For The Skunk Podcast companion episode to this article, click here.
I've noticed a strange trend. Although people will spar over nearly every subject in both politics and life, there seems to be one thing everyone agrees on: we all admire the work of George Orwell, and feel certain that he is politically aligned with us. From Trump supporters to Antifa, everyone thinks Orwell is their man, a dead prophet warning them about their enemies with his eerily accurate prognostications.
Hey, ladies.
Terms like "Big Brother", "Orwellian", and "Newspeak" have been deployed against political enemies of all stripes for so long now that the words themselves have become cliché. Orwell the writer would have hated to hear this; he despised literary clichés almost as much as he despised totalitarian regimes. The man was defined by such passions, which is what made him a great political writer to begin with. If nothing else, he was clear about his political views, unafraid to attack enemies large or small if he felt they posed a danger to liberty or human rights.
So how is it that George Orwell, who worked so hard to produce lucid writing about his political allegiances, is claimed by both sides of the political spectrum? I've done some thinking on this, and I believe I have it figured out. It's not Orwell's fault. He didn't suffer from murky writing. He didn't switch political alignments late in life or leave us with contradictory expressions of his views. He stayed the course, in fact, and stood by his convictions until the day he died.
No, it's not on Orwell. It's on us. Or you, really, because I happen to know I'm right (not to be a dick about it, but you'll soon see what I mean).
The American Problem
One of the big misreadings of Orwell comes down to the fact that your average American doesn't know the difference between democratic socialism and communism. You hear constant conservative chatter from the right-wing of American society about how Democrats are trying make America a communist country. They accuse people like Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being democratic socialists and communists at the same time, despite the fact that these are very different things.
Socialism, I will grant, can be a somewhat mushy term, and is often misunderstood because it is both a catch-all label and a vague buzzword appropriated by several parties with conflicting viewpoints. For example, many communists call themselves socialists, but many other socialists shun communism because it is authoritarian. These other socialists (usually called democratic socialists) see their platform as merely an improvement upon democracy, rather than a completely new alternative, as the communists do. It's complicated, overlapping, and one can't really blame the uninitiated for being confused.
The upshot of this messy terminology is that when an American conservative reads Orwell's vicious attacks on communism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and the Big Brother surveillance state, they think he's talking about Bernie Sanders, or (even more laughably) mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. And while Bernie Sanders is a democratic socialist (more on that later) the other two are not socialists, communists, or anything of the sort. They're basically Keynsians. Which is a solid spot to be, historically, when it comes to capitalist economics.
With this misunderstanding firmly in place, an American conservative sees something like Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan (a $1.9 trillion stimulus package to boost a sagging economy), and they ignorantly mistake this for communism, because it is the state "interfering" in the free market. But this is not communism. This is Keynsian economics again, the capitalist-friendly philosophy that simply states the government has a role in overseeing market stability, and that deficit spending is a great way to stimulate a sagging economy. And you know what? It works.
But this article isn't about John Maynard Keynes, it's about George Orwell. My point is that conservative readers are right to understand that Orwell didn't like authoritarian communist regimes, but they're not very good at understanding the nuance of who he's actually talking about.
Orwell's two famous novels Animal Farm and 1984 are aimed squarely at Soviet Russia, one an allegorical satire about the Russian revolution, and the other a dystopian piece of Sci-Fi about a manipulative surveillance state that crushes personal autonomy. For this reason, I think, conservatives have co-opted Orwell as their own, a man who they believe hated left-wing ideals and was perhaps even some sort of Western Chauvanist.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Despite his criticism of authoritarian communist regimes like Soviet Russia, Orwell was actually a staunch leftist - a self-identified democratic socialist - and he is plain-spoken about this fact. In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell explains:
"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it".
Democratic Socialism, I will remind the conservative reader, is precisely what Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez advocate. What's more, Orwell mentions 1936 because that was the year he took up arms with the socialists against the fascist Franco regime in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was quite literally the original Antifa - an anti-fascist soldier in a war against a right-wing government. And yet, bizarrely, modern conservatives often spook each other with vague insinuations about how the modern Antifa movement is pushing for something "Orwellian". In a way, they're correct - just not in the manner they think they are.
In other writing, Orwell has made remarks such as:
“What this war has demonstrated is that private capitalism – that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit – does not work. It cannot deliver the goods”
and:
“.. Unlike capitalism, it (socialism) can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times, a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus …. and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it. …… In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them”.
In another instance, Orwell once declined an invitation to speak at the right-wing ‘British League for European Freedom’. In his response to the invitation, Orwell wrote that he “could not associate with a Conservative body that defended Democracy in England but had nothing to say about British Imperialism”. He pointed out that he “belonged to the Left and must work inside it, however much I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country”.
Notice that Orwell explicitly says he belongs to the left, and carefully chooses the phrase "I hate Russian totalitarianism". This very deliberate writer chose that phrase because he did not see the USSR as leftist at all, but simply a corrupt totalitarian state. Most importantly, Orwell felt that communism itself was authoritarian and thus inherently fascistic and right-wing at its core, whatever babble about classless societies and working people's dignity it came cloaked in. He viewed socialism, not communism, as the true left.
Animal Farm
Armed with this knowledge, the proper reading of Animal Farm is not as an anti-leftist or anti-revolution novel, but as a condemnation of Stalinists, who in Orwell's view hijacked the Russian revolution and used the newly-established communist government for their own criminal benefit.
Snowball, the idealist pig who is Animal Farm's porcine analogue of Leon Trotsky, is banished by another pig named Napoleon, who represents Stalin, after the human's farm is taken over by the animals. After Snowball's expulsion from the farm, it is later implied that he is killed by dogs sent by Napoleon. The real-life Leon Trotsky was forced out of Russia by Stalin and later assassinated with an ice axe in Mexico City, which is the reference here.
Animal Farm is often read in America as an anti-communist allegory, but that's missing the mark. It's really about the co-opting of a people's revolution by corrupt egoists, and the summary expulsion and execution of the idealists and humanists that were trying to build a better society. By the end of Animal Farm, we see that the pigs who co-opted the farm's revolution are as decadent, corrupt, and cruel as the humans they replaced. Meanwhile, the idealist animals who originally conceived of the revolution are all gone - banished, jailed, or killed.
This book isn't some pro-capitalist cautionary tale, as is often taught in America. It's also not an indictment of socialism. It's about corruption and authoritarianism, and how bad actors take over and destroy the visions of idealists. But don't take it from me, here's Orwell himself in a letter to a friend about Animal Farm:
"Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. … I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt). If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism."
And there you have it. Animal Farm was not intended to defend laissez-faire capitalism at all. It's a satire about the Russian Revolution whose meaning has been twisted for use as propaganda.
Reviewing Amazon Reviews
Understanding that Orwell viewed himself as a democratic socialist allows the reader to properly understand his allegorical work. But, as I've pointed out, I think the disconnect with many American readers is that they are completely clueless about this, and it hinders their ability to interpret his fiction.
I want to take you through some amusing Amazon reviews of Orwell books written by confused Americans. The books I chose were Orwell on Truth, a collection of his essays about political lies and finding truth in a world full of professional manipulators, and 1984, a work that conservatives have comically latched onto as their own.
Published in 2019 during the post-truth regime of Donald Trump, the introduction to Orwell on Truth can't help but draw parallels between the most prolific liar ever to sit in the oval office and Orwell's essays about, well, political liars. Knowing Orwell's leanings as we now do, there is little doubt how he would feel about Trump's tenure as president, and his politics in general. But don't tell that to Amazon customers.
Settle down, Carol.
This baby boomer seems to be lamenting the removal of Confederate statues, and expressing anxiety about the "creeping secularism" that so many Christian conservatives view as "erasing their history". More on that in this Trash Skunk article, where I explain my reasons for being such an asshole to Americans like Liz here.
First of all, Andrew, the word is spelled "Parler". Secondly, private business is under no obligation to host your speech on their infrastructure. Freedom of speech doesn't mean everyone has to lend you their microphone. Get your own microphone if you want to engage in hate speech and insurrections. Private companies want no part of that, and there is no law forcing them to host your bullshit.
We've got another Confederate sympathizer on our hands.
The irony here is painful. This person just gave five stars to a book written by and for progressive leftists.
You got graded down because you clearly didn't understand what Orwell was talking about. Your professor was right - Orwell was an anti-capitalist and would have detested Ronald Reagan and all that he stood for.
One customer named Eggbert Alonzo seems particularly outraged:
To be fair, Eggbert wrote this in 2018, two-and-a-half years before Donald Trump would lie about winning the 2020 US Election and perpetuate a conspiracy theory that led to a failed coup at the American Capitol building. But there were plenty of lies, conspiracies, and state propaganda committed by Trump and his allies pre-2018, certainly enough to warrant comparing that administration with Orwell's work on fascists and liars.
Eggbert continues:
Here our outraged reviewer commits the classic American blunder of thinking Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were socialists. A small history lesson for you, Eggbert:
Hitler's fascists took over the German National Socialist German Workers' Party and kicked out all of the socialists, keeping only the name. This is similar to North Korea calling itself "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea". We all know that North Korea is neither democratic nor a republic, nor is it controlled by the people. It's just a deceptive name for an autocratic regime. The same applies to Hitler's "National Socialist Party", a name he did not come up with, and a description that does not accurately reflect what that party was about under his rule.
Stalin and Mao, meanwhile, are totalitarian communists, not socialists. To lump a western democratic socialist in with those two is to demonstrate that you are an idiot with no understanding of the subjects you are attempting to criticize. The broad term “socialism” pre-dates communism and Marx by decades, and although some communist regimes liked to call themselves “socialist”, they were anything but.
Lastly, there is no intellectual trickery (or as this bombastic pretender writes "legerdemain") in comparing Orwell's writings on truth to the anti-truth, full-time bullshit generator that is Donald Trump.
It is staggering to see how many five-star reviews Orwell's books get from conservatives on Amazon. A cursory scroll through the reviews for 1984 and Animal Farm makes it seem like fully half the people buying these books think Orwell was a right-wing figure. As a businessman, Orwell might have appreciated the popularity, but as a thinker and writer I believe he would be horrified to see so many people misinterpreting his work.
Conclusion
If there are any lingering doubts from conservatives about this beloved writer's allegiance, let me crush them like wine grapes beneath an Italian villager's feet. Orwell once expressed an incredibly blunt sentiment that I myself have privately harbored, long before I knew he felt this way too. The idea is that "there is no such thing as a right-wing intellectual". Orwell's word-for-word quote is:
"It should be noted that there is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense 'Left'. Perhaps the last right-wing intellectual was TE Lawrence."
Earlier, I wrote that one of the biggest problems conservative readers have with Orwell is that they don't know the difference between socialism and communism, and see his anti-communist writing as also being anti-socialist. They follow this faulty logic to the conclusion that Orwell was against socialism, and was trying to warn Americans about AOC and Bernie Sanders all the way back in the 1940s.
I've showed why and how they are mistaken in this belief. But that's not the only thing going wrong, here. There's another clue to the mystery of the right's embrace of Orwell: his most famous books are literary allegory.
Allegory demands a base level of intelligence from its reader. It assumes you can read a novella about pigs and horses taking over a farm and, through context clues, understand that the author is really producing a satire on the Russian Revolution. But, as Orwell himself says, the right has found itself rather wanting for intellectuals. For this reason, I think, we see conservatives worshipping Orwell as their patron saint... even when they are often the ones he is skewering. The joke is going over their heads because Orwell's allegories are too opaque for them to understand.
The fact that people give 1984 five-star reviews on Amazon and then go watch Fox News all night is indicative of the lack of critical thinking going on here. Fox is precisely the type of authoritarian-friendly, lying media manipulation apparatus that Orwell was writing about. Yet if you turn on Fox News, Tucker Carlson tells his viewers Orwell was actually warning them about socialism! This is truly the snake eating its tail.
These poor conservative readers have completely missed the point that Orwell was trying to make about mass-manipulation and thought control. They are not only victims of such a program themselves, but have warped and adjusted Orwell's writing to fit their own narrow, ignorant, miscalculated political views. They are passionately convinced that he is on their side.
"Orwell warned us about these AOCs! He warned us that Twitter would ban us for free speech!"
He also warned you that he was a socialist who hated capitalism and communism alike. Orwell would be as repulsed by figures like Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan as he was by Joseph Stalin. The man warned you in dozens of essays that he was both a lefty and an anti-fascist. But you ignored that warning, or rather, you never read it because you've only checked out the hits, 1984 and Animal Farm.
And of course conservatives misread those books. There is a level of anti-intellectualism and paranoia baked into the American right through which everything in their lives must be viewed. Joe Biden talking about economic stimulus makes him communist. People being banned from Twitter for violating terms of service is somehow communism. They think socialists want an authoritarian government, or hate free speech.
All of these notions are absolutely ludicrous. Orwell wasn't trying to warn us about Twitter bans or economic stimulus packages, you idiots. He was warning us about manipulative media like Fox News, and wannabe dictators with truth-telling problems like Donald Trump. He was warning us about you.
In closing, I want to make it clear that I'm not trying to say the right shouldn't read George Orwell because he's "ours". Far from it. I think everyone should read Orwell's work, because he's a fantastic writer whose ideas are critical to understanding politics and history. And I think if more people read him in context, it would open their eyes to some of the falsities swimming around in their brains. What's more, people should read his essays and letters, not just his allegorical fiction. The man is blunt and hiding nothing when he discusses politics in essay form, and you will quickly ascertain how he feels about right-wing thought.
So please, keep those five star reviews coming. And give the man another read now that you know what he's talking about.
