Anna Chen - George Orwell: a literary revolutionary? page 5
Skewering the Soviet myth
The accusation that he had abandoned socialism altogether intensified with the publication of Animal Farm . This allegorical fable, which Orwell wrote in response to Stalin's dissolution of the Comintern in 1943, earned him much enmity and a deliberate distortion of his very clear warning that Stalin was "genuinely aiming at a closer tie up with the USA and Britain". [35] The growing Russophile feeling in Britain since the Nazi invasion of Russia finished the Hitler-Stalin pact in June 1941 gave an added urgency to Orwell's objective. Animal Farm was finally published by Warburg in 1945 at the outset of the Cold War. Newsinger explains:
The fable offered little comfort to the conservative right. Not only did it wholeheartedly endorse the initial revolutionary act, it also went on implicitly to condemn the Soviet Union, not for being socialist, but for betraying socialism, for becoming indistinguishable in its conduct from the other great powers, for exploiting its own people and joining in the division of the world. [36]
Orwell's original intention was that Animal Farm should be an attack on the 1943 Tehran Conference and its aim that Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill should carve the world up between them. When their alliance broke down the book was interpreted as an attack on revolution and socialism. Orwell later clarified his position, writing, "I meant the moral I to be that revolutions are only 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". [37] Although Orwell placed responsibility for Stalin firmly with the Bolsheviks, even extending his criticism to Lenin and Trotsky, Newsinger is clear that he did not oppose revolution itself, having called for exactly that on numerous occasions over many years: "All revolutions are failures," he quotes Orwell's famous epigram, "but they are not always the same failure". [38]
Stills from Halas and Batchelor's 1954 animated film of Animal Farm. (Great cartoons, but they mangled Orwell's story and changed the meaning of the ending.)
His last novel, the disturbing dystopian vision of the future, Nineteen Eighty Four , written in 1948, was influenced by the Trotskyist critique of the Soviet Union. Originally written to attack both Fascist and Communist tyranny, the defeat of Nazism allowed Orwell to focus on the totalitarianism of the Russian state and the slavishness of the left intelligentsia that allowed the myth of Soviet "socialism" to take hold. For Orwell it was the managerial class, of which the intelligentsia was one section, who would make the revolution alongside the working class, but who would also be repelled by the Soviet myth. He was appealing to them, warning what it would be like to be "rigidly policed and controlled by an omnipotent terroristic apparatus that aspires to thought-control". [39] He dissects the mentality of this "middling" group and recounts Winston Smith's failed rebellion against Big Brother.
Peter Cushing as Winson Smith in BBC TV's teleplay,1984
In Big Brother's world, the primary antagonist of the Party is "Emmanuel Goldstein", once part of the Party's leadership, but subsequently expelled for a dizzying variety of crimes and betrayals. Goldstein is either the Party's greatest enemy, or else simply a bogeyman created by the Party as a focus for the society's fears, and as bait to lure potential rebels into showing their hands. The mysterious figure of Goldstein, object of the "three minute hate" sessions, is a hybrid of Trotsky and the martyred Andreas Nin. [40] Goldstein's secret book at the heart of the story - entitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - was drawn from the Workers Party in America and their debates in the pages of Partisan Review , which argued that the Soviet Union was a bureaucratic collectivist society, rather than capitalist or socialist. Newsinger takes great pains to distance Orwell from James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution (which another Blair and his Third Way mentor seem to have swallowed wholesale), which claimed that the managerial class was the new ruling class, and locates, instead, Nineteen Eighty Four 's chief political influence in the writings of American Trotskyist Dwight Macdonald. For Macdonald, who debated fiercely with Burnham in Partisan Review , "the bourgeoisie have been replaced by a new ruling class, the bureaucracy; capitalism has yielded to bureaucratic collectivism". [41] In Russia and Germany, he insisted, supreme power lay with the political bureaucrats who directed the lowly managerial class to do their bidding. This is the world, recreated as Oceania with O'Brien as the personification of the ruling bureaucracy, inhabited by Winston Smith and his fellow managerial drones. According to the theory of state capitalism, the Russian bureaucratic ruling class needed to accumulate capital in order to compete with the superpowers rather than out of a simple lust for power. [42]
1984
The novel was also a fictional account of the nuclear stalemate Orwell dreaded, leading to "the division of the world among two or three vast super-states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion". [43] At the end of a pessimistic view of the future Winston Smith reaches the conclusion that hope for social transformation ultimately lies with the "proles" when they realise their own massive potential. Winston the individual is broken, finally agreeing with Big Brother that two plus two does indeed make five.
Nineteen Eighty Four was immediately seized upon by the right to attack socialism which was equated with Stalinist Russia. In refusing to recognise that the Soviet Union was not socialist, the left found themselves wide open to these attacks. The most schizoid reaction must be Raymond Williams's dismissal of Orwell as an "ex-socialist" in the same breath as he was apologising for Mao's Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge campaign: "The revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated." [44] Orwell was never able to complete his defence of the book - that it was never intended as an attack on socialism or the British Labour Party - due to his illness from TB and his early death in 1950.
The fight over Orwell continues. He has been (mis)quoted by Thatcher, John Major, Rupert Murdoch and a bizarre raft of conservatives. Even recently centre-left columnist and Marx's biographer Francis Wheen invoked Orwell in The Guardian to justify the bombing of former Yugoslavia. [45] Comparing the tiny Balkan state of Serbia with Germany, which was the world's second most powerful industrial country at the outbreak of World War Two, and the petty nationalist dictator Slobodan Milosevic with Hitler, who represented the ideological last stand of capitalism in crisis, Wheen quotes Orwell on Hitler after the Hitler-Stalin pact and adds: "Orwell would, I'd guess, be contemptuous of those who blame Nato for the horrific exodus from Kosovo." Orwell believed in calling all sides of a conflict to account for their actions, and it would indeed be interesting to know if he would have had as much faith in the judgement and motives of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as Wheen. What we do know is that, on the subject of the left and war, Orwell had this to say:
Bullets hurt, corpses stink, men under fire are often so frightened that they wet their trousers ... A louse is a louse and a bomb is a bomb, even though the cause you are fighting for happens to be just ... Our memories are short nowadays, but ... dig out the files of New Masses or the Daily Worker , and just have a look at the romantic warmongering muck that our left wingers were spilling at the time. All the stale old phrases! And the unimaginative callousness of it! The sang-froid with which London faced the bombing of Madrid! ... But here were the very people who for 20 years had hooted and jeered at the "glory" of war, at atrocity stories, at patriotism, even at physical courage, coming out with stuff that with the alteration of a few names would have fitted into the Daily Mail of 1918. If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war; the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result. Well, the same people who in 1933 sniggered pityingly if you said that in certain circumstances you would fight for your country, in 1937 were denouncing you as a Trotsky-Fascist if you suggested that the stories in New Masses about freshly wounded men clamouring to get hack into the fighting might he exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their swing over from "War is hell" to "War is glorious" not only with no sense of incongruity but almost without any intervening stage. [46]
But then, as Bernard Crick has cautioned and Newsinger reminds us, "all we can say with any degree of certainty is that if George Orwell was alive today, he'd be very old." [47]
Notes
1. J. Newsinger, Orwell's Politics (Macmillan Press Ltd, 1999), p.ix.
2. Ibid., p.155.
3. B. Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Secker and Warburg, 1981), p.294. To be precise, Orwell's feet were size 12. In Catalonia his boots had to be specially made.
4. J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.122.
5. Ibid., p.123, quoting Isaac Deutscher, 1984 - the Mysticism of Cruelty, in Raymond Williams (ed.), George Orwell: a Collection of Critical Essays (New Jersey, 1974), pp. 126-127.
6. Ibid., p.156.
7. Ibid., p.ix.
8. Ibid., p.4.
9. Ibid., p.4.
10. G. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, quoted in J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.3.
11. G. Orwell, As I Please, Tribune, October 1944, in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol.3 (Penguin, 1970). p.299.
12. F. Borkenau quoted in J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.43.
13. L. Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (New York, 1973), p.322, quoted ibid., p.43.
14. Ibid., p.43.
15. G. Orwell, Spilling the Spanish Beans, The Collected Essays. Journalism and Letters, vol.1 (Penguin, 1970), p.303.
16. B. Crick, op. cit., p.208.
17. J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.45.
18. G. Orwell, Spilling the Spanish Beans, op. cit., p.304.
19. G. Orwell, Homage To Catalonia (Penguin, 1989), p.197.
20. Newsinger, op. cit., p.163.
21. Ibid., p.54.
22. G. Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism arid Letters, Volume 1 (Penguin 1970), op. cit., p.269.
23. G. Orwell, Author's Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol.3 (Penguin 1970), p.455. The Penguin edition notes, "Orwell's original text has not been traced and the version given here is a recasting back into English from the Ukrainian translation."
24. Ibid., p.338.
25. J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.72.
26. Ibid., p.75.
27. Ibid., p.77.
28. Ibid., p.91.
29. Ibid., p.91.
30. Ibid., p.90.
31. Ibid., p.93.
32. Ibid., p.95.
33. Orwell quoted ibid., p.96.
34. Ibid., p.96.
35. G. Orwell quoted ibid., p.98.
36. Ibid., p.116.
37. G. Orwell quoted ibid., p.118.
38. Ibid., p.118.
39. Ibid., p.121.
40. B. Crick, op. cit., p.246.
41. D. Macdonald quoted in J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.126.
42. For more on state capitalism, Newsinger recommends T. Cliff, Russia: a Marxist Analysis (London, 1963), and C. Harman, Bureaucracy and Revolution in Eastern Europe (London, 1974).
43. G. Orwell quoted in J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.152.
44. R. Williams quoted ibid., p.124.
45. F. Wheen, Why we Are Right to Bomb the Serbs, The Guardian, G2 section, 7 April 1999, p.4.
46. G. Orwell, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol.2 (Penguin 1970), Looking Back on the Spanish War (Penguin 1970), p.288.
47. B. Crick paraphrased in J. Newsinger, op. cit., p.ix.
Links:
How the CIA funded the animated film of Animal Farm
http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,4120,908925,00.html
Songs from Animal Farm - click on lyrics
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© 1999 Anna Chen