The debate over Orwell's "1984"

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Thirty-five years ago the British writer George Orwell published 1984, the classic dystopian novel of a future society run by a ruthless party dictatorship. In this nightmarish book, Orwell's imaginary country of Oceania exists in a state of permanent warfare with two rival superpowers; life has become mechanical and inhuman under the total surveillance of a dictator called "Big Brother"; history books are rewritten and old photographs doctored to accommodate governmental changes in policy; and society is highly stratified with a class of "proles" brainwashed by mass culture at the bottom, and an "Inner Party" elite at the top. and Podhoretz's claim is that an octogenarian Orwell, if alive today, would be opposed to the antimissiles movement in Europe and a partisan of U.S. foreign policy. Hitchens, of course, has no difficulty in providing plenty of documentation to show that Orwell was vehemently anticapitalist, absolutely opposed to making anti-Stalinism the pretext for imperialist adventures, against nuclear weapons, suspicious of the growing power of the United States, and anti-Zionist.

• Yet there is an idealization of Orwell in Hitchens' defense that probably reflects the limitations of the confused social democratic politics he espouses—a reformist outlook incapable of realizing the ages"-defying conventional notions of genre and characterization in order to dramatize ominous social trends in fascist, Stalinist, and even democratic capitalist societies. However, in Orwell's tarian" social formation, not unlike James Burnham's prognosis in The Managerial Revolution (1941).

Thus the real problem with 1984 as a work of art. intended by its author to warn and to educate is that, on the level of social and political analysis, it inspires fear of the future as much as it illuminates dangerous trends in the present. It is true, as Paul Siegel demonstrates in an excellent chapter on Orwell in Revolution and the 20th-Century Novel (1979), that by the end of the book the "proles" are depicted as holding out the best hope for the future of humanity. But I believe most readers of 1984 are overwhelmed by a feeling that the logic of social movements advocating party organization, economic centralization, and planning, is toward some sort of "totalitarianism" _ a misrepresentation by Orwell that can only leave us unorganized and helpless in the face of the complex and oppressive social forces of our time. Furthermore, in his narrative and imagery, Orwell conflates features of Stalinism into fascism to create what political theorists call a "unitotalitarianism" model, most IN FACT BIG BROTHER DOESNT GIVE A DAMN It Papado famously depicted in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). This view, expressed more crudely in the epithets "Red Fascism" and "CommuNazi, " makes similarities in the political superstructure of radically different social formations the decisive factor in judging their historic nature and future evolution, which is also an ideological underpinning of Reagan's reactionary foreign policy based on a specious distinction between "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" countries.

One of the most useful contributions of Leon Trotsky to contemporary Marxist theory is precisely in the area of disintegrating such ideological specifications as the unitotalitarian model, in order to disclose the authentic character of social formations—past, present, and in the process of consolidation. In The Revoluton Betrayed (1937), Trotsky did acknowledge that, at least in terms of political structure, Stalin's dictatorship bore a real resemblance to German fascism: "The U.S.S.R. minus the social HOMESTEAD to lower wages during the past several years, especially since the beginning of this decade and the election of President Keagan.

But the other more important and decisive reason for the failure of the union movement to organize any largescale fightback is the class collaboration policy of the present union leaders. In addition to offering no class-struggle strategy to fight concessions, they have kept the workers trapped in the political maze of the Democratic and Republican parties. Until the workers find new leadstructure of the October Revolution [the residue of nationalized industry and planned economy] would be a fascist regime." Nevertheless, he also pointed out that this residue of the Bolshevik-led mass upsurge, which had passed through a period of widespread workers' control and democratic rights previously unknown to the Russian population, meant that the USSR and similar societies had a profoundly contradictory character. In his writing Trotsky provided the most cogent theorization of the USSR;s progressive and reactionary features that we have.

In recent scholarship, the most comprehensive defense of Trotsky's ideas on postcapitalist societies is contained in volume Il of Ernest Mandel's Marxist Economic Theory (1968). In recent political practice, these same ideas have been verified in the struggle of Polish Solidarity to throw out the bureaucratic misrulers of Poland and institute authentic workers' democracy. Furthermore, the experiences of the Cuban Revolution, the Nicaraguan Revolution, and the Maurice Bishop phase of the Grenadian Revolution, also seem to confirm Trotsky's view that social transformations in economically underdeveloped countries are not fated to duplicate the Soviet pattern.

Orwell probably intended to frighten readers of 1984, but I doubt that he set out to purposely mystify them. That 1984 frequently does mystify is probably a consequence of his own intellectual limitations—outstanding artists are not necessarily competent social theorists— as well as a result of the ideological crisis of the postwar era for radical intellectuals, many of whom have lost their bearings to a greater degree than Orwell. Today we can see that, despite its artistic merits and the original intentions of its author, 1984 continues to lend itself to abuse by a new generation of mystifiers because for many people the world has become a very frightening place. Wars are already in progress in Central America and the Middle East; there is the imminent threat of nuclear holocaust; and a brutal offensive against the standard of living of the U.S. working class is well under way.

But it does not follow that 1984 should simply be rejected as one more fear-inspiring mystification, or that revolutionary socialists should naively try to appropriate Orwell for our cause without confronting the problematical features of his politics. Instead, a special New Year's pledge might be in order for 1984: Marxists should make a greater effort than ever before to reach the U.S. working class with an accurate and intelligible analysis of the nature and dynamic of, as well as the appropriate strategies for changing, the complex social formations of our time. ers who can work their way out if this trap, there is little likelihood that 1 solution to the jobs problem and to rising prices will be found in the union movement.

For the moment, the changes in the economy are providing great gains to the bosses. But the resulting transformations in the conditions of work are also producing a new sense of solidarity among workers, which is necessary for the development of fighting trade union and working-class political leadership in this country.

Socialist Action January 1984 11

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view, all of these systems tend in the direction of becoming the same "totali-