Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot:
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
The comment by T. S. Eliot reminds me of one of Orwell's critiques of Charles Dickens. Namely, that whilst he is very insightful about the ills of society, he offers no better solution than to hope for "good rich men".
> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
I can't help but feel like Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
> If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
Which in turn reminds me of Federalist No. 51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. "
What's Orwell's own solution, though? The whole point of Animal Farm is that the existing order was overthrown, with the best of intentions, and some unscrupulous individuals, with support from naive idealists and selfish opportunists, turned the new order into something no better than before.
Sounds to me like an argument towards an argument exactly for focusing on "public-spirited pigs" and how to get them into power, rather than how to overthrow the existing order with something you don't know will work out or revert to something worse.
Thank you for digging up the quote and summarizing the sentiment. I've never been able to put my finger on this aspect of Dickens.
I personally share the same philosophy that morality swings above its weight in the grand scheme of society. It's fully within our control as individuals and therefore a worthy target for literary influence.
Good points. The New Yorker made somewhat the same points on Alger Horatio say in context of ragged dick. Horatio never dealt with racism or class hierarchies. And his villans are simplistic. There was no murder or rape. And it was implied that fraudsters (as one example) knew they were doing wrong almost as if they had internalized morals but ultimately never followed them. So again no serious engagement of human nature. Moreover dick was helped by a Christian rich person --- to the good in intent and result--- but it leaves a lot left unexplored too.
In this way lord of the flies is another take worth reading
Somewhat related, Churchill was very fond of pigs. He famously said (some variant of) "I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
I feel the someone might argue suggests that's not T.E. Eliot... but...
At the time there was a sizable movement not on political lines but one of emergent sociology that people could be conditioned en masses by (it seemed largely assumed) by conditioning. Take the book Walden Two written by B.F. Skinner during WWII years, (or Living Walden Two documenting places where it was tried and failed) of conditioning altruistic and intelligent societies, the not working out due to the positivist view of social truth, rather than social 'truth' being a much more dynamic, and endogenously generated, concept, perhaps, is it really ontologically 'is'. And to circle back on learning/reflection in technology, much effort being applied in AI to assist in grasping such 'truths' as repeating mistakes of the past (especially LLMs missing verticals of specialist knowledge), however I diverge.
>Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right.
It's more specific than that. Eliot has in mind the exile of Snowball (obviously Trotsky), and the betrayal of his ideals by Napoleon. One might, or might not, expect a Snowball-led farm to ultimately disintegrate into the same totalitarianism that Napoleon's farm (and all Communist societies in history), but we don't get to see that outcome, so Snowball remains the pure, unimpugned ideal. Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!)), or sarcastically as is more often done nowadays, is up to the speaker.
> Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!))
We’ve seen capitalism done better and worse in various countries, many times dissolving into dictatorship or fascism, and usually built on the backs of a downtrodden group (a racial minority, a migrant population, outsourced indentured labour, etc.). The idea the handful of attempts at communism (all while being besieged by the capitalist nations around them) shows that communism is a bad idea, is just as laughable as the idea that capitalism always succeeds.
So, not sure that’s exactly what you’re (!)-ing about here, but the truly intellectually curious position is not to oppose communism, but to wonder if there is a way to achieve its noble goals while avoiding the pitfalls that that the ussr fell into.
But Snowball the pig, who is presented much more positively, was clearly based on Trotsky so Eliot had a good argument that it was a Trotskyite book. It certainly wasn't a pro-capitalist book. The end was that the pigs could not be distinguished from the (capitalist) human farmers.
The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs.
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.
We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch.
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.
No one spots the 'elephant in the room' in Animal Farm.
The novel is a thinly disguised morality play about aristocracy -- "humans" who own and govern 'their farms' ! -- with various types of humanity depicted as "animals".
The moral of the story is that regardless of the intelligence and abilities of the common man ("pigs"), the natural order of things is for 'Farmers' to own and run the 'Farm' and its 'Animals'.
Pigs joining Farmers actually occurred a couple of centuries earlier in England. It was called a "Corporation".
That's a possible interpretation but a more common understanding is that it's an allegory of recent (at the time) Russian history where the old aristocrats were overthrown to be replaced by communists with lofty ideals, however those ideals quickly fell away and the society went back to something similar to what came before, just with a different set of assholes in charge.
I think if you read more of Orwell's writing besides just Animal Farm, you'd see that he didn't think this was the only possibility. He was a democratic socialist and humanist.
If he was saying it's the natural order of things under monarchy and under communism, that doesn't mean he was claiming it to be the natural order of things under all possible political systems. His political views had a wider scope than just this one short story.
This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history.
Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
>Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin
The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
UPD. From Wikipedia:
>Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to criticize their own government much more harshly than they'd criticize the USSR, and their love for the Soviets predated WW2 anyway.
A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did.
This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them:
This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
> The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism',"
Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2. So the answer to your question is in the social milieu of the 1920s-30s. Someone else will have to try a detailed explanation.
> Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2.
While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing:
> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
It's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
There had been by that point a long-standing admiration among the British (and American) intelligentsia for Stalin, the USSR, and in general Soviet Communism; this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country and the aforementioned unprintability of any real criticism of it.
The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth.
> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
Lots of them were admirers of USSR and Stalin himself. Sartre, one of the most admired intellectuals of the time, was openly a fan until the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Lots of people, and lots of intelectuals, firmly believed that the USSR was building an utopia.
The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
> Sartre, one of the most admired intellectuals of the time
Still pretty popular in philosophy classes when I was in college (class of 2009). Big fan of Castro too, our coursework included at least one picture of him checking out a Cuban collective farm.
Orwell wasn't a trotskyist, but democratic socialist. He probably leaned libertarian in his socialism, cause he admitted that he should join anarchist side and not POUM, which was some coalition of trotskyist and libertarian Marxists.
In the 1930s you had the Soviets perpetrating genocide in Ukraine and people like Walter Duranty knew this and deliberately, consciously, spun lies to cover it up. These 'fellow travelers' weren't naive; they thought that mass murder was justifiable when ostensibly working towards their goals.
The affection precedes the Second World War. Victor Gollancz, a notable left-wing publisher at the time, wrote this mea culpae in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to his disillusionment with the Soviet cause.
>Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere.
>I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone.
>I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
Orwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.
Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
There is nothing subtle about Animal Farm's critique of Soviet Communism. From Wikipedia:
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
Honestly, English intellectuals are a good yardstick for how history will remember people and events. If the English intellectuals esteem someone or some event, then generally those people and events are widely considered disparaged two generations down.
Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.
And Nazis allies against the West. Essentially a 3rd power that tried to win against both. And looking at how they helped Nazis/Germany before the war, they were one of the main actors to kickstart the war.
I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm.
Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
Survivorship bias people in their 30s be like "My money stacks have bullet holes, better buy some armor for my money stacks" ignoring the corpses and poverty of their less fortunate peers.
> (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time)
Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
I don't think he's giving a blanket free pass on censorship during war time, but rather is acknowledging that there are necessarily censored fields of information during war that would otherwise be used to the enemy's strategic advantage. Anti-war protests should not be censored, but a news story specifying the production capacity of one's navy may very well be.
Anyone who takes such an extreme position during a war would be most likely conquered by the enemy. Ideally there should be no wars, but if there are, some compromises are necessary to win them. Besides, in a brutal war like the World Wars censorship is the least of anyone's worries. If your city is being bombed or you are fighting at a trench, controlling sensitive information is far more important.
"But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
I’m finding this surreal: hackernews standing up against censorship? But maybe it’s just the wording, or because it’s Orwell, since “free speech” became a dirty phrase around here a few years ago. As if people forgot that we have the nice things we have today because of all the forbidden things those before us were able to say, as if we can just stop with that rule since the left is the one in charge of public opinion now, as if free speech only applies to us and things we like
HN isn't pro censorship. HN is very much against government censorship.
It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue.
But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
Readit News
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george...
Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
I can't help but feel like Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
https://www.orwell.ru/library/reviews/dickens/english/e_chd
Which in turn reminds me of Federalist No. 51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. "
Sounds to me like an argument towards an argument exactly for focusing on "public-spirited pigs" and how to get them into power, rather than how to overthrow the existing order with something you don't know will work out or revert to something worse.
I personally share the same philosophy that morality swings above its weight in the grand scheme of society. It's fully within our control as individuals and therefore a worthy target for literary influence.
In this way lord of the flies is another take worth reading
https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest...
In the context of things like
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/winston-churchill/11370727/...
it seems like he was more of an all-round animal lover who once delivered an amusing pig quip.
At the time there was a sizable movement not on political lines but one of emergent sociology that people could be conditioned en masses by (it seemed largely assumed) by conditioning. Take the book Walden Two written by B.F. Skinner during WWII years, (or Living Walden Two documenting places where it was tried and failed) of conditioning altruistic and intelligent societies, the not working out due to the positivist view of social truth, rather than social 'truth' being a much more dynamic, and endogenously generated, concept, perhaps, is it really ontologically 'is'. And to circle back on learning/reflection in technology, much effort being applied in AI to assist in grasping such 'truths' as repeating mistakes of the past (especially LLMs missing verticals of specialist knowledge), however I diverge.
Book recommendation:
Walden Two, B.F.Skinner
Living Walden Two, Hilke Khulman
It's more specific than that. Eliot has in mind the exile of Snowball (obviously Trotsky), and the betrayal of his ideals by Napoleon. One might, or might not, expect a Snowball-led farm to ultimately disintegrate into the same totalitarianism that Napoleon's farm (and all Communist societies in history), but we don't get to see that outcome, so Snowball remains the pure, unimpugned ideal. Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!)), or sarcastically as is more often done nowadays, is up to the speaker.
We’ve seen capitalism done better and worse in various countries, many times dissolving into dictatorship or fascism, and usually built on the backs of a downtrodden group (a racial minority, a migrant population, outsourced indentured labour, etc.). The idea the handful of attempts at communism (all while being besieged by the capitalist nations around them) shows that communism is a bad idea, is just as laughable as the idea that capitalism always succeeds.
So, not sure that’s exactly what you’re (!)-ing about here, but the truly intellectually curious position is not to oppose communism, but to wonder if there is a way to achieve its noble goals while avoiding the pitfalls that that the ussr fell into.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/noam-chomsky-90th-...
(Search the text of the article for the word preface to directly find the reference).
That's no reason not to print it, of course.
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
Dead Comment
The novel is a thinly disguised morality play about aristocracy -- "humans" who own and govern 'their farms' ! -- with various types of humanity depicted as "animals".
The moral of the story is that regardless of the intelligence and abilities of the common man ("pigs"), the natural order of things is for 'Farmers' to own and run the 'Farm' and its 'Animals'.
Pigs joining Farmers actually occurred a couple of centuries earlier in England. It was called a "Corporation".
I think if you read more of Orwell's writing besides just Animal Farm, you'd see that he didn't think this was the only possibility. He was a democratic socialist and humanist.
If he was saying it's the natural order of things under monarchy and under communism, that doesn't mean he was claiming it to be the natural order of things under all possible political systems. His political views had a wider scope than just this one short story.
Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
UPD. From Wikipedia:
>Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did.
This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them:
https://journals.sagepub.com/action/doSearch?AllField=marx&S...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00380385211037...
This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism',"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homage_to_Catalonia
While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing:
> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth.
You can also get the key points from Scott Alexander's review of it. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles...
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
Still pretty popular in philosophy classes when I was in college (class of 2009). Big fan of Castro too, our coursework included at least one picture of him checking out a Cuban collective farm.
>Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere.
>I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone.
>I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
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Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/11/revealed-sovie...
Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.
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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07CQ9T198
I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm.
Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
I think adult 'socialists' ( as opposed to capitalists ) are in that league.
A quote come to mind: “If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.”
Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
Sounds eerily appropriate for most issues today
It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue.
But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
Asimov's critiques of his work, for example.