George Orwell (2023)

Book Review from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Orwell: The New Life. By D. J. Taylor, Constable, 2023

Eric Arthur Blair was born in 1903. In 1933 he adopted a pen name for his first book mainly because he thought the seedy subject matter of Down and Out in Paris and London would upset his parents. It was George, after the reigning monarch, and Orwell, after his favourite river in Suffolk. Having shown little previous interest in politics, at the end of 1936 he decided he wanted to ‘fight fascists’ in the Spanish Civil War. He travelled independently to Barcelona and served with POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification). His service on the front line ended when he was shot by a sniper. His Homage to Catalonia noted two years later that the real aim of the military mutiny, backed by the Church and landowners, was not to impose Fascism but to restore feudalism.

In Spain he befriended members of the ILP (Independent Labour Party) and on his return to England he joined the ILP because, Orwell said, they were the only party ‘which aims at anything I should regard as Socialism’. A little later he wrote that he hoped to see ‘something that has never existed before, a specifically English socialist movement’ (Orwell’s emphasis; The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941). His conception of socialism was mainly state interventionist: nationalisation, income limitation and reform of education. On this last reform, Orwell had wanted his son to go to Eton, as he had, though eventually he put his name down for Westminster Public (that is, private) School.

Taylor claims that one consequence of his experience fighting in Spain was a newfound pacifism; Orwell wrote about the looming Second World War ‘in which I do not intend to fight’. His wife Eileen commented on the psychological effect of his six months in Spain and that her husband had turned to ‘complete pacifism’. But Orwell was a committed patriot and as the Second World War was near he wrote in his diary that ‘I would give my life for England’. On the possibility of a Nazi invasion in 1940: ‘there is nothing for it but to die fighting, but one must above all die fighting and have the satisfaction of killing somebody else first’. The ILP were now deemed to be hopelessly pacifist: they ‘live almost entirely in a masturbation fantasy, conditioned by the fact that nothing they say or do will ever influence events’.

Orwell sometimes contributed articles to a small but influential quarterly magazine called Adelphi. Founded by John Middleton Murry in 1923, it was self-consciously ‘literary’ in tone. Taylor states that It had ‘unorthodox Marxism’. He doesn’t explain what that means but it’s probably their writers not being members or supporters of the Communist Party. Adelphi had an important influence on Orwell and the contacts it provided in the north of England enabled him to do the research which was published as The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937. In 1932 Murry had read the Socialist Party pamphlet Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse and wrote to us saying: ‘It seems to me I ought to join’. He didn’t pursue the matter and in any case we pointed out that we didn’t allow members of other political organisations to join us – he was a member of the ILP. Later in his life Murry became a Tory and an advocate of war against Russia.

During the Second World War, while serving in the Home Guard in London, a member of his platoon put a direct question to Orwell: ‘Are you a communist?’ To which Orwell replied: ‘It depends what you mean.’ It’s not known whether he elaborated, but Taylor is baffled by Orwell’s response and accuses him of being ‘enigmatic’ and speaking ‘delphically’. However, for many Socialists this exchange will be familiar; we sometimes get asked the same question and we usually give the same answer as Orwell as a start. Like Orwell, we have been bitterly opposed to the Communist Party and its regimes; but we accept a properly understood conception of communism — classless, moneyless, stateless. Orwell never identified as a communist but he obviously knew enough about communism to differentiate it from what he called ‘the smelly little orthodoxies’ of the Communist Party and similar organisations. His response suggests that he saw nothing objectionable in communism, even if he didn’t support it himself.

Orwell mentions the Socialist Party a few times in his work as a journalist. In his Observer article covering a few London constituencies in the 1945 general election he claims that the Tory candidate in Paddington North could win, and that if he does:

‘It will quite likely be because Mr C Groves, the Socialist Party of Great Britain candidate (this is the sole constituency the SPGB is contesting) has split the Labour vote’ (24.06.1945).

The Labour candidate, General Mason-Macfarlane, won comfortably. Orwell had made enquiries at the Socialist Party election office in Paddington North and it’s possible that he took this opportunity to buy Socialist Party literature. His collection of political pamphlets (tinyurl.com/297szbet) is held by the British Museum and it includes these by the Socialist Party:

• The Socialist Party – Its Principles and Policy (1934)
• War and the Working Class (1936)
• The Socialist Party Exposes Mr Chamberlain and His Labour Critics (1938)
• The Next Step for Trade Unionists (1939)
• Socialism (1941)
• Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis (1943)
• Should Socialists Support Federal Union? (Two editions: 1940 and 1943)

They can be downloaded from our website.

Orwell wrote six novels and he would probably have been considered a minor novelist of the twentieth century were it not for the last two: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), which made him world famous. Taylor argues that all his novels feature a rebellion that fails; there could be an interesting link between this and Orwell’s political outlook but he doesn’t pursue it. The last books gave many the impression of being anti-Russian or ‘anti-Soviet’, but Orwell regarded himself as anti-totalitarian; in a letter to a friend he wrote:

‘I don’t think I could fairly be described as Russophobic. I am against all dictatorships and I think the Russian myth has done frightful harm to the leftwing movement in Britain and elsewhere, and that it is above all necessary to make people see the Russian regime as it is.’

Orwell died from tuberculosis in 1950. The title of this book may suggest his reincarnation, but it’s merely a new edition of his life story first published in 2003. Taylor doesn’t mention the Socialist Party.

Lew Higgins