WeeklyWorker

25.09.2025
George Orwell (the tall one) and Eileen O’Shaughnessy (kneeling) with members of the ILP unit on the Aragon front, March 13 1937

The road from Eton College

Seventy-five years after George Orwell’s death Paul Flewers examines how 1984 caused deep unease on the left and how it was seized by the right as a means of fighting the cold war. This is the fifth in a series of seven articles

By the closing stages of World War II, George Orwell had a fairly comprehensive notion that the world was facing a collectivist, étatised future, which would be ruled in a totalitarian manner, if some form of libertarian, socialist society were not established. One major influence upon him was James Burnham, who, in two books, The managerial revolution and The Machiavellians, published in 1942 and 1943, articulated and expanded upon many of the ideas about collectivism, totalitarianism and the intelligentsia’s quest for power that Orwell had been developing over the previous few years.1

Burnham had broken from the Trotskyist movement in the USA after he had concluded that the Soviet Union represented a new form of society, which was neither capitalist nor socialist, and which, moreover, was the precursor of similar societies across the world, with Nazi Germany and the ‘New Deal’ USA being developing examples. Promoting this gloomy prognosis in The managerial revolution, Burnham gave up on any idea of socialism. The basis of his theory was that the capitalist classes were being challenged by managerial and technical strata, who would increase their control over society and eventually seize power. Managerial societies were almost by definition totalitarian, and they would coalesce around three rival super-states.2

In the subsequent work, Burnham claimed that the guiding principles of political struggles were Machiavellian: in other words, that the main object was to obtain and then to maintain power, and that one must interpret political programmes and declarations in that light. In the age of the struggle between the dying capitalist class and the new, aspiring managerial elite, a real democracy was unattainable, and the rising managerial class would appeal to the masses under fraudulent democratic slogans, mobilising them as its strike force against the existing capitalist rulers.3

As the war turned to peace, Orwell asserted that humanity was facing “the prospect of two or three monstrous super-states” armed with atomic weapons - each one “self-contained”, isolated from each other, “at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours”.4 A little earlier, he had insisted that the majority of intellectuals in Britain were “perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsifications of history, etc”.5 Orwell faced the post-war world with some trepidation - the heady atmosphere of The lion and the unicorn had faded into something less optimistic.

The world had changed considerably by the time 1984 was published in June 1949. The wartime ‘Big Three’ alliance was a fading memory, as the world was divided into two camps, separated by what had become known as the ‘Iron Curtain’. Stalinism appeared to many to be an irresistible, malignant, expansionist movement, clamping down upon rival political forces with an iron hand, and the Stalinist takeover in Czechoslovakia in 1948 in particular intensified anti-Soviet sentiments. In the west, the process of deradicalisation within the intellectual milieu was accelerated. Not a few succumbed to the cold war atmosphere, whilst others drifted into despair.6 With the bifurcated world reflected in an oppressive intellectual conformity in both the east and the west, there seemed to be little room in which a libertarian socialist such as Orwell could manoeuvre.7

Totalitarianism

1984 became a best seller, surpassing even Animal farm’s prodigious sales by a wide mark.8 The vision of a world divided up amongst three vast super-states - all ruled by vicious totalitarian regimes, which suppressed all civil liberties and intellectual life, watched every move of their subjects and continually rewrote their own histories; in the book, the plight of Winston Smith, with his almost solitary revolt against the system and his breaking by the sinister O’Brien into total submission and repentance, struck a ready chord with large numbers of people.

1984 was an immediate success, as it keyed into the consciousness of the cold war. As Isaac Deutscher put it a few years after the book’s release, “The novel has served as a sort of an ideological super-weapon in the cold war. As in no other book or document, the convulsive fear of communism, which has swept the west since the end of the Second World War, has been reflected and focused in 1984.”9

The American liberal, Lionel Trilling, found the book chilling because the society depicted in it was “substantially little more than an extension into the near future of the present structure and policy of Stalinism”, that not only existed in the eastern bloc, but potentially in the west. The lesson was clear: there could be no appeasement of Stalinism: “Otherwise we shall go on playing Winston Smith, falling sooner or later into the hands of the O’Briens of the east, who will break our bones until we scream with love for Big Brother.”10 The American socialist, Irving Howe, stated that 1984 reflected the “apocalyptic situation” facing humanity - either socialism or totalitarianism, as depicted in the book.11

1984 caused quite a stir on the left. For the Stalinists, it merely confirmed what they already thought about Orwell.12 Most leftwing opponents of Stalinism had welcomed Homage to Catalonia, as it was a strong leftwing work, which brought out both the revolutionary factors of the Spanish Civil War and the counterrevolutionary nature of Stalinism. Their response to Animal farm varied. Some saw it as a vindication of Trotsky, whilst others saw it as an expression of the idea that revolutions inevitably lead to the rise of a new elite. 1984 was widely seen on the left as a deeply pessimistic and depressing work. Some thought that Orwell was stating that the fight for a better future was hopeless - this was certainly the view of Deutscher, who stated that it was “a document of dark disillusionment - not only with Stalinism, but with every form and shade of socialism”13 - whilst others, notwithstanding their discomfort with the book, did not think that he had given up on socialism.14

Although Orwell had not visited either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, some commentators have pointed out that he had managed to grasp many of the features of a totalitarian society.15 In fact, 1984 was drawn from a number of different influences, both within and without the totalitarian countries.16

Firstly, many of the features of the Oceania superstate were based upon Orwell’s personal observations. The proles are reminiscent of the most lumpenised and degraded workers in The road to Wigan Pier. The mores of Oceanian society are clearly based upon his memories of his days at a minor public school: “Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people - in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way.”17

Much of the day-to-day dreariness and information manipulation of Oceanian life are an exaggerated extrapolation of Orwell’s experiences in wartime London and of the insidious censorship at the BBC and Ministry of Information in the 1940s.18

Secondly, we have seen that Orwell had read several worthwhile accounts of Soviet society. Quite a few of Eugene Lyons’ observations reappear in Orwell’s novel, with two striking examples being the poster used during the attempt to complete the first five-year plan in four years: “2+2=5”, which Orwell turned from a witty propaganda slogan into a sinister symbol of Smith’s abject defeat at the hands of the Oceanian regime; and the UP telegram, which looks just like an example of newspeak.19

Thirdly, there was a rich vein of utopian and dystopian novels from which he could draw. Orwell had read Jack London’s The iron heel and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, and was well acquainted with the works of Aldous Huxley and HG Wells.20

Fourthly, some of the features of 1984 were redolent of the more dramatic writings of Burnham and Arthur Koestler, which Orwell had elsewhere criticised for being too pessimistic. He wrote that Burnham’s vision of a “huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire” would either never be established or would not endure, because slavery was “no longer a stable basis for human society”, and so the Soviet regime would either “democratise itself” or it would perish,21 yet in 1984 the three totalitarian states stretched off into an indefinite future. Similarly, Orwell wrote off Koestler’s “without education of the masses, no social progress; without social progress, no education of the masses” as a “pessimistic conclusion”,22 only to have Smith sadly conclude about the proles: “Until they have become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”23

Orwell’s conceptions about social strata re-emerge in 1984. Despite their degraded condition, the proles are the sole repository of human decency: “The proles had stayed human … They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea: they were loyal to one another.”24 And, confirming his worst fears about them, the pre-revolutionary middle strata had become the ruling elite of Oceania, which was composed, in the words of Goldstein’s ‘book’, “for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians … whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class”, and who “had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government”.25

And this leads us to a possible further influence - Max Nomad, the follower of Jan Wacław Machajski, the Polish revolutionary who considered that socialism constituted the accession to power of a new exploiting class of intellectuals. In an article first published in 1937, Nomad referred to the “neo-bourgeois” pretenders for political power, listing “office-holders, teachers, professional men, technicians, clergymen, commercial and financial experts, journalists, writers, artists, politicians, professional revolutionists and agitators, trade union organisers and so on”.26 The similarity to Orwell’s rogues’ gallery is striking. Furthermore, Nomad and Orwell agreed that these contenders for power key into the dissatisfaction of the lower orders in order to use them as their assault troops against the existing ruling elite, and thus facilitate their own route to power.

Many factors in 1984 remain unexplained or unexplored. The revolution itself - surely an epochal event - hardly exists in the narrative beyond a few fragmentary childhood memories on Smith’s part that barely go beyond the hardships caused by social dislocation, or in Goldstein’s ‘Book’, or for that matter in the propaganda put out by ‘Ingsoc’ (‘English Socialism’ - the British equivalents of the Russian soviets, factory committees, strikes, demonstrations, mass meetings and street-corner speeches and discussions - the lively democratic reality of 1917). All are conspicuous by their absence.27

How we get from the revolution to the situation in 1984 remains a mystery. How did the party establish itself as a ruling elite? Why did the proles permit it to do so? Why did the British revolution become a super-Stalinist dystopia? Smith’s journey from a homeless waif to an ‘Outer Party’ member and ‘Minitrue’ (‘Ministry of Truth’) clerk is not traced; it is as if great chunks of his own memory have been eradicated. Of course, a novel is not necessarily an historical treatise and the lacunae emphasise the party’s control of the historical record, but they also serve to give the impression that the ‘Ingsoc’ regime in ‘Airstrip One’ (Britain) was the inevitable result of the revolution, that no other outcome was possible - an impression reinforced by the bald, unexplained assertion in Goldstein’s ‘Book’ that “the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned” in “each variant of socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards”.28 Other questions come to mind: for example, if the proles were, comparatively speaking, free, why did anyone join the Outer Party, seeing that the existence of its members was pretty miserable and in material terms little (if any) better than that of the proles?29

1984 should not be viewed as Orwell’s political testament. The novel is indeed deeply pessimistic, as Smith is not merely defeated, but is mentally eviscerated to the degree that he accepts without question the legitimacy of the regime, thereby symbolising the all-powerful nature of the Oceanian state, yet Orwell’s non-fiction writing is more optimistic. The total dystopia of 1984 was not a certainty; he replied to a critic by declaring: “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe … that something resembling it could arrive.” Moreover, it was not a description of the Soviet regime, as Oceania had only been “partly realised” in the Soviet Union.30 Considering also that, as we have seen, he believed in the possibility of the democratisation of the Soviet regime, his vision of the future was not so gloomy as his last novel suggested.31

Criticism

Needless to say, 1984 has provoked a vast industry of acclaim and criticism.32 The pessimism expressed in it has been explained, often by leftwing writers, as resulting from Orwell’s political demoralisation. Paul O’Flinn claimed that his lack of any coherent political philosophy had caused him by the late 1940s to be “liable to be gusted along by the cold war hurricane” - a victim of a “potentially revolutionary” approach, which “thrashes around in despair, looking for and failing to find a base”.33

Michael Maddison stated that Orwell was dismayed by the decline of the working class as an actor on the historical stage, as “in the decade from 1939 to 1949 no revolutionary wave broke over the surface of politics”. And so: “‘They’ - the bureaucrats and power politicians - were able to change the face of the world, and in the process trampled on ‘us’; such would be a condensation of Orwell’s views.”34

Alex Zwerdling stated that it would be wrong to say that Orwell had abandoned socialism, but his inability to answer the questions that he raised about it “eventually … brought himself to the edge of despair”.35 Opinions have differed sharply over what Smith’s hopes in the proles represented in Orwell’s thinking - between those who detected optimism on the author’s part despite the fact that the proles lived on in a slumber and Smith’s opposition was crushed,36 and those who claimed there is nothing in the text to justify claiming a “prole victory” or the idea of “democratic invincibility”.37

Conservative analysts have seen 1984 as a sign that Orwell was moving away from socialism. Dennis O’Keefe stated that the conservative claim on the book is strong: it is “explicitly anti-socialist, converging with the work of a number of writers … in the view that socialism is essentially the hypertrophy of the state”, and implicitly accepting that capitalism is the only system that can guarantee the liberty of the individual.38 Others, such as Robert de Camara, have scoffed at the notion that Orwell was looking at totalitarian tendencies in western countries.39 Norman Podhoretz asserted that Orwell would have been amongst those leftists of the late 1940s who were to slide across to conservatism.40

Left response

Orwell’s critics in the ‘official communist’ movement shared the conservatives’ view that 1984 is a pro-capitalist work. Leslie Morton stated in 1952 that Orwell played upon “the lowest fears and prejudices engendered by bourgeois society”: “His object is not to argue a case, but to induce an irrational conviction in the minds of his readers that any attempt to realise socialism must lead to a world of corruption, torture and insecurity.”41

Leftwing assessments often have concentrated upon the sinister activities of the capitalist state - phone-tapping, visual surveillance, computer details on individuals, news and language manipulation, etc - to show the present-day relevance of 1984.42 This upset rightwing commentators Paul Johnson and John McEwan, who poured scorn on the equation of the western states’ covert operations and Oceania’s Thought Police and telescreens.43 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that, however general the surveillance was under Stalinism, it is only under modern capitalism that the technology exists that could reach anywhere near that required to carry it out to the level achieved in Oceania. If anything, Stalinism was marked by its inability to achieve consistent technological advance.

Although Robert Conquest countered the left’s arguments by stating that the totalitarian society portrayed in Oceania was based upon the Soviet Union, and that it came into being through the overthrow of capitalism, rather than through its development,44 it is clear that Orwell was concerned about the trends towards totalitarianism within society as a whole. He hit out hardest at Stalinism because it represented to him the furthest development of the trend. But state censorship and self-censorship in wartime Britain nonetheless worried him greatly. As he wrote in 1944,

The MoI [Ministry of Information] does not, of course, dictate a party line or issue an index expurgatorius. It merely ‘advises’. Publishers take manuscripts to the MoI, and the MoI ‘suggests’ that this or that is undesirable, or premature, or ‘would serve no good purpose’. And though there is no definite prohibition, no clear statement that this or that must not be printed, official policy is never flouted. Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.45

Orwell was not referring to Stalinism here: rather he was addressing the nascent totalitarian behaviour within the official structures of Britain which was not enforced by fear or fiat, nor commanded by a party line dictated from Moscow, but was voluntarily adhered to by those concerned. As we have seen, Orwell’s ideas for Oceania were drawn not only from people’s observations of totalitarian societies, but from tendencies within Britain and, by extension, of liberal democracies in general. It was not just the uncritical support shown during the war for one particular totalitarian state - the Soviet Union - that perturbed him; more important was the mindset of ideological conformity and closed dogmatic thinking that underpinned both this example of state-worship and the surreptitious censorship and guidance exercised at that time by the British state.

Orwell aimed many barbs at leftwing intellectuals who should have known better than to have supported Stalinism - indeed, he attacked Stalinism so heavily because he was a leftwinger - but the right has no justification to claim his heritage. However, it did lay claim to it and continues to do so, and one reason for that lies in the structure of 1984. Taken by itself, the novel can easily be interpreted as an anti-socialist work. Taken in conjunction with his other writings, the story is quite different, and another, far more positive interpretation is possible. It seems to me that Orwell wrote 1984 not merely in order to warn against a possible Stalinist dystopia, but also (and perhaps more importantly) to show the degree of surveillance, degradation, manipulation and oppression that is required to destroy the autonomy of the individual, to forestall the elaboration of critical thought and to eradicate the possibility of collective action, and thereby prevent any challenge to a ruling elite and to rule out any transformation of society.

On that basis it is clear that, so long as society did not descend into the depths of Oceania, the future for Orwell was not so bleak. There was a way out: hope did lie with the proles, with the working class. And even if, as he admitted, the prospects for socialism during the late 1940s were slim,46 he never repudiated his belief in it.

Orwell was fascinated - obsessed even - by the question of the exercising of power. We have seen how he viewed the radical intelligentsia as power-seeking would-be totalitarians and that he saw their appreciation of the Soviet Union as proof of their quest to exercise overarching power. A prominent feature of 1984 is the Inner Party’s obsessive quest for power for its own sake. O’Brien tells Smith:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power … The German Nazis and the Russian communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognise their own motives … Power is not a means: it is an end … The object of power is power.47

Orwell had little argument with Burnham on this question, as he basically accepted his basic proposition that intellectuals become involved in politics merely in order to seize and to exercise power, and only disagreed with him over the possibility of the durability of the totalitarian future, which they both felt power-seeking intellectuals were hoping to bring into being.

Deutscher, who worked with Orwell during the war, explained that he was “at heart … a simple-minded anarchist” for whom “any political movement forfeited its raison d’être the moment it acquired a raison d’état”: “To analyse a complicated social background, to try and unravel tangles of political motives, calculations, fears and suspicions, and to discern the compulsion of circumstances behind their action was beyond him. Generalisations about social forces, social trends and historic inevitabilities made him bristle with suspicion.”

Without a system of investigation, Orwell was forced ultimately “to adopt and to cling to the oldest, the most banal, the most abstract and the most barren of all generalisations … ‘sadistic power worship’”.48 The conflicts amongst a vast array of social forces were reduced to the banality of a conspiracy theory. Not surprisingly, Deutscher considered Orwell to be a fanatic who wanted easy answers - a harsh, but not unfair, characterisation.

State power

Power, however, is very rarely an object in and of itself (dictators are little different to democrats in this respect). Although state power was projected both in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union through the personal leadership of an authoritarian party, pure power was neither the desire of Hitler and Stalin, nor the reality of their rule, however much their personal caprices actually affected society.

Both saw themselves as the living embodiment of a quest. Hitler saw his task as rebuilding and extending a mythical Germany, and in that he did not deviate. Stalin started as a proletarian revolutionary and, through the process of gaining power in an isolated, backward state, came to personify a new nationalist ruling elite building a new Russia - although, for reasons we will discuss, he continued to use the egalitarian language of the Russian Revolution. Power had a purpose, and this purpose was shared throughout the ranks of the Nazi and Soviet bureaucracies.

Orwell considered that totalitarian ideologies were essentially instrumental: the ideologies that existed within the three superstates in 1984 were presented as conscious fabrications drawn up by would-be elites as justification for their quest to seize and then to exercise power. However, this was not the case in Hitler’s Germany: Nazi ideology was in most respects an exaggerated development of existing German nationalist ideas, which appealed to many members of the intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie, who felt alienated from the liberal-democratic Weimar republic. Nazi ideology was a product of bourgeois society, albeit a particularly malignant one, springing from capitalist social relations and reflecting them at a particularly febrile juncture.

Ideology in the Soviet Union was, however, a different matter, and here there was a definite question of artifice. Marxism is the anti-elitist philosophy par excellence: it shows that a genuinely egalitarian future - a society without a ruling elite - is eminently possible. The October Revolution was fought under the banner of Marxism; the Bolsheviks saw it as the first blow of a world socialist revolution. However, by the 1930s, having been isolated in a backward, war-ravaged country, the Soviet Communist Party had mutated into an elite, ruling over a hierarchical, non-capitalist socio-economic formation, with Marxism as the putative state ideology. This contradiction is explained by the fact that, so long as the elite rested upon the foundations laid by the October Revolution - that is, so long as capitalism was not restored - it was obliged to use the language of 1917: what sort of ideology could emerge out of a society that was not only neither capitalist nor socialist, but did not constitute a new mode of production?49

On the surface, the classic totalitarian regimes were extremely ideological. Ordinary life was politicised to a much greater degree than under a parliamentary democracy. But the politicisation of everyday life in a totalitarian system quickly leads to its opposite - the destruction of politics - particularly in Stalinist countries, in which the ideology has little relationship with reality. Ideology and politics become a meaningless ritual.

Latter-day Stalinist societies were marked by a deep-running cynicism. Although as late as the Brezhnev era leading bureaucrats enthused publicly over the wonders of Soviet-style ‘socialism’, their heart had long gone out of it. By the 1980s (not 60 years since the launch of the first five-year plan, and not 40 years since the Sovietisation of eastern Europe) the Soviet bloc bureaucracies were seriously considering going over to the market - a process which would necessitate their rejecting an ideology in which they only expressed themselves, rather than believed, and adopting one in which they could really believe.50

Pro-Soviet

Orwell’s assumptions about the supposed totalitarian ambitions of Britain’s radical intellectuals were greatly exaggerated. Was it really the case, as he asserted, that the bulk of the intelligentsia in Britain was “perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsifications of history, etc”?51 Some of Orwell’s critics have convincingly argued that he exaggerated the influence of Stalinism upon Britain’s intellectuals.52 Also, Orwell’s concentration upon power-seeking had led him away from taking into account other, less sinister reasons for the interest shown by many radical intellectuals in the Soviet Union: for example, the idea that Soviet state welfare and economic policies might have some practical application in Britain.

Certainly by the late 1940s Orwell was kicking at an open door: it is remarkable just how rapidly pro-Soviet sentiments faded away, once hostilities ceased. Official Britain, with Labour in government, quickly adopted a hostile stance towards Moscow. The already waning credibility the Soviet elite enjoyed amongst leftwingers in the Labour Party was stripped away in response to its new round of repressive actions in the Soviet Union and the clampdown in its new domain in eastern Europe. The group of actual pro-Soviet Labour MPs who so worried Orwell and were expelled from the party numbered a mere four.53 The pre-war and wartime allure of Soviet welfare schemes and economic administration rapidly faded, once the Labour government’s programme of reforms and the revival of British capitalism led to a steady amelioration of the onerous conditions of the 1930s. By the time that 1984 appeared, few outside the declining CPGB and the shrivelled fellow-travelling scene adhered to an unblemished vision of Stalinism.

And then - as if to confirm Orwell’s more optimistic prognoses and to spite 1984 with its unending totalitarian future - within three years of Orwell’s death Stalin had himself died and his successors had initiated a far-reaching process of reform, which loosened to some extent the cultural straitjacket, considerably reduced the level of state coercion, and largely wound up the prison camp system.54 Then, in 1956, Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’, with its denunciations of Stalin, dealt a blow to the Soviet myth, from which it never recovered amongst the ‘official communists’.55 Stalin’s successors did not introduce a liberal democracy, let alone a socialist democracy: repression and censorship remained prominent features of the regime, but they nonetheless steered Soviet reality to some degree away from the dystopia presented in 1984 - not ever closer to it.

Finally, to confound all those who saw the Stalinist system, whether positively or negatively, as a durable socio-economic formation, a workers’ paradise or a louring menace to the west, the events of 1989-91 demonstrated that the whole Stalinist edifice had reached the end of the road. In his introduction to the Ukrainian edition of Animal farm, Orwell pointed out that many readers had assumed that the final scene was intended to show that the pigs and humans - that is, the Soviet and western elites - had become reconciled. This, he added, was not the intention: he meant the book “to end on a loud note of discord”.56 That is ironic, as events have shown this misinterpretation to be a more accurate portrayal of the fate of Stalinism - the practical and ideological adoption of the capitalist market by the former Soviet bloc elites - than the centuries of endless war amongst three identical Stalinist states portrayed in 1984.

Although Orwell greatly exaggerated the degree of pro-Soviet sentiments amongst intellectuals, his concerns about the broader trends of nascent totalitarian behaviour in society - most notably the voluntary acceptance of ideological conformity and closed dogmatic thinking - were nonetheless pertinent and indeed still remain relevant. State-worshipping of totalitarian countries sporadically recurred over the ensuing decades, with a number of radical intellectuals making fools of themselves, pursuing their Stalinist Mecca variously in Mao’s China, Hoxha’s Albania and even Pol Pot’s Cambodia. More importantly, considerable numbers of erstwhile pro-Soviet intellectuals forsook their obeisance to Moscow merely to sign up to the western side in the cold war, as the ‘new civilisation’ became ‘the god that failed’, and the Soviet Union became seen as an unrelenting totalitarian threat to western civilisation.

Orwell did not view the substitution of one orthodoxy for another as anything positive - “Nothing is gained by teaching a parrot a new word”57 - and he lashed out at what he called the “smelly little orthodoxies” of his time.58 So why should the cold war orthodoxy - an intellectual mindset that was immeasurably more pervasive amongst western intellectuals than the transitory pro-Soviet sentiments of the popular front days and World War II (and, let us remember, one whose basis was undermined by the events of 1989-91, with the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc and the elites’ jettisoning with indecent haste their long-proclaimed Marxist-Leninist ideology) - have been exempt?

  1. J Burnham The managerial revolution London 1942; J Burnham The Machiavellians: defenders of freedom London 1943. For Burnham’s influence on Orwell, see in particular Michael Maddison’s ‘1984: a Burnhamite fantasy?’ Political Quarterly January-March 1961; and W Steinhoff George Orwell and the origins of ‘1984’ Ann Arbor 1975.↩︎

  2. J Burnham The managerial revolution pp145-74. For a convincing early debunking of Burnham’s theory of managerialism, see C Wright Mills ‘A Marx for the manager’ Power Politics and People New York 1963.↩︎

  3. J Burnham The Machiavellians, pp64-89.↩︎

  4. G Orwell ‘You and the atom bomb’ Collected essays, journalism and letters (CEJL) Vol 4, Harmondsworth 1984, pp25-26.↩︎

  5. G Orwell ‘Letter to HJ Willmett’ CEJL Vol 3, p178.↩︎

  6. The process of deradicalisation had started in the late 1930s, and was intimately connected with the phenomenon of Stalinism. Bidding farewell to the socialist movement, the US radical, Max Eastman, concluded that the totalitarian state was “the political form natural to a collectivised economy” (M Eastman Stalin’s Russia and the crisis in socialism London 1940, p156). Borkenau took the same view: see F Borkenau The totalitarian enemy London 1940, p239.↩︎

  7. For descriptions of the process of intellectual demoralisation in Britain and the USA, see R Hewison In anger: culture in the cold war, 1945-60 London 1988, pp24-33; A Wald The New York intellectuals: the rise and decline of the anti-Stalinist left from the 1930s to the 1980s Chapel Hill 1987. Indicative of this was the fate of Horizon, Britain’s leading non-partisan radical cultural-political review, which petered out in 1949.↩︎

  8. By the mid-1950s, 1984 had sold 1.2 million copies in the USA, plus 596,000 copies of an abridged version, whilst sales of the paperback in Britain ran into the hundreds of thousands (J Rodden The politics of literary reputation: the making and claiming of ‘St George’ Orwell New York 1989, p46.↩︎

  9. I Deutscher Heretics and renegades London 1955, p35.↩︎

  10. Partisan Review July 1949.↩︎

  11. New International November-December 1950.↩︎

  12. This was particularly the case in the USA, where his previous books were practically unknown, and where 1984 was immediately championed by the radical right. Howard Keylor, who was in the Communist Party of the USA at the time, told me that Orwell was seen as “one of the ideologues of the extreme anti-communists”. Mike Jones informed me of the hostility he noted towards Orwell in the CPGB in the early 1960s, and David Gorman told me that when he was a lad his father actually tried to confiscate his copy of Homage to Catalonia!↩︎

  13. I Deutscher Heretics and renegades p44.↩︎

  14. Thanks to John Archer, Don Bateman, Ray Challinor, Baruch Hirson, Harry Ratner and Charlie Van Gelderen for their ideas and reminiscences. Bateman, a member of the ILP, told me that the only ILP members who were antipathetic to Orwell were the handful of Stalinists who remained in the party. Archer told me that he and his comrades in the Trotskyist movement were always very critical of Orwell, although other Trotskyists to whom I have spoken were less critical of him, at least until 1984.↩︎

  15. Masha Karp, who had read a clandestine copy of the novel in her hometown of Leningrad, and Czesław Miłosz both emphasised this: see M Karp George Orwell and Russia London, 2023, ppvii-x, 234-48; C Miłosz The captive mind Harmondsworth 1980, p42. For a detailed account of the impact of Orwell’s two last novels in the Soviet bloc, see J Rodden Scenes from an afterlife: the legacy of George Orwell Wilmington 2003.↩︎

  16. Orwell was also deeply suspicious of Roman Catholicism, which he saw as essentially totalitarian. For the Catholic imagery in 1984, see P Siegel Revolution and the twentieth-century novel New York 1979, pp159-60.↩︎

  17. G Orwell ‘Such, such were the joys’ CEJL Vol 4, p411. See also J Rose, ‘Eric Blair’s school days’, in J Rose (ed) The revised Orwell East Lansing 1992, pp75-96.↩︎

  18. For the way in which wartime censorship influenced 1984, see WJ West The larger evils - 1984: the truth behind the satire Edinburgh 1992.↩︎

  19. E Lyons Assignment in utopia London 1938, pp240, 338. Newspeak was also based upon Esperanto, to which Orwell had a lifelong aversion.↩︎

  20. Orwell first acquired a copy of We in 1946. Deutscher reckoned that much of 1984 was lifted from We, but Crick disagreed, arguing that Orwell had started on his book long before he read We: see I Deutscher Heretics and renegades pp36ff; B Crick George Orwell: a life Harmondsworth 1982, pp387-88, 629. For other possible influences, see J Rose ‘The invisible sources of 1984’, in J Rose (ed) The revised Orwell East Lansing 1992, pp131-47.↩︎

  21. G Orwell James Burnham and the managerial revolution London 1946, p19.↩︎

  22. G Orwell ‘Arthur Koestler’ Dickins, Dali and others New York 1946, p197.↩︎

  23. G Orwell 1984 Harmondsworth 1969, p60.↩︎

  24. Ibid p135.↩︎

  25. Ibid pp164-65. Elsewhere, Orwell pointed to “scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians: in general, middling people who … are hungry for more power and more prestige”, and who see in the Soviet Union “a system which eliminates the upper class, keeps the working class in its place, and hands unlimited power to people very similar to themselves”: G Orwell James Burnham and the managerial revolution p18.↩︎

  26. M Nomad ‘Masters - old and new’, in VF Calverton (ed) The making of society: an outline of sociology New York 1937, p882. For Machajski, see M Shatz Jan Wacław Machajski: as radical critic of the Russian intelligentsia and socialism Pittsburgh 1989.↩︎

  27. I thank Mike Belbin for pointing out the absence in 1984 of any significant reference to the revolution that put the Ingsoc regime into power.↩︎

  28. G Orwell 1984 p163.↩︎

  29. Goldstein’s ‘Book’ states that the inner party’s members live in a “different world from a member of the outer party” and that the latter has “a similar advantage” in comparison with the proles: G Orwell 1984 p155. Not only does the latter assertion jar with the descriptions of the similar living conditions of the members of the outer party and the proles, but it is obvious that the proles were not subject to the intrusive state surveillance, regimented life and interminable propaganda campaigns that outer party members were obliged to endure, and therefore in some respects were in a rather less unenviable situation.↩︎

  30. G Orwell ‘Letter to Francis Henson’ CEJL Vol 4, p564.↩︎

  31. Orwell was certainly less pessimistic than his friend, Borkenau, who in 1949 insisted that the Soviet Union faced a future of “terror without end, of hostility towards everything human, of horrors that carry no remedy and which can be cured only ferro et igni”: see F Borkenau ‘Stalin im Schafspelz’ Der Monat No14, 1949 (thanks to Mike Jones for the translation).↩︎

  32. Rodden provides an excellent account of the Orwell industry The politics of literary reputation.↩︎

  33. P O’Flinn ‘Rereading 1984 in 1984’, in P Flewers (ed) George Orwell: enigmatic socialist London 2005, p61.↩︎

  34. Maddison ‘1984: a Burnhamite fantasy?’ Political Quarterly January-March 1961, pp78-79.↩︎

  35. A Zwerdling Orwell and the left New Haven 1978, pp4, 37.↩︎

  36. P Foot Words as weapons London 1990, pp272-73.↩︎

  37. P Reilly 1984: past, present and future Boston 1989, pp126-27.↩︎

  38. Salisbury Review April 1985. See also A Eckstein ‘George Orwell’s second thoughts on capitalism’, in J Rose (ed) The revised Orwell East Lansing 1992, pp191-205.↩︎

  39. National Review May 13 1983.↩︎

  40. N Podhoretz ‘If Orwell were alive today’, in B Oldsey and J Browne (eds) Critical essays on George Orwell Boston 1986, pp19-30. For a critical response to this type of argument, see G Beadle ‘George Orwell and the neo-conservatives’ Dissent Winter 1984; P Flewers ‘Review essay’ George Orwell Studies 9:2, 2025.↩︎

  41. AL Morton The English utopia London 1978, p274.↩︎

  42. See P Siegel Revolution and the twentieth-century novel pp168-70; P Lashmar ‘Information as power’ in P Chilton and C Aubrey (eds) 1984 in 1984: autonomy, control and communication London 1983, pp79-88; W Russel Gray ‘1984 and the massaging of the media’, in C Wemyss and A Ugrinsky (eds) George Orwell Westport 1987, pp111-16.↩︎

  43. Spectator January 7 1984; Spectator January 14 1984.↩︎

  44. R Conquest ‘Orwell: 1984’, tyrants and typewriters: communiques in the struggle for truth London 1989, p88.↩︎

  45. G Orwell ‘As I please’ July 1944 CEJL Vol 3, p212.↩︎

  46. G Orwell ‘Towards European unity’ CEJL Vol 4, p423.↩︎

  47. G Orwell 1984 pp211-12.↩︎

  48. I Deutscher Heretics and renegades pp47-48.↩︎

  49. See L Trotsky ‘Does the Soviet government still follow the principles adopted 20 years ago?’ Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-1938 New York 1976, p126. Were the Soviet Union either state capitalist or a new form of étatised class society - analyses which Orwell endorsed at different junctures - the élite would eventually have adopted some sort of capitalist ideology, or one that reflected the social relations of bureaucratic collectivism.↩︎

  50. There have been occasional upsurges in seemingly ideologically charged activism in Stalinist countries, such as the Cultural Revolution in China, but even that was only a decade and a half after the establishment of the regime, and merely represented the use of radical phraseology by one section of the Chinese bureaucracy to mobilise amongst the population against another section: P’eng Shu-tse The Chinese Communist Party in power New York, 1980, pp282, 433; see also I Deutscher The cultural revolution in China Nottingham 1969.↩︎

  51. G Orwell, Letter to HJ Willmett CEJL Vol 3, p178.↩︎

  52. For example, George Woodcock claimed that those influenced by ‘official communism’ “had always been a minority”: G Woodcock The crystal spirit: a study of George Orwell Harmondsworth 1970, p198. Robert Hewison stated that, notwithstanding the relegitimisation of the Soviet Union after June 1941, there had been a steady drift away from the ‘official’ communist movement on the part of British intellectuals since 1939, because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the “slow seep” of information about the realities of Stalinism: R Hewison In anger pp25-26.↩︎

  53. In 1946, Orwell had estimated their number as 20 or 30: G Orwell ‘London letter to Partisan Review’ May 1946 CEJL Vol 4, p221.↩︎

  54. Years later, Raymond Aron, a leading protagonist of the totalitarian school, admitted that the novel referred “rather to 1951-52 than to 1984”: R Aron Democracy and totalitarianism London 1968, p226. See also C Brinton The anatomy of revolution New York 1956, p249; G Woodcock Orwell’s message: 1984 and the present Madeira Place 1984, pp143-47.↩︎

  55. Although entrenched ideas did take some shifting: Orwell no doubt would have been amused by the fact that the critical attitude towards Stalin that grew amongst ‘official communists’ after 1956 still required to be sparked off ex-cathedra and not by any local initiative.↩︎

  56. G Orwell ‘Author’s preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm’ CEJL Vol 3, p459.↩︎

  57. G Orwell ‘Annotations to Randall Swingler, “The right to free expression”’, G Orwell Collected Works Vol 18, London 1998, p443.↩︎

  58. G Orwell ‘Charles Dickens’ Dickens, Dali and others p75.↩︎