates, and all it means to him is a soft job and the chance of “bettering” himself. Not merely while but by fighting the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois himself. And meanwhile it is quite possible that he has remained an orthodox Marxist. But I have yet to meet a working miner, steel-worker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy, or whatnot who was “ideologically” sound.”

Sources: James Keir Hardie, From Serfdom to Socialism (London: George Allen, 1907), pp. ix, 29–31; George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1958), pp. 173–177. Copyright © George Orwell, 1937. Copyright © 1958 and renewed by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company and by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell. All rights reserved.

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