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David Walsh
‘The Satan of our cosmology is the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, which implies that everything is running down. Life is … a
local contradiction of this law … [it] refuses to submit … and rewinds itself
up again.’
William Golding
Anyone who moved through those years, without understanding
that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong
in the head.”
Wiliam Golding
Lord of the Flies, written in the aftermath of the Second
World War, is essentially a “libel against humanity”. The book’s plot line
follows a group of largely public schoolboys who descend into savagery at the
drop of a hat after being stranded on a deserted island. While Golding argues that "man produces
evil as a bee produces honey," he rejects the premise that the boys'
behaviour could be socially constructed. Golding believes violence is a default
setting of humanity and not a condition of the competitive, capitalist and
class-divided society in which the boys were raised.
A class analysis would indicate that Ralph and Piggy are
members of the ruling elite representing the liberal-democratic order and that
both exhibit "bourgeois" values. Jack would be the totalitarian/militarist,
portraying the rise of fascism or the expression of Stalinism, valuing strength
and production (meat) over intellectualism and law.
Piggy's alienation and death could be explained by his
lower-class status (indicated by his accent and physical limitations), showing
that an irrational" democratic system fails to protect those it deems
inferior. Golding believed that it would
not take much for civilisation after the Second World War to suffer the same
fate as the boys. A Marxist would argue that the novel reflects the
"political subconscious" of the Cold War era, in which the fear of
nuclear war and the struggle between democracy and communism are projected onto
the children’s conflict.
As Alexander Lee points out in a recent article, Golding's
postwar irrational vulnerabilities were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We
(1924) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), which had already pointed to
a dystopian future in which rationalism and science run amok, destroying
morality. In 1941, a Mass Observation Report found that a majority of British
people believed that science was ‘out of control’.
Such was the toxic atmosphere created by the post-war
period, by the American state and ruling class when they carried out a purge of
socialist and left-wing views from film, writing and culture as a whole. Golding’s
opinions, as presented in Lord of the Flies (1954), which present violence and
atavism as central to the human condition, were already being expressed by
other writers during this period.
However, William Golding’s novels are not merely literary
artefacts; read dialectically, they are tools for political education—revealing
how ideas, institutions and everyday relations reproduce domination, and
pointing to why only organised working-class struggle can overturn the
conditions that give rise to the very tragedies he depicts.
David North puts this better when he says, “Most of you are,
I am sure, familiar with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, which argues that
barbarism is the natural condition of humanity. Release a group of ordinary
school boys from the usual restraints of civilisation and they will, within a
few weeks, revert to a state of homicidal savagery. This misanthropic work
flowed from the conclusions drawn by Golding from the experiences of the Second
World War. “Anyone who moved through those years,” he later wrote, “without
understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been
blind or wrong in the head. The popularity of Lord of the Flies reflected the
bewilderment and despair provoked by the horrors of World War II. This mood was
strengthened by the political relations that arose in the aftermath of the war.
It became more challenging to engage in a discussion of the nature of the Third
Reich after 1945 than before. In the reactionary political environment of the
Cold War, it was no longer considered appropriate, especially in the United
States, to dwell too seriously on the relation between fascism and modern
capitalism.”[1]
In his defence, Golding was not born a pessimist or prone to
irrationality. According to Alexander Lee, “Long before Golding began writing
Lord of the Flies, he had also been a rationalist. The son of a science
teacher, he studied Natural Sciences at Oxford before switching to English. He
grew up believing that humanity was not only capable of change but also
progressing. Like many students in the 1920s and 1930s, he agreed with Karl
Marx that history moves in one direction: forward. He believed that, even if
the process might sometimes be painful, even violent, the conditions of life
would inexorably improve and humanity become happier, more ‘enlightened’, and
fulfilled. It was inevitable.”[2]
So what changed? What made Golding write ‘We are the masters
of ignorance, proud, frightened, and god-haunted. We have no country and no
home.’ We are no better than before: worse, in fact. Death has become a
calculation, and even cruelty has lost its horror. It might be tempting to
compare this to the ‘law of the jungle’, but even that would be an
understatement. In what jungle could you find six million people being
processed through a death chamber?’[3]
Again, Golding was not the only writer to draw pessimistic
conclusions from the rise of fascism and Nazi Germany’s responsibility for the
murder of six million jews. Walter Benjamin’s famous “Angelus Novus”‑inspired
lament saw history as an accumulating catastrophe rather than a process moving
toward emancipation; Benjamin’s
own despair culminated in suicide while fleeing fascism, a tragic personal
witness to the collapse of political possibilities. Others turned to cultural
nihilism or moral relativism—treating
the Holocaust as proof that Enlightenment rationality and historical
materialism were bankrupt. In his book Understanding the Nazi Genocide: Marxism
after Auschwitz, Enzo Traverso makes clear his deepening opposition to Marxism
as a method of historical analysis and as the basis of a political perspective.
In the introduction, he writes: “Between emancipation and
genocide, the history of European Jewry, as much in its metamorphoses as in its
wounds, can be seen as an excellent laboratory in which to study the different
faces of modernity: its hopes and liberatory aspirations on the one hand, its
destructive forces on the other. This history shows both the ambiguity of the
Enlightenment and its heirs, including Marxism, and the extreme forms of
barbarism that modern civilisation can take.”
The Marxist writer Nick Beams replied, saying, “This
approach, in which 'modernity' is made responsible for the crimes against the
Jewish people—one could say the crimes against humanity committed on the body
of the Jewish people—performs a vital political role. It obscures the political
forces and the social classes whose interests they ultimately served. Modernity
is an empty abstraction. It is wracked by class division and class conflict.”[4]
While Golding’s and others' approach is psychologically
understandable, this thinking depoliticises the lesson of Auschwitz. It turns
the Holocaust into an argument that history has no laws or that socialism is an
inadequate response and substitutes metaphysical despair for political
struggle. As the World Socialist Web Site has argued, attempts to attribute
Auschwitz to amorphous “modernity” rather than to specific class and
imperialist dynamics serve to blur responsibility and paralyse resistance.
Since some of the article was written with the help of the
WSWS’s Socialism AI, it would be churlish of me not to praise it, and to say
that it has already become an invaluable educational tool in the struggle for
socialism. One aspect I am particularly struck by is that it not only provides
information but also offers a Marxist study guide. It provides a systematic
framework for studying Golding’s book to inform both a theoretical
understanding and aid political development.
[1]The
Myth of “Ordinary Germans”: A Review of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing
Executioners-www.wsws.org/en/special/library/russian-revolution-unfinished-twentieth-century/15.html
[2]
William Golding’s Island of Savagery Alexander Lee | Published in History Today
Volume 75 Issue 12 December 2025
[3]
William Golding’s Island of Savagery
[4]
Marxism and the Holocaust-www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/05/adde-m15.html
