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.

Cui bono? State capitalism comes to town

According to the investment bankers Macquarie, the “beating heart of Australian capitalism”, the reactions of world governments to coronavirus are a sure sign that “conventional capitalism” is being discarded in favour of a “version of communism”.

The view of the bank, which is famous for leaving Thames Water £2 billion in debt, seems to chime with the idea that the British government, following its promises to pay ‘furloughed’ workers 80% of their wages and support the incomes of the self-employed (in about 3 months), has undergone an overnight conversion to ‘socialism’.

In fact, if any conversion has taken place it is to state capitalism, not socialism, and it represents an intensification of previous trends, rather than their negation.

State capitalism, as a theory, is associated with Trotskyism and some anarchists and the idea that the Soviet Union, far from being socialist in any way, was actually a continuation of capitalism in which the nomenklatura extracted the wealth made by the rest of the population. Early on Trotsky predicted that, in a wave of privatisation, state capitalism would become conventional capitalism again. This is indeed what happened, though many decades later.

But I propose a simpler definition: State capitalism is using the power of the state to control, sustain, and, in some cases, own, private resources whilst leaving power and wealth in the hands of private corporations and high net worth individuals.

This can be seen in the ‘effective nationalisation’ that has occurred in the British railway system. 

While rail franchising has been ended, private train operators are being paid a management fee to continue to run services. The government is guaranteeing their income as long as the coronavirus crisis lasts.

The same is true of the unconditional bail out for bus companies.

In the health service, NHS England has temporarily assumed powers from the clinical commissioning groups set up by the 2012 Health and Social Care Act to buy services from the private sector but there is no indication that the government has changed its mind on outsourcing to the private sector or competition in the internal market. Trade negotiations with the US, in which medicine prices and the NHS are thought to be up for grabs, will still commence as soon as possible.

QE 2

However, the major way in which state capitalism is asserting its dominance in our allegedly ‘free market’ system is through quantitative easing. QE, which works by central banks buying government bonds and other debt from banks, is a form of massive state intervention which nonetheless leaves the most powerful private actors in the economy untouched – in fact it enormously bolsters their position.

Not only does QE hugely increase inequality as a direct result of government action, as economist Grace Blakeley observes, it inverts the way a free market economy is supposed to work. Theoretically a company’s share price should increase only if other people think it is a good bet to make profits in the future. QE, however, by reducing the yield on government bonds, ‘incentivises’ investors to switch their funds into other assets – primarily the stock market – regardless of whether such a switch is justified by underlying economic conditions. In other words, QE creates stock market booms – the appearance of economic health – where none should exist.

The world’s governments resorted to QE in the aftermath of the financial crisis with the desperation of an alcoholic grasping for another drink – the four largest central banks have created around $10 trillion in new money since 2010. This was an era presciently described by geographer David Harvey as defined by the “dictatorship of the world’s central bankers”. This was state control – central banks are an intimate part of national states and pan-national state organisations – but a type of state intervention insulated from democratic interference: since the 1990s central banks have invariably been made ‘independent’ of any meddling by elected governments.

However, the era we are now entering – I think it’s unarguable that March 2020 marks the beginning of new historical era – has and will see levels of quantitative easing that make the previous decade seem like the height of sobriety. And, moreover, QE that will take its inherent logic of expanding state ownership of the corporate economy to new peaks.

In Britain, £200 billion QE has been announced. The European Central Bank, which already was dabbling in QE to the tune of €20 billion a month has expanded the programme so that it will create €750 billion by the end of 2020. And the Federal Reserve in the US has unveiled “QE infinity” – unlimited quantitative easing – in addition to, for the first time, the purchase of corporate, as well as government, bonds.

In the last case, certainly, what this portends is not only the state massively intervening in the economy – in the interests of the rich and powerful – but also taking ownership of its commanding heights.

The new nationalisation

Because this is what has been happening in the birthplace of quantitative easing, Japan. Confronted since the 1990s with a stubbornly stagnant economy, the Bank of Japan has resorted to ever greater doses of QE. In 2013, it inaugurated Quantitative and Qualitative Easing (QQE), buying government bond and “other market assets” worth £1.8 trillion. In an article from last summer, entitled ‘Capitalism’s Silent Surrender”, economist Harry Shutt noted the “creeping nationalisation” occurring all over the world. The Bank of Japan, he wrote “is now estimated to own at least half both of all outstanding government bonds (JGBs) and of equities quoted on the Nikkei 225 Index of the Tokyo stock exchange”.

On the surface, Japan still appears to be a classic capitalist economy. The world-famous names of its economy – Toyota, Hitachi, Sony, Mitsubishi and so on – are all still alive and kicking and internally organised no differently to before. The country is as hierarchical as it ever was, as well as steadily becoming more unequal. But behind the scenes it is transforming, in terms of ownership, into something different. “If this trend continues,” Shutt concludes, “it is evident that the Japanese state will become the de facto owner of the bulk of what has been the hitherto privately owned enterprise sector.”

And, as current events show, this trend is continuing, in fact rapidly accelerating. If lockdown persists for 18 months, albeit with brief relaxations, it seems almost certain that the main capitalist countries of the world will follow Japan and become the effective owners of large swathes of the private sector.

State control is not socialism

But it won’t be anything resembling socialism, unless the suffix “for the rich” is added afterwards. This isn’t merely because, in the UK, Sunak’s massive package to pay 80% of employee wages will go to the companies that employ them not to the workers themselves. Or that support for businesses eclipses that for ordinary people (estimated in the US to be set at 2/3rds for business, in terms of cash and loans and 1/3rd to unemployed workers and the self-employed). Or indeed that the rescue package is conspicuously partial, passing over private renters – who can still be evicted – and benefit claimants for whom existing sanctions have not been rescinded.

It is mainly because the expansion of state control and ownership will be used to reinforce the power and control of the small minority at the top of the corporate economy. While small businesses will suffer, large corporate entities with enormous cash reserves, will survive and likely prosper, aided by state bail-outs and de facto state ownership.

As Blakeley wisely notes, the Left should not react to the massive rises in public spending in evidence across advanced economies as if its programme is being reluctantly enacted by those ideologically opposed to it. “The legacy of this crisis will be the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of a tiny oligarchy, composed of senior politicians, central bankers, financiers and corporate executives,” she says.

The question to ask is cui bono.

What Shutt said last summer in relation to another financial crisis may, in fact, be the end result of the coronavirus crisis: “… it may suddenly dawn on the public that it has already, by default, assumed ownership of most or all of what was once believed to be the private enterprise sector – without ever having taken control of it.”