Their George O

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GEORGE ORWELL didn't attach any particular importance to the present year. It seemed like a good title for the book, written in 1948. How was he to know that ignorant philistines would take it literally as a prediction? Margaret Thatcher turns her hand to literary criticism and comes to the stunningly profound conclusion. "Orwell got it wrong"

But like it or not this is inevitably Orwell's year. What with the "Big Brother" t-shirts, the TV specials, the articles in the trendy colour supplements, and all the "learned" pieces in the New Statesman, Marxism Today and so on, it's a good bet that Orwell is revolving in his grave at this very moment.

Spanish Republican militiamen on their way to fight th George Orwell, who told the Left unpalatable truths One wonders who Orwell would have despised the most - the ignorant Tories who have tried to enlist him as an anti-socialist crusader, the professional liars (mainly Stalinists) on the 'left' '. whe put about the same story Of course, the Communist Party has long hated Orwell.

And with good reason, from their point of view. Almost alone among middle class leftist intellectuals of the 1930s, he saw through Stalinism. For all his many faults, that fact alone should weight the balance in his favour for readers of Socialist Organiser.

While more "sophisticated"

intellectuals blinded themselves to what was really going on in Russia, and Fabians like Shaw and the Webbs wrote peans of praise to Stalinist totalitarianism, Orwell cut through the then-fashionable crap. The CP has never forgiven him for that.

Thus a trendy Euro-communist like Beatrix Campbell can write a nasty little piece in the New Statesman describing Orwell as "a socialist who was best known for his anti-socialism" , and be supported in this scurrilous lying by an old Stalinist, Leslie Moody (It is not often that I have the pleasure of reading an article with every word of which I agree without reservation. 1 have to thank Beatrix Campbell on Orwell for this rare privilege"). Never mind our own internal CP feuding — we can all agree about the 'anti Soviet" Orwell.

Actually, one of Campbell's charges against Orwell has some truth in it: he was a male chauvinist of a most unpleasant kind. But then, the cates, though she doesn't admit it) wasn't so hot on women's rights, either. And they covered for and lied about the massive and systematic assault on women's rights in the Soviet Union that was part of Stalin's counter-revolution then.

Orwell's attacks on "earnest ladies in sandals" and his obsessive dislike of birth control would certainly have placed him on the wrong side in modern debates on feminism.

But his general dislike of faddists and his tirades "guinst fruit-juice drinkers. nudists. escaped Quakers and so forth (the rant about socialism at the end of 'The Road to Wigan Pier" , for instance) has a positive side to it. It demonstrates a serious concern to make socialism acceptable and accessible to workers.

Orwell's revulsion against cranks and faddists (and he'd come across plenty of them around the ILP and the the American Trotskyist James P. Cannon's aversion to "freakish, abnormal, exotic"

types with "trick moustaches' and corduroy suits.

It also flows quite logically from Orwell's understanding of the need to make socialism universal cause his concern to unify and generalise the struggle in the interest of the working class as a whole. This naturally set him against the special interest groups around the left.

It continues, naturally, to be anathema to the single issue campaigners and pig's trough municipal socialists of today.

Orwell's hostility to the Communist Party's Popular Front. and to the Popular-Front 'Broad Left' around the Left Book Club was not at all the same as his hostility to 'socialist faddism'. The goal of the CP and its allies after 1936 was not socialism but a coalition government of Labour, Liberals and progressive Tories'.

How ironic that the Stalinists today charge Orwell with having been a 'liberal'.

Alliance He himself had all sorts of funny ideas about an alliance between the working class and dispossessed 'lower-uppermiddle-class gentlefolk' like himself.

But at least his fantasy alliance was to be under uncompromising proletarian leadership and dedicated to socialist revolution, not the maintenance of capitalist bourgeois democracy in the face of fascism which was what the Popular Front aimed for and in Spain, slaughtered working class revolutionaries for.

He clearly denounced the "Popular Front which ... will not be genuinely socialist in character, but will be simply a manoeuvre against German and Italian not English] fascism. " (Road to Wigan Pier).

He saw through "the mealy-mouthed Liberal who wants fascism destroyed in order that he may go on drawing his dividends peacefully - the type of humbug who passes resolutions against fascism and commumsm, ie. against rats and rat-poison. And he as good as called for a revolutionary party: "In the next few years we shall either get that effective Socialist Party that we need, or we shall not get it. If we do not get it, then Fascism is coming. " (The Road to Wigan Pier).

These largely intuitive, undeveloped semi-revolutionary ideas were firmed up by his experience when he put his life on the line as a POUM militia volunteer in Spain in 1937.

The POUM was a politically unstable group of ex-Communist Party people, exTrotskyists and others But the POUM retained enough socialist principles to: find itself (along with the Spanish anarchists) on the receiving end of the Comintern's murderous onslaught.

Orwell' s account of his Spanish experience, 'Homage to Catalonia', is not the kind of worked out, working class socialist analysis presented by Felix Morrow in 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain" (the best book on the Spanish civil war). But his conclusions are much the same.

Orwell describes explaining to a rank and file CP member why he would not join their 'International Column"

"I had to tell him that after this affair I could not join any Communist-controlled unit. Sooner or later it might mean being used against the Spanish working class. One could not tell when that kind of thing would break out again, and if I had to use my rifle at all in such an affair I would use it on the side of the working class and not against them Big Brother Hitler Between 1937 and September 1939, Orwell advocated a policy against fascism in the 'democratic imperialist' countries like Britain and France, essentially the same as that of the Trotskyists, though more simply arrived at:

'I do not see how one can oppose Fascism, except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course. in one's own country. If one collaborates with a capitalistgovernment: against Fuscism', i.e. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting Fascism in by the back door.' Then, horrified by the reality of the Nazi threat, he turned "patriotic" - "My Country Right or Left" as he ironically put it. On this again, the Stalinist-influenced left seize hypocritically upon Orwell's shortcomings whilst forgetting their own, much more shameful, record.

After its popular-frontist jingoism between 1935 and 1939, the CP was "pro-Nazi neutral' , during the Stalin-Hitler pact of 1939-41. And that "neutrality" actually tended towards a pro-Nazi stance, with R. Palme Dutt (editor of the British CP's magazine 'Labour Monthly' and the leading CP intellectual for many decades) publishing blatant pro-German propaganda. After 1941, when Hitler attacked to the East and Russia joined the Allies, the CP returned to its superpatriotic role. Unlike Orwell, they advocated strike-breaking as part of the war effort. In the words of CP General Secrétary Harry Pollitt, "it is the class conscious worker who will cross the picket line.

Patriotism Orwell's patriotism was actually no more than the flipside of his over-simplistic •*revolution or fascism" scenario. Very few people, apart from pacifists (whom Orwell despised) and workedout, scientific socialists (i.e. Trotskyists) could stand against the "anti-Fascist" urge for national unity. At least Orwell's patriotism retained a revolutionary socialist objective. He could still write:

'Only revolution can save England, that has been obvious for years, but now that revolution has started and may proceed quite quickly if only we can keep Hitler out. Within two years, maybe a year, if only we can hang on, we shall see changes that will surprise the idiots who have no foresight. I dare say the London gutters will have to run with blood. All right, let them, if it

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rwell and ours A miner in the 1930s took the grime and dirt home with him : Francoite fascist rebellion, 1936 necessary." (The Lion ie Unicorn).

The truth is that it was not well's patriotism which furiated the Stalinists and eir fellow-travellers, but his ntinued advocacy of working iss struggle against both the pitalists in the West and the ling caste of totalitarian vssia. Criticism of the assian "workers' fatherind" and of good old 'Uncle le" Stalin was not as popular the 1940s as it is now. In et the government propaindists in both Britain and e USA glorified Stalin and Animal Farm has been widely portrayed as an antiCommunist diatribe. But even a cursory reading shows such an interpretation to be wide of the mark. Orwell's objective was not to denigrate the revolution but to expose the betrayal of revolutionary ideas by the bureaucrats.

The famous final passage of the book (in which the Stalinist ruling caste are appropriately portrayed as pigs, and the "men" are the capitalists) sums up Orwell's view of the degeneration of the Russian Winereet ighty Four abolished, but common ownership will not be established The new "managerial" societies will not consist of small independent states, but of great super-states grouped around the main industrial centres in Europe, Asia and America. These super-states will fight amongst themselves for possession of the remaining uncaptured portions of the earth, but will probably be unable to conquer one another completely. " (James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution, Collected Essays Vol 4). ical judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.

And that is the important point to remember about Orwell. Despite the undoubted pessimism that pervades his later writings, he remained committed to the possibility of socialist change. And the force he believed could bring about that change was the working class.

Snobbery

A lot of slanderous nonsense MAGE TO CATALONIA GEORGE ORWELL Orwell told the truth about Stalinism in Spain. in upon the working class, laid Orwell open to a lot of misunderstanding. The dow nright lie (first put about by CP General Secretary Harry Pollitt in response to Orwell's denunciation of the 'Popular Front') that Orwell said 'the working classes smell" still has credence to this day (actually, what he said was that the middle class was brought up to believe that the working classes 'smell').

Orwell's attitude towards workers was sympathetic and unprejudiced. That he didn't idealise workers or hypocritically pretend to be one of them, was his strength, not his weakness.

True, the workers he describes in Wigan Pier are not on the whole politically aware or active, and he makes no mention of the huge, militant demonstrations against unemployment that had taken place in the very towns he visited, just a year previously.

Similarly Boxer and Clover (the carthorses representing the Russian working class in Animal Farm) are passive, uncomprehending, entirely

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CP in Orwell's day (the alter- natives that Campbell advo-

'Adelphi" magazine, which he contributed to) is very like