Teoría, Cultura y Género

Dossier: 100 años del nacimiento de George Orwell

Autor: Socialist Review

Fecha: 6/2/2004

Traductor: Guillermo Crux, especial para PI

Fuente: Socialist Review 276, julio 2003

Orwell Centenary: The Biographies
Feature Article by John Newsinger, July 2003

George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. John Newsinger reviews recent biographies of Orwell.

In 1946 George Orwell was to acknowledge the importance of his Spanish experiences. Spain, he wrote, had 'turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line I have written since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.' What is remarkable, of course, is that an old Etonian, very much a product of the imperial middle class should have ended up fighting in Spain with the POUM militia and then have gone on to become the most important socialist writer and novelist of 20th century Britain. The paradox has made Orwell the subject of numerous biographies and studies of various kinds, some friendly, some hostile, some useful, some not. Inevitably, 2003, the centenary of his birth, is witnessing the publication of a rash of new books about the man. Christopher Hitchens led the way last year with his Orwell's Victory and so far this year we have had DJ Taylor's Orwell: the Life, Scott Lucas's Orwell and Gorden Bowker's George Orwell. What do they contribute to the already large body of writing that exists?


Development


First, let us look at Orwell's political development after Spain. On his return to Britain he attempted to expose the betrayal by the Communists there and actively opposed the build-up to war in 1939. He even argued with anarchist friends for the establishment of an underground organisation to continue illegal anti-war propaganda once conflict broke out. In the event, when war was declared Orwell abruptly reversed his position, a reversal made easier by the Hitler-Stalin pact, and began advocating a revolutionary patriotism. In effect, he tried to adapt POUM arguments about how to win the war in Spain to the situation in Britain. By the summer of 1940 he was arguing that 'only revolution can save England' and was calling for the arming of the people. 'I dare say', he wrote, that 'the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them if necessary.' He urged all true patriots and all true socialists to 'embrace the Trotskyist slogan "The war and the revolution are inseparable".' He insisted that either 'we turn this war into a revolutionary war or we lose it'. The ruling class was completely discredited by appeasement, defeat and class privilege and all that was needed for a socialist revolution was decisive leadership. The Home Guard would play the role of a revolutionary militia. Once the revolution had triumphed in Britain a people's war of liberation would be declared, carrying revolution throughout occupied Europe and into Germany itself, where the people would rise up, massacre the Gestapo and overthrow the Hitler regime.


These revolutionary hopes were not to be realised. The challenge from the left was beaten back in Britain by the Conservative-Labour coalition government and the involvement of the Soviet Union and the US in the war made it possible for victory to be achieved without socialist revolution. Orwell chronicled these developments in a remarkable series of 'London Letters' that he wrote for the US 'literary Trotskyist' journal Partisan Review. This American connection is vital to understanding his political development as a 'literary Trotskyist'. This is not to deny that Orwell had serious disagreements with Trotskyism. Nevertheless, he was engaged in a continual debate with Trotskyist ideas right up until his death.


With the reluctant recognition that socialist revolution was not on the agenda in Britain for the foreseeable future, Orwell looked to Labour reformism as the best alternative. Earlier, he had always dismissed the Labour Party as hopelessly compromised, as always bound to capitulate to the rich. Now he became literary editor of the left Labour newspaper Tribune. Although he was always critical of the 1945-51 Labour government's moderation, his support for it began to pull him to the right politically. This did not lead him to embrace conservatism, imperialism or reaction, but to defend, albeit critically, Labour reformism.


Recognition


The other crucial dimension to Orwell's socialism was his recognition that the Soviet Union was not socialist. Unlike many on the left, instead of abandoning socialism once he discovered the full horror of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union, Orwell abandoned the Soviet Union and instead remained a socialist - indeed he became more committed to the socialist cause than ever.


In 1948 the Labour government established a propaganda organisation, the Information Research Department (IRD), supposedly to counter Communist propaganda and advocate the cause of democratic socialism. In practice, it was to become an important tool of British imperialism in the Cold War, carrying out black propaganda at home and abroad. Shortly before his death Orwell became one of a number on the non-Communist left recruited to help the organisation. He provided it with his notorious list of people he believed could not be relied on to help fight Communism. This was a terrible mistake on his part, deriving in equal measure from his hostility to Stalinism and his illusions in the Labour government. What it certainly does not amount to, however, is an abandonment of the socialist cause or transformation into a footsoldier in the Cold War. Indeed, Orwell made clear on a number of occasions his opposition to any British McCarthyism, to any bans and proscriptions on Communist Party members (they certainly did not reciprocate this) and any notion of a preventive war. If he had lived long enough to realise what the IRD was actually about there can be no doubt that he would have broken with it.


Which brings us back to the four new books examining Orwell and his times. First of all Taylor's Orwell: The Life. This is a lightweight literary biography written by someone who is not really interested in his politics. Its limitations are best demonstrated by the fact that Taylor spends more time discussing Orwell's attitude to rats than he does his attitude towards the Soviet Union. The book is just not worth reading. Much more substantial is Gordon Bowker's George Orwell. He certainly does take Orwell's politics seriously and has uncovered new material of considerable interest. Where Bowker falls down, however, is in actually getting to grips with the particular character of Orwell's socialism. Despite this, the book is a valuable contribution to debate and discussion about Orwell. The best biography of the man remains Bernard Crick's Orwell: A Life published in 1980.


More controversial are the volumes from Hitchens and Lucas. Hitchens' Orwell's Victory is likely to be his last decent book now that he has become a cheerleader for US imperialism. It is a vigorous defence of Orwell, marred by a tendency to show off and self advertise. Nevertheless it is an excellent introduction.


This leaves Scott Lucas's rather strident attack on Orwell as an enemy, indeed as the enemy of the left in his book Orwell. What is interesting is that in many ways, for example, his anti-imperialism, Scott Lucas is much closer to this journal than the likes of Hitchens. But what we get from him here is the traditional Stalinist attack on Orwell, but with the Stalinism left out. For Lucas, Orwell was really never more than a liberal (he provides a particularly fatuous discussion of Orwell and Dickens to prove this) and with the onset of the Cold War he finally displayed his true colours.


Lucas can only advance this argument by refusing to engage with the problem that Orwell faced up to: how to be a socialist and an opponent of Stalinism. Stalinism as a problem for the left is completely absent from Lucas's book. Instead all of Orwell's attacks on Stalinism are treated as if they were attacks on socialism, despite Orwell's continued insistence that they were not. This was never an honest way to proceed but while one might have got away with it when Stalinism still had some credibility on the left, you cannot get away with it today. For Lucas, Orwell is tarnished by, indeed blamed for, those socialists who did become Cold War liberals. What he cannot account for are the thousands who every year are inspired by Orwell, who he helps to see through the rubbish to continue the struggle for a better world.
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Orwell Centenary: Culture, Class and Communism
Feature Article by Gareth Jenkins, July 2003

George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Gareth Jenkins assesses Orwell's writing on culture.

Room 101, Big Brother, doublethink - all these have passed into the language to become instantly recognisable, though in ways that might have surprised Orwell. They are testimony to the power of his writing and the way it has become part of everyday culture.


Orwell took culture very seriously and was one of a handful of writers in the 20th century to map its influence. He wrote about the enduring popularity of the 19th century British novelist Charles Dickens and about Rudyard Kipling, whose poems and stories celebrated the Indian Raj. His writings on culture are tremendously readable - journalistic in the best sense of the word. Orwell could not be dull - and present-day academics, whether addressing high or low culture, could learn a thing or two about how to interest the reader. But Orwell is not simplistic in his judgements, even at his most annoying. Whether writing about Dickens, or the Irish poet W.B. Yeats, or the American low-life writer Henry Miller, or Donald McGill's postcards, he is out to engage with a larger question about the importance of culture in the 1930s and 1940s.


The culture of the period had been deeply politicised in a way that it hadn't for a hundred years or so in Britain, with writers invited to take sides and with culture itself being harnessed to right and left wing causes. The driving force in this respect was the Communist Party and its Stalinist reduction of culture to being 'good' or 'bad' because of its class perspective. Orwell refused such gross oversimplification - but did not fall into the opposite trap of pretending that culture should exist in some rarefied atmosphere. So he rejected the idea that Dickens was some kind of 'proletarian writer' but didn't for all that deny the importance of Dickens's politics.


He explores the contradictions in the novelist's work - in Dickens's moral, rather than social, criticism of his society, his championing of the underdog yet fear of the mob - as well as the way in which his style and language work on these contradictions. He memorably concluded his essay by defending Dickens as a writer who was 'generously angry - in other words, a 19th century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls'.


More controversially, in his essay on Kipling Orwell looks beyond the jingo imperialism, moral insensitivity and aesthetic disgust and sees a certain realism in the portrayal of Anglo-Indian life. Orwell was also fascinated by the 'popular' culture generally despised by genteel culture, the culture of saucy postcards, boys' weeklies and the cult of the detective - long before such subjects become central to cultural studies departments in universities. He writes about these things not just to criticise but to see what the left might learn. He sees in the vulgarity of saucy postcards an expression of an 'unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul', the worm's eye view as against the elevated heroic self. At the end of his essay on boys' weeklies he speculates whether adventure stories could be written without being 'mixed up with snobbishness and gutter patriotism' - a kind of 'left' popular fiction.


Inside the Whale's starting point is Henry Miller's novels about low-life drifters and would-be artists. Orwell uses them to explore a broader issue of a cultural trend towards passivity in the face of social conflict and war - a refusal to be involved in the kind of political choices that so many left wing writers, like the poet W H Auden, felt confronted with in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell caught this idea in another memorable metaphor. Miller and writers like him responded to the appeal of being swallowed up by the whale like Jonah in the biblical story. The whale's belly 'is simply a womb big enough for an adult. There you are in the dark, cushioned space that exactly fits you, with yards of blubber between yourself and reality, able to keep up an attitude of the completest indifference, no matter what happens.'


Orwell, writing in 1940, with fascism victorious in Spain and Britain at war with Nazi Germany, was deeply critical of the limitations of this acceptance: 'To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films, and political murders.'


But Orwell was also deeply critical of the alternative on offer - commitment to Communism. The Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 meant that 'the unquestionable dogma of Monday' (the popular front against fascism) became 'the damnable heresy of Tuesday' (siding with imperialism). 'Why', he asked, 'should writers be attracted by a form of socialism that makes mental honesty impossible?'


The answer, he reckoned, was cultural. Middle class unemployment (among British intellectuals) meant that the old loyalties towards King and Empire had been undermined. But you still needed to believe in something. The young writers of the 1930s had flocked towards the Communist Party - 'here', he claimed, 'was a Church, an army, an orthodoxy, a discipline'. 'The "Communism" of the English intellectual is the patriotism of the deracinated.'


Whatever the limited truth in this sweeping generalisation about middle and upper class recruits to Communism, this hardly explains why thousands of working class militants joined the Communist Party and constituted the bulk of its membership. This is something Orwell never tackles in his writing. For him, the working class experience is closer to that represented by Henry Miller: 'For the ordinary man is also passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade union or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against the major events he is as helpless as against the elements.'


Yet it was only four years earlier that Orwell had glimpsed in Barcelona something quite different, 'the working class in the saddle', and noted a quite different culture among ordinary people, in which 'waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal'. This was quite the opposite of the passivity he noted in the later piece of writing.


Why the difference? Orwell's discussion of popular culture - particularly in The Lion and the Unicorn, the essay-pamphlet he published in 1941 - provides the clue. Its subtitle is 'Socialism and the English Genius'. It shows Orwell still committed to socialism, despite his own sudden conversion when war was declared, to support for Britain. In January 1939 he was talking about 'organising for illegal anti-war activities' and 'underground organisation'. For, as he wrote as late as July 1939, 'what meaning would there be, even if it [British imperialism] were successful, in bringing down Hitler's system in order to stabilise something that is far bigger and in its different way just as bad?'


Yet it was 'My Country Right or Left' - to use the title of a piece he wrote in the autumn of 1940 - once he realised he was 'patriotic at heart'. Yet this was a strange sort of patriotism. 'Only a revolution can save England,' he declared, even if 'loyalty to Chamberlain's England and to the England of tomorrow might seem an impossibility.'


How did Orwell resolve this contradiction? This is where the 'English genius' comes in, for much of The Lion and the Unicorn is devoted to investigating the cultural peculiarities of the English. These form the basis of Orwell's simultaneous attachment to patriotism and revolution. Orwell claims that the only way to understand the modern world is to recognise the strength of patriotism, in comparison with which 'Christianity and international socialism are as weak as straw'. This comes from the reality of national differences, which makes English culture as 'individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.' And this culture stretches into the future as well as the past, making it 'your civilisation, it is you'.


Orwell is putting a positive gloss on the picture of the 'ordinary man' depicted in Inside the Whale. Passivity in the face of major events is now the celebration of 'the privateness of English life': 'All the culture that is most truly native centres around things which even when they are communal are not official - the pub, the football match, the back garden and the "nice cup of tea".'


This privateness explains hypocrisy towards empire and anti-intellectualism - but it also connects with indifference, or hostility, to regimentation. So, party rallies, youth movements, coloured shirts, Jew-baiting go against the grain - as do, according to Orwell, militarism and flag-wagging of the Rule Britannia type.


Does class disappear in this analysis? Orwell's view of the 'most class-ridden society under the sun' does not spare the ruling class in its attachment to imperial exploitation or ambivalence towards fascism. But his conclusion - which is in line with putting nation before class - is that the best way to describe England is that it is 'a family with the wrong members in control'. What therefore Orwell hopes from the war is that in fighting Hitler the right members of the family will take control: 'It is only by revolution that the genius of the English people will be set free.' An understanding of culture, rather than the attempt to impose some 'alien' left-intellectual doctrine of class consciousness, is the road to socialist change.


Sixty years on, Orwell's portrait of English culture bears little relationship to today's realities. Few people, apart from former prime minister John Major, would think of 'old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning' as a characteristic fragment of the English scene that has persisted as our civilisation.


But it's not just that he got it wrong. There's a problem with his method which comes back to why he writes about culture. In the end his interest in 'ordinary' life accompanies a paradoxical despair about change. Spain showed him a way forward - how change could be rooted in the self-activity of ordinary people. However, defeat did not, as it did for many others, turn him away from socialism. He stuck tenaciously to the capacity of ordinary people to resist. But understandably, he was reluctant to use 'internationalist' vocabulary that had been abused by Communists and seemed to bear little relationship to concrete realities.


But the surrender to patriotism, however radically presented as rooted in popular national culture, is a move against change from below. There was no English revolution. The wrong members of the family remained in charge, kitted out in Labour colours. Nineteen Eighty-Four maintained that hope remained with the 'proles'. But the culture of the proles that we see denies that hope.

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Orwell Centenary: No Pasaran
Feature Article by Andy Durgan, July 2003

George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Andy Durgan describes the impact of revolutionary Spain on Orwell.

'I had dropped into the only community of any size in western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.' So wrote George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia on the six months he was to spend in revolutionary Spain.


Witness to revolution


When Orwell reached Barcelona in December 1936, the revolution that had taken over the city five months before was already on the wane. The creation of a unified Popular Army to replace the workers' militias, the undermining of collectivised industry and the campaign of lies against the revolutionary left were all under way. Yet the revolution was still very visible, thus leaving an indelible mark on Orwell: 'It was the first time that I had been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flags of the anarchists.'


He goes on to describe how, to a backdrop of broadcasts of revolutionary music and slogans, churches were being demolished and every shop and cafe, and even the bootblacks, had signs stating that they had been collectivised; how there appeared only to be 'workers' on the streets - the rich and middle classes having disappeared or having disguised themselves as 'proletarians'.


In Britain Orwell had contacted the ILP about going to Spain as a volunteer, after having been turned down as being politically unreliable by the Communist Party. Through the ILP he would join the militias of the revolutionary socialist POUM. After a few days 'training', Orwell was sent to join the party's militia on the Aragon front. He was soon disappointed both by the lack of activity at the front and the militia's chronic lack of resources. He would learn later that this was the result of the authorities' deliberate withholding of arms and munitions from the revolutionary forces which dominated this front.


Orwell's frustration was tempered by his growing realisation of the significance of the militia as an example of how socialism itself could be organised. Its democratic nature and its members' high level of political consciousness and self imposed discipline were a revelation for someone from a traditional military background such as Orwell. 'Here', he would write later, 'I became a real socialist.'


Stabbed in the back


At the front Orwell had disagreed with his fellow POUM fighters that the war and the revolution were inseparable. Instead he had favoured the Communist Party line that the war had to be won first and the revolution 'postponed'. In late April 1937 he returned on leave to Barcelona, with the intention of transferring to the Communist-controlled International Brigades, only to find himself in the middle of an armed conflict that would decide the fate of the revolution.


The Stalinists counterposed the defence of democracy to the revolution so as to not to upset the USSR's attempt to win an alliance with western governments. But they also opposed the revolution because it was led not by themselves but by the anarchists and the POUM. The Spanish Communists had benefited greatly from the, albeit conditional, support given to the Republic by the USSR, and had grown massively since the beginning of the war, particularly among those sectors in the Republican zone most opposed to the revolution.


The first thing Orwell noticed when he returned to Barcelona was how the atmosphere had changed. The 'bourgeoisie' was again visible on the streets. There were queues for food and protests over shortages. Gone was the revolutionary enthusiasm of five months previously. He was also immediately aware of the barrage of slander in the Stalinist press against the revolutionaries, and in particular the POUM which was constantly denounced as 'fascist'.


On 3 May police forces under Communist control tried to take over the Barcelona telephone exchange, a symbol of workers' power in the city. This led to several days of bloody fighting between government and Stalinist forces and the revolutionary organisations. The latter would be defeated when their leaders agreed to a ceasefire rather than endanger anti-fascist unity. The POUM was outlawed and its leaders imprisoned or murdered. The anarchist organisations also found themselves on the defensive. It proved a decisive defeat for the revolution.


On 23 June 1937 Orwell finally left Spain, a fugitive with the secret police on his trail. Such was Stalinist influence that in Britain Orwell found that the left wing publisher Victor Gollancz refused to publish Homage to Catalonia without even having read the text. Although it was published elsewhere, only after his later success would the book begin to get the recognition it deserved.


Spain changed Orwell's politics forever. In 1942, he would recall meeting an Italian militiaman in the POUM's barracks, an incident which opens Homage to Catalonia. He symbolised for Orwell 'the flower of the European working class, harried by the police of all countries, the people who fill the mass graves of the Spanish battlefields and are now, to the tune of several million, rotting in forced labour camps. The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable? That was the real issue of the Spanish war.'

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Orwell Centenary: From 2003 to 1984
Feature Article by Andrew Stone, July 2003

George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Andrew Stone assesses the relevance of Orwell's most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Whenever a politician says one thing but means another, we think of 'Newspeak'. Whenever we need shorthand for the intrusive power of the state, the media or big business - such as the RMT's dispute with PPP contractor Metronet over a CCTV camera at Baker Street - the spectre of Big Brother is raised. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is ensconced in our political (and - in the case of the facile gameshow Big Brother - not so political) vocabulary, synonymous with rampant authoritarianism and oppression.


Orwell's cautionary tale, following the efforts of 'thought criminal' Winston Smith to subvert the dictatorial rule of the Party and its icon Big Brother, retains immense rhetorical power. But how relevant is it to the modern world? A world which is not divided into three superstates (Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia), where the free market not autarky reigns, where a newspaper article of a few years hence is more likely to be found on a web search than be doctored out of all recognition? Clearly, being free to read about such an extreme dystopia is a pretty good disproof of its existence. Nevertheless, there is much in Nineteen Eighty-Four which is recognisable, albeit in a much less exaggerated form, in the world today.


Many see Oceania (where the book is set) as a Stalinist state, an immediately distancing factor for British readers. This wasn't quite Orwell's intention. The book within the book, Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, describes the superstates as having been foreshadowed by totalitarian systems - a problematic categorisation of Stalinism alongside fascism much favoured by the right in the Cold War. But Orwell's cautionary tale also reflected his fear that the 'official left' (into which he bracketed the Labour Party) was becoming seduced by the power it had had to curtail civil liberties since entering the wartime coalition government. Big Brother rules in the name of 'Ingsoc' (English Socialism), which Orwell was clear was not an imported phenomenon.


The Britain of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been subsumed within Oceania - blocked with the Americas (plus Australasia and South Africa) and designated Airstrip One. At the time of the book's publication, in 1949, the British ruling class was still coming to terms with its increasing dependence on the US. If Orwell seems prescient in seeing Britain as an outpost for an empire centred on the Americas, then it is mainly relative to contemporaries who clung onto unsustainable imperial illusions until the Suez Crisis of 1956. But whereas Britain's primary use within Oceania is geographical, in the modern world the US has a range of options should its military and intelligence outposts in Britain be closed. It is the political fig leaf of support the British government provides as part of an 'international coalition' in highly disputed ventures, such as the invasion of Iraq, which Washington ultimately prizes.


If the superstates described by Orwell are reminiscent of the Cold War blocs that inspired them, they have less obvious relevance to a world with a single military superpower like the US. But one of the striking features of the book is the continuing state of war which society is kept in. This brings to mind the amorphous 'war on terror', used to justify the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which were being considered by the influential Project for the New American Century long before 11 September 2001. Their vision extends much further than Kabul and Baghdad - to Iran, Syria, North Korea and other 'rogue states'. Former CIA director James Woolsey has described this as the 'fourth world war', one which could take decades to complete.


War in Nineteen Eighty-Four is, in some ways, more like that of today than when Orwell wrote it. It doesn't take place in 'the centres of civilisation' (for which read the major powers, rather than major sources of civilisation such as Iraq), but at the periphery. Relatively small numbers of people in these centres are active combatants, who use specialised equipment. Warfare follows the same logic as any other industry - it tends over time to become more capital intensive (ie it uses more technology relative to human labour), meaning that conscription has become less common, and better trained armed forces more of a necessity. This overall tendency is despite warfare's unique ability to destroy much of what the military industry provides for it (bombs, munitions, etc). This wasteful imperative, by slowing the proportional increase of 'dead labour' (eg machinery) compared to living labour, offset the destructive effects of what Marx called 'the tendency of the rate of profit to fall' and sustained the long post Second World War boom. In Nineteen Eighty-Four war also confers stability, but in Orwell's world it is the distribution of products, and the challenge to authority which would result from greater access to goods and education, which is the source of instability a war economy negates.


Methods of war


Orwell also makes some telling predictions about the development of the methods of war, with Goldstein reporting that 'bombing planes have been largely superseded by self-propelled projectiles' and describing 'almost unsinkable Floating Fortress[es]' which sound like modern aircraft carriers. In a world where 'science' only exists as a series of discrete investigations, Goldstein tells us that 'various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped'. This is both like and unlike our world. On the one hand, capitalists are constantly hungry to create new needs, and thus new markets, and technology plays an important role in this (witness biotech companies trying to convince us that world hunger can only be solved by genetically engineering crops to be sterile!). But most of the technological developments of the past half century - from the home computer to the mobile phone - have only been possible because of long term research and development by the military.


One of the most memorable such developments in Nineteen Eighty-Four is the omnipresent telescreens, the Party's means of constant surveillance over its members. The ubiquity of TVs in our homes is not quite analogous to this - the crucial differences being that they are one-way and we can turn them off without penalty. But the erosion of privacy is a major concern, with CCTV cameras spreading (with Transport for London assuring us that they make us 'secure beneath the watchful eyes') and the government passing 'anti-terrorist' legislation to vastly increase the scope and scale of e-mail monitoring and phone bugs. The Civil Contingencies Bill, among other worrying powers it would confer on the police in the event of a terrorist attack, would allow them to control internet provision.


Vast amounts of data are held about every individual already - about shopping habits from loyalty cards, on location from mobile phone use. Our main protection from misuse is not the benevolence of departments of state or corporations that have this information, but its diffuseness among multiple agencies. David Blunkett's plans for compulsory 'entitlement cards' would weaken this safeguard, with much personal information centralised for the benefit of state agencies and to the detriment of personal liberty.


Perhaps the parallels which people feel most keenly with Orwell's dystopia are the mind games - the abuse of memory and language. They see in the 'two minutes hate' the mindless invocation of 'the new Hitler' whenever a war is to be fought. They recognise the shifting alliances of the war which alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia, in a superpower which has armed, trained or supported Saddam Hussein, the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden to various degrees, then sought to expunge the memory. So just as Winston Smith rewrites old newspaper reports to fit the needs of present Party policy, Republican hawks can blithely cite the Halabja massacre - which they disputed the veracity of when committed by their then ally - as a reason for war. Added to this the supposedly imminent threat of Iraqi WMD has been the subject of extensive governmental revisionism.


Newspeak


Then there is 'Newspeak'. Whereas the central tenet of Orwell's fictional language was to destroy as many words as possible - and thus take away the means of dissent - it is in the ideological euphemisms that today's reader feels at home. The Ministry of Peace wages war for Oceania, the Ministry of Defence does for Britain. Tony Blair spun his quest to justify war against Iraq as a 'final push for peace', which France was accused of sabotaging by not wishing to vote for war! And the abuse of language is never starker than in the heat of war itself, with civilian deaths described as 'collateral damage', with occupation masquerading as 'liberation', and with 'democracy' amounting to the freedom of US-based multinationals to loot Iraqi oil.


There are many other features of Nineteen Eighty-Four which should give the modern reader pause for thought. Winston Smith describes a propaganda film celebrating the bombing of refugees in the Mediterranean. In June, after 60 to 70 would-be immigrants drowned off the coast of Sicily, Umberto Bossi, a minister in the Italian government about to take the rotating presidency of Fortress Europe, said, 'I want to hear the roar of the cannon. The immigrants must be hunted down, for better or worse... At the second or third warning - boom! Fire the cannons at them!'


Big Brother's glorification of spying and mistrust is not a million miles from hotlines to 'shop benefit cheats'. The use of torture in a legal vacuum should remind us of the plight of 'enemy combatants' held indefinitely and in legal limbo by the US at Guantanamo and Bagram, as well as the 'terrorist suspects' denied due process in Britain. Even the promotion of chastity finds a modern parallel in the 'True love waits' cult in the US. This is a richly detailed vision of a society we should all want to avoid.


But although Orwell feared this was one possible future, he was not without some hope - the notion expressed by Winston Smith that 'all hope lies in the proles'. It wasn't a vision which Orwell spelled out - his brief experience of workers' power in Spain convinced him that workers could control their own destiny, but this was weakened by the patronising conviction that workers were stirred by emotion, and only the middle class by socialist theory.


And yet the Newspeak notion of 'doublethink' is quite useful for explaining why periods of working class passivity punctuate those of rebellion. Essentially it describes the conflict of fact with ideology, a similar process to what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci called 'contradictory consciousness'. He argued that in any society the dominant ideas would be those of the class in power, reflecting their own interests, but that the experience of the working class under capitalism also created the potential for rejecting that ideology - not abstractly but through practical needs and organisation. The unprecedented mobilisations against the war in Iraq showed that no matter how slick the propaganda, collective resistance can flourish.


Orwell may have been too pessimistic to see exactly how this could happen. Or perhaps he just didn't want to dilute the power of the dystopia with a cathartic happy ending. But the appendix, innocuous as it seems, suggests he did remain hopeful that tyranny was defeatable. For in describing the principles of Newspeak (in standard English) it uses the past tense throughout, suggesting that sometime in the future Big Brother was deposed and history reclaimed.


We may not live in bureaucratically controlled economies, but under modern capitalism billions suffer ongoing war, poverty, oppression and injustice. The minority who benefit from the system find they can only maintain their privilege by extending the means of separation, surveillance and control. This is why Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to resonate with readers, and will do until we realise the potential we have to run the world on a completely different basis.

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Orwell Centenary: The Cold War Controversy
Feature Article by Paul Foot, July 2003

George Orwell was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth we examine the controversy around his work and his legacy for today. Paul Foot examines why much of the left rejects Orwell.

As the Private Eye columnist Glenda Slagg might ask, 'George Orwell? Arncha sick of him?' As the hundredth anniversary of his birth - 25 June 1903 - comes and goes the literary media appear to have taken leave of their senses. Three more full-scale biographies have been produced to enlarge an already enormous pile. Orwell's rather mediocre love life fills the gossip columns and the Guardian devotes its front page and the main piece in its weekly Review to an old story, first published (in the Guardian) seven years ago, about how Orwell gave a woman he fancied who worked for the secret service a list of names of people he suspected of being 'fellow-travellers' or Communist agents.


We socialists have a right to be bemused. What is the truth about this remarkable writer? Is he not, obviously, a creature of the right, if not the far right? Was he not feted by the US imperialist establishment for at least three decades? Were not his famous satires, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, required reading for the sons and daughters of imperialist America and Europe during all the long period of the Cold War? Even before that, was he not savagely attacked as a snob and a dilettante by Harry Pollitt in the Daily Worker in 1936? Was he not an Old Etonian and former police officer in Burma who never forsook that sad upbringing? Were not some of his reflections on the English people during the war nothing but fatuous expressions of jingoism? Is the grass really greener in England than anywhere else, as he claimed? Was he not an outright homophobe? Was the odious epithet 'pansy' one of his favourites when describing the socialist poets - Auden, Spender, Isherwood, etc - of the 1930s? Were not his attitudes towards women downright chauvinist? Were not his novels (aside from the satires) relatively third rate, lacking in any real understanding or appreciation of the human spirit? Above all, was he not a splitter, if not even a Franco agent, in the Spanish Civil War as well as the century's most ardent opponent of the Russian Revolution and all that flowed from it, and did not his writing give the lie direct to all the socialists of his generation and the next who defended the revolution and its leaders?


Such is the indictment against Orwell which was the common view on the left for a generation, and was upheld in the 1950s by the New Left Review essays in Out of Apathy, and is still sustained by the Stalinist remnant in the British left. Much of the indictment is hard if not impossible to answer. But almost every part of it is balanced by a rather different picture of George Orwell's life and works. How does the Pollitt picture of the reactionary snob fit the tramp and downmarket waiter who forsook all worldly wealth to put together the astonishing account of desperate poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) or The Road to Wigan Pier (1936)? How does the image of the splitter fit the young man who went to Spain to kill fascists where the only thing he managed to split was his own throat, shot through by a fascist bullet? How does his alleged support for McCarthyism and the Cold War fit his continued and vehement assertions that he had no truck with either? How does his distaste for the Russian Revolution fit his (admittedly occasional, but nevertheless emphatic) admiration for Lenin?


Stalinism


The key to the answers to all these questions (and to the almost paranoid hostility to him by Stalinists of all ages including this one) is that George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist - Stalinism. As he admitted himself, he showed little or no interest in the Russian Revolution when it happened when he was 14. He wrote almost nothing on the subject until he went to Spain in 1936. In Barcelona he was bowled over by the workers' revolution there. The first few pages of his book Homage to Catalonia, where the 'working class was in the saddle', are still one of the finest pieces of inspirational revolutionary writing. On the front, alongside Spanish and British fellow-fighters, he observed with mounting horror the crushing of that revolutionary fervour by agents of the Russian government. Such people, he deduced, were not socialists at all but ruthless envoys of a 'mean state capitalism with the grab motive left intact'. He watched while his comrades were hauled off one by one to be questioned, tortured and in one case murdered by the Stalinist secret police. His fury at this process lasted for the rest of his short life. With it came an understanding, utterly at odds with conventional left wing thinking at the time, that any politics that emerged from Stalinists was no more or less than propaganda for the Russian government, and therefore was as likely as not to be reactionary and anti-socialist.


On his return from Spain he joined the ILP - the only mainstream organisation opposed to the war, but as the fascist armies lined up for invasion of Britain he swung right over. Yet even his most nationalistic expressions were tempered with a yearning for the sort of democratic and socialist revolution he had seen in Spain. The war could not be won, he reckoned, wrongly, without such a revolution in Britain. And among the enemies of such a revolution were the Communists, who campaigned for Tories and imperialists in by-elections.


Orwell got a job with Tribune where he wrote a weekly column full of unorthodoxy. All the staff there were supporters of Zionism, but not Orwell. He opposed it for the effect it would have on the people living in Palestine, and of course was denounced then and later for being anti-Semitic. His satire Animal Farm was equivocal about the revolution that starts it. 'Old Major', the revolutionary pig who inspires it, is not Lenin, but neither is he or the revolution reactionary. Orwell never set out his views on the familiar question, 'Did Lenin lead to Stalin?' On one occasion he thought 'yes'; on another he agreed that Lenin would have opposed the Stalinist agenda. Either way, his support for the idea of revolution lasted right until the end of his life, when he finally surrendered to Cold War gloom and tuberculosis.


Socialists who are (as I have been) inspired by Orwell's outspoken fervour and his clear writing style, but puzzled by the questions he never answered would be better off reading John Newsinger's Orwell's Politics than any of the interminable biographies now available. John shows how a proper appreciation of Orwell's work owes a lot to the late Peter Sedgwick, a founder of the International Socialists, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party. Sedgwick's article in International Socialism (another one was promised but it never materialised) was the first real effort on the left to explain the attraction, the inspiration and the contradictions in Orwell's work. For many of us socialists at the time, the article was an intellectual liberation. It led in my case to further reading and enjoyment of Orwell's works, and a much greater understanding of the revolutionary inspiration and reactionary contradictions in them. One of Orwell's many free speech campaigns was for the publication of Victor Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, a book eventually published in the early 1960s, beautifully translated by Peter Sedgwick. Like Orwell, Serge was part of a submerged tradition of anti-Stalinist socialist and revolutionary thought, a tradition that the combined obfuscation from both sides of the Cold War cannot suppress forever.