George Orwell was no god-damned anarcho-capitalist/conspiracy theorist. The abuse of his writings by the fringe is truly shameful. You really think he was levying those charges against social democrats? Give me a fucking break. He was as opposed to extreme liberalism as he was totalitarianism.
You do realize what he's saying here, yes? He's criticizing those who reduce the socialist movement to "heresy-hunters." He's not saying that socialist writers present this reductive impression; he's saying critiques of socialism are often reductive.
Orwell actually believed in socialist policies, and The Road to Wigan Pier is in part a defense of his socialism.
Did I say he was anarcho capitalist? In Wigan Pier he was juxtaposing the wretched lot of the underclass with the English bourgeoisie (and counting himself among them) through his own undertaking to live among the underclass for a time. It is apparent across his writings that his target was totalitarianism, but particularly that of the socialist/communist sort as time went on (probably because the Fascist variant had already met with defeat - Animal Farm and 1984 came after the war and Wigan Pier).
He obviously showed no love for the Corporation, as it chewed through the underclass, but he also recognized the elements of grey: Where the engine for the slum was also the engine out of it. He was against a Means Test for aid but for programs that helped people work and provide for themselves, and noted this was not a a preferred Socialist policy:
They say that the occupational centres are simply a device to keep the unemployed quiet and give them the illusion
that something is being done for them. Undoubtedly that is the underlying motive. Keep a man busy mending boots and he is less likely to read the Daily Worker. Also there is a nasty Y.M.C.A. atmosphere about these places which you can feel as soon as you go in. The unemployed men who frequent them are mostly of the cap-touching type--the type who tells you oilily that he is 'Temperance' and votes Conservative. Yet even here you feel yourself torn both ways. For probably it is better that a man should waste his time even with such rubbish as sea-grass work than that for years upon end he should do absolutely nothing.
...............
The whole trade union movement testifies to this; so do the excellent working-men's clubs--really a sort of glorified cooperative pub, and splendidly organized--which are so common in Yorkshire. In many towns the N.U.W.M. have shelters and arrange speeches by Communist speakers. But even at these shelters the men who go there do nothing but sit round the stove and occasionally play a game of dominoes. If this move-met could be combined with something along the lines of the occupational centres, it would be nearer what is needed. It is a deadly thing to see a skilled man running to seed, year after year, in utter, hopeless idleness.
Here, is where he fails to see how the former relates to the latter, or in general how the types and attitudes he marks as being drawn to Socialism specifically inhibit productivity. This is why it matters not whether those clamoring for the means of production get them, for they actually want nothing to do with them. This is why, man for man, fascism is a superior form of collectivism to communism - it leaves the means to those who will use them and simply takes more off the top. The problem for 20th century fascism is it didn't have enough men, and it was inferior to 20th century Anglo-liberalism.
It's interesting that he notes that wastefulness is endemic in the expenditure of allowances (but with a cynical view that were they uniformly better at spending, it would be reduced. The more things change, the more they remain the same:
I doubt, however, whether the unemployed would ultimately benefit if they learned to spend their money more economically. For it is only the
fact that they are not economical that keeps their allowances so high. An English-man on the P.A.C. gets fifteen shillings a week because fifteen shillings is the smallest sum on which he can conceivably keep alive. If he were, say, an Indian or Japanese coolie, who can live on rice and onions, he wouldn't get fifteen shillings a week--he would be lucky if he got fifteen shillings a month. Our unemployment allowances, miser-able though they are, are framed to suit a population with very high standards and not much notion of economy. If the unemployed learned to be better managers they would be visibly better off, and I fancy it would not be long before the dole was docked correspondingly.
Ultimately, the constant sentiment, the one I referenced first, throughout Wigan Pier can be captured in this bit:
This is the outlook of a confessed reactionary. But how about the middle-class person whose views are not reactionary but 'advanced'? Beneath his revolutionary mask, is he really so different from the other?
and this
The middle-class Socialist enthuses over the proletariat and runs 'summer schools' where the proletarian and the repentant bourgeois are supposed to fall upon one another's necks and be brothers for ever; and the bourgeois visitors come away saying how wonderful and inspiring it has all been (the proletarian ones come away saying something different). And then there is the outer-suburban creeping Jesus, a hangover from the William Morris period, but still surprisingly common, who goes about saying 'Why must we level down? Why not level up?' and proposes to level the working class 'up' (up to his own standard) by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry, etc.
Orwell stabs at his own kind consistently:
it is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being. The modem English literary world, at any rate the high-brow section of it, is a sort of poisonous jungle where only weeds can flourish.
It is irony then, that he spends the entire 10th chapter engaging in the thing which he notes, in alternating paragraphs even, is quite easy for the Socialist to do (criticize their own). I would quote from it but that would require far too much space.
Orwell's version, or vision, if you will, of Socialism was at odds with nearly anyone who called themselves Socialist - by his own admission. Can we then even call him a Socialist? Rather, he seems to imply in the final chapter that he is really a communal Luddite with no hopes of realizing that goal.
