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
