A Marxist Analysis of Nineteen Eighty-Four
International Socialist Review Issue 32, November–December 2003
The Orwell we never knew
By LEE WENGRAF
***
BIG BROTHER, double-think, thought police: George Orwell’s 1984–his bleak portrait of a futuristic, totalitarian society–is as powerful today as ever. Though it has often been used as a cautionary tale about the terrors of socialism, its portrayal of government deception, lying and thought-control has a familiar ring in today’s post 9-11 world. His Animal Farm and 1984 are among the best-selling political novels of all time.
Orwell’s writing has come to epitomize lessons taught in schools everywhere: Resistance is impossible, and Orwell’s Big Brother–the Soviet Union–is the unavoidable result of fighting for a better society. Reagan-era Cold Warriors and the U.S. education system have continually lifted up Orwell’s writings to proclaim the socialist vision dead and buried. Ex-Trotskyist, now neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, writing on the eve of the year 1984, claimed Orwell as a "guiding spirit" for his Committee for the Free World by exclaiming, "If Orwell were alive today, he would be taking his stand with the neoconservatives and against the left."1 Podhoretz is not the only former leftist to use what’s seen as Orwell’s shift to the right as a cover for their own conservatism, such as Nation columnist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who embraces Orwell to cover his own rightward drift.2
But George Orwell had a different vision than these conservatives, and for that, his life and works have something to offer the left today. Orwell became a self-described socialist as a result of lessons learned early in life. His service as a colonial policeman in Burma turned him into a fierce anti-imperialist with a commitment to exposing oppression and championing the rights of the working class. But Orwell was also a controversial and contradictory writer who took diverse–sometimes courageous–positions over the course of his life that have left his
The Orwell we never knew
By LEE WENGRAF
***
BIG BROTHER, double-think, thought police: George Orwell’s 1984–his bleak portrait of a futuristic, totalitarian society–is as powerful today as ever. Though it has often been used as a cautionary tale about the terrors of socialism, its portrayal of government deception, lying and thought-control has a familiar ring in today’s post 9-11 world. His Animal Farm and 1984 are among the best-selling political novels of all time.
Orwell’s writing has come to epitomize lessons taught in schools everywhere: Resistance is impossible, and Orwell’s Big Brother–the Soviet Union–is the unavoidable result of fighting for a better society. Reagan-era Cold Warriors and the U.S. education system have continually lifted up Orwell’s writings to proclaim the socialist vision dead and buried. Ex-Trotskyist, now neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, writing on the eve of the year 1984, claimed Orwell as a "guiding spirit" for his Committee for the Free World by exclaiming, "If Orwell were alive today, he would be taking his stand with the neoconservatives and against the left."1 Podhoretz is not the only former leftist to use what’s seen as Orwell’s shift to the right as a cover for their own conservatism, such as Nation columnist and writer Christopher Hitchens, who embraces Orwell to cover his own rightward drift.2
But George Orwell had a different vision than these conservatives, and for that, his life and works have something to offer the left today. Orwell became a self-described socialist as a result of lessons learned early in life. His service as a colonial policeman in Burma turned him into a fierce anti-imperialist with a commitment to exposing oppression and championing the rights of the working class. But Orwell was also a controversial and contradictory writer who took diverse–sometimes courageous–positions over the course of his life that have left his