Orwell’s political journey
Phil Tinline charts how the author became a champion of democracy
Before 1939, George Orwell feared that democracy was little better than fascism with a veneer of civility. Yet, by the start of the Second World War, he had come to regard it as humanity’s greatest defence against the rise of totalitarianism. Phil Tinline traces the author’s political journey to Nineteen Eighty-Four
II n 1932, as the Great Depression pushed unemployment towards 3.5 million, and swathes of Britain were branded ‘Distressed Areas’, a posh young politician called John Strachey was trying to find a way through the crisis. He had broken from Labour to join his friend Oswald Mosley’s New party. Then, watching Mosley turn fascist, Strachey turned Marxist – and published a book that captured the great fear of his time. The Coming Struggle for Power warned that capitalism was growing desperate, and would soon abandon democracy: “The democratic forms, liberal ideas, and subtle methods of the rule of the capitalist class have to be scrapped. Direct, open terror against the workers, violent aggression against its rivals, can alone enable a modern empire to maintain itself. A name for such a policy has been found: it is fascism.”
Strachey’s lurches from one position to another catch something of the decade’s desperation. Democracy seemed dangerously weak or, worse, a sham. In 1936, as fascism advanced on the continent, Strachey’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, suggested creating a ‘Left Book Club’ to popularise the Marxist alternative to fascism. He asked Strachey to help run it, and asked another, rather more obscure, writer – George Orwell – to head north to the Distressed Areas and write about what he found. Orwell, then 32, had been two years below Strachey at Eton, but was an altogether more marginal, impoverished figure. His commission from Gollancz would become The Road to Wigan Pier, one of the Left Book Club’s most famous publications – and it would set Orwell on a political journey through the borderlands between dictatorship and democracy, culminating in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Small and squalid
At this point, Orwell’s view of democratic politics was still forming. Perhaps the closest England got was, he considered, the “small, squalid democracy” he had found when he lived among tramps, writing Down and Out in Paris and London. In March 1936, he found himself in Barnsley, detailing its slum housing and its slump into misery. In the public hall, he watched Strachey’s one-time comrade Oswald Mosley work his fascist wizardry as his blackshirted stewards brutalised hecklers.
Later that year, as he wrote
Wigan Pier, Orwell reckoned the “pinch” would come within two years. This final capitalist crisis would pit socialism against fascism, and there was a terrible danger that fascism would win out. But the Blackshirt leader was not his main concern: “When I speak of fascism in England, I am not necessarily thinking of Mosley and his pimpled followers. English fascism, when it arrives, is likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind (presumably, at any rate at first, it won’t be called fascism)…”
A fascist appeal to patriotism and tradition, he feared, might win over the struggling middle class. This was the other scenario troubling the left: that democracy could be a front, behind which a fascist-style regime could develop. As Strachey wrote, even before Hitler took power through the ballot box: “If a capitalist class can succeed in transforming and fusing its existing political parties – into a ‘National Government’, for instance – the institutions of democracy will be gradually and, if possible, imperceptibly withdrawn.”
That same year, Strachey’s “struggle for power” came to Spain. A socialist government was elected; the army rose against it, cheered on by the aristocracy and the Catholic church. Civil war erupted, and Orwell saw his chance to go and fight fascism. When he sought Strachey’s advice on how to do this, he was sent to see communist leader Harry Pollitt, who rejected him as politically unreliable, and he ended up with a smaller, independent-minded revolutionary militia.
On the front lines, Orwell would be hit in the throat by a fascist bullet. But in Barcelona, he received a short, sharp education in how his anti-fascism, however brave, was not enough. His terrified wife, Eileen, warned him he was in mortal danger: Stalinist forces were hunting down the members of Orwell’s quasi-Trotskyist militia, which they smeared as ‘fascist’ as a deliberate pretext to destroy it. This experience would transform Orwell’s politics, and lay the ground for his great dystopian novel.
On his escape from Spain, he denounced the communist campaign to smear and murder their supposed allies against fascism. But crucially, at this point, he was also suspicious of democracy and appeals to defend it, suggesting that: “Fascism and bourgeois ‘democracy’ are Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” For all that he had risked his life to fight fascism, he now retreated towards pacifism – writing that “we are one step nearer to the great war ‘against fascism’… which will allow fascism, British variety, to be slipped
over our necks during the first week”.
In his despairing 1939 novel Coming Up for Air, Orwell torments the book’s antihero George Bowling with visions of how war and its aftermath will bring a form of totalitarianism: “The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader…”
Bowling’s bleak fantasy is triggered by attending a Left Book Club lecture where the anti-fascist speaker seems to want to smash fascist faces in with a spanner. He imagines the lecturer and the handful of young male communists in the audience in a fascist England smashing faces or having theirs smashed, “according to who’s winning”.
Totalitarian twins
Coming Up for Air was published in June 1939. In August came news of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Orwell was forced to re-examine whether it was really democracy that was Tweedledum to fascism’s Tweedledee. In Spain he had nearly been killed by fascist and communist alike. Hitler and Stalin’s pact confirmed he had one arch-enemy: totalitarianism. That January, in a review of a book called Russia Under Soviet Rule, he had recognised that, even before Stalin took power, the Bolsheviks’ “essential act” had been “the rejection of democracy”.
The pact meant war within days. Orwell decided fighting fascism and defending democracy was not just propaganda after all. His pacifist and anarchist friends were astonished that he suddenly came out in favour of what they still condemned as a pointless defence of capitalism and imperialism. In January 1940, he wrote to Victor Gollancz: “What worries me at present is the uncertainty as to whether the ordinary people in countries like England grasp the difference between democracy and despotism well enough to want to defend their liberties.”
Yet until recently, Orwell had struggled with that difference himself. On 4 May 1940, as the threat of Nazi invasion intensified, he explained: “Until the signing of the RussoGerman pact, the assumption made on both sides was that… National Socialism was simply capitalism with the lid off.” That, he said, had been “the official theory, proved in many a pamphlet by Mr John Strachey”.
Not any more. Strachey – like Gollancz –
THE PACT BETWEEN HITLER AND STALIN CONFIRMED TO ORWELL THAT HE HAD ONE ARCH-ENEMY: TOTALITARIANISM
had been floored by Stalin’s decision to align himself with Hitler, and was scrambling to catch up. In early 1941, the three men collaborated on an angry book called The Betrayal of the Left, junking their defunct 1930s worldviews. Orwell contributed an essay called ‘Fascism and Democracy’, which encapsulates how his perspective had shifted: “During the last 20 years ‘bourgeois’ democracy has been much more subtly attacked by both fascists and communists, and it is highly significant that these seeming enemies have both attacked it on the same grounds.”
In 1937, Orwell had attacked bourgeois ‘democracy’ as the twin of fascism. But now, he slid his sarcastic quote-marks sideways, defending ‘bourgeois’ democracy against fascism – and its totalitarian twin, communism. He was “willing to admit the large measure of truth” in the accusation that democracy was just a fraud to cover up the rule of the rich, but he had now concluded that this was, finally, unfair.
This was not simply a matter of one man changing his mind. Orwell’s rethink was part of a much wider turn – the curious reawakening, in wartime Britain, of political hope. The visions of coups and chaos that haunted the 1930s were a consequence of not being able to see a democratic, peacetime solution to the torment of mass unemployment. The pressure of war forced British politics to reorder itself: old taboos shattered, new alliances gelled. Necessity hatched possibilities.
Back in The Road to Wigan Pier, Orwell had warned that, without an effective socialist party, “Fascism is coming; probably a slimy anglicised form of fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika.” Now, in 1941, he reclaimed that patriotic paraphernalia, in a book called The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. The war could not be won, he said, unless “capitalist democracy” was transformed, under threat of Nazi invasion. This meant overcoming rightwing resistance – from “the bankers and the larger businessmen, the landowners and dividend-drawers, the officials with their prehensile bottoms”. But it also meant discrediting the left’s doubts, left over from the 1930s:
“They will start by refusing to admit that British capitalism is evolving into something different, or that the defeat of Hitler can mean any more than a victory for the British and American millionaires. And from that they will proceed to argue that, after all, democracy is ‘just the same as’ or ‘just as bad as’ totalitarianism. There is not much freedom of speech in England; therefore there is no more than exists in Germany. To be on the dole is a horrible experience; therefore it is no worse to be in the torture-chambers of the Gestapo.”
A fascist swearword
By 1944, as victory approached, Orwell had the leisure to observe how the word ‘fascist’ had become almost meaningless – an insult to throw at anyone you disagreed with: Conservatives or socialists, war supporters or resisters. But he held fast to the view that it did mean something, and it was important “to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword”.
In the general election of 1945, Churchill came close to doing just that, when he suggested Labour would need “some kind of Gestapo” to enforce its policies. Voters, Orwell was doubtless pleased to note, treated that with circumspection. In the wake of world war, Clement Attlee led Labour into power without bloodshed. All those catastrophic visions of the 1930s had evaporated. The former Marxist firebrand John Strachey settled in as minister for food.
Once, Strachey had captured the apocalypticism of the 1930s. Now it was Orwell who caught the great fear of the postwar era, in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
At the heart of Orwell’s vision of a totalitarian England was a riddle: why did a committed democratic socialist write what was heralded as the great anti-socialist novel? Shortly before he died, he stressed that his message was that “totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere” – but also that he remained a supporter of the Attlee government. The key is Orwell’s hard-won ability to distinguish between democracy – however shoddy – and totalitarianism. To defend democracy from totalitarianism, you have to be alive both to the risk of one becoming the other, and to the difference between them. If you present democracy as no better than fascism, others can present fascism as no worse than democracy.