Lucida condanna di un'idea asservita al potere personale: George Orwell

Lucida condanna di un'idea asservita al potere personale: George Orwell

Sin dai principi programmatici della sua opera, George Orwell si dimostra un perfetto campione della tesi che stiamo tentando di provare in questo lavoro, come possiamo leggere nel suo pamphlet 'Why I Write':

'Why I Write'

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. It seems to me nonsense in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And more one is conscious of one's political ideas, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

What I have most wanted to do throughout the past years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, 'I'm going to produce a work of art'. I write it because there is some lie I want to expose, some facts to which I want to draw attention, and my inital concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience. Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.

George Orwell e la sua opera furono fortemente influenzati dalla vita che lo scrittore si trovò a trascorrere. Non ci può essere nessuna buona analisi della figura di Orwell e del suo pensiero politico che prescinda da un attento studio della sua vita.

George Orwell: vita di un idealista

Although not his real name, George Orwell was more than a nom de plume. For a decade or so before the publication of Animal Farm, in 1945, close friends and acquaitances had called him 'George'.

In choosing this name, plain, solid and very English, the man who had been born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903 seemed to be presenting, probably deliberately, a particular view of himself. Orwell's self-charactezation as a blunt Englishman, decent and direct, is important in understanding his work.

Orwell's father, Richard Blair, was a government official in India. Although Orwell was very young when his mother, born Ida Limouzin (his father was French), in 1904 died, his Indian birth and his career suggested the colonial service when he left school. His education had been a mixed experience. He grew up in the south of England, his family not quite able to support the upper-middle-class image of themselves that, it seems, they would have liked. It was possibly his awareness of this that made him acutely sensitive to graduation of class.

At the age of eight Eric was sent to a preparatory school, St. Ciprian's, at Eastbourne, about which he wrote virulently in his essay 'Such, Such Were the Joys'. Then, at thirteen, he went to Eton. although Orwell looked back on himself as an oddity at Eton, it is clear that it was not a hostile environment. There was plenty of opportunity for reading and conversation, two activities to which he remained addicted for the rest of his life.

By the time the eighteen-year-old Eric Blair left Eton he had decided to join the Imperial Indian Police. In November, 1922 he arrived in Burma.

Five years later he returned to Europe, and resigned from the police force. He could stomach no longer his role as an instrument of imperialism. In his book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which there is a passage of autobiography, he wrote about the effect of his Burma experience.

I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself

Clearly, this theory, mistaken or otherwise, played an important part in the next phase of Eric Blair's life, when he might almost be described as testing it, from the point of view of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. He made up his mind that he wanted to be a writer, and with that in mind went to Paris, where he wrote and published his first articles. His Paris experiences, and his investigations of life on the road with tramps, both before and after his stay in Paris, provided the material for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933).

Between 1932 and 1936 Orwell continued to write and publish, but also taught in private schools, worked in a Hampstead bookshop and tried his hand at running a shop in Hertfordshire. He was reviewing books fairly regularly, and writing his first three novels. Burmese Days (1934), A Clergyman's Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Although he was being noticed as a writer he was not very successful, and financially life was a struggle. At this stage, although acutely aware of social and political issues, Orwell would not have described himself as a politically committed writer. Two crucial experiences were to change that.

Early in 1936 Orwell made a trip to Lancashire and Yorkshire to gather material for a book commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz. The book, The Road to Wigan Pier, was published the following year. An indication of the significance of this trip, which gave Orwell intimate contact with industrial depression, can be seen in this comment from a close friend, Richard Reese.

There was such an extraordinary change both in his writing and, in a way also, in his attitude after he'd been to the North and written that book. I mean, it was almost as if there'd been a kind of fire smouldering in him, all his life which suddenly sort of broke into flame, at that time

The second crucial experience was his involvment in the Spanish Civil War. In June, 1936, he married Eileen O'Shaughnessy. Seven months later he went to Spain and within a few weeks had enlisted to fight for the Republican cause. Soon afterward his wife also arrived in Spain.

In May, Orwell was seriously wounded in the throat. Although he recovered, his voice was permanently affected. Orwell was in Barcelona at the time when the Communists attempted to suppress the other revolutionary parties that were allied against the Fascists. He was caught up in the fighting that broke out, and his experience left a legacy of profound and bitter distrust of the Communists, although it did not shake his now firm belief in socialism. It was after the Barcelona fighting that he wrote in a letter to his old school friend Cyril Connolly:

I . at last really believe in Socialism, which I never did before

Orwell wrote about his Spanish experience in Homage to Catalonia (1938). In fact, he had been lucky to survive, first because if his wound, and secondly because he himself was a target for the Communists. He and his wife had to make their escape from Spain, and were back in England early in July, 1937. Some months later Orwell was diagnosed as having a tubercular lesion in his lung, and for the next twelve years, until his death, illness increasingly dominated his life. In spite of this and all kinds of other difficulties, he wrote with, if anything, intensified energy and conviction throughout the years of the Second World War and its aftermath.

During the War he lived mainly in London. His output of essays, articles and journalism increased. He was frustrated at not being able to contribute directly to the war effort - he was medically unfit for the army. In august, 1941, he joined the staff of the BBC, becoming Talks Producer in the Eastern Section, bradcasting to India. At the same time he was contributing regularly to several newspapers and periodicals. After a little more than two years he resigned his post at the BBC, feeling that much of his time and effort there were being wasted. Shortly afterwards he became literary editor of the left-wing newspaper Tribune, and in December, 1943, published the first of his weekly 'As I Please' columns. These, and the 'London Letters' he wrote for the American Partisan review, reflect the range of his interests and involvments in political, domestic, social and recreational spheres. During these years, both Orwell and his wife led a life that was physically and emotionally demanding. They were in London during the worst of the bombing, and in fact were bombed out, but refused to allow the condition of war to change their lives. They frequently provided food and shelter for those in need and went without basic comforts themselves. In February, 1945, Orwell gave up working for Tribune to become a war correspondent for the Observer. He left for France almost immediately and followed the progress of the Allied armies through France and into Germany. While he was away his wife died under an anesthetic for what should have been a straightforward operation.

By this time Animal Farm was written and Orwell had been experiencing difficulties in finding a publisher. His own health was not good, and the profound blow of Eileen Blair's death and accumulating disappointments and difficulties took their toll. And he now had an added responsibility. In June, 1944, the Blairs had adopted a son, Richard, and Orwell was determined not to give him up. Neither the loss of Eileen nor the gain of Richard were allowed to interfere with his writing. He had produced sufficient substantial essays to make two volumes of collected material, Inside the Whale, and Critical Essays, which both appeared in 1946. But his major undertaking was now the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Orwell had been full of hopes that the spirit of co-operation and equality generated by the War and the effort to combact Nazism would lead to a genuinely socialist Britain. But in spite of the fact that the General Election of 1945 brought a Labour Government, Orwell saw all around him evidence of the re-establishment of old class attitudes. He also saw evidence of more ominous developments, which influenced the writing of '1984'. Recent personal experience was not likely to relieve an increasing foreboarding. In April, 1947, intensely depressed by London, Orwell set up house on the Hebridean island of Jura with his small son and his sister, Avril Blair. He worked on '1984' and wrote a lot of articles and reviews. He was also preparing his last pre-war novel Coming Up for Air (1939) to launch a collected edition of his work to be published by Secker and Warburg. It was a rugged existence on Jura, and a long way from civilazation. To many it has seemed characteristic of Orwell's dogged refusal to compromise that he should have made his life on the remotest part of a remote island, far from doctors and friends at a time when his health was so precarious. By the end of 1947 he was in hospital near Glasgow, with inflammation of the lungs. although he was able to return to Jura briefly, he was never well again. Back in Jura in the autumn of 1948 he revised the first draft of '1984', doing most of the work in bed. Very ill by this time, he typed the final draft, this, too, done partly in bed.

In January 1949 Orwell was admitted to a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, seriously ill with tubercolosis. He corrected the proofs or '1984', wrote many letters and at least one review. He was planning another novel. In September he was transferred to University College Hospital. The following month he was married for the second time, to Sonia Brownell, who worked on the literary magazine Horizon, for which Orwell had written.

He died on 21^st January, 1950.

Acutissima è l'analisi che Orwell fa degli avvenimenti della Rivoluzione Russa, di come siano stati travisati gli ideali marxisti in favore della mera sete di potere personalistica e di come la Rivoluzione si sia ridotta ad una mera farsa. Però la sua analisi va ancora più in là: il suo pensiero afferma come in qualunque cosa sarebbe errata anche una totale ed acritica adesione agli ideali propugnati da Marx. La sua critica investe il pensiero del filosofo tedesco in alcuni suoi punti, ma, soprattutto, afferma che ogni idea politica deve essere sempre 'in fieri' e pronta a imparare dai suoi errori. Questa analisi è palese in 'Animal Farm'

Orwell & Marx: Animalism against Marxism

'Every line I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism,' quotes George Orwell in the preface to the 1956 Signet Classic edition of Animal Farm. The edition, which sold several million copies, however, omitted the rest of the sentence: 'and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it'. It is in Animal Farm, written in 1944 but not published until after World War Two in 1945, that Orwell offers a political and social doctrine whose ideas and ideals can be seen in all of his proceeding works. In an essay published in the summer of 1946 entitled 'Why I Write' Orwell claimed to have been motivated over the preceding ten years by a desire to 'make political writing into an art.² In the essay, he states that 'in Animal Farm he had for the first time in his writing career consciously tried to achieve this goal to harmonize political concerns with artistry. Orwell, however, for reasons such as the omitted portion of his preface and misreadings of his novels, has been mislabeled a traitor of Socialism or a hero to the right wing by theorists and critics. His book, besides a parody of Stalinist Russia, intends to show that Russia was not a true democratic Socialist country. Looked at carefully, Animal Farm is a criticism of Karl Marx as well as a novel perpetuating his convictions of democratic Socialism; these are other inherent less discussed qualities in Animal Farm besides the more commonly read harsh criticism of totalitarianism. Orwell and Marx differed in their views on Socialism and its effects on religion and nationalism as well as Socialism's effects on society and its leaders. Orwell shared many of Marx's viewpoints, but he did not share with Marx the same vision of a utopian future, only the prospects of a worldwide revolution. Orwell's work indicates that he had read Marx with care and understanding. That he remained unconvinced and highly critical does not mean he did could not follow Marx's arguments; or rather, it could mean that only to a Marxist. It is in Animal Farm, lesser talked about for the author's social theories than Nineteen Eighty-Four, that Orwell's criticisms of Marxism can be seen as well as Orwell's social theory, which can be seen through a careful reading of what the animals refer to as Animalism. Animalism, as we will see, has its faults and inaccuracies, but Orwell's use of it is to put forth his own political and social doctrine based on remedying those faults. Orwell's Animalism, what I believe to be his moderately Marxist-Leninist ideology, is different from the animals', but it is Orwell's Animalism that can best be compared to Marxism.

Animalism, based on the theories of old Major, a prized-boar of Mr. Jones, is born early on in Animal Farm. The fact that old Major, himself, is a boar implies that political theory to the masses or a theorist proposing radical change and revolution are, themselves, bores, in the eyes of the proletariate more prone to worrying about work and survival. Old Major, however, is able to gather all the animals on the farm except the sleeping Moses, the tame raven, for a speech about a dream he had the previous night. In his talk, old Major tries to explain the animals' place in nature and how they can get out of it, very much like Marx's writing on the social consciousness of the proletariate in A Contribution to the Political Economy and the evil practices of bourgeois-controlled capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being' wrote Marx, 'but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness'. He also called for revolution by the proletariate in The Communist Manifesto to change the social structure of the state and its distribution of wealth. Orwell agreed with Marx's social arguments, but as we will later see, disagreed on many of his other beliefs. In Animal Farm, we can see his depictions of man as a social animal and his Socialist ideologies through old Major's very Marxist speech in the barn:

'Why do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labour is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems: It is summed up in a single word, Man. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing He sets [the animals] to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion!'

Old Major, sanctified by the animals after his talk, is the visionary the animals needed to lead them out of their state of nature. But old Major, who dies three days after his speech is not a prophet nor is he representative of the nature of religion in Orwell's view of the state, only as the visionary philosopher responsible for perpetuating social change. It is Moses, the lone animal who slept through the speech, that represents religion. Though his name alone invokes an underlying religious meaning, when we look at the character and his interactions with the animals do we see his role as representative of the Church. Moses does no work; he only sits on a pole and tells tales of a mysterious country called Sugarland Mountain, where all animals go when they die. Moses, like Marx's view of religious institutions, is a tool of the state. Feeding off crusts of bread soaked in beer (an allegory for the body and blood of the ruling bourgeois) left by Mr. Jones, Moses is his especial pet, feeding lies and stories to the animals to give them something to live for. After old Major's speech was heard by the animals and his school of thought, to be known as Animalism, began to spread across the farm, only Moses was too stubborn to listen or pay any attention. Interestingly, after the animals successfully revolt, Moses disappears, only to return a little while later, after Napoleon, the eventual totalitarian leader of the animals, uses him as a tool just as Mr. Jones did. He begins to tell his stories again and gets paid in beer, just as he did before with the animals' leader. Orwell, unlike Marx, believed religion would not fade away after revolution because there would always be a people hard on their luck and looking for answers to questions and places they can go after they die where life is easier. Later, we will see Orwell's views on revolutions themselves. Orwell believed in a society that would always have a class of people who would always turn to religion. Not a dystopian theorist, as many believed after Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell was a theorist who was not in favor of any orthodox theories that were naive enough to believe such a class of people would not exist. His books might depict dystopian societies with ruthless leaders, but he did so to convince people how to stave off the ascension of such leaders. His reasons were simple; he favored no society where a leader like Josef Stalin, Big Brother, Napoleon the pig or Napoleon the emperor could emerge to destroy what could be a suitable society based on democratic Socialism. If such a society existed, as it does in Animal Farm, the same problems and social consciousness are still existent. Orwell wrote:

To accept an orthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions

It is a belief not unlike Leon Trotsky's view on revolution. 'Revolution is full of contradictions, wrote Trotsky. 'It unfolds only by taking one step back after taking two steps forward'. The paradox, however, is that Orwell wanted to show that capitalism was not the only social injustice nor the only cause for dystopian societies while Trotsky wanted to use the revolutionary process to overthrow a government.

Orwell believed that a nation would always exist where there are people, thereby allowing for nationalism, something Marx said, just like religion, would fade away after the Revolution. The Revolution in Animal Farm, clearly based on the Russian Revolution, did not keep nationalism from disappearing, a point Orwell makes clear early on. The animals, after revolting, are so proud of their newly formed state, that they take a green tablecloth and paint a white hoof and a horn on it similar to the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union. It is a flag that flies over the newly-named Animal Farm and at whose base lies a gun taken from a helper of Mr. Jones and later, the disinterred skull of the old Major.

Looking deeper at Animal Farm, we can see that Orwell's criticism of Marx through Animalism goes way beyond religion and the nationalism to revolution and the nature of man. The gun that sits at the foot of the flagstaff, besides being a reminder of the Battle of Cowshed, It is also a criticism on the method behind the Rebellion, thereby a criticism on Trotsky's methods of revolution as well. Whereas old Major's Animalism preached revolution through working 'day and night, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race, the animals revolted with war and bloodshed, symbolized by the gun and the war cry of Snowball (Trotsky) at The Battle of Cowshed: 'The only good human being is a dead one'. A serious objection by Orwell on Marxism and Trotskyism is their conviction of Socialism's victory by any means necessary. Though hard-working proletarian Boxer, after a subsequent attempt at taking over the farm by the humans, says:

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

when his damage has already been done, having killed a man. Boxer, representative of the anti-capitalistic Boxer Rebellion of 1900 in China, may speak of pacifism, but his words are coming from the mouth of a horse who has killed. To Orwell, Socialism through warring was just as decadent as what Socialism was supposed to overthrow capitalism. Orwell did not want war because it would put Socialism on the same scale as its enemy because, as Vladimir Lenin wrote, capitalism led to war not Socialism. Where Animalism stresses a long process and some sort of mechanism, classical Marxism misses the essential nature of revolution as a complex and extended process. It offers no conception of the natural sequence of stages in the revolution.

Another criticism Orwell had of Marx was the idea that one man could foresee the future and predict the actions of men, as Marx had done in many of writings. Orwell the novelist could write fictional political tales about the future as he did in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he believed no man could accurately understand the nature by which man acts. He wrote:

The main weakness of Marxism is the failure of human motives As it is, a Marxist analysis of any historical event tends to be a hurried snap-judgement based on the principle of plus value Along these lines, it is impossible to have an intuitive understanding of men's motives, and therefore impossible to predict their actions.

It is a criticism evident after the rebellion in Animal Farm, as each animal's heart driven motivations drives them to individually try and make life better for themselves and leads the pigs towards greediness and the eventual assertion of power. The pigs go through the Jones's farm house and eventually come away with all its clothing, excess food and alcohol: three things that eventually set them apart from the rest of the animals. We can see this lead to the argument, inherent in the episode, that man will always be driven towards such things as private property, another evident criticism of Marxist belief. The materialistic understanding of society, however, is a nod to Marxist analysis, though the notion that men are so different that can not fully be understood is but another criticism.

Orwell did, however, want the tendencies that lead some men to guide societies and other men to obey them, to fade away; in effect, he wanted to change the state of nature that led to hierarchal social structures. As critic Alex Zwerdling eloquently puts it in Orwell and the Left: 'The born victim and the born ruler; each acts his part in an almost predestined way. The victim's humility and shame become reflex responses; the ruler shifts uneasily between arbitrary assertion of power and the guilty gestures of charity. Orwell suggests that no amount of good will on either side can make this fundamental property of power tolerable. The task is to shatter the molds from which such men are made'.

Orwell's disgust of the social structure that separated men and economic classes from one another can clearly be seen in an episode from Down and Out in Paris, where, as a dishwasher, Orwell noticed how social hierarchies developed everywhere. Referring to the fact that no workers in the hotel where he washed dishes could wear moustaches, he writes:

This gives some idea of the elaborate caste system existing in a hotel. Our staff, amounting to about a hundred and ten, had their prestige graded as accurately as that of soldiers, and a cook or a waiter was as much above a plongeur as a captain above a private.

Calling the set-up of the hotel staff a 'caste system, Orwell implies that there is very little chance for upward mobility where one is employed as well the implicit nature of contentment within that system. Those at the bottom, like the horses in Animal Farm change very little when there are changes at the top of the system because they just want to do their job; maybe they want to do their job a little harder now, but nothing else changes, especially their place in society after realizing Napoleon is just another Mr. Jones.

They are the proletariat, like the plongeur in the hotel who only worries about keeping his job to keep his children fed and his days filled. It is a proletariate quite different than Marx's; it is a proletariate unaware of a lot going on around them and preoccupied with the notion of bringing home the bacon. Orwell's critique of Marx is that Marx believed too much in a rationalized, educated proletariate that, asserts Orwell, can never exist. To Orwell, the proletariate is too easily swayed by its leaders as well as its guiding ideologies. As mentioned previously, they are the leaders which Orwell detests just as much as a society that allows them to emerge. In Animal Farm, the proletariate is not very swift in recognizing its situations. The animals, indoctrinated by a discourse of revolution put forth by the pigs and perpetuated by the Seven Commandments painted on the barn wall and the song of the revolution, 'Beasts of England', do not realize that as the state of their society changes every time the discourse gets molded by a leader, it stays the same. The Seven Commandments, by the end of the novel, eventually become one commandment and 'Beasts of England', a song taught to the animals by old Major, is replaced by 'Animal Farm', a song taught by Minimus, the poet. 'The replacement of 'Beasts of England' Marks the crucial change from collective longing for a freer existence to a government-enforced enthusiasm for a utopia officially proclaimed as now achieved' (Twayne, 37). It is the replacement of 'Beasts of England' where Old Major's (Marx's) Animalism, represented by its lyrics, graphically fails, succumbing to a simple song such as 'Animal Farm'. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell points out the eventual dystopian drawbacks of governmental control of the social discourse to a much further extent. In Animal Farm, it is Boxer, the hard-working horse who gives his life to the cause, who pledges his allegiance to Napoleon; his speech is indicative of the discourse fed to him day in and day out. What Ignazio Silone's Frank-and-file-Fascist thinks: 'If my leader acts in this manner, it must be right!' Boxer says aloud. 'Napoleon is always right,' intones the horse at just the crucial moment when a sign of his disapproval or even doubt might have stalled, if not thwarted, Napoleon's bid for sole power.

Boxer's trust in his leader is faulty because it is a trust in an orthodox philosophy of society such as Marxism, according to Orwell. Orwell's view on society is that of moderate Marxist. It is true that many faults are found in old Major's (Marx's) Animalism, but they are exploited so much so as to learn from them and further Orwell's own Animalism based on Marxist ideologies. Their lessons, Orwell's lessons, are that utopias such as old Major's might never exist and that an extremist ideology such as Marxism can never accomplish what it is intended to accomplish. We can see this if we look to the fact that Animalism, obviously communism, is significantly not instituted according to plan. The rebellion occurs spontaneously: once again Jones neglects to feed the animals, who break into the barn for food when they can stand it no longer. The revolution occurred not because of Marxist theory, but from a natural need, hunger. This is not to say though, that Orwell did not want change in the system.

Orwell did, like Marx, want revolutionary change to occur and agreed with the Marxist principle that rebellions would spread and hoped that they would eventually lead to new democratically Socialist societies. Orwell did not, though, believe that revolution would be successful. We see this in Animal Farm when Animalism is suppressed by farmers after word of the Rebellion and its apparent success spreads and animals turn rebellious. Though we hear little of these other societies, the idea that revolutionary social change is bound to occur in them comes in the form of what the farmers think when they listen to their animals singing Animalism's hymn, 'Beasts of England': 'Rumours of a wonderful farm, where the human beings had been turned out and the animals managed their own affairs, continued to circulate in vague and distorted forms, and throughout that year a wave of rebelliousness ran through the countryside. Bulls which had always been tractable suddenly turned savage, sheep broke down hedges and devoured the clover The human beings could not contain their rage when they heard [Beasts of England] Any animal caught singing it was given a flogging on the spot And when the human beings listened to it, they secretly trembled, hearing in it a prophecy of their future doom' (45-46). The question emerging from this scene is how long can these farmers vent their anger on rebellious animals before those animals are driven so far as to rise up and rebel as Manor Farm's animals did, if they can at all. When a revolution does occur, however, as it does on Manor Farm, it eventually shatters and forms a whole new society in need of another, as it does on Manor Farm, a microcosm of revolutionary societies. It is a comment on the ever-increasing gap in the distribution of wealth and its affects on the proletariate as well as a criticism on Marxist theory of revolutions and dialectic materialism. Combined with Orwell's theories on man, 'Orwell is opposing here more than the Soviet or Stalinist experience. Both the consciousness of the workers and the possibility of an authentic revolution are denied' (Williams, 73).

In Animal Farm, Orwell, like Marx in many of writings, wrote for the common man whose place in society was of utmost importance but of little recognition. Orwell's use of satire in the form of a 'fairy story' as he calls it on its title page, to get his point across shows his indignation for hard-core ideological doctrines whose purposes are to lead to the eventual destruction of a society. Another general aim of Animal Farm as a satire is to offer itself as an example of temperate, responsible criticism, in no way a rancorous verbal assault. It is a generally sympathetic criticism of Marxism that offers to ease many of Marx's statements about man, revolution, religion and society. It is a moderate Marxism whose definitive ideas are not really stated, but whose ideology surely exists throughout the novel.

Orwell's Animalism shares many of the same beliefs as Marxism, but its political goals are not as extreme, its trust in revolution is not as confident and its (Orwell's) forecast of the future is not as utopian as Marx's. Successful Animalism is the political and social doctrine George Orwell waited years to write; often misconstrued and rarely considered more than a criticism of totalitarianism, its natural tendency to be compared with Marxism has been too often overlooked.

Ora possiamo vedere come Orwell e Silone si avvicinino per la totale avversione a ogni conformazione totalitaria del potere. Silone aveva sentito fortemente il bisogno di comunicare con sufficiente chiarezza le sue analisi sul fenomeno totalitario e sulle debolezze della democrazia scrivendo La Scuola dei Dittatori. In quell'opera si vedeva ancora una speranza; Silone aveva abbandonato la viziata politica attiva, ma credeva ancora nella importante figura di educatore che poteva avere lo scrittore; Orwell è disgustato dalle esperienza di vita ed è malato; il pessimismo in lui è totale. Il bisogno di dare forma alle sue idee sul totalitarimo sorge anche in Orwell, ma in lui trova un uomo quasi prostrato, sicuramente disilluso; Orwell allora facilmente adotta la forma del romanzo, descrivendo quella che potrebbe essere una possibile, mostruosa, futura civiltà, nel caso di excalation totalitaria.

Questo lo fa nel suo capolavoro, 1984.

Mass society nightmare: 1984

All the early work was really preparation for 1984, although I do not mean by this that the 1984 he actually wrote was the inevitable product of the earlier development. I simply mean that it seemed natural that he should ultimately give a picture of the future state, the state towards which all others were tending. That the picture he did give us was almost devoid of hope was not entirely due to the existing situation; his now deteriorating health must have hints in abundance factor. In his earlier work we can find hints in abundance of the malevolent superstate that might be building, but not until the end do we have the convinction that worst must thriumph.

is a completely rational demonstration of the victory of irrationalism in politics and human society. The corrective it needs is the irrational faith that rational behaviour will never be wholly abandoned.

The best analysis of the political basis of the society existing in 1984 is contained in the work of the system's chief enemy, Emmanuel Goldstein, and to be found in his book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. (It is doubtful that such a person as Goldstein ever existed, but he is as necessary to social discipline in the superstate of Oceania as Trotsky had been to Soviet Russia and Snowball to Animal farm) Goldstein's analysis consisted of two parts, the War Situation and the Party Control.

It is possible to state his view of the War Situation in a series of propositions. There is no doubt at all that Goldstein's alalysis is accepted as a true one by Orwell. As Goldstein's book had been in all probability written by a member of the Inner Party of Oceania, it is also an official picture of the situation.

The first proposition is that three great superstates exist and necessary exist. None desire to defeat the other. There is a permanent war but the war cannot be crucial. It is merely a struggle for possession of the equatorial quadrilateral and the northern ice-cap. The primary aim of the war is to use the products of industry without raising the general standard of living. An all-round increase of wealth would threaten the destruction of hierarchical society. Therefore the essential act of war was the destruction of the products of human labour and war accomplished destruction in a psychologically acceptable way. In each case it is a merely internal affair; each state is virtually a self-contained universe.

Another proposition is that society had always consisted of three classes, the High, the Middle and the Low and that it had always been the aim of the Middle to replace the High by recruiting the support of the Low. During the 20^th century the Middle dropped the old concepts of liberty and justice and planned to turn out the High and keep its position permanently by conscious strategy. By this time human equality had became possible and so, to the new High, it was no longer an ideal to striven for but a danger to be averted. One particular invention allowed the new aristocracy to maintain their position: this was the telescreen, transmitting and receiving simultaneously, with its consequent power over opinion. The new High realised that the secure basis for a modern oligarchy was collectivism. by this means economic inequality could become permanent.

The proles were no longer to be feared; they alone were granted intellectual liberty because they had no intellect.

Every Party member was capable of crimestop, the ability to stop short, as by instinct, of a dangerous thought. Blackwhite was the ability to believe and know that black is white. One of the chief weapons in the hands of the party was its constant alteration of the past so that every action and every policy change could be represented as completely consistent with whatever had gone before. The Party member must have no standards of comparaison and the infallibility of the party must be safeguarded. In Newspeak this thing were called doublethink. This was the power of holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accepting both of them., to reconcile contradictions.

Society was controlled by four Ministries: the Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, enterteinment, education and fine arts; the Ministry of Peace, which conducted the war; the Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order; and the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affair. The three slogans of the party were:

We can see the effect of the destruction of history on the mind of the individual when we consider Winston Smith, who was not particularly adept at doublethink. When there were no external record to refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. Some of the events you remembered had probably not happened. You found yourself remembering details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blanck periods to which you could assign nothing. Winston was unable to control his private memories which spontaneously rose in rebellion against official records. But failure in doublethink was the major treason. Doublethink was a more powerful weapon than atomic power in the control of population, and it was of most value in the control of the past. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan 'controls the future'; who controls the present, controls the past. Alteration of the past as a political weapon had been one of Orwell's subjects of study for some years.

In fact, many people today are already capable of doublethink and Orwell could also produce evidence of falsification from recent history. In 'As I Please', he referred to an announcement in a London newspaper that Maurice Thorez, French Communist Leader, was returning from Moscow where he had been living in exile for the last six years. At the most the period had been five years, but this was not an unimportant mistake: it was done to make it appear that Thorez deserted from the French army, if he did desert, a year before the war and not after the fighting had started.

In a sense the society of 1984 already exists, only it has not been systematised. Or rather, it exists in patches and these patches will spread.

There is very little doubt that manipulation of statistic goes on to a very large extent today, particularly in coutries which indulge in large-scale economic planning and where the fulfillment of the plan is a matter of social and international prestige. The Ministry of Plenty had estimated the output of boots for one quater at 145000000 pairs. The actual output had been 62.000.000 and Winston was required to correct the original forecast. The only question which remains is why it was necessary to make any alteration at all. There was no free, enquiring mind who would ever check the figure or draw public attention to a descrepancy between plan and performance. In fact, the manipulation of statistic and the very existence of a Plan at all were probably the relics of the transition period, destined to disappear.

This new society was based on power-mania, but now the appetite is for power itself. This was a characteristic of the 20^th century which Orwell had watched growing. The sheer joy in power over other people, partly sexual, seemed to be capturing large sections of humanity, particularly in the 'advanced' countries. In '1984' we see the culmination of this trend.

Love is banned, hatred rules

There are organizations, particularly for children, which canalise these emotions, which allow people to tyrannise over others in no matter how petty a way; the decent purposes of life have been blocked and forbidden.

Winston's fantasies are of no value to the State and they are symbols of the malcoordination which led to his downfall; he has lost the old decencies but he has been unsuccessful in replacing them with the new sanctions. Once you have started the descent of the slippery path it is doubtful if anything can save you. For most of the day you are in the field of vision of the telescreen, and you have no idea whether the Police have plugged in or not. Even at night you could give yourself away by a word muttered in sleep. The sensation of being watched or overheard without intermission will either conquer you entirely or bring any latent revolt into open. And that is what the Inner party want. They are not satisfied with unwilling obedience. Obedience had to be freely given or not at all.

Winston believed that the only hope of salvation lay with the proles, but he knew at the same time that they were powerless. The party naturally claimed to have liberated the proles from the capitalists, under whom they had suffered unspeackable agonies. At the same time, doublethink allowed the party to think of the proles as natural inferiors, who had to be kept in subjection. The Thought Police kept an eye on them but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with Party ideology. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to when they were required to accept longer working hours or shorter rations. Sometimes they became discontented but they had no means of focousing their discontent.

Fundamentally the whole population was at the mercy of the Government, but the Government cunningly persuaded the population that it was their servant. Just as law had been abandoned (the free state !!! ), so there was no pretence of social morality. Many of the activities which liberal bourgeois states had condemned in the capitalistic 19^th century were now revived, not because there had been a moral change but because the Government was prepared to indulge any criminal instinct if it strengthened the emotional tie between ruler and ruled. An example of this was the reintroduction of hanging as a public spectacle.

The Government naturally had a much more positive attitude towards sex than any previous one. What it could not allow was unhinibeted love between individuals. Love simply meant a loyalty stolen from the state. Therefore children were enrolled in the Anti-Sex League to prevent their sexual instincts finding a sexual outlet; they were sublimated into hate for the Party's enemies and the kind of sadistic impulses satisfied by a public hanging. The blocking of the sexual urge also had a positive value for the state as it inducted hysteria, which could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The unforgivable crime was promiscuity between Party members. The aim of the Party was really to remove all pleasure from the sexual act, as to destroy any possibility of platonic real love. The only recognised purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party.

Julia is really a symbol of the particular weakness of love, its isolation. As an emotion love is stronger than anything else in the world, but as a social force it suffers from a great disadvantage. It is purely individual in its action. Individual: a word which should not exist in a materislistic totalitarian society.

The condition of love is isolation from the rest of the world.

The last section of the book is largely concerned with Winston's tortures, his confessions, conversations with O'Brien and his punishment. Even this latest and most modern of all the societies must have its occasional human sacrifices. It is necessary that men should be outraged and broken , that now and again someone should die for the people. There is no question of reforming Winston. He knows that he has to be laid bare so that he becomes nothing, so that his bent body and empty mind can be displayed to the people as an instance of the Government's power when a man is so foolish as to set up in opposition. Winston is a kind of Wallace's head on London Bridge.

The type of person who dominated the world of 1984 would get no pleasure from seeing gentle slaves serving their masters with love and convictions. Only the infliction of physical punishment could bring a sense of fulfilled power. The rulers of 1984 are the direct heirs of Hitler and Stalin. Hitler and Stalin tortured opponents, not to kill them, but to assert power and to war others. Big Brother, or O'Brien, or the junta in general, wanted to hear Winston confess every disgusting crime, although they knew they were untrue, because they wanted him to touch rock bottom, to taste the dregs. Winston's real failure was doublethink. As O'Brien put it, he suffered from a defective memory: he was unable to remember real events and he persuaded himself that he rembered other events that had never happened. This sounds perfectly rational until we realize that the events Winston remembers actually had happened but the Party had expurged them not only from the records, not only from human memory, but in effect from actual existence. But the Party would not even accept the modifying in 'effect'. These things had never happened. Reality was not whatever happened, it was what the Party said had happened.

Winston believed that reality was something external, objective, existing in its own right, that the nature of reality was self-evident. But O'Brien maintained that reality existed in the human mind, it was the vision of the stronger: the Party.

It was intolerable that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere. It was no victory to martyrise men who maintained their defiance to the end. They only killed after they had won the victory, as a kind of celebration; earlier killings had been admissions of defeat. The mind had to be reshaped, made 'clean' before death. The original man was annihilated, scooped hollow, his capacity for love, friendship, joy of living, laughter, curiosity, courage and integrity wholly removed. He was squeezed empty and the vacuum was filled with Party essence.

The Party sought power entirely for its own sake, and power meant power over human beings. But this movement, based on its early stages on materialism, had swung to the opposite pole and acknowledged that power over humanity is power over mind. Control of matter was already absolute. But even in the midst of annihilation Winston saw his real hope. To die hating them, that was freedom.

Why did Orwell date this horrible world so early? He mentions somewhere that intellectuals tend to be correct in their forecast of the future but usually get the tempo of change wrong. This is in general true. Many critics have expressed surprise that the society depicted in 1984 should have been placed only three decades on. There is little doubt that Orwell was aware of this particular improbability, and it seems likely that it was part of his propagandist purpose. He wished to rouse people to the dangers inherent in existing political tendencies. He knew that many of his readers would still be living in 1984 and he hoped that this book would act as a stimulus, cause them to take first warning and then action to avert it.

We know, and Orwell always maintained, that totalitarianism can only be challenged by individual values. This Winston Smith was quite incapable of doing. He was a weak creature who was born to be victimised. There is truth in this but no drama. Walter Allen refers to the book's 'sheer intellectual power', but this is not enough. Herbert Read calls it mythology for the future but it is a modern fallacy to believe that a work admired by a cultural elite can ever be raised to the level of myth.

very much a product of Orwell's last pain-wracked years. Before then he had never recognised the dangers latent in totalitarian development but he had never lost hope. The best expression of his doubts about the future is to be found in a review of N. de Basily's Russia Under Soviet Rule:

'The terrifying thing about the modern disctatorship is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of human nature, which, as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that human nature is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of modern state. The radio, press-censorship, standardised education and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years and we do not yet know how successful it will be.'

This does state the vagueness of the present situation. As we look into the future we see even less than our ancestors were able to see. There are certain tendencies at work in the world which we cannot evaluate through any previous experience.

Questi sono i due più grandi scrittori, a mio parere, che mettono su carta le loro idee sulle ideologie totalitarie. Ma anche nell'antichità l'uomo si trovava a dover combattere tra due opposte istanze, la politica societaria e l'ordine in opposizione all'importanza di libertà ed individualità.