Orwell fought in a Marxist militia (the POUM) during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists, and got a bullet to the neck for it. He then had to quickly flee Spain while still recovering from the wound when the Stalinist Marxist-Leninist faction turned on both the Marxists and the Anarchists, and began to round them up for imprisonment or execution, justifying the betrayal by calling them ‘secret fascists’ that were somehow collaborating with the enemy (which was obviously absurd).
That event fully soured Orwell on Marxist-Leninist authoritarian communism, inspiring both Animal Farm and 1984, as well as motivating him to make that list of ‘communists’ which he thought sympathetic to authoritarianism and the USSR. I can’t say I would’ve made that same choice, but I can certainly understand why he would’ve wanted to prevent USSR collaborators from gaining more power after what he’d directly experienced.
Saying that, as with most figures of that time, he also had some pretty fucking bad takes, such as being pretty homophobic and antisemitic, and may have included some people on that list for being either of those things (he also possibly could’ve written that list while pretty deluded with advanced tuberculosis, as some later figures have postulated). That’s not to say we should throw out the baby with the bath-water, otherwise we’d also have to dismiss the entire works of most historical figures, such as Bakunin (Antisemite, racist) or Marx (Antisemite, Racist), and certainly Engels (Racist, Antisemite) instead of sifting the good from the bad (though Engels in particular has little to offer, other than justifications for authoritarianism).
To build on this, no matter who you are, or who your leftist fave is, they have problems. There are aspects of revolutionary thought where they are failing their comrades either through having a biased blindspot or through experiencing some trauma that makes it hard for them to trust.
Me for example, I have trouble trusting and will occasionally take an ungracious approach to someone because when you spend your whole life fighting for the survival of your community, you lose patience sometimes. It’s something I take effort to ensure I’m being constructive, but sometimes I fail. And as for my lefty fave, he believed that all people’s morality needed to be rooted in religious faith and denounced agnostics through most of his life up until his later years when he started making more room in his heart for them.
The key isn’t to look for perfect figures to idolize, but instead to look for people who did their level best to defy the status quo in their time. Because the thing to realize to is that somewhere out there is someone you could inspire to action through your defiance of your own status quo. Because that’s the thing I’ve learned about leftist organizing in my time on this earth: all of us are someone else’s hero, we just don’t realize it. So instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, highlight the positive aspects and present the issues and failures.
For example, for all of their talk of class consciousness, the ML Union organizers of the 1930s threw out a lot of the prior 50 years of racial consciousness that the US labor movement had built, making the unions long term more fragile. They were correct that they needed to get all the laborers on side to succeed, particularly in the southern coal fields, however they failed to realize that they couldn’t do this by recruiting the Klan to terrorize Black people into joining the union. A mere 30 years later, and the union was no longer advocating for workers rights, and was instead was disrupting laborers from organizing to gain more rights and protections (such as respirators to prevent the proliferation of black lung that was associated with the proliferation of mechanized drilling).
In conclusion: was George Orwell perfect? No. But we don’t waste that much time talking about Karl Marx being a sex pest, now, do we?
Orwell fought in a Marxist militia (the POUM) during the Spanish Civil War against Franco’s fascists, and got a bullet to the neck for it. He then had to quickly flee Spain while still recovering from the wound when the Stalinist Marxist-Leninist faction turned on both the Marxists and the Anarchists, and began to round them up for imprisonment or execution, justifying the betrayal by calling them ‘secret fascists’ that were somehow collaborating with the enemy (which was obviously absurd).
That event fully soured Orwell on Marxist-Leninist authoritarian communism, inspiring both Animal Farm and 1984, as well as motivating him to make that list of ‘communists’ which he thought sympathetic to authoritarianism and the USSR. I can’t say I would’ve made that same choice, but I can certainly understand why he would’ve wanted to prevent USSR collaborators from gaining more power after what he’d directly experienced.
Saying that, as with most figures of that time, he also had some pretty fucking bad takes, such as being pretty homophobic and antisemitic, and may have included some people on that list for being either of those things (he also possibly could’ve written that list while pretty deluded with advanced tuberculosis, as some later figures have postulated). That’s not to say we should throw out the baby with the bath-water, otherwise we’d also have to dismiss the entire works of most historical figures, such as Bakunin (Antisemite, racist) or Marx (Antisemite, Racist), and certainly Engels (Racist, Antisemite) instead of sifting the good from the bad (though Engels in particular has little to offer, other than justifications for authoritarianism).
To build on this, no matter who you are, or who your leftist fave is, they have problems. There are aspects of revolutionary thought where they are failing their comrades either through having a biased blindspot or through experiencing some trauma that makes it hard for them to trust.
Me for example, I have trouble trusting and will occasionally take an ungracious approach to someone because when you spend your whole life fighting for the survival of your community, you lose patience sometimes. It’s something I take effort to ensure I’m being constructive, but sometimes I fail. And as for my lefty fave, he believed that all people’s morality needed to be rooted in religious faith and denounced agnostics through most of his life up until his later years when he started making more room in his heart for them.
The key isn’t to look for perfect figures to idolize, but instead to look for people who did their level best to defy the status quo in their time. Because the thing to realize to is that somewhere out there is someone you could inspire to action through your defiance of your own status quo. Because that’s the thing I’ve learned about leftist organizing in my time on this earth: all of us are someone else’s hero, we just don’t realize it. So instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, highlight the positive aspects and present the issues and failures.
For example, for all of their talk of class consciousness, the ML Union organizers of the 1930s threw out a lot of the prior 50 years of racial consciousness that the US labor movement had built, making the unions long term more fragile. They were correct that they needed to get all the laborers on side to succeed, particularly in the southern coal fields, however they failed to realize that they couldn’t do this by recruiting the Klan to terrorize Black people into joining the union. A mere 30 years later, and the union was no longer advocating for workers rights, and was instead was disrupting laborers from organizing to gain more rights and protections (such as respirators to prevent the proliferation of black lung that was associated with the proliferation of mechanized drilling).
In conclusion: was George Orwell perfect? No. But we don’t waste that much time talking about Karl Marx being a sex pest, now, do we?
Well said, Quill. :)