George Orwell
1984
"All
animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."― George
Orwell, Animal Farm.
The ancient
philosopher said that strife is the father of all things. No new values can be
created where a free conflict of ideas is impossible. To be sure, a
revolutionary dictatorship means, by its very essence, strict limitations of
freedom. But for that same reason, epochs of revolution have never been
directly favourable to cultural creation; they have only cleared the arena for
it. The dictatorship of the proletariat opens a wider scope to human genius the
more it ceases to be a dictatorship. The socialist culture will flourish only
in proportion to the dying away of the state.
Leon Trotsky
Revolution Betrayed (1936)
The essence of
Marxism consists in that it approaches society concretely, as a subject for
objective research, and analyses human history as one would a colossal
laboratory record. Marxism appraises ideology as a subordinate integral element
of the material social structure. Marxism examines the class structure of
society as a historically conditioned form of the development of the productive
forces; Marxism deduces from the productive forces of society the
inter-relations between human society and surrounding nature, and these, in
turn, are determined at each historical stage by man’s technology, his
instruments and weapons, his capacities and methods for struggle with nature.
Precisely this objective approach arms Marxism with the insuperable power of
historical foresight.
Leon Trotsky's
Dialectical Materialism and Science (1925)
D J Taylor’s new
book is an extremely good introduction to the work of George Orwell. However,
it joins an already overcrowded market, so much so Taylor was encouraged to
justify his new book. It must said Taylor’s book is one of the better book
releases. It is a well-researched perceptive analysis of the work of Orwell.
Unfortunately, that cannot be said of many new releases and articles attempting
the “uncover the real Orwell”. Some of these books and articles have been
nothing more than hack work aimed at character assignation and burying Orwell ‘s
reputation under a large pile of dead dogs.
Before I review
Taylor’s book, I would like to say something about a recent article from the Orwell’s
Society’s website[1]. The
article in question was by Patrick Homes called Can We Truly Rebel? Fisher and
Orwell[2].
Homes begin by mislabeling Fisher as a Marxist. Fischer was nothing of the
sort. He was a pseudo-left masquerading as a Marxist and a very pessimistic one
at that.
Fisher’s 2008 book
Capitalist Realism offers no real alternative to Capitalism. It was easier for
him to “imagine the end of the world than the end of Capitalism”. Fisher cannot
imagine a modern world without Capitalism. Not a very classical Marxist
position I might add. While offering mild criticism of
Capitalism, Fisher accepts that Capitalism “entails subordinating oneself to a
reality that is infinitely plastic, capable of reconfiguring itself at any
moment.”[3] It would appear that Fisher has accepted
Francis Fukuyama's Mantra that we have reached the “End of History” and that
Liberal Capitalism is now the only game in town.[4]
Fisher writes, “The
catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road nor has it
already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual
moment of disaster; the world doesn't end with a bang. It winks out, unravels, and
gradually falls apart. What caused the catastrophe to occur, who knows; its
cause lies long in the past, so absolutely detached from the present as to seem
like the caprice of a malign being: a negative miracle, a malediction which no
penitence can ameliorate. Such a blight can only be eased by an intervention
that can no more be anticipated than was the onset of the curse in the first
place. Action is pointless; only senseless hope makes sense. Superstition and
religion, the first resorts of the helpless, proliferate. But what of the
catastrophe itself? It is evident that the theme of sterility must be read
metaphorically as the displacement of another kind of anxiety. I want to argue
this anxiety cries out to be read in cultural terms, and the question the film
poses is: how long can a culture persist without the new? What happens if the
young are no longer capable of producing surprises?”[5]
Unfortunately
there are no surprises in Fisher’s book. He is both hostile and disdains orthodox Marxism and its history in equal
measure, writing, “One of the left’s vices is its
endless rehearsal of historical debates, its tendency to keep going over Kronstadt
or the New Economic Policy rather than planning and organising for a future
that it believes in.”
Unlike Homes, I do not believe Fisher's
intellectual framework offers
an insightful understanding of George Orwell’s work, particularly Nineteen
Eighty-Four. Regardless of his faults, and there were many, Orwell did not
share Fisher’s total pessimism or despair. His “Hope Lies in the Proles “ from 1984
is a clear indication that Orwell saw the working class as a revolutionary class
and was the only force that could overthrow Capitalism. Orwell was not a
Marxist, but throughout his life, he sought to understand and live by Marx’s theory
that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles.”[6] I am
pretty sure that Orwell would have concurred with Marx’s understanding of the
role of the individual in history. Marx wrote, “Men make their history, but
they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on
the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising
themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely
in such epochs of revolutionary crisis, they anxiously conjure up the spirits
of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and
costumes to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise
and borrowed language.”[7]
As was said earlier Taylor’s book is a fine
introduction to the literature of Orwell. D. J. Taylor is a leading scholar on
Orwell, and this book is the product of decades of work on Orwell. Taylor
concentrates mostly on Orwell’s literary output and focuses less on his
political involvement. Orwell’s trip to Spain had an enormous impact on him,
and if you want to understand the real Orwell, you have to study Orwell’s
experience in Spain and his book Homage To Catalonia. This book is far more
important than Animal Farm or 1984. As Taylor writes, “Spain, it is safe to
say, politicised Orwell in a way that his exposure to homegrown Socialism in
the previous five years had not. To begin with, it offered him a vision of how
an alternative world, founded on the principles of freedom and equality, might
work.”[8] Taylor
is not a Marxist and can only offer a perfunctory analysis of Orwell’s experiences
in Spain.
A closer approximation of Orwell’s time in Spain
can be found in the analysis of the Marxist writer Vicky Shaw, who wrote, “Orwell’s
experience was different from most other artists and intellectuals, who went to
Spain as supporters of the Stalinist Communist Parties, which many still
associated with Lenin’s Bolshevik party and the revolutionary traditions of
October 1917 and which possessed a massive apparatus for both propaganda and
direct repression of dissent. For George Orwell to produce and publish such
material then was, therefore, no small task. The Kremlin bureaucracy was
actively seeking the physical annihilation of the entire generation of Marxist
workers and intellectuals who had made the Russian Revolution in 1917 possible,
while internationally, the Communist Parties were acting as the agents of
Stalin in suppressing any opposition to the bureaucracy’s interests wherever
such opposition appeared. Orwell’s honest account of the Spanish events also
conflicted with the reigning perceptions amongst large layers of revolutionary-minded
working people.
Homage to Catalonia is, therefore, a
seminal text and remains an excellent introduction to the Spanish events and
the strangling of the revolution by Stalinism. However, Orwell could not
elaborate on a revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. Eventually, the
domination of the workers’ movement by the bureaucracy, combined with the
victories this gave Fascism, led him to extreme forms of political demoralisation,
as is seen in his book 1984. He supported the democratic imperialist powers in
the Second World War”.[9]
Taylor does not make much of Orwell’s faith
in the working class. In 1984, 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 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”.
That said, Orwell never clarified his position
towards the 1917 October Revolution. As Fred Mazellis correctly states, "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 criticising Trotsky's merciless
critique of Stalinism as "sectarian." In Spain, the POUM played a
similar role, supporting 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."[10]
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 John Newsinger correctly points out, "Taylor's
achievement 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 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!".
[1] https://orwellsociety.com/
[2] https://orwellsociety.com/can-we-truly-rebel/
[3] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?2008
[4] The world economic crisis and the return of history-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/02/meet-f02.html
[5] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
[6] The Communist
Manifesto
[7] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
[8] Who Is Big Brother?: A Reader's Guide to George Orwell
[9] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish
revolution- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html
[10] https://atrumpetofsedition.org/george-orwell/
