Other side of George Orwell

It is undoubted that George Orwell is one of the most important political writers of the twentieth century. To call him a political writer is justified because his life and works were heavily influenced by the events of his lifetime. Though Orwell died in 1950 at the age of 46, his last two works of fiction—Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—brought him enormous worldwide fame. In these two novels, Orwell expressed deep anguish about Stalin, Soviet Communism, and totalitarianism. Perhaps for this reason, many came to see Orwell as an anti-Communist writer who sold his soul to capitalism.

My generation matured during the 1990s—after the fall of the Soviet Union. I read a Bangla translation of Animal Farm before I entered college. As a result, many youths came to know about Communism through Animal Farm, and to them, Communism meant Stalin’s Soviet Union. The same fate befell Nineteen Eighty-Four. After its publication in 1949, most readers believed that it portrayed Stalin’s Soviet Communism. Almost no one thought of this novel as a portrayal of surveillance, propaganda, and the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany—which was openly Fascist and capitalist. Despite Orwell’s reductionist image as an ‘anti-Communist’ writer, his life and non-fiction works prove that he remained deeply committed to socialism until the end of his life.

Orwell wrote an autobiographical essay, Why I Write, in 1946, in which he pointed out four reasons why writers write. The first is sheer egoism—to express oneself, to be known to all, and to be praised by all. The second is aesthetic pleasure—a love of language and the beauty of the world. The third is historical motivation—to document events truthfully for future generations. And the fourth is political purpose. Orwell believed that no artwork is politically neutral. The statement that ‘art should maintain distance from politics’, he claims, is itself a political statement. Orwell honestly confesses that his writing was shaped by his political beliefs and experiences. He did not believe in ‘art for art’s sake’. Rather, he wrote to expose lies and bring out uncomfortable truths.

Many life events shaped Orwell as a political writer. He worked in Burma for five years (1922–1927) in the Imperial Police, where he encountered the everyday cruelty and hypocrisy of British colonialism. He saw how colonial power functioned through fear, violence, and humiliation. Stories such as Shooting an Elephant, A Hanging, and the novel Burmese Days carry Orwell’s anger, frustration, and inner conflict regarding the British Empire. In a similar tone, his travel writing on French-occupied Morocco in 1939, Marrakech, is also significant.

Poverty in Paris and London

After returning to England from Burma, Orwell was plunged into abject poverty. During this period, he lived in Paris for two years and experienced the iron reality of a society divided into rigid classes. In Paris, and later in London, Orwell lived like a vagabond, spent extensive time with the poor and homeless, and survived on meagre wages. His first non-fiction work, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was written from these experiences of poverty and hardship. Despite its storytelling style, the book is profoundly political and formative in Orwell’s writing career. Through writing this book, Orwell gained a clear understanding of the working class. He writes, “poverty is what I am writing about…the slum was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences”.

The Road to Wigan Pier

After his firsthand experience of poverty, Orwell turned his attention to the English working class. He lived for almost two months with coal miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire and published his first political book, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). He writes that the purpose of living with coal miners and unemployed workers was “necessary to me as part of my approach to Socialism”. The first part of the book is very vivid, ethnographically written, and focuses on the daily life of the miners. Orwell’s diaries and letters also prove that he contacted at least two social anthropologists in England about how to incorporate ethnographic writing techniques while writing this book.

Orwell made an incredible journey to the bottom of a mine, and after reaching the coal face, he compared it with Dante’s Inferno: “most of the things one imagines in hell are there—heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space.” He mentioned that giant corporations made millions of pounds from these mines, but the miners received very little; capitalism, he argued, is at its dirtiest here. The Road to Wigan Pier proves that nothing had changed among the working class since the publication of Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England one hundred years earlier.

The second part of the book is highly political and controversial, but Orwell was honest about his opinions. He knew that the readers of this book would largely be British Left liberals, yet he did not hold back in criticising his fellow Socialists. Orwell began with the question that if Socialism is capable of improving the condition of the working class, then why are we not all Socialists. He clarified his intention at the outset by saying, “And please notice that I am arguing for Socialism, not against it”. He argues that it is the working class that understands Socialism more authentically than any other class because “Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.”

He complains that the working class does not understand the language of the Left. Therefore, the success of Socialism, in his view, depends on the connection between the working class and the Left middle class. After returning from the coal mines, Orwell convinced himself that socialism was the common-sense answer to the dire situation of the working class in England. This reminds us of his famous line, “Every empty belly was an argument for socialism”. Interestingly, Orwell’s ‘emotional socialism’ did not satisfy the British Left at the time. When the book was published, another Socialist, Victor Gollancz—the publisher of the Left Book Club—wrote the Preface to The Road to Wigan Pier and called for ‘Scientific Socialism’.

Homage to Catalonia

According to all biographers, Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) was a decisive moment in his life. In 1936, Orwell enlisted in the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) to participate in the civil war in support of the Republicans against the Fascist General Franco. The militias of the Republican faction consisted of several parties, including Socialists, Communists, Marxists, workers, trade unionists, and others. Orwell spent seven months in Spain, including time at the front, where he witnessed workers and militias fighting side by side against the Fascist Nationalists. Later, at the front, Orwell was also shot in the throat.

Orwell also witnessed street fights between Socialist and Communist factions—a civil war within the Civil War. Many POUM leaders were tortured and killed by their Communist allies. As a volunteer of the POUM, which followed Leon Trotsky, Orwell literally fled Spain with his life. After returning to England and finishing the draft of Homage to Catalonia—one of the best books ever written on the Spanish Civil War—Orwell struggled to find a publisher, as no one was interested in learning how the fight against fascism bred infighting and factions within the Left. Orwell realised how the International Left was grouped under Stalin’s Soviet leadership, with a blind loyalty to Communism.

Orwell’s Matured Socialism

When Hitler bombed England in 1940, Orwell offered a curious response at a time of existential threat to his motherland. The following year, in 1941, he published The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a long essay-book in which he supported the war out of patriotism and strongly believed that England’s class system hindered the war effort, and that Britain needed a socialist revolution to defeat Germany. Aware that the Left often mocks patriotism as “the flag-waving fetish of wannabe fascists or rural huckleberries”, Orwell argued that patriotism was just the opposite of such conservatism in a time of war.

Orwell believed that the war would destroy capitalism and pave the way for socialist transformation in England. He claims, “We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war”. In one sense, this proved to be true, because after the war no one wished to return to pre-war England. In this book, Orwell provided a long definition of socialism, such as, “Socialism is usually defined as ‘common ownership of the means of production’…”. He enthusiastically proposed many concrete socialist tenets, including equality of income, nationalisation of the economy, the democratisation of all education, the abolition of hereditary privilege, and political democracy.

Though Britain won the war, it emerged as the biggest loser among the Allied forces. The economy collapsed, and the future appeared bleak. The opportunity for socialist transformation that the war had created passed without immediate success. Orwell’s health began to decline. It was during this time that Orwell completed Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
 

Fahmid Al Zaid is associate professor in Department of Anthropology, University of Dhaka, and a PhD candidate at Durham University, UK. He can be reached at fahmidshaon@du.ac.bd

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