#Bearded fruit-juice drinkers

[Dänk 42Ø]

"The Road to Wigan Pier"
By George Orwell
1937

[Excerpts from Part 2, Chapter 11]

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form
is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. 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. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist
parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. 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.

One day this summer I was riding through Letchworth when the bus stopped and two
dreadful-looking old men got on to it. They were both about sixty, both very short, pink, and
chubby, and both hatless. One of them was obscenely bald, the other had long grey hair bobbed in
the Lloyd George style. They were dressed in pistachio-coloured shirts and khaki shorts into
which their huge bottoms were crammed so tightly that you could study every dimple. Their
appearance created a mild stir of horror on top of the bus. The man next to me, a commercial
traveller I should say, glanced at me, at them, and back again at me, and murmured 'Socialists,'
as who should say, 'Red Indians.' He was probably right -— the I.L.P. [Independent Labor Party]
were holding their summer school at Letchworth. But the point is that to him, as an ordinary
man, a crank meant a Socialist and a Socialist meant a crank. Any Socialist, he probably felt,
could be counted on to have something eccentric about him. ...

To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically
pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social
prestige. I remember my sensations of horror on first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in
London. (It might have been rather different in the North, where the bourgeoisie are less
thickly scattered.) Are these mingy little beasts, I thought, the champions of the working
class? For every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class
superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly
walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry, and disgusted; some, I should
think, would have fled holding their noses. You can see the same tendency in Socialist
literature, which, even when it is not openly written de haut en bos, is always completely
removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought. ...

To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism
does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about. To the
more revolutionary type, the type who is a hunger-marcher and is blacklisted by employers, the
word is a sort of rallying-cry against the forces of oppression, a vague threat of future
violence. ... 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 M.P. 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, steel-worker,
cotton-weaver, docker, navvy, or whatnot who was 'ideologically' sound...

Sometimes I look at a Socialist —- the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his
pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation —- and wonder what the devil his motive
really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the
working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many
Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. The present state of affairs
offends them not because it causes misery, still less because it makes freedom impossible, but
because it is untidy; what they desire, basically, is to reduce the world to something
resembling a chessboard... The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists,
revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves;
it means a set of reforms which 'we,' the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them,' the
Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a
bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of
affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred—-a sort of queer,
theoretical, in vacua hatred —- against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of
denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash
himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself
invariably belongs...

The fact is that Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to
unsatisfactory or even inhuman types. On the one hand you have the warm-hearted un-thinking
Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not
always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained
Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilization down the sink
and is quite willing to do so. And this type is drawn, to begin with, entirely from the middle
class, and from a rootless town-bred section of the middle class at that. Still more
unfortunately, it includes —- so much so that to an outsider it even appears to be composed of
—- the kind of people I have been discussing; the foaming denouncers of the bourgeoisie, and the
more-water-in-your-beer reformers of whom [George Benard] Shaw is the prototype, and the astute
young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years
hence, because it is all the go, and all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and
sandal-wearers and bearded fruit-juice drinkers who come flocking towards the smell of
'progress' like bluebottles to a dead cat. ...


http://www.orwelltoday.com/wiganpier.shtml

[Lou Keemia]

Bearded Fruit-juice drinker

http://tinyurl.com/bearded-fruitjuicedrinker

[Joe Fineman]

Lou Keemia <sava...@ojooo.ru> writes:

> Bearded Fruit-juice drinker
>
> http://tinyurl.com/bearded-fruitjuicedrinker

%^)
--
--- Joe Fineman jo...@verizon.net

||: Hopes, fears, plans, fantasies -- what's the difference? :||