36 Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four: a Marxist perspective Ammal Farm: A Fairy Story Centenary Edition, Penguin Books, 2003 120 pages, £7.99 Nineteen Eighty-Four By George Orwell Penguin Classics, 2000 326 pages, £6.99 ALEX MILLER George Orwell's two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, have almost become textbooks, and are routinely used in schools to show children the dangers of social revolution. It's time for a reappraisal. The Centenary Edition of Animal Farm contains a preface written by Orwell for the first edition (1945) but never published, plus a preface that he wrote for a translation for displaced Ukrainians living under British/US administration after WWII. If we take Orwell at his word in the first preface, Animal Farm is intended as a critique of He explicitly dissociates himself from actuated by sordid motives" This is laudable: a left-wing critique of Stalinism was desperately needed in Britain at a time when the prestige of Stalin's regime was at its apogee, and almost all of the left was turning a blind eye to its crimes. No doubt the attempt manifests a degree of intellectual courage on Orwell's part. But the conservatives he distanced ringing endorsements from The Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, Evening Standard, Sunday Times, and The Spectator. of his work after his death, so let's ask: how successful was Orwell's attempt to criticize Stalinism 'from the left'? Orwell believed that the Bolshevik revolution had degenerated into something as bad as Tsarism, and much abuse has been heaped on Orwell by those on the left who refused to believe that the revolution had indeed degenerated under Stalin. However, we can surely now leave that sort of criticism of Orwell safely behind. Instead, we will eschew such an ad homenim approach and attempt to appraise Animal Farm (and Nineteen EightFour) purely on their merits.
revolution the Stalinist Soviet regime 'from the left'. conservative critiques, which he describes as "manifestly dishonest, out of date, and himself from have hijacked his work. The Centenary Edition of Animal Farm displays
the proletariat. It's unfair to blame Orwell for the misuse
Animal Farm
LITERATURE
Degeneration of the
A prerequisite of a left-wing critique of
the degeneration of the revolution is an
accurate account of its causes. We can
make progress by considering some of
the features that according to Marx are
essential for a successful socialist revolution.
Two years prior to the Communist Manifesto
Marx wrote: "A development of the
productive forces is the absolutely necessary
practical premise [of Communism],
because without it want is generalised, and
with want the struggle for necessities begins
again", and that means that all the old
crap must revive (quoted in Leon Trotsky,
The Revolution Betrayed). In other words,
Marx thought that a successful socialist
revolution would require the high level of
development of material resources made
possible by advanced capitalism plus the
most important productive force of all: the
highly developed skills and knowledge of
So we can identify two prominent causes
of the degeneration of the Russian
Revolution: first, the scarcity of material
resources and the low level of industrial
development in Russia, and on the other
the near annihilation of the already
numerically small working class as a result of the civil war that followed the invasion of Bolshevik Russia in 191821 by a coalition of several imperialist countries, including Britain and the US. Thus, although it survived the catastrophic destruction of the civil war, Bolshevik Russia lacked two of the key characteristics identified by Marx as necessary for a successful transition from capitalism to socialism. Without these, the field was open for the formation of bureaucratic strata whose dominance of the USSR was crystallised in Stalin's dictatorship and the defeat of the Left Opposition.. Animal Farm completely fails to reflect these key causes of the revolution's degeneration. In the story, the rebellion of the animals leaves them with an abundance of food: there is milk galore and a generous harvest of windfall apples, both of which are purloined by the cunning pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin) and the soon-to-be-ousted Snowball (Trotsky). Additionally, only one animal -a sheep - dies as a result of the civil war", an attempt by the deposed farmer Mr. Jones to retake the farm. Thus, in Orwell's story the Rebellion degenerates despite conditions of material
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LITERATURE abundance and an 'animal class' left intact by human aggression. Orwell seems to be saying that unless ruled by humans, the mass of animals will inevitably succumb to the tyrannical rule of the cunning among themselves. In the human domain, the moral of Orwell's story is clear: without the capitalist class to govern them, the mass of workers will inevitably find themselves subject to the tyranny of the 'brainworkers' among them. Of course, the animals in the tale are far from the high level of political, cultural and technical development required for the success of a socialist revolution. But there's the rub: Orwell's animals, apart from the pigs, are devoid of all intelligence and completely unable to learn anything from experience. This extremely low estimate of the potentialities of the working class is part of Orwell's conception of the possibilities open to socialists. These are exhausted by Stalinist totalitarianism and the social democratic' struggle for reforms within the confines of 'parliamentary democracy. The flipside of Orwell's elitist and patronising attitude towards working people is his distorted picture of British capitalism. In the first preface, he writes of "the intellectual liberty which without a doubt has been one of the distinguishing marks of western civilisation" and states that "tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England [sic]". That would be the intellectual liberty' afforded - not so long before Orwell's time - to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and other workers, imprisoned, banished or simply murdered by the British state for daring to organise trade unions, or the tolerance and decency' that callously sent millions of young people to the slaughterhouse of World War I - not to mention the horrors of imperial rule within the British Isles and overseas. The intellectual liberty, tolerance and decency of British imperialism are the real Orwellian fantasy: insofar as those qualities exist in Britain, they are the product of generations of struggle by the working people that Orwell snobbishly portrays as bovine dunces. It's easy to see why Orwell is the darling of the ruling-class newspapers mentioned above. He may genuinely have attempted to provide a critique of Stalinism from the left, but all that he actually produced in Animal Farm was a banal piece of ruling-class propaganda. Nineteen Eighty-Four Animal Farm thus fails utterly as a critique of Stalinism 'from the left'. We'll now attempt an evaluation of Nineteen Eighty-Four. It's always been regarded as an attack on any form of communist revolution. Isaac Deutscher, for instance, recounts that when he bought a copy of the book in New York in 1949 the bookseller said to him: "Have you read this book? You must read it, sir. Then you will know why we must drop the atom bomb on the Bolshies." (Heretics and Renegades). Does it fare better than Animal Farm as a critique of Stalinism from the left"? The action of Nineteen Eighty-Four takes place in London 40 years after a 'socialist revolution: the ideology of the society is known as 'Ingsoc' (English socialism'), the banners of the ruling party ("The Party") are scarlet, Party members address each other as 'comrade', and Party literature describes a horrible time before the Revolution when the country was ruled by top-hatted 'capitalist' toffs. The leader of The Party, whose portrait is omni-present, and who has godlike status, is Big Brother, who looks remarkably like Stalin. The most hated figure is Emmanuel Goldstein, leader of the secret terrorist and anti-Party organization "The Brotherhood'. Goldstein looks remarkably like Trotsky (whose real name was Bronstein'). The details of the story of Winston and Julia, the two main characters, needn't concern us here. For our purposes, the main facts are that the Revolution - which apparently started out with high ideals, has degenerated into something similar to, but much worse than, Stalinism. The social composition of the country is revealing. Two percent belong to the Inner Party', a privileged layer of top-level bureaucrats, and thirteen percent to the 'Outer Party', a much less privileged layer of minor bureaucrats and administrators. While the members of the Inner Party have access to wine, real coffee, and live in plush serviced apartments, the members of the Outer Party live in shoddy accommodation, drink synthetic Victory Gin', and are plagued by shortages of minor goods like razor blades and shoelaces. Below the Party members come the 'proles, who make up the remaining 85% of the population. The society is unimaginably totalitarian. Every aspect of the lives of the Outer Party members is subject to surveillance by ubiquitous 'telescreens: two-way television sets so sophisticated that they can detect changes of heartbeat rhythms in the dark. Any sign of deviation from the principles of Ingsoc results in the 'vaporisation' of the person concerned by the "Thought Police'. There is a daily ceremony called the two minutes hate,
37 in which Party members whip themselves up into a frenzy of hate against Goldstein, and history is continually falsified: Winston's job, in the Ministry of Truth, is the systematic rewriting of archived newspaper articles to delete references to the victims of the Thought Police. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, then, we have another example of a revolution that has degenerated, this time in spite of taking place in an advanced capitalist country with a numerically preponderant proletariat. Given that technology has developed to the extent that much of the society is under 24 hour surveillance, one would expect the 'proles' to manifest a high degree of intelligence and technical skill: after all, who designs, builds and maintains the telescreens that make possible the intricate surveillance operation? (The Inner and Outer Party members don't, as they have mainly bureaucratic and administrative functions: although some of the Outer Party, such as Julia, have minor technical roles). In Orwell's story, however, the 'proles', like the beasts in Animal Farm, are completely stupid, and devoid of even the most rudimentary intelligence. They have 'debased' cockney accents, are described as "helpless, like the animals", as constituting "an impenetrable wall of flesh", and a working-class mother is described as having "powerful mare-like buttocks". A simple-minded anarchist Thus, Orwell's elitist and patronising attitude towards the working class in Animal Farm reappears in Nineteen EightyFour, and the message is identical: a socialist revolution, even in an advanced capitalist country, would inevitably degenerate because of the innate helplessness and low intelligence of the working class. Orwell believes that power, independently of the social circumstances in which it is realized, is governed by a logic that inevitably leads to corruption and exploitation. In his view, even if the working-class successfully seizes power in an advanced capitalist country, corruption and exploitation will inevitably prevail. This idealist and anarchist philosophy is vastly inferior to Marx's approach, according to which power can only be studied meaningfully as embodied in concrete social and economic structures. This point is well-made by Deutscher: "At heart Orwell was a simple-minded anarchist... To analyse a complicated social background, to try and unravel tangles of political motives, calculations, fears and suspicions, and to discern