Book Review: Orwell and the Left
George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist
Reviewed by Keith O’Regan
With the possible exceptions of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Tommy Douglas, no figure on the Left, living or dead, is as universally well known in this country as George Orwell.
And, unlike these others, almost every high school graduate can claim to have been required to read one if not two of his texts. Of course, Orwell’s Left wing credentials are not the reason for his popularity among the educational establishment. The Orwell popularly disseminated is a fervent anti-communist who, as the story goes, laid bare the “insanities” and barbarities of communism.
Yet despite this, we should beware of falling into a position of “their Orwell and ours.” For, while there may be much in Orwell that we wish to retain, much of his work is simply beyond redemption.
And it is on this problem that the authors in this collection of essays on Orwell hang their hats. With one exception, the authors are drawn from the ranks of the Socialist Workers Party in Britain and every last revolutionary socialist man of them (there is no female writer of any of the ten essays) is in some manner grappling with Orwell’s standing on the Left.
Reclaiming Orwell
The majority of the essays in this collection, written between 1967 and 2000, have sought to reclaim the author of Animal Farm and 1984 from two principal groups: Western conservatives and the formerly influential bloc of European Communists. The latter, whose contemporary attacks on Orwell simply rehash their forebears’ diatribes against Orwell’s indictment of Stalinism in action in Homage to Catalonia, are quickly brushed away and rightly so.
The former, however, require a different approach because the reactionary reading of Orwell – that of a one-time fellow traveller who saw the light and warned the world of the dangers of socialism – is still very much in play and heavily fortified by aforementioned high school curricula the world over. To this we can add the concerted efforts of ideologists of capitalist imperialism, many of whom were one-time Trotskyists themselves (Max Eastman, James Burnham and now Christopher Hitchens).
The conservatives are dealt with in two ways. The first, perhaps the more common approach here, is to discredit the ‘epiphany’ reading of Orwell by reviewing the sizeable body of critical-leftist journalism that Orwell produced before, while and after he wrote Animal Farm and 1984.
This strategy bears considerable fruit and the authors who take up this line (predominantly John Newsinger and Peter Sedgwick) are on fairly safe ground. Newsinger argues that it is erroneous to say that Orwell had recanted his Left-wing politics when he himself repeatedly claimed that his attacks on the Soviet Union were not an abandonment of socialism, but rather an attempt to rescue socialism from the barbarities of the Soviet ‘communism’. Couple this with the fact that Orwell continued to be involved in radical journals until his last productive days and the claims of conservatives come off hollow.
Inadequate politics
The second and less persuasive argument holds that the reason that the Right has been so successful in their appropriations of Orwell is that Orwell’s inadequate politics (read not Marxist) left the door ajar, or perhaps even invited such a reading. Animal Farm (and most likely 1984 as well) were accidents waiting to happen, or, as John Molyneux crudely puts it, “a ‘right wing’ book by a ‘left wing’ writer.”
The ultimate failure for Molyneux is that Orwell has little faith in the working class as the agent of change. This claim will seem wildly inconsistent for readers of Homage to Catalonia, and there are times when Molyneux’s lack of sophisticated argumentation makes one wince.
This is not to say that Molyneux is bereft of ideas to prove his point. Examining the text closely, for instance, Molyneux notes that in Animal Farm Orwell writes: “The reading and writing classes however were a great success. By autumn almost every animal was literate to some degree.” However, on the very next page of Animal Farm, as Molyneux summarises Orwell, “apart from the pigs, only the dogs, Muriel the goat and Benjamin the donkey learn to read. The vast bulk of animals get no further than the letter A.” Thus, Orwell contradicts himself within the space of one page.
This gem of an insight should form part of the lynchpin of Molyneux’s argument, but we find it buried in a footnote. For Molyneux, it is seemingly better to berate Orwell for including no Lenin figure in the text than to pursue a method of inquiry along the lines of Trotsky, who would argue, as Molyneux himself points out, that “a work of art must first be judged by the laws of art, and a novel cannot be treated as if it were merely the dramatization of a political treatise.”
Orwell’s literary text
And this, despite many careful and persuasive insights, is the main criticism of George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist; Orwell’s position as a writer of fiction is never given its due. If there is a critique of Orwell’s literary text, the authors respond not by trying to unpack the text, but substantiate their points through either biographical repudiation or a reliance on his journalistic/essayistic work.
Why then is Orwell’s literary work worthy of redemption? Because he openly declared that he was a socialist and he called for and wrote about revolutions. This logic leads the authors to advance positions that are ultimately untenable.
Most obvious here is the declaration that Orwell has the unpleasant distinction of being the only socialist gleefully championed by conservatives of all sorts. This betrays a real weakness as one wonders why a poet of such sheer radical intensity as William Blake is excluded, when his work is routinely appropriated in the cause of oppressive, nationalistic structures.
What’s more, the style of Orwell’s writing, his “clear as a window pane” prose, which has contributed significantly to his wide public audience, goes unaddressed.
Orwell’s politics
An appreciation of Orwell’s literary texts is not the only thing left wanting here. A sufficient analysis of Orwell’s at times outrageous sexism and homophobia is also largely absent. Orwell equation of feminists with “vegetarians with wilting beards”, “sandal wearers” and “sex-maniacs” is hair-raisingly infuriating.
His further inclusion of the brazenly homophobic “nancy” or “pansy poets” in his litany of dislikes just adds to the noxious, oppressive politics that Orwell was capable of advancing. Yet if the authors here do not sufficiently deal with this side of Orwell, they are (perhaps predictably) much better on Orwell’s anti-Stalinism and his support for working class struggles towards socialism.
As many of the authors here point out, Orwell is trapped in the idea of the simpleton who nonetheless does right in the end, despite those smart ones who might lead him astray. This is an age-old story, a fable (as Animal Farm is) if you will. Yet it is here where Orwell fails.
Orwell’s lack of theoretical consistency leads very often to insulting reductionism, as is evident in the following. He writes: “The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in face of endless discouragements.”
It is with this in mind that one should remember that, in 1984, the working classes are hardly in need of control in comparison to middle class intellectuals. This latter group must be ruthlessly controlled and brought to believe – by all means – in the current order.
And if there is one group that Orwell is convinced could provide an obstacle to democratic socialism it is the intellectuals. Not just intellectuals per se, but specifically Stalinist intellectuals, posed the greatest danger, as they had a considerable record of snuffing out revolutionary potential.
Here one may have sympathy with Orwell, as readers of Homage to Catalonia can attest. What many readers will have remembered from reading Homage to Catalonia is the image of Barcelona, as Orwell phrases it, a city where “the working class was in the saddle.” Yet seeing a functioning socialist city, however embryonic, did not win Orwell over to revolutionary socialism. What wins Orwell over is his return to Barcelona, when the Stalinists are working to smother the revolutionary impulse.
Orwell, having seen socialism as a viable proposition crushed by those who are supposedly its proponents, will take from this tragedy a severe hatred of Soviet-run society and its necessary lies. This is Orwell’s greatest strength and although at this low ebb of revolutionary struggle we may find Orwell’s critique somewhat distant, Orwell’s failures and his successes, and his currency, can prove vital to a truly revolutionary politics.
