George Orwell, Communism and the Danger of Seeing the World Through Fiction

 

Despite being one of the greatest essayists in the history of the English language, George Orwell’s fame rests largely on two novels written near the end of this life – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Superficially they are about the same subject – the degeneration of Communism from something promising freedom and equality into its opposite. But because of when they were written, they are very different.

The time-gap between their creation, a mere three or four years, is so small as to appear irrelevant. But despite that, they inhabit separate epochs.

The first, Animal Farm, was written at the height of the Second World War alliance between Stalin and the West, between 1943 and 1944, and is about how Communism morphs into something as exploitative as capitalism. The book ends with the pig dictator, Napoleon, (an obvious portrayal of Joseph Stalin) changing the name of Animal Farm back to what it was under the ‘old regime’ when humans were in charge.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, meanwhile, was written as the Cold War began (between 1946 and 1948), and is about how communism vanquishes capitalism – “unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated” — with the result that inequality and oligarchy become permanent.

Ingsoc – originally “English socialism” – is the ideology of Oceania, which incorporates Britain, and is one of the three huge blocs into which the world is divided. In the neighbouring bloc – Eurasia – the philosophy is called Neo-Bolshevism, which comes into being after Europe is absorbed by Russia. The three philosophies in control of the world are, according to Orwell, “barely distinguishable” and “the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all”.

With his bushy moustache, Big Brother even looks like Stalin. The fact that ostensibly totally loyal party members are regularly purged in Oceania is also redolent of Stalinism. One notable feature of Stalin’s rule in Soviet Union, later adopted by other ‘Stalinoid’ countries like Czechoslovakia and North Korea, is that being a devoted Stalinist didn’t save you. The vast majority of delegates to the 17^th Communist party “Victors’ Congress” in Moscow, so-called because the ‘Stalinists’ used it to celebrate their victory over inner party opposition, were subsequently arrested and executed.

Orwell’s sporadic attempts to liken the ideology of Oceania to Fascism as much as to Communism were quite feeble.

For example, as he is torturing the hero Winston Smith, inner party bigwig O’Brien reflects on the Party’s place in history:

The German Nazis and Russian Communists came very close to use in their methods but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, they have seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where humans beings would be free and equal. We are not like that.

But the Nazis never claimed, or even pretended, to have taken power temporarily. They wanted, as they repeatedly said, to usher in a “thousand-year Reich”. Nor did they profess any belief in freedom and equality. On the contrary, they fervently believed in profound racial and social inequality, and acted out those beliefs with devastating consequences. Orwell feels like he should make some cursory reference to Nazism, which after all had just ravaged Europe, killed tens of millions of people and carried out a genocide, but he really just wants to expose Stalinism.

Some works of fiction, and this specially applies to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four have an influence far beyond any literary merits they may have (and Orwell was a great writer). They enable people, often far better than works of non-fiction, to make sense of the world. And this is the problem with both novels. Though they impart great insights, they are partial. And in the world we are now entering, that of corporate Fascism, this partiality is only becoming more glaring.

Animal Farm gives hints of this, which become more flagrant in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the former, the West (then Britain and France basically) is represented by Pilkington* of Foxwood Farm – “a large, neglected, old-fashioned farm”. Napoleon (Stalin), the leader of Animal Farm, vacillates between making deals with Pilkington or the other neighbouring farmer Frederick, who is a cypher for Hitler.

Napoleon finally puts his lot in with Frederick, only to be double-crossed and attacked (the Battle of the Windmill which represents the 1941 Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union). This is how Orwell portrays the episode:

Wistful glances were sent in the direction of Foxwood. If Pilkington and his men would help them, the day might yet be won. But at that moment, the four pigeons, who had been sent out the day before, returned, one of them bearing a scrap of paper from Pilkington. On it was pencilled the words: ‘Serves you right’.

But this doesn’t bear any relation to what actually happened historically, misrepresenting both the two-timing character of Stalin and the rightful moral effrontery of the West. In reality, Stalin (Napoleon) resorted to the deal with the Nazis (Frederick) – the Nazi-Soviet Pact, which was ended by the surprise German attack on the Soviet Union – only after years of fruitlessly trying to interest the West (Pilkington) in a military alliance against Germany (Frederick), even formally requesting an alliance in April 1939 and then offering to invade Germany with a million troops on eve of the outbreak of the Second World War.

Meanwhile the West (Pilkington) continually rebuffed Stalin’s (Napoleon’s) overtures, hoping, unsuccessfully, to convince the Nazis to leave the West alone and be satisfied with devouring the Soviet Union. Negotiations with ‘moderate’ Nazis (i.e. not Hitler) who would agree to ‘limit’ their ambitions in this fashion even continued after the Second World War had begun. They only ended after Churchill became Prime Minister.

In short, Orwell’s representation of events is almost the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Orwell’s rose-tinted view of the British elite can be seen in the war-time pamphlet the Lion and the Unicorn (sub-titled Socialism and the English Genius and written just before Animal Farm). There Orwell was trying to drum up support for the war by emphasising its patriotic underpinnings – ironically precisely what Stalin was doing in the Soviet Union.

In that book, the English are presented as a “rather stuffy Victorian family” which thwarts the young and cedes all the power to “irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”.

But in truth, as I think Orwell recognised deep down, the British elite was more malign than old-fashioned and thoughtless. They were, in more modern language, ‘Fascism enablers’.

The appeasement Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, for example, not only tried to do a with deal with Hitler so that he would exclusively turn his guns to the East but also previously pushed – unsuccessfully he was only the Chancellor of the Exchequer at the time – for the British government negotiate a non-aggression pact with Fascist Japan. This was after Japan had invaded the Chinese region of Manchuria in 1931 (it is a fact still barely recognised in the West that the Second World War in Asia began far earlier than the one in Europe).

But Orwell’s attitude, intimated in Animal Farm, of concentrating on the dangers posed by the official enemy while downplaying the sins of one’s own ‘side’, pervades Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, with the coming of the Cold War, it became all-consuming. In the fictional Oceania the doctrine of Ingsoc grows out of “English socialism” while the Russians have absorbed continental Europe, imposing something called “Neo-Bolshevism”. Fascism, resting on slave labour, war and genocide, though clearly a recent memory, is nowhere in sight.

This is despite the fact that Fascism, or at least extreme right authoritarianism that routinely kills and tortures political opponents, became the norm after the Second World War in the part of the world – which was most of it – controlled by the West. Think of Suharto in Indonesia, the Shah in Iran, Mobutu in the Congo, the succession of genocidal generals ruling Guatemala, or Pinochet in Chile. Europe wasn’t immune either. Right-wing dictators presided over Spain, Portugal, and Greece in the late 1960s, all of which were, by the way, loyal members of Nato.

 As the writer Michael Parenti put it in 1969, “our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has”.

And the one thing that really defines Fascism is obsessive anti-communism. In 1936 Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan signed an alliance called the Anti-Comintern Pact (Comintern being an abbreviation of the Soviet Communist International). Later Mussolini’s Italy and Fascist regimes in Spain and Hungary joined.

Despite the fact that Communism, with the exception of isolated hold-outs, is no more, the influence of Nineteen Eighty-Four is so great that we are still trapped within its mental architecture. European leaders delude themselves that the real threat to Greenland comes from China and Russia, even though the corporate fascist in the White House openly threatens to invade it.

Our politicians obsess over the phantom of Russia attacking Europe – clearly a vestige of Cold War propaganda about the Soviet threat – but happily pave the way for the quasi-Fascist Reform ‘party’ (appropriately enough it’s actually a limited company) to become the next government.

And Reform looks to Dubai as a model for the society it wishes to create. Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, a country “owned” by the Royal Family that rules over it. Dissent is not allowed. In Dubai, 92% of the population (all immigrants without rights) serve (and that is an appropriate word) a wealthy elite that regards the city as a sun-filled playground. Corporate Fascism is an accurate description.

Like imperialism, Fascism is one of those things we can only see in inverted commas, as archaic accusations coming from fevered, extreme leftists. But both are real, and in the First World, becoming realer by the month. That we suffer from such intellectual blindness owes a lot to the aura of the undoubtedly great work of fiction, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

* The fact that in the new Andy Serkis version of Animal Farm the billionaire who plots to take over Animal Farm is called Frieda Pilkington is possibly an indication that it’s not as dumb as people make out.

 

The Political Significance of The Beatles

 

What was the political meaning of the Beatles? I realise this is a rather dilatory question to ask of a band that broke up in 1970. But fascination with them endures and the real answer to this question, is, in my opinion, utterly different from the ones that are usually put forward.

On the surface, the political significance of the Beatles is exactly that, superficial. The company they established, Apple, did not embody, in Paul McCartney’s description, “Western communism”, whatever that was supposed to mean. John Lennon’s utopian, anti-materialist song ‘Imagine’ undoubtedly had, and still has, influence but personally I can’t take seriously someone wondering if I’m able to “imagine no possessions” while playing a grand piano in his stately home (and employing a gardener, a cook, and an art advisor).

As political role models, the Beatles were terrible. They moaned about paying too much tax – which Lennon claimed made them “anti-establishment” – and expected the minions they employed to indulge their every wish. In 1969, their press officer, Derek Taylor, was prompted to wonder why on earth he worked for them:

Whatever the motivation the effect is slavery.  Whatever the Beatles ask is done. I mean, whatever the Beatles ask is tried. A poached egg on the Underground on the Bakerloo Line between Trafalgar Square and Charing Cross? Yes, Paul. A sock full of elephant shit on Otterspool Promenade? Give me ten minutes, Ringo. Two Turkish dwarfs dancing the Charleston on a sideboard? Male or female John? Pubic hair from Sonny Liston? It’s early closing, George (gulp), but give me until noon tomorrow. The only gig I would do after this is the Queen. Their staff are terrified of them, and not without reason. They have fired more people than any comparable employer unit in the world. They make Lord Beaverbrook* look like Jesus.

But despite the egotism, they managed, in their later years, to produce the most innovative, experimental and influential music in pop history, while remaining – to quote a phrase – more popular than Jesus. In April 1966, for example, they recorded this and in the same month this ‘song’. In a two month period spanning December 1966 and January 1967, they produced Strawberry Fields Forever and A Day in the Life, which no-one, to this day, has come close to imitating. In the summer of 1967, when a normal band would have been promoting their last ground-breaking album, released a few months before, they took a completely different tack. The following year, the sound changed again and again from month to month. In 1969, they could still knock out classic pop songs while increasing disliking each other. And they probably invented heavy metal, either in 1965 or 1968.

In 1967, they were warned by the press that the Maharishi, the Indian meditation teacher under whose spell they were falling, was “commercial”. To which, Lennon replied, “Well, that’s fine because we’re the most commercial band in the world”, or something like that.

And, in terms of sales and merchandise, they certainly were. But judged by the standard of our current definition of “commercial” – following established trends, playing it safe for maximum sales, not upsetting anyone – the Beatles were anything but.  That determination to innovate, to go against the grain, to not give a damn what anyone else thought – while successfully remaining  at least as popular as during Beatlemania in the early sixties  – is what makes the Beatles historically interesting and politically significant. Their last album, Abbey Road, sold more copies in America than Sgt Pepper which, in turn, sold vastly more copies than the early Beatlemania LPs.

Barry Miles, a friend of the band who, as owner of the Indica bookshop in London introduced them to underground books and trends, said something perceptive about them a few years back. “The interesting thing,” he noted, “is that the Beatles were not only the world’s most commercial band but, at that point, [1966] they were also the world’s most experimental band, which was very unusual”.

“Brian Epstein [their manager] was concerned that they were going too far ahead of their fanbase,” he added. “But they were always very sensible, they wanted to bring the fans along with them. They did want to become some wild, avant-garde band that only 150 people had heard of.”

Back in 2009, the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher spoke about the “cult of minimal variation” – the pervasive compulsion to produce cultural products that are almost indistinguishable from those already successful. But, said Fisher, this ignores what people instinctively desire which is “the strange, the unexpected, the weird”.

“These can only be supplied,” he went on, “by artists and media professionals who are prepared to give people something different from that which already satisfies them; by those, that is to say, prepared to take a certain kind of risk.”

This is precisely what the Beatles, devoted members of the cult of maximum variation, were determined to do, even when it was met with incomprehension or hostility.

To this day, some Beatles fans complain that eight minutes of the White Album is taken up with ‘Revolution No 9’, a non-song consisting of noises and snatches of conversations aimed to paint in sound, in Lennon’s words, “a picture of revolution”.

Whether he succeeded or not (he later thought it was “anti-revolution”), Revolution No 9 became, in author Ian Macdonald’s description, “the world’s most widely distributed avant-garde artefact”. The track was “one of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop”. Rather than remaining “the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon’s sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work.”

The point is not whether the Beatles experimental work was good or bad (half a century on, I think the jury’s decided that most of it, maybe not ‘Revolution No 9’, was extremely good) but that, in stark contrast to today, they were able to produce it whilst remaining wildly popular. What the Beatles had, in fact, was an out of control popularity, which is why powerful people (like Nixon’s future Vice President Spiro Agnew or the anti-communist John Birch Society) were always trying to ban their songs, often for exceedingly dumb reasons.

Music aside, the Beatles’ influence – popularising meditation, promoting LSD or inspiring Charles Manson – was questionable but it certainly existed as a force and they knew it did. This is why Lennon spent the Beatles’ dying days planting acorns and singing about peace while sitting in bed – because he knew the media would report whatever he did because of who he was.

And there is something inherently subversive about uncontrollable popularity, whether it is used wisely or not. This is while the elites that have power within western societies are fixated on controlling popular opinion. They’ve realised there’s no need to ban radical manifestoes, uncomfortable facts, or avant-garde expression but just make sure that only fringe minorities are exposed to them. Usually this works quite efficiently.

But when elites lose control of the narrative most people consume, that’s when they get desperate. The ‘shock’ 2017 General Election campaign – in which the left-wing, anti-imperialist Jeremy Corbyn got 41% of the vote in reactionary old England – happened in large part because the broadcast media were suddenly legally obliged to report what the socialist Labour party was actually saying, rather than just amplifying smears from the billionaire-owned right-wing (and liberal) press. Everything that has happened since – the blatant lying, the purges, the establishment arrogation of the liberal media, the mysterious algorithm changes, has been about regaining control.

This multi-fanged operation has undoubtedly been successful, at least temporarily. But the genocide in Gaza has revealed that controlling the narrative is more difficult to sustain in era when people have alternatives to legacy media at their fingertips. And the desire to control popular reaction is leading to outright repression, even in esteemed liberal democracies. Whether this impulse will be ratcheted up is a distinct possibility. The Hague Invasion Act, authorising the US President to invade the Netherlands should the International Criminal Court put any of its citizens on trial was passed in 2002 under George Bush but has now been extended to Israel.

Whether faced with overt authoritarianism or the manipulation of opinion (or, as is likely, a combination of the two), the only ‘cure’ is reform of the media to ensure that diverse opinions reach the mass of people: ‘cure’ in the sense that the patient may die in a nuclear conflagration, or endure the slow death of global warming, if this course is not followed. But because of what it will lead to, it will be fought tooth and nail.

In this future conflict, what the Beatles said politically or explicitly represented is really not interesting at all. It’s a total blind alley. What is interesting is that they were able to experiment and reach hundreds of millions of people directly while remaining beyond the grasp of their detractors and conservatives of all stripes. That is the most precious form of power of all.

 

*Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), a sort of proto-Rupert Murdoch, was the owner of the Daily Express (in addition to being a government minister in Britain in the two world wars) and was famous for sacking journalists whose output was not to his satisfaction.

Sylvia Pankhurst and feminism, part two

The destinations of the leaders of the Suffragette movement in Britain were, as shown in part one, utterly contradictory. Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the WSPU, became a zealous supporter of the First World War, fervent anti-communist and, in time, Conservative party candidate. Sylvia Pankhurst, her daughter, worked to improve the conditions of working class women, opposed the First World War, agitated for universal suffrage and unreservedly backed the Russian Revolution when it burst onto the scene in 1917. In fact, the East London Federation of Suffragettes morphed, after several incarnations, into the first British Communist party, although Sylvia Pankhurst swiftly became an anti-Leninist council communist.

These outcomes were not accidental but pre-determined by a feminism informed by class in contrast to one that regarded class an irrelevant distraction. Sylvia Pankhurst’s support for ‘human suffrage’, her urgent desire to improve the lot of the working class and her instinctual backing of the Russian Revolution did not subsume her feminism. She advocated a system of ‘household soviets’ in order that mothers could be represented in how society was managed and refused to get married, instead co-habiting with an Italian anarchist in Essex. But she became unequivocal socialist.

 A sheen of equality

The other kind of feminism is doomed to play an ultimately conservative role by buttressing already existing institutions, albeit with the caveat that they be opened up equally to women. There is an unmistakable echo of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Party in the assertion of Hillary Clinton’s former speechwriter, Anne-Marie Slaughter, that gender equality will achieved by closing the “leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders.”

There is undoubtedly value in doing this, opening up roles to women that have been the province of men for decades or even centuries. But it is a tightly constricted form of progress. The value will be felt, and already is being felt, by middle class women who will fill those roles as social mobility stagnates or goes into reverse. In the OECD, a club of 34 rich countries, half of the well-paid professional and managerial “class 1” jobs are now held by women. Norway has a law demanding that 40% of company directors are women. Its effect has been extremely limited, aside from creating a tiny elite of rich women. What changes like this do achieve, however, is to lend a sheen of equality and diversity to institutions that don’t merit such validation. They also leave in place, even solidify, armies of poorly paid, overwhelming female, workers doing ‘caring’ jobs such as nursery assistant or cleaner. Gender equality becomes synonymous with elite concerns.

Chartism and other ‘male’ movements

We would do well not to cast ‘patriarchical’ male-dominated movements of the past into the dustbin of history. When the first extension of the vote in Britain in 1832 confined enfranchisement to middle class men only (13% of adult males), the result was the formation of co-operatives and trade unions throughout society. Chartism, the original movement to enlarge the franchise which swiftly followed, was inherently sexist – it demanded the vote for all men only. But this did not stop it being bitterly resisted and posing an existential challenge to the order of things. Male democracy was deemed a mortal danger to the newly minted capitalist system by the liberal rulers of the day and, according to one historian, “the mere demand for the ballot was often treated as a criminal act by the authorities.”

Chartism was accompanied by a wave of strikes and the right to vote was extended gradually, only once the ruling class was convinced workers had become sufficiently docile. “Only when the working class had accepted the principles of a capitalist economy and the trade unions had made the smooth running of industry their chief concern did the middle classes concede the vote to the better situated workers,” wrote economic historian Karl Polanyi in the 1940s, “that is, long after the Chartist Movement had subsided and it had become certain that the workers would not try to use the franchise in the service of any ideas of their own,”. Syndicalism was similarly male dominated (the document quoted in part one from the Welsh miners’ union refers to ‘men’ determining how work shall be done) but it nonetheless represented a radical challenge to how society and industry should be managed.

What this means is that divisions among white men will be replicated among women and people of different ethnicities and, conversely, movements for equality among white men can be adapted beyond their original sexist and racist defects. To take one historical example, Ancient Athens was patriarchical to an absurd degree - women were not allowed outside the family home unless under male surveillance. It resembled, in this respect, modern-day Saudi Arabia. But Athens pioneered a form of direct democracy and political equality that can be used to increase female participation in public affairs. Sortition – where decision makers are chosen by random selection as opposed to elected to a position – has been demonstrated to be far more representative of the population than conventional forms of democracy, reliant on universal suffrage and the vote. The very rights the Suffragettes fought for. Nearly 90 years after women gained the vote in Britain, working class women are the most unrepresented group in the House of Commons. Formal equality and enfranchisement have clearly not had the seismic effects both the Suffragettes, and their opponents at the time, imagined.

Economic inequality and class

But class is very definitely still with us. One of the chief television ‘entertainments’ of today in Britain are reality programmes about the lives of people on welfare benefits. Their tone is uniformly contemptuous and stigmatising, to the degree that, were they about an ethnic group, they would be deemed irredeemably racist. The current width of the UK’s Overton Window permits the suggestion that people who don’t pay sufficient taxes should have the right to vote taken from them, while businesses should be enfranchised. The higher echelons of politics, the judiciary and the corporate world are dominated by the privately educated and Oxbridge graduates, while 91% of the general population go to state schools.

The Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK, published in 2010 by the last Labour government, found that inequalities among individuals from the same social group (for example gender or ethnicity) were much greater than differences between the social groups. “Even if all differences between groups were removed, overall inequalities would remain wide,” it concluded.

For this reason, the push to increase gender inequality at the summit of major social institutions, though necessary and valuable for other reasons, will not dent overall inequality which is now huge and getting more extreme. An overwhelming concentration on gender will not make class disappear. This is something Sylvia Pankhurst understood very well. It is why there are statues of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst opposite the Houses of Parliament but not of her.