Orwell and the British Left

Abstract

According to his own last words on the subject, just before his death, Orwell was a supporter of Socialism and of the British Labour Party which had swept to power in 1945. Before then, for most of his writing career, certainly from The Road to Wigan Pier in 1937 onwards, George Orwell was an avowed proponent of socialism, although his conceptions of what that meant certainly changed over the years. Despite his own unequivocal and often expressed views, the popularity of the Orwell 'brand' has led many people to misrepresent his views since his death, and to appropriate his prestige for their own political projects. That was typified by the introduction to the most popular edition of Nineteen Eighty-Four in the US, which quotes him accurately as saying that all his work 'was against totalitarianism', while in a somewhat Orwellian manner cutting out his important following phrase 'and for democratic socialism'. Since his death of course, other people's ideas of socialism have also changed, and even geography has an effect. Socialism will have entirely different connotations, for example, for West Europeans, East Europeans and for Americans, as the truncated Orwell quote would suggest. This chapter briefly traces Orwell's political development in the context of the British socialist politics of his era and shows how at an early stage he defined himself specifically as a 'democratic socialist', thus intending to distance himself, and indeed socialism itself, from the various totalitarian tendencies that claimed, spuriously in his view, to be socialist.