Hi – this is Jan, your gentle radical. As you hear my brand-new jingle made with AI, we’re about to start another journey into what radicality means. Welcome.

In the previous episode I outlined radicality in general terms: not as extremism, but as a refusal of domination and as a responsibility for one’s own freedom and the freedom of others. Today I would like to stay within that framework and turn to one concrete figure who has shaped my sense of radical thought from very early on – George Orwell. Already in secondary school I was struck by fragments of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the reader: there was a clarity and moral sobriety that was hard to ignore. Yet Orwell has since been repeatedly misread. Because 1984 so powerfully exposes the logic of total power, he has been appropriated as a kind of patron saint of anti-socialism. This is historically inaccurate. Orwell remained a socialist until his death – but a libertarian, anti-bureaucratic socialist, we could even say an anarchist socialist – and his polemic was never with socialism as such, but with party socialism imposed from above, whether Soviet, British, or any other middle-class Marxism cut off from ordinary people. The right has claimed him because he criticizes totalitarian planning, but what Orwell is actually defending is something else: the moral intelligence of common people, their “common decency”, the popular, pre-ideological sense of justice that precedes theory. That is why this episode will try to read Orwell back into the left: as a radical who places the root not in doctrine, but in everyday solidarity.

Common decency is a term Orwell uses to describe the organic solidarity between ordinary people. For him, it is to some extent synonymous with socialism, which he understands not as a political ideology but as an expression of the human desire for freedom and justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier from 1937, he writes:

„No genuine working man grasps the deeper implications of Socialism. Often, in my opinion, he is a truer Socialist than the orthodox Marxist, because he does remember, what the other so often forgets, that Socialism means justice and common decency. But what he does not grasp is that Socialism cannot be narrowed down to mere economic justice' and that a reform of that magnitude is bound to work immense changes in our civilization and his own way of life. His vision of the Socialist future is a vision of present society with the worst abuses left out, and with interest centring round the same things as at present--family life, the pub, football, and local politics“ (G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier)

The problem with workers is that they often fail to see beyond their material needs to the visions that would make socialism a real political movement. According to Orwell, the problem with intellectuals and politicians is that they have lost touch with common decency and see the world through the prism of dogma, partisanship, and the desire for power. However, when he looks for a source of revolutionary energy, he finds it precisely in ordinary human solidarity, in common decency. The book concludes with a kind of manifesto of his conception of socialism:

„There is no chance of righting the conditions I described in the earlier chapters of this book, or of saving England from Fascism, unless we can bring an effective Socialist party into existence. It will have to be a party with genuinely revolutionary intentions, and it will have to be numerically strong enough to act. We can only get it if we offer an objective which fairly ordinary people will recognize as desirable. Beyond all else, therefore, we need intelligent propaganda. Less about 'class consciousness', 'expropriation of the expropriators', 'bourgeois ideology', and 'proletarian solidarity', not to mention the sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed. And less about mechanical progress, tractors, the Dnieper dam, and the latest salmon-canning factory in Moscow; that kind of thing is not an integral part of Socialist doctrine, and it drives away many people whom the Socialist cause needs, including most of those who can hold a pen. All that is needed is to hammer two facts home into the public consciousness. One, that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that Socialism is compatible with common decency.“ (G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier)

However, it was the Spanish Civil War, which Orwell experienced firsthand as the fighter, that clarified for him the meaning and power of common decency and at the same time fully revealed the dangers of party socialism, which inevitably works against the common man. As biographer D. J. Taylor explains, Orwell encountered for the first time a power that could completely destroy the truth. Press propaganda and Soviet political officers presented the events he had seen with his own eyes, participated in, and experienced in a completely different light. They falsified both the past and the present. Already in the 1930s, Orwell's resistance to the Soviet power machinery, against which he warns so strongly in his novel 1984, was maturing. Taylor points out, however, that Orwell paradoxically took away from the horrors of the civil war a belief in the “indomitability of the human spirit,” a belief in the equality of people regardless of the trenches that divide them. In the civil war, he understood what socialism meant for ordinary people — that it was essentially a materialistic approach to reality, in which satisfying basic needs was essential. This differed from the romantic socialism of intellectuals, which did not take into account human needs, experiences, and sentiments.

At first glance, common decency seems to merge with common sense, a concept adapted by the right to defend the conservative order. It must be acknowledged that Orwell is conservative, but a socialist or perhaps an anarchist. But this conservatism does not mean leaving the world as it is. On the contrary, his goal is to transform the world into a place where people can freely, organically, and in solidarity build a society based on their natural relationships, experiences, and emotions. Orwell thus approaches the concept of society as presented by the anarchist Peter Kropotkin, whom I will also discuss in one of the next episodes. In short, a just and free society must be based on daily negotiation, on personal relationships in which we learn to live with others, and on solidarity and mutuality that cannot be transferred to political competition. Any political party, any large system of thought, will inevitably destroy it.

French left-wing philosopher Jean-Claude Michéa has long been interested in Orwell's common decency, and his comments on the subject are scattered throughout many of his essays and books. In his essay The Empire of the Lesser Evil, he explains that one of the main problems of liberalism is its abstraction from everyday morality. This is because liberalism wants to create a space of harmony or consensus, to avert the “war of all against all,” which is supposed to consist, among other things, in the expression of desires, feelings, and partisanship. It strives for a sanitized space in which equality will be guaranteed by cultural leveling, allowing free competition between equal personal interests. Morality is privatized, losing its social character and thus its dialogical dynamics. Society is to act “axiologically neutral,” or, in Orwell's words, abstractly. This can be clearly demonstrated wherever we are required to be “objective” and “impartial,” to keep emotions, personal feelings, and experience out of our decision-making.

Thus, we are faced with a rationalized system that prescribes human behavior. And it does not matter whether the ideology is conservative, communist, or neoliberal. All of them abstract from the empirical world in which people live. From the relationships they form, from specific faces, sentiments, and solidarity. In contrast, common decency expresses natural human solidarity; instead of the cycle of capital or power, it functions on the basis of the cycle of giving. Michéa, of course, follows on from Marcel Mauss's famous essay on the gift. For Mauss, the gift is not a romantic surplus to “real” economic life, but the original social logic in which giving, receiving, and repaying are at once voluntary and binding — precisely because they acknowledge the other as a partner in a shared world. This is why common decency can be read as the everyday, de-ideologized form of the gift: a small, concrete recognition that we owe something to those we live with, before any abstract system tells us so. He says:

„There is a series of rights and duties about consuming and repaying existing side by side with rights and duties about giving and receiving. The pattern of symmetrical and reciprocal rights is not difficult to understand if we realize that it is first and foremost a pattern of spiritual bonds between things which are to some extent parts of persons, and persons and groups that behave in some measure as if they were things. … In perpetual interchange of what we may call spiritual matter, comprising men and things, these elements pass and repass between clans and individuals, ranks, sexes and generations.“ (M. Mauss, The Gift)

Philosophically speaking, both Mauss and Michéa emphasize the ontological primacy of relationships over individual subjects. First comes the network of gifts, obligations, acceptance, and reciprocity — and only then does the “I” emerge. This is why Michéa can say that “common decency stems from humanity’s continuous historical work on itself…” – namely, from working to make the three skills of gift-giving – giving, accepting, reciprocating – concrete, internalized, and extended to all. Mauss's gift and Orwell's common decency meet here: both categories are pre-state and pre-ideological, growing out of the practice of people who have to live together. And that is precisely why it makes sense for Michéa to talk about socialism – not as technical planning, but as a political form that generalizes this ancient, relational logic of gift-giving: making it a principle of the whole society, not just the family or neighborhood.

But this is precisely where Michéa's warning against the “ideology of Good” (idéologie du Bien) comes in: as soon as morality breaks away from this lived, relational ground, it begins to become an instrument of power. This is also Orwell's motif – when common human decency becomes a program that is decreed upon people, its power is lost.

To put it simply: both Mauss and Michéa remind us that “we” always comes before “I.” First, there are relationships in which people give, take, and reciprocate — and from this gradually arises a sense of belonging. Michéa calls this common decency: humanity's long work to make this giving and receiving apply to more and more people. And here we can also talk about socialism – not as cold planning from above, but as a policy that extends this ordinary human solidarity to the whole of society. The problem arises when it becomes an “ideology of good”: someone starts telling people from outside what is right, instead of it coming from their real relationships. Michéa also recalls Hegel here: living, shared morality is what we do every day; morality that exists only in our heads is prone to forgetting the people for whom it was supposed to have been created.

Revolution, rebellion, or protest therefore has a chance of success only if it is based on this common decency. More precisely, people are relational beings, entangled in society by a mechanism of gift-giving and solidarity, within which they always give something “of themselves.” In this way, they connect with each other through informal, emotional relationships that enable them to form communities.

This is also the principle of grassroots movements, which, in line with the above, we can consider the only form of social revolution that, according to Orwell, has any chance of success. This is opposed by movements orchestrated “from above” by political power. Michéa notes in his essay Rebellion and Conservatism:

„There certainly are alienated rebellions, that is, rebellions that are perfectly adjusted to the logic of the systems that they claim to combat and which often contribute to reinforce those systems’ effects. For Orwell, this occurs whenever a rebellion does not proceed from the “generous anger” that, for example, inspired Dickens (as we shall see, this generous anger is always linked to common decency), but when its deep psychological roots are located in envy, hatred and resentment. No authentic rebellion can arise from this poisoned spring.“ (J.–C. Michéa, Rebellion and Conservatism)

David Wieck gives a wonderfully ordinary example to show this. Imagine you go to the butcher and you see his thumb on the scale. You could lecture him about injustice and tell him he is robbing the poor – that’s only talk. You could call the inspection office – that’s indirect action. But you could also do something that grows straight out of common decency: refuse to be cheated, weigh the meat yourself, bring your own scale next time, or even start buying from a cooperative. That, says Wieck, is direct action. It doesn’t wait for an institution to fix the world; it starts from the simple, decent conviction that people shouldn’t cheat each other. In other words, direct action is what happens when ordinary moral expectations are taken seriously enough to act on them right now.

Before we dive back into Orwell, it’s worth saying this clearly: 1984 is not just a novel about total power; it also hides a fragile trace of common decency. We usually miss it because we read the book only as an x-ray of totalitarianism and forget to look at the few places where ordinary, unplanned, popular life is still breathing. Orwell isn’t attacking socialism as such – he is attacking a socialism run from above, by a party, by an ideology, whether Soviet, British or any other middle-class Marxism that has cut itself off from the people. And this is exactly what Michéa notices in his reading of 1984: whenever Orwell looks at the proles, he is looking at a world where human solidarity, memory and everyday cooperation have not yet been falsified by the Party.

Orwell shows this most plainly in the moment when Winston stops staring at the Party and turns his eyes to the people the Party despises. He suddenly realizes that if there is any force left that has not been ideologized, not been taught to rewrite the past, not been trained in Newspeak, it is the ordinary people living outside the Party’s mental world. That’s the point where he writes in his diary the sentence that sums up this whole intuition about popular, non-programmed socialism.

„'If there is hope,' wrote Winston, 'it lies in the proles.' … They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution. The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the fifties and sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender. If there was any one still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole. Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston's mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him. He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him. He would say to him: 'Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?'“ (G. Orwell, 1984)

But when Winston Smith visits the pub to talk to the old man, he is unable to connect with his way of thinking. He states:

„The few scattered survivors from the ancient world were incapable of comparing one age with another. They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a workmate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister's face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision. They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.“ (G. Orwell, 1984)

The Proles in the novel 1984 have a special sense of solidarity, they can sense when a missile is coming, they carry echoes of ancient times when humanity had not yet been falsified by the Party. But Smith is unable to work with this world; he remains in the intellectual world of the Party and resistance within it. As Michéa points out, Orwell depicts the “Brotherhood” as another gang corrupting human thought, just like the Party. And Smith submits to them, ready to lose his identity, to murder, to throw sulfuric acid in a child's face. Literally. In the novel, Orwell clearly portrays the intelligentsia as a “new aristocracy,” disconnected from the past, responsible for falsifying the past and devastating human dignity in the name of an ideal:

„The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organizers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists, and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralized government. As compared with their opposite numbers in past ages, they were less avaricious, less tempted by luxury, hungrier for pure power, and, above all, more conscious of what they were doing and more intent on crushing opposition.“ (G. Orwell, 1984)

1984 is a critique of totalitarianism and a warning against the dangers of not only Soviet socialism, but any form of intellectual socialism. At the same time, it is also a warning against the futility of any revolution based on resentment rather than organic anger arising from the common people. This is because, according to Orwell, ordinary people do not actually desire power; they do not want to rule. They want to live peaceful and contented lives. A revolution based on this decency is, in his view, the only truly free and just one, because its goal is not to own the lives of others, to control them, or to take revenge. Common decency is therefore not conservative peasant wisdom, but rather a grassroots principle that, in times of crisis, leads ordinary people to take care of themselves.

It is true that for someone from the former Eastern Bloc, like me, it is somewhat difficult to accept this optimism. In the 1950s, after Orwell's death, it was ordinary people in my homeland, Czechoslovakia, who cheered Stalin, denounced their neighbors, and coveted the property of political prisoners and Germans expelled after the war. On the other hand, an Orwellian analysis of this period would also have to take into account the fact that this vindictiveness and greed stemmed from exuberant nationalism, through which people tried to come to terms with the Nazi oppression they had experienced during World War II. At the same time, it was a carefully orchestrated mass emotion, controlled by political officers from the Soviet Union, the same ones that Orwell had come to know in Catalonia as masters of falsifying reality and distorting the truth.

Reading 1984 therefore raises a burning question to which Orwell does not provide an answer: how to counter this orchestration of resentment, which disinfects the revolutionary potential of common decency? From the perspective of today's neoliberal society, any answer will have to reckon with the fact that the consumerist way of life can satisfy a large part of people's material needs, thereby effectively bribing them. At the same time, mass media, social networks, and the individualization of responsibility are devastating the space in which common solidarity could organically develop in the past. This can be illustrated by a small, everyday detail: people no longer stop on the street as much as they used to. In a world driven by efficiency and rationality, there is not much time to form the small, spontaneous, and slowly maturing alliances of everyday life that Orwell describes in his writings.

Common decency, then, is not a nostalgic slogan. It is the name Orwell, Mauss, and later Michéa give to that low, steady moral temperature in which people still recognize one another as partners in a shared world. It is relational before it is ideological, generous before it is strategic. It says: give, receive, reciprocate — and do it in such a way that the other can stay human. It is fragile because it depends on practice, on small gestures, on time spent together, and it can be very quickly dissolved by propaganda, bureaucratic routines, or by the seductions of consumerism. But precisely because it is ordinary, it is also renewable: it reappears in crises, in strikes, in mutual aid, in neighborly conversations over the fence.

Seen from here, Orwell’s radicality is not the radicality of a party or a theory. It is the radicality of someone who refuses to sacrifice truth and human dignity to an abstract future. He is radical where he insists that a socialist transformation must stay compatible with common decency; where he distrusts every “Brotherhood” that wants to own the revolution; where he sides with the people who do not want power, but want a livable life. In that sense, Orwell is a left-wing radical who keeps the root in the everyday — in speech that is not falsified, in memory that is not rewritten, in solidarity that is not commanded.

And that is also why I call this podcast “Your Gentle Radical.” Common decency is gentle because it begins with care for the other and refuses to brutalize politics; and it is radical because it goes to the root of our being-together and will not hand that root over to any party, state, or market. That’s the place I want to keep speaking from. Thank you for listening. You can find notes and extras at www.yourgentleradical.space, and we’re also on Instagram — come say hi, tell me what Orwell text stayed with you, or what you want to hear next. Until next time — stay gentle, and stay radical.