1984

[(Re)volution]

While being a work of fiction, anyone who lives in the U.S who reads the part of the book stating Goldstein's opposition tot he party knows that it all rings true for modern society. Many people look at this booka s being anti-communist but it is really an anti-totalitarian statement from George Orwell who was himself a socialist. It holds a strong message and a resonating feeling that alot of the novel represents something that is very real today.

[Karl Belin]

You're very correct. Orwell based Goldstein on Trotsky. To be very specific, Orwell was a Trotskyist. One of his best works, which I love, is Homage to Catalonia, his memoirs of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War.

[P.O.U.M]

Homage to Catalonia was, I thought his best work.

Also, I wouldnt say Orwell was specifically a Trotskyist. But after the Spanish Civil War Orwell definitly sympathized with Trotskyism.

[Karl Belin]

I could have over-simplified a bit, but yes, Orwell was definitely a Trotskyist sympathizer.

[Karl Belin]

Hey comrades,

I looked up a bit more on Orwell's political views... Here are some excerpts from the wikipedia article on Orwell:

Orwell and the Spanish Revolution:

In December 1936, Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War against Francisco Franco's Nationalist uprising. He went as part of the Independent Labour Party contingent, a group of some 25 Britons who joined the militia of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), a revolutionary socialist party with which the ILP was allied. The POUM, along with the radical wing of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT (the dominant force on the left in Catalonia), believed that Franco could be defeated only if the working class in the Republic overthrew capitalism — a position fundamentally at odds with that of the Spanish Communist Party and its allies, which (backed by Soviet arms and aid) argued for a coalition with bourgeois parties to defeat the Nationalists. By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the communist-run International Brigades by chance — but his experiences, in particular his witnessing the communist suppression of the POUM in May 1937, made him sympathetic towards the POUM line and turned him into a lifelong anti-Stalinist. During his military service, Orwell was shot through the neck and was lucky to survive. His book Homage to Catalonia describes his experiences in Spain.

Orwell's Political Views:

Orwell's political views changed over time, but there can be no doubt that he was a man of the left throughout his life as a writer. His time in Burma made him a staunch opponent of imperialism, and his experience of poverty while researching Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier turned him into a socialist. "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," he wrote in 1946.

It was Spain, however, that played the most important part in defining his socialism. Having witnessed at first hand the suppression of the revolutionary left by the Communists, Orwell returned from Catalonia a staunch anti-Stalinist and joined the Independent Labour Party.

At the time, like most other left-wingers in the United Kingdom, he was still opposed to rearmament against Hitlerite Germany — but after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the outbreak of the Second World War, he changed his mind. He left the ILP over its pacifism and adopted a political position of "revolutionary patriotism". He supported the war effort but detected (wrongly as it turned out) a mood that would lead to a revolutionary socialist movement among the British people. "We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary," he wrote in Tribune, the Labour left's weekly, in December 1940.

By 1943, his thinking had moved on. He joined the staff of Tribune as literary editor, and from then until his death was a left-wing (though hardly orthodox) democratic socialist. He canvassed for the Labour Party in the 1945 general election and was broadly supportive of its actions in office, though he was sharply critical of its timidity on certain key questions and was also harshly critical of the pro-Soviet stance of many Labour left-wingers.

Although he was never either a Trotskyist or an anarchist, he was strongly influenced by the Trotskyist and anarchist critiques of the Soviet regime and by the anarchists' emphasis on individual freedom. This is a central truth about Orwell. Many of his closest friends in the mid-1940s were part of the small anarchist scene in London.

In his last years, Orwell was, unlike several of his comrades around Tribune, a fierce opponent of the creation of the state of Israel. He was also an early proponent of a federal Europe.

[proletarianrevo]

Hi Karl and everyone else...!

Orwell was never a Trotskyist, as the post on Wikpedia correctly states. But he was an anti-Stalinist and this shines through in all his works. I think the best book to read if you want to understand his political thinking, is Homage to Catalonia. Its really a masterpiece, in the sense that it gives such a good eye-witness report on the events in Spain at that time, the mood, etc.
But in that book, and especially in his epilogue, you will find his differences with Trotsky very clearly. Orwell did not believe that it was possible to win the civil war against the fascist, he thought that the battle was decided beforehand because of the military technology that the fascist possesed, aided by Germany and Italy.

This led him to a pessimistic world-view that you can see so clearly in 1984. Though the book definitely is a litterary masterpiece, it is really a reflexion of a man that has lost hope in humanity.

I think that another extremely recommendable book by Orwell is "Animal Farm" (also known as "Comrade Napoleon"). Every twist and turn in this essay is really hinting at the Russian Revlution, the comparision with Trostky even shinning more clearly through the picture here, but it is highly originally and living written. A must read!

[proletarianrevo]

And oh yeah, definitely you can see some aspects of 1984 becoming thrue in the US statemachinery today. "New language" : War agaiunst terrorism signifies torture of prisoners....There you have it!!!