The Socialist Orwell

Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, was born 100 years ago on June 25, 1903, at Motihari, India. His dystopian novels Animal Farm and 1984, bleak accounts of both past and future totalitarian societies, have become classics, profoundly influencing millions of people all over the world, surpassing in this respect Huxley’s Brave New World, Zamyatin’s We, and everything else that had been written. "Newspeak", "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," "Big Brother" have become standard references for libertarians, democrats, and even Trotskyites, and rightly so.

Self-described as "drawing totalitarian ideas that have taken roots in the minds of intellectuals everywhere to their logical consequences," quite a few of the prophecies of Oceania, a nightmare world of totalitarianism, have become true for many Winston Smiths – in 1984 and today still. Animal Farm, the satiric beast fable and political allegory, describes most of the Russian revolution-turned-dictatorship milestones between 1917 and 1943, and drawing analogies between revolutionary communists rising to power and pigs taking over the farm is a powerful depiction of Orwell’s conviction that "history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters."

However, despite all of Orwell’s powerful insights, and his understanding of the inner and outer workings of the dominant totalitarian ideologies of the time and their propaganda, Orwell’s case against collectivism and for the dignity, freedom, and recognition of the rights of the individual should not be overestimated. After all, it was Orwell himself who, reflecting his "desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after," concluded in his essay Why I Write that "every line that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it." He would always retain his view of socialism as a remedy for social injustice, arbitrary distribution of wealth, and the poverty of the masses.

Born into the lower-middle-class family of a British civil servant in India, early at his private prep school in England he was confronted with social differences among his classmates, and his own status of an outsider due to his family’s meager circumstances. He faced with great discontent the obvious difference in treatment by the teachers. Reflecting on this experience many years later through the words of Gordon Comstock, the main character of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, he said that "probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than itself."

True to his conviction that writer’s motives cannot be rightly assessed without knowing something of his early developments, these child’ s memories set the theme of many of Orwell’s future works – the worlds and lives of the oppressed, down-and-outs, beggars, and underdogs stuck in the vicious circle of poverty and misery (he would even take up the case of the common toad and devote one of his essays to it, primarily for its being neglected by the "cultural establishment" for saluting the coming of spring much before the acclaimed swallow and daffodil). His natural talents recognized by others early on through a scholarship enabled him to continue his study at the prestigious Eton, where he found much friendlier environment. His lifelong determination to serve the poor and backward led him, rather strangely, to the Indian Imperial Service in Burma – only to see "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters." It is here, where his hatred of authoritarianism, colonialism, and imperialism can be traced – "the truth is that no modern man in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force. Foreign oppression such a more obvious, understandable evil than economic oppression."

Orwell left the Imperial Service in disgust, with the aim of relieving his guilt-riddened conscience and gaining even more authentic experience of poverty and > misery for his future writings, he shared the lives of the social outcasts of Paris and London, seeing slums, visiting hospitals and pawnshops, listening to the stories of beggars and the homeless, concluding along with G.B. Shaw that "the greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty." Autobiographical stories and essays Down and Out in Paris and London, and his early novels A Clergyman’s Daughter, Road to Wigan Pier, or Keep the Aspidistra Flying represent various restatements of "physical and spiritual rottening of men" of the impoverished as well as senselessness, boredom, and triviality of the middle class – however, without much literary success and conviction. Orwell the novelist is by far surpassed by Orwell the journalist and essayist – even his most famous novel, 1984, is in reality more of a superb political essay than a work of an imaginative novelist in line with Orwell’ s efforts "to make political writing into an art."

Orwell is renowned for his conscious striving for clear language conveying his ideas to the common people with common sense. For Orwell, good prose was "like a window pane." He was well aware of the ongoing destruction of language by government propaganda and its allied intelligentsia, and fought vigorously "the deliberate corruption of language – the most unbearable aspect of modern life." He resisted pretentious diction, the use of meaningless words, dying metaphors, ready made phrases, Latinized English.

Thus writes Orwell in Politics and the English Language words that are very well true today and indeed anytime: "A mass of Latin words fall upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find – this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify – that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship. But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage of can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better."

And elsewhere – (the language) "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thought," words which are as very well true today, as they were sixty years ago.

Orwell’s final turn to the socialist cause followed his fighting for the Spanish Republicans in the Civil War of 1936 depicted in his Homage to Catalonia. It is here that he finally became convinced that socialism would work and that socialist measures (among those Orwell pushed for in England were "nationalization of land, mines, banks and major industries, limitations of income such that the highest does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one and reform of the educational system along democratic lines") would bring about his ideal vision of the future – "political democracy, social equality and internationalism."

Orwell held capitalism responsible for "the horrors of the Industrial Revolution, the destruction of one culture after another, the piling up of millions of human beings in hideous ant-heaps of cities, and above all, the enslavement of the coloured races" and it was difficult for him to feel that "in itself it is superior to feudalism." Reviewing Hayek’s Road to Serfdom he wrote that "a return to "free" competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift toward collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter" – beliefs to which he stuck to the end of his days (he died on January 21, 1950, of tuberculosis, having witnessed the phenomenal world-wide success of the Animal Farm and completing his other opus magnum, 1984, in hospital).

With all his concern for eradicating poverty and making human beings live as human beings, and despite his lack of economic literacy, George Orwell could have and should have known better. After all, there is no better example than Orwell’s own life and story, that for all the Gordon Comstocks of the world, the only way for people to improve their lots and find sense and purpose in life is through productive work and peaceful coexistence and cooperation with others. And equally importantly, having the opportunity to keep the products of their work – which leaves no place for democratic socialism.

June 28, 2003

Matus Petrik [send him mail] is a PhD student of law in Bratislava, Slovakia, where he also works for the Institute for a Free Society. Currently he is a summer fellow at the Mises Institute.

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