Something I think the narrative at the end is overlooking is how the new safety laws came into being.
It was economic progress itself, not muckrakers and labor unions, that solved them.
This implies that the laws would just naturally come into being. However, they had to be specifically advocated for by individuals and groups who supported them. I’m not familiar with the specific laws, but at least the German worker’s compensation law originated with a socialist group and was introduced to placate workers. In other countries, I’m doubtful that it was the companies who would have to pay significantly more afterward who supported the laws.
One of the benefits of an organization like a labor union is that it can be a top-down (or at least collectively organized) organization that advocates for laws like these that make sense but not from the perspective of any individual business owner or worker.
Did you read all the way to the end? I feel this was addressed in the last few paragraphs.
(Incidentally, many if not most businesses were in favor of the workers’ comp law, even though they knew it would raise their costs. In part that was because they thought it would improve labor relations, although it also may have been because they thought some reform was inevitable and they wanted something moderate to pass before something radical came along. Re labor unions, many of them were actually against workers’ comp at first, although Samuel Gompers of the AFL then changed his mind and became for it.)
I did, and I appreciated that you (to the extent you identify with Carla the Capitalist) gave thanks to the people who you oppose ideologically but appreciate for their results anyway.
Again, I’m woefully uninformed about the history here, but: It sounds like there was support for something that would solve the issues but was more radical than workers comp (and presumably wouldn’t include the short term pain for workers, and perhaps would be worse overall because of it). If workers comp wound up being a middle ground that all sides would accept then it seems disingenuous to discount worker support for a more radical solution when the compromise worked. Of course, if that’s an inaccurate view of the history and the workers and their advocates were really just poorly educated and misinformed about safety, let’s hope that they’re more informed in our modern day and on other issues.
I’m not sure if there was a specific more-radical proposal on the table, or if that was just a general concern of the businesses. If there was one, I haven’t encountered it.
Again, the labor unions actually were originally for the less-radical proposal of simply reforming the tort system (taking away some employer protections) without going all the way to a no-fault system.
The workers themselves seem mostly focused on pay, hours, and other more tangible things.
The workers themselves seem mostly focused on pay, hours, and other more tangible things.
I think Orwell already commented on how left-wing activists speaking on behalf of the working class typically propose dramatic redesigns of the system, while workers typically want… kinda the same thing, only with more pay, more vacation, less abuse, etc.
(Connotationally, I am not mentioning this to say that the left-wing activists are therefore wrong. Some redesign may be needed to switch things to a different equilibrium, while quantitative improvements may slowly revert, e.g. the pay increase will soon be eaten by inflation.)
Do you have the original source for this (even if it’s not a quote)? This reflects my real life experience and sounds like the kind of thing Orwell would say but I don’t recall encountering it in the subset of Orwell’s works I have read. I’d like to read his original writings on the subject.
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man 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 wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that 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. [...] For instance, I have here a prospectus from another summer school which states its terms per week and then asks me to say ‘whether my diet is ordinary or vegetarian’. They take it for granted, you see, that it is necessary to ask this question. This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
[...] it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense. 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 higher up. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more man better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is black-listed by employers, the word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future violence. But, so far as my experience goes, 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. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed down to mere economic justice and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilisation and his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round 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 don’t work with their hands, that is. They belong either to the type I mentioned in the last chapter, the type who squirms into the middle class via the literary intelligentsia, or the type who becomes a Labour MP or a high-up trade-union official. This last type is one of the most desolating spectacles the world contains. 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, steelworker, cotton-weaver, docker, navvy or whatnot who was ‘ideologically’ sound.
In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that 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.
It’s interesting to see how this aged. 85 years later, sex-maniacs and quacks are still considered ‘cranks’; pacifism and nudists are not well tolerated by most societies, whereas sandal-wearing is more often respected; and vegetarianism and (1930s) feminism are completely mainstream.
Also, I was surprised to learn that Orwell thinks people typically become vegetarian to extend their lifespan, and not for ethical reasons. Was this true in 1930s England? Did Western vegetarianism use to be a fad diet on part with Orwell’s “fruit-drinkers”?
I guess that Orwell’s objection was something like “these people seem incapable to tone down their middle-class signalling”. They ostentatiously care about things that working-class people do not have capacity to care about. They utterly fail at empathy with the workers… and yet presume to speak in their name.
The worker is trying not to starve, and to have enough strength for daily 16-hour work at the factory. Vegetarianism is a luxury he can’t afford. Will healthier diet really make him live longer? His main risk factors are falling of the scaffolding, mutilation by an engine, suffocation in a mine, et cetera; how does eating a f-ing tofu protect against that?
For a working-class woman, the lack of right to vote is also not very high on her list of priorities, I suppose.
Therefore, talking about these topics too much is like saying that actual working-class people are not invited to the debate.
Also: if Orwell thought vegeterians expected to gain 5 years of life, that would be an immense effect well worth some social disruption. And boo Orwell for mocking them merely for being different and not for any substance of the way they were different. It’s not as if people eating different food intrudes on others (or even makes them notice, most of the time), unlike e.g. nudists, or social-reforming feminists.
Hah, this was my first impression too, when I first read that years before, but let me offer a different perspective here...
1) Middle class better at theory than working class—is there actually anything surprising here? I mean, if you take a random sample of middle class and a random sample of working class, who would you expect to do better at a math test? Science test? History test? Betting on the middle class is the obvious winning move here, right?
I might go even further and bet on the middle class in many topics that are close to the actual everyday work of the working class, because while I would expect the welders to be highly knowledgeable about welding, cooks to be experienced at cooking, and so on, each specialization is just a tiny fraction of the entire working class, and I would expect the rest of them to drag the average on the specialized knowledge really low; while on the side of the middle class, you get someone who has welding as a hobby, someone who watches a lot of YouTube video about welding despite never actually doing it, many people who remember something from high school physics or chemistry, some people who remember reading some online article about welding, and some answers probably can be guessed just using general education and common sense… so, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the group containing all the professional welders (but who make only a tiny fraction of it) to lose at this comparison, too.
Now if you look from a perspective of someone who considers socialism a kind of science—like a subset or intersection of economics, sociology, history, and whatever—is it surprising if the working class as a whole sucks at the theory of economics, sociology, and history, and the middle class contains both the actual experts and most of the amateurs?
2) Hypocrisy? Look at the trust fund kids at expensive universities, preaching about social justice and anti-racism, until they graduate, and afterwards many of them become managers and CEOs, measuring the bathroom breaks of their employees, and expanding the prison-industrial complex. But even assuming that most of them are hypocrites, does that make racism the right thing? What about capitalism? (Disclaimer: I am not sincerely comparing capitalism to racism here, just trying to make an argument for someone who might feel that way.)
3) Are many socialists also polyamorous hippies? A similar argument can successfully be made about rationalists; we happen to be more picky about astrology and religion (with the possible exception for Buddhism), but many of us also believe in technological rapture and resurrection of frozen bodies, so maybe we are just more sci-fi flavored, or maybe just living in later century than Orwell’s contemporaries. No problem finding a feminist or a vegan at a LW/SSC meetup. Some people take this as a strong argument against rationalists, some don’t. Being one of the latter, why should I take it as a strong argument against socialists?
But I agree that it makes a really bad impression… and if you choose to remain a socialist regardless, because you believe in the ideas even if you no longer believe in the people and groups, you are going to be a very lonely socialist… which I think describes Orwell correctly.
1) Middle class better at theory than working class—is there actually anything surprising here? I mean, if you take a random sample of middle class and a random sample of working class, who would you expect to do better at a math test? Science test? History test? Betting on the middle class is the obvious winning move here, right?
Part of the socialist ideals is that the working class should actually have the power to make a lot of decisions. Believing that the middle class is better goes counter to socialist ideas.
I can’t speak for Orwell, or actually any socialist, but there are ways around this.
For example, you might believe that if we improve educational opportunities for the workers (they would support this), then their beliefs will become similar to what the middle-class socialists believe now. In other words, they only disagree because they didn’t have time to learn and reflect, but if we provide them more free time (they would support this), they will. That is, in the actual socialism, the decisions will be made by actual workers, and they will be quite similar to what the middle-class socialists promote now.
Also, I think the classes are supposed to be eliminated in socialism.
There’s a general idea of starting out with the “rule of the proletariat” after the revolution in Marxist ideology which means actual working class people would govern. They would also govern without first needing to be educated for that.
Social democrat ideology doesn’t have the same issue but the Marxists do have it.
Something I think the narrative at the end is overlooking is how the new safety laws came into being.
This implies that the laws would just naturally come into being. However, they had to be specifically advocated for by individuals and groups who supported them. I’m not familiar with the specific laws, but at least the German worker’s compensation law originated with a socialist group and was introduced to placate workers. In other countries, I’m doubtful that it was the companies who would have to pay significantly more afterward who supported the laws.
One of the benefits of an organization like a labor union is that it can be a top-down (or at least collectively organized) organization that advocates for laws like these that make sense but not from the perspective of any individual business owner or worker.
Did you read all the way to the end? I feel this was addressed in the last few paragraphs.
(Incidentally, many if not most businesses were in favor of the workers’ comp law, even though they knew it would raise their costs. In part that was because they thought it would improve labor relations, although it also may have been because they thought some reform was inevitable and they wanted something moderate to pass before something radical came along. Re labor unions, many of them were actually against workers’ comp at first, although Samuel Gompers of the AFL then changed his mind and became for it.)
I did, and I appreciated that you (to the extent you identify with Carla the Capitalist) gave thanks to the people who you oppose ideologically but appreciate for their results anyway.
Again, I’m woefully uninformed about the history here, but: It sounds like there was support for something that would solve the issues but was more radical than workers comp (and presumably wouldn’t include the short term pain for workers, and perhaps would be worse overall because of it). If workers comp wound up being a middle ground that all sides would accept then it seems disingenuous to discount worker support for a more radical solution when the compromise worked. Of course, if that’s an inaccurate view of the history and the workers and their advocates were really just poorly educated and misinformed about safety, let’s hope that they’re more informed in our modern day and on other issues.
I’m not sure if there was a specific more-radical proposal on the table, or if that was just a general concern of the businesses. If there was one, I haven’t encountered it.
Again, the labor unions actually were originally for the less-radical proposal of simply reforming the tort system (taking away some employer protections) without going all the way to a no-fault system.
The workers themselves seem mostly focused on pay, hours, and other more tangible things.
I think Orwell already commented on how left-wing activists speaking on behalf of the working class typically propose dramatic redesigns of the system, while workers typically want… kinda the same thing, only with more pay, more vacation, less abuse, etc.
(Connotationally, I am not mentioning this to say that the left-wing activists are therefore wrong. Some redesign may be needed to switch things to a different equilibrium, while quantitative improvements may slowly revert, e.g. the pay increase will soon be eaten by inflation.)
Do you have the original source for this (even if it’s not a quote)? This reflects my real life experience and sounds like the kind of thing Orwell would say but I don’t recall encountering it in the subset of Orwell’s works I have read. I’d like to read his original writings on the subject.
From The Road to Wigan Pier:
It’s interesting to see how this aged. 85 years later, sex-maniacs and quacks are still considered ‘cranks’; pacifism and nudists are not well tolerated by most societies, whereas sandal-wearing is more often respected; and vegetarianism and (1930s) feminism are completely mainstream.
Also, I was surprised to learn that Orwell thinks people typically become vegetarian to extend their lifespan, and not for ethical reasons. Was this true in 1930s England? Did Western vegetarianism use to be a fad diet on part with Orwell’s “fruit-drinkers”?
I guess that Orwell’s objection was something like “these people seem incapable to tone down their middle-class signalling”. They ostentatiously care about things that working-class people do not have capacity to care about. They utterly fail at empathy with the workers… and yet presume to speak in their name.
The worker is trying not to starve, and to have enough strength for daily 16-hour work at the factory. Vegetarianism is a luxury he can’t afford. Will healthier diet really make him live longer? His main risk factors are falling of the scaffolding, mutilation by an engine, suffocation in a mine, et cetera; how does eating a f-ing tofu protect against that?
For a working-class woman, the lack of right to vote is also not very high on her list of priorities, I suppose.
Therefore, talking about these topics too much is like saying that actual working-class people are not invited to the debate.
GBS got a good lifespan out of his vegetarian diet.
Sorry, who is GBS?
Also: if Orwell thought vegeterians expected to gain 5 years of life, that would be an immense effect well worth some social disruption. And boo Orwell for mocking them merely for being different and not for any substance of the way they were different. It’s not as if people eating different food intrudes on others (or even makes them notice, most of the time), unlike e.g. nudists, or social-reforming feminists.
George Bernard Shaw. 1856-1950.
Thanks. That is a timeless, searing attack on Socialism.
Hah, this was my first impression too, when I first read that years before, but let me offer a different perspective here...
1) Middle class better at theory than working class—is there actually anything surprising here? I mean, if you take a random sample of middle class and a random sample of working class, who would you expect to do better at a math test? Science test? History test? Betting on the middle class is the obvious winning move here, right?
I might go even further and bet on the middle class in many topics that are close to the actual everyday work of the working class, because while I would expect the welders to be highly knowledgeable about welding, cooks to be experienced at cooking, and so on, each specialization is just a tiny fraction of the entire working class, and I would expect the rest of them to drag the average on the specialized knowledge really low; while on the side of the middle class, you get someone who has welding as a hobby, someone who watches a lot of YouTube video about welding despite never actually doing it, many people who remember something from high school physics or chemistry, some people who remember reading some online article about welding, and some answers probably can be guessed just using general education and common sense… so, yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the group containing all the professional welders (but who make only a tiny fraction of it) to lose at this comparison, too.
Now if you look from a perspective of someone who considers socialism a kind of science—like a subset or intersection of economics, sociology, history, and whatever—is it surprising if the working class as a whole sucks at the theory of economics, sociology, and history, and the middle class contains both the actual experts and most of the amateurs?
2) Hypocrisy? Look at the trust fund kids at expensive universities, preaching about social justice and anti-racism, until they graduate, and afterwards many of them become managers and CEOs, measuring the bathroom breaks of their employees, and expanding the prison-industrial complex. But even assuming that most of them are hypocrites, does that make racism the right thing? What about capitalism? (Disclaimer: I am not sincerely comparing capitalism to racism here, just trying to make an argument for someone who might feel that way.)
3) Are many socialists also polyamorous hippies? A similar argument can successfully be made about rationalists; we happen to be more picky about astrology and religion (with the possible exception for Buddhism), but many of us also believe in technological rapture and resurrection of frozen bodies, so maybe we are just more sci-fi flavored, or maybe just living in later century than Orwell’s contemporaries. No problem finding a feminist or a vegan at a LW/SSC meetup. Some people take this as a strong argument against rationalists, some don’t. Being one of the latter, why should I take it as a strong argument against socialists?
But I agree that it makes a really bad impression… and if you choose to remain a socialist regardless, because you believe in the ideas even if you no longer believe in the people and groups, you are going to be a very lonely socialist… which I think describes Orwell correctly.
Part of the socialist ideals is that the working class should actually have the power to make a lot of decisions. Believing that the middle class is better goes counter to socialist ideas.
I can’t speak for Orwell, or actually any socialist, but there are ways around this.
For example, you might believe that if we improve educational opportunities for the workers (they would support this), then their beliefs will become similar to what the middle-class socialists believe now. In other words, they only disagree because they didn’t have time to learn and reflect, but if we provide them more free time (they would support this), they will. That is, in the actual socialism, the decisions will be made by actual workers, and they will be quite similar to what the middle-class socialists promote now.
Also, I think the classes are supposed to be eliminated in socialism.
There’s a general idea of starting out with the “rule of the proletariat” after the revolution in Marxist ideology which means actual working class people would govern. They would also govern without first needing to be educated for that.
Social democrat ideology doesn’t have the same issue but the Marxists do have it.
I can’t simulate a (non-Leninist) Marxist well enough to answer this. Yes, when you put it this way, it sounds too naive.
Leninism assumes a “vanguard” that will lead the proletariat towards its coherent extrapolated volition.
Mondragon Corporation has management, but the workers-owners can vote them out. No idea what Marx would think about this.
The idea that people are equal in the sense of one hour of work being the same is one of the cornerstones of Marx’s work.