Who Is Big Brother? A Reader's Guide to George Orwell Hardcover – March 26, 2024, by D. J. Taylor
“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."
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/
The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War-By Peter Stansky Stanford University Press, 2023, 150 pp
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
George Orwell
“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."
George Orwell 1984
Who controls the past controls the future: 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
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 very 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 this 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)
The Socialist Patriot, published in 2023, joins an extremely busy book market on the English writer George Orwell, one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. There is no special reason for reviewing Stansky’s book other than to place it in the context of recent Orwell studies.
The majority of recent publications, it must said, have not been very good. Some have been written by paid-up members of the #MeToo movement that have been nothing short of character assassination. The attack on Orwell by Anna Funder in her book Wifedom is particularly nasty.[1] Given the caustic nature of the attack, it is not surprising that Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, took to his father’s defence in the Spring edition of the Orwell Society’s journal. In the same journal, John Rodden argues that Orwell was neither a “plagiarist” nor a “predator”. Other writers have written in defence of Orwell.
In an essay for The Article, Jeffrey Meyers defends Orwell. He relates how “In Barcelona in May 1937, the Stalinists attacked POUM, their supposed anti-fascist allies, and began a civil war within the Civil War that led to their defeat. Orwell was in the losing faction of the losing side. While he was fighting at the front, the Stalinist police searched Eileen’s hotel room. She was not arrested and hid their passports and chequebooks under the mattress while she remained in bed. Funder says Orwell “abandoned” Eileen by returning to the front, but he went to Spain to fight the fascists, not to take care of her. It is true that when he was shot through the throat, she devotedly nursed him. In July, the Stalinist secret tribunal condemned Orwell and Eileen to death for espionage and high treason, and they barely managed to escape with their lives into France.
Anna Funder, extremely imperceptive, says she’d read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) twice without realising that Eileen had been in Spain with him. Though there are in fact 37 references to Eileen in his book, Funder, determined to put a malign interpretation on everything Orwell does, states that she’s scarcely mentioned and never named and that he wrote her out of the story. She doesn’t realise that Homage is about Spain, not Eileen and that his sense of privacy and decorum prevented him from naming her. (Orwell would have been sickened by the current dedications “To my beautiful and brilliant wife” that are deleted in the post-divorce edition.) More important, after being convicted of treason and condemned to death, he feared he could be murdered by Soviet agents whom he knew were operating in England, and wanted to protect Eileen from dangerous reprisals by hiding her connection to POUM Funder repeatedly calls his very real fear “paranoia”. But millions of people were murdered in Stalin’s Purges of 1936-38, and Leon Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico in 1940. The Communists continued to murder their enemies for the next 80 years. Recently, Sergei Skripal was poisoned in England, and Yevgeny Prigozhin was blown up for opposing the present Russian dictator.[2]
While containing biographical elements, The Socialist Patriot is more polemic than biography. Stansky is broadly politically sympathetic towards Orwell. While reading Stansky’s book, one is struck by how contemporary much of what Orwell wrote about. Room 101, Ignorance is Strength, Big Brother, and doublethink – to name but a few are Orwellian phrases instantly recognisable even today’s phrase-laden society. Despite being born over one hundred years ago, Orwell’s writing is still part of our everyday culture.
Orwell was a brilliant writer who took the study of culture very seriously and was one of many writers in the 20th century to chart its influence. Orwell had an extraordinary range. He wrote about the 19th-century British novelists Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, the American writer Henry Miller, and Donald McGill’s postcards, to name but a few. While Orwell’s Novels and cultural writings are important, I believe Orwell’s greatest book is neither Animal Farm nor 1984 but his Homage To Catalonia.
In a letter he wrote to Cyril Connolly from the hospital in Barcelona where he was being treated for a bullet wound to his throat and arm by the fascists, he wrote: “Thanks also for recently telling the public that I should probably write a book on Spain, as I shall, of course, once this bloody arm is right. I have seen wonderful things and I believe in Socialism, which I never did before. On the whole, though I am sorry not to have seen Madrid, I am glad to have been on a comparatively little-known front among Anarchists and POUM [Workers Party of Marxist Unification] people instead of in the International Brigade, as I should have been if I had come here with CP [Communist Party] credentials instead of ILP [Independent Labour Party] ones. “[3]
In Another letter to his publisher, Victor Gollancz On 1 May 1937, he wrote “ I shall be going back to the front probably in a few days & barring accidents I expect to be there till about August. After that, I think I shall come home, as it will be about time I started on another book. I greatly hope I come out of this alive, if only to write a book about it. It is not easy here to get hold of any facts outside the circle of one’s own experience, but with that limitation, I have seen a great deal that is of immense interest to me. Owing partly to an accident, I joined the POUM militia instead of the International Brigade, one which was a pity in one way because it meant that I had never seen the Madrid front; on the other hand, it has brought me into contact with Spaniards rather than Englishmen & especially with genuine revolutionaries. I hope I shall get a chance to write the truth about what I have seen. The stuff appearing in the English papers is largely the most appalling lies – more, I can’t say, owing to the censorship. If I can get back in August I hope to have a book ready for you about the beginning of next year.[4]
After Orwell returned from Spain, he elaborated his commitment to Socialism by writing the essay/pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn, Socialism and the English Genius. Orwell's essay was not just a knee-jerk reaction to the war. Gregory Claeys writes, "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 carried forward). Third, Orwell argued that 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."[5]
Orwell is crystal clear that the only way to beat the fascists was for the working class to make the war a revolutionary one. 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 power shift. 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. Ordinary people want a conscious, open revolt 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 to break the grip of the monied class. England has got to assume its real shape. The England that is only beneath the surface, in the factories and the newspaper offices, in the aeroplanes and the submarines, has got to take charge of its destiny."
Stansky spends a fair amount of time and space writing about Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn essay. It is then all the more bizarre that he could conclude on page 73 of his book that Orwell disdained theory and had an empirical outlook. He further elaborates that Orwell was part of an unbroken radical tradition. This is a line that is perpetrated by the Pseudo Lefts, who see the working class as inherently radical and in no need of a revolutionary perspective. It must be said that the paragraph looks out of place from the rest of the book. It seems like another writer might have inserted it.
Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the defeat 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".
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."
Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, "In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky's Life of Stalin (1941): "I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin's childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin" by Stalin. The earlier parts were "particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky's assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book."
Remarkably, the political discussion over Orwell's opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the Uk Socialist Equality Party,[6] 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 anticommunist propaganda.
Marsden made the point that The co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposiiton 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.
As the Marxist writer Fred Mazelis wrote, “The Trotskyists showed that there was a socialist alternative to Stalinism and that the bourgeois-democratic regimes headed by Churchill and Roosevelt, the same regimes which praised the Soviet government at the time of the Moscow Trials and were its allies during WWII, and whose predecessors had intervened to destroy the Russian Revolution, were no defenders of democracy at all. Those who today praise Orwell as a solitary opponent of Stalinist are the same ones who deliberately censor any mention of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.”
Notes
A Link to the Debate over Animal Farm.
https://www.tiktok.com/@sep_uk/video/7386965563416775969?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc
[1] https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html
[2] In defence of George Orwell- https://www.thearticle.com/in-defence-of-george-orwell
[3] The Collected Non-Fiction: Essays, Articles, Diaries and Letters, 1903-1950
[4] Orwell in Spain-by George Orwell- bookreadfree.com/412706/10147298
[5] "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
[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/01/dmho-j01.html
The Sisterhood: Big Brother is watching. But they won't see her coming. -Katherine Bradley-Hardcover – Simon & Schuster UK (16 Mar. 2023)
It must be said Katherine Bradley's new book is a substantial improvement of what has been a relatively bad bunch. What marks Bradley’s book out is it retells the story of Julia from Orwell's book 1984 from a far more left-wing and even working-class perspective than even Orwell contemplated. Julia and her fellow members of the Sisterhood organisation try to reach a common platform with their male counterparts in the Brotherhood to launch a joint campaign against Big Brother. This cuts across the current right-wing MeToo movement's insistence on keeping women's struggle separate from their male counterparts. For them, this is just “a feminist retelling of Orwell’s beloved story, this time written from Julia’s perspective.”
Mainstream media platforms have largely ignored the book, and it has come under attack from more right media outlets, such as the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Jessa Crispin wrote in the Telegraph, “We have, whether we like it or not, entered the second wave of rewriting classic tales to align them with modern-day social sensibilities about women, people of colour, and other marginalised groups who were prevented from writing and publishing their own stories for too long. People are rewriting “Little Red Riding Hood” like Angela Carter never happened. The latest in this soon-to-be-remaindered trend is Katherine Bradley’s The Sisterhood, a feminist update on George Orwell’s more referenced than read (and let’s be honest, for good reason) 1984.”[2]
The response from working-class men and women has naturally been very different. The book has been well received. Writing on Goodreads, Shelves_by_sim wrote, “This book was riveting, haunting, exceptionally well-written, terrifying and fantastic. Not only was the story brilliant from the beginning, but the entire book was so metaphoric it made my hair rise! Julia's thought process was so cutthroat and straight to the point. The story was the right amount of intriguing, captivating and utterly horrific. The author wrote at the end that she hoped George Orwell would have approved, and I think he certainly would have. The characters! The plot twists! The hope! The shock! The horror!! I loved the read. I don't read much dystopian, but this book was phenomenal.”[3]
This is well worth a read, and previous knowledge of the work of George Orwell is a must but I would highly recommend this book.
[1] See http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/11/julia-1984-by-sandra-newman-published.html and http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html
[2] This feminist update of 1984 won’t bother Big Brother- https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/sisterhood-katherine-bradley-review-feminist-update-1984-.
[3] https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/147376927-shelves-by-sim
Julia 1984 by Sandra Newman- published by Granta (£18.99) 2023
Bethanne Patrick
“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."
George Orwell 1984
"Who controls the past controls the future: 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
” Orwell’s vision may have been inspired by the USSR, but the rest of the world has become more Orwellian in the years since. “It actually is frightening,” says Newman. “We live in a world where if you walk down the street, there are screens everywhere that are filming you, in New York at least. We’re living in a Nineteen Eighty-Four in which we get to choose the government.”
Sandra Newman
“Julia” is Sandra Newman’s retelling of George Orwell’s classic “1984. The book is well written and researched; remaking a classic is no mean feat. The Orwell Estate commissioned the book. Although The main executor of the Estate is Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, he did not make the final choice of author. It must be said that the Estate has not always acted with the utmost generosity. In 2015, it notified CafePress that it had infringed copyright by having T-shirts with 1984 written on them.
TorrentFreak, the company that produced the T-shirts, said, “First off is the irony of the Estate of George Orwell being all Orwellian, but second is that you can’t copyright a number. This is a blatant abuse of the copyright system, and, more often, it’s a ridiculous attempt to control something that needs no control. I am in the process of having this image retouched and added to the store on my current site, as I will not allow this kind of abuse of authority to stand.”[1]
Although since 2021, the Orwell Estate has lost the copyright to the book 1984, it is still a big deal that it asked the writer Sandra Newman to give the book a “feminist” slant. Newman says, “people are re-examining his legacy” in light of the MeToo movement – it seemed inevitable that somebody would produce a feminist take on Nineteen Eighty-Four, with or without the Estate’s approval, so, “I think they had decided almost that time had run out on not doing it.”
Newman is not alone in rewriting classic books. Many contemporary publishing houses are retelling classic stories from women’s perspectives. Apart from Sandra Newman’s feminist retelling of Nineteen Eighty-Four, Katherine Bradley’s novel The Sisterhood is also a feminist retake of 1984, published in March this year. Other non-Orwell books include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Helen Oyeyemi’s Snow White, and Barbara Kingsolver’s recent Charles Dickens Demon Copperhead.
But who knew there was a literary term for it? The academic term “anastrophe” refers to the technique of reversing word order in a sentence for effect. It means taking one author's work to produce another relatively new work.
The Orwell Estate must have come under extreme pressure from elements of the right-wing MeToo movement to sanction this piece of “anastrophe”. The right-wing fanatics that make up the MeToo movement believe Orwell was a misogynist. Daisy Lafarge says “Julia” would appear to “fix” Orwell’s novel for a contemporary feminist readership.
This is not to say that the book is worthless. As Natasha Walter writes in her Guardian review, “In the most basic way, Julia is a satisfying tribute act. Newman has deeply considered the language and culture of Orwell’s novel, which created its future setting by way of early 20th-century Britain and takes us carefully through its familiar landscape. Indeed, these scenes are so well-trodden for many of us that re-entering each one, from the grim windowless factory floor of the Ministry of Truth to the fragile respite of the room above the junk shop to O’Brien’s luxurious but threatening sitting room, can feel almost like encountering scenes from your memories.”
Although Newman’s new book is not a direct attack on Orwell’s reputation, it is nonetheless a by-product of a growing assault on his reputation. Newman's half-hearted defence is quite touching: “I don’t fully understand those who are judgemental to such a degree that they think somebody should be erased from the book of life posthumously,” she says. “It’s not like we’re giving money to George Orwell and rewarding him for being a misogynist.”
It seems a host of new books and articles have one goal: to bury the already long-deceased author under a mountain of dead dogs and, therefore, destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century.[2]
While Newman’s book complements the original, she has none of Orwell's highly developed political or historical understanding. At the same time, Newman writes of a future beyond Orwell’s ending. She prevents Julia from saying anything about the political developments after 1984. Newman is not interested in placing Julia in the context of today's political developments. As Lafarge writes, “The novel was written in direct response to Stalin’s regime, yet the motives of “Julia” don’t seem to be concerned with the differences between Orwell’s period and our political moment. Instead, its main project seems to be redressing the gender balance in Orwell’s fiction. As a result, claims for its “timeliness” can only lead to vague generalisations about women’s oppression rather than examining the political structures imposing it. For contemporary readers, whose reproductive rights are being encroached on by the right, the novel’s simplistic depiction of amalgamated socialist evils may feel somewhat out of step with present affairs.”[3]
George Orwell’s “1984” was published in 1949 with its Newspeak and Ministries of Truth, Peace, Love and Plenty, “doublethink” — “Truth is Hate, Peace is Hate. Love is Hate” — “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” we are back with a contemporary bang. It does not take much imagination to easily recognise a description of “Oceania” or any of the terms above as having a very contemporary resonance. The futuristic dystopia immortalised by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four exists in today's capitalist society.
Richard Mynick is spot on when he writes, “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 realised 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 emphasise 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.”[4]
Newman has written an interesting and competent book but does not have a single inch of subversiveness. In this age, to be subversive is to be revolutionary. As Richard Mynick writes, “Early in the novel, Winston undertakes to commit a subversive act: he begins writing a personal diary. He wistfully addresses it: “To the future or the past, to a time when thought is free.” Orwell has elsewhere been credited with “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Assaulted by the Newspeak of the US political class, we manifestly live in a time of universal deceit. We are all Winston Smith and must look to revolutionary acts of telling the truth to light the way to a time when thought is free.”
[1] George Orwell's estate denies 'Big Brother values' after challenge to 1984 merchandise-https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/28/george-orwell-estate-disputes-allegations-orwellian-cafepress
[2] See book review-Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/2023/09/wifedom-by-anna-funder-penguin-books.html
[3] A New, Feminist Retelling of ‘1984’-www.nytimes.com/2023/10/24/books/review/julia-sandra-newman.html
[4] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010Richard Mynick- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html
Wifedom by Anna Funder-Penguin Books Ltd, £20
“It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
“There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.”
— Oscar Wilde From the Preface of The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.”
“ Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.”
Proverbs 26:4-5
This is a very bad book. It is both tedious and confusing, which takes some doing. Funder’s main aim seems to be to destroy the reputation of one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. The book is neither a biography nor a novel. Large swathes of the book are completely made up, and her conclusions are predicated on using just six letters written by Eileen O'Shaughnessy to a friend.
While stating Orwell was her “hero," Funder uses him as a conduit for her attack on “the Patriarchy, " which she does not define or offer any objective or scientific evaluation of the term. Far from “fixing sexual relations”, Funder and her allies in the #MeToo movement are out to destroy any progress made over the last 100 years and further muddle one of the most complex relationships among humans.
If this was not bad enough, the book has encouraged an avalanche of articles[1] that labelled Owell a sexual predator who preyed on vulnerable women, stole their ideas and used them to write books.
Despite the tedious and confusing nature of the book, Funder does, on a limited basis, rescue George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, from the condescension of history. O'Shaughnessy was a highly intelligent and complex woman who has been largely airbrushed out of history. Her relationship with Orwell, both sexually and politically, was complicated. Their marriage was an “open “one, and both had affairs. According to Guardian journalist Rachel Cooke, “When she (O'Shaughnessy) followed him to Spain in 1937, where he was fighting the fascists during the civil war, she had a fling with his commander, George Kopp, while he was away at the front. Other affairs would follow.”[2]
Funder has an unhealthy interest in the sex life of both Orwell and, to a lesser extent, O'Shaughnessy, much to the detriment of the complex political relationship between the two. It is no accident that Funder started her book in 2017, which was the beginning of the right-wing MeToo# movement. One of the primary roles of the book seems to be, in the words of Vladimir Lenin, “to shout down the truth,[3] to prevent a more objective account of Orwell’s work and his relationship with O'Shaughnessy from being heard. Funder and others drown the truth in a torrent of abuse and shouts to prevent an open elucidation of the facts.
As Rebecca Solnit points out, “Being a moralist is a particularly fun and easy pursuit when it comes to the past because pretty much everyone from the past comes up short when measured by present-day standards. Virtually no one in 1973, let alone 1923, had 2023 values about race, gender, sexuality and the rest, any more than they had search engines or Twitter accounts. It’s not our individual virtue, but our collective receipt of humane and egalitarian ideas worked out in recent decades that gives us our presumably splendid present-day beliefs.”[4]
It seems clear that Eileen shared a significant amount of Orwell’s political beliefs. Travelling to Spain with him as both wife and comrade took enormous courage and political agreement. In some respects, she seemed far more alert to the dangers of the Fascists and the Stalinists when it came to their attempts to kill them both.
One of the more outlandish accusations supported in the book and made by a few other writers is that Orwell “stole” the ideas for his two major works, Animal Farm and 1984, from Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Although you do not see this in the book, it would appear that Orwell had a dialectical relationship with his wife. Like all great writers, if someone has a better idea, you turn it into a piece of art or, in this case, two of the greatest books of the 20th Century. If anything, Orwell’s 1984 was heavily influenced by the novel We, written by the Russian Yevgeny Zamyatin in 1934, which Funder does not care to mention in case it interferes with her hatchet job on Orwell.
In other words, it has been standard practice for authors the “steal” from others. As Sir Isaac Newton said, If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Orwell saw further than O'Shaughnessy and, for that matter, Yevgeny Zamyatin
One of the more disturbing aspects of this slandering of Orwell is that it has gone largely unanswered. Oliver Lewis from St Catherine's College, Oxford, is the only brave soul to stick his head above the parapet. Writing on the Times Literary Supplement’s (TLS) letter page, Lewis wrote, “Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s school poem about an authoritarian future may have been a contribution to the concepts in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it is not possible to argue that Orwell’s most significant work was simply the genius of others. I am concerned that, by assuming that the sum of Orwell’s work is ascribable to other people – who all happen, in the view of Eileen M. Hunt (August 11), to be women – some observers are depriving the author of the right to respect that he and his work deserve. Hunt makes a plea for “argument and significance” in newly published works about Orwell, but seemingly only when they comply with her theory-driven narrative of the world. This is clearly one based on gender, namely her belief in the “patriarchy” (of which, as a male, she accuses me of being a part, as the author of one of the books under review, The Orwell Tour: Travels through the life and work of George Orwell).[5]
Another disturbing aspect of this book is the absence of any analysis by Funder of any of Orwerll’s major works. Take, for instance, one of Orwell’s most important works, Homage Catalonia. Aside from Funder intimating that Orwell had homosexual tendencies, she says nothing of worth about this great book. As the Marxist writer Vicky Short points out, “ George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an inspiring book by a gifted and honest writer committed to exposing the truth. Written in 1937, it is a moving account of the heroic revolutionary struggle of the Spanish people against fascism and Socialism. Above all, it provides irrefutable proof by an independent living witness to the crimes committed by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Spain and its betrayal of the Spanish Revolution. Orwell’s account was a vindication of the analysis that had been made by Leon Trotsky and the International Left Opposition to the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[6]
Reading this book left a bad taste in my mouth. Aside from it being both tedious and confusing, Funder's main purpose seems to lead a right-wing attack on the work and character of George Orwell using the cover of a biography of Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She has merely made a literary fool of herself and all those who have written glowing reviews of a very bad book.
[1] See-The biography that destroys George Orwell: from thief of ideas to sexual predator www.tellerreport.com/life
[2] Eileen: The Making of George Orwell by Sylvia Topp – review- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/10/eileen-the-making-of-george-orwell-sylvia-topp-review
[3] A Partnership of Lies- www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/13c.htm
[4] George Orwell in an age of moralists- Should we stop measuring the great English writer by today’s standards?
[5] https://www.the-tls.co.uk/categories/regular-features/letters-to-the-editor/
[6] George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution
April 11 2002
On Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Biography (Books about Books) Hardcover – by D.J. Taylor- Abrams Press; 1st edition (October 31 2019)
"the day I joined the militia…he was probably a Trotskyist or an anarchist, and in the peculiar conditions of our time, when people of that sort are not killed by the Gestapo, they are usually killed by the GPU".
George Orwell
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."― George Orwell, Animal Farm
"Who controls the past controls the future. 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
D J Taylor's book is a useful but somewhat politically limited biography of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's book and his previous masterpiece Animal Farm are correctly seen as "key texts necessary for an understanding of the twenty-first century." Taylor concentrates mainly on the making of the novel, trying to find out how and why Orwell wrote it.
Orwell took five years to write his last book and was already very ill during its gestation period. Written in seclusion on the windswept Isle of Jura, off Scotland's coast, he died less than a year after it was published in 1949. Taylor writes, "By writing about the terrors that obsessed him, he had got them out of his system. 1984 is a devastating analysis of the corruption of language and dystopian horror world…and more."
Taylor believes that Orwell's idea for 1984 came from his study of The 1943 Allied leaders' Tehran Conference, which according to Taylor, gave "his consciousness a decisive kick." Maybe it did, or perhaps it did not. But Taylor misses the point. Orwell's 1984 attempts to come to terms with Stalinism's betrayal of the Russian and Spanish revolutions. To give his book clarity and accuracy, Orwell carried out extensive research. One important influence was Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.[1] Orwell did not live to see how important the book would become. It sold over 40 million copies and is as contemporary today as when it was written.
Orwell died in January 1950. One consequence of his early death was that he could not defend his work or prevent it from being used by right-wing ideologues in Europe and the United States for their ideological crusade. As was said in the opening of this review, Taylor's biography of 1984 is useful but limited. The same can be said about his biography of Orwell despite winning the Whitbread Book Award in 2003.
Missing from both books is an accurate political evaluation of George Orwell himself. Orwell was part of a generation of workers and intellectuals who moved sharply to the left in the 1930s in response to the Depression, the rise of Nazism in Germany and the growing struggles of the working class. While Orwell looked to the Soviet Union for leadership, very early on, Orwell saw that the Stalin regime had nothing to do with Socialism and was betraying the ideals of the 1917 Revolution.
From the late 1930s onwards, he described himself as a Democratic Socialist, but he was mostly a centrist politically wavering between reform and revolution. He detested inequality and, on numerous occasions, favoured the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system. This sentiment was expressed in his book 1984, and Orwell's main character Winston had a broadly sympathetic and hopeful attitude towards the working class or, as he says, the "proles."
In the book, 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 up 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."[2]
Orwell was never a Marxist but was influenced by Marxist writers such as Leon Trotsky. I have not been able to ascertain if Orwell read Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, but he certainly knew what was in it. But as Fred Mazelis writes, "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 criticizing Trotsky's merciless critique of Stalinism as "sectarian." In Spain, the POUM played a similar role, giving crucial support to 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."
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".[3]
Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refutes 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…What I was trying to say was, "You can't have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship."[4]
Several short-sighted and stupid ideologues, both left and right, saw that the novel's police state had an uncanny resemblance to Stalin's USSR and accused Orwell of being an anti-communist but as Richard Mynick points out, "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."[5]
Despite having serious political differences with Leon Trotsky, there is no doubt that Orwell respected and was heavily influenced by the writings of Trotsky. As Jeffrey Meyers writes in his not-too-friendly essay on Trotsky and Orwell, "In May 1946 Orwell tried to persuade his publisher Fredric Warburg to publish the English edition of Trotsky's Life of Stalin (1941): "I have read a good deal of it, mostly the bits dealing with Stalin's childhood, with the civil war and with the alleged murder of Lenin" by Stalin. The earlier parts were "particularly interesting because they demonstrate the difficulty of establishing any fact about a public figure who has been a subject for propaganda. It might be worth trying to get a little more information about the circumstances of Trotsky's assassination, which may have been partly decided on because of the knowledge that he was writing this very book."[6]
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 Newsinger correctly points out, "Taylor's achievement in his volume 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 of the 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!".[7]
It is not in the realms of possibility in this review to give justice to what was Orwell's legacy. His most important work concerned the question of what Stalinism was and how to fight it. His most important books satirized the Stalinist political regime and warned of the dangers of totalitarianism. If you ignore the rubbish about him being a reactionary defender of the status quo or even an anti-communist, a systematic study of his most important works reveals a far more nuanced and complex individual. He was very much a product of his time. An old Russian proverb[8] once said, "It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens, but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles". George Orwell remains an eagle.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
[2] 1984, George Orwell
[3] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/
[4] Letter to Dwight Macdonald,George Orwell
[5] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s-1984-wsws.org
[6] https://orwellsociety.com/orwell-and-trotsky/
[7] https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/
[8]In criticizing Rosa Luxemburg Lenin once quoted two simple lines from a Russian proverb: “It sometimes happens to eagles that they descend lower than chickens but chickens never succeed In mounting as high as eagles”, and he added, “she was and remains an eagle”.
George Orwell-(1903-1950) At Notting Hill
One of my favourite walks is from my home through the Portobello market up to Notting Hill Gate. Once you fight past the tourists, it is a pleasant stroll. A few years ago, I spotted a blue plaque on the side of a house. To my amazement, it was where the novelist George Orwell lived in 1927. The author of Animal Farm and 1984 lived at number 22 Portobello Road.
To my disappointment, the great man never wrote anything worthwhile staying at the house except for a few articles. But it did inspire him to write some important stuff in the early 1930s. According to Gordon Bowker, “In late 1927, his friend Ruth Pitter, the poet, found him an unheated attic at 22 Portobello Road, a short walk from his old home at Notting Hill Gate. The room was so cold that he had to warm his hands over a candle-flame before he could start writing in the morning.
From this icy cell, he set out in old clothes to mingle with the tramps and down-and-outs who slept along the Embankment, in common lodging-houses and ‘spikes’, the casual wards of workhouses. Most of these spikes and lodging-houses (or ‘kips’) have long gone, though a few old workhouse buildings survive, often as NHS hospitals. It was from a kip in Lambeth that he tramped down to Kent to go hop-picking among the East Enders and gipsy families who migrated there every year for a working holiday. This experience was recaptured in his first article for the New Statesman in October 1931 and lay at the heart of his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter.[1]
As I said, Notting Hill is a great attraction for tourists looking for a door that does not exist and a bookshop that does not exist except in the film. As I walked by Orwell’s house last week, two young women, whom I assumed were tourists, took a photo outside the house. I guessed they had not spotted the blue plaque, and I was correct. They were even more surprised when I told them who had lived there. I asked one girl if she had read him, and she replied only 1984. I asked her where she was from, and she said Spain. I did not have the energy to tell her that Orwell had fought Fascism in her country. Or that, in my opinion, Homage To Catalonia is his greatest book.
[1] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/articles/gordon-bowker-orwells-london/
A Rebel's Guide to George Orwell – by John Newsinger-Published
by Bookmarks
December 10 2020.
"If there was
hope, it must lie in the proles... Everywhere stood the same solid
unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and child-bearing, toiling from
birth till death and still singing. You were the dead; theirs was the future.
But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind."
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 points out "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]
Stalinism's betrayal of the Spanish revolution had a massive
impact on Orwell and led to certain disorientation and confusion, which
showed up in his later writings, particularly his work on war and nationalism.
His experience of Revolutionary Spain would move him further to the left.
Homage to Catalonia, written about the events in Spain, is arguably his most
important book and the key event in Orwell's political life.
Suffice to say this book came under ferocious attack from
Stalinists around the world. In fact, they still attack it even today. The
English historian Eric Hobsbawm. 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 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. Although 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 the work and legacy of such an important literary
and political figure. 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 he compiled 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
that had been 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. His work should be studied and
critiqued but he was an intrasif=gent 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
[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
The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and England in the 21st Century. Tristram Hunt-Winchester University in 2016.
