Orwell and Marxism

The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell

Philip Bounds

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781845118075
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732828
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Whether as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, an advocate of patriotic Socialism or a left-wing opponent of the Soviet Union, George Orwell was the ultimate outsider in politics - insecure, scornful of orthodoxies, cussedly independent. Best known today as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell also wrote seven other full-length books and and a vast number of essays, articles and reviews. A pioneering cultural critic, he addressed a range of important issues including art, literature, 'Englishness', mass communication and the spectre of totalitarianism. Famously describing his own background as 'lower-upper-middle class', Orwell had a complex relationship with Marxism and all his work reflects the influence of British communism. In this thoughtful and original study Philip Bounds argues that Orwell's writings effectively took the form of a dialogue with the leading British Marxists of his day. Bounds shows that Orwell often agreed with the Marxists and built on their insights in his writings, while on other occasions he used his disagreements with them as the basis of his own critical position. Through close analysis of Orwell's writings as well as his historical and literary context, Bounds has produced an important study of one of the iconic writers of the 20th century. 'Orwell and Marxism' offers a thorough introduction to Orwell the intellectual, reviving his reputation as a serious cultural thinker and documenting his most important influences, as well as a convincing portrait of British Marxism and society in the 1930s and 40s.

1

THE COMMON PEOPLE

George Orwell’s writings on what he sometimes called the ‘common people’ are at the heart of his cultural criticism, since they go a long way towards explaining his reasons for becoming a socialist. As we saw in the Introduction, Orwell was a disaffected member of the ‘lower-upper-middle class’ who believed that working people possess a ‘common decency’ which is often lacking in their social superiors. His conversion to socialism stemmed from the belief that these reserves of decency can only spread outwards and permeate the whole of society if power is somehow devolved to the workers themselves. The great interest of the writings on the common people is that they show why Orwell was attracted to working-class culture in the first place. They can broadly be divided into two categories: (1) the early writings in which Orwell explored his experiences as a member of the ‘down and out’, and (2) the later work in which he defined his understanding of Englishness. The first category largely consists of a full-length work of reportage (Down and Out in Paris and London) and three major essays (‘The Spike’, ‘Clink’ and How the Poor Die’), though it is also worth looking at the so-called ‘Hop-Picking Diary’ from 1931 and the handful of letters and magazine articles which Orwell wrote at about the same time. The major works in the second category are two remarkable short books which a number of editors have downgraded to mere pamphlets: The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) and The English People (1947). This chapter provides a brief account of both these bodies of work, though it also glances at certain other writings in which Orwell evoked working-class culture in less detail – notably The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) and Homage to Catalonia (1938). In line with my thesis that Orwell’s cultural and literary criticism was often deeply influenced by the work of British communists, I will try to relate his ideas about the common people to those of Marxist contemporaries such as Edgell Rickword, A.L. Morton and Jack Lindsay. Although Orwell’s work on the down and out has relatively few parallels in communist criticism (though not, as we shall see, in communist fiction), I will argue that his account of Englishness can reasonably be seen as a response to the emphasis on ‘radical patriotism’ which defined Marxist criticism in the years of the People’s Front.

Orwell and the Underclass

When Orwell tried to explain his decision to explore the world of what we might now call the ‘underclass’, he gave the impression that his main desire was to cleanse himself of moral and political impurities by pursuing a strict programme of self-mortification. Having been corrupted by his work as an Imperial Policeman in Burma, the only way he could restore his humanity was to experience the worst conditions which the people at the bottom of society had to endure: ‘I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate…I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.’¹ However, if the element of guilt in Orwell’s decision to go ‘on the toby’ (i.e. tramping) should not be underestimated, it is nevertheless clear that other and perhaps more fundamental impulses were also at work. The sheer obsessiveness with which he donned shabby clothes and roamed through a twilight world of spikes, dirty cafés and common lodging houses suggests that at some level he actually enjoyed what he was doing. His descent into the underclass was as much a consequence of his deep romanticism as of any desire for moral improvement. Like many another sensitive public schoolboy who feels that he has been rejected by his own class, Orwell suspected that the wretched of the earth possessed a broader humanity than the people at the top of the ‘system’, and believed (obscurely at least) that he could somehow achieve redemption by immersing himself in their rambunctious, unlettered but deeply egalitarian culture. Indeed, some two or three pages after insisting that guilt was his main motive for going down and out, Orwell made a startling admission about his experiences among the tramps of London:

I was very happy. Here I was, among ‘the lowest of the low’, at the bedrock of the Western world! The class-bar was down, or seemed to be down. And down there in the squalid and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure, which seems absurd when I look back, but which was sufficiently vivid at the time.²

There is no doubt that Orwell’s adventures in the badlands of London, Paris and Kent played a crucial role in his later conversion to socialism. Although he recognised that tramps and criminals were hardly representative of the working class as a whole, it was his experience of the rough comradeship of life on the road which first convinced him that socialism provided a real solution to the moral crisis of capitalist civilisation. As such, this section explores the political significance of Orwell’s writings on the underclass by examining their three most important features: first, their barely concealed admiration for the antinomianism of the dispossessed; second, their account of the more constructive elements of tramp culture (especially its comradeship, its curious aesthetic intensities and its instinctive libertarianism); and third, their critical response to the various institutions with which the underclass most frequently comes into contact.

Outsiders are often deeply attracted to the spectacle of moral anarchy. Alienated from a society which has failed to accept them (or which has not accorded them the respect they feel they deserve), they tend to react with disproportionate enthusiasm when its most cherished values are openly defied. Although Orwell is often portrayed as the most morally incorruptible of men, he clearly took a mischievous delight in the behaviour of what we might call the underclass antinomians – those cheerfully amoral men and women who fend for themselves in difficult circumstances by resorting to all kinds of larceny, dishonesty and petty crime.³ The most memorable example of this sort of character in Orwell’s writings is probably Ginger, the ‘strong, athletic youth of twenty-six, almost illiterate and quite brainless’ who befriended Orwell when they both tramped into the Kent countryside to seek temporary employment as hop pickers.⁴ Ginger featured prominently in the ‘Hop-Picking Diary’ of 1931 and later formed the basis of the character Nobby in A Clergyman’s Daughter. Since all his efforts to lead a respectable life had ended in disaster (his wife died young and he had been forced to leave the army after injuring an eye) his only means of eking out a living was to ‘steal anything that is not tied down.’⁵ Orwell portrayed him as a sort of roguish force of nature whose thieving could only be brought under control with the greatest difficulty: ‘On several nights Ginger tried to persuade me to come and rob the church with him, and he would have done it alone if I had not managed to get it into his head that suspicion was bound to fall on him, as a known criminal.’⁶ What Orwell seemed to find especially amusing was Ginger’s extreme fecklessness, the way he invariably blew any sum of money within hours of receiving it. There was perhaps a sense in which he regarded this sort of behaviour as a salutary contrast to the penny-pinching of the dominant culture, which (as he was rapidly coming to understand) sought to reconcile the poor to their poverty by preaching the virtues of thrift. Orwell also admired the way that the underclass’s immorality was accompanied by a supreme indifference to the disdain of other people. Observing a group of prostitutes in a slummy café in St Martin’s Lane in 1931, he found it remarkable that they should be so roundly abused by the other customers and yet remain unruffled: ‘…the prostitutes did not mind much.’⁷ Like several other characters in the writings on the underclass, they had insulated themselves against society’s contempt by nurturing a state of near egolessness – theirs was the enlightenment of the gutter. It is easy to see why the young Orwell, still smarting from the humiliations of his youth and early manhood, should have been so deeply attracted to the sort of self-forgetfulness which more confident people might merely have found abject.

Orwell was obviously not suggesting that a taste for larceny and a contempt for public opinion could somehow form the basis of a new society. He knew perfectly well that all societies have ‘to demand faultless discipline and self-sacrifice’ from their members, even though absolute virtue is an ideal which no single individual can ever live up to.⁸ Yet his account of underclass antinomianism was not without its political significance. As he showed in Nineteen Eighty-Four and in some of his literary essays, especially the marvellous brief essays on Mark Twain and Tobias Smollett (to which we will return in Chapter Three), Orwell tended to regard people who challenge the prevailing morality as a specific against totalitarianism. By ordering their lives according to so uncompromising a vision of personal liberty, they serve to remind the rest of us that mindless conformity can never be justified. It is true that Orwell was not yet preoccupied with totalitarianism when he wrote about the underclass; but even in the ‘Hop Picking Diary’ (one of his least self-conscious pieces of writing) the sense of Ginger and the prostitutes in St Martin’s Lane as exemplars of English liberty still comes through strongly.

When Orwell turned his attention to the more constructive aspects of tramp culture, he began by emphasising the spirit of mutual aid which animated the lower reaches of society. While recognising that tramps could frequently be mean, selfish and narrow minded (qualities which are focused to high comic effect in the portrait of Paddy in Down and Out in Paris and London), he often portrayed their culture as a sort of miniature welfare system in which people behaved compassionately to others through choice rather than compulsion. There were two simple principles to which tramps invariably seemed to adhere. The first was that favours must always be returned. As he walked away one morning from an awful spike in Lower Binfield, Orwell was surprised to discover that ‘little Scotty’, a tramp from Glasgow to whom he had given a small amount of tobacco, insisted on repaying him with four pitifully decrepit cigarette ends:

‘Here y’are mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag-ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag-ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another – here y’are.’⁹

More importantly, Orwell also made it clear that the underclass instinctively refused to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. If someone had fallen on especially hard times, he or she deserved help as of right. Describing the men who congregated in the communal kitchen of a cheap lodging house in Pennyfields, Orwell noted that ‘There was a general sharing of food, and it was taken for granted to feed men who were out of work.’¹⁰ By focusing on the unwillingness of the tramps to make pompous moral judgements, Orwell was perhaps implying that a ruthless capacity to be honest about one’s own faults is an essential feature of the good society. Because most of the tramps in Orwell’s writings were prepared to admit their own weaknesses, their approach to the destitute was shaped by an inescapable sense of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’. They were largely innocent of the sort of cruel high-mindedness which denies assistance to anyone whose difficulties are ‘self-inflicted’ – a feature of the British welfare system in Orwell’s day as well as in ours. Since Orwell was notoriously prone to brooding on his own ‘sins both real and imagined’ (the phrase is Gordon Bowker’s),¹¹ he probably took a lot of comfort from the thought that feelings of personal inadequacy can sometimes result in greater social solidarity.

If the first principle of the tradition of literary populism to which Orwell belonged is that the common people are more compassionate than anyone else, the second is that they are often more fully alive as well. Orwell’s writings on the underclass teem with characters whose aesthetic capacities seem far greater than those of their social superiors. There is the ‘pale and consumptive-looking’ youth who gives impassioned recitals of poetry in the kitchen of a common lodging house on the Southwark Bridge Road, dropping every ‘h’ and modulating nearly every ‘a’ into an ‘i’: ‘A voice so thrilling ne’er was ’eard/In Ipril from the cuckoo bird’.¹² There is the self-obsessed young Parisian called Charlie who entertains his drinking partners with highly improbable Gothic reminiscences, most of them about the tragic consequences of love: ‘Alas, messieurs et dames, women have been my ruin, beyond all hope my ruin.’¹³ And, most remarkably of all, there is the disabled pavement artist called Bozo whose story is told in detail in the second part of Down and Out in Paris and London.¹⁴ Bozo had an extraordinary ability to pursue his cultural and artistic interests in the most difficult circumstances imaginable. He had been obliged to take up pavement artistry or ‘screeving’ on London’s Embankment at some point in the early 1920s, shortly after sustaining a horrific injury to his foot while working as a housepainter (he had gone to work drunk and fallen over forty feet from a stage). He lived in terrible poverty for most of the year but his pictures were always meticulously drawn. He invariably used ‘proper colours’ rather than ordinary chalks and specialised in topical cartoons. (Interestingly enough, some of these cartoons expressed a subversive message by depicting social forces in symbolic form: ‘Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a rabbit marked Labour.’)¹⁵ If Orwell was impressed by his commitment to art, he seemed positively awestruck by his deep knowledge of astronomy. One night, resting in the alcove of a bridge in Lambeth, he listened in astonishment as Bozo rhapsodised about the stars and constellations above them: ‘From the way he spoke he might have been an art critic in a picture gallery.’¹⁶ He found it especially noteworthy that this down-at-heel aestheticism seemed to be the expression of a deep need for personal liberty. Whereas many destitutes had effectively sunk to the level of their surroundings, leading miserable lives which revolved around begging for food and cigarette ends, Bozo was determined to create an inner space in which he could be temporarily free from the brute realities of his everyday circumstances. There are few more moving passages in Down and Out than the one in which Bozo tells Orwell that: ‘You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you’re all right.”’¹⁷ This is another area in which Orwell’s work on the underclass clearly anticipates his later concern with totalitarianism. As we shall see in Chapter Five, Orwell came to believe that the thing which most obviously distinguished Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany from earlier authoritarian regimes was their ability to invade the inner lives of the people they governed. Instead of compelling obedience through the threat of force (though this was obviously important) they exercised the sort of mind control which made it almost literally impossible for anyone to question the official ideology. By erecting an aesthetic barrier between himself and his miserable surroundings, Bozo was displaying precisely the sort of resistance to hostile external influences which Orwell thought increasingly rare in the age of the dictators. In this sense he was a distant relative of Winston and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, though one trusts that his rebellion proved longer lasting and more successful than theirs.¹⁸

Why exactly were men like Bozo able to sustain an aesthetic approach to life while living in such squalor? Orwell did not give a clear answer to this question, though at times he implied that they had been forced to turn inwards by their obvious inability to pursue the holy grail of wealth. In an industrial society which usually subordinates spiritual well-being to the accumulation of material goods, Orwell seemed to be saying, Bozo and his friends were at least spared the indignity of scurrying around in search of the latest consumer durables. Their greater sensitivity to the ‘surface of the earth’ was a direct consequence of their complete exclusion from the rituals of the market.¹⁹ Orwell also implied that the underclass enjoyed an advantage over everyone else by being forced to create a culture for themselves. In a remarkable passage towards the end of Down and Out, he described the way that tramps would often while away the time by telling each other long and elaborate stories – stories about ghosts, gruesome deaths and rebellions against the existing order. He found it especially striking that the tramps would often go to great lengths to rewrite historical anecdotes so that criminals, rebels and other misfits seemed more successful than they actually were. This was nothing if not an active approach to storytelling. One tramp insisted that the Scottish robber Gilderoy had not been put to death but had actually ‘captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him.’²⁰ Another seemed to believe that the Great Rebellion had been an insurrection of the common people against the ruling class. The information which the tramps used in their stories had not been derived from the media but had been handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. At a time when most people relied on the culture industry for their entertainment, the tramps were sustaining an oral (and oppositional) tradition which perhaps went back as far as the Middle Ages. Orwell’s brief comments on this tradition would not have been out of place in the later work of the great communist writer A.L. Lloyd, who provided the British Folk Revival with its guiding ideology in the first 15 years after the War.²¹ If the thesis of this book is that the British communists often exercised a deep influence on Orwell, this is arguably a case of Orwell’s work anticipating the later concerns of the communists.

There is one other theme in Orwell’s writings on the underclas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Common People
• 2 The Politics of Mass Communication
• 3 Literature and Commitment
• 4 Reforming English Culture
• 5 The Totalitarian Future
• Appendix 1 Orwell as his Own Critic
• Appendix 2 Biographical Details
• Notes