90
RICHARD WOLLHEIt.4
Belief. The first question a socialist must
ask
himself is:
If
I believe
in
socialism,
what is it that I believe in? And there must be few
socialists who don't ask themselves this question. But the second
question that a socialist should ask himself is one that I suspect very
few socialists do. It is:
If
I
believe in
socialism, how do I stand to
socialism? And that is Orwell's question. What made him raise it?
In
The Road to Wigan Pier
Orwell describes his own road to
socialism, and I think that if we consider this more closely we shall
find our answer. When Orwell left Eton-a word he won't quite
mention-he joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to Burma.
He was there for five years, administering a rule that he gradually
came to feel was absolutely unjustifiable.
It
was, in his eyes, quite
simply a system of oppression, and by helping to sustain it he him–
self was an oppressor. When he came back to England on leave in
1927, he could bear it no longer: he threw up his job and never
went back. "I was not going back to be a part of that evil despot–
ism" is how he puts it. But once back in England he could not feel
free of the charge of being an oppressor. For the working classes of
England, it now occurred to him, were just as much victims of in–
justice as the unfortunate Burmese. Indeed the system of oppres–
sion in Britain of one class over another seemed,
if
anything, worse
because harsher and less tempered with mercy than the more pub–
licized system that existed outside Britain of one country over
another. The question then arose for Orwell, How could he con–
tract out of the second system as he had out of the first? What in
the case of capitalism was the analogue of leaving the Indian Im–
perial Police? The obvious answer was socialism. But what did so–
cialism involve?
If
it was no more than a theoretical belief, then to
embrace socialism was the exact counterpart of declaring oneself to
be a little Englander and staying on in the Indian Imperial Police.
Surely there must be something more-and this, of course, is how
the central problem of
The Road to Wigan Pier
came to assert it–
self.
. The "sensible" answer to Orwell's question is, I suppose, that
there is no analogue to leaving the Indian Imperial Police. There
is no single action or set of actions that counts as contracting out of
