Book Review

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1984 was intended to be a fantasy; the reviewer who recommended it to Orwell's publisher in London called it a "horror novel." But so much of the social reality of the previous two decades was embodied in the book, especially the brutal dictatorships of Hitler and Stalin and the devastating atrocities of World War Il, that many readers took 1984 as a prophecy. Now that the year 1984 has literally arrived, symposia on the book are being held across the country, and leading magazines such as Newsweek, Time, New Republic, and Harper's have been running articles discussing ways in which the author's predictions have or have not come true.

As might be expected, the popular press in the United States is using Orwell's book for anti-Communist purposes, amalgamating Oceania with the Soviet Union and other postcapitalist societies that have come to be ruled by bureaucratic dictatorships. More fairminded commentators, however, know that Orwell, who was ill with tuberculosis when he wrote the book and died in 1950 at the age of 46, was not only a fierce anti-Stalinist but also a committed socialist who left the following death-bed protest against the use of his novel for reactionary procapitalist purposes:

"My recent novel 1984 is not intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. .. • Totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences."

Yet this statement is not without certain ambiguities, such as a tendency to equate Communism and Fascism in a single social category called "totalitarianism." This is why we have in the January and February 1983 issues of Harper's the peculiar spectacle of Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, a neoconservative, and Nation contributor Christopher Hitchens, a liberal socialist, debating each other to appropriate Orwell's legacy for their own particular ideological purposes. • The neoconservative case is a bit farfetched, more a function of the audacity of this influential and well-heeled bunch of right-wingers than of sound scholarly appraisal. The neoconservatives consist mainly of ex-socialists who became proNixon in 1972 and pro-Reagan in 1980. To some extent their ideological mentor is the philosopher Sidney Hook, a one-time revolutionary socialist who, in the 1950s, became a specialist in mobilizing liberal-sounding arguments for reactionary ends. Recently the neoconservatives, organized in the Committee for the Free World, established an "Orwell Press" to propagandize for their ideas, the often worthy sentiments of some of its adherents. Ever since the Marxist literary critic Raymond Williams published his sharply critical book, George Orwell (1971), leftists have had to look more circumspectly at the paradoxical legacy of the novelist. In the mid-1930s Orwell was so committed to a self-styled revolutionary socialism that he took up arms with PLYMPTON. IL BIG BROTHER ISN'T WATCHING' YOU the P.O.U.M. militia in Spain; yet at the advent of World War II he switched to a social patriotism so retrograde that he accused left-wing critics of the imperialist war of aiding the fascists. The point is that Orwell was a man of his time, shaped by the complex and contradictory pressures of the 1930s and 40s, and it is a dubious exercise to try to project his final political stance 30 years into the future.

Furthermore, judgements about his personal politics are not decisive for assessing the novel 1984 and its meaning for our time. Anyone familiar with Marx and Engels' predilection for the novels of the reactionary monarchist Balzac over the novels of radical socialist writers of their day, knows that works of art can transcend the particular political affinities of their authors, depending on the quality of the writer's skill, sensitivity, and vision. In the case of 1984 we have a very impressive achievement—as Irving Howe recently wrote, one that is "a classic of our age," even if not "a classic for ...Rust bowl (Continued from page 12) shop will close or whether they will be laid off. They are usually guided by their most recent experiences-the shock of suddenly finding themselves out of work with nothing in sight.

This feeling of shock has not contributed to militancy at this juncture; rather, it has instilled caution. This is what accounts in part for the failure of the union movement to organize any largescale fightback operation against the offensive by the government and the employers to undermine the unions and

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