How George Orwell Mislead Liberals

In the Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell paints a ghastly picture of the depravity working class miners were forced to deal with in the early 20th century. Orwell describes a kind of life that barely seems worth living, all brought to you at the great low price by capitalism.

Traveling MILES to work in mine shafts shorter than the workers, at some places crouching and at others crawling all while being weighed down with mining gear. They didn’t get paid for this “commute” and the labor once they got to the coal shelf was tortuously back breaking, working from the knees and inhaling copious coal dust. At the end of the day the workers would go back to their mining town where they were lucky to have a house, and nearly none had plumbing; they could not shower the sweat or coal soot away, all the while paying exorbitant rents for apartment that were falling apart and where to get to the shared bathroom you would have to walk nearly a quarter mile or more. The coal must be produced, sneered the upper class bourgeoisie, “besides, miner’s don’t LIKE to be clean,” they also sneered. People in power make the most justification for their power, “the poor want to be poor.”

After reading this book the animosity of the working class for the upper class, and vice versa, clung to me like coal soot clings to sweaty skin. In any new capitalistic venture, there are bound to be unforeseeable dangers, and those dangers have been becoming less and less in modern time, due to a mix of regulations and better industry equipment, but there are still things the market does not consider. In a sense with climate change, we are all in the mine, and we should want policies that keep the likelihood of cave ins as low as possible, however they get their. Whether the market can manage to not partake in harmful ventures, or whether the government can put regulations in place to prevent worker extortion or damage to the environment. We want policies put in place that WORK to either produce monetary value or protect human equality whatever political side it stems from.

The Liberal Autoimmune Disease

Now, you may be wondering, what did Orwell get wrong? capatalism is just bad, right? We’ve gotta get these oppressing rich-types in line!

Orwell’s inspiring rallying cry for the middle and working class across Europe to unite in The Road to Wigan Pier also serves as liberalism’s most self defeating quality:

“The Socialist movement has not time to be a league of dialectical materialists; it has got to be a league of the oppressed against the oppressors.”

In the context of the writing of The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937, Orwell believed, with good evidence, fascism in Europe was about to swallow up everything unless socialism could drop some attitudes and aesthetics and really take hold of the working and middle class.

The idea that socialism includes the oppressed and its enemy is the oppressors, by nature allows for no question in the matter to who the enemy of socialism is, even if they are of low class or even liberal themselves. Orwell outlines well in Wigan Pier how socialism pushes the middle class to fascism, but I would argue that this idea does the most in modern times to push the right to go more right. While forgivable to make this false dichotomy in the face of the third Reich, it will not do today.

In glossing over the shades of grey and putting on the two tone glasses, we can only see oppressor and oppressed. This is why there are issues in college like Dean Spellman’s case. Even when there are no fascists around, there has to be an oppressor somewhere. It also leads to conclusions that being in a place of power is only because you oppressed someone.

It is valid to say that there are still oppressors in the capitalistic sense and in the authoritarian sense. Acquiring an inordinate amount of the wealth in America, I would say, is a form of oppression because it deprives others of that wealth. There is still a ways to go in this regard, but this thinking creates an error in the identify friend or foe part of the brain and causes a kind of auto immune disease that attacks supporters of the general liberal ideal. Another criticism of this objection to Orwell is that he himself probably did not ascribe to this kind of simplistic view of socialism, but he still prescribes this dangerous idea to his audience, albeit self reportedly simplistic.

The Libertarian’s Nightmare

Below is evidence of the market self regulating perfectly and not literally crushing a miner’s home because the company needed somewhere to put the stuff that comes out of the mine–which is literally a trash fire.

Back to what this means for policy. This kind of black and white thinking is what drives both the right away from talking regulations which are tinted of socialism and left away from talking free market, causing a despise of both free market and regulations. Mention socialized health care and if the next word out of the conservatives mouth is not “Venezuela, socialism, etc.,” I would be surprised. Mention a solution to a problem where more degrees of freedom in a market might solve, and the liberal blogger will point to the photo above.

Animosity of capitalism seems to stem from the fact that the West is fully inside of it, and notices the flaws more than the benefits, and is attracted to socialism because of its moral appeal.

Capitalistic Fundamentalism

The answer lays in acknowledging that capitalism is the best game in town, but it does not get everything right, it is great in generating wealth and digging the poor out of poverty, although unequally and sometimes at other’s expense. Lets leave the market to drive growth and innovate in the way only human greed and self interest can, but leave the government to not allow the pursuit of capital to infringe on individual rights–or better yet, incentive making human opportunity equality greater in a market. This extends to allowing a small, small percent of the population to possess a ridiculous amount of the money. Lets stop confusing the fact that capitalism is our best economic game with it being infallible and unbridgeable.

Originally published at brandondot.wordpress.com on September 14, 2018.