He describes socialism as the great ideology of the machine age. He saw the socialist propaganda of the age as unsettling and untrustworthy. Socialists were fond of predicting the benefits of socialism. The typical socialist vision of the day when the workers controlled the means of production was that all people would be fulfilled in an earthly paradise, a human race of geniuses and supermen at play. Orwell wondered if the mechanization of labour would produce a race of healthy people. The working miners he saw in the coal mines were physically awesome. Would we see such strong men in a society where no one worked? And why would we assume that an industrial society could exist without defiling England's pastoral splendor? He couldn't see an industrial society working without some kind of totalitarian social controls. This provides an insight into the vision that inspired Nineteen Eighty-Four. The same fears could be said to have inspired Tolkien's dark vision of legions of deformed men enslaved by the dark lords in The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Lewis's Arcadian vision of Narnia.

Orwell presented British socialism as an unreal vision peddled by marginal people to an untrusting public. He saw, accurately, the appeal of anti-modern thinking in British culture, and the appeal of fascism to large segments of the British public. His basic advice to the socialist movement was to address itself to justice and freedom, to lose its fondness for bragging about new factories in Russia, to lose its love of Marxist theory, and to attack the totalitarian threat of fascism.

The Road to Wigan Pier provides some interesting insights into Orwell's character. More importantly, it contains an honest personal record of Orwell's navigation of the cultural and political currents of British society during the Great Depression. Most importantly, he claims a unique honest and moral stance as a writer and critic.