From a paper delivered by Ian Williams at a recent conference on Orwell at Wellesley, <URL: http://www.orwell2003.com/pages/722302/index.htm > (BTW, Ian kibbitzed w/The Hitch, who was a paper presenter and/or discussant. Hitch owns up to being a Neo-Con now AND still feels he is a Trot. Go figure.
In Defense of Comrade Smith: the Orwellian treatment of Orwell.
I first read 1984 when I was nine years old, in a battered Penguin edition, which I still have, given to me by an old man who was a founder member of the Independent Labour Party. In the following years, I joined the Labour Party Young Socialists, flirted with the Young Communist League, became a teenage Maoist, and went to China where I argued English Literature with Chiang Ching and had a drinking competition with Chou En Lai.
It may seem that the book missed its mark on this young comrade, but in fact, in an odd way, it hadn’t. I became a Maoist because of it. Some of you may remember the books by people like Felix Green and others who followed in Edgar Snow’s footsteps and cast the Chinese revolution as a sort of libertarian antithesis to the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union. The Cultural Revolution looked like a liberating experiment, in its own weird oriental way, and slogans such as “Bombard the Headquarters” and “It is right to rebel” had a certain refreshing appeal to them. However, unsurprisingly, I subsequently discovered that they were only kidding.
In the course of a New Year’s Eve drinking competition with Chou En Lai, I got into an argument with Mme Mao, Chiang Ching who asserted that there were only two great English proletarian novels, Jane Eyre and Hard Times. I knew enough of her life not to tread on the first – clearly a case of identification – but I had to point out that the hero of Hard Times was a strike breaker. The rest of the Gang of Four and their comrades looked distinctly worried. But I was not re-educated on the spot. She hissed, “You have long hair. You look like a girl!” In retrospect, it is pretty much the same critical method used by many who attack Orwell. When faced with the irrefutable, go for the ad-hominem and inconsequential details.
Certainly, the British “Marxist-Leninist” groupuscule that I was in was no more tolerant of dissent than the Chinese Communist Party. I watched people stand on their heads whenever there was an inner party coup in China. My favorite was the veteran Indian communist at meeting in London who was asked why the Chinese government was providing weapons to Sri Lanka to fight the Maoist guerrillas. Without pausing for breath, in a stunning example of both doublethink and duckspeak, she explained that the cunning revolutionary purpose of the Chinese comrades, was that the guerrillas would then steal the weapons from the government. I was expelled, and left, eventually to rejoin the Labour Party back in 1978, inoculated against the doctrine of democratic centralism, which from personal example and historical study was much stronger on the latter than the former.
In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Liverpool Labour Party was in the process of being infiltrated and taken over by a secret entrist organization, the Revolutionary Socialist League, which for those of who you are interested in the obscure taxonomy of the Trotskyist movement was part of the Pabloite Fourth International. It was to some extent competing with and filling the ecological niche formerly held by the now waning Communist Party fellow travelers, who had, for example managed to make Liverpool a twin city with the East German port of Rostock.
I take some modest pride in playing a part in defeating the attempts of the RSL, partly on ideological grounds, and partly by exposing some of its leading members for adding Al Capone to the canon of Leon Trotsky. The RSL had in fact tried to recruit me, and then later stood up at meetings and denounced me as both a liar and a redbaiter for mentioning their existence.
They never seemed to notice the contradiction. All through this period, I was profoundly grateful to Orwell, since 1984 and his essays provided me with the intellectual tools to understand what I was dealing with.
While they were not averse to offering physical violence what they were really adept at was pulling the inner strings of party loyalty and faith in their various left wing litmus tests which worked even with other Labour Party members. The Party was under siege, and anyone who broke ranks was, objectively, an ally of Margaret Thatcher. One of my more enduring memories of the power of thoughtcrime as a working concept was of Labour Party members, including members of parliament from Liverpool, who privately encouraged me and fed me information, while publicly distancing and even denouncing me. As George Orwell had in the more trying circumstances of Catalonia, I realized that democratic socialism was something which had to be vigorously defended against totalitarianism in whatever guise it came in. And what is more, that democratic socialism should actually be something of a tautology. If a society does not have political and civil rights then it cannot be truly socialist. Far from maintaining “unity of the left,” any socialist who made concessions to the totalitarianism of the various post-Leninist groups, parties or governments, was in fact in the language that they themselves were much more likely to use “betraying” socialism.
I should add that I I began over twenty years ago to contribute to Tribune, the weekly in which Orwell wrote many of his essays, and still do now, so I do feel a close affinity.
Having explained the background to my thoughts on Orwell, I want to begin by defining my premises. For the purposes of this essay, I will use Orwellian in a benign sense, which gives what I consider to be due credit to the author, rather than in its usual derivative sense, which somewhat unfairly attaches his name to the concepts that he was actually attacking.
The confusion is apparent in a recent Wall St Journal review by David Henderson of Robert Schiller’s book The New Financial Order, in which he described as “Orwellian” the statement that “We will want to arrest any possible tendency for the fruits of our economy to be distributed much more unequally between rich and poor in the future.” Henderson, ironically thought he was using the word in the sense that most of us use, the derivative malign one referring to the tyranny of 1984, but in fact he was, unwittingly, using it in a proper positive sense, since Orwell, despite his NeoCon admirers, remained a socialist to his death, and would indeed have wanted to arrest, and indeed to reverse any such tendency towards inequality. Later, more in accordance with current usage Henderson used the word again to describe the government’s collection of data on its citizens – which was indeed called Orwellian, in the 1984 sense.
The Journal notwithstanding, and although the Oxford English Dictionary gives both definitions of “Orwellian” (Bunch of square boxes, thanks to Microsoft Word glitch, M.P.)Orwell, its negative sense has clearly overtaken that, so I am aware that I am engaged in a Quixotic tourney on this issue. But it reinforces my point, that far from simply being an inventive fantasy and science fiction writer -
which is another aspect of Orwell’s work not usually considered, he has a distinctive way of looking at the world, an "Orwellian" analysis which merits the benign use of the adjective.
As I re-read Orwell’s essays in preparation, the Iraq War was raging in the background and I saw both sides of the political spectrum adroitly practice doublespeak and thoughtcrime. We saw attempts to turn actors and artists into non-persons for disagreeing with Little Brother Bush, we saw weeks of unreasoning vituperation against France. By the way, I’m all in favour of occasional vituperation, and there often are lots of reasons to direct it against France. But that it was so unreasoning was indeed disturbing.
At the same time, there were attempts by some wings of the anti-war movement to silence critics of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist tyranny on the specious grounds of movement “unity” that Orwell would have recognized. It was fine for Leninist sects to insist that no one in the anti-war movement should make critical comments about a regime that had so egregiously savaged human rights, but it was disruptive for anyone to make the universal application of human rights a bedrock principle of the movement. As Kurt Vonnegut says about the consistency of human barbarity, “So it goes.”
In April, I was one of the drafters of a letter signed by a group of Democratic Socialists in the US and elsewhere, who castigated Cuba for the savage sentences meted out against dissidents under cover of the US war in Iraq. Needless to say we were savaged by the usual suspects who accused us of providing political cover for a US attack on Cuba, even though one of the main points in our statement was that we opposed the US embargo on Cuba and that Castro’s behavior provided aid and comfort to his enemies in the US who wanted to maintain it.. <SNIP> Can send offlist the full text in Micro$loth Word to any who wish.
-- Michael Pugliese