Animal Balm – The Noble Art of Getting Orwell Wrong

 

 

The trailer for the new Andy Serkis (Lord of the Rings) directed reimagining of Animal Farm has caused apoplexy among the right-wing guardians of George Orwell’s true message. With which there can be absolutely no messing. By order of God himself.

As is well known, Orwell’s novella is a thinly-veiled allegory of the descent of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist totalitarianism and repression. The dream of freedom and equality and liberation from human slavery is gradually turned into a nightmare of repression by the domination of the pigs, led by Napoleon (Stalin). In the end, the animals of Animal Farm are worse off and work harder than animals on neighbouring human-run farms. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

This is where communism leads so don’t go getting any ideas is what they want you to think Animal Farm is saying.

Serkis’s unpardonable sin is to have ‘updated’ the plot of Animal Farm to make it about capitalism. The film, 15 years in the making apparently but only a trailer has been made public so far, has a tech billionaire plotting to take over Animal Farm and allying with pig dictator Napoleon to do so. Rather than leading a communist enclave, Napoleon now craves to “belong among the ruthless human billionaires”. And there are fart jokes, which last I checked weren’t in the original book.

Cue a predictable torrent of outrage from the sentinels guarding Saint George’s official message. The new Animal Farm is a “complete perversion of the book”, “they literally INVERTED Orwell’s message”, “It guts the entirety of the book’s message,” “Orwell must be spinning in his grave”, etc, etc.

Central Unintelligence Agency

It might be possible to take this avalanche of offence more seriously if the film adaptations of Animal Farm that have already been made, such as the iconic CIA-financed 1954 animation, weren’t also – while, unlike Serkis, outwardly sticking to the original plot – “complete perversions of the book”.

The problem for it seems almost everyone who wants to adapt Animal Farm is the way Orwell ends it *. In the final chapter, neighbouring farmers, including the old established farmer Mr Pilkington, come to visit the now unassailable pigs on Animal Farm. In the analogies of the book, Pilkington represents the West (Britain and France basically) while another farmer, Mr Frederick, who brutally mistreats his animals and leads a failed attempt to destroy Animal Farm (‘The Battle of the Windmill’, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) is a stand-in for Hitler.

“Years later” it is Pilkington who comes to Animal Farm clutching an olive branch, lauding the fact that “a long period of mistrust and misunderstanding” was now over. “Between pigs and humans,” he declares, “there was not, and there need not be, any clash of interest whatever …. If you have your lower animals to contend with … we have our lower classes.”

A gratified Napoleon clinks beer mugs with Pilkington, regretting the unfortunate misconception that Animal Farm had been trying to stir up rebellions by other animals on neighbouring farms. He then announces that, henceforth, Animal Farm will revert to its old pre-rebellion name under Mr Jones, the Manor Farm.

There then comes Orwell’s kicker of a last line:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and looked from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Seriously, could this be any more obvious? Orwell is saying that the communists, Stalinists whatever you want to call them, were becoming indistinguishable from the exploitative capitalist countries that surrounded them, a fact celebrated by the latter.

But such an ending was unacceptable to the CIA in 1954. In that adaptation of Animal Farm, “pig delegates come from far and wide” ** to celebrate their supremacy with Napoleon. No human is in sight. This scene so incenses the watching animals that they rise up in revolt, overthrowing their porcine overlords. This was described by one critic as “a wholesale inversion of Orwell’s ending”.

Ironically, in portraying the pig dictator Napoleon’s “desperation to belong among ruthless human billionaires”, the new version of Animal Farm may be truer to Orwell’s actual message than its supposedly more faithful predecessors.

The History Nobody Knows

Because the events and history that Orwell was drawing on in the conclusion of Animal Farm have been deliberately forgotten, and in the current era of compulsory Russophobia are unlikely to be remembered. The uncomfortable kernel of that history is that Stalinism, while internally incredibly repressive (in that sense the story of Animal Farm hit the nail on the head) was externally totally hostile to revolution, desiring nothing more than, in Orwell’s words in Animal Farm, “normal business relations” with its capitalist neighbours.

Orwell was inspired to write Animal Farm (and its equally famous successor Nineteen Eighty-Four) by his experience in fighting on the Republican side against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. There he saw first-hand the role of the Soviet Union (then run by one man, Joseph Stalin) in destroying the anarchist and syndicalist revolution that had gripped Catalonia and other Northern provinces and that Orwell enthusiastically supported.

In the only instance of Stalin’s feared secret police (Napoleon’s dogs) operating in a Western European country, left-wing opponents of the Communist party were hunted down, tortured and disappeared. You can see something of this atmosphere in the Ken Loach film Land and Freedom. Orwell himself feared for his life and had to secretly slip across the border to France.

Contrary to the presumption of Western historians that in the 70 years of its existence the Soviet Union had an unvarying policy of fomenting world socialist revolution, the actions of Stalin and his henchmen in Spain were aimed at reversing a revolution. “The Russians,” as Orwell was later to write, did “all in their power to crush the Spanish revolutionary movements, defend private property and hand power to the middle class as against the working class”.

Why on earth would devout ‘communists’ do that? The answer lies in Stalin’s (prolonged) desire to do nothing to offend the Western capitalist countries in the hope that they would agree to ally with the Soviet Union against the threat of Nazi Germany. This alliance – the so-called ‘Grand Alliance – did eventually come about after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 but it was a definite last resort for Britain and France who would have much preferred that Hitler leave the West alone and concentrate on the barbarians to the East.

Stalin pursued the same policy in the Grand Alliance – that of appeasing the Right and supporting non-Fascist conservatives in the West – as he did in the Spanish Civil War. For example, in the so-called ‘Salerno Turn’ of March 1944, Italian Communist party leader Palmira Togliatti – under instructions from Moscow – joined with ex-Fascists and monarchists in a unity government and disbanded the Communist resistance. In war-time Britain, the Communist party, in decidedly non-revolutionary fashion, threw its weight behind Conservative party candidates in by-elections.

Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, i.e. when this war-time alliance between official Communism and actually existing capitalism was in full bloom. And many people overlook the fact that the book was not merely a barely disguised history of the Russian Revolution and the depredations on Stalinism in the 1930s, it was also a prediction. The last historical event ‘covered’ by Animal Farm was probably the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union – in the book ‘The Battle of the Windmill’. The animals, at immense cost, beat back Mr Frederick’s (Hitler’s) men. Although, at the time Orwell was writing Germany hadn’t yet been expelled from the Soviet Union, it was clearly going to happen.

Thereafter, and especially in the last chapter (‘Years passed…’), the book becomes Orwell’s prediction of what would happen, based on what was already happening in the ‘Grand Alliance’ between Stalin and the West. That capitalism and communism would merge, or to be more specific communism would become indistinguishable from capitalism, losing all traces of its revolutionary origins. Symbolically, in the penultimate page of the book, Napoleon/Stalin announces that Animal Farm will no longer be called Animal Farm – it will revert to the name it had under the ‘old regime’ of Mr Jones.

Of course, as it turned out, none of this actually occurred. Rather than converging, Stalinist communism and Western capitalism faced each other down for decades in the Cold War – ironically a term coined by Orwell himself in 1945. Stalin instituted socialist revolutions from above in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states and the West seriously considered invading the Soviet Union after Nazi Germany was no more.

But two things should be borne in mind. Outside of the confines of its buffer, Soviet communism remained non-revolutionary even, in Orwell description, “counter revolutionary”. Stalin and his successors never reneged on the “percentages agreement” hammered out with Churchill in October 1944, whereby each side was given control over its zone. This is why Italian and French Communists tamely left post-WW2 governing coalitions in their respective countries despite the huge well of support they enjoyed after leading the war-time resistance, and why Britain and America were given carte blanche to fight the Left in Greece (in fact also while the Second World War was still raging). This was their zone and they could do what they wanted in it.

Secondly, Stalin did avidly court the West (notwithstanding the interlude of the Nazi-Soviet pact) for about a decade (1934 to 1944). And this was the context in which George Orwell wrote Animal Farm.

After the Thaw

However, the passing of the Cold War and of the state that Stalin led for 29 years did not lead to more honest adaptations of Animal Farm. The ending of the 1999 Babe-style version (with talking animals) is, if anything, even more ridiculous than the 1954 CIA-financed animation.

In this version, the animals leave Napoleon’s dystopia which eventually collapses of its own accord (get the symbolism?). In time, a new human family comes to take over, promising that the mistakes of the past won’t be repeated. In a final voice-over narration, Jessie the sheepdog gasps “And now at last, we shall be free!”

How wonderful. Given that, in the real-world, the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union after 1991 had led to the biggest decline in life expectancy, outside of war or famine, in human history, that final line should be seen, in retrospect, as somewhat ironic.

In truth, Animal Farm was a subversive book that satisfied virtually no-one. It was, predictably, banned in the Soviet Union. But ostensibly supportive Ukrainian and Russian translations in the late 1940s also saw fit to delete certain offending passages. There then came the travesty of the CIA-approved version of 1954, to be followed 45 years later by an even more inept interpretation.

And despite the weary, fatalistic assertion that Animal Farm is a parable of the inevitable fate of all revolutions – “humans are not equal and you can’t force them to be” – the book retains its pep 80 years after its publication precisely because it is not inherently pessimistic – the novella ends with the animals finally realising what is going on.

Orwell was a democratic socialist (and a real one, he thought Attlee and co. were sell outs) lambasting communist totalitarianism for becoming no better, probably even worse, than capitalism. HG Wells called him a “Trotskyist with big feet”. If Animal Farm was really a conservative critique of revolution as such, its author would hardly have bothered to fight for a real revolution in Spain, nearly being killed in the process. Why fight for something that would inevitably be perverted anyway?

In point of fact, Orwell did criticise precisely the fatalistic, conservative attitude that Animal Farm supposedly embodies. In 1946 (a year after the publication of Animal Farm), he wrote an essay admonishing the shallowness of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler, a man who had precisely concluded that because the Russian Revolution had ended in oppression and murder, “This is what revolutions lead to”. Orwell’s response was:

Perhaps some degree of suffering is ineradicable from human life, perhaps the choice before man is always a choice of evils, perhaps even the aim of Socialism not to make the world perfect but to make it better. All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

The “unwillingness to admit this”, in Orwell’s words, had led all adaptations of Animal Farm to be travesties of the original book. Perhaps because Serkis’s version gets Orwell so wrong, it can turn out to be more right than any of its inglorious predecessors.

 

*Orwell’s endings, even of his ostensibly non-political novels, always seem to confound the adapters of his works. The end of the 1997 film version of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for instance, is a joyous celebration of the belated maturity achieved by its ‘hero’, Gordon Comstock. But in the 1936 novel, the final act – putting an aspidistra in the window – is portrayed as a resigned succumbing to middle class respectability, after years of impotent defiance. Again a “wholesale inversion” of Orwell’s meaning.

** This makes no sense from the point of view of the book – or indeed the film. Both show Napoleon’s Animal Farm dedicated to trading with the surrounding human-run farms, so where exactly do these “pig delegates” come from? Their presence might ring more true if Snowball (Trotsky) had won the battle for control with Napoleon (Stalin) because he was dedicated, unlike Napoleon, to “stirring up rebellion” on neighbouring farms. But early on in the book, Snowball is chased out of Animal Farm by Napoleon’s dogs, never to return.

Financial crisis: Why and what's the reason for?

There’s an old Bob Dylan song called ‘Who killed Davey Moore?’ It’s the tale of a boxer killed by a fatal punch and the song recounts the protests of those involved – the referee, the crowd, the gambler, his manager and his opponent – that they weren’t the ones really responsible for his death. “It wasn’t me that made him fall,” they all cry. “No, you can’t blame me at all.”

That song springs to mind whenever anyone apportions blame for the 2008 financial crisis. There are no shortage of culprits. And given that the world may experience similar economic tremors in the near future, the question of who is to blame is extremely relevant.

Who really did make the system fall?

Culprit # 1 Senior Bankers

Bankers are, unsurprisingly, the most likely suspects. Adjectives like reckless and greedy have clung to banks like leeches since 2008 (which may be an apt analogy). But according to Dutch author Joris Luyendijk, the fatal flaw was not so much greed as wilful incompetence. The recently released movie The Big Short exemplifies, he says, the atmosphere in run-up to 2008. Days in which extremely clever finance geeks took advantage of the fact that senior managers in most banks had no idea what was really going on in their organisations. The impenetrable financial products they devised combined to make them vast fortunes and lay the seeds for financial meltdown.

Luyendijk quotes former UK Chancellor Alastair Darling who laments the fact that top managers in US and UK banks “failed to understand – or even ask – what was making them so much profit and what were the risks.”

He attributes this failure to lack of personal liability. In the days before the Big Bang, financial firms were organised as partnerships, rather than publicly floated corporations which any person, or hedge fund or other company could buy shares in. Partnerships ensured managers kept an unblinking eye on their organisation’s activities, says Luyendijk, because if things went awry they were personally liable for the cost of mistakes. But when partnerships were taken over by publicly floated banks or the investment divisions of major banks began marketing their own financial products, this discipline was lost.

I believe that while deliberate blindness on the part of senior managers was a factor in the financial crisis, it is far from a complete explanation. Firstly, bank executives were not as unaware as Luyendijk or The Big Short suggest. From pooled mortgages, to Libor and Forex fraud, the idea that senior executives were utterly oblivious to the machinations going on beneath them is not credible. When apologies become necessary, incompetence is always preferred to culpability.

In 2004, it was agreed that banks needed to have capital or deposits worth a mere 8% of the risky loans they had on their books. That agreement, known as Basel II, was “largely written by the banks themselves” says Mark Blyth in his book, Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. Banks became massively indebted in the early 21^st century (they still are) and that was a conscious decision on the part of senior managers; a way of securing more profit by increasing the amount of money they loaned out. European banks, especially, became chronically ‘over-leveraged’ and may yet have to be recapitalised ‘on a scale yet unimagined’. To blame all this on unruly traders is way too convenient.

Second, the financial crisis was not just about the risk-laden products, the famous mortgage backed securities, collaterized debt obligations and credit default swaps, that boomeranged on the institutions that devised them. It spread across the world with such devastating effect because other institutions – other banks, companies, governments and NGOs – bought those toxic assets. And they bought them because they seem to embody the irresistible combination of low risk and high yield.

Lastly, risk-taking by banks was not merely an internal transgression. They were subject to pressure, possibly decisive pressure, from outside …

Culprit # 2 Shareholders

“In the run-up to the financial crisis, shareholders failed to control risk-taking in banks,” concluded the UK Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards, “and indeed were criticising some [directors] for excessive conservatism. Some bank leaderships resisted this pressure, but others did not.”

So it wasn’t just that senior executives in banks failed to control super-intelligent and ambitious underlings who could reel off all the prime numbers up to 100 in 2.5 seconds. As directors of publicly floated companies, they were also under constant pressure to deliver greater and greater profits for the owners, the shareholders. And aware that if they didn’t succeed, they needed to look elsewhere for regular remuneration. In the words of Citigroup chief exec Charles O Prince in 2007, (in an article written by Luyendijk) “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”

To whose tune were the senior bank managers dancing? Other banks, primarily. Financial behemoths like Barclays, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank top a list of 147 multinationals who literally own each other through interlocking shareholding. Other major shareholders include hedge funds, fantastically wealthy individuals and pension funds.

What these owners have in common is a need to maximise yield. According to Paul Mason, economics editor of Channel 4 News, big institutional investors such as pension funds, in their pressing need for higher returns on their investments, have become “crucial drivers of instability”. The signature products of the 2008 crisis, mortgage backed securities and collaterized debt obligations, seemed, before they exploded, low risk. So major shareholders were happy to buy them and to breezily criticise banks for ‘excessive conservatism’.

What lies at the root of this predilection for risk-taking among shareholders is the same weakness that Luyendijk criticises bank executives for – that if things go drastically wrong, they know they won’t be accountable. Just as bank executives are cushioned by a lack of personal liability, so shareholders enjoy the protection of limited liability.

Limited liability means that shareholders can lose only their investment in a company; they are never on the hook for the entirety of its bad debts. It is a right granted by the state. Limited liability first originated in Britain in the 1850s and was opposed in an earlier time by the father of market economics, Adam Smith, because of the dangers he saw in separating ownership and management.

The situation is complicated by the fact that, while shareholders seem very adept at pressurising the managers of the corporations they own to maximise profit without heed to public welfare, they are positively impotent when it comes to reining in harmful behaviour. Senior managers seem able to set their own pay which has mushroomed to 180 times that of the average worker in Britain. When shareholders do revolt over excessive executive pay – as they did at Shell in 2009 - they find that their opinion is merely advisory. In many ways, the senior management of large, shareholder-owned corporations are a law unto themselves.

So some have concluded that protecting the public from the selfishness of corporations requires removing both the limited liability of shareholders and the personal liability of company directors. “The most effective way of curbing predatory practices is to withdraw limited liability and hold the shareholders and directors of these enterprises personally liable,” argues Essex University’s Professor of Accounting, Prem Sikka.

Sikka wants alternatives to the corporate model – mutuals, cooperatives, not for profit and worker owned enterprises – to thrive and be promoted by government. “All are subjected to community pressures and control by employees, savers and consumers,” he says. “They see something beyond making a fast buck.”

The trouble is, during the crisis of 2008/9, the eyesight of these supposedly alternative enterprises seemed as myopic as anyone else’s.

Culprit # 3 the global market

The list of mutuals in Britain felled by the financial crisis is embarrassingly long. The Dunfermline Building Society, the Scarborough Building Society, the Chesham Building Society, the Derbyshire Building Society and the Cheshire Building Society all either collapsed or had to be bought by other financial institutions. In the case of the Dunfermline, the Bank of England bailed it out and ran it for a time.

Building societies don’t have shareholders. They are owned by, and in theory accountable to, their members – people who have mortgages or savings with them. But, though they didn’t create the banks’ financial ‘weapons of mass destruction’, they were just as reckless with the way they lent money.

In May last year, regulator Andrew Bailey, the chief executive of the Prudential Regulation Authority, warned building societies that they must not return to the ‘fatal’, high risk lending that helped trigger the financial crisis. He cited evidence that building societies were resuming the pre-crisis practice of making loans many times larger than their customers’ income and property.

These failings are not limited to Britain. In 2009 two of Germany’s famous state-owned Landesbanken, were forced to merge after they had borrowed too much capital and invested it in toxic US sub-prime mortgage assets. Four others had to be bailed out by state governments in Germany to the tune of millions of euros.

In Spain, savings banks, known as cajas de ahorros, are owned by non-profit foundations and dedicated to charitable activities as well as savings and mortgages. But they were at the heart of the implosion of Spain’s housing bubble. Of 45 cajas in existence at the start of the crisis in 2007, only two survived. The rest collapsed and had to be taken over by banks or the government. The effects have been catastrophic. Hundreds of Spaniards have been evicted every single day and the unemployment rate has reached a staggering 25%.

The financial crisis may have been hatched in corporate-land but it unfolded like a virus throughout the world because of markets. And allegedly alternative enterprises were as starry-eyed about these markets as anybody else.

Why then did alternative enterprises, which presented themselves as different to soulless, money-grubbing corporations, turn out to be not so different after all? Partly, because of a lack of real accountability. Though they were accountable in theory, they weren’t in practice. German Landesbanken had advisory boards that were meant to keep senior management in check but merely rubber-stamped their activities. In Britain, the Cooperative Bank’s woes can be attributed to the fact that its elected board didn’t have the knowledge or confidence to challenge the ‘incredibly optimistic’ assumptions of the management team. In this sense, the corporate and mutual sectors suffer from a similar affliction – out of control senior executives.

We don’t live in democratic societies. People don’t have the knowledge, time or inclination to hold the powerful to account. Without a conscious change in that level of knowledge and intention, mechanisms of accountability will remain empty shells.

But perhaps the problem is deeper still. The Marxist economist Andrew Kliman argues it is foolhardy, in a capitalist economy, to expect nationalised or worker controlled banks to behave differently to their corporate equivalents. “In order to survive, a state-run (or worker-run) bank must pursue the goal of profit maximisation, just like every other bank,” he says. “As long as there is capital, what are actually in control are the economic laws of capitalism.”

Those economic laws of capitalism mandated that building societies and other mutuals compete with major banks for market share and profitability. And doubtless many members, at the time, agreed with these aims. Governments in Britain have since the 1980s relied on rising house prices to ensure re-election. When that measure goes into reverse, as it did for the Conservatives in the early ‘90s, they watch as erstwhile supporters desert them in droves. Pensions funds are a ‘crucial driver of instability’, yet many millions rely on them to deliver high investment returns to fund their pensions.

This is not to descend into the ethical void and assume that everyone is equally guilty. Some people are infinitely more culpable than others. A tiny elite get to set their own pay. A tiny elite have been bailed-out by government and their wealth rescued by state action. A tiny elite get to make – and rig – the rules of the game. But, as in Dylan’s Davey Moore parable, it is the rules of the game that need altering. The blame game confers only an ephemeral pleasure. A bit like shopping.