Friday, 23 May 2025

George Orwell and the "Marxist Left"

 

George Orwell









“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

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

Animal Farm

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."

George Orwell

In the most recent edition of The Orwell Society Journal, John Rodden wrote an article[1] defending George Orwell from a “Never Ending Siege”. According to Rodden, no day goes by without Orwell coming under sustained attack from both left and right writers or journalists.

In the first part of his article, under the heading The Hate Campaign: From Two Minutes to a Hundred Years Rodden examines one of the more recent and sustained attacks on Orwell from the poison pen of Naoise Dolan writing in the Financial Times[2]. The FT donated an inordinate amount of space for her to bemoan Orwell’s influence: She writes, “ George Orwell died in 1950, but he’s in the newspapers nearly every day. In the past few years alone, the British press has quoted him on whether Britain is an unserious country, whether book blurbs are degenerate and why a good British pub should be revolting.

Writers ask what he would have made of the end of British coal, and repeat his counsel on how to make the perfect cup of tea. They cite him on why English people love queueing, the importance of having hobbies, and why “cancel culture” is a poor substitute for free speech. They ask what he can teach us about Israel and Palestine, and when Britain will tire of its culture wars. One might just as well ask when Britain will tire of the obligatory Orwell reference.”

Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist, while I have nothing against novelists, it would appear that Dolan has not read too much Orwell or perhaps not understood what she has read. She would also appear to be weighed down by an extraordinarily large axe, looking for a place to grind it.

Rodden breaks his article down into seven parts. In the first part, he perhaps inaccurately states that Orwell “hated the Marxist Left”. A wildly inaccurate generic term if ever I saw one. It would be an understatement to say that Rodden is loose with his wording, something that Orwell hated. Just read his essay Politics and the English Language.

The “Marxist Left “ is a vague term meaning just about every radical group under the sun. Although in the end Rodden is forced to make the distinction between the Marxist Left, by which he means the Stalinist British Communist Party, who are the Far Left, Rodden does not elaborate. The term usually denotes radical groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who do not hate Orwell; in fact, one of its leading members is an expert on Orwell.[3]

The Stalinists, on the other hand, had good reason to hate Orwell, and for more than two minutes. Orwell, who called himself a democratic socialist, first came to prominence in the 1930s for the powerful social criticism of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. The Stalinists hated these two books. The general secretary of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, accused Orwell of “slumming it” and  “bourgeois snobbery”.

He wrote, “If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. If on his return from Mandalay he had bought one or two penny pamphlets on socialism and the working-class movement, what fatal experiences he could have saved himself from, because one never gets to know the movement by slumming. I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the "smell" of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. Well, pardon me if I say at once, without any working-class snobbery, that it's a lie.”[4]

However, what put the Stalinist noses severely out of joint was the publication of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. According to Fred Mazelis: “ 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. In the ensuing years, Orwell found it increasingly difficult to get his writings published.”[5]

In section two, Spain and the Communists, Betrayal of the Left, Homage to Catalonia 1938, Rodden ends the paragraph with the strange assertion that the Russian secret police spied on Orwell and may have targeted him for elimination. Given what we know about Orwell and his wife, it is pretty clear that if Orwell’s wife had not acted when she did, they would have both been murdered by the Stalinists in Spain.

Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. 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”.[6]

Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refuted 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…I was trying to say, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”

Although Homage to Catalonia was a devastating exposure of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinists, he was to some extent blinded by his bitter experiences with the pro-Stalinist intellectuals and the smug pro-Stalinist liberals. Although his analysis of these people was usually accurate, his method was largely a subjective one. He dismissed the historic significance of the Russian Revolution and saw nothing left to defend in this revolution.

Mazelis writes, “This finds expression in Animal Farm and especially in 1984. While there is much that is powerful in these books, Orwell's outlook also made it possible for them to be used by the anti-communists. Stalinism itself, of course, bears the major responsibility for dragging the name of socialism through the mud.”[7]

Orwell certainly did not write 1984 to drag Socialism through the mud. Published in June 1949, it came out amid rising Cold War tensions.  As Richard Mynick explains, “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 realized 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 emphasize 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.”[8]

In section six, The Anti Intellectual Brigade, Rodden examines E.P. Thompson's attack on Orwell. Thompson criticised Orwell from the right, not the left; he compared Orwell to “a man who is raw all down one side and numb on the other. He is sensitive—sometimes obsessionally so—to the least insincerity upon his left, but the inhumanity of the right rarely provoked him to a paragraph of polemic.”

Thompson spent most of his academic career distancing himself from his former life inside the British Communist Party. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a type of "socialist humanism". Thompson at an early age rejected the classical Marxism of Leon Trotsky; despite later breaking with Stalinism, it is clear that Thompson's subsequent historical and political writings still retained ideological baggage from his Stalinist past.

As Rodden’s article shows the discussion over Orwell’s work and, more importantly, his opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the UK Socialist Equality Party, a member of the audience used Orwell’s book Animal Farm to conclude that revolutions have always been defeated. In his reply, Chris Marsden said that despite Orwell being a brilliant writer and an opponent of Stalinism, he nonetheless drew pessimistic conclusions from the victory of Stalinism in the former USSR.

One example of this confusion was his turning over some 35 of these names, a year before he died in 1950, to a secret government unit called the Information Research Department. This arm of the British Foreign Office had been set up to organise anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda. Marsden made the point that the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposition opposed Stalinism from the standpoint of Marxism and had faith in the working class overthrowing it. They worked under extraordinary political and physical pressure to provide a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, something Orwell could never have done.

 

 

 

 

 



[1] The Never Ending Siege-Orwell and the Left The Orwell Society-Journal no 25 spring 2025

[2] How George Orwell Became a Dead Metaphor-https:www.ft.com/content/83625fad-f101-4712-ba2b-483b87ef0e12

[3] See John Newsinger -Hope Lies in the Proles

[4] George Orwell, Snobby Truthteller- Blaise Lucey- litverse.substack.com/p/george-orwell-snobby-truthteller

[5] George Orwell and the British Foreign Office- www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html

[6] Nineteen Eighty-Four and all that-https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/

[7] George Orwell and the British Foreign Office- www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html

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