Britain did not become socialist, but socialists -- including George Orwell himself -- existed in Britain, some of whom were working-class socialist intellectuals like George Garrett whom Orwell knew personally. It's Orwell's portrait of British working-class socialists in _The Road to Wigan Pier_ that I question.
Were the British working class passive in Orwell's lifetime? If you set the standard of working-class self-activities very high, for instance, by dismissing all working-class actions short of socialist revolution as evidence of passivity, you could say that they were indeed passive, but such a standard is misleading, not to mention useless and self-defeating for socialists like Orwell.
As a matter of fact, Orwell himself managed to offer a compliment (if something of a backhanded one) on British workers' ability to organize:
***** By far the best work for the unemployed is being done by the N.U.W.M. -- National Unemployed Workers' Movement. This is a revolutionary organization intended to hold the unemployed together, stop them blacklegging during strikes, and give them legal advice against the Means Test. It is a movement that has been built out of nothing by the pennies and efforts of the unemployed themselves. I have seen a good deal of the N.U.W.M., and I greatly admire the men, ragged and underfed like the others, who keep the organization going. Still more I admire the tact and patience with which they do it; for it is not easy to coax even a penny-a-week subscription out of the pockets of people on the P.A.C. As I said earlier, the English working class do not show much capacity for leadership, but they have a wonderful talent for organization. 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. . . .
One must remember that just then, immediately after the war, the English working class were in a fighting mood. That was the period of the great coal strikes, when a miner was thought of as a fiend incarnate and old ladies looked under their beds every night lest Robert Smillie should be concealed there. All through the war and for a little time afterwards there had been high wages and abundant employment; things were now returning to something worse than normal, and naturally the working class resisted. The men who had fought had been lured into the army by gaudy promises, and now they were coming home to a world where there were no jobs and not even any houses. Moreover, they had been at war and were coming home with the soldier's attitude to life, which is fundamentally, in spite of discipline, a lawless attitude. There was a turbulent feeling in the air. To that time belongs the song with the memorable refrain:
There's nothing sure but The rich get richer and the poor get children; In the mean time, In between time, Ain't we got fun?
People had not yet settled down to a lifetime of unemployment mitigated by endless cups of tea. They still vaguely expected the Utopia for which they had fought, and even more than before they were openly hostile to the aitch-pronouncing class. So to the shock-absorbers of the bourgeoisie, such as myself, 'common people' still appeared brutal and repulsive. Looking back upon that period, I seem to have spent half the time in denouncing the capitalist system and the other half in raging over the insolence of bus-conductors.
(George Orwell, _The Road to Wigan Pier_, <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79r/chap0.html>) *****
So, as far as the capacity to organize themselves and, if objective conditions are promising, to fight fiercely is concerned, it appears that Orwell didn't necessarily think that British workers were always literally passive. When he thought of them as "passive," his opinion was based on his negative judgment on working-class leadership capacity, which he applies to not just British workers in the mid-1930s but also revolutionary workers of the Paris Commune:
***** A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. In Lissagaray's History of the Commune there is an interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the Commune had been suppressed. The authorities were shooting the ringleaders, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would be the ringleaders. An officer walked down a line of prisoners, picking out likely-looking types. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'. I should not like to be shot for having an intelligent face, but I do agree that in almost any revolt the leaders would tend to be people who could pronounce their aitches.
(George Orwell, _The Road to Wigan Pier_, <http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/o79r/chap0.html>) *****
Robert Pearce, however, documents that Lissagaray does not say what Orwell attributes to him:
***** Twice Orwell reminded himself, in the [Road to Wigan Pier] Diary, to check the book [Lissagaray's History of the Commune]. In Wigan Pier he corrected his previous mis-spelling of the author's name: otherwise, he included, virtually word for word, the Diary paraphrase which he had perhaps half-suspected might be inaccurate.(86) And it was. He correctly remembered several details from the book, but badly misinterpreted their significance. He argued that men were executed who wore a watch or had intelligent faces because the authorities wanted to identify the ringleaders behind the Commune and automatically assumed that they would be of `better class', a status that could be judged from their appearance. Orwell's main point was that middle-class people were so indoctrinated to believe in their own superiority that they would have taken the lead. But this is not what Lissagaray was saying at all. Galiffet, an officer who had been insulted by the Communards' press, was merely taking revenge by choosing victims arbitrarily. Anyone who stood out, regardless of social class, was liable to be shot. On 26 May 1871 he chose eighty-three men and three women to be executed, including those described by Orwell. Someone was chosen because he had a broken nose, not a particularly middle-class trait. Two days later, he shot no fewer than 111 people, all of whom had white hair.(87) Orwell had misinterpreted the incident very badly, presumably because he did not check his source.
(Robert Pearce, "Revisiting Orwell's 'Wigan Pier,'" _History: The Journal of the Historical Association_, July 1997, <http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/wigpier.htm> *****
It may be the case that the working-class did not produce leaders from their own class as often as anarchists or autonomists would like to see. Reading Orwell alone, however, you would end up erasing working-class socialist leaders and intellectuals that did exist, creating an exaggerated image of political and intellectual passivity unwarranted by history. -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>