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Orwell and the Lesson Elites Still Don’t Want to Understand

Orwell reminds us that politics loses its meaning when it stops walking the streets and begins to exist exclusively in seminars, offices, ministries, or parliaments. No statistic can replace a conversation with someone who works, runs a business, pays taxes, or waits for medical care.

By Alfredo Ugarte S. (El Mostrador)

HAVANA TIMES – In light of the latest political and parliamentary discussions surrounding several bills currently under consideration in Chile, I was reminded that in January 1976, Ediciones Destino in Barcelona published the first Spanish-language edition—after several years of censorship under the Franco dictatorship—of one of George Orwell’s most lucid and least ideological works: The Road to Wigan Pier, first published in England in 1937.

Today, at a time when diagnoses, programs, and grand promises of social transformation abound, there is no doubt that it would be worthwhile—particularly for political elites—to read it again.

Although it was written almost 90 years ago, its pages contain a warning that is even more relevant today than it was in England in 1937.

Many remember this book for its moving description of the lives of miners in northern England. However, its most profound contribution is found in its second part, where Orwell turns his attention not toward poverty, but toward those who claimed to represent the poor.

His critique is striking because it is not directed primarily against capitalism, but rather against the inconsistency of a significant part of the intellectual and socialist elites of his time.

Orwell observed that many of those who spoke in the name of workers barely knew the everyday reality of the people whose cause they claimed to defend. They constructed theories about the lives of people with whom they rarely interacted, proposed solutions from within closed........

© Havana Times