Let us stipulate that Socialism’s appeal to the proles is “I offer you a good time”. Orwell takes this as read, but it also follows from the premises laid out earlier in the essay. Orwell equates “ease, security and avoidance of pain” with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense”. The Commies explicitly promise the proles those things; he could’ve lifted that phrase straight from the Webbs’ most doe-eyed propaganda leaflet.
And yet, as Orwell knows better than anyone, the proles can’t do it on their own. You really do need a vanguard of the proletariat. As Orwell himself notes, Hitler was backed by the big industrialists, and if you really want to needle the eggheads in your life, point out how quickly and thoroughly the German professors knuckled under […] They couldn’t wait to lick his jackboots, any more than his British and American colleagues could wait to kiss Stalin’s ass. They called themselves a “workers’ party”, but in the early days [German fascists] were almost exclusively found among the dueling fraternities – and professors! — of the German university system.
In other words, maybe the proles don’t need nothin’ but a good time, like the old song says, but though the proles are the “mass” of “mass movement”, the “movement” part gets started considerably higher up the social ladder … that is, with guys like Orwell. Guys who know, deep in their bones, that there’s more to life than hygiene, short working hours, birth control, etc. Because he’s one of the great prose stylists, it’s not as apparent in Orwell, but in lesser hands than his you can smell the contempt dripping off every sentence an egghead writes about the proles …
It’s not that the proles want hygiene, birth control, etc. It’s what they need. What they deserve, when you come right down to it, because that’s what you do with livestock — keep ’em clean and well fed, and of course control their breeding. You could take the most purple passage of “animal rights” eco-lunacy and set it side by side with the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, and see no difference at all. Sure, every aspect of our lives is managed for us by Our Betters, but at least we’re free range!
Severian, “Bonfire of the Vanities II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-29.
August 20, 2025
QotD: Most “mass movements” really do need that “vanguard” to start moving
Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: Communism, Fascism, GeorgeOrwell, Ideology, Severian, Socialism, University — Nicholas @ 01:00
Comments Off on QotD: Most “mass movements” really do need that “vanguard” to start moving
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
