The Political George Orwell. By DAVID N. SMITH
George Orwell was
serious about politics. That might seem
obvious, given the pervasively political valence of “Orwellian” discourse and
the politically charged touchstones of Orwell’s famous novels, the Bolshevik
revolution in Animal Farm and totalitarian thought control
in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
But the degree to which Orwell was steeped
in the crosscurrents of radical politics has been routinely underestimated. So
much has been said about Orwell’s legendarily plain speech and his
free-thinking worldview that he now figures, for many, as an icon of
non-doctrinaire and even anti-doctrinaire thought. George Orwell, whose
most celebrated novel features a thirty-page tract by a fiery Trotsky-like
ideologue on “the theory and practice of oligarchical collectivism,” is often
treated as a quixotic naïf whose socialism was moral rather than theoretical,
intuitive rather than intellectual. The truth is more complex. Orwell was an
iconoclast, but within the socialist tradition, not outside it. His satires of
ideological excesses rang true because he knew those excesses intimately —
ideologically, culturally, and theoretically.
As we now know, thanks
to his Complete Works published between 1986 and 1998, Orwell
was very much at home in the arcana of left politics. In 1945, when he rebuked
pro-Soviet writers for exaggerating Stalin’s role in the Russian revolution, he
drew his evidence from an unexpected source: the man who had served as Stalin’s
Foreign Minister from 1930 to 1939 and who had returned to the foreign ministry
after serving as Russia’s ambassador to the United States during World War 2.
“I have before me,”
Orwell wrote, “what must be a very rare pamphlet, written by Maxim Litvinoff in
1918 and outlining the recent events in the Russian Revolution. It makes no
mention of Stalin, but gives high praise to Trotsky, and also to Zinoviev.”
Readers who may have
casually noticed, in passing, that characters inspired by Leon Trotsky are
central to both Nineteen Eighty-Four (Goldstein) and Animal
Farm (Snowball) are often surprised to encounter discussions of
Trotskyism in Orwell’s letters and essays - unfiltered, heretical Trotskyism.
In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell offered a regular catalogue of
political tendencies, including “3. Trotskyism,” in which he said that this
term is frequently “used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic
Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist” and
“hostility to the Stalin régime.”
He warned, further,
against confusing the doctrine with its namesake: “Trotskyism can be better
studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the
works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea.” He was
equally interested in many other currents, major and minor. This was not an
eccentricity. Orwell never romanticized left groups, even those he favored,
like the Independent Labour Party in Britain or the militia of Spain’s Workers’
Party of Marxist Unification, with which he fought in the Spanish civil war.
But he admired dissent, and he knew that building an oppositional force,
however small, is an achievement. “I have never seen him so enthusiastic,”
Arthur Koestler later reminisced, as when they decided to work together to
found a human rights organization in 1946.
When groups he opposed
but respected were victimized, he rallied to their defense, both privately and
publicly. During the war he was sharply critical of anarchist war resisters,
but when Scotland Yard raided their press in 1944, Orwell published a stinging
criticism in the socialist Tribune… read more:
