George Orwell

The Sisterhood: Big Brother is watching. But they won't see her coming. -Katherine Bradley-Hardcover – Simon & Schuster UK (16 Mar. 2023)

While it has been seventy-three years since the death of George Orwell, there appears to be no let up in the substantial publication of books about him or what seems to be a popular new genre of rewriting his most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984.[1]

It must be said Katherine Bradley's new book is a substantial improvement of what has been a relatively bad bunch. What marks Bradley’s book out is it retells the story of Julia from Orwell's book 1984 from a far more left-wing and even working-class perspective than even Orwell contemplated. Julia and her fellow members of the Sisterhood organisation try to reach a common platform with their male counterparts in the Brotherhood to launch a joint campaign against Big Brother. This cuts across the current right-wing MeToo movement's insistence on keeping women's struggle separate from their male counterparts. For them, this is just “a feminist retelling of Orwell’s beloved story, this time written from Julia’s perspective.”

Mainstream media platforms have largely ignored the book, and it has come under attack from more right media outlets, such as the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Jessa Crispin wrote in the Telegraph, “We have, whether we like it or not, entered the second wave of rewriting classic tales to align them with modern-day social sensibilities about women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups who were prevented from writing and publishing their own stories for too long. People are rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood” like Angela Carter never happened. The latest in this soon-to-be-remaindered trend is Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood, a feminist update on George Orwell’s more referenced than read (and let’s be honest, for good reason) 1984.”[2]

The response from working-class men and women has naturally been very different. The book has been well received. Writing on Goodreads, Shelves_by_sim wrote, “This book was riveting, haunting, exceptionally well-written, terrifying and fantastic. Not only was the story brilliant from the beginning, but the entire book was so metaphoric it made my hair rise! Julia's thought process was so cutthroat and straight to the point. The story was the right amount of intriguing, captivating and utterly horrific. The author wrote at the end that she hoped George Orwell would have approved, and I think he certainly would have. The characters! The plot twists! The hope! The shock! The horror!! I loved the read. I don't read much dystopian, but this book was phenomenal.”[3]

This is well worth a read, and previous knowledge of the work of George Orwell is a must but I would highly recommend this book.

 



[1] See http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/11/julia-1984-by-sandra-newman-published.html and http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html

[2] This feminist update of 1984 won’t bother Big Brother- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sisterhood-katherine-bradley-review-feminist-update-1984-.

[3] https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147376927-shelves-by-sim




Julia 1984 by Sandra Newman- published by Granta (£18.99) 2023

Newman hasn’t proved herself a worthy successor to Orwell; she’s outclassed him, both in the knowledge of human nature and in character development. “Julia” should be the new required text on those high-school curricula, a stunning look into what happens when a person of strength faces the worst in humanity, as well as a perfect specimen of derivative art that, in standing on another’s shoulders, can reach a higher plane.”

Bethanne Patrick

“If there was hope, it must lie in the Proles because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated."

George Orwell 1984

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

George Orwell 1984

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

George Orwell

” Orwell’s vision may have been inspired by the USSR, but the rest of the world has become more Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We live in a world where if you walk down the street, there are screens everywhere that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”

Sandra Newman

“Julia” is Sandra Newman’s retelling of George Orwell’s classic “1984. The book is well written and researched; remaking a classic is no mean feat. The Orwell Estate commissioned the book. Although The main executor of the Estate is Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, he did not make the final choice of author. It must be said that the Estate has not always acted with the utmost generosity. In 2015, it notified CafePress that it had infringed copyright by having T-shirts with 1984 written on them.

TorrentFreak, the company that produced the T-shirts, said, “First off is the irony of the Estate of George Orwell being all Orwellian, but second is that you can’t copyright a number. This is a blatant abuse of the copyright system, and, more often, it’s a ridiculous attempt to control something that needs no control. I am in the process of having this image retouched and added to the store on my current site, as I will not allow this kind of abuse of authority to stand.”[1]

Although since 2021, the Orwell Estate has lost the copyright to the book 1984, it is still a big deal that it asked the writer Sandra Newman to give the book a “feminist” slant. Newman says, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, with or without the Estate’s approval, so, “I think they had decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”

Newman is not alone in rewriting classic books. Many contemporary publishing houses are retelling classic stories from women’s perspectives. Apart from Sandra Newman’s feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Katherine Bradley’s novel The Sisterhood is also a feminist retake of 1984, published in March this year. Other non-Orwell books include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White, and Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Charles Dickens Demon Copperhead.

But who knew there was a literary term for it? The academic term “anastrophe” refers to the technique of reversing word order in a sentence for effect. It means taking one author's work to produce another relatively new work.

The Orwell Estate must have come under extreme pressure from elements of the right-wing MeToo movement to sanction this piece of “anastrophe”. The right-wing fanatics that make up the MeToo movement believe Orwell was a misogynist. Daisy Lafarge says  “Julia” would appear to “fix” Orwell’s novel for a contemporary feminist readership.

This is not to say that the book is worthless. As Natasha Walter writes in her Guardian review, “In the most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by way of early 20th-century Britain and takes us carefully through its familiar landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well-trodden for many of us that re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of Truth to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop to O’Brien’s luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes from your memories.”

Although Newman’s new book is not a direct attack on Orwell’s reputation, it is nonetheless a by-product of a growing assault on his reputation. Newman's half-hearted defence is quite touching: “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,” she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him for being a misogynist.”

It seems a host of new books and articles have one goal: to bury the already long-deceased author under a mountain of dead dogs and, therefore, destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.[2]

While Newman’s book complements the original, she has none of Orwell's highly developed political or historical understanding. At the same time, Newman writes of a future beyond Orwell’s ending. She prevents Julia from saying anything about the political developments after 1984. Newman is not interested in placing Julia in the context of today's political developments. As Lafarge writes, “The novel was written in direct response to Stalin’s regime, yet the motives of “Julia” don’t seem to be concerned with the differences between Orwell’s period and our political moment. Instead, its main project seems to be redressing the gender balance in Orwell’s fiction. As a result, claims for its “timeliness” can only lead to vague generalisations about women’s oppression rather than examining the political structures imposing it. For contemporary readers, whose reproductive rights are being encroached on by the right, the novel’s simplistic depiction of amalgamated socialist evils may feel somewhat out of step with present affairs.”[3]

George Orwell’s “1984” was published in 1949 with its Newspeak and Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty, “doublethink” — “Truth is Hate, Peace is Hate. Love is Hate”  — “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” we are back with a contemporary bang. It does not take much imagination to easily recognise a description of “Oceania” or any of the terms above as having a very contemporary resonance. The futuristic dystopia immortalised by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in today's capitalist society.

Richard Mynick is spot on when he writes, “The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to Stalin’s USSR. Coming from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was deeply hostile to Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions...which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism.…”, his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this distinction. His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to emphasise that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked, and in the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself mainly to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist “democracies.” Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four was no endorsement of the West. It posits only an unaccountable elite that rules in its interests and maintains power by taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It examines what’s operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to exploitative rule—without regard to the nominal form of economic organisation. Put a bit differently. The book considers the psycho-social machinery of unaccountable state power in general—regardless of whether it originates from a ruling bureaucracy or finance capital. It explores the general problem of maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society, which can be done only through some combination of repression and controlling the population’s consciousness.”[4]

Newman has written an interesting and competent book but does not have a single inch of subversiveness. In this age, to be subversive is to be revolutionary. As Richard Mynick writes, “Early in the novel, Winston undertakes to commit a subversive act: he begins writing a personal diary. He wistfully addresses it: “To the future or the past, to a time when thought is free.” Orwell has elsewhere been credited with “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Assaulted by the Newspeak of the US political class, we manifestly live in a time of universal deceit. We are all Winston Smith and must look to revolutionary acts of telling the truth to light the way to a time when thought is free.”



[1] George Orwell's estate denies 'Big Brother values' after challenge to 1984 merchandise-https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/george-orwell-estate-disputes-allegations-orwellian-cafepress

[2] See book review-Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html

[3] A New, Feminist Retelling of ‘1984’-www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/books/review/julia-sandra-newman.html

[4] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010Richard Mynick- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html






Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20

“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”

― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan

“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”

— Oscar Wilde From the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray

 “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”

“ Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”

Proverbs 26:4-5

This is a very bad book. It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six letters written by Eileen O'Shaughnessy to a friend.

While stating Orwell was her “hero," Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the Patriarchy, " which she does not define or offer any objective or scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships among humans.

If this was not bad enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles[1] that labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their ideas and used them to write books.

Despite the tedious and confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history. O'Shaughnessy was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated. Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O'Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in 1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs would follow.”[2]

Funder has an unhealthy interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O'Shaughnessy, much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,[3] to prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O'Shaughnessy from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.

As Rebecca Solnit points out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923, had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”[4]

It seems clear that Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.

One of the more outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984, from Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in this case, two of the greatest books of the 20th Century. If anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.

In other words, it has been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Orwell saw further than O'Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin

One of the more disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine's College, Oxford, is the only brave soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve. Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through the life and work of George Orwell).[5]

Another disturbing aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies, she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[6]

Reading this book left a bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder's main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews of a very bad book.

  



[1] See-The biography that destroys George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator www.tellerreport.com/life

[2] Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review

[3] A Partnership of Lies- www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm

[4] George Orwell in an age of moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s standards?

 

[5] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/

[6] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution

April 11 2002



On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (Books about Books) Hardcover –  by D.J. Taylor- Abrams Press; 1st edition (October 31 2019)


"the day I joined the militia…he was probably a Trotskyist or an anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo, they are usually killed by the GPU".

George Orwell

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."― George Orwell, Animal Farm

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." ― George Orwell, 1984

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." ― George Orwell, 1984

D J Taylor's book is a useful but somewhat politically limited biography of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Orwell's book and his previous masterpiece Animal Farm are correctly seen as "key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century." Taylor concentrates mainly on the making of the novel, trying to find out how and why Orwell wrote it.

Orwell took five years to write his last book and was already very ill during its gestation period. Written in seclusion on the windswept Isle of Jura, off Scotland's coast, he died less than a year after it was published in 1949. Taylor writes, "By writing about the terrors that obsessed him, he had got them out of his system. 1984 is a devastating analysis of the corruption of language and dystopian horror world…and more."

Taylor believes that Orwell's idea for 1984 came from his study of The 1943 Allied leaders' Tehran Conference, which according to Taylor, gave "his consciousness a decisive kick." Maybe it did, or perhaps it did not. But Taylor misses the point. Orwell's 1984 attempts to come to terms with Stalinism's betrayal of the Russian and Spanish revolutions. To give his book clarity and accuracy, Orwell carried out extensive research. One important influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.[1] Orwell did not live to see how important the book would become. It sold over 40 million copies and is as contemporary today as when it was written.

Orwell died in January 1950. One consequence of his early death was that he could not defend his work or prevent it from being used by right-wing ideologues in Europe and the United States for their ideological crusade. As was said in the opening of this review, Taylor's biography of 1984 is useful but limited. The same can be said about his biography of Orwell despite winning the Whitbread Book Award in 2003.

Missing from both books is an accurate political evaluation of George Orwell himself. Orwell was part of a generation of workers and intellectuals who moved sharply to the left in the 1930s in response to the Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing struggles of the working class. While Orwell looked to the Soviet Union for leadership, very early on, Orwell saw that the Stalin regime had nothing to do with Socialism and was betraying the ideals of the 1917 Revolution.

From the late 1930s onwards, he described himself as a Democratic Socialist, but he was mostly a centrist politically wavering between reform and revolution. He detested inequality and, on numerous occasions, favoured the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. This sentiment was expressed in his book 1984, and Orwell's main character Winston had a broadly sympathetic and hopeful attitude towards the working class or, as he says, the "proles."

In the book, he believed the "proles were the only hope for the future. If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated." If only they could somehow become conscious of their strength needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened. They had a "vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill…the future belonged to the proles."[2]

Orwell was never a Marxist but was influenced by Marxist writers such as Leon Trotsky. I have not been able to ascertain if Orwell read Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, but he certainly knew what was in it. But as Fred Mazelis writes, "Orwell was always ambivalent about the genuine legacy of the October Revolution which Trotsky represented. His identification with the working class was based more on emotion and sentiment than scientific conviction. He associated with centrists like the Independent Labour Party in Britain and the POUM in Spain. The ILP called for "left unity," adapting to the Stalinists and criticizing Trotsky's merciless critique of Stalinism as "sectarian." In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, giving crucial support to the Popular Front government, which turned around and suppressed it. At the same time, the Stalinists assassinated the POUM leaders because they could not tolerate any independent left-wing working-class movement."

Orwell's Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, "The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state".[3]

Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refutes this slander saying, "I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…What I was trying to say was, "You can't have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship."[4]

Several short-sighted and stupid ideologues, both left and right, saw that the novel's police state had an uncanny resemblance to Stalin's USSR and accused Orwell of being an anti-communist but as Richard Mynick points out, "Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, "My recent novel ['1984'] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions...which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism."[5]

Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, "In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky's Life of Stalin (1941): "I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin's childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin" by Stalin. The earlier parts were "particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky's assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book."[6]

To conclude, the discussion about Stalinism and the betrayal of revolutions has little interest for Taylor, which is certainly reflected in this book. His main concern is literature and culture. As Newsinger correctly points out, "Taylor's achievement in his volume is to construct an Orwell who is acceptable to the literary establishment, someone non-threatening, irredeemably one of them. As far as he is concerned, two of the major influences on Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell's rat phobia and the totalitarian horrors he had experienced at his prep school St Cyprian's!".[7]

It is not in the realms of possibility in this review to give justice to what was Orwell's legacy. His most important work concerned the question of what Stalinism was and how to fight it. His most important books satirized the Stalinist political regime and warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. If you ignore the rubbish about him being a reactionary defender of the status quo or even an anti-communist, a systematic study of his most important works reveals a far more nuanced and complex individual. He was very much a product of his time. An old Russian proverb[8] once said, "It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens, but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles". George Orwell remains an eagle.

 



[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)

[2] 1984, George Orwell

[3] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/

[4] Letter to Dwight Macdonald,George Orwell

[5] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s-1984-wsws.org

[6] https://orwellsociety.com/orwell-and-trotsky/

[7] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/

[8]In criticizing Rosa Luxemburg Lenin once quoted two simple lines from a Russian proverb: “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”, and he added, “she was and remains an eagle”.





George Orwell-(1903-1950) At Notting Hill

One of my favourite walks is from my home through the Portobello market up to Notting Hill Gate. Once you fight past the tourists, it is a pleasant stroll. A few years ago, I spotted a blue plaque on the side of a house. To my amazement, it was where the novelist George Orwell lived in 1927. The author of Animal Farm and 1984 lived at number 22 Portobello Road.

To my disappointment, the great man never wrote anything worthwhile staying at the house except for a few articles. But it did inspire him to write some important stuff in the early 1930s. According to Gordon Bowker, “In late 1927, his friend Ruth Pitter, the poet, found him an unheated attic at 22 Portobello Road, a short walk from his old home at Notting Hill Gate. The room was so cold that he had to warm his hands over a candle-flame before he could start writing in the morning.

From this icy cell, he set out in old clothes to mingle with the tramps and down-and-outs who slept along the Embankment, in common lodging-houses and ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses. Most of these spikes and lodging-houses (or ‘kips’) have long gone, though a few old workhouse buildings survive, often as NHS hospitals. It was from a kip in Lambeth that he tramped down to Kent to go hop-picking among the East Enders and gipsy families who migrated there every year for a working holiday. This experience was recaptured in his first article for the New Statesman in October 1931 and lay at the heart of his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.[1]

As I said, Notting Hill is a great attraction for tourists looking for a door that does not exist and a bookshop that does not exist except in the film. As I walked by Orwell’s house last week, two young women, whom I assumed were tourists, took a photo outside the house. I guessed they had not spotted the blue plaque, and I was correct. They were even more surprised when I told them who had lived there. I asked one girl if she had read him, and she replied only 1984. I asked her where she was from, and she said Spain. I did not have the energy to tell her that Orwell had fought Fascism in her country. Or that, in my opinion, Homage To Catalonia is his greatest book.



[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/articles/gordon-bowker-orwells-london/


A Rebel's Guide to George Orwell – by John Newsinger-Published by Bookmarks

December 10 2020.

 "If there was hope, it must lie in the proles... Everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and child-bearing, toiling from birth till death and still singing. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind."

George Orwell -1984

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

George Orwell

'"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."'

Animal Farm

Bookmarks are the publishing arm of the British Socialist Workers Party (S.W.P.). Their Rebel's Guide is a series of small books which largely consist of condensed versions of larger books written by the same author.

A Rebel's Guide to George Orwell by John Newsinger is one of these books. It is largely a smaller version of his book Orwell's Politics.[1]At only sixty pages long, this is a short introductory guide to the work of the English writer George Orwell. To a certain extent, Newsinger does a good job. By any stretch of the imagination, Orwell is a complex and controversial literary and political figure. He was, without doubt, one of the most influential writers of the 20th century

Orwell is an attractive figure for the S.W.P. They even mistakenly go as far as calling him a literary Trotskyist.[2]A significant amount of material has been written about Orwell by this Pseudo Left political organisation. Yet, for all their so-called insight, they do not characterise Orwell as a centrist political figure.

This is not to denigrate the work of one of the great literary figures of the 20th century, but political categories matter. A simple reading of Leon Trotsky's writings on centrism would help understand Orwell's shifting political positions that occurred throughout his life. As Trotsky said, "Speaking formally and descriptively, centrism is composed of all those trends within the proletariat and on its periphery which are distributed between reformism and Marxism, and which most often represent various stages of evolution from reformism to Marxism – and vice-versa. Both Marxism and reformism have a solid social support underlying them. Marxism expresses the historical interests of the proletariat. Reformism speaks for the privileged position of proletarian bureaucracy and aristocracy within the capitalist state. Centrism, as we have known it in the past, did not have and could not have an independent social foundation. Different layers of the proletariat develop in the revolutionary direction in different ways and at different times. In periods of prolonged industrial uplift or the periods of political ebb tide, after defeats, different layers of the proletariat shift politically from left to right, clashing with other layers who are just beginning to evolve to the left. Different groups are delayed on separate stages of their evolution; they find their temporary leaders and create their programs and organisations. Small wonder then that such a diversity of trends is embraced in the comprehension of "centrism"! Depending upon their origin, their social composition and the direction of their evolution, different groupings may be engaged in the most savage warfare with one another, without losing thereby their character of being a variety of centrism".[3]

While Trotsky was not writing directly about Orwell, who vacillated between revolution and reformism for most of his life, they capture the essence of Orwell's politics.  But he was also a consistent anti-capitalist and a lifelong opponent of Stalinism. He died a Socialist

There are many striking aspects of Newsinger's work on Orwell. Perhaps the most obvious is that for a member of an organisation that purports to be Trotskyist, he makes no use of Leon Trotsky's writings on centrism or his important writings on The Spanish Revolution in this small book or bafflingly in his major book Orwell's politics, making one passing comment that Trotsky had differences with the centrist POUM leader Andreas Nin.

To his credit, Newsinger does show that Orwell read many works by the various radical groups of the time. As Newsinger points out "Orwell saw no shame in starting small. He collected pamphlets from even the smallest groups, and he took them seriously. The 214-page inventory of his 2,700-item collection includes pamphlets by the All-India Congress Socialist Party, the People's National Party (Jamaica), the Polish Labour Underground Press, the Leninist League, the Groupe Syndical Français, the Workers' Friend, Freedom Press, Russia Today, the Meerut Trade Union Defence Committee, the Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, and myriad others".[4]

He also read Karl Marx and had a substantial collection of left-wing pamphlets borne out by this quote from Newsinger's book on Orwell" I have before me, what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in 1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no mention of Stalin but gives high praise to Trotsky and also to Zinoviev." [5]Orwell also had a significant number of Leon Trotsky works found in his library after his death. He believed that "Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea."[6]

As Newsinger states, Orwell read a significant amount of Trotsky's work enough to be heavily influenced by his work. You could safely say that without Trotsky's analysis of Stalinism, Orwell could not have produced his two most famous works Animal Farm and 1984. Orwell mistakenly called himself a Democratic Socialist, but he was more than that. As he writes, he was heavily influenced and radicalised by the times he lived in "In a peaceful age, I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is, I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer... Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows."[7]

As Newsinger points out, Orwell was not always a socialist his early days were spent being a colonial policeman in Burma. Orwell was forced to break from this past imperial life. He did so in response to the 1926 General Strike in Britain. His experiences of poverty and unemployment shaped Orwell's future writing in the North of England. As Orwell explained, "I have only been down one coal mine so far but hope to go down some more in Yorkshire. It was for me a pretty devastating experience, and it is fearful thought that the labour of crawling as far as the coal face (about a mile in this case but as much as 3 miles in some mines), which was enough to put my legs out of action for four days, is only the beginning and ending of a miner's day's work, and his real work comes in between." [8]

Stalinism's betrayal of the Spanish revolution had a massive impact on Orwell and led to certain disorientation and confusion, which showed up in his later writings, particularly his work on war and nationalism. His experience of Revolutionary Spain would move him further to the left. Homage to Catalonia, written about the events in Spain, is arguably his most important book and the key event in Orwell's political life.

Suffice to say this book came under ferocious attack from Stalinists around the world. In fact, they still attack it even today. The English historian Eric Hobsbawm. As Ann Talbot writes “One could be forgiven for thinking, from the venom with which Hobsbawm attacks him, that Ken Loach was personally responsible for the defeat of the Spanish Republic. And George Orwell, author of Homage to Catalonia, which records his own experiences in the Spanish Civil War, also comes under sustained attack. Victor Gollancz was right to refuse to publish the book, Hobsbawm fumes, and Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman was right to run hostile reviews when it was published since it could only divide the left. No one was interested in it anyway. "Only in the cold-war era did Orwell cease to be an awkward, marginal figure." With this sneering remark, Hobsbawm implies that Orwell was serving the interests of Washington and the C.I.A. when he tried to expose the crimes of the Moscow bureaucracy in Spain. It is an old lie and one that has been hawked about ever since 1938 when Homage to Catalonia revealed the way in which Stalin suppressed the revolution in Spain”.[9]

This confusion is seen in his essay the Lion and the Unicorn. Orwell writes, "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings". This could be seen as an attack on left-wing intellectuals. It also could read as a little bit of a right-wing attitude regards patriotism.

Orwell's essay was not just a knee jerk reaction to the war. As Gregory Claeys points out "before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell had briefly suggested three of its central themes: first, patriotism was not inherently conservative or reactionary, but might be expressed as a legitimate sentiment among those on the left; second, patriotism alone would not prevent England's defeat, but instead the social revolution must progress (and here his Spanish ideals were clearly carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that, in fact, it was those who were most patriotic who were least likely to "flinch from revolution when the moment comes." John Cornford, a Communist, killed while serving in the International Brigades, had been "public school to the core." This proved, Orwell thought, that one kind of loyalty could transmute itself into another and that it was necessary for the coming struggle to recognise "the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues".[10]

Orwell's work after Spain vacillated between right and left positions. Some of his best analyses drew heavily on the works of Leon Trotsky and his British supporters. Although as this quote shows his work also contained much political confusion. He writes "It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting; it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government.

British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure from below, we shall get the government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right through our national life, we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the monied class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own destiny."[11]

Conclusion

It is hard not to recommend this little book. It is a good basic introduction to the work of George Orwell. A Short Review of this book is not enough to do justice to the work and legacy of such an important literary and political figure. as Orwell undoubtedly was. Towards the end of his life, there was much controversy over the issue of Orwell of compiling a list of some 130 prominent figures he compiled in 1949 that he believed were sympathetic to the Stalinist regime in Moscow.

Orwell gave over 35 of these names to a secret government organisation called the Information Research Department. This was an arm of the British Foreign Office that had been set up for organising anti-Soviet and anticommunist propaganda. This fact has been used to rubbish his political and literary legacy.

What Orwell did was wrong and a grave mistake but his actions should be put in historical context not to justify what he did but to understand and learn from this experience.

As points out “Orwell, to his credit, was neither a dupe of Stalinism nor a bourgeois liberal defender of the Moscow regime during this period. He took up an intransigent struggle against Stalinism from the left, at a time when this was the most unpopular position to take amongst liberal intellectuals. When Homage to Catalonia was published, Orwell was virtually ostracised for this account of the Spanish Civil War which laid bare the Stalinists' treachery against the Spanish and international working class. The Stalinists and their supporters were enraged by the book's exposure of their role in strangling a genuine revolutionary movement through the same bloody methods then being utilised inside the USSR. His work should be studied and critiqued but he was an intrasif=gent opponent of Stalinism and died an opponent of capitalism it should be in that context that his memory should be honoured.

Reference

1.   George Orwell and the British Foreign Office-Fred Mazelis-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html

2.   A comment: Revisiting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010-Richard Mynick-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html

3.   George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html

4.   Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade Ann Talbot-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/03/hobs-m16.html

 

 

 

 



[1] https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9780333682876

[2] George Orwell: a Literary Trotskyist? A review of John Newsinger, Orwell's Politics (Macmillan Press, 1999), £42.50 Anna Chen

[3] Centrism “in General” and the Centrism-of the Stalinist Bureaucracy

(January 1932) - marxists.architexturez.net/archive/trotsky/1932/01/whatnext9.htm

[4] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/06/george-orwell-birthday-politics-socialism

[5] Orwell's Politics-By J. Newsinger

[6] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/

[7] George Orwell, Why I Write (September, 1946)

[8] George Orwell, letter to Richard Rees (29th February, 1936)

[9] Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade

Ann Talbot-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/03/hobs-m16.html

[10] "The Lion and the Unicorn", Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics-Gregory Claeys-The Review of Politics-Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 186-211

[11] The Lion And The Unicorn-Socialism and the English Genius-1941

George Orwell

The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and England in the 21st Century. Tristram Hunt-Winchester University in 2016. 

Tristram Hunt is a former Labour MP and British Historian who is now director of Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2016 he gave a speech at Winchester University entitled: The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and England in the 21st Century. The speech was a clumsy attempt to bring George Orwell's original essay into the 21st century.

Orwell's essay was an extraordinary piece of work in that, among other things called for a social revolution during the Second World War in England. Suffice to say that Hunt a right-wing Labourite is not calling for that.

Hunt's speech is a dishonest attempt to use Orwell's confusing support for patriotism for his right-wing politics. Some of Orwell's work in this essay is confusing and just wrong, but the overall thrust of his essay is spot on and far more left-wing than Hunt will ever be. At no stage in Hunt's essay does he call for a social revolution against one of the oldest bourgeoise in the world.

Much of Hunt's speech is flippant and shallow. His speech is a cover for Labour's incredibly right-wing trajectory. The word socialism in the title of his speech is mostly for show, similar to how the Nazi's used it in the 1930s in order to confuse the working class. Hunt's real perspective is the revival of a particularly nasty form of English nationalism and a thinly disguised one at that. Hunt begins the lecture with a paean to the good old days of the English "dissenting tradition" of Watt Tyler, the Peasants revolt and the radicals of the English revolution.

While pretending to be a radical Hunt is in fact on the right-wing of the Labour Party. As part of the offensive to shift the party even further to the right he argues that it must "take English identity and cultural affiliation seriously".

He then says that Labour "needs a much greater honesty in how we navigate Englishness and politics - particularly when it comes to questions of immigration". To do this, the party must not oppose populist English culture, and instead learn to embrace it". In reality, Hunt's appeal is directed at the most degenerate, parochial and right-wing in society.

Hunt goes on to attack the working class for abandoning the Labour Party because "They value home, family, and their country. They feel their cultural identity is under threat. They yearn for a sense of belonging and national renewal. Tradition, rules, and social order are important to them".

To be honest, Hunt's politics are not dissimilar to that of the Tory party, or for that matter any number of fascist parties that exist in Britain. Like the fascist's Hunt wraps himself up in the St George's flag. Paraphrasing the writer Paul Kingsnorth Hunt believes that there is an analogy "between the spread of St. George's Cross and the Confederate Flag in the South of the United States. An unofficial, unspoken act of defiance by a people which says "we are still here".

He continues "Although it is not as entrenched as often suggested, there is a reluctance amongst some in the party to embrace patriotism and promote national pride… An aversion to the institutions and traditions people hold dear has helped to create the perception that the Labour-party is anti-English and does not share the values of the nation".

Immigration

Hunt's extreme right-wing comments regarding immigration would not look out of place with Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood Speech. You do not have to share Gordon Brown's politics to agree with his comments that Duffy was a bigot. Hunt says "We had nothing to say to Mrs Duffy and the millions of voters like her who, first and foremost, had sincere, legitimate worries about immigration". This is shocking. Duffy's patriotism should have been treated as Samuel Johnson so beautifully put it as being "the last refuge of a scoundrel".

As Hunt's praise of Derek Blunket in an article in the Guardian is just plain bizarre. In the article, he praises David Blunkett MP as "One of the few politicians brave enough to confront this dilemma has been David Blunkett. The teaching of citizenship in schools, the introduction of citizenship ceremonies, and the publication by Bernard Crick of an official history of Britain have served to return the emphasis to British values. Meanwhile, Blunkett himself has happily broken with the left's usual reserve on these matters, speaking of his patriotic ardour for English music, poetry, drama and humour".

This supposed defence of English culture is nothing more than an excuse to wrap himself in the union jack. Does Hunt' really believe that Blunkett's tacky and clumsy appeal to British nationalism against the 'Muslim Hoards' is progressive? Historically Hunt is not the only historian to promote the so-called British values of Justice and fair play, but he does so to empty any class content behind these slogans. After all these concepts were espoused by a ruling elite that has a lot of blood rather on its hands and has routinely cloaked their imperialist adventures in such terms. Finally, on this matter, Hunt's attempt to justify his defence of British imperialism aims in the garb of the Enlightenment is a somewhat disgusting spectacle.

George Orwell

It is hard to know where to start with Hunt's use of George Orwell as a cover for his right-wing conservative perspective. To start with, it must be said that Orwell wrote his famous essay when actual bombs were falling on England; that was hardly the case facing Hunt.

One of the significant problems of Hunt's choice of the Lion and the Unicorn is not only what he says about it but what he does not say. It should be said that Orwell is wrong and a little confused on the question of patriotism. Orwell writes "England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles, it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings". This could be seen as an attack on left-wing intellectuals it also could read as his position as regards patriotism.

However, this is not the main point and misses the thrust of Orwell's attack on British capitalism. It must be said that Orwell's analysis would not have looked out of place with much of the perspective of the British Trotskyists during the Second World War. Orwell's answer to the war was the call for a social revolution. Some of his work, although he does not acknowledge it, is heavily influenced by the great Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky.

Orwell's essay was not just a knee jerk reaction to the war Orwell had in the words of Gregory Claeys "before he wrote The Lion and the Unicorn Orwell had briefly suggested three of its central themes: first, patriotism was not inherently conservative or reactionary, but might be expressed as a legitimate sentiment among those on the left; second, patriotism alone would not prevent England's defeat, but instead the social revolution must progress (and here his Spanish ideals were clearly carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that in fact, it was those who were most patriotic who were least likely to "flinch from revolution when the moment comes." John Cornford, a Communist, killed while serving in the International Brigades, had been "public school to the core." This proved, Orwell thought, that one kind of loyalty could transmute itself into another and that it was necessary for the coming struggle to recognize "the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues"[1].

The more you read Orwell, the more you see how far politically he was from Hunt. "The Lion and the Unicorn" is an extraordinary book written at the height of the war it is a damning indictment 0f the war.

Orwell is crystal clear that the only way to beat the fascist is for the working class to make the war a revolutionary one. Orwell writes "It is only by revolution that the native genius of the English people can be set free. Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting; it means a fundamental shift of power. Whether it happens with or without bloodshed is largely an accident of time and place. Nor does it mean the dictatorship of a single class. The people in England who grasp what changes are needed and are capable of carrying them through are not confined to any one class, though it is true that very few people with over £2,000 a year are among them. What is wanted is a conscious open revolt by ordinary people against inefficiency, class privilege and the rule of the old. It is not primarily a question of change of government. British governments do, broadly speaking, represent the will of the people, and if we alter our structure from below, we shall get the government we need. Ambassadors, generals, officials and colonial administrators who are senile or pro-Fascist are more dangerous than Cabinet ministers whose follies have to be committed in public. Right through our national life, we have got to fight against privilege, against the notion that a half-witted public schoolboy is better for command than an intelligent mechanic. Although there are gifted and honest individuals among them, we have got to break the grip of the monied class as a whole. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only just beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its own destiny."

To collude in our current time of crisis although no bombs are falling on our heads we do face an even more deadly foe. It is a pity we do not have a George Orwell, we have instead Hunt who thankfully has remained silent.



[1] "The Lion and the Unicorn", Patriotism, and Orwell's Politics-Gregory Claeys-The Review of Politics-Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1985), pp. 186-211