Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist, and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. He is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and his work remains influential in both popular and political culture. One reason for this is that people from across the political spectrum believe they can use Orwell’s work to demonstrate their position is the correct one. In particular, many on the right interpret works like Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning against moving away from capitalism. “Socialism doesn’t work – just read Animal Farm!” as one right-wing acquaintance once put it to me. But what did Orwell himself think?
Orwell was born on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, Bengal Presidency (now Bihar), British India, into what he described as a “lower-upper-middle class” family. His mother wanted him to have a public school education, and although his family could not afford the fees, he succeeded in winning a scholarship to Eton. Orwell was unhappy at Eton and performance reports suggest he neglected his studies. His parents could not afford to send him to university without another scholarship and concluded from his poor results he would not be able to win one, so decided instead that Orwell should join the Imperial Police, the precursor of the Indian Police Service. He chose a posting in Burma, then still a province of British India.
Working as an imperial police officer gave Orwell considerable responsibility while most of his contemporaries were still at university in England. He drew on his experiences in the Burma police for the novel Burmese Days (1934), and the essays A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936). The latter describes the experience of the English narrator, probably Orwell himself, called upon to shoot an aggressive elephant whilst working as a police officer in Burma. Because the locals expect him to do the job, he does so against his better judgment, his anguish increased by the elephant’s slow and painful death. The story is regarded as a metaphor for colonialism as a whole, and for Orwell’s view that “when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys”.
In 1927, Orwell moved to London and started to explore the poorer parts of the city. For a while he lived as a tramp; he recorded his experiences for use in The Spike, his first published essay in English, and in the second half of his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). The first part of this book was based on his experience living and working as a kitchen hand in Paris, where he had moved to in 1928. In 1929, after nearly two years in Paris, Orwell returned to England where his explorations of poverty continued with regular tramping expeditions and time spent doing various menial jobs. He even went as far as deliberately getting himself arrested in 1932 so that he could experience Christmas in prison.
In 1936, concerned by Francisco Franco’s military uprising, Orwell went to Spain to fight in the Spanish Civil War. He was at first exasperated by the “kaleidoscope” of political parties and trade unions that made up the Republican government but soon joined the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Orwell was also shocked by the lack of munitions, food, and firewood, as well as other extreme deprivations. The subsequent campaign of lies and distortion carried out by the Stalinist press, in which the POUM was accused of collaborating with the fascists, had a dramatic effect on Orwell. During his time on the front he was wounded in the throat by a sniper’s bullet, and was then forced to escape from hospital after being charged with “rabid Trotskyism” and being an agent of the POUM.
Orwell returned to England in 1937 where his health deteriorated. He was declared “unfit for any kind of military service” by the Medical Board, and although he joined the Home Guard he eventually had to retire on medical grounds. In 1941 he began to write for the American Partisan Review which linked Orwell with the New York Intellectuals who were also anti-Stalinist. He began work on Animal Farm in 1943 and by 1944 the book was ready for publication. However publication would have to wait until the end of WWII as the book was an obvious attack on the Stalin and the Soviet Union, Britain’s allies at that time. Animal Farm had particular resonance in the post-war climate and its worldwide success made Orwell a sought-after figure.
In 1947, Orwell set off to live on the Scottish Island of Jura in an abandoned farmhouse without outbuildings, where he worked on Nineteen Eighty-Four. Around this time he began collaborating with a Foreign Office unit, the Information Research Department (IRD), set up by the Labour government to publish anti-communist propaganda. Orwell provided them a list of people he considered to be unsuitable as IRD authors because of their pro-communist leanings, now referred to as “Orwell’s list”. In 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published to critical acclaim. However, Orwell’s health continued to decline, and in 1950 he suffered a pulmonary artery rupture due to complications of tuberculosis and died. He was just 46 years old.
So, was Orwell a socialist? He certainly claimed to be one. Orwell famously summarized his political stance in his 1946 essay Why I Write, stating: “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.” His views were clearly shaped by his experience and solidified after witnessing poverty first-hand in England and fighting alongside the POUM. Orwell strongly opposed Soviet-style communism and Stalinism, which he saw as a betrayal of true socialist values. Most socialists today would agree. The confusion of right-wingers over the central message of Animal Farm mad Nineteen Eighty-Four ultimately stems from a mistaken identification of socialism with Stalinism.
More generally, Orwell believed in a classless society, public ownership or control of the means of production, and the preservation of fundamental democratic liberties and free speech. If that isn’t a socialist, then what is?
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