Middle class can become fascist, says Orwell

It is quite easy to imagine a middle class crushed down to the worst depths of poverty and still remaining bitterly anti-working class in sentiment; this being, of course, a ready-made Fascist Party.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 258 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Mechanization cuts you off from life, says Orwell

[I]n a fully mechanised world there would be no more need to carpenter, to cook, to mend motor bicycles, etc., than there would be to dig. There is scarcely anything, from catching a whale to carving a cherry stone, that could not conceivably be done by machinery. The machine would even encroach upon the activities we now class as "art"; it is doing so already, via the camera and the radio. 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.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 230 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Orwell notes the ambiguity in "work" and "play"

But what is work and what is not work? Is it work to dig, to carpenter, to plant trees, to fell trees, to ride, to fish, to hunt, to feed chickens, to play the piano, to take photographs, to build a house, to cook, to sew, to trim hats, to mend motor bicycles? All of these things are work to somebody, and all of them are play to somebody. There are in fact very few activities which cannot be classed either as work or play according as you choose to regard them. The labourer set from digging may want to spend his leisure, or part of it, in playing the piano, while the professional pianist may be only too glad to get out and dig at the potato patch. Hence the antithesis between work, as something intolerably tedious, and not-work, as something desirable, is false. The truth is that when a human being is not eating, drinking, sleeping, making love, talking, playing games or merely lounging about—and these things will not fill up a lifetime—he needs work and usually looks for it, though he may not call it work.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 229 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

The British empire was what made British life comfy

[T]he high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon our keeping a tight hold on the Empire, particularly the tropical portions of it such as India and Africa. Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation—an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last think that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the empire together.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 191-92 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Orwell's loathing of the criminal law

I had begun to have an indescribable loathing of trhe whole machinery of so-called justice. Say what you will, our criminal law (for more humane, by the way, in India than in England) is a horrible thing. It needs very insensitive people to administer it. . . . I watched a man hanged once; it seemed to me worse than a thousand murders. I never went into a jail without feeling (most visitors to jails feel the same) that my place was on the other side of the bars. I thought then—I think now, for that matter—that the worst criminal who ever walked is morally superior to a hanging judge.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 178 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

How Orwell came to hate imperialism

I was in the Indian Police five years, and by the end of that time I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear. In the free air of England that kind of thing is not fully intelligible. In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it. Seen from the outside the British rule in India appears—indeed, it is—benevolent and even necessary; and so no doubt are the French rule in Morocco and the Dutch rule in Borneo, for people usually govern foreigners better than they govern themselves. But it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny. Even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian is aware of this. Every "native" face he sees in the street brings home to him his monstrous intrusion. And the majority of Anglo-Indians, intermittently at least, are not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England believe. . . . The truth is that no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression is a much more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression. 

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 175-76 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

War of the Generations after the Great War

[T]hose years, during and just after the war, were a queer time to be at school, for England was nearer revolution than she has been since or had been for a century earlier. Throughout almost the whole nation there was running a wave of revolutionary feeling which has since been reversed and forgotten . . . . Essentially, though of course one could not then see it in perspective, it was a revolt of youth against age, resulting directly from the war. In the war the young had been sacrificed and the old had behaved in a way which, even at this distance of time, is horrible to contemplate; they had been sternly patriotic in safe places while their sons went down like swathes of hay before the German machine guns. Moreover, the war had been conducted mainly by old men and had been conducted with supreme incompetence. By 1918 everyone under forty was in a bad temper with his elders, and the mood of anti-militarism which followed naturally upon the fighting was extended into a general revolt against orthodoxy and authority. At that time there was, among the young, a curious cult of hatred of "old men." The dominance of "old men" was held to be responsible for every evil known to humanity, and every accepted institution from Scott's novels to the House of Lords was derided merely because "old men" were in favour of it.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 170 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Lessons in snobbishness last

I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English "education" fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school—I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet—but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 169 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Prejudice against the reportedly smelly

That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell. And here, obviously, you are at an impassable barrier. For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling. Race-hatred, religious hatred, differences of education, of temperament, of intellect, even differences of moral code, can be got over; but physical repulsion cannot. You can have an affection for a murderer or a sodomite, but you cannot have an affection for a man whose breath stinks—habitually stinks, I mean. However well you may wish him, however much you may admire his mind and character, if his breath stinks he is horrible and in your heart of hearts you will hate him. It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish and dishonest; is it when he is brought up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 85 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

The irrational shame of unemployment

When I first saw unemployed men at close quarters, the thing that horrified and amazed me was to find that many of them were ashamed of being unemployed. I was very ignorant, but not so ignorant as to imagine that when the loss of foreign markets pushes two million men out of work, those two million are any more to blame than the people who draw blanks in the Calcutta Sweep. But at that time nobody cared to admit that unemployment was inevitable, because this meant admitting that it would probably continue. The middle classes were still talking about "lazy idle loafers on the dole" and saying that "these men could all find work if they wanted to," and naturally these opinions percolated to the working class themselves.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), p. 85 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)

Mining is HARD

The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on the flying trapeze or to win the Grand National. I am not a manual labourer and please God I never shall be one, but there are some kinds of manual work that I could do if I had to. At a pitch I could be a tolerable road-sweeper or an inefficient gardener or even a tenth-rate farm hand. But by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1958), pp. 32-33 (1st U.S. ed.; pub. in England in 1937)