Orwell's Ghosts by Laura Beers

Author:Laura Beers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

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BLUEPRINT FOR REVOLUTION

Making the Case for Democratic Socialism

George Orwell was, first and foremost, a social critic. He was much better at identifying the problems with capitalism, imperialism, communism, and fascism than he was at generating concrete proposals for how to create a more just and equal society. He would not have made a great civil servant, nor fellow at a policy think tank. In his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” he contended, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.” The first half of his assertion is demonstrably true. The second half is more debatable.

While Orwell rarely offered constructive solutions, neither did he stand silently by. Rather, he took a frequently controversial and unpopular stand against injustice. He succumbed neither to the cynicism that prevents Benjamin the donkey in Animal Farm from speaking out against the revolution until it is too late, nor the political quietism that he tendentiously claimed to admire in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale.” Yet, the criticism that Victor Gollancz levied against him in a preface to The Road to Wigan Pier stands: “Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism; nor does he explain how the oppressors oppress, nor even what he understands by the words ‘liberty’ and ‘justice.’ ” Gollancz viewed Part II of the book, in which Orwell outlines what he perceived to be the failures of the British socialist movement, as a damp squib, in that it didn’t address the “great deal of hard work and hard thinking to be done—less noble and more humdrum than the appeal to generosities, but no less important if a real victory is to be won” in the war against inequality.

The one place where Orwell did clearly articulate the case for democratic socialism was in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, the brief book that he wrote during the Blitz of 1940–41. Along with a few other World War II essays, we’ll see that it represents Orwell’s most concrete attempt to draft a blueprint for a truly English revolution—how the country he loved could throw off the capitalist-imperialist yoke that he hated and build a social democratic future. Orwell saw the war as a moment that had “turned Socialism from a text-book word into a realizable policy.” “The inefficiency of private capitalism has been proved all over Europe. Its injustice has been proved in the East End of London,” he wrote. By exposing the bankruptcy of capitalism, the war had for the first time made socialism “both revolutionary and realistic.”

In fact, Orwell argued that the circumstances of the war had made a socialist revolution not only possible, but necessary. The total mobilization of society that the war demanded could not be achieved without revolutionizing the command and control of the economy, and the shared sacrifice that the war effort required could not be sustained unless equality of sacrifice were

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