Orwell's people

Published in slightly revised French translation as“Le peuple d’Orwell” in AgonE, n° 45, 2011, p. 49-79

Orwell’s People

John Crowley and S. Romi Mukherjee

Reference to “the people” runs through the work of GeorgeOrwell, both in his fiction and in his essays andjournalism. To take just one example, his reflections on thepossibility and likely character of an English revolutionare explicitly set within an analysis of the “Englishpeople”. Furthermore, an idea of “the people” lies behindfrequent and often quoted references to more concretecollectives such as the working and middle classes; torepresentative figures such as the worker, the common man orthe “£5-a-week man”; and to notions such as common decencyand common sense. There is a sense in which Orwell’spolitics are all about Orwell’s people.

Yet, far from being systematic or coherent, Orwell’spolitical populism was a site of great agon and struggle.Such struggle entailed the cultivation of a sustained gazenot at the abstract, messianic, or utopian “people”, butrather at men and women as they were, their odors, theiranxieties, their ugliness and their hopes. This strugglerepresented nothing short of Orwell’s tireless attempt toconfront the apparent impossibility of true politicalconsciousness.

What People, What Consciousness? Tensions and Antagonisms

Any close scrutiny of Orwell’s treatment of the “common” andthe “people” reveal them to be a site of deep political andpsychological ambivalence. Orwell reminds us that politicsis about setting aside one’s class pretensions andfrequenting the uncouth, the uneducated and the unclean whom

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one would normally avoid. Regardless of political discourseabout people or “the people”, the true test of one’scommitments was always found in the streets and gutters andamongst workers and tramps. Nonetheless, while Orwell mayhave indeed believed this, he was also aware that the flightfrom bourgeois determinism to a space of pure politicalconsciousness where such “inter-course” would indeed bepossible was not without its contradictions; politicalconsciousness inevitably poses the question of one’sproximity to people and to others. It is for precisely thisreason that Orwell’s work is shot through by a series ofpolitical chiasmi. The (successful) struggle to distinguishbetween workers and tramps – against the thrust of his earlyliterary efforts – is merely the best known and most visibleindex of the tensions and antagonisms in Orwell’s idea ofthe people.

For Orwell’s problem with his “people” had multiple, partlyoverlapping dimensions: sociological, political, ethical,cultural. Each dimension led to rather differentdistinctions and dividing lines, in response to analyticalissues and political challenges that were themselvesvariable. In Orwell’s œuvre, one encounters, inter alia, thedichotomy between the “bourgeois slave” and the “proletariananimal” which is central to Nineteen Eighty-Four, but alsoexplored in a different form in the novels of the 1930s.This dichotomy effectively maps the conceptual absence ofthe people Orwell was trying to theorize. On the other hand,the excluded “middle” recurrently appears as the concretepeople of Catalonia, Wigan, and the many essays on popularculture, but with a distinct and cross-cutting tensionbetween the organized working class and the emergingtechnical middle class, itself set within “the upward anddownward extension of the middle class”.1

Orwell’s suspicion of Marxian paradigms, naiveuniversalisms, and leftist utopian reveries of all sorts,

1 George Orwell, “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the EnglishGenius”, in Why I Write, New York: Penguin (1984), p. 42

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led him to erect a new series of categories. While Englandremained “the most class-ridden country under the sun…a landof snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and thesilly,”2 it was also a land where “the distinction betweenthe rich and the poor dwindles… England is certainly twonations, if not three or four.”3 Within the simpleopposition of the rich and the poor, one finds a series ofmicro-oppositions, triadic structures, and places ofslippage. The proletarians, for example, appear as dignifiedand decent minors, as loathsome and despondent lovers oftheir own abjection, and as wily tramps and confidencetricksters. The world of the bourgeois slave is no lesscomplex – typified at once by George Bowling’s suburbannightmare and territorialization by the money code; byGordon Comstock’s fetishism of the freedom of the poor,desire to deterritorialize from the money code and inabilityto do so; and by Winston Smith, whose subjectivity ischaracterized by his docility to the Party and hissimultaneous steadfast, melancholic, doomed belief that theProles remain society’s last hope.

In depicting and wrestling with these antinomies, Orwell wasreflecting on the dilemmas of a universe that lackedpolitical consciousness and thus created the conditionswhere, as in Animal Farm, pigs could effectively triumph. Thefirst half of the twentieth century was thus, for Orwell, atemporal space where the people had disappeared and with ittrue political consciousness, opposed to the debasedconsciousness of the “intellectual”, the avant-garde, andthe cultural and desiring left. Through his cartographies ofthe “people” and his acerbic caricatures of their idlenessand phobias, Orwell placed in relief not the classcontradictions that would bring capitalism to an apocalyptichalt, but the contradictions within classes that preventedbourgeois socialists and proletarian militants alike fromcultivating real and practical resistance against thehypocrisies and terrors of the modern world. 2 Ibid., p. 293 Ibid., p. 24

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In other words, “true political consciousness” meantovercoming these contradictions, filling in the void, andbringing the bourgeois, just as Orwell did, to “suppress hisdistrust and dislike of the poor, his revulsion from thecoloured masses who teemed throughout Empire, his suspicionof Jews, his awkwardness with women and his anti-intellectualism.”4 This entails equally, and for the samereasons, a suppression of the self-hatred implicit in thetendency of some bourgeois socialists to idealize theproletariat as if it were the fount of all wisdom. As Orwellput it sarcastically, “why should a man who thinks allvirtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains todrink his soup silently?”5 – the point being not thatsocialism is hostile to table manners, but that theidealized proletariat stands in the way of understanding thereal people. Simultaneously, those of the “low”, must, invarying degrees, both refuse to accept their own reificationand abjection and ward off the technologically produceddespondency of capitalist “low leisure” and canalize theirpurported freedom from the money-code to problematize boththe bourgeois, who equally disdain them and speak on theirbehalf, and late capitalism at large. There is no politicalvirtue in slurping one’s soup or dropping one’s aitches.Such shibboleths are what pass for political consciousnesswhen one fails to grasp the basic facts about society, thosethat are “in front of one’s nose”.

It is clear enough that the elision of the working class,the fact that the middle-class socialist is ultimately morecomfortable (at least ideologically) with radical others(tramps, natives) than with close compatriots, constitutethe absence of a “people” in a sense that is bothsociologically and politically significant. In a negativesense, this is the problem of “Orwell’s people”. It remainsto be understood to what extent (if at all) he managed todeal with it, and what his solutions mean. The search for4 Hitchens (2002), p. 95 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, London, Harvest (1958), p. 136

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Orwell’s people is therefore necessarily the search for anover-arching frame of reference that can establishcommonalities between the classes without requiring eitherto align itself with the other. On the one hand, the peopleis the result of a certain kind of fusion (social,political, material, cultural and imaginative) between theworking class and the salaried middle class. It ispotentially a political subject, one that bears the hope ofgenuinely democratic and socialist revolution. On the otherhand, it is the locus of a composite property called“decency”, which underwrites its political role, but alsoextends far beyond politics to the defining features of awhole way of life.

To think “Orwell’s people” is necessarily to think a seriesof ambivalences that do not allow political consciousnessever to become self-satisfied, let alone adopt a systematicposition. Of further interest, is precisely the manner inwhich Orwell navigated and confronted these ambivalences andaspired to collapse them in a politics that ignored radicalcant and rhetorical gesture in favor of sustained work onthe “political self”. Such work, for Orwell, necessitatesbetraying and ultimately destroying one’s class, habitus,and determinism. It is only through such a process ofbetrayal and destruction that consciousness and the “people”stand to be not found, but constructed, as the void thatOrwell was always rendering present (as absence) in hisanalyses.

Work on our political selves remains all the more timely inour contemporary age, one where the working class has beencast out of the sphere of representation and discourse, onewhere the cultural and desiring left have triumphed, onewhere new forms of abjection are produced in the darkunderbelly of the global, and one where the juggernaut ofneo-liberal technocracy breeds new forms of soft control anddocility all designed to ensure that the quest for politicalconsciousness is forever averted.

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A Sociology of the Devitalized: the Bourgeois and the Middle Classes

A simple yet harrowing question continues to plague themiddle class: how can the attainment of creature comforts,respectability, security, and an array of gadgets producesuch malaise? Upward mobility, a decent education, thecapacity to hold down a “good job” and to be “good”, move insynchrony with the downward spiral of vitality, hope, andthe forces of life. In this paradox, Orwell diverted hisgaze to the pre-eminent class of the 20th century, a classwhose saturated presence on the modern world-historicalstage not only rendered the working class invisible, butalso pushed the elites and the moneyed further into theequally invisible folds of neo-capitalist Empire whilesimultaneously dragging many members of the former eliteinto the comfortable psychic squalor of the middle classes.In other words, the 20th century effects a strange classdistension where the immense chasm between the rich and thepoor is filled not by “the people”, but by the lower- andupper-middle class, the bourgeois and the petit bourgeois,all characterized by their lack of vital human qualities andtheir lack of political consciousness. Orwell was outragednot only by the way things were, but by the fact that themiddle class was divested of its own rage and quietlyaccepted and actually came to long for its own imprisonment;it is the burgeoning middle class of the 20th century thateffectively forecloses the very possibility of politicalconsciousness. Orwell, for whom one’s capacity to resist andbe outraged functioned as the capstone to one’s being, saw amiddle class that, as Rita Felski suggests, was “drowning inthe accumulated detritus of lower-middle class life: stewedpears, portable radios, false teeth, lace curtains, hirepurchase furniture, teapots, manicure sets, life insurancepolicies.”6 Orwell, who thought it important to try to makehis own furniture, thus performed one of the most thorough

6 Rita Felski, “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the LowerMiddle Class,” PMLA, Vol. 115, No. 1 (2000), p. 35

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autopsies of this devitalized, de-sensualized, and indeedalready dead grey class.

The central focus on the lower-middle class in A Clergyman’sDaughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up for Air serves anumber of purposes. Politically, the issue is to considerhow solidarity might be possible between the working classesand those who stand barely above them in the economic order(as assessed by income and by subordination to the relationsof production) but are nonetheless convinced, by snobbery inthe broad sense, that they have more in common with their“betters” than with the workers. This is, at a generallevel, the same question as posed by The Lion and the Unicorn andby The English People. However, the novels, unlike the essays,point to a broadly negative conclusion, perhaps because theyare framed in terms of individual escape rather thancollective solidarity.

For instance, Dorothy Hare’s wanderings, which in anovelistic sense lack coherence and perhaps evencredibility, nonetheless map a failure to escape from thematerial condition, psychic neuroses and imaginativeparalysis of the middle-classes. Similarly, Gordon Comstockembraces (as did Orwell himself at one time) an artisticconceit of failure as ethically superior in a corruptsociety, but utterly fails to make failure work in its ownterms (i.e. transmute it into success) and is finallycompelled to re-embrace the “respectability” symbolized bythe aspidistra, not through any positive sense ofreappropriation but simply as a consciously masochistic formof self-sacrifice to the “Money God”. The break withRavelston, as the symbolic type of bourgeois socialism, doesnot create the basis for an alternative form of solidarity,but simply leaves the lower-middle class drifting, unmoored.

What Dorothy and Gordon are seeking, at a certain level, isa whale to shelter inside, to borrow the image Orwell usedto evoke the worldview of Henry Miller: a place of quietwhere the pressures of the world can be dampened by “a thick

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layer of blubber”. Orwell criticized Miller’s radicallyapolitical stance in its own terms, and this criticismresonates with the narrative dead-end within which Rosemaryand Gordon find themselves.

It is no accident in this regard that the working-class isentirely absent from both novels. Orwell probably did notdeliberately engineer this structural absence as a literarydevice, but it is profoundly significant that the sharpest,most desolate form of the middle-class dilemma flourishes ina social space from which the worker – as a concrete socialbeing rather than an abstract object of snobbery – isentirely missing.

Coming Up for Air is somewhat different in this respect. GeorgeBowling is not a worker by occupation or upbringing, and hehas no tangible or practical social connection with theworking class, but the worker occupies a space in hisimagination that is more concrete and more positive thananything in the earlier novels. Bowling’s ideal worker isfreer than Bowling himself because he does not aspire to themiddle-class accoutrements (including, specifically, amortgage) by which the middle classes are entrapped bothfinancially and imaginatively. Biographically, it is fairlyclear that this difference corresponds to a shift inOrwell’s thinking, coming after the decisive breakrepresented by The Road to Wigan Pier and Homage to Catalonia,which clarified Orwell’s politics as well as his literarypurposes. Fictionally and politically, it is howeverremarkable that the shift, again whether or not Orwelldeliberately engineered it, takes the form of the entranceof the concrete worker into the middle-class imagination. Akey motif of The Lion and the Unicorn is thus established.

However, one would hardly expect a purely imaginativeconnection (and a one-sided one at that: the worker’s viewof George Bowling is entirely absent from the novel) to besufficient to establish social, political or even moralsolidarity. Indeed, what enables Bowling to avoid drowning

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entirely in soul-dead respectability (unlike, ultimately,both Dorothy Hare and Gordon Comstock) is, apparently,entirely non-political: the escape back to a golden age ofchildhood that can still just be recaptured, at leastimaginatively.

On Ellesmere Road, George is nothing less than a prisoner ofrespectability, in

a prison with cells all in a row. A line of semi-detached torture-chambers where the poor little five-to-ten-pound-a-weekers quake and shiver, everyone ofthem with the boss twisting his tail and the wiferiding him like the nightmare and the kids sucking hisblood like leeches.7

While the tramps of Paris had “not taken off their clothesin four years”8 and the miners of Wigan are “black from thewaist down for at least six days a week” and when the bathdoes come it is “impossible for them to wash all over intheir own homes”,9 Bowling’s day begins with the anxiety ofthe soapy patch on his neck which made him feel fat andreminded him that his clothes didn’t fit.10 But Bowlingrecognizes that while “the prole suffers physically, he’s afree man when he isn’t working”, and laments his inabilityto cast off his own shackles, to explode those “stuccoboxes” where resides that “poor bastard who’s never free”.11 Theproblem with middle-class life is that everyone has too muchto lose, too much “comfort” that fails to comfort but cannotbe foregone.

However, what remains of interest with Bowling is the factthat, in the gilded cage of his stucco, chromium, andplastic nightmare, he craves authenticity. That is, he7 George Orwell, Coming Up For Air, London: Harvest (1950), p. 128 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, London: Harvest (1961), p.89 Orwell (1958), p. 3710 Orwell (1950), p. 1011 Ibid., p. 13

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desires once again to come to consciousness and toexperience, without irony or cynicism, the vitality that isquashed by the reification of the middle class. Hilda, histhirty-nine year old wife, with a “perpetual, brooding lookin her eyes”, is no consolation. In an atmosphere of middle-class comfort qua precariousness, “It’s fixed firmly in herhead that we’ll end up in the workhouse”.12 The fear of theworkhouse, however, is not the simple fear of the loss ofmoney and security. Rather, it is the fear of being divorcedfrom the money code and the snobbery and faux airs that itindulges. The money code, far from being simply about money,is an ethos where one keeps up with the Joneses and keeps upappearances, but with a great price: the absence oflaughter, the destruction of joy, programmed apathy to worldoutside, and the frailness of human bonds are among the mostsalient features of the code’s impingement on freedom. It isthus deeply ironic that while middle-class life appears tooffer a decent standard of living, it engenders a sordidstandard of emotional, psychic, and interior life. Bowlingcan articulate his predicament only through disgust; he canescape it only through nostalgia.

Bowling’s only solace comes in his wistful recollections ofthose idyllic days of fishing in Binfield where things wereno less difficult than the present, but where the world hadnot dissolved in the pseudo-newness of the simulacrum and animagined authenticity reigned. To the lakes he swam in as ayouth, he counters the lakes of fear that the Europeanmiddle class swim in now where “everyone that isn’t scaredstiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Fascism,or Communism or something”.13 The pond and fishing are allthat have been cast out of the modern world and “as soon asyou think of fishing you think of things that don’t belong…does anyone go fishing nowadays, I wonder? Anywhere within ahundred miles of London there are no fish to catch”.14 Thelakes of Binfield had been sites of pastoral continuity. By

12 Ibid., pp. 7-913 Ibid., p. 1814 Ibid., p. 87

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the time George returns, they have been invaded by therupture of modern war culture and the invention of themodern middle class where no one fishes, but fights for“good prospects”, while all the while disavowing the factthat civilizational progress was a regression intobarbarism.

Bowling’s lament is less about fishing – which has in factsurvived rather well as a pastime – than about modernity’sfall into a period of flux, liquidness, environmentaldegradation, general equivalence, and relativism, all tingedwith the fear of war and of destitution. In groundlesstimes, the middle class may have leisure, but not thepolitical and moral categories through which to reflect inany meaningful way on politics. The people are doublyendangered by the threat of the workhouse and the falling ofbombs, and as Crick further notes, in Coming up For Air,Orwell’s “pessimism is precisely political: the world wasrunning downhill out of control into war because politicalwisdom had not been applied, but it could have been”.15

Bowling’s desire to return to Binfield typifies a desperateattempt both to flee the money code and to rediscover aconnection with the material world which for Orwell is theground of political consciousness.

But there is no way back. When Bowling returns to LowerBinfield, it no longer even exists. It is merely the site ofa series of mis-recognitions where locals cannot tell Georgewhere the market is and where George’s mythical geography ofBinfield has been flattened and rendered unrecognizeable.Moreover, no one seems to care. Embarking on a minor bingewhere he puts on four pounds in three days, he seeks out thepool at Binfield House only to find a suburban nightmare ofchildren with their sail boats and a sign that reads UpperBinfield Yacht Club. And all the woods that used to growbeyond the pool have also been “shaved flat”.16 There wereno longer any “people” in Binfield, and for Bowling, if they15 Crick (1980), pp. 251-25216 Ibid., p. 252

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were not there, they could be found nowhere. The lush treesand ponds were now dubbed “Pixy Glen” and no one fishedanymore. The Republican Army in Spain was defeated as Orwellconcluded the text.

For Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, on the contrary,political consciousness and vitality could be attained onlyby severing all ties with the money code that has brandedhim. But one simply cannot win against the aspidistra,proving that Gordon, like so many, is condemned to hismiddle class desires. Or rather, one cannot win against theaspidistra on its terms. It is Gordon’s egoism and inability toefface the stain of the middle-middle class that prevent hisgrasping this key point. Poverty was thus an instrument forGordon’s self-understanding, one egoistically used, and thusone which actually depoliticized an already depoliticizedconsciousness, not least because poets are supposed to bepoor. In other words, as Philip Rieff remarks, GordonComstock is emblematic of the twilight of liberal fantasies,and the symbolic violence that he does to himself in thename of non-moneyed freedom is a testimony to someone whohas not yet accepted and no longer knows how to reject themeaningless world around them – they are full of the lastfine activity of the liberal: imagining the utterdestruction of this commercial world.17

Thus, the tension in Comstock’s strategy, as in Bowling’s,is that the quest for political consciousness is melded intoa highly personal (and thus strangely apolitical) questsimply to purge one’s being of comformism and the viruses ofmiddle-class life that breed slackening and exhaustion.Comstock and those like him cared little about politics atall; he simply did not want to work and the latter decisionwas informed more by bohemian whimsy than by any protestagainst alienation. These tensions, epitomized by Comstock’sown ambivalence towards socialism, further problematize thedegree to which Orwell, who had been an assistant in a

17 Philip Rieff, “George Orwell and the Post-Liberal Imagination,” TheKenyon Review, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Winter, 1954)

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Hampstead bookshop as he made Comstock in the novel, had, atleast initially, understood political consciousness to be aninternal enterprise drenched in modern nihilism rather thana real social project. Indeed, Gordon’s bookshop days screamof Oedipal rage and a desire not to wither in the middle-class black hole of mommy-daddy-me which, when coded in latecapitalism, becomes transplanted onto the very modes ofproduction and the dogma of the “good job”. However, theblack hole is not purely Oedipal. In order for Gordon to gethis girl, he has to re-enter the black hole, with theaspidistra which Rosemary hates as a displaced maternalobject. This creates a double bind wherein one must choosebetween Oedipal neurosis and solipsistic psychosis.

Unlike the lower classes, which do not measure themselves,the middle-middle classes, defining themselves constantly bytheir respective proximity or distance from what theybelieve to be respectability, embody a collective ethos ofsacrifice – the sacrifice of joy, the sacrifice of bodilyvitality, the sacrifice of Gordon Comstock’s un-pretty andun-clever sister. A caricature of respectability is thuspurchased even though no one can really afford it. But theseare sacrifices made without any real profit or result. Themoney world is the religion of the middle class, a beastlydemiurge that succeeds in demanding sacrifices whiledepoliticising and destroying the very consciousness andbeing of the sacrificers; hence, “there will be norevolution in England while there are aspidistras in thewindow”.18

Orwell’s project is about finding other terms that evadethese pathologies. His own words indeed stress that Orwellsaw himself as having “outgrown” the misidentification ofpolitical consciousness with romantic “revolt” thatpermeates Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Taking the working classesseriously, in concrete terms, was a crucial aspect ofOrwell’s development in this regard.

18 Ibid., p. 44

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The same basic question – “escape” from the genteelspiritual desert of the middle classes – is approached froma slightly different direction in Down and Out in Paris andLondon, The Road to Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia and Burmese Days.In these works, the social divide is viewed rather frombelow, and the middle class has little presence – though itis never quite as absent in the working-class or underclassworldview as the working class is in the middle classimagination. The strategies on offer in the four books are,however, very different. The protagonists of Down and Out inParis and London and Burmese Days are engaged in a form ofescape through abjection, which, notoriously, hadbiographical and not simply literary significance forOrwell. The point is not that Orwell believed such astrategy to be viable. On the contrary, it was for him atemptation to be resisted, not just personally, butpolitically, in so far as middle-class abjection simplyreverses the valences of snobbery and respectability whilepreserving their structure in its entirety.

The ghostly image of a “people” is thus at the centre ofOrwell’s work in the 1930s. As a problem, which Orwell’simaginative sensitivity to middle-class snobbery led him toregard as serious: how can the working class and the middleclass attain solidarity and, first and foremost, mutualrecognition of common belonging? And as the sketch of asolution: through revolutionary social and political change– but not just any kind, as Nineteen Eighty-Four makes clear.

Comstock’s two-year gap, Bowling’s return to Binfield, evenDorothy Hare’s wanderings – symbolic markers of the questfor lost political consciousness and authenticity – are nolonger possible in Oceania. The chasm between the money codeand technocratic middle-class deadening and the nostalgia,lament, and search for lost political personhood iseffectively sutured in the world of doublespeak where peopleare saturated by the information emitted from screens, buthave no idea what they are looking at. They no longer knowwhat they “mean” or rather, as Roger Fowler argues, “Orwell

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is starting here from a kind of communication in which theindividual does not start from meanings he wishes tocommunicate, about experience which is important to him… inthis kind of communication, the meaning is already pre-packaged. It is the experience (real or imaginary) of otherscoded into language. The basic meanings are prescribed”.19

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, consciousness is a site of irreparableloss and, moreover, something that cannot even be graspeddue in large part to a new historical amnesia. “It was truethat he had no memories of anything greatly different”, butin Winston Smith traces of nostalgia nonetheless survive astangible symptoms of political heresy. He finds his life inLondon intolerable, yet “why should one feel it intolerableunless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things hadbeen different?”20 The clerks of Oceania live in thedrudgery of the instant, a drudgery that the Ministry ofPlenty insists is “our happy new life”. Although Winstonfeels in his gut that he has been cheated and turns his backto the telescreen, he is unable to nurture that feeling intoany real articulation except a brute disdain for BigBrother. In a world where everything is its opposite,personhood and consciousness are inevitably stunted. Beautyremains to be found in the paperweight and Shakespeare, butthe cold sensuality of Oceania, one divorced of alleroticism, is also reversible: “’I betrayed you’, she saidbaldly. ‘I betrayed you’, he said.”21 In this universe ofamnesia and lies, the co-optation of singularity and therecuperation of all that waivers even slightly from thedicta of the Ministries is prone to violent absorption. Atone point in its early composition, Orwell used for NineteenEighty-Four the working title “The Last Man in Europe” – thelast one to have autonomous memories, the last one for whom,because the past is real, the future is open. In a word, thelast politically conscious man. For the Party, on the other

19 Roger Fowler, Language and Control, London, Routledge (1979), p. 6. 20 George Orwell, 1984, New York: Plume (1983), p. 61. 21 Ibid., p. 302

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hand, “he who controls the present controls the past, and hewho controls the past controls the future”.

These rather complex connections between nostalgia,objective truth and beauty coalesce around the centralOrwellian motif of “decency” and help to illuminate itsdifficulties. The objective of revolutionary change issocialism, which is at one level primarily about equalityand political control of the economy. However, political,economic and social change can go in very differentdirections. The criterion for distinguishing between thechanges one should applaud and the changes one shoulddeprecate is ultimately moral, and it relates as much towhat should be retained as to what should be changed. Whatshould be retained has an aesthetic dimension – Orwell putssurprising and consistent emphasis on the texture of food,for instance, as metonymic of social debasement –, but whatsummarizes it best is the characteristic and difficultnotion of “decency”. Decency is what is generically to bepreserved; it is also the mechanism, or the state of mind,that provides some hope that, at least in England, specificthings of value might be preserved, including suchintangibles as tastes, smells and sights, and thedistinctive texture of language itself.

This characterization shows the way in which decency can begrasped only at the confluence of the moral and thesociological. Indeed, there is a sense in which decency is,in Orwellian terms, the political coming together of themoral and the sociological. This gives credence to thefamiliar claim that “common decency” is the linchpin ofOrwell’s entire politics, but also calls into question thefailure in much of the secondary literature to take fullaccount of the social setting within which decency ispossible and acquires political meaning.22

22 Bruce Bégout, for instance in his recent in his excellent De la décenceordinaire (Allia, 2008), appears to at times over-determine common decencyas the central trope of Orwell’s politics.

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The problem, in essence, is that, while common decency isnot uncommon, rare or privileged, nor is it common in thesense of being necessarily shared by any particular group ofpeople, still less humanity as a whole. In particular, itcannot be naturalized. The politically relevant question isthus: who can be expected to partake of common decency,making it both widespread and shared? The answer issomething like the “people” that Orwell was groping for, butunless the “people” can be defined independently of thedecency that supposedly characterizes them, it is no answerat all. In Homage to Catalonia, we are told that decent peopledo not shoot Fascists with their trousers down. But it isnot clear why. Similarly, a decent person will recognizecommon humanity in the eyes of the downtrodden, but again itis not clear why.

In the absence of a systematic answer on the part of Orwellhimself, we need to work indirectly. In the spirit of Swift,one should presumably therefore look at the satire ofNineteen Eighty-Four as offering a distorted mirror image. Theabsence of any form of “common decency” in the psychoticworld of Oceania thus points to a number of key features ofa “decent” society and of what “decency” refers to in such asociety:

- a language that has escaped the worst forms ofdebasement and that makes it possible to state truthsin a simple and direct way (“freedom is the freedom tosay that 2 + 2 = 4; if that is granted, everything elsefollows”);

- a connection to the world of things, which embody interalia memory (the book and the paperweight in NineteenEighty-Four), and to the natural world, which marks thebounds of human power (it can be destroyed, but notmastered – unlike Winston himself who will not be shotuntil he has been thoroughly purged of heresy, until hehas learned to love Big Brother). What is crucial isthat this connection should enable things, broadlyunderstood, to be valued for their own sake, i.e. not

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simply as instrumental to human purposes. Orwellestablishes a key ethical connection betweeninstrumentalism and power worship as he understood it;

- the absence of those forms of racism, snobbery etc.that make it impossible for fellow members of a societyto recognize each other as such;

- a considerable degree of economic equality;- a culture that has a certain degree of integrity, in

its connections to language, to things and to the past,and above all perhaps to a way of life. Popular cultureis not to be valued simply because it is popular. Whatis to be valued about popular culture is precisely itscapacity to express a way of life (“The Art of DonaldMcGill”). Conversely, the debasement of popular culturein Oceania (where “literature”, “films” and “music” forthe Proles are mass-produced by specialized machines)is one of the abominations committed by the Partyagainst the human spirit and decency.

A famous phrase in Nineteen Eighty-Four still resonates with anambivalence that confounds such decency: “Proles and animalsare free”. Of course, this is a Party slogan that isintended to ridicule the notion of “freedom”, and echoes themore famous slogan “Freedom is slavery”. Nonetheless,Orwell’s point seems to that the processes and procedures ofpolitical control, the deliberate destruction of popularculture have succeeded, as matter of fact, in debasing theProles to an animal-like state where freedom such as it isexists in purely vitalistic form. This suffices to underlinethe fact that Orwell is neither a naturalist nor asentimentalist about decency, which is clearly a culturalachievement, as his discussion of its English forms makesclear.

Winston Smith is half-conscious of this problem, but hisinability to deal with it is one of the crucial limitationsof his attempts to “escape”, which, because they arepolitically vacuous, are as doomed in their way asRosemary’s and Gordon’s. On the one hand, he is entrapped in

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a form of vitalism that equates sexual fulfilment withrevolt. The Party gives warrant for this by its puritanism,but in fact sex in itself is no threat, so long as itremains at the animal level that is allowed unreservedly tothe Proles, so long as it reduces revolt to the clashbetween individualism and collectivism. Orwell’s ratherunfashionable view on this, expressed in many of his essays,is that contrary to what liberals and sentimentalists tendto think, individualism loses in a straightforward clashwith collectivism, because hedonism is a less powerfulmotivating force than often assumed. Julia, the mouthpiecefor such vitalism, is the agent of Winston’s destruction inmore ways than one: in enabling him to escape, she preventshim rebelling in any meaningful way.

On the other hand, Winston is conscious of the Proles in away that (potentially) is more threatening to the Party thanhis sexual “freedom”. One of the purposes of the radicalideological split between Party members and Proles is toeliminate “common” decency entirely. The Proles and theOuter Party share, to a considerable extent, a universe ofmaterial culture, and clearly meet frequently through theblack market, unsanctioned sex and so on. The tripartitestabilization of “oligarchical collectivism” thereforerequires that they should be incapable of mutualrecognition, of fellow-feeling, of any of the routine,quotidian bases of reflexive solidarity. Winston does comeclose at points to grasping the fact that hope lies not inthe Proles but in the overcoming of the division between theProles and the Outer Party, but he remains trapped withinthe blind alleys of Party ideology even as he tries toquestion it. The Prole woman glimpsed singing fascinatesWinston, but he draws the wrong conclusion: instead of thefirst hint of common feeling (“Proles, unlike animals, areas oppressed as we are”), which he merely gestures at, he ismore comfortable with a vitalistic interpretation, based onthe sheer power of the woman’s hips, that traps the Proleswithin otherness and animality.

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In a literary sense, as many commentators have noted, thisscene in Nineteen Eighty-Four echoes the famous scene in The Roadto Wigan Pier of the woman glimpsed from the train unblockingthe drain. However, as Orwell undoubtedly intended, there isa crucial difference between the two episodes. What Orwellas narrator finds in the first scene is proof of commonhumanity: one might think that it is “different for them”,but when our eyes meet I am convinced that I am seeing, notan animal, but a fellow human being trapped in an impossiblesituation.23 What Winston finds in the second scene is asuperficially reassuring vision of otherness, evidence thathe is right to think that hope lies in the Proles as Proles.But powerful hips can no more overthrow the Party thanBoxer’s powerful muscles can save the integrity of therevolution in Animal Farm.

Similarly, Winston’s futile attempts to connect to olderProle men, by drinking with them in a pub, come up againstthe brick wall of ideology. He is actually uninterested inProles as people – he has no operative concept of an“ordinary person” at all. The Prole serves merely as aplaceholder for the necessary recovery of memory, and whenhe proves disappointing in this respect is simply dismissed.However, the conclusion Winston draws is not (as he should)that the Proles are fully within the Party’s dominion andform a structurally essential feature of “oligarchicalcollectivism” – though at a purely intellectual level heknows that – but that, ultimately, the Party is right toanimalize them. The idea that his drinking companion mightnot share Winston’s obsessions never occurs to him – becausethere is no imaginative basis on which to “share” anything.The “hope” that Winston places in the Proles – which O’Brienlater quite correctly mocks – is thus merely negative: thehope that “something”, a pure unreflective vitalism, willsomeday overthrow the Party.

Conversely, any attempt to interpret the Proles in politicalterms gets nowhere. As is well known, treating the Proles as23

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a screen for political negativity not only betrays middle-class bad faith, but also introduces into politicalconsciousness the other paradox of the “managerialrevolution”. Hope in the Proles is misplaced when the Prolesmorph into the mass. As Orwell observed,

The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towardsliberty and human brotherhood, which are easily playedupon by power-hungry individuals and minorities…political activity, therefore, is a special kind of behaviour,characterised by its complete unscrupulousness, andoccurring only among small groups of the population,especially among dissatisfied groups whose talents donot get free play under existing forms of society. Thegreat mass of the people – and this is where (2) tiesup with (1) – will always be unpolitical.24

Orwell is also lamenting here the deprogramming of certaintypes of behaviour and activities that once formed thesubstance of “political life”. In other words, the end ofthe people, and the end of the political, is about the endof a certain politicized make-up of body, psyche, and affectthat created the conditions for the retrieval ofconsciousness. In addition, those small groups will havesoon also been recuperated and their dissatisfaction quelledwith new forms of neo-liberal leisure and pleasure that masknew forms of bodily and psychic subordination.

A Sociology of the “Common” and the “Free”: Tramps, Proles, and Sheep

If “the lower classes smell”, as Orwell says he was broughtup to believe, then to smell as strongly as possible oneselfis simply to confirm the prejudice. At the level of personalBildung, the experience may or may not be salutary.Politically, however, it is absurd and counterproductive ineliding what the middle class needs to relate to, and in thefirst instance to see and to recognize – the working class.24 George Orwell, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,” inOrwell: In Front of Your Nose (1945-1960), Boston: Nonpareil (2005), p. 177

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Starting from the realities of 1930s England, the problem ofclass solidarity could be resolved in three generic ways:

- by working-class acceptance of middle-class theoreticaland ideological terms of reference

- by middle-class acceptance of working-class terms ofreference, i.e. by the construction of a truly“proletarian” Left

- by elaboration of an alternative, over-arching frame ofreference that could establish commonalities betweenthe classes without requiring either to align itselfwith the other.

Orwell’s views on the first two options are well known. Onthe one hand, the theories and ideologies of middle-classintellectuals are inherently incapable of providing a basisfor working-class commitment. First, because intellectualsare particularly susceptible to power worship, and thereforelikely to produce theories that, instead of offering insightinto real social conditions, serve simply to rationalizetheir party allegiance. Secondly, because the (snobbish,English) middle-class world-view is dominated by disdain,which when diverted from standard class prejudice tendstowards self-hatred, and particularly anti-patriotism, whichundermines the concrete imaginative basis of solidarity.Thirdly, theory and ideology corrupt language in ways thatare not only politically destructive in their own right, butalso inevitably alienate non-intellectuals. Fourthly,intellectuals are too divorced from the material world ofconcrete experience: in a “flabby” civilization, the logicalultimate expression of which would be the “brain in a vat”,the issue of solidarity disappears entirely, becauseanything resembling a “working class” simply ceases toexist. On the other hand, the “proletarian” option isultimately a form of reverse snobbery that reduces politicalsolidarity to cultural posturing (“losing one’s aitches”).It simply denies the validity of middle-class experience asa structural component of modern society. If

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proletarianization is taken to its logical extreme, it doesnot provide a basis for solidarity, but simply removes theneed for it by suppressing the middle class entirely.

However, “organic solidarity”, even when augmented by thehomogenization of material culture, does not produce commonfeeling. On the contrary, in the ideological and culturalsetting of inter-war England, the underlying fact of organicsolidarity precisely precludes reflexive solidarity. The factthat the workers “by hand and by brain” (to quote the LabourParty Constitution of 1918) are all basically workers is in asense the dirty secret of industrial society, the one thatneeds to be concealed by the Great Lie of which snobbery isthe debased quotidian echo.

Orwell tried to reveal this dirty secret, to “call out” allthose who secretly ignored it. “Tramping” was one means andso was the early sociology of the poor that he meticulouslyconstructed at Wigan. But Orwell was no cool ethnographerand the valences of participation and observer that theanthropologist so cherishes collapse under what can only becalled Orwell’s “becoming-poor”. Yet we must be equallysuspicious of the plausibility of Orwell’s very realfeelings of common purpose and fraternity. Orwell’s owndisdain for the proles and tramps resonates throughout hiscorpus. Whether this disdain emerged from his inability toescape the world view of Eton or from a far moreconscientious desire, out of respect, to hold the proles andthe tramps to the same standards that held to himself andthe rest of the world (and not simply “tolerate” them), thetruth is that Orwell was disgusted by Mrs. Brooker at theboarding house of Wigan who

had a habit of constantly wiping her mouth on one herblankets. Towards the end of my stays she took totearing off strips of newspaper for this purpose, andin the morning the floor was often littered with

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crumple-up balls of slimy paper which lay there forhours. The smell of the kitchen was dreadful…25

And in this miasma of visceral and olfactory politics,contra Bruce Bégout, Orwell does not simply bear testamentto the common decency of the people, but also to its rawrealities (dirt, smells, vile food) which left himindignant. Like the middle class, Orwell’s “low” is equallyambivalent and organized along a trajectory that spannedfrom “English People” to the “proles” to the “tramps” to“sheep” – not to mention the fallen middle class thatwrapped itself in avant-garde airs. What bemused Orwell wasnot simply the smells but how, like the middle-class whoseconsciousness was swallowed in the money code, the prolesand tramps, ground down by poverty, were often equallylacking in consciousness. In the end, no one was really“free” and no one “possessed” wisdom.

In many ways, all things begin and end at the Road to WiganPier. The boarding house in Wigan is a place of “meaninglessdecay” where “people go creeping round and round just likeblack beetles in an endless muddle of slovened jobs.”26

Worse yet is the repetition of the dying spirit: the Bookersare content to say the same things over and over again,convincing Orwell that they were not “real people” at all,but ghosts.27 But, against critics like Ian Pindar and ScottLucas, who curtly dismiss Orwell’s “political pilgrimage tothe poor” as being constrained by its inability to movebeyond the question “isn’t this terrible?”,28 Orwell iswrestling with how the low come to accept their owndefilement, how they are besieged by a inversion ofconsciousness and personhood that brings them to imagineonly slums, to be so radically disconnected (anddisconnection is a type of abjection) that their squalor is

25 Orwell (1958), p. 1626 Ibid., p. 1727 Ibid., 28 Ian Pindar and Scott Lucas, Orwell, London: Haus Publishing (2003) p.17.

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naturalized. For all of its obsessions with cleanliness,youth, and propriety, the modern world is also a place whereone simply gets used to the fact that defilement,decrepitude, and dilapidation reign everywhere and consolesoneself by believing this to simply be the way of the world.But Orwell unmasks the hidden dialectic underneath such“naturalness”, the fact that “our civilisation is founded oncoal”. It is upon the shoulders of the miner, that “grimycaryatid”, that “nearly everything that is not grimy issupported”.29 Really existing democracy contains within it asacrificial economy and one of the most stringent of castesystems.

The miner, marked by the blue scar on the nose (a kind ofcapitalist writing on the body) has approximately four hoursof leisure time in the world above, but this is taken up byelementary activities such as washing and dressing.30

Moreover, it is difficult to say that his world aboveresembles the one we know insofar as the windows of histenement refuse to open and the W.C. requires a walk downthe street. He can’t come up for air and within his quartersone finds filth and bugs and a “poor drudge” of a woman who“cannot keep up her standards of cleanliness andtidiness”.31 Below ground, the miner is king – in the sensethat no one else can do his job. Above ground, on the otherhand, he is nothing. It goes without saying that politicalconsciousness, wisdom and personhood cannot be flourish inthe shadow of such a stark, alienating contrast. Whatshocked Orwell was not simply the worker’s plight, but howhis liminal existence called into question the veryfoundations of what is normally assumed to be personhooditself. Orwell’s response, characteristic of his ratheridiosyncratic socialism, is to exhort that “when all is saidand done, the most important thing is that people shall livein decent houses and not pigsties”.32 However, they have to

29 Ibid., p. 2030 Ibid., p. 3931 Ibid., p. 5932 Ibid., 73

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be perceived as people first and assume personhood: decenthouses need decent people to live in them.

For Orwell, the “people” would emerge from in between: theywould burgeon from that inter-zone where the middle classneither coddled, nor tolerated, nor disavowed the existenceof the low and deliberately made the effort to smell thesmells, in good faith and with a dose of realism. As for theproles, they would simultaneously have to humanize themselvesand also to refuse the reverse snobbery that rejects, whileenvying, the world of those who have never worked with theirhands.

However, while the space “in between” is important in termsof “emergence”, it is by no means purely co-extensive orontologically identical with the “people”. The politicalconstitution of a people – particularly one that is supposedto be a subject of revolution – needs to fuse the workingand middle classes, and not simply to transcend personalfeelings of marginalization. Political consciousness is thusan interstitial construct that emerges from a dual movementof deterritorialization on the part of both the middle classand the proles, but this is a calculateddeterritorialization that, conscious of its ownimpossibility, does not exaggerate solidarity nor revolt.Following from this, there can be no absolute moment ofpolitical consciousness; political life thus poses itself asa real and constant challenge. Amongst the most salientelements of such a challenge is the dismantling of“ideological” revolutionary discursive markers such as“class consciousness” and “proletarian solidarity”.33

Insofar as bourgeois ideologues and proles form two poles of aunified spectrum of exploitation, a novel discursive frameneeds to be cultivated that accounts for the spaces inbetween where the people stand to emerge.

Tramps, of course, constitute yet another matter andcomplicate the aforementioned theses in numerous ways.33 Ibid., p. 230

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Comprising drunks, con-artists, hobos, prostitutes, what wenow call “trans-nationals”, and one-legged Russians, theyinhabited the negativity nestled in the urban frenzy of theworld above. The tramps constitute a floating and nomadicpopulation and are the vacataires of the urban under-belly,the invisible service class of the world above.

Amidst all the howls and eccentricities that Orwell includesin his portrait of the modern Parisian demi-monde in Down andOut in Paris and London, the fantastically poor tramps are caughtin an altogether different cycle of abjection comprised oftemporary labor, vulgar debauchery, hunger. They retaintheir anger, but in the end the essential characteristic ofthe tramp, regardless of the drinking and cajoling, is deepsolitude and those cold rooms where one’s passes timesquashing the bugs. And while the miners of Wigan guarded avision of the conservative nuclear family, Paddy, Orwell’stramp associate in London, whose character was solelydefined by self-pity, “could only look at women with amixture of longing and hatred. Young pretty women were toomuch above him to enter his ideas, but his mouth watered atprostitutes.”34 But Paddy was still a decent good fellow,who could not even bring himself to steal a bottle of milk.

The non-moneyed code of the down and out is organized alongthe axes of ennui, sadism, and “crust-wiping”, all coupledwith the secrecy and shame that come with being poor. But inDown and Out, Orwell moves beyond ethnography and literature,and composes a psychology of the poor depicting the variousgrades of hunger and humiliation which lead to the totalparalysis of personhood and the eclipsing of self by self-pity. Poverty is learned, not only as a mental dispositif, butas a strategy for food.35 Yet what Orwell notices is thatthose on the bread and margarine diet with their clothes atthe pawn shop experience a temporary giddy liberation athaving officially dropped out of the money code, a sense ofquiet exaltation at knowing that in fact they no longer need34 Ibid., p. 15235 Ibid., p. 19

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to keep up appearances or be responsible. The politicalquestion that Orwell was sub-textually asking was how toimagine such a freedom without hunger and without dirt?Orwell thus opened up a space of political reflection thatmany a bourgeois socialist, still stuck in a condescendingpity for the poor, could not even think.

Tramps, unlike plongeurs, drop out of the under-class and arenot exploited as they do not produce surplus value or anymeaningful “sweat”. Conversely, unlike the miners of Wigan,plongeurs are defined by precisely their proximity to thebourgeois world and by a useless sort of menial labor, lessglorious and politically charged than the heroic imagos ofthe miner. Orwell wonders whether the plongeur’s work isreally necessary to civilisation: at best, hotels “supply aluxury, which, very often is not a luxury”.36 In addition,within the hierarchical micro-structure of the urban workingclass, one encounters the equally cold and cruel theatre ofrank that moves between the waiter, the plongeur, and themaître d’. The plongeur is a “wasted slave” dumbed down by thefutility of his labor. In Orwell’s view, the “instinct toperpetuate useless work” was “at bottom, simply fear of themob. The mob (the thought runs) are such lowly animals thatthey would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer tokeep them too busy to think”.37 As Orwell emphasizes on manyoccasions, middle-class socialists very often share thisfear. It looks paradoxical that, whereas workers are kepttoo busy to think, tramps are kept too idle to think. Makingsense of what is not really a paradox at all is one of theuseful services Orwell performs for the prospect ofpolitical consciousness.

Once one takes account of all the categories and codingsthat exceed the binary distinction between rich and poor,the possibility of the people as something new and inclusiveappears and eludes capture in almost the same movement.Orwell provided no comprehensive answer, but he did give36 Ibid., p. 11737 Ibid., p. 118

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some striking and instructive pointers, at least withrespect to England. The English People functions as a sociologyof the English class system and a lament that mourned the“end of the people”. Orwell praised here the Englishman’s“non-acceptance of the modern cult of power worship”, hisoften unknowing fidelity to humanistic Christian ethics, hisdisdain for all politics that moved by way of “might isright”, and his revulsion at all forms of bullying andterror.38 But on closer observation, while these virtues mayhold true for the “English people”, the entrenchment ofclass divisions between the moneyed and the non-moneyedcalls them into question resulting in a schism wherein themiddle classes paradoxically reject bourgeois morality andbegin worshiping power in its name. As Orwell remarks, “theMarxist version of Socialism has found its warmest adherentsin the middle class. Its methods, if not its theories,obviously conflict with what is called ‘bourgeois morality’(i.e. common decency), and in moral matters it is theproletarians who are bourgeois”.39

The bourgeois betrayal of bourgeois morality prevents itfrom incarnating the people. What perplexed many on the leftabout middle-class socialism in the twentieth century,including Orwell himself, was the socialist’s rejection ofthe very simple political imperative that dictates that onealways side with the weaker party. In lieu of this, the“socialist” morphs into a sadist who nevertheless is readilyequipped to proffer a healthy dose of rousing civicdiscourse when needed. In addition, to be “decent” was notto be Victorian, prudish, or puritanical and, as Orwellnever ceased to observe, sexual health and a bit of healthyindulgence were essential to the soul’s well-being.Unfortunately however, just as the British middle class“Victorianized” the Indian population during the reign ofthe Raj, they also forced asceticism, prudishness, and the“kill-joy spirit” on the working class in order to bringthem in line with a Calvinist-capitalism model of prudence38 Orwell, “The English People,” in Orwell (2000), p. 7-839 Ibid., p. 8

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and efficiency that would make sure that they didn’t smoke,drink, or enjoy sex.40 Such disciplinarity is also psychic,and most English people, out of a sense of propriety orsheepishness, rarely utter their political opinions inpublic.41 This politeness is then offset by the occasionalsuper-articulations of hatred against a new scapegoat, butin reality, such quietude is the norm and one which actuallymasks a desire to be subjugated and to defer consciousnessto others. Devitalized, cut off from the physical body andstripped of public discourse, political consciousness slowlydisappears. As Orwell observed, the English people are“remarkably ignorant politically”.42

Such ignorance emerges not only out of politicalanesthetization, but also out of its corollary, the desireto maintain one’s standard of living and self-respect.Capitalism is therefore actually the deterrence of allpolitics and the deliberate construction of a new historicalspace of uncertainty wherein political consciousness isreduced to the desire for the simultaneously incongruousterms of democratic liberty/individualism and security – allof those George Bowlings who epitomize the fading of themiddle-class “gentlemen” into a herring-suited and growingtechno-middle-class, “a new kind of man”, born of thetechnical schools and the provincial universities, “whoseeducation has not been of a kind to give them any reverencefor the past, and who tend to live in blocks of flats orhousing estates”. 43 Orwell himself stressed that thesegroups were already “an important section of society” in the1930s. Today, they are actually the most important sectionof society and have been transformed into the ideal for themajority of the world’s inhabitants.

The working class thus retains its political suspicions ofthe middle class, while simultaneously desiring its cultural

40 Ibid., p. 1041 Ibid., p. 1242 Ibid., p. 1343 Ibid., 20

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and economic pretences. In other words, as Thomas Friedmanhas recently written, “with all due respect to revolutionarytheorists, the ‘wretched of the Earth’ want to go toDisneyland, not to the Barricades. They want the MagicKingdom, not Les Misérables”.44 What Orwell cringed at, likeAdorno and Horkheimer, was the “leveling of all manners”, aculture of the simulacrum where workers wear the sameclothes as the middle class (although cheaper and poorlyfitting) and the culture industry and mass-producedliterature and amusements sedate so as to insure that classantagonisms and contradictions are never reflected upon, letalone acted upon.45 Orwell saw the seeds of a universalhomogenous state primarily characterized by uniformity, thedestruction of alterity, and the displacement andliquidation of consciousness in market mechanisms andspectacle. In short, Orwell’s people were always apotential, a series of instincts, affects, and traits thatwere always struggling to harmonize themselves against theleveling effects of late capitalism and its incessantproduction of simultaneous degradation and sameness. Thestruggle was reaching a point of paroxysm in 1944, whenOrwell rightly predicted that the “working class and themiddle class [are] evidently to merge… the final effects ofthis we cannot foresee”.46

The People as Political Project

What our argument here shows, in sketchy and preliminaryfashion, is that Orwell’s people is not an empirical socialgroup, perhaps not even a definable social group, but afundamental category that is of political, sociological andmoral significance. As already noted, the “people” is thename of a problem: the problem of solidarity andconsciousness in mass consumer societies. It is also the

44 Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, New York: Random House(2000), p. 36445 Orwell, “The English People,” in Orwell (2000), p. 2346 Ibid.,

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name of a solution that can now be stated more precisely: acertain kind of diffidence, rooted in memory, embodiment andfellow-feeling, that operates under the guise of commondecency and has revolutionary potential precisely in so faras it is conservative.

What make such a people possible are social trends that tendto produce a middle class defined not simply by snobbery butalso by education and its technical functions in industrialsociety. Such a middle class is one to which workers canaspire to belong, not by submitting themselves to thedictates of snobbery, but on their own terms. What can unitesuch a people is not simply material culture and the sharedfear of oppression, exploitation and war. Such forces doindeed unify, but in purely negative ways. The positiveunifying force, in so far as it is imaginable, is moral. Itis common decency defined as participation in withoutsubjection to the material, economic and political dynamicsof modernity. The glorification of modernity leads to thesteel and glass future of H.G. Wells, whose “new worldorder” Orwell mercilessly mocked. The detestation ofmodernity leads to the pseudo-medieval nostalgia ofChesterton and Belloc, about which Orwell was no lessscathing. Somewhere in between is the balance of concretesituated nostalgia and sceptical acceptance of progress thatOrwell was groping for. There lies the political hope of anOrwellian socialism in which the people, once conscious ofits own integrity and decency, is to be subjected neither tothe market nor to the machine, neither to history, race ornation, nor to the leader.

The particular form in which Orwell raised and addressedthese problems is geographically limited and historicallydated. The underlying arguments are, nonetheless, of generaland enduring significance. Indeed, when consideringcontemporary discussions on the left about Middle England,soccer moms or the necessary new alliance of the classesmoyennes and classes populaires, it is hard not to feel that we

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have much work to do, theoretically, imaginatively andpolitically, even to reach the point where Orwell left off.

Orwell may not have been the prophet that many would likehim to be, but his diagnosis of the “people” and theirabsence and his critique of the left thus still offer aplatform from which to rethink the crisis of contemporaryleftisms and the global world. The unwavering honesty ofOrwell’s criticism need only be slightly adjusted to ringtrue in our own universe. What matters is not just Orwell,but his hatred of all that depoliticized or claimed to bepolitical while simply deferring the real questions. Whatstands to be resurrected, in our all too touchy-feely worldof tolerance, modest reform, pluralism, and “nice” liberalpolitics, is the anger that Orwell drew from his horror ofindecency.

However, if decency is to be a political project, it needs anew politics that is all encompassing and critical of itsown internal contradictions. This also attests to the degreeto which the poor and the abject have evaded politicaldiscourse, and confirms Orwell’s deep belief in the left’sultimate acceptance of class distinctions. In Žižek’sappraisal, which runs parallel in this respect, the left hasfallen prey to the very cynical reason it seeks to do awaywith and does not really believe what it believes: itdesires only a Robespierrean “revolution withoutrevolution”. Hence, Orwell’s anger-becoming-decency needs tobe relearned: his outrage not simply against the conditionsof the world, but against the excesses of leftists andleftist-intellectuals alike who remain, in many ways,indecently blind to “the people” and to its contradictions.

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Orwell's people

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Transcript of Orwell's people