Anna Chen - George Orwell: a literary revolutionary? page 2
Orwell gets a life
George Orwell was the name adopted by Eric Blair, the Eton educated son of a government official overseeing lie opium trade. Born in India, Blair returned to the east to serve as an imperial policeman in Burma. He was by no means a socialist at this point. Conservative MP Christopher Hollis observed, following his visit to Burma in 1925, That Blair exhibited "no trace of liberal opinions" and felt a particular loathing for Buddhist monks. [8] However, something was eating away at his conscience. In the opening chapter, entitled Pox Britannia, Newsinger charts Blair's changing attitude to the dirty job of maintaining order and breaking strikes. Prisons overflowed and villages were burnt to the ground. He returned to England in 1928 and later expressed his growing disgust with imperialism in fictional form in his first novel, Burmese Days, as well as in numerous articles and letters. His atonement was to put himself through the ordeals described in Down and Out in London and Paris, working as a dishwasher in a Paris hotel, and as a hop-picker in Kent when he wasn't living as a tramp. In The Road to Wigan Pier, written in 1936, before he fought in Spain, and published in 1937, he stated his opposition to "every form of man's dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants." It is this determination to side with the oppressed that Newsinger sees setting Orwell on the road to socialism. [9]
George Orwell (standing third from left),
Mandalay 1923
Five years in Burma had transformed Eric Blair into "George Orwell", a man who "hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear". [10] Step by step Newsinger shows us the developing line of Orwell's politics initially fuelled by that loathing. In one of his later As I Please columns in Tribune [11], Orwell was to connect the ruling classes' need for racism with their justification for imperialism. Satirising the British colonialists' absurd claims to racial superiority, he settled on the pith helmet as an "emblem of imperialism" as it protected the supposedly thinner skull of the white master from the sun, whereas, we assume, Asiatic natives could happily fry while labouring like animals, their tiny brains protected by thick, simian, cranial bone.
Although Orwell acquired a small degree of fame with his first books, it was his experiences in Spain when he fought against Franco's fascists in the civil war, and the publication of his account of them in Homage To Catalonia and numerous articles, that put the revolutionary socialist cat among the Communist apparatchik pigeons. What he personally witnessed in Spain, above all else, turned Orwell against the Soviet Union and the international Communist movement, paradoxically driving him deeper into revolutionary socialism at the same time as he was being turned into a pariah among the left.
When Franco attempted the military coup on 17 and 18 July 1936, it had been held off only by a spontaneous uprising of the working class in many towns and cities. The Republican government remained paralysed. An armed working class took power in many Republican areas, and was particularly strong in Catalonia whose chief city was Barcelona. In his book The Spanish Cockpit, favourably reviewed by Orwell, Franz Borkenau describes revolutionary Barcelona. He notes the absence of any bourgeoisie or their agents, the police, who were replaced by armed workers' militias: "Practically all the factory owners, we were told, had either fled or been killed, and their factories taken over by the workers." [12] And all the churches had been burnt. It was so promising that Trotsky commented that in "its political and cultural level, the Spanish proletariat stood on the first day of the revolution, not below, but above the Russian proletariat at the beginning of 1917". [13] As Newsinger points out, "Whether this revolution should be continued or reversed was to be the great political debate within the Republican camp, a debate finally settled by the Communists with police, torture chambers and execution squads". [14]
The Spanish Civil War
The ensuing split among the anti-fascist forces broke down roughly along three lines. The first - Largo Caballero of the Socialist Party left wing, the socialist organisations, and the anarchists (FAI) and their trade union confederation, the CNT - took the initially dominant position that the revolution should be put on hold while Republican forces defeated the fascists. Caballero did not want the Republic overthrown by a workers' state but they agreed that once the military was crushed the revolution would continue. Adopting this attitude left the leaders of these organisations increasingly incapable of resisting the pressure they came under from the second group.
The second line was the deliberate slamming of the revolutionary process into reverse, liquidating all the revolutionary gains of July 1936, and re-establishing the bourgeois state. This was the policy adopted by the Republican middle class, but more surprisingly, this was also the line taken by the Spanish Communist Party, the Catalan Communists (PSUC) and supported by the Russian military-political machine. Communist policy in the 1930s was to unite left and centre parties as a Popular Front against right wing movements, which inevitably meant diluting the revolutionary content of their politics. Although the revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie were fighting against the same thing, i.e. fascism, they were fighting for mutually exclusive goals, i.e. capitalism and socialism. "It is a combination," wrote Orwell, "with about as much vitality, and about as much right to exist, as a pig with two heads or some other Barnum and Bailey monstrosity". [15] Orwell eventually realised, along with many others, that Russia was seeking a compromise with international capital in the form of an alliance with Britain and France. Russian foreign policy interests took precedence over supporting left wing movements in Europe: the revolution was marked for death.
Arguing against these positions were many individual anarchists and a small independent revolutionary party called the POUM, translated as the United Marxist Workers' Party, whose general secretary, Andreas Nin, was a former secretary to Trotsky. They believed that if the war was to be won the revolution had to be completed through the overthrow of the bourgeois state together with the continuation of the process of expropriation.
These, then, were the circumstances of Orwell's arrival in Catalonia to fight the fascists.
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© 1999 Anna Chen