ABSTRACT
George Orwell's attack on the left's officiousness was rooted in a contrast between the socialist movement's working-class sympathizers and its more articulate middle-class spokesmen. Everything he said about the left's officiousness, ambivalence and technophilia serves to focus our minds on the problems of contemporary radicalism. Written in the middle of the deepest depression that Western capitalism has ever known, Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) still powerfully conditions our sense of how austerity should be portrayed. Using Pinochet's coup against the Allende government in Chile as her template, she claims that the New Right has achieved power only when people's political judgment has been temporarily warped by a catastrophic decline of the social fabric. By drawing a rigid and highly tendentious distinction between principled militants who reject all cuts and wishy-washy dilettantes who reject only certain cuts, activists in organizations like the SP are engaging in a shamelessly sectarian exercise in political bonding.
