Looking for a particular Orwell reflection on colonialism and economics
March 10, 2024 4:22 PM   Subscribe

Can anyone find a passage in George Orwell's essays where he argues that Britain will have to get used to a lower standard of living following the end of its colonial empire? The excellent AA recalled such a reflection in a thread on degrowth, but none of us have yet sourced it.

There are some statements in Orwell's essays to the effect that, because England's ongoing wealth was based on colonial exploitation, England would have to accept a lower standard of living under socialism--and this was a real problem for selling it to the lower classes.
posted by doctornemo to Society & Culture (5 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Response by poster: Apologies: the MeFiite who posed the topic was the excellent praemunire.
posted by doctornemo at 4:23 PM on March 10, 2024


One such is in The Road To Wigan Pier (pp191--192):
Under the capitalist system, in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation--an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream. The alternative is to throw the Empire overboard and reduce England to a cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herrings and potatoes. That is the very last thing that any left-winger wants. Yet the left-winger continues to feel that he has no moral responsibility for imperialism. He is perfectly ready to accept the products of Empire and to save his soul by sneering at the people who hold the Empire together.
Characteristically, this isn't Orwell actually addressing imperialism, or advocating some way of ending it, it's an argument against the hypocrisy of his fellow left-wingers, and the 'secret conviction that nothing can be changed'.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:37 PM on March 10, 2024 [7 favorites]


Best answer: Short essay "Towards European Unity," in the fourth volume (In Front of Your Nose) of the collected letters/short essays, has it.
posted by praemunire at 7:04 PM on March 10, 2024 [2 favorites]


Best answer: From “Writers and Leviathan”:

“Ever since the nineteenth century our national income, dependent partly on interest from foreign investments, and on assured markets and cheap raw materials in colonial countries, had been extremely precarious. It was certain that, sooner or later, something would go wrong and we should be forced to make our exports balance our imports: and when that happened the British standard of living, including the working-class standard, was bound to fall, at least temporarily. Yet the left-wing parties, even when they were vociferously anti-imperialist, never made these facts clear. On occasion they were ready to admit that the British workers had benefited, to some extent, by the looting of Asia and Africa, but they always allowed it to appear that we could give up our loot and yet in some way contrive to remain prosperous. Quite largely, indeed, the workers were won over to Socialism by being told that they were exploited, whereas the brute truth was that, in world terms, they were exploiters.”
posted by rustcellar at 8:20 PM on March 10, 2024 [5 favorites]


Response by poster: From "Towards European Unity":

The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. This relationship has never been made clear by official Socialist propaganda, and the British worker, instead of being told that, by world standards, he is living above his income, has been taught to think of himself as an overworked, down-trodden slave. To the masses everywhere ‘Socialism’ means, or at least is associated with, higher wages, shorter hours, better houses, all-round social insurance, etc. etc. But it is by no means certain that we can afford these things if we throw away the advantages we derive from colonial exploitation. However evenly the national income is divided up, if the income as a whole falls, the working-class standard of living must fall with it. At best there is liable to be a long and uncomfortable reconstruction period for which public opinion has nowhere been prepared. But at the same time the European nations must stop being exploiters abroad if they are to build true Socialism at home.
posted by doctornemo at 3:02 PM on March 13, 2024


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