The millennium will mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of George
Orwell, critic, novelist, essayist and polemicist, and one of the best
loved and most frequently quoted British authors of the century. The
political consciousness pervading his writing makes him a touchstone for
a wide range of readers and 'one of the major literary protagonists in
the Cold War era'.1 His last two novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty
Four, are acknowledged as modern classics, while his experience of
working class life in Down and Out in London and Paris and The Road to
Wigan Pier, and of revolutionary struggle betrayed in Homage To
Catalonia, continue to inform and inspire generations of socialists.
Orwell's writing was the source of as much controversy during his life
as it was when left and right fought over his literary corpse after his
death. The right claimed him for themselves, 'embracing him as an
emotional conservative who had given terrible warning of the
totalitarian logic inherent in the socialist cause',2 while the
Stalinist dominated left were willing to give away the man H G Wells
once described as the 'Trotskyist with big feet'.3 Nineteen Eighty Four,
Orwell's final novel and a satire of Stalinist Russia, has been defined
as 'the "canonical text" of conservative anti-Communism, as "the key
imaginative manifesto of the Cold War" and gives Orwell the dubious
honour of having "invented...a complete poetics of political
invective".'4 Isaac Deutscher, Marxist historian, famed anti-Stalinist
and biographer of both Trotsky and Stalin, weighed into the debate,
dismissing Orwell as 'a "simple minded anarchist" for whom any movement
"forfeited its raison d'etre the moment it acquired a raison d'etat".'5
The 1970 publication of Orwell's miscellaneous writing under the title
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters provided a context for
Orwell's best known books and put the Stalinists and right wingers on
the back foot as a new generation of socialists, unfettered by loyalty
to the Communist Party, broke through the claims and counter-claims. And
in 1980 Bernard Crick's exhaustively researched biography, George
Orwell: A Life, lifted Orwell out of the quagmire of malice and
misinformation and placed him firmly on the left, albeit as a Tribune
socialist grown shy of revolutionary politics. However, even this mild
reclamation of Orwell for the reformist left proved too much for
adherents to the Communist tradition. Their reaction plumbed new depths
with the publication in 1984 of Inside The Myth: OrwellViews from the
Left, a collection of essays attacking Orwell, edited by Christopher
Norris and published by Lawrence and Wishart, a book which Newsinger
calls 'an unholy alliance of feminists, cultural theorists and old
fashioned Stalinists, dedicated to reversing his influence'.6
Orwell's Politics by John Newsinger moves the debate a critical step
further. Taking the end of the Cold War as 'an ideal context for a
reassessment' of Orwell's political ideas,7 Newsinger gives us a map of
Orwell's intellectual terrain, and deftly orientates the reader around
the key Orwellian debates. He examines how Orwell's politics developed
in a changing world, and extracts a throughline strung like a piano wire
through volatile circumstances, warring ideologies and intellectual
sleight of hand in the century that promised workers in the saddle.
Newsinger's thesis is that, although Orwell's politics shifted
throughout his lifetime, the one constant was his unwavering socialism.
What detractorsand even some admirershave missed is that he never
ceased to write from within the left, attacking the betrayal of the
revolution rather than the revolution itself.
Orwell gets a life
George Orwell was the name adopted by Eric Blair, the Eton educated son
of a government official overseeing the 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
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 ensuing split among the anti-fascist forces broke down roughly along
three lines. The firstLargo Caballero of the Socialist Party left wing,
the socialist organisations, and the anarchists (FAI) and their trade
union confederation, the CNTtook 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, ie fascism,
they were fighting for mutually exclusive goals, ie 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.
Orwell in Spain
Orwell's arrival in Barcelona, the reddest of Spanish cities, was,
according to Crick, an accident.16 Turned down for the International
Brigade by the British Communist Party, Orwell eventually travelled to
Spain under the auspices of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in
December 1936. Once in Barcelona, he signed up to the ILP affiliated
POUM militia as 'Eric Blair: grocer'. He enthused over the tell tale
signs of workers at least superficially in chargeor 'in the
saddle'finding them 'startling and overwhelming'. Newsinger describes
it thus:
Buildings were draped with red flags or with the red and black flags of
the anarchists, the walls were covered with the hammer and sickle and
the initials of revolutionary organisations, and almost all the churches
had been destroyed. The shops and cafes had been collectivised and the
waiters and shop workers treated customers as equals. The trams and
taxis were all painted black. Crowds of working class men and women
filled the streets while loudspeakers played revolutionary songs. What
particularly struck him was that as far as he could see the rich had
disappeared. This was, he recognised, something worth fighting for. What
Orwell had encountered in Barcelona was a working class that was
becoming a class for itself.17
The thrill wore off once he hit the front line. Orwell was dismayed by
the conditions. As he says often in Homage To Catalonia, it wasn't so
much the squalid state of the muddy trenches and drenched dugouts, or
the terrifying abundance of rats, or the infestations of lice, or the
human excrement caked everywhere that lowered his spiritsthat was just
war. It was the incessant boredom while waiting for action, the
inadequate training, and the antiquated weaponry with which they were
meant to fight the fascists stationed within eyesight that he found
frustrating. His sympathies were by no means set when he arrived: he
initially thought the Communists were right to concentrate on fighting
Franco by building a more disciplined army. However, what kept him
fighting for the POUMeven regretting later that he didn't joinwas the
realisation that the Communist line was effectively a
counter-revolutionary one. It didn't merely stop the revolution in its
tracks. It actually meant putting back the clock.
Orwell was deeply engaged in the debate around what to do about the
revolution, siding with the most revolutionary lineto take the
revolution forward. He thought it a mistake that the Republican
government had been left in nominal control and was critical that, 'in
spite of various changes in personnel, every subsequent government has
been of approximately the same bourgeois-reformist character.' He
explained that at first it didn't seem to matter, because the government
was 'almost powerless'. The bourgeoisie were lying low, even disguising
themselves as workers. But then, as power was grabbed by the 'Communists
and right wing Socialists' and used in the interest of the Popular
Front, 'the government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came
out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor
reappeared, not much modified'.18 One by one the different parties
composing the government were edged out by the Communists. Once Russia
began to supply arms, a grateful Communist led Government came to heel
and the success of the Spanish Communist Party was assured. Orwell
explains how the Catalan Communists, the PSUC, were then able to recover
power through 'a policy of pinpricks':
In every case, needless to say, it appeared that the thing demanded by
military necessity was the surrender of something the workers had won
for themselves in 1936... The process of [land] collectivisation was
checked, the local committees were got rid of, the workers' patrols were
abolished and the pre-war police forces, largely enforced and heavily
armed, were restored, and various key industries which had been under
the control of the trade unions were taken over by the
Government...finally, most important of all, the workers' militias,
based on the trade unions, were gradually broken up and redistributed
among the new Popular Army, a 'non-political' army on semi-bourgeois
lines, with a differentiated pay rate, a privileged officer caste, etc,
etc.19
He returned to Barcelona to find it just another bourgeois city,
unrecognisable from the vibrant centre of workers' control he had seen
only a few months earlier.
Trotsky had by now split with the POUM over their refusal to break away
from the far greater numbers of anarchists and 'build their party as the
revolutionary leadership of the Spanish working class... Instead, they
hoped to persuade and influence the anarchists, who were the decisive
force in Catalonia, into completing the revolution'.20 Following a
police attack on the CNT controlled telephone exchange in Barcelona on 3
May, working class Barcelona took to the barricades in defence of their
rapidly eroding bastions of power. Unfortunately, both the POUM and CNT
leaders vacillated instead of going on the offensive, giving the
counter-revolutionary forces the upper hand. In a perverse twist of
logic, the Communists accused Trotsky of leading the POUM alongside the
fascists in a conspiracy against the Popular Front, his living several
thousand miles away in Mexico and not being in touch with the Spanish
comrades notwithstanding. The POUM was similarly slandered, firstly, as
being 'objectively pro-fascist' because it was contradicting the
Communist line to abandon the revolution, and then accused of actually
fighting alongside the fascists, of sabotage and treason under Trotsky's
orders. The official term for the POUM was 'Trotsky-Fascist', a libel
that was repeated in newspapers across the world and used in support of
the Moscow Show Trials. The Daily Worker called the ILP volunteers in
Spain, many of whom were killed or wounded fighting fascism, a 'stain on
the honour of the British working class'.21 The propaganda war was
vicious, the body count high and rising. Many were tortured by the
dreaded secret police, languished in jail or were executed. Andreas Nin,
a leading member of the POUM, was reportedly skinned alive. All were
hounded by the Communists.
Orwell narrowly escaped but he had gained a whole new perspective. While
convalescing from a fascist bullet in the throat, Orwell wrote to Cyril
Connolly, telling him, 'I have seen wonderful things and at last really
believe in Socialism, which I never did before'.22 Although from his
earlier publication The Road to Wigan Pier it was clear that he was at
least intellectually committed to socialism, it was Spain that gave his
socialism an emotional bedrock and dictated the course his socialism
would take. Having witnessed the destruction of the revolution in Spain,
and lost comrades in the Communist persecution of the POUM, that course
would never lead to Moscow. In the preface to the Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm he wrote:
Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea
of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that
every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the
past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet
myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.23
He returned to Britain to find that his association with POUM and his
hostility to the Communists had left him alienated and marginalised in
left circles. It was all but impossible to challenge the Communist
version of events. His own publisher, Victor Gollancz, who controlled
the Left Book Club with its massive readership, declined to publish
Homage To Catalonia despite the success of The Road to Wigan Pier but
Orwell refused to be gagged. His may have been a lone voice, but it was
also a loud and clear one powered by a will to make itself heard through
a torrent of articles and reviews.
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 1939effectively
carving Eastern Europe up between Germany and Russiawas 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 premisethat 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 and 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 war-time
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
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 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
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.
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 storyentitled The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical
Collectivismwas 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. Tony Cliff
later made a crucial contribution to this debate, advancing the theory
of state capitalismthat 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 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 superstates, 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 bookthat it was never
intended as an attack on socialism or the British Labour Partydue 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 back into the
fighting might be exaggerated. And the Left intelligentsia made their
swingover 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), pix.
2 Ibid, p155.
3 B Crick, George Orwell: A Life (Secker and Warburg, 1981), p294. To
be precise, Orwell's feet were size 12. In Catalonia his boots had to be
specially made.
4 J Newsinger, op cit, p122.
5 Ibid, p123, quoting Isaac Deutscher, '1984the Mysticism of Cruelty',
in Raymond Williams (ed), George Orwell: a Collection of Critical Essays
(New Jersey, 1974), pp126-127.
6 Ibid, p156.
7 Ibid, pix.
