Orwell told the truth Lenin

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AMITIES MORIR QUEC ONSEWTIR TIRAN WHAT is the political message purveyed by the booming industry built around the reputation and literary products of George Orwell? The Orwell industry is working flat out to convince people that capitalism is not so bad after all - at least when compared to Orwell's nightmare vision of the collectivised bureaucratic society. But while TV plays and documentaries, articles and personal reminiscences about George Orwell abound, there is one aspect of him which the Orwell industry chooses not to examine too closely, and that is the very considerable attempt in the 1930s to suppress his reports and analysis of the Spanish Civil War and the political conclusions he drew from it. For a while George Orwell was an outspoken champion of revolutionarv socialism The streets of Madrid after a bombing raid by Fascists Republican troops on their way to the front For most of his life, Orwell was a political maverick. He was for a time a member of the Independent Labour Party and in the 1940s to his death a supporter of the Labour Party. He was a maverick in the sense that he only took part in organised working class activity once and that was in Spain.

There, he was able to experience workers' democracy and solidarity as a member of the POUM workers' militia. The POUM was the Workers Party of Marxist Unification, a vacilating would-be revolutionary organisation.

On his return from Spain, he wrote Spilling the Spanish Beans' in the summer of 1937 in which he attempts - and succeeds - to provide a political analysis of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. "The real struggle is between revolution and counter-revolutit ar lit wl of rel an ca: by WC plE Ru abı intı ber ger W01 Ru:

anc •J www on: between the workers who e vainly trying to hold on to a tle of what they won in 1936, id the Liberal-Communist bloc ho are so successfully taking it vay from them."

For Orwell the disbandment the workers' militias, the turn of factories to capitalists mbined with the setting up of . army with a privileged officer ste structure and the jailing the Stalinists and Liberals of irkers opposed to this policy these were actions which aced the interests of the ssian bureaucracy toremost, ove those of the Spanish and ernational working class cause "the spectacle of a nuine revolution in Spain uld rouse unwanted echoes in ssia."

Irwell showed that the jailing 1 execution of workers prepared to fight and die for the revolution was accompanied by a systematic lying campaign:

"In Spain, to some extent even in England anyone professing revolutionary socialism (i.e.

professing the things the CP professed until a few years ago)

is under suspicion of being a Trotskyist in the pay of Franco or Hitler. "

The central role in this campaign of lies fell to the Daily Death of a Republican soldier Worker, now renamed the Morning Star. Its reporter in Spain was Frank Pitcairn, better known as Claude Cockburn (latterly of Private Eye and the Irish Times). In a recent TV program he admitted that he knowingly sent lying reports for the good of the cause' camps So all pervasive was the 'two camps" version of what was going on in Spain — the Francoist, supported by the international right, and the Republican, supported by the left - that Orwell was unable to find a left publisher for his book 'Homage to Catalonia'. Gollancz, publishers of the Left Book Club refused to touch it. The New Statesman even refused an article by Orwell presenting facts about the repression of the POUM. It was "against editorial policy" to take account of such Orwell rightly regarded the Stalinist tactic of the Popular Front as an unnatural alliance of enemies, with the working class subordinate. It would, in Orwell's words, "have the effect of fixing the capitalist more firmly in the saddle. " He believed that fascism could only be combatted by attacking capitalism in its non-fascist as

well as its fascist forms. This was the policy of the left wing of the ILP to which Orwell then

belonged.

At the outbreak of war with Germany Orwell left the ILP because of its pacifism. He believed Britain had to be supported against Hitler's Germany. He withdrew altogether from organised politics. After the signing of the RussoGerman pact Orwell retreated into despairing isolation and assumed the exclusive role of 'writer' 'In sentiment I am definitely 'left'. But I believe that a writer can only remain honest if he keeps free of party labels."

His success as a writer dates from this time as does the fundamental pessimism which runs like a seam through his writings, particularly 'Animal Farm'. His journalism is a mixture of desperation and confusion — for example the fusion of patriotism and "war socialism" in "The Lion and the Unicorn' Slanderous At the war's end echoes of his earlier disgust at the lies and slanderous methods of the Stalinists are to be found in a letter to the magazine 'Forward' and to the Manchester Guardian'. This letter was published only by 'Forward' and concerned the defamation of Trotsky.

Signed by H.G. Wells among others, the letter recalls that Trotsky had been exonerated from the charges made by Stalin that he was "an agent of Hitler" as a result of the investigations carried out by the "Commission of Inquiry into the Moscow Trials" chaired and named after the prominent American philosopher and educationalist John Dewey.

The charge that Trotsky was an agent of the Nazi government and the Gestapo had been demolished. The letter called for the release of all relevant Gestapo papers and records in the hands of the Allied Powers so that the definitive historical truth about Trotsky could be established.

It requested that Natalia Sedov-Trotsky be allowed to go. to Nurnberg to cross-examine witnesses. Needless to say this request was ignored.

Class . conscious militants should read Homage to Catalonia' '. Reading 'Animal Farn' and '1984' we must remember they were products of the politics of the time.

Today, with confidence and optimism we can expose those methods of lies and deceipt so grimly portrayed by Orwell. They are part of the armoury of class rule and class collaboration and of bureaucratic Stalinist rule.

The nightmares of Orwell's '1984' will be forestalled by the living force of independent working class action to establish a workers' democracy in place of both capitalism and Stalinism.

VLADIMIR Ilyich Ulyanov -died sixty years ago. Few. ghi fully as Lenin's. Elevated to th ing a messiah in the Soviet Ur detested by the ruling class in subversive, architect of commi world, Lenin is one of the history of the international wo The fact is" that Lenin's life and ideas have been distorted and lied about both by those who portray him as right-hand man to the Devil, and — especially - the big majority of those who supposedly defend his heritage and base their actions on his thinking.

The Soviet Union, and the political movement that has come out of it, Stalinism, are a monstrous perversion both of Lenin's ideas and of the sort of society he and his comrades were seeking to build.

The police states that exist in the USSR and in other countries where the governments claim to be Marxist-Leninist, are a far cry from the programme fought for by Lenin and his party, the Bolsheviks, who led the Russian Revolution in October 1917.

The Stalinist states have enormous, anti-working class anti-democratic bureaucracies. Lenin's life was devoted to creating genuine working-class democracies, quite different from the caricature of socialism that exists in these countries.

In 1917, in his book State and Revolution, Lenin outlined what a workers' state should consist of, and what he thought the working class in Russia and internationally should fight for.

All officials were to be elected, subject to recall, and be paid no more than the averdge wage of workers. Officers were to be rotated, so that 'where everyone is a bureaucrat, no one is a bureaucrat.

The repressive apparatus police, army, courts, prisons — would no longer stand above society.

The working class was able to police itself and defend itself against counter-revolutionaries. Justice would be organised by the working class instead of the capitalists.

In short, the working class was to be the ruling class and govern itself and society accordingly in the most democratic form of government imaginable.

In time class distinction would be eradicated and all need to defend working class rule from the old rulers would disappear, so all forms of state coercion, the very notion of a 'state' — would 'wither away'.

In the 1920s, the genuine working class revolutionaries lost power in the Soviet Union to the Stalinists, who based themselves on a privileged bureaucratic caste which became increasingly anti-working class, both inside the UŞSR itself and outside it.

But that degeneration of the Russian Revolution was avoidable. And in his last in. - known to history as Lenin -osts haunt the world so powerle status of something approachlion and its satellites, feared and the West as the anti-Christ, archunism and everything evil in the most important figures in the rking class movement.

By Clive Bradley years Lenin fought against it.

The fight was continued by Trotsky and the Left Opposition, seeking to return the Russian Revolution to the democratic, working class tradition of Lenin.

The goa! of a workers' democracy is still the goal of genuine Leninists: a state controlled by the working class far more democratic than anything that exists or has existed in the pathetically inadequate bourgeois democracies of the capitalist countries.

But what we also need to learn from Lenin's thinking is that such a state cannot be achieved by 'taking over' the existing institutions of capitalist society — that all of those institutions, including the very partial democracy of Parliament, are there — in the last analysis — to defend capitalism.

The capitalist state machine (standing army, police, civil service, etc) will need to be destroyed - 'smashed' as Marx and, after him, Lenin put it.

The bureaucratic Stalinist states too will have to be smashed and dismantled.

In Britain we must be prepared for violent resistance from the capitalist class to prevent us smashing the state apparatus which guarantees a monopoly of organised violence in our society.

Like Lenin, we need to build a revolutionary organisation fighting for the leadership of the working class, to win the mass of workers to a perspective of creating a workers' democracy, and able to defeat the resistance of the capitalists.

That is the significance of Lenin for the British labour movement on the 60th anniversary of his death.

The we st Available from Ian Stephenson,INALGO Branch Secretary. ¡NALGO Office, Town Hall, Bury.!

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Socialist Organiser no.165 February 9 1984 P.