Orwell and socialism

June 7, 2009 at 9:01 pm (history, Jim D, left, literature, socialism, stalinism, truth)

On the 60th anniversary of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, I’m raising a glass of single malt (Jura of course) and toasting George Orwell, the most honest writer of the last century.

Completing Nineteen Eighty-Four on the cold, damp and remote Scottish island of Jura and then having to type it up himself because his handwriting was virtually illegible, prevented Orwell from getting his tuberculosis treated and led directly to his death. Questions have been asked ever since about how his politics would have evolved had he lived. It’s been suggested that his outspoken anti Stalinism would have led him into the camp of the cold warriors (as it did his friend Arther Koestler), but most of the people who argue that are the kind of people who hated Orwell and lied about him when he was  alive.

Orwell bent over backwards to make it clear where he stood. In his last public statement he told an American trade union: “My novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the British Labour Party…I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw those ideas out to their logical consequences.”

Elsewhere he stated (in 1946): “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.”

Certainly, the now infamous “list” of real and imagined communist (ie Stalinist) sympathisers he drew up for his friend Celia Kirwan who worked for the Foreign Office, is difficult to defend and leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. But it should be kept in proportion: it was not a list of people to be blacklisted or suppressed, but a list of people Orwell thought unsuitable to work for the Information Research Department that had just been set up by the new Labour government.

Orwell, like many leftists of his day had some pretty backward views on women and gays and said some dodgy things about Jews. He also opposed the creation of Israel. But for all his faults, he remained a man of the left to the end, and the sheer honesty and decency still marks out his writing (the essays and journalism perhaps even more than the novels) as something quite exceptional that every socialist should read and re-read again and again for intellectual hygiene and for the sheer pleasure of of his simple, powerful prose.

Sean Matgamna wrote about “the man who told the left unpalatable truths” on the centenary of Orwell’s birth.

In 1969 the late Peter Sedgwick wrote “George Orwell: International Socialist?” in International Socialism. Like Matgamna, Sedgwick was in no doubt that Orwell was on our side.