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| 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
