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 shows "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]
The English historian Eric Hobsbawm. Suffice to say; this
book came under ferocious attack from Stalinists around the world. They still
attack it even today. 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 as 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. 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 such an important literary and political figure's
work and legacy, 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 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 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”. [12]
His work should be studied and critiqued, he was an intransigent
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
For Emily, My Bestie
[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
[12] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html
