George Orwell and the Problem of Anti Stalinism: A Marxist Reassessment
The claim that George Orwell served as a “left-wing gatekeeper” who “vociferously opposed actual socialism” and was thus a “traitor to socialism” has some historical basis. However, as the document emphasises, this is “a significant and genuinely complex question that requires a careful, historically informed answer.” While there is some truth to the accusation, it is part of a broader political and theoretical confusion—one that sheds more light on the ideological landscape of the twentieth century than on Orwell’s personal shortcomings.
This response traces Orwell’s political evolution to better understand the nature of his anti-Stalinism, the boundaries of his theoretical development, and why his work ultimately supported imperialist interests despite his proclaimed socialist beliefs. The argument aligns with the view of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), which rejects the simplistic dichotomy of viewing Orwell as either a hero or a traitor and instead advocates a dialectical analysis of his complex legacy.
I. Orwell’s Political Crime: Collaboration with the British State
Any comprehensive Marxist analysis must confront the most damaging event in Orwell’s political history. In 1949, while gravely ill and just a year before his death, Orwell submitted a list of individuals sympathetic to Stalinism to the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD). The document states: “Orwell compiled a list of roughly 130 intellectuals… and passed approximately 35 of those names to the Information Research Department.” This act—regardless of Orwell’s personal motives—constitutes a political capitulation to imperialism. As Fred Mazelis observes: “He was willing to form a political alliance with British imperialism… This decision revealed his rejection of Marxism and a genuinely revolutionary perspective.”
From a Marxist perspective, collaborating with an imperialist propaganda machine is a grave political offence, not a minor mistake. It positioned Orwell clearly on the side of the bourgeois state during the Cold War’s rise as a worldwide ideological push against socialism. Later, Western propagandists exploited Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four to falsely link socialism with totalitarianism, worsening the reactionary impact of this choice.
II. The Limits of the Indictment: Stalinism Is Not Socialism
Labelling Orwell simply as a “traitor to socialism” overlooks a crucial distinction in Marxist analysis: the difference between Stalinism and socialism. Orwell’s opposition to Stalinism was not only justified but also, in some ways, brave. His book, Homage to Catalonia, is one of the earliest and most explicit critiques of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinist machine during the Spanish Civil War. As the essay highlights: “Orwell, to his credit, was neither a dupe of Stalinism nor a bourgeois liberal defender of the Moscow regime.” In this regard, Orwell aligned more closely with the truth than most Western intellectuals of his era, who either capitulated to Stalinist defences or supported the Popular Front’s class-collaborationist policies.
The issue was not Orwell’s anti-Stalin stance itself, but rather the absence of a Marxist theoretical framework capable of clearly distinguishing Stalinism from socialism. His political ties—including Britain’s Independent Labour Party and Spain’s POUM—were centrist groups that fluctuated between revolutionary rhetoric and accommodation within the Popular Front. As I mentioned, “Orwell’s anti-Stalinism was based more on emotion and sentiment than on scientific conviction.” This theoretical deficiency made Orwell susceptible to Cold War ideological pressures, where anti-Stalinism was increasingly controlled by the bourgeoisie.
III. The False Binary: Stalinism vs Bourgeois Democracy
The article highlights Orwell’s main political tragedy: being caught in the misleading binary that shaped twentieth-century ideological debates. “You dislike Stalin? Then you must support Churchill, Roosevelt, and NATO.” This dichotomy of Stalinism versus bourgeois democracy was actively promoted by Western imperial powers. Orwell, without a revolutionary Marxist viewpoint, eventually embraced this framework. Consequently, he drifted rightward politically, not for personal gain but due to theoretical confusion.
In contrast, the Fourth International proposed a third camp: an independent revolutionary movement representing the international working class. The document highlights that “Those who today praise Orwell as a solitary opponent of Stalinism… censor any mention of Trotsky, the Left Opposition and the Fourth International.” Orwell never understood this alternative. His anti-Stalinism, detached from Marxist theory, was co-opted into imperialism’s ideological framework.
IV. The Irony of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty‑Four
The article reveals a significant irony: Orwell emphasised that Nineteen Eighty-Four was “NOT intended as an attack on socialism.” Instead, it served as a warning against the bureaucratic distortion of socialism—a problem seen in fascism, Stalinism, and possibly Western capitalism. As noted in the text, “His novel… is a critique of unaccountable elite power in general, including capitalist power.”
Since Orwell lacked a clear Marxist analysis of bureaucracy, class, and the state, his work was frequently appropriated by the forces he sought to critique. During the Cold War, the establishment transformed 1984 into a symbol of opposition to socialism, diverging from Orwell’s true intent. This highlights a political lesson: without a strong theoretical basis, even sincere socialist critiques can be hijacked by reactionary groups.
Conclusion: Orwell’s Tragedy and the Necessity of Marxist Theory
The document concludes—and this rewrite confirms—that Orwell was not merely a treacherous figure but a deeply confused socialist whose mistakes stemmed from a lack of theoretical understanding rather than malicious intent. “Sentiment, moral outrage, and literary talent are no substitute for the scientific socialism that Trotsky embodied.” Orwell’s life shows that anti-Stalinism, unless based on Marxist theory and the Fourth International’s revolutionary program, can be misused to serve imperialism. Therefore, his legacy is not one of moral caution against individual betrayal but a historical defence of the importance of revolutionary theory, clear programmatic goals, and the active political engagement of the working class.
George Orwell, Anti Stalinism, and the Politics of Appropriation: A Marxist Reassessment of John Rodden, Fred Mazelis, and the Historiography of “Orwell
1. Introduction: The Problem of “Orwell”
Few twentieth-century writers have been as extensively appropriated, repurposed, and wielded as ideological tools as George Orwell. Today, his name is less linked to a particular historical figure and more as a symbolic term within the political lexicon of the capitalist West: “Orwellian” surveillance, propaganda, and authoritarianism. This term functions as a universal shorthand for political evil, used effortlessly by liberals, conservatives, libertarians, and even security agencies. This broad usage is no accident but the result of a long, deliberate process of cultural shaping that has transformed Orwell from a nuanced democratic socialist into a Cold War icon of anti-communism and a moral voice against “totalitarianism” in all its forms.
John Rodden’s *Becoming George Orwell: Life and Letters, Legend and Legacy* offers a nuanced look at Orwell’s changing reputation. His key point—that there are “two Orwells,” the historical figure and the posthumous icon—is convincing and well-supported. Rodden tracks Orwell’s reputation from the Book-of-the-Month Club’s promotion of *Animal Farm* to the CIA’s influence in the film adaptation, showing how cultural bodies shape political meanings. Despite thorough archival work, Rodden’s perspective remains politically limited. By focusing mainly on how audiences received Orwell’s work, he subtly endorses the liberal view that Orwell’s politics were always consistent, and that the Cold War distorted them. This assumption is weak analytically and overlooks important questions a Marxist approach would raise.
This question is simple: why did the ruling class easily embrace Orwell? Why did Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four become key texts in Western anti-communism? Why has Orwell’s name been turned into a tool within the ideological weapons of the very system he aimed to oppose? These questions extend beyond cultural history alone. They require a political analysis of Orwell’s personal beliefs, contradictions, and limitations.
Fred Mazelis and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) provide an important correction here. Mazelis’s critique of Orwell’s anti-Stalinism—particularly in “George Orwell and the British Foreign Office”—challenges the liberal myth about Orwell that has persisted since the 1950s. For Mazelis, Orwell’s political evolution is more about unresolved contradictions than heroic dissent. Although Orwell’s opposition to Stalinism was genuine and courageous, it was not based on a revolutionary Marxist worldview. His political associations—the ILP in Britain and the POUM in Spain—aligned him with centrist groups that rejected Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism and, in effect, supported the Popular Front. As Mazelis notes, Orwell’s connection to the working class was “more based on emotion and sentiment than on scientific conviction.” Thus, he was opposed to Stalinism but did not fully support the revolutionary alternative of the Fourth International.
This article argues that Orwell’s work is susceptible to right-wing co-optation not due to misinterpretation, but because of the inherent ambiguities in his political position. The Cold War did not distort Orwell’s ideas; rather, it selectively highlighted certain aspects of his writings. The ruling elite did not need to distort Orwell’s anti-Stalinist views; they just had to disconnect them from his broader socialist beliefs, which Orwell himself could never fully articulate. Consequently, Orwell’s ideological legacy is closely linked to the political boundaries within which he operated.
The argument is supported by comparing three historiographical traditions: Rodden’s cultural-historical approach, which examines how “Orwell” became a symbolic figure; the mainstream liberal and social-democratic perspective, seeing Orwell as a moral witness and democratic socialist; and the Marxist analysis by Mazelis and the WSWS, which situates Orwell’s anti-Stalinism within the wider context of the international socialist movement’s political crisis.
These traditions are more than just different interpretations; they are rooted in conflicting ideological theories. Rodden views ideology as its reception, the mainstream perceives it as a moral stance, and Mazelis regards it as a political position. Only the political line can explain Orwell’s internal political contradictions and the way his work has been used externally.
The significance of this analysis extends beyond Orwell himself. The discussion of Orwell’s legacy primarily centres on interpretations of socialism, anti-Stalinism, and the history of revolutionary Marxism. Clarifying Orwell’s role against liberal mythmaking doesn’t imply portraying him as a revolutionary—since he was not— but rather involves situating his work within the political chaos that shaped his experiences and outcomes. Orwell’s tragedy isn’t being misunderstood but being politically stuck: caught between a Stalinism he truly hated and a revolutionary path he couldn’t pursue. This article aims to highlight an alternative focus in Orwell studies. Only through this can we fully grasp Orwell’s work, legacy, and the political uses to which they have been subjected.
2. Rodden’s “Two Orwell’s”: Reputation, Myth, and Cultural Construction
John Rodden’s *Becoming George Orwell* offers the most thorough exploration of Orwell’s evolution from a specific historical figure to a lasting cultural icon. His central idea—the distinction between Orwell the person and “Orwell” the myth—is more than just stylistic; it’s a methodological stance. This approach allows him to examine Orwell through the lens of the sociology of reputation, highlighting that his importance is shaped not only by his political beliefs but also by the institutional and ideological forces that have invoked his name since he died in 1950. Consequently, Rodden’s work resonates with reception studies inspired by Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, and the Birmingham School, albeit without their Marxist perspective. For Rodden, “Orwell” functions as a cultural artefact, a symbolic resource, and a site of ideological contest.
Rodden’s key empirical insights include a detailed examination of how Animal Farm integrated into American culture. He discusses its promotion by the Book-of-the-Month Club, how anti-communist liberals embraced it, and the CIA’s covert funding of its 1954 animated adaptation. Additionally, he shows that Nineteen Eighty-Four was seen not just as a socialist warning about bureaucracy but as a universal symbol of “totalitarianism,” a concept that during the Cold War blurred the distinctions between Stalinism and fascism. Rodden’s analysis also highlights how Orwell’s essays were selectively included in anthologies, how his letters were curated, and how politicians from various ideologies used his image. Through his analysis, Orwell serves as a lens for understanding Cold War cultural politics.
Rodden’s framework, while sophisticated, suffers from a key theoretical flaw: it views appropriation as happening after the author’s death, overlooking its reliance on the original work’s political context. His “two Orwells” model posits a distinct separation between the historical Orwell and the symbolic “Orwell,” allowing him to set aside Orwell’s anti-Stalinist stance to concentrate on later interpretations. This methodological choice has significant consequences. It causes Rodden to perceive Cold War-era uses of Orwell as distortions, misinterpretations, or cultural recontextualizations, rather than as expressions of contradictions already present in Orwell’s own political beliefs.
Rodden intentionally avoids scrutinising Orwell’s political views on the grounds of the liberal belief that Orwell’s anti-Stalinism and his concept of “democratic socialism” are fundamentally valid. This view holds that the Cold War highlighted certain aspects of Orwell’s work while hiding others. Such an approach allows Rodden to maintain a neutral stance, positioning himself as a credible historian rather than an ideological critic. However, this also prevents him from addressing a key question: why was Orwell’s work so easily co-opted by groups he opposed? While Rodden can explain how this appropriation occurs, he struggles to justify why it remains politically feasible.
Rodden’s analysis of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four highlights this limitation. He thoroughly documents their Cold War usage but doesn’t investigate why these works, rather than titles like The Road to Wigan Pier or Homage to Catalonia, became Orwell’s main texts. Although he mentions the CIA’s role in the Animal Farm film, he doesn’t explore the political reasons that made the text suitable for such intervention. He claims that American audiences primarily knew Orwell through his anti-totalitarian works, but overlooks how Orwell’s political ambiguities influenced this perception.
Rodden’s lack of mention of Trotsky is especially revealing. In a study examining Orwell’s ideological perspectives, Trotsky—the prominent opponent of Stalinism—is not just absent but fundamentally omitted. He is only referenced as a name Orwell or his contemporaries mention, never as a political alternative that could shed light on Orwell’s own boundaries. This omission is common in mainstream Orwell scholarship but significantly weakens Rodden’s analysis, which seeks to explore Orwell’s ideological applications. By ignoring Trotsky and the revolutionary tradition Stalinism aimed to erase, it becomes impossible to fully grasp Orwell’s stance or properly analyze his ideological position.
Rodden’s “two Orwells” model shifts focus twice: it attributes the political contradictions in Orwell’s writings to the cultural forces that shaped his posthumous fame, while also marginalising Trotsky and the Fourth International’s revolutionary alternative. This creates a thorough history of Orwell’s reputation but offers limited political analysis. Although Rodden discusses how Orwell became a Cold War icon, he does not explore why Orwell’s work was so easily transformed in this way.
3. The Mainstream Liberal and Social‑Democratic Orwell
While Rodden’s work provides the most detailed effort to contextualise Orwell’s posthumous reputation historically, the mainstream liberal and social-democratic traditions most frequently aim to maintain its stability. From Bernard Crick’s “George Orwell: A Life” (1980) to D. J. Taylor’s “Orwell: The Life” (2003), and from Michael Shelden’s more narrative biography to Christopher Hitchens’ provocative “Why Orwell Matters,” the dominant scholarly and journalistic consensus largely remains unchanged: Orwell is regarded as a principled democratic socialist, a moral critic opposing totalitarianism, and a writer whose political integrity exceeds the ideological conflicts of his time. This consensus persists strongly, not because it is strictly historically accurate, but because it plays a specific ideological role within the political culture of the capitalist West.
The common view considers Orwell as a figure of moral clarity amidst the chaos of ideology. His socialism is seen not as a fixed Marxist theory but as an ethical position based on a rejection of injustice, compassion for the oppressed, and a dedication to fairness and decency. This form of ethical socialism stands in contrast to Stalinism’s bureaucratic nightmare, which is regarded as an inevitable result of rigid ideology and revolutionary zeal. In this view, Orwell serves as the conscience of the Left, highlighting the risks of ideological extremism and advocating for moderation, diversity, and parliamentary democracy.
This interpretation offers political benefits, allowing liberal scholars to view Orwell as aligned with their values while distancing him from the revolutionary roots that shaped early-twentieth-century socialism. Likewise, social democrats can present Orwell as a precursor to their reformist ideas, often ignoring his profound disillusionment with the Labour Party and his recognition of the limitations of parliamentary socialism. Furthermore, the broader ideological apparatus of the capitalist state can leverage Orwell as a tool to oppose any radical critique, whether Marxist, anarchist, or anti-imperialist.
This analysis centres on selective emphasis. Mainstream scholars often focus on Orwell’s critique of Stalinism, frequently ignoring his criticisms of British imperialism, class society, and capitalist exploitation. They celebrate *Animal Farm* and *Nineteen Eighty-Four* as universal warnings against totalitarianism but tend to minimise *The Road to Wigan Pier* and *Homage to Catalonia*, which expose capitalism’s brutality and the Popular Front’s betrayals. Moreover, they highlight Orwell’s essays on language and politics while overlooking his more radical views on revolutionary change.
This focus excludes Trotsky and the Fourth International. Crick’s biography portrays Trotsky as a distant figure, briefly mentioning him without emphasising his role as a political thinker whose ideas could illuminate Orwell’s perspectives. Taylor’s biography is even more evasive, presenting Trotskyism as a marginal sect rather than a significant revolutionary alternative to Stalinism. Hitchens, despite his rhetorical skill, reduces Trotsky to an emblem of ideological excess, linking him to Orwell only as victims of Stalinist repression. Consequently, the revolutionary Marxist critique of Stalinism becomes obscured, and Orwell’s anti-Stalinism is detached from the political tradition that could have given it coherence.
This omission is intentional, not accidental. It emphasises a core idea: viewing Trotsky as a viable political choice requires us to see Stalinism not as an unavoidable outcome of Marxism but as a particular historical decline. This means recognising that the crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy are not inherently socialist but are committed by a counter-revolutionary elite that seized the gains of 1917. Furthermore, it shows that Orwell’s anti-Stalin position, though morally compelling, lacked the analytical depth and political strategy that Trotsky provided.
The dominant tradition avoids admitting this because it would diminish Orwell’s influence in liberal political culture. Orwell is appreciated because he appears to critique totalitarianism without undermining the legitimacy of capitalist democracy. He can be invoked by both the Left and the Right, embodying a brand of socialism that fits within the existing system — one motivated by sentiment and ethics instead of revolutionary strategy.
Mainstream scholars stick to calling Orwell a “democratic socialist’ because the term is broad enough to encompass his ethical views while excluding revolutionary Marxism that might challenge liberal democracy. This perspective allows Orwell to be regarded as a critic of injustice without supporting any movement that aims to overthrow the existing system. Consequently, Orwell is viewed as a ‘safe socialist’—a figure respected but not necessarily endorsed.
A closer look reveals complexity in Orwell’s views. His political writings reveal deep ambivalence and unresolved contradictions, highlighting the tension between his disdain for oppression and his difficulty articulating a clear revolutionary alternative. His socialism was sincere but lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework. His anti-Stalinist stance was courageous but lacked a solid political foundation. While his critique of totalitarianism was influential, it was not sufficiently dialectical. Calling Orwell a coherent democratic socialist wrongly implies a unified perspective that his thoughts do not actually exhibit.
A Marxist historiography should therefore reject the typical portrayal of Orwell as merely a moral witness and democratic socialist. This depiction aligns more with the ideological goals of the capitalist state than with Orwell’s actual political development. Furthermore, it is important to restore the revolutionary alternative as a central aspect of the narrative—a choice Orwell rejected and that mainstream scholars often ignore.
4. Mazelis and the WSWS: Anti‑Stalinism, Centrism, and the Revolutionary Alternative
Rodden’s work provides the most sophisticated cultural analysis of Orwell’s reputation, and the predominant liberal perspective offers a simplified, sanitised view of Orwell’s politics. Fred Mazelis and the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) offer the only approach capable of uncovering the political reasoning behind Orwell’s posthumous interpretation. While Rodden focuses on reception and mainstream narratives highlight moral character, Mazelis centres on political line—the essential element in any Marxist assessment of an intellectual’s historical importance.
Mazelis contends that Orwell’s anti-Stalinism, though courageous and sincere, lacked a basis in revolutionary Marxist ideology. Consequently, it was inherently susceptible to manipulation by the bourgeois state. This insight is a political analysis rather than a moral judgment. For Mazelis, Orwell’s ideological position consistently leans toward centrism—a hesitation to support either the Stalinist regime or revolutionary Marxists such as Trotsky and the Fourth International. It is this centrist tendency, rather than any later misinterpretation, that accounts for Orwell’s work being so effectively exploited during the Cold War.
Mazelis’ analysis begins by examining Orwell’s political affiliations. In Britain, Orwell associated with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a centrist group opposing both the reformist Labour Party and the Stalinist policies of the Communist Party, though it lacked a clear revolutionary agenda. In Spain, Orwell was involved with the POUM, which opposed Stalinism, supported the Popular Front, and rejected Trotsky’s criticism of the Soviet bureaucracy. These political connections were intentional, reflecting Orwell’s personality: principled, contrarian, and strongly supportive of the working class, but cautious of extreme theories and opposed to what he saw as ideological “sectarianism.”
Mazelis’ critique is incisive, arguing that Orwell’s ties to the working class were “more rooted in emotion and sentiment than in scientific conviction.” This doesn’t call into question Orwell’s sincerity but highlights the limits of a politics driven by moral intuition rather than revolutionary theory. While Orwell’s intense opposition to oppression was evident, his lack of a Marxist understanding of the state, class struggle, and bureaucratic decline meant his anti-Stalinism lacked political depth. He recognised the Soviet bureaucracy’s abuses but couldn’t explain their roots, condemned totalitarianism but failed to propose a revolutionary alternative.
This political flaw had real consequences. Orwell’s failure to recognise the Fourth International as the compassionate third camp, positioned between Stalinism and capitalism, confined him to the ideological framework of the Popular Front. Although he opposed Stalinism, he believed bourgeois democracy was the only viable alternative. Consequently, he later provided the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), an openly anti-communist propaganda agency, with a list of individuals suspected of Stalinist sympathies. Orwell’s collaboration with the IRD was a logical outcome of his political stance—which rejected revolutionary Marxism in favour of a “lesser evil” alternative to Stalinism—rather than a sign of personal weakness or confusion.
Mazelis’ critique of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four is based on the same logic. He argues that while these works strongly denounce bureaucratic tyranny, they lack the specific programmatic focus needed to condemn capitalist exploitation as well. Their critique of totalitarian regimes remains broad and abstract, not anchored in particular historical contexts. As a result, they can be—and have been—exploited by the bourgeois state as tools against socialism. This misapplication isn’t due to Orwell’s intent, but to his political viewpoint creating the possibility.
Mazelis’s analysis emphasises the strong link between Orwell’s political contradictions and the larger crisis affecting the international socialist movement. For Mazelis, Orwell’s centrism reflects more than a personal preference; it signals a broader political confusion stemming from the Stalinist decline of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Comintern as a revolutionary organisation. Orwell’s lack of support for the Fourth International reveals the ideological pressures of his time but also shows the limits of a politics driven by ethical instinct rather than revolutionary theory.
Mazelis’ analysis is essential to any Marxist understanding of Orwell, as it reintroduces the revolutionary viewpoint Orwell dismissed and mainstream scholars often overlook. It clarifies both Orwell’s objections and what he overlooked. Moreover, it reveals the political logic behind the ideological exploitation of Orwell’s work: rather than misrepresenting him, the ruling class has manipulated the contradictions in his own politics.
Mazelis’ framework provides the basic theory for analysing Orwell’s influence. It emphasises that discussions of Orwell’s importance are closely tied to broader debates about the meaning of socialism. Furthermore, it paves the way for the next stage of analysis by recognising that Rodden, the mainstream tradition, and Mazelis all hold fundamentally different ideas about ideology.
5. Three Theories of Ideology: Why the Historiography Cannot Be Reconciled
The earlier sections showed that Rodden, the mainstream liberal tradition, and Mazelis/WSWS hold markedly different views on Orwell’s politics and legacy. Yet, their disagreement extends beyond mere interpretation or academic focus. The core difference lies in their fundamental understanding of ideology—what it is, how it operates, and how it shapes the relationship between a writer’s work and its historical backdrop. These divergent notions are incompatible, resulting in not only contrasting views of Orwell but also entirely different analytical objects. A Marxist historiography must recognize that the field is influenced by three conflicting theories of ideology: as reception, as moral stance, and as political line. Each theory leads to a different version of Orwell, with each fulfilling a unique ideological role in the present context.
A. Rodden: Ideology as Reception
Rodden’s theory is grounded in the idea that meaning is constructed after the text’s creation, during reception, circulation, and cultural recontextualization. According to this perspective, the author’s political beliefs are less significant than the ways their work is subsequently employed; ideology operates through institutions such as publishers, cultural bureaucracies, and media networks; and the crucial phase occurs after the author’s death, when “Orwell” becomes a symbolic resource.
This theory allows Rodden to analyse Orwell’s reputation in detail, but it also overlooks the political dimensions of Orwell’s anti-Stalinism. Since ideology primarily emerges from how Orwell is perceived, the internal contradictions in Orwell’s politics are considered less important. As a result, the Cold War perspective on Orwell is viewed more as a cultural phenomenon than a purely political one. Rodden’s Orwell is therefore a passive figure, seen as a writer whose work is shaped by external influences. While this perspective helps explain how reputation operates, it does not clarify why Orwell’s work was so easily reinterpreted from the outset.
B. The Mainstream Tradition: Ideology as Moral Stance
The mainstream liberal and social-democratic tradition perceives ideology differently—as connected to personal ethics, moral clarity, and political decency rather than as a structural force. In this view, Orwell’s socialism is regarded as an ethical position rather than a set of theoretical beliefs. Anti-Stalinism is seen as a moral victory rather than a particular political stance. Any inconsistencies in Orwell’s thoughts are interpreted as signs of integrity rather than political inconsistency.
This theory allows mainstream scholars to see Orwell as a moral witness, valued for his honesty and decency. It also distances Orwell’s anti-Stalinism from the revolutionary tradition, which might have given it more coherence. By presenting ideology as a moral stance, the mainstream view elevates Orwell to a figure beyond political conflicts—a writer whose insights are widely relevant and whose warnings are timeless. This highlights Orwell’s role in liberal political culture: as a safe socialist critic of injustice who does not threaten the capitalist system. However, this perspective systematically omits Trotsky and the Fourth International, whose presence would expose the political limits of Orwell’s anti-Stalinism and demonstrate that ethical socialism alone cannot prevent bureaucratic decline.
C. Mazelis/WSWS: Ideology as Political Line
Mazelis and the WSWS follow a traditional Marxist understanding of ideology, viewing it as a reflection of one’s political stance—specifically, their position within class struggle—rather than merely perceptions or morals. In this framework, anti-Stalinism holds significance only when based on a revolutionary program. The crucial issue is not Orwell’s personal sentiments but the political alternative he offered. Additionally, centrism is not just a moderate position; it is a structural attitude that naturally results in political capitulation.
This theory clarifies why Orwell’s anti-Stalinism, even if sincere, was politically constrained. It also illustrates how the bourgeois state could adopt Orwell’s ideas. Since Orwell rejected Trotsky’s revolutionary approach, he lacked a firm foundation to oppose Stalinism beyond endorsing the “lesser evil” of bourgeois democracy. Consequently, Orwell is not merely a misinterpretation or moral observer but a complex figure reflecting the crisis within the global socialist movement. Thus, Orwell’s ideological role is closely tied to his political limitations.
D. Why These Frameworks Cannot Be Reconciled
These three interpretations of Orwell present conflicting images: Rodden’s Orwell is a cultural figure shaped by posthumous memory. The mainstream view portrays Orwell as a moral exemplar with unwavering ethical beliefs. Mazelis’ depiction shows Orwell as a centrist navigating contradictions that seem fitting. These images are incompatible because their underlying ideologies clash. Rodden’s reception-based model does not account for Orwell’s anti-Stalinist political stance. The mainstream moral narrative fails to explain the contradictions in Orwell’s politics. Similarly, the Marxist view cannot accept the liberal notion of Orwell as a straightforward democratic socialist.
A Marxist historiography should avoid attempting to unify these diverse traditions. Instead, it must recognize that discussions about Orwell’s significance fundamentally revolve around the meaning of ideology—and, by extension, the fundamental concepts of socialism, anti-Stalinism, and revolutionary politics.
6. The Structural Ambiguity of Orwell’s Politics
To grasp why Orwell’s work remains ideologically adaptable—how the Cold War state could readily utilize it and why it continues to serve as a rhetorical device for both liberalism and conservatism—we must examine the fundamental structural ambiguity in Orwell’s politics. This ambiguity wasn’t caused by personal inconsistency or internal psychological conflict. Rather, it originated from a political position that rejected Stalinism but did not endorse the revolutionary alternative presented by Trotsky and the Fourth International.
The ambiguity originated from a form of socialism rooted more in ethical sentiments than in scientific analysis, coupled with anti-Stalinism that lacked a clear program. It also involved a critique of totalitarianism that was not dialectical enough to fully understand the link between bureaucratic control and capitalist exploitation. This ambiguity manifested in three interconnected areas: Orwell’s perspective on socialism, his critique of Stalinism, and his understanding of the capitalist state.
A. Socialism as Ethical Sentiment
Orwell’s socialism was authentic and emotionally driven, grounded in a genuine connection to the working class. However, it lacked in-depth theoretical foundation. It was not founded on Marxist analysis of class struggle, the state, or capitalist accumulation. Instead, it was motivated by a moral intuition: the belief that ordinary people deserve dignity, fairness, and a decent standard of living. This ethical view of socialism gave Orwell a deep sense of injustice, but it did not provide a concrete revolutionary strategy.
This explains why Orwell was able to write *The Road to Wigan Pier*, a compelling critique of working-class poverty and bourgeois hypocrisy, without endorsing a specific plan for socialist reform. It sheds light on his criticism of the Labour Party’s cautious stance while also remaining cautious of revolutionary groups. As a result, his political writings often oscillate between radical critique and pragmatic reform. Ethical socialism, although admirable, is inherently fragile. It lacks the theoretical frameworks to analyze the state as a tool for class domination, to grasp the necessity of revolution in history, or to understand how bureaucratic systems can deteriorate. Consequently, liberalism can easily adopt it, embracing its moral critique but dismissing its political implications.
B. Anti‑Stalinism Without Revolutionary Anchoring
Orwell’s opposition to Stalin was courageous and, in many respects, ahead of its era. His experience in Spain exposed the brutal reality of the Stalinist regime, and his writings on the Moscow Trials, purges, and the suppression of POUM serve as strong condemnations of Stalinist repression. Nonetheless, Orwell’s anti-Stalin position was not based on a solid political foundation. Although he viewed Stalinism as a betrayal of socialism, he did not employ the revolutionary Marxist analysis that explains this betrayal.
Orwell’s opposition to Trotskyism was based not on an in-depth critique of Trotsky’s perspectives on the Soviet bureaucracy but on a suspicion of what he perceived as ideological “sectarianism” and a rigid, doctrinal stance among Trotskyists. This suspicion prevented Orwell from recognizing that Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism went beyond mere doctrinal disputes; it was an in-depth analysis of how the bureaucracy caused the workers’ state to decline.
Orwell opposed Stalinism but didn’t fully understand its origins. Although he recognized signs of bureaucratic tyranny and shown how totalitarian control functioned, he failed to explain why the Soviet state had transformed. This lack of insight led Orwell to be influenced by the liberal perspective that Stalinism was an inevitable outcome of revolutionary aims—an interpretation endorsed by the Cold War authorities.
C. A Critique of Totalitarianism Without a Critique of Capitalism
Orwell’s political ambiguity is most evident in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. These works critically examine bureaucratic control, surveillance, and ideological manipulation but remain open-ended politically. Their critique of totalitarianism is general and not linked to any particular historical period. While they illustrate how domination operates, they do not identify the specific class forces involved. They portray the horrors of bureaucratic regimes without distinguishing between the decline of a workers’ state and the authoritarian features of capitalist democracies.
This indeterminacy serves more than a literary purpose; it underscores the limits of Orwell’s political outlook. Lacking a Marxist critique of the capitalist state, Orwell did not recognize how thoroughly mechanisms like surveillance, propaganda, and ongoing war were woven into the fabric of liberal democracies of his time. As a result, Nineteen Eighty-Four was frequently seen as a warning primarily about Soviet totalitarianism, neglecting its implications for the United States and Britain.
The Cold War government didn’t distort Orwell’s work; rather, it exploited its ambiguity. *Animal Farm* and *Nineteen Eighty-Four* served as anti-communist instruments because they lacked a definite stance that would also criticize capitalist control. Their political ambiguity increased their usefulness for ideological aims.
D. The Logic of Appropriation
Orwell’s political ambiguity stems from a structural flaw that made it easy for the ruling class to co-opt his work. This wasn’t because Orwell was reactionary—he was not. Nor was it due to the CIA and the Book-of-the-Month Club being particularly shrewd—though they certainly were. Instead, it was because Orwell’s political framework contained an ideological gap that the bourgeois state could exploit. Ethical socialism can be absorbed by liberalism, and anti-Stalinism without a revolutionary basis can be redirected against socialism itself. A critique of totalitarianism that overlooks capitalism can be used to justify the capitalist state. This logic explains Orwell’s posthumous fate: the ruling class didn’t need to falsify Orwell, only to emphasize certain parts of his work.
7. The Revolutionary Counterfactual: The Orwell Who Never Existed
To fully grasp Orwell’s political contradictions, we must consider the elusive figure that haunts his work but never appears: the Orwell who might have embraced Trotsky and the Fourth International’s revolutionary Marxist path. This isn’t a trivial counterfactual; it serves as a tool to clarify history. Reconstructing the political worldview Orwell rejected uncovers the limits of the one he inhabited. Envisioning the Orwell who could have existed allows us to better understand the Orwell that was.
This exercise does not intend to categorize Orwell as a Trotskyist or imply he was nearing revolutionary Marxism. Historical evidence indicates Orwell strongly disliked Trotskyism, mainly because he saw it as excessively rigid and doctrinal. Nonetheless, this aversion originated from the political confusion caused by Stalinist corruption in the Soviet Union and the weakening of the Comintern as a revolutionary force. Orwell’s opposition to Trotskyism was not founded on an in-depth critique but was shaped by the ideological chaos of his time.
A revolutionary Orwell—who considers the Fourth International as the true successor of the October Revolution—would have a markedly different body of work than the one we recognize today. This Orwell would view Stalinism not as an inevitable outcome of socialism but as a bureaucratic counter-revolution. He would understand that the crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy are not based on Marxist principles but are carried out by a parasitic elite that hijacked the achievements of 1917. Moreover, he would see that fighting Stalinism requires bolstering revolutionary politics rather than abandoning them.
This recognition would have significantly altered Orwell’s key works. Instead of viewing Animal Farm as a general allegory of power’s corrupting nature, it would have been a precise critique of the specific decline of the workers’ state in history. The book would emphasize not just the deception of Stalinist leaders, but also the political motivations behind the Popular Front, the suppression of the Left Opposition, and the betrayal of the global working class. It would have endorsed the October Revolution, rather than lament its failures.
Nineteen Eighty-Four would have been quite different if it focused more on materialist views of the state rather than just philosophical ideas about power. It would have shown how both capitalist democracies and Stalinist regimes display authoritarian traits. The novel also would have pointed out that control mechanisms—like continuous warfare, ideological influence, and shaping consent—are not only used by totalitarian governments but are essential features of imperialist capitalism.
The Cold War regime would likely have struggled to confiscate these works, as they challenged both the Stalinist bureaucracy and capitalist elites. Such writings would have aligned Orwell more with revolutionary Marxism than with the liberal anti-communists who linked to him after his death. As a result, Orwell would have been viewed as a threat to the status quo rather than a symbol of its ideological triumph.
The absence of this imagined Orwell—the Orwell who never truly existed—is thus significant historically. It reveals the limits of the real Orwell’s views, showing that his political contradictions were not just personal but also structural. These contradictions arose from a stance that opposed Stalinism yet did not fully support the revolutionary alternative. This highlights that Orwell’s work, despite its impact, was shaped by the crisis within the international socialist movement and the ideological pressures of the Popular Front. Furthermore, it suggests that Orwell’s ideological arguments are closely linked to the political choices he made—and those he was unable to make.
Rebuilding the Orwell who never was involves revisiting the revolutionary vision Orwell overlooked. It requires acknowledging that the fight against Stalinism was not opposition to socialism but a struggle for it. Understanding that Orwell’s failure to see this distinction is key to grasping his work and legacy. This perspective leads to the article’s final point: the discussion about Orwell’s importance ultimately mirrors a broader debate about the meaning of socialism.
8. Conclusion: Orwell, Anti‑Stalinism, and the Meaning of Socialism
For a long time, two misconceptions have shaped the way Orwell’s history is perceived: the idealized image of Orwell as a moral figure held by liberals, and scholars’ reluctance to confront the political contradictions in his work. Rodden’s *Becoming George Orwell* provides a nuanced attempt to contextualize Orwell’s reputation after his death, but it still is influenced by the same ideological lens it seeks to critique. By framing appropriation as how Orwell’s work is received rather than how it was created, Rodden inadvertently supports the notion that Orwell’s political beliefs were consistent. and that the Cold War only distorted them. This belief is not only analytically flawed but also obscures the political reasoning behind Orwell’s enduring posthumous influence.
The mainstream liberal and social-democratic view even elevates Orwell to a secular saint of “democratic socialism.” His moral integrity is often viewed as justifying any lack of political consistency. This perspective emphasizes Orwell’s ethical values but downplays the revolutionary context necessary to understand his anti-Stalinist stance. It commends Orwell’s critiques of totalitarian regimes but neglects his criticisms of capitalism. The focus tends to be on *Animal Farm* and *Nineteen Eighty-Four*, while works like *The Road to Wigan Pier* and *Homage to Catalonia* are often overlooked. Moreover, it usually excludes Trotsky and the Fourth International, whose inclusion would highlight the shortcomings of Orwell’s ethical socialism and demonstrate that moral instincts alone cannot solve bureaucratic decline.
Conversely, Mazelis and the WSWS highlight the political element often overlooked or dismissed by Rodden and mainstream discourse. They argue that anti-Stalinism holds significance only when it’s connected to a revolutionary goal. While Orwell genuinely opposed Stalinism, he did not do so with a revolutionary purpose. His political affiliations — including the ILP and POUM — placed him among centrist groups that distanced themselves from both Stalinism and revolutionary Marxism. His resistance to Trotskyism stemmed more from a suspicion of strict ideological loyalty than from a thorough engagement with Trotsky’s ideas. Orwell’s socialism was motivated by ethics rather than theory, sentimental rather than scientific. Although his critique of totalitarianism was powerful, it lacked the dialectical nuance needed to analyze authoritarian features in capitalist democracies.
This structural ambiguity—ethical socialism without revolutionary theory, anti-Stalinism without revolutionary roots, and a critique of totalitarianism without addressing capitalism—explains why the ruling class easily co-opted Orwell’s work. The Cold War state didn’t distort Orwell; it exploited the contradictions within his politics. ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ served as anti-communist tools because they lacked a clear stance condemning capitalist domination. Orwell’s ethical socialism was compatible with liberalism, as it did not threaten capitalism. His anti-Stalinism could be used against socialism by lacking a revolutionary alternative. Similarly, his critique of totalitarianism was exploited by opponents because it didn’t fully address the link between bureaucratic control and capitalist exploitation.
Imagining an alternative Orwell—one who might have backed the Fourth International—highlights the significance of this analysis. Such an Orwell would have produced anti-Stalinist writings that the bourgeois state could not suppress. He would have supported the October Revolution while denouncing the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy. He would have viewed the fight against Stalinism as a struggle for socialism, not against it. Additionally, he would have recognized that the control mechanisms in Nineteen Eighty-Four are not exclusive to totalitarian regimes but are rooted in imperialist capitalism.
The missing version of Orwell—the one who never existed—exposes the limitations of the Orwell who did. It highlights that Orwell’s political contradictions were not just personal but structural, stemming from a stance that opposed Stalinism but did not support the revolutionary alternative. Despite his powerful work, Orwell’s writings were influenced by the crisis within the international socialist movement and the ideological pressures of the Popular Front. Additionally, his ideological perspectives are closely linked to the political decisions he made—and those he was unable to make.
A Marxist historiography should therefore reject the liberal myth that Orwell was the sole conscience of the twentieth century. It must also dismiss the academic view that Orwell’s politics were consistent or that his anti-Stalinism can be separated from the revolutionary alternative he misunderstood. Furthermore, it should reject the comforting notion that depicting Orwell’s image distorts his ideas, when in reality, it highlights the contradictions in his worldview.
The main issue isn’t simply Orwell’s intentions or interpretations, but what he couldn’t anticipate. The clear answer is that the Fourth International was the only consistent opposition to both Stalinism and capitalism in the twentieth century. Overlooking this aspect in Orwell’s history omits its core. Acknowledging it shows that the debate about Orwell’s legacy mainly hinges on the true definition of socialism.
Notes
The Spectre Haunting Orwell Studies-John Rodden-The Orwell Society Journal 27 Spring 2026
George Orwell and the “Marxist Left”
“Who Controls the Present Controls the Past…
George Orwell 1984
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”
George Orwell 1984
“All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Animal Farm
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
George Orwell
In the most recent edition of The Orwell Society Journal, John Rodden wrote an article[1] defending George Orwell from a “Never Ending Siege”. According to Rodden, no day goes by without Orwell coming under sustained attack from both left and right writers or journalists.
In the first part of his article, under the heading The Hate Campaign: From Two Minutes to a Hundred Years Rodden examines one of the more recent and sustained attacks on Orwell from the poison pen of Naoise Dolan writing in the Financial Times[2]. The FT donated an inordinate amount of space for her to bemoan Orwell’s influence: She writes, “ George Orwell died in 1950, but he’s in the newspapers nearly every day. In the past few years alone, the British press has quoted him on whether Britain is an unserious country, whether book blurbs are degenerate and why a good British pub should be revolting.
Writers ask what he would have made of the end of British coal, and repeat his counsel on how to make the perfect cup of tea. They cite him on why English people love queueing, the importance of having hobbies, and why “cancel culture” is a poor substitute for free speech. They ask what he can teach us about Israel and Palestine, and when Britain will tire of its culture wars. One might just as well ask when Britain will tire of the obligatory Orwell reference.”
Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist, while I have nothing against novelists, it would appear that Dolan has not read too much Orwell or perhaps not understood what she has read. She would also appear to be weighed down by an extraordinarily large axe, looking for a place to grind it.
Rodden breaks his article down into seven parts. In the first part, he perhaps inaccurately states that Orwell “hated the Marxist Left”. A wildly inaccurate generic term if ever I saw one. It would be an understatement to say that Rodden is loose with his wording, something that Orwell hated. Just read his essay Politics and the English Language.
The “Marxist Left “ is a vague term meaning just about every radical group under the sun. Although in the end Rodden is forced to make the distinction between the Marxist Left, by which he means the Stalinist British Communist Party, who are the Far Left, Rodden does not elaborate. The term usually denotes radical groups such as the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who do not hate Orwell; in fact, one of its leading members is an expert on Orwell.[3]
The Stalinists, on the other hand, had good reason to hate Orwell, and for more than two minutes. Orwell, who called himself a democratic socialist, first came to prominence in the 1930s for the powerful social criticism of Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. The Stalinists hated these two books. The general secretary of the British Communist Party, Harry Pollitt, accused Orwell of “slumming it” and “bourgeois snobbery”.
He wrote, “If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. If on his return from Mandalay he had bought one or two penny pamphlets on socialism and the working-class movement, what fatal experiences he could have saved himself from, because one never gets to know the movement by slumming. I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the “smell” of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. Well, pardon me if I say at once, without any working-class snobbery, that it’s a lie.”[4]
However, what put the Stalinist noses severely out of joint was the publication of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. According to Fred Mazelis: “ When Homage to Catalonia was published, Orwell was virtually ostracised for this account of the Spanish Civil War, which laid bare the Stalinists’ treachery against the Spanish and international working class. The Stalinists and their supporters were enraged by the book’s exposure of their role in strangling a genuine revolutionary movement through the same bloody methods then being utilised inside the USSR. In the ensuing years, Orwell found it increasingly difficult to get his writings published.”[5]
In section two, Spain and the Communists, Betrayal of the Left, Homage to Catalonia 1938, Rodden ends the paragraph with the strange assertion that the Russian secret police spied on Orwell and may have targeted him for elimination. Given what we know about Orwell and his wife, it is pretty clear that if Orwell’s wife had not acted when she did, they would have both been murdered by the Stalinists in Spain.
Orwell spent the last few years before his death coming to terms with the betrayal of the Russian Revolution and the rise of Stalinism. Orwell’s Animal Farm was his second attempt at reckoning with Stalinism, his first being the book Homage to Catalonia. At 120 pages, the book Animal Farm can be read on many levels. As John Newsinger points out, “The politics of the book were pretty straightforward: a capitalist farmer had been quite properly overthrown by the worker animals, and an egalitarian socialist system had been introduced on the farm. The pigs had then betrayed the revolution with the revolutionary Snowball (Trotsky) driven out and the dictator Napoleon (Stalin) establishing a murderous police state”.[6]
Right-wing ideologues have attempted to portray the book as anti-revolutionary. Orwell refuted this slander, saying, “I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down, then it would have been all right…I was trying to say, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”
Although Homage to Catalonia was a devastating exposure of the counterrevolutionary nature of the Stalinists, he was to some extent blinded by his bitter experiences with the pro-Stalinist intellectuals and the smug pro-Stalinist liberals. Although his analysis of these people was usually accurate, his method was largely a subjective one. He dismissed the historic significance of the Russian Revolution and saw nothing left to defend in this revolution.
Mazelis writes, “This finds expression in Animal Farm and especially in 1984. While there is much that is powerful in these books, Orwell’s outlook also made it possible for them to be used by the anti-communists. Stalinism itself, of course, bears the major responsibility for dragging the name of socialism through the mud.”[7]
Orwell certainly did not write 1984 to drag Socialism through the mud. Published in June 1949, it came out amid rising Cold War tensions. As Richard Mynick explains, “The novel’s police state bore an obvious resemblance to Stalin’s USSR. Coming from Orwell—a self-described democratic socialist who was deeply hostile to Stalinism—this was unsurprising. But while Orwell was too clear-sighted to conflate Stalinism with socialism (writing, for example, “My recent novel [‘1984’] is NOT intended as an attack on socialism…but as a show-up of the perversions…which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism.…”), his Cold War-era readership was often blind to this distinction. His cautionary notes (“The scene of the book is laid in Britain…to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism…could triumph anywhere”) were largely overlooked, and in the public mind, the novel’s grim prophesy (“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”) attached itself mainly to political systems seen as enemies of Western-style capitalist “democracies.”
Yet Nineteen Eighty-Four was no endorsement of the West. It posits only an unaccountable elite that rules in its interests and maintains power by taking state-run mind control to its logical extreme. It examines what’s operationally involved in compelling a population to submit to exploitative rule, without regard to the nominal form of economic organisation. Put a bit differently, the book considers the psycho-social machinery of unaccountable state power in general, regardless of whether it originates from a ruling bureaucracy or finance capital. It explores the general problem of maintaining social stability in a highly unequal society, which can be done only through some combination of repression and controlling the population’s consciousness.”[8]
In section six, The Anti Intellectual Brigade, Rodden examines E.P. Thompson’s attack on Orwell. Thompson criticised Orwell from the right, not the left; he compared Orwell to “a man who is raw all down one side and numb on the other. He is sensitive—sometimes obsessionally so—to the least insincerity upon his left, but the inhumanity of the right rarely provoked him to a paragraph of polemic.”
Thompson spent most of his academic career distancing himself from his former life inside the British Communist Party. His criticism of Stalinism was not from an orthodox Marxist position; instead, he advocated a type of “socialist humanism”. Thompson at an early age rejected the classical Marxism of Leon Trotsky; despite later breaking with Stalinism, it is clear that Thompson’s subsequent historical and political writings still retained ideological baggage from his Stalinist past.
As Rodden’s article shows the discussion over Orwell’s work and, more importantly, his opposition to Stalinism continues unabated today. At a recent election meeting held by the UK Socialist Equality Party, a member of the audience used Orwell’s book Animal Farm to conclude that revolutions have always been defeated. In his reply, Chris Marsden said that despite Orwell being a brilliant writer and an opponent of Stalinism, he nonetheless drew pessimistic conclusions from the victory of Stalinism in the former USSR.
One example of this confusion was his turning over some 35 of these names, a year before he died in 1950, to a secret government unit called the Information Research Department. This arm of the British Foreign Office had been set up to organise anti-Soviet and anti-communist propaganda. Marsden made the point that the co-leader of the Russian Revolution and his Left Opposition opposed Stalinism from the standpoint of Marxism and had faith in the working class overthrowing it. They worked under extraordinary political and physical pressure to provide a Marxist opposition to Stalinism, something Orwell could never have done.
[1] The Never Ending Siege-Orwell and the Left The Orwell Society-Journal no 25 spring 2025
[2] How George Orwell Became a Dead Metaphor-https:www.ft.com/content/83625fad-f101-4712-ba2b-483b87ef0e12
[3] See John Newsinger -Hope Lies in the Proles
[4] George Orwell, Snobby Truthteller- Blaise Lucey- litverse.substack.com/p/george-orwell-snobby-truthteller
[5] George Orwell and the British Foreign Office- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html
[6] Nineteen Eighty-Four and all that-https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/nineteen-eighty-four-and-all/
[7] George Orwell and the British Foreign Office- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html
[8] A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010- http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html
160 George Orwell’s papers saved after a Public Protest.
“There are lots of people with lots of money who’d like a trophy. But you then lose track of them and they disappear, until they pop up on the market again.”
Prof Jean Seaton
‘I hope I shall get the 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.’ –
George Orwell, May 1937
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others
Animal Farm-George Orwell
“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds, any pretence was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp”.
1984
About 160 historically important George Orwell papers have been acquired by University College London. The Gollancz Papers, as they were known were at risk of being sold to the highest bidder at auction.
The papers contain Orwell’s correspondence, contracts and readers’ reports relating to his earliest novels, dating from 1934 to 1937. The papers relate to four of his earliest published works – A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, The Road to Wigan Pier and Inside the Whale . His analysis of the politics of 1930s Europe, shaped his world viewpoint. The newly acquired papers contain manuscript notebooks, personal papers and the first handwritten notes of some of Orwell’s most famous words and phrases, such as “Two Minutes Hate”, “Newspeak”, and “War is Peace. Ignorance is strength. Freedom is slavery”.
The collection acquired by UCL had originally belonged to Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, who founded one of the 20th century’s most important left-wing publishing houses. Publishing several of Orwell’s early novels. However he refused to publish three of Orwell’s major political books, Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Gollancz was particularly hostile to Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Gollancz thought Orwell was a Trotskyist and was hostile to Stalinism. Although no Trotskyist, Orwell was hostile to Stalinism. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is an important written 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 for 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 of the Soviet bureaucracy, whose policies had by then become utterly counterrevolutionary on a world scale.”[1]
A spokesman for University College London (UCL) said the papers were “a valuable piece of Britain’s cultural heritage”. UCL already has the world’s most comprehensive research material relating to Orwell. The purchase by UCL was done with the help of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries to stop the collection falling into the hands of a few money-grabbing collectors. Anger was also expressed at the condition of the papers, which had been “languishing in dozens of rusty, dusty filing cabinets”.
The Orwell papers were owned by the Orion Group, which was in turn owned by Hachette. Hachette had no interest in the cultural value of the papers. Their decision to sell to the highest bidder because they were closing down the warehouse where the papers were stored had been condemned as an act of “Cultural vandalism”. According to Rick Gekoski in his 2021 book, Guarded by Dragons, “No one on the Orion board cared where they went, or to whom.”[2]
How Orion came to get the papers was explained by Richard Young, who writes, “Gollancz continued as an independent publishing house even after the death of Victor Gollancz in 1967, under the guidance of his daughter Livia. In the late 1980s, however, the business was sold to new owners and went through several changes of ownership in the 1990s, ending up under the Orion Group. In 2012, Orion was faced with a problem, in that the archive of Gollancz was by then housed in a warehouse on the south coast, along with archives from several other publishing houses. The warehouse provider planned to close the facility in the coming years, and so faced with this, Orion took the opportunity to put the archive up for sale.
So, what exactly is a publishing house archive? Essentially, it consists of two main elements: so-called file or archive copies of the books published by the firm, and secondly, the correspondence or publishing files relating to each of the published works. Gekoski did his best to place the entire correspondence archive with an institution. Those tapped included the British Library, as well as Universities in the UK and the US. The price tag of 1 million pounds, which Orion was seeking, proved to be a stumbling block, however, and all negotiations to sell the archive (which included significant George Orwell correspondence) in its entirety fell through.[3]
The capitalist speculators of the Orion company stands in stark contrast to the “extraordinary generosity” of Orwell’s only son of Richard Blair, who with his own money purchased 50 letters to donate them to UCL’s Orwell Archive, to stop them being gobbled up by vampire collectors and according to him “Then they’re never seen again.
Orwell’s biographer D J Taylor concurred with Blair, saying, “This is a fantastic treasure trove from the point of view of Orwell and publishing history … Literary manuscripts have a terrible habit of disappearing”.
[1] www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html
[2] Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People Paperback – 19 Jan. 2023
[3] Orwell and the Gollancz Archive -orwellsociety.com/orwell-and-the-gollancz-archive/
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.
[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)
While it has been seventy-three years since the death of George Orwell, there appears to be no let up in the substantial publication of books about him or what seems to be a popular new genre of rewriting his most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984.[1]
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
Newman hasn’t proved herself a worthy successor to Orwell; she’s outclassed him, both in the knowledge of human nature and in character development. “Julia” should be the new required text on those high-school curricula, a stunning look into what happens when a person of strength faces the worst in humanity, as well as a perfect specimen of derivative art that, in standing on another’s shoulders, can reach a higher plane.”
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- http://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 publication-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 shows “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.
The English historian Eric Hobsbawm. Suffice to say; this book came under ferocious attack from Stalinists around the world. They still attack it even today. 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 as 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. 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 such an important literary and political figure’s work and legacy, 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 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 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”. [12]
His work should be studied and critiqued, he was an intransigent opponent of Stalinism and died an opponent of capitalism. It should be in that context that his memory should be honoured.
Reference
- George Orwell and the British Foreign Office-Fred Mazelis-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/09/orw-s09.html
- A comment: Revisiting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in 2010-Richard Mynick-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/06/1984-j12.html
- George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, Stalinism and the Spanish revolution-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2002/04/orwe-a11.html
- Eric Hobsbawm on the Spanish Civil War: an anti-historical tirade Ann Talbot-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2007/03/hobs-m16.html
For Emily, My Bestie
[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
A Trumpet of Sedition 