I was reading The Road to Wigan Pier (copyright 1937) by the socialist George Orwell and I was struck by how current a few phrases seemed: [Machines] would

I was reading The Road to Wigan Pier (copyright 1937) by the socialist George Orwell and I was struck by how current a few phrases seemed: [Machines] would even encroach upon the activities we now class as 'art'; [they are] doing so already there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. [snip] To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. For every person [at the I.L.P. branch meeting], male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. Establish Socialism--remove the profit principle--and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanization of the world, already rapid enough, would be or at any rate could be enormously accelerated. And this prospect is a slightly sinister one, because it is obvious even now that the process of mechanization is out of control. It is happening [not] for any clearly understood purpose, but simply from the impulse to invent and improve, which has now become instinctive. Put a pacifist to work in a bomb-factory and in two months he will be devising a new type of bomb. http://george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/10.html http://george-orwell.org/The_Road_to_Wigan_Pier/10.html