From: joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   Martha Bridegam  writes:   
      
   > Joe Fineman wrote:   
   >> Martha Bridegam  writes:   
   >>   
   >>>Hard in fact to think of any English literature that doesn't   
   >>>involve the tragedies of class stratification. What I'm wondering   
   >>>is whether Orwell accepted class as immutable and tried to make   
   >>>himself an exception to it, or whether he thought class differences   
   >>>could/should be made obsolete for everyone. That line about "We   
   >>>have nothing to lose but our aitches" in *Wigan Pier* sure sounds   
   >>>like he wanted to do away with class difference, but when it came   
   >>>to the visceral as opposed to the cerebral, did he really?   
   >> From the same paragraph:   
   >>   ...our plutocracy will not sit quiet under a genuinely   
   >>   revolutionary government.  And when the widely separate classes   
   >>   who, necessarily, would form any real Socialist party have fought   
   >>   side by side, they may feel differently about one another.  And   
   >>   then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and   
   >>   we of the sinking middle class -- the private schoolmaster, the   
   >>   half-starved free-lance journalist, colonel's spinster daughter   
   >>   with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship's   
   >>   officer without a ship, the civil servants, the commercial   
   >>   travellers and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns   
   >>   -- may sink without further struggles into the working class   
   >>   where we belong,....   
   >> And earlier on:   
   >>   It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the   
   >>   commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has "come down in   
   >>   the world," the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant and   
   >>   all other doubtful cases that they _are_ the proletariat....   
   >> From these lists, it would seem that the middle class, from (say)   
   >> the lower upper down, is to join the working class -- politically   
   >> at once, and socially only after the victory of Socialism.  (What   
   >> is to become of the plutocrats, he perhaps is too tactful to   
   >> mention, or doesn't care very much.)  Accordingly he excused   
   >> himself from dropping his aitches & drinking tea out of the saucer.   
   >> Very sensible as far as it goes.   
      
   > So, setting the shocking rhetoric aside for the moment, maybe he was   
   > saying that differences of accents and manners shouldn't be mistaken   
   > for class distinctions?   
      
   That's certainly not what I said he said, and, I think, not what he   
   meant to say.  He thought that differences in accents & manners were   
   indeed class distinctions & were, for the time being, unavoidable   
   facts of life, but we shouldn't let them get in the way of a necessary   
   political alliance, which, if victorious, would enable us, in the long   
   run, to get rid of them.   
   --   
   ---  Joe Fineman    joe_f@verizon.net   
      
   ||:  We insular peoples prefer our enemies distant.  :||   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)