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Revolutionary patriotism and the Second World War
The Spanish Civil War was a pivotal point in Orwell's political development and the lessons learnt there coloured his politics for the rest of his life. The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 - effectively carving Eastern Europe up between Germany and Russia - was another seismic world event that was to shake up his outlook and that of many Communists. Until that point Orwell had taken the ILP line of pacifism and internationalism but the pact reversed his position. He became staunchly pro-war, arguing in Tribune , the American literary journal Partisan Review , and his wartime broadcasts for the BBC that "this war is a race between the consolidation of Hitler's empire and the growth of democratic consciousness". [24] Newsinger stresses the importance of the wartime Searchlight series of books, a platform for left writers to discuss "war aims for a better future", co-edited by Orwell, and sees "the whole series as a political intervention by Orwell at a time when he believed socialist revolution both imminently possible and urgently necessary". [25] Orwell's own contribution, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, the first of the series, propounded the view that patriotism was a material reality that overshadowed class hatred and internationalism. Orwell argued that the British working class had never acted internationally, citing the generally cool response to Franco's rise to power as an example, and so could not be relied upon to further the revolution alone. He dismissed the idea of an "old fashioned" proletarian revolution in England and contended that any English socialist revolution would have to include the expanding middle class of professionals, higher paid skilled workers, media producers and technicians. These people, he insisted, were kept down by the ruling class and the system of private capitalism. "Capitalism, he proclaimed, 'simply does not work ... cannot deliver the goods' and would have to be replaced by socialism if England was to defeat Hitler." [26] Newsinger makes allowances for Orwell's patriotic excesses as a product of the times and as something he questioned towards the end of the war. For Newsinger, the core problem was that The Lion and the Unicorn was predicated on a faulty premise - that England in 1940-1941 was ripe for revolution. There were no signs of power moving into workers' hands even as late as 1942. Orwell started to speak of a third way between the "timid reformism" of the Labour Party and "the 19th century doctrine of class war" of the Communists and Trotskyists. "This third way, between reform and revolution, would, he believed, make it possible to carry through a socialist transformation of Britain that would nevertheless leave intact what he considered to be the essential qualities and character of the British national culture," writes Newsinger, who adds: It is this that makes Orwell such an uncomfortable political thinker: he was serious about both the desirability anti necessity for socialism and about preserving national culture and character, propagating an almost mystical patriotism. Most commentators have focused on his contribution to the elaboration of the "English Genius" ... and have neglected his call for a new socialist movement that would reject both Communist-style revolution and Labour Party reformism in favour of a third way to socialism, a third way that he continued to call revolutionary but that was adapted to modern conditions. [27] Commentators have suggested that Orwell moved away from revolution towards despair or reformist Tribune socialism some time towards the end of 1942, but Newsinger shows him pursuing another route. Certainly, faced with the reality that there would be no revolution in wartime Britain, Orwell reached an accommodation with British Labourism. However, when assessing this period, Newsinger points out, what is often overlooked is the absence of a British equivalent of the American literary journal, Partisan Review , for which Orwell wrote the London Letters series of articles between 1941 and 1946. While the Communist line may have dominated British left politics, it had no such clear run in America. Originally committed to the viewpoint of "the revolutionary working class" and to "defence of the Soviet Union" [28] , the Partisan Review , like Orwell, emerged from the fallout of 1936-1937 with a hostility to Stalinism and a broad sympathy for Trotsky's ideas. This certainly qualifies Orwell as a "literary Trotskyist", "a creative writer and commentator broadly influenced by Trotskyist ideas". [29] Newsinger also lists the catalogue of numerous Trotskyist pamphlets in Orwell's archive to show that he had more than a passing acquaintance with Trotsky's politics: "Clearly Orwell had a familiarity with Trotskyist politics that academic commentators on his work have singularly lacked, with the result that they have missed the extent to which much of his own political writing was a debate with the politics of the revolutionary left". [30] From 1941 Orwell fought for a "revolutionary patriotic" line in the anti-war Partisan Review against the "revolutionary defeatist" editorial line. [31] For Orwell and many others on the left the fate of the war was inextricably bound up with the success of the revolution and the two were inseparable. The crisis of the war came to a head in the early summer of 1942 when it seemed possible that the left Labour politician Stafford Cripps would provide significant leadership. By the end of the summer the Conservatives had won power and the longed for growth in popular consciousness failed to materialise. In January 1943 Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that the "crisis is over and the forces of reaction have won hands down". [32] He later apologised in his December 1944 London Letter for his "many mistaken predictions", and went into a lengthy self critical analysis of his "very great error". The war had been won but the peace was lost. The survival of the ruling class had ended any hope of socialism: Britain is moving towards a planned economy, and class distinctions tend to dwindle, but there has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own all the property and usurp all the best jobs. [33] What Newsinger crucially detects in this article is: Orwell in the process of abandoning any serious hope of revolutionary change in the foreseeable future and coming to terms with the prospects of a Labour Government ... as a "lesser evil". What he did not do, however, was repudiate his belief in the need for revolutionary change, for socialism, but merely acknowledged that he had been guilty of wishful thinking in believing it to be imminent. There was no lessening of his opposition to "class distinctions and imperialist exploitation, no defection to "the forces of reaction". [34]
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