GEORGE ORWELL's SOCIALISM

Wakefield Socialist History Group:

Brian Bamford's contribution to the event at the Red Shed

yesterday discussing George Orwell & Socialism 

(a more extensive report on the other four speakers will follow):

BECAUSE the subject of this talk is specifically about Orwell's socialism I ought to say what I won't be dealing with.  Orwell is such a vast subject, and he featured on Radio 4 only this week.

I’ll only be touching on Raymond Williams's differences with regard to Orwell. With regard to the philosophical issues, and what has been called the 'Plato Problem', the 'Chomsky Problem', and the 'Orwell Problem', I do not intend to tackle these unless someone should ask a question relevant to this.

Here I'm going to try to explain how Orwell was transformed into becoming a socialist.

In 2011, I gave some talks in Newcastle, London and Bristol dedicated to the 75^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War.  About that time at a meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, the historian Professor Preston had described George Orwell’s book 'Homage to Catalonia' by saying: 

'George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a book which I would rank alongside Spike Milligan's “Adolf Hitler: My part in His Downfall”, another interesting book by a footsoldier who played a small part in a much wider conflict'.

Since then Professor Preston has cheerfully repeated this claim from time to time.  He did it at a lecture at the Imperial War Museum; on 'Start the Week' with Andrew Marr; and on Radio 3 on 'Night Waves'.

At that time in 2011, as an ethnomethodologist, I was keen to show that Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' was an eye-witness account in the tradition of an ethnography rather than an attempt at historical analysis.

In December 1936, George Orwell left England for Spain, but he was STILL unsure  whether he would participate as a soldier or as a journalist.

Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden in his book 'Orwell - an Authorised Biography' writes:

‘...[Orwell] doubted whether he had the stamina or the skill to be a good soldier. And because of the chronic weakness of his lungs, he suspected// he would be turned down for health reasons if he tried to enlist. Yet he did not rule out joining one of the Spanish political militias if they could use him.

‘But he decided that the best way to serve the cause was to observe the war and write about it for the New Statesman or some other English paper that was sympathetic to the Republican government.’

We know now that in the end Orwell opted to join the POUM Militia.  And we know that Orwell kept a journal and wrote notes in the trenches.  It is now on record that this journal was seized by the communist police from his hotel room while he was on the run sleeping on building sites in Barcelona in May 1937.

When I made reference to doing an ethnography in my Bristol talk in 2011, I was invited to explain was an ethnography was.

The definition taken from the Glossary of terms written by Simon Coleman and Bob Simpson is that:
'Ethnography is the recording and analysis of a culture or society usually based on participant-observation and resulting in a written account of a people, a place or an institution.'

Before I go on to consider its limitations and the methodological problems of what Orwell is doing here and perhaps elsewhere, let me say something to my current talk:
Timothy Garton Ash, who reported on the wars in the Balkans described Orwell's book 'Homage to Catalonia' as a gold standard in war reporting, and the journalist Paul Foot in his Guardian review of the book claimed it made him into socialist.

Yet Orwell eludes to the fact that his Spanish experiences and the good fortune to be among Spaniards turned him into a socialist.  Before that he had been described as a Tory anarchist.
About half way through the book, on page 101 of my own Penguin edition, Orwell wrote:
'I had dropped into by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.'
And he goes on:
'Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly but not all, of working-class origins, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality.'
He speaks of the sense of near perfect equality that he found up there on the Aragon front., and he says he felt he was 'experiencing a foretaste of socialism adding that he found 'ordinary class-divisions had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England.'
He writes that:
'No one was there except for us and the peasants, no one owned anyone else as his master.'

So, up there in the trenches South of the Pyrenees, Orwell concluded that for most people 'socialism means a classless society or it means nothing.'
Orwell also talks about the fashion to deny that socialism had anything to do with equality and he writes;
'In every country in the world a huge tribe of party hacks and sleek little professors are busy "proving" that socialism means no more than planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact.'
Orwell claims that 'the mystique of socialism is equality and it's this idea that attracts ordinary folk to socialism.'

That's what Orwell maintained in the 1930!
So for Orwell it was equality that mattered not left-wing Keynsianism or half-baked Fabianism.

I think it was over this distaste for 'planned state-capitalism' that Orwell and Raymond Williams differed.

So what is wrong with Orwell's book on Spain?

According to Professor Preston in the Guardian this year:
'However, limited to the time and place of Orwell's presence in Spain, Orwell situated on a quiet sector of a quiet front, his book would certainly not be there as a reliable analysis of the broader politics of the war, particularly of its international determinants.'
He clearly, says Preston, 'knew nothing of its origins or of the social crisis behind the Barcelona clashes.'
To grasp the bigger picture 'the broader politics of the war', Preston seems to be saying that to get the analysis right we will have to turn to proper historians who have the benefit of hindsight.
Perhaps the kind of historians like Gabriel Jackson, that Noam Chomsky describes and critiques in his essay 'OBJECTIVITY AND LIBERAL SCHOLARSHIP'.
In that essay, Chomsky argues that what these academic historians like Jackson tend to do is ignore the views of the workers in a struggle such as that in Spain. 

Look at what Professor Preston says about Spike Milligan's book, belittling 'footsoldiers'.  Or where he writes:
'Homage to Catalonia is a book about the Spanish war written from a narrow perspective, by someone who left out much that the professional historian could now encompass, supported as he is, by the enriched body of scholarship which has been published in Spanish, Catalan, and English... since 1996.'

With the greatest respect to Professor Preston and the rest of the community of scholars, I think we should remind ourselves of what Isaiah Berlin had to say and history and the historians.   To remind ourselves that no-one, not even Marx, managed in their powerful attempt to turn history into a science.

As an ethnomethodologist, it seems to me that history often verges on the art of advocacy.  Professor Preston's main gripe is that Orwell's book is the only book most people read about the Spanish war.

Why is Orwell's book so popular?  Why is it so widely read?

In the last few months I have just finished interviewing Joan Christopher about her husband Bill Christopher, who was a socialist and anarcho-syndicalist in the ILP, and she told me that Bill Christopher became politically transformed to socialism while serving in the Second World War.

Similarly, I have just discovered that the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was writing 'The Tractatus', while fighting in the Austrian army on the Russian front in the First World War experienced a similar transformation.  Before the war Wittgenstein had considered that he was preparing a book on logic, but after his experiences in the war he decided that he had written a book that was fundamentally ethical.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised then, that Orwell describes his transformation following his Spanish encounters thus:
'I was hardly conscious of the changes occurring in my own mind'.
Or where says on page 103 of the Penguin edition:
'I hope I can convey to you the atmosphere of the time.  The good luck of being among Spaniards with their innate decency, there ever present anarchist tinge.'
And when he writes this, unlike the 'sleek professors' and the historians, he's not trying to tell us something, he's not lecturing us as his readers, he's conveying something - he's showing us something of what it was like.  He's giving us a picture!

Orwell's memory broods over 'incidents that might seem too petty to be worth recalling':
'I am in the dug-out at Monte Pocero on the limestone ledge that serves as a bed.'
'I am... struggling to keep my balance and to tug a root of wild rosemary out of the ground.  High overhead meaningless bullets are singing.'

What Orwell is doing is showing us a picture of the underlying nature of the war.

Professor Preston feeds us facts and figures, while Orwell shows us something of the true nature of war.  Hence, 'Homage to Catalonia' is the most widely read book on the Spanish Civil War precisely because of this.

At my talk in Newcastle a lad there claimed that he'd stood where Orwell had stood on guard in Barcelona on guard on the Ramblas just opposite the Cafe Moka.  And he said that he didn't believe Orwell's account because he wouldn't have been able to see the Civil Guards across the street he was supposed to fire at.

Not being able to see everything symbolises the problem of Orwell's limitations.  The limitations of the eye-witness account; the limitation of the foot-soldier.

If we consider Tolstoy's Epilogue to 'War & Peace', we find that it was Napoleon not the foot-soldier who couldn't see the battle from where he was standing.  He couldn't see for all the smoke and dust produced in the battle.  Consequently, Napoleon had to depend on the dispatch riders whose messages were unreliable and useless, because the situation had changed in the time it had taken to reach their Emperor to get his orders.

Yet we find that at the Battle of Borodino, according to Tolstoy,  it was precisely the foot-soldiers and their morale that mattered, rather than the commands of the great man.

Regarding Orwell's lack of prior understanding of the Spanish conflict I want to say something.

I knew Vernon Richards the old editor of FREEDOM, the anarchist newspaper.  Vernon was close to Orwell in the 1930s and 40s, and he told me that Orwell didn't have much background knowledge of Spanish politics or indeed really deep understanding of the nature of the Spanish conflict before he went to Spain.

Orwell was really in the same situation as David in the Ken Loach film 'Land and Freedom'.  David was a bit of a scous bumpkin in the film, and he had to mature during the course of a two-hour film.  Yet precisely by being naive, both David, Orwell and the viewer, can begin eventually to see things as  we shall say, 'anthropologically strange'.  

Martha Gellhorn, who travelled around Spain during the Spanish Civil War reporting on events, shows us the importance of the on the spot account when she says:  'I wrote very fast, as I had to, afraid that I would forget the exact sound, smell, words, gestures, which were special to this moment and this place.'

Philp French in his Observer review of 'Land and Freedom' writes:

'David has a painful lesson that leads from naivety to maturity without making him a cynic.  He retains his belief in the essential decency of working people and their right to control their own destinies, individually and as a community.'

Hence, I believe it was an advantage from the point of view of an anthropological account that George Orwell didn't have any apriori made-up opinions when he first went to Spain.

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