[Marxism] Scott Lucas on George Orwell

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.newstatesman.com/200005290038
The Back Half - The socialist fallacy
Scott Lucas
Monday 29th May 2000

Reputations - Scott Lucas argues that Orwell's status as the secular saint
of socialism is built on a myth

On 2 May 1949, George Orwell, battling against tuberculosis in a sanatorium
in Essex, wrote a very special letter to Celia Kirwan, the sister-in-law of
Arthur Koestler and a former editorial assistant for the journal Polemic.
Three years earlier, Orwell had proposed marriage to Kirwan; now he offered
something even more important: a list of 35 names, taken from the author's
notebook of 130 "crypto-communists, fellow-travellers, or inclined that
way". Kirwan had more than a literary interest. She worked for the
Information Research Department, a secret agency that the government had
created in the previous year for anti-communist propaganda at home and abroad.

Last November, in a lengthy comment on life and politics in post-communist
eastern Europe, the historian Perry Anderson stated in passing that Orwell
had supplied "officialdom with a secret list of suspect acquaintances".
Christopher Hitchens, Washington's favourite British scribe, and scourge of
Bill Clinton and Mother Teresa, came to Orwell's rescue. He reassured
worried readers that the incident "was actually more of a party game"
between Orwell and his friend Richard Rees. Anyway, "informing, and
heresy-hunting, and applause for judicial murder, were political
obligations for a large number of the people who feature on Orwell's list".

The list that was passed to Kirwan is still classified by Her Majesty's
Government. Orwell's 130 threats to the state (36 names are still withheld
from public view) included not only Labour MPs, but also the future Poet
Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, the New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin, the
author J B Priestley, the actor Michael Redgrave, the singer/actor Paul
Robeson, the actor Orson Welles, the historians Isaac Deutscher and A J P
Taylor and the political theorist G D H Cole. One member of the list, the
poet Stephen Spender, would later become an editor of the CIA-subsidised
journal Encounter.

George Orwell was not a socialist.

Let's reiterate that for those advocates who hail Orwell as a good
socialist but, in Orwellian doublethink, do so without examination of any
of the political or economic tenets of socialism. Take, for example, the
pre-eminent biographer Bernard Crick. He reassures us that Orwell is in the
lineage of "English" socialists simply because of the belief that "only in
a more egalitarian and fraternal society can liberties flourish and abound
for the common people". Nasty old Marxism is marginal to this philosophy:
no need for messy concepts such as redistribution of income or common
ownership of property. Or how about the chronicler Michael Shelden who, in
almost 500 pages, deals with the issue with the passing comments that
Orwell was an "individualistic" socialist and "every movement needs its
divisionists"? Or Peter Davison, the editor of the 20-volume set of
Orwell's writings, who reduces his subject's "passion for what he saw as
social justice" to the epitaph: "He was human (his most endearing
characteristic)"?

Let's reassert it to turn back the dilution of socialism to Orwell's
"decency" or "the indivisibility of citizenship and culture". For there is
nothing peculiarly socialist about being decent. Those with no interest in
politics - and even readers of the Spectator - can be kind to children and
small animals. What "decency" does, as in John Atkins's statement that "the
special connotation of this English word is a complex of English living and
English attitudes", is draw a pernicious line between the "English" Orwell
and those unfeeling, "intellectual" European socialists who are too
concerned with scientific concepts such as surplus value and economic
imperialism to be decent.

There was a brief time when Orwell was vehement in his left-wing views. He
returned from service in the Spanish civil war in June 1937 proclaiming: "I
have seen wonderful things and at last believe in socialism, which I never
did before." The problem was that Orwell had already sabotaged his
socialist revolution. The Road to Wigan Pier famously established Orwell's
disdain, long expressed in reviews, essays and novels, for left-wing
"intellectuals" with their theories, speech-making and posturing. The book
also vividly demonstrated, for all his two months of life with the working
classes, Orwell's unwillingness or inability to fill the vacuum with his
own political and economic programme. Instead, he offered two facts: "One,
that the interests of all exploited people are the same; the other, that
socialism is compatible with common decency." Heaven help any socialists
who went further, however, for this might provoke conflict; let's "go easy
and not frighten more people than can be helped".

There was always the hope that the "common people" would rise on their own
accord to fight for decency, but Orwell had little faith in that
possibility. The working man, "the slave of mysterious authority", had
little time and less confidence. On the off chance that a proletarian rose
up from the mass, the very act of rising would take him away from his
working-class roots; "By fighting against the bourgeoisie, he becomes
bourgeois." Thus, "people of the higher class [would] always tend to come
to the front in times of stress, though not really more gifted than the
others".

So Orwell's common people of Wigan Pier, not just the valiant miners, but
the chronically lazy, "astonishingly dirty" and "desperate, hopeless"
specimens (and Yorkshiremen coming to London "in the spirit of a barbarian
looking for loot"), were trapped. They could only wait for liberation with
middle-class direction, but middle-class socialists were bound up in a
Marxist doctrine that inevitably brought repression. The possible
leadership of the revolution had been reduced to one: Orwell himself.

On the surface, Orwell's socialist manifesto was The Lion and the Unicorn,
published in 1941. For the first and only time, Orwell puts forth a
programme. At home, there would be nationalisation of land, mines,
railways, banks and major industries; limitation of incomes to a 10:1 ratio
from the highest-paid to the lowest-paid; and educational reform. Abroad,
there would be dominion status for India and a General Council to discuss
the future of the British empire. But Orwell's real revolution, as the
title suggests, would be for Englishness, an insular Englishness because
"few Europeans can endure living in England, and even Americans often feel
more at home in Europe", an Englishness (don't even bother asking if the
Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish get a look-in) that reads like a British
Council pamphlet of the 1930s. The English may not be gifted artistically,
or "intellectual", but they have "a certain power of acting without taking
thought". They have the liberty to enjoy a home and their "addiction to
hobbies and spare-time occupations", including their love of flowers. The
English "common people", who are not puritanical and are without definite
religious belief, are never "caught up with power politics". Thus, "the
gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked
characteristic" with its "hatred of war and militarism".

Much of Orwell's wartime writing was a variation on the theme. "Notes on
Nationalism" was penned to distinguish his "patriotism" from the
"nationalism" of all his opponents: political Catholics, communists,
"Celtic" nationalists, "neo-Tories" and the left-wing British
intelligentsia. A critique of Kipling softened criticism of English
imperialism while attacking the "middle-class left": "The 19th-century
Anglo-Indians . . . were, at any rate, people who did things. It may be
that all that they did was evil, but they changed the face of the Earth (it
is instructive to look at a map of Asia and compare the railway system of
India with that of the surrounding countries), whereas they could have
achieved nothing, could not have maintained themselves in power for a
single week, if the normal Anglo-Indian outlook had been that of, say, E M
Forster." And when Orwell looked at Charles Dickens, he found himself - a
writer with the "almost exclusively moral" outlook that, "if men would
behave decently, the world would be decent".

Little wonder, then, that Malcolm Muggeridge, who saw Orwell frequently
during the war, called him "deeply conservative", or that George Woodcock,
another friend, later wrote of his simultaneously radical and conservative
Englishness. Little wonder also that, when the common man and his Home
Guard did not shoulder arms for the New Society during the war, Orwell was
stranded, his programme of "socialist" war aims in ruins: "The forces of
reaction have won hands down . . . as to the real moral of the last three
years - that the right has more guts and ability than the left - no one
will face up to it."

George Orwell was not a socialist.

Let's hold this up to the spirit of Orwell, whose socialism consisted
primarily of bashing other socialists; Orwell, who gave his admirers their
lead when he wrote: "The direct conscious attack on intellectual decency
comes from the intellectuals themselves"; Orwell, who even as he penned the
nightmare of a state brooking no dissent, provided a list of the
politically suspect to the British secret services.

Orwell had personal cause for animosity towards the British left. While
serving with the Republican side in the Spanish civil war, he had been
caught up in the acrimonious split between the communists and erstwhile
allies such as the anarchists and the United Marxist Workers' Party (POUM);
he and his wife narrowly escaped arrest by the Spanish authorities when
they fled to France in June 1937. Homage to Catalonia is a vivid account of
Orwell's time in Spain, but it is also a damning indictment of the press's
prejudice against POUM and its whitewashing of communist actions.

However justified the anger, it sharply distorted Orwell's views. Even if
communist manipulation, rather than political miscalculation or naivety,
defined the left in 1938, Britain after Spain and after the Second World
War was a far different country. Orwell never took the time to examine the
changes. Instead, he used the same logic as experts such as the FBI
director J Edgar Hoover, writing: "The actual number of communists and
'fellow travellers' is still only a few score thousands, and has no doubt
dwindled over the past year. But while they have somewhat lost ground with
the general public, they have now succeeded in capturing the leadership of
several important unions, and in addition there is the group of
'underground' communist MPs - those MPs elected as Labour men, but secretly
members of the CP or reliably sympathetic to it." The reds (and parlour
pinks) were not only under the bed, but in parliament, the editorial
office, the classroom, the labour union and most certainly among the
literary elite; and when someone such as the left-wing MP Konni Zilliacus
denied that he was a "crypto-communist", Orwell had the unanswerable
rebuttal: "What else could he say?"

Orwell banged away in a negative key, his positive melody reduced to
vestiges of Englishness - the perfect cup of tea, the consummate pub, the
common toads - and the mantra of "freedom". An essay comparing crime
fiction in Britain and the US, "Raffles and Miss Blandish", digressed to
explain: "The countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin
are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler."
In a critique of Jonathan Swift, he asserted that the author's "greatest
contribution to political thought . . . is his attack . . . on what would
now be called totalitarianism". Orwell's essays on politics and literature
not only shot arrows at Soviet communism, but targeted non-communist
writers on the left, such as his long-time nemesis Harold Laski, as "unfree".

Orwell did battle scourges such as laissez-faire capitalism in the initial
chapters of Animal Farm, and the machine society of 1984. Moreover, there
are passing references in Orwell's columns and essays to his distrust of
the American cultural and political monolith (even if Orwell has a strange
reverence for the 19th-century United States as a liberal's paradise) and
the possibility of a United States of Europe to counter both Washington and
Moscow.

All this was overshadowed, however, as Orwell's obsession with the
"vegetarians and communists whom one cannot answer" fostered gleeful
readings of his work as not only anti-communist, but also anti-socialist.
It wasn't just the newspaper vendor who excitedly told the historian Isaac
Deutscher: "You must read [1984], sir. Then you will know why we must drop
the atomic bomb on the Bolshies." Even 1984's publisher, Fredric Warburg,
thought it "a deliberate and sadistic attack on socialism and socialist
parties generally", which would be "worth a cool million votes to the
Conservative Party". Orwell could only splutter that the Ingsoc of 1984
might stand for English socialism, but it didn't really stand for English
socialism.

The grim reality was that Orwell had nothing left to offer, even as he
issued a call "to make democratic socialism work". Instead, he would either
jump or be pulled into an orchestrated campaign to discredit the left. He
may have written in 1946, "The less spy-hunting that is indulged in, the
better", but soon he would be influenced by allies of his crusade against
communism. Crick, in a desperate defence of his subject, complained about
Orwell being "claimed for the camp of the cold war, Encounter magazine and
the CIA". Unfortunately, Orwell happily became one of the campers.

In the United States, "experts" such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr were helping
foster McCarthyism long before Joseph McCarthy, writing in Life magazine:
"With history breathing down their necks, communists are working overtime
to expand party influence, open and covert, in the labour movement, among
Negroes, among veterans, among unorganised liberals." Orwell echoed: "If
[the communists] could get inside the Labour Party as an organised body,
they might be able to do enormous mischief . . . The important thing to do
with these people . . . is to sort them and to determine which one of them
is honest and which is not." After no doubt carefully sorting "them", he
happily joined Schlesinger and contacts such as Dwight Macdonald in the
concerted attack on Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party's candidate in the
1948 US presidential campaign, as a fellow-traveller: "I am afraid W may
well cause 'our' man [President Truman] to lose the election."

Schlesinger and Orwell would try to distinguish themselves from later
red-hunters by claiming that the threat from communists and
fellow-travellers was not a takeover of power, but a siphoning of support
from the Democratic and Labour parties, allowing the right to take power in
the US and Britain. By 1949, however, Orwell was in the company of more
ardent cold-warriors. Arthur Koestler, with whom Orwell had spent the
Christmas holidays in 1945 and developed a scheme for the "League for the
Dignity of the Rights of Man", had become more strident in his
anti-communism after a tour of the US in 1948; eventually, he would become
one of the founding members of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural
Freedom. Celia Kirwan, Koestler's sister-in-law and the target of Orwell's
affection in 1946, had moved from the London literary world to the shadows
of the Information Research Department.

So, Orwell found his true calling as an anti-communist liberal, telling
Kirwan that "he was delighted to learn of [the IRD's work] and expressed
his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims". So he not only
gave her his list, apparently annotated by Koestler, and laid out for her a
network of anti-communist writers including "hordes of Ameri-cans" through
journals such as Commentary, New Leader and Partisan Review; he also
approached the Voice of America and the US Army in Germany to ask them to
finance the dissemination of his work.

And so he had posthumous success. His new friends in the IRD turned Animal
Farm into a comic strip for the "deve-loping" world of Asia and Latin
America. By April 1951, Animal Farm and 1984 were the leading books in the
State Department's psychological offensive, translated and published both
overtly and covertly by American agencies. A year later, the US
intelligence services obtained the rights to turn Animal Farm into a film.
The price? Arranging for Orwell's widow, Sonia, to meet Clark Gable.

George Orwell was not a socialist.

Let's state this not as an intellectual exercise in "J'accuse" or as the
ritual toppling of an icon. These are, as Christopher Hitchens might put
it, "a party game" compared to the struggle for Orwell's reputation. When
Orwell wrote of the image of Dickens in 1940, he idealised himself: "[This]
is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who
fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is
generously angry in other words, of a 19th-century liberal, a free
intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little
orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls."

Praise, if you will, Orwell's fighting spirit, praise his generous anger,
praise his free intelligence. Just remember that, no matter how smelly the
orthodoxies, 19th-century liberalism and 20th-century anti-communism did
not, and still do not, constitute socialism.

Scott Lucas is a specialist in culture and foreign policy at the University
of Birmingham. He is currently working on a book about the life and
writings of George Orwell

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