Tony Cross: Animal Farm revisited

[Socialism Today, No 3, November 1995, p. 30-31]

Animal Farm by George Orwell – a 50th anniversary edition. Secker and Warburg, 1995, £14-99. Reviewed by Tony Cross.

Farmer Jones is no longer to be found in the Red Lion at Willingdon drowning his sorrows at the expropriation of Manor Farm by his livestock. Expropriations in general aren’t practised much in Willingdon these days. The modern farmer doesn’t tremble at the strains of Beasts of England, the revolutionary anthem of Animal Farm.

Orwell’s satire of Stalinism, in which the animals take over the farm but human dictatorship is eventually replaced by pig dictatorship, is the product of another era. Russia has swapped Stalinist tyranny for capitalist chaos; Britain is not on the verge of its most left wing ever Labour government; the Communist Party of Great Britain is no more. And, after nearly two decades of Thatcher and her successors, Orwell’s belief in a deep-rooted English tolerance and decency looks naive, to put it mildly.

There’s no problem finding someone to republish Animal Farm on its fiftieth anniversary, but in the 1940s things were different. The book was turned down by four publishers before it finally got into print. The new edition contains an introduction that has never been published before. In it Orwell claims that one publisher said no on the advice of the war-time Ministry of Information. With typically British delicacy, the publisher wrote to Orwell: “I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are”.

In 1945 publishing houses were sensitive to Russian feelings because the USSR had been a decisive ally during World War Two. And, after the social upheavals of the 1930s, Stalinism had a stifling authority in wide intellectual circles. Orwell complains that from about 1931 “criticism of the Soviet regime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty”.

The italics are his but they have added importance today. Animal Farm has been thoroughly respectable for some time; it’s even found its way onto school syllabuses throughout the English-speaking world.

But it might come as a surprise to many who sweated over the book for their homework to hear that Orwell was the sort of socialist Tony Blair finds more embarrassing than breaking wind in a lift.

An American I know told me that at his school, after reading Animal Farm, the pupils had to write an essay on ‘Why the Communist ideal cannot work’.

“Orwell would have denounced the subversion of his work by the right. But it’s partly his own fault”.

And if that isn’t enough to get you angry, cast your mind back to the gruesome experience of Margaret Thatcher quoting Orwell to justify her politics. Orwell would have denounced this subversion of his work as violently as he did the 1940s attempts to repress it, if not more so. But it’s partly his own fault.

Animal Farm, and his later grim fantasy 1984, are both very ambiguous works. Of course, a novel isn’t propaganda or political theory. But don’t let’s pretend that Animal Farm plunges deep into the human (or pig) psyche or unveils any deep philosophical truths. It’s a political fable, as Orwell himself put it, and disgusting reactionaries, for whom Orwell would have had no sympathy, have exploited it to plug the ‘this is what you get if you revolt’ line.

By the time he got to writing Animal Farm, Orwell had been demoralised by the rise of fascism, the degeneration of the Russian revolution and his own experience of the betrayal of the Spanish civil war, which he described in Homage to Catalonia.

Orwell didn’t mind picking up a point or two from Trotsky’s analysis of these events – in Animal Farm the revolution is isolated, a caste becomes privileged through its exercise of political power.

But, fundamentally, the other animals lose out because they’re more stupid than the pigs. Although he was politically committed to fighting exploitation, his fable implies that it’s inevitable.

This was an expression of a new consensus that was soon to take over from the quasi- Stalinism of the 1930s and early ‘40s. A whole pack of intellectuals left the left, declaring that fascism and communism were essentially the same, and that the key world contradiction was between democracy and totalitarianism.

This fitted fine as an ideology for the Cold War era, as long as it turned a blind eye to the ruthless political and economic domination of the colonial and semi-colonial world, without which the rich countries’ liberties would have been impossible.

Sadly, Orwell, who sincerely hated hypocrisy and servility, gave literary expression to a defeatism that could be coopted to this prettification of the most effective and ruthless domination of the world by greed and profit-grabbing in history.