It was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. George Orwell, A Homage to Catalonia
But when I see an actual flesh and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy the policeman I do not have to ask myself which side I am on. ibid.
The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we passed row after row of little grey slum houses running at right angles to the embankment. At the back of one of the houses a young woman was kneeling on the stones, poking a stick up the leaden waste-pipe which ran from the sink inside and which I suppose was blocked. I had time to see everything about her – her sacking apron, her clumsy clogs, her arms reddened by the cold. She looked up as the train passed, and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate, hopeless expression I have ever seen. It struck me then that we are mistaken when we say that. ‘It isn’t the same for them as it would be for us,’ and that people bred in the slums can imagine nothing but the slums. For what I saw in her face was not the ignorant suffering of an animal. She knew well enough what was happening to her – understood as well as I did how dreadful a destiny it was to be kneeling there in the bitter cold, on the slimy stones of a slum backyard, poking a stick up a foul drain-pipe. George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people’s convenience, is inherent in working-class life. A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that ‘they’ will never allow him to do this, that, and the other. Once when I was hop-picking I asked the sweated pickers (they earn something under sixpence an hour) why they did not form a union. I was told immediately that ‘they’ would never allow it. Who were ‘they’? I asked. Nobody seemed to know, but evidently ‘they’ were omnipotent. ibid.
As you walk through the industrial towns you lose yourself in labyrinths of little brick houses blackened by smoke, festering in planless chaos round miry alleys and little cindered yards where there are stinking dust-bins and lines of grimy washing and half-ruinous WCs. The interiors of these houses are always very much the same though the number of rooms varies between two and five. All have an almost exactly similar living-room, ten of fifteen feet square, with an open kitchen range; in the larger ones there is a scullery as well, in the smaller ones the sink and copper are in the living-room … Not a single one has hot water laid on … Great numbers of them are by any ordinary standard not fit for human habitation. ibid.
The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about capitalist and proletarian and a little more about the robbers and the robbed. ibid.
I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by the habitual rudeness … All I knew was that it was lower-class sweat that I was smelling, and the thought of it made me sick. ibid.
A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work. He is kept at work, ultimately, because of a vague feeling that he would be dangerous if he had leisure. And educated people, who should be on his side, acquiesce in the process, because they know nothing about him and consequently are afraid of him. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the trade unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. George Orwell, England Your England IV
Every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labour. While every previous form of society was an organization of labour in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labour in the interests of the labouring majority itself. Leon Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism
As a general rule, man strives to avoid labour. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. ibid.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE! Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
This revolution is necessary not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overturning it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845
What I did was to prove ... that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Karl Marx
The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. Karl Marx, clause 1 article The International Working Men’s Association
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that, thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. Karl Marx
Universal suffrage is the equivalent of political power for the working classes in England. The inevitable result is the political supremacy of the working class. Karl Marx, essay Chartists
For Marx was, before all else, a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat. Friedrich Engels
What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847
For the industrial masses their work has no human meaning in itself. And offers no satisfying interest. They save their living for their leisure but don’t know how to use it except in the bingo hall, filling pools forms, spending money, eating fish and chips in Spain. Nothing but emptiness that has to be filled with drink, sex, eating, background music, and what the papers and telly supply. F R Leavis, public lecture recorded BBC
cf.
Richard Hoggart, a lecturer not from Oxbridge but Hull, seriously studied the lives of the urban working classes. Coining a new term ‘cultural studies’ he investigated an ignored culture of pubs, of racing and music hall songs. Great Thinkers: In Their Own Words III: Culture Wars, BBC 2011
What I mean by a cultural study of society is trying to understand better and to interpret therefore the whole way of life of that society as it shows itself, as the way it goes about its daily business. Richard Hoggart, interview BBC
O let us love our occupations,
Bless the squire and his relations,
Live on our daily rations,
And always know our proper stations. Charles Dickens, The Chimes
I want to see them starving
The so-called working class
Their wages yearly halving
Their women stewing grass. Philip Larkin, A Dreary Little Hymn
The Right to Work: Today it seems a rather quaint notion wrapped in the misty idealism of working-class unity. Kirsty Young, The British at Work: Them and Us 1964-1980, BBC 2011
It was something straight out of a Victorian industrial nightmare. I just found it completely dangerous and it was. You can see from the film they are not wearing any safety kit, no helmets, no safety jackets; they are wondering around the place in their shirt sleeves and flat caps. They probably thought it was woosy to wear a helmet. I found them very hard. Crusty. Quite bitter really. Working in the steel mill was a grim experience that they did for the gash. I think it was to do with kind of feeling left out of mainstream civilised development, and they were left to do the dirty work. And people thought badly of them. Despite doing the dirty work. Lionel Took, interview Kirsty Young, subject of 1967 BBC documentary of young person experiencing working life in steel mill