Orwell and Socialism

• For decades, the common view has been that Orwell's great works, and Animal Farm and 1984 were critiques of socialism. An article in the June New Statesman suggests just this, arguing

It is hard not to wonder whether the pessi­mism of this conclusion was partly a response to the art (or propaganda) Orwell was himself creating in those years. He had published Animal Farm in 1945; weakened by the tuberculosis that would kill him, he was writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1947-48. After the reception of Animal Farm, and with the direction Nineteen Eighty-Four was taking, it must have been clear to him on some level that the world was going to use these books in a certain way. And it did use them that way.

The socialist critique of Orwell’s late work seems essentially correct – they were not only anti-Stalinist but anti-revolutionary, and were read as such by millions of ordinary people (a fact that Orwell, who was always curious to know what ordinary people thought, would have had to respect). Out of “necessity” he had chosen a position, and a way of stating that position, that would be used for years to come to bludgeon the anti-war, anti-imperialist left.

Yet the same article notes

His voice as a writer had been formed before Spain, but Spain gave him a jolt – not the fighting nor his injury (a sniper had shot him through the throat in 1937), though these had their effects, but the calculated campaign of deception he saw in the press when he got back, waged by people who knew better. “Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper,” Orwell recalled, “but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed . . . This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or at any rate similar lies, will pass into history.”

This insight reverberates through Orwell’s work for the rest of his life. The answer to lies is to tell the truth. But how? How do you even know what the truth is, and how do you create a style in which to tell it? Orwell’s answer is laid out in “Politics and the English Language”: You avoid ready phrases, you purge your language of dead metaphors, you do not claim to know what you do not know. Far from being a relaxed prose (which is how it seems), Orwell’s is a supremely vigilant one.

Recently I have revisited three of Orwell's novels from the 1930s: Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wiggan Pier and Homage to Catalonia. Of the three, Wiggan Pier offers Orwell's clearest statement on socialism. As I have written before, his concern was not with socialism as a political program but with what it had become. In Britain, he argued, it had been captured by middle class "prigs" and eccentrics. In Homage, he argues, it was captured by totalitarians who opposed revolution.

Yet even in Wiggin Pier he identifies the facist impulse inherint in a middle class socialism intolerant of workers and their culture. And it is this, I think, that emerged more strongly in Catalonia and found its real voice in his last two novels. Orwell was never opposed to socialism; he championed it. But he was unalterably opposed to the totalitarian impulse he found within socialism as it existed, particularly in the Soviet Union.