06.01.2011

Paradox of an anti-Stalinist

Gareth Evans reviews Philip Bounds's 'Orwell and Marxism: the political and cultural thinking of George Orwell' IB Tauris Publications, 2009, pp253, £46

Think of George Orwell and most of us are immediately drawn to classic popular literary works, such as The road to Wigan Pier, Animal Farm, and 1984. These works have stimulated debate throughout British (and world) literary and political circles, with Philip Bounds’ Orwell and Marxism a further welcome contribution.

Broadly speaking, Orwell’s politics are commonly identified as having two particular traits. Firstly, there was his hatred of capitalism. Influenced by his research into the effects of Britain’s economic slump on working class communities in Leeds, Sheffield and Wigan during the 1930s, Orwell became convinced that capitalism had “run its course”, as Bounds puts it, and that “the industrial derelicts, the misery of the unemployed, the ghastly housing conditions and the pervasive atmosphere of quiet despair” that it produced needed to be ended (p20). Then there was Orwell’s perspective on the system that he believed was necessary to replace capitalism. Defining his socialism as one that emphasised a full and decentralised democracy in order to ensure that “ordinary people’s innate creativity and decency can come into force”, Orwell’s experiences in the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification) during the Spanish civil war meant that his socialism was also based upon a hatred of ‘official communism’. Indeed, much of the last years of Orwell’s life was taken up with denouncing Stalinism and totalitarianism - to the point that the period when Animal Farm and 1984 were published (1945 and 1949 respectively), his “loathing” (p27) for the USSR saw him take up a position in the Labour government’s Information Research Department - an organisation dedicated to churning out anti-communist propaganda during the cold war.

One of the main attractions about Bounds’ work, though, is that it comprehensively captures not only Orwell’s perspective of capitalism during the period throughout which he was one of Britain’s most prolific and respected literary commentators, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the central paradox that lay within his theoretical, political and cultural proclamations on his socialism during this time. From the mid-1930s until his death in 1950, as an arch-critic of Stalinism, Orwell was more than aware of the impact Soviet ‘communism’ was having on the theory and practice of the world communist movement, including in Britain. Indeed, as Bounds writes, although there was “no truth” in the claim that communists operating within or around the ranks of the CPGB were merely “Moscow stooges”, many, if not all, of the party’s early political ‘lines’ were decided by Comintern and Stalin’s firm bureaucratic grip on it (p7). With this in mind, it was hardly surprising that Orwell’s anti-Stalinism manifested itself in attacks on those in and around the ranks of the CPGB.

However, the basis for such attacks often originated in and was shaped by an ideological engagement with them. Various individuals in the British communist movement may “have done more than anyone else to portray Orwell as a sort of Tory fifth-columnist in the camp of the working class” (p6), as a consequence of his attacks upon them (and on Soviet politics generally), but that did not prevent his work from containing “striking parallels” with “those of the young literary intellectuals who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1930s and 1940s”, the author argues. In fact, such individuals were among Orwell’s “biggest influences”, he asserts (p6).

Orwell and Marxism details why this was the case. Concentrating on his novels subsequent to Orwell’s socialist ‘conversion’ after the Spanish civil war, as well as probing his work as a broadcaster and producer at the BBC, Bounds examines his political writings prior to and during the time when he was literary editor for Tribune and dissects the many pamphlets the man wrote popularising literary forms. He highlights the complexities and contradictions within Orwell’s politics, reveals the influences and ideas that shaped those politics and highlights the efforts he undertook in order to counter Stalinist influence.

On one level, we are shown how Orwell’s interpretation of the role of popular culture, for example, epitomised in comics such as Gem and Magnet, whilst frequently differing from those of communist writers at the time, often mirrored them: Orwell’s writings may well have contained “very different conclusions” to writers from the CPGB about how the ruling class disseminates ideology, Bounds argues, but they also contained themes “already launched by those individuals” (p64). On another level, when responding to communist writers about their proclamations on British literary greats such as Dickens and Swift, Orwell may well have warned about the “dangers of excessive partisanship” (p86) by such writers and of an ideology that suggested the main criterion for judging a book was “whether or not it reflected the current line of the Communist Party” (p85). But he also used their ideas as a starting point with which to advance his own. Indeed, throughout Bounds’ book, the writings of Christopher Hill and Arthur L Morton, let alone the other 20 or so prominent communist literary critics Orwell refers to in his work, provide him with much more than simple ideological target practice.

Although not the main purpose of Bounds’ work, by default the book also outlines some of the more controversial politics the CPGB pursued subsequent to its formation in 1920. Perhaps because of his long and close relationship with the Communist Party of Britain, Bounds himself never explicitly proclaims his own thoughts on such politics, leaving readers to deduce that he is sympathetic to much of ‘official’ communism’s interpretation of the CPGB’s perspectives at the time. Thus, while outlining the influence Comintern had on the party and its united front approach during the 1920s, as well as on its Class against class perspective at the turn of that decade, Bounds, prompted by the writings and thoughts of Orwell, probes and places into sharp focus the various concepts about English radicalism, modernism, fascism and, of course, totalitarianism existing throughout the 1930s and 1940s. But any serious critique of popular frontism - the main perspective that drove the CPGB from 1935 is absent.

The consequences of this approach are twofold. On the one hand, when looking at the question of totalitarianism, for example, we are told (quite correctly) of the need not “simply to denounce” such a system but to seek to understand it (p137). The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of Stalin’s Russia, as well as Hitler’s Germany, are probed to this end. Indeed, practically all of Orwell’s ideas on the issue of totalitarianism - from his musings about its psychological basis and its interrelationship with those people “with dictatorial ambitions” (p140) to his belief that behaviour control and threats to the freedom of speech in Britain could be “ascribed to the excessive prestige of communism” - are examined, brought to the fore and thus developed, as they are compared to and contrasted with those of the CPGB.

Good. On the other hand, however, when looking at Orwell’s and the CPGB’s politics during the period throughout World War II, the reluctance to critique the pro-war effort both were engaged in (often for different political reasons), is problematic. By the latter part of the 1930s, the CPGB had fully subscribed to the policy Georgi Dimitrov insisted was the only way to defeat fascism - uniting all anti-fascists into nationally based popular fronts. Orwell had attacked this approach, even though he “profoundly misunderstood it” (p141). But Bounds is reluctant to critique the ideology outright himself - surely a profound mistake, given that Orwell’s alternative was hardly that ideologically distinct or superior. He relied on the radical history and traditions of the “English people”, believing that “leftwingers”, under the correct social circumstances, only had to take “patriotism to their hearts” for a capitalist government to be replaced by “an authentically socialist one” (p26).

Despite this, however, Orwell and Marxism is a comprehensively researched piece of work. As a result, it is a valuable asset for anyone wishing to get to grips with the politics of George Orwell and a useful tool for assessing those issues prominent within the communist movement throughout his most prolific and productive years.