George Orwell

I thought that Peter Lowe’s account of Orwell (‘Englishness in a Time of Crisis’)¹ did not do justice to the complexity of his case. For an understanding of Orwell’s conventional patriotism during the Second World War, it is necessary to realise that it represented a break with the position he took immediately before it. In 1938 and 1939 Orwell was a member of the Independent Labour Party and, after a spell with POUM, in the Spanish Civil War he fought alongside other members of the ILP on the side of the Spanish republic. It is still not widely recognised that the ILP, though willing to fight fascism in Spain, was opposed to a war against Hitler since, like the Communist Party before its volte face when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, it regarded such a European war as one between two forms of capitalism. So until September 1939 Orwell stuck to the ILP line and even supported Chamberlain’s accommodation with Hitler at Munich. When the war started, Orwell decided to support it and broke with the ILP which, led by James Maxton in Parliament, continued its opposition throughout the war. (At the ILP summer school in Bangor in 1941 or 1942, a panel from the Party was asked whether one was a better socialist if one went to prison as a conscientious objector or if one took part in the fighting : the panel came down on behalf of the conscientious objector. Both question and answer were recorded in The New Leader a week or two later.)

It is important to remember that Coming Up for Air was written and published during Orwell’s ILP period and cannot be fully understood unless it is realised that it is an anti-war novel. Orwell’s position was that if Britain fought in a war against Hitler it too would become a fascist state: the first adumbrations of Nineteen Eighty-Four are indeed to be found in Coming Up for Air (‘But it isn’t the war that matters, it’s the after-war. The world we’re going down to, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day and detectives watch you while you sleep’). To read what Orwell wrote during the war one would never dream that it represented a significant departure from his pre-war position. While not suppressing his change of mind completely, he certainly did not go out of his way to draw attention to it. There was a touch of Nineteen Eighty-Four about his reticence.

It must be appreciated, too, that Orwell was not, until after the war, a democratic socialist but a revolutionary one. This is made clear in Homage to Catalonia and later in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’, while in ‘My Country Right or Left’ he says: ‘Only revolution can save England. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood.’ Broadly speaking his position (as Eliot and Wells recognised) was fundamentally Trotskyist (though he could never bring himself to admit it) and, though there are certain ambiguities in Animal Farm, it is not a condemnation of revolution as such, as it is often presented as being, but of a revolution that went wrong. Its implicit message is similar to that at the end of Friedrich Wolf ’s play Die Matrosen von Catarro about the failure of the German Revolution in 1918–1919: ‘Next time better.’ It is still not sufficiently realised just how anti-Stalin Trotskyists were. Stalin’s Satellites in Eastern Europe, which was published not long after the war ended, was not, as its title would suggest, written by a scholarly supporter of the Cold War but by Ygael Gluckstein, aka Tony Cliff, a leading figure in the International Socialist Party (neither Washington nor Moscow but international socialism), which later became the Socialist Workers Party, which is still very much with us. It is indeed possible to see the end of Animal Farm, where the pigs turn into men, as a political statement: Stalinist...