George Orwell and his Political Views

George Orwell's books - especially Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm - are written against totalitarianism and also against Communism from the point of view of an ardent socialist.

Orwell thought that all political theories and ideologies - except socialism - are hopeless and disillusioning. But Orwell did not mean the utopian Socialism, but the realistic view of this political line and his aim was to split the two types of socialism and to establish the realistic one. He said, that Socialist did not claim that they could make the world perfect, but they were trying to improve it. He also argued that if there were no more very rich and no more very poor people, such a society would still have a vast number of other problems to solve, because a society which is balanced in wealth, is not a perfect society. In Orwell's point of view most of the labour parties of Europe were just parties in the hand of trade unions, that were concerned just of local problems and especially wages. He judged that real socialism can just be successful in Europe, when there is something like the United States of Europe, because it would include half the skilled industrial workers of the world. His dream continued that Europe then will be an example for the whole world and that socialism - real socialism and not totalitarian communism - will spread around the world. Although he was as anticommunist as anti-totalitarian he did not criticise the Soviet Union, because he could not clearly see, what was behind this system of society. So he wrote in an essay that the people of the USSR are the hungriest, but at the same time the best fed, that these people are most advanced and most backward and that they are the happiest and the most miserable as well. He then hoped very strongly that the world will recognise Stalin's policy not as clever, but merely stupid and in best case opportunistic. While writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1948 he was fully convinced that the Communist revolution in Moscow was just a failed experiment, because the Communists got a permanent ruling caste, which was neither elected nor recruited by birth, but by adoption. For this reason they had to rule the country in a totalitarian style. If they had not done so, the opposition would have grown and they would have criticised the whole system. Orwell did not like Communism as well, because he saw that the Communists always had to find scapegoats to hide their own failure and their own errors.

Orwell also was a pioneer of the left wingers, because he said that the Communism and Fascism are from the psychological point of view more or less the same. He admit that they were different in their beginning but the older the grow the more similar became the regimes on both sides. He stated that both sorts of regimes began to expropriating and nationalising the industry. Orwell saw in the Communist as well as in the Fascist leaders just people who were greedy for power and that their political views did not matter a lot so long the meanings promised increase of power.

His experiences in the Spanish civil war reinforced his view on the Communists, the Fascist and authoritarian respectively totalitarian regimes in general. He saw that their only aim was to get the power over Spain and that they did not fight for any particular form of society to help the people to increase their life standard.

All contents © by Robert Koller