Why reread ‘Animal Farm‘? I could spin you a line that the novel has a new importance in our post-Brexit world, but the honest answer is that my list of reviews looks a bit sparse without this novel. I can’t really claim to have read extensively across the great novels written in English without including ‘Animal Farm’ can I?

At the same time I was interested to see how it had changed. To be clear, I don’t mean the words on the page will have changed, of course. But all literature exists in a specific cultural context, and as that context has changed dramatically since ‘Animal Farm’ was first published, and even since I first read it (in the 70’s, I guess) the novel is bound to be different.

When first published the novel was read as an outspoken attack on Stalinism. It’s hard to argue against this reading – Orwell confirmed that interpretation himself in various articles and in an introduction to the novel which was ultimately only published much later. But if the novel only has a historically specific interpretation, as a commentary on the now defunct Soviet Union, then is it any longer of interest? When written in 1943 and ’44, opposition to Stalinism was an inconvenient position to hold. Stalin was our brave ally, pushing the Nazis back into Germany after having endured horrors during the previous years of the war. It was a curious time to be focussing on how Stalin had betrayed the revolution. By the time the novel was published the world had changed entirely. Hitler was gone, the war in the Far East was just over, and the first few days of the new Cold War had begun. All of a sudden attacks on Stalin were more than fashionable, they were useful, and ‘Animal Farm’s anti-Stalinism went from being something of an embarrassment to be promoted.

‘Animal Farm‘ is still taught in schools as a reductive exercise in transcribing Russian history into a farmyard parable. In this reading Snowball = Trosky, Napoleon = Stalin, and errr, then it begins to get a bit tricky. Is Old Major, the pig who prophesises the coming of animalism, Marx, or Lenin? He can’t be Lenin surely, because he dies before the revolution, whereas Lenin very definitely didn’t, but many guides will tell you he is an amalgam of the two. This difficulty – in drawing precise parallels between the novel and Russian history – extends to the events of the novel. An early review, in the New Republic (published in 1946) observed:

” The young dogs are alone selected for schooling; later they appear as the secret police. Is this a picture of Soviet education? The pigs not only keep the best food for themselves, but also become drunkards, taking over the pasture reserved for retirement of the superannuated in order to raise the necessary barley. Of course prohibition was abolished early in the revolution, but have the leaders drunk too much and has social insurance been abolished? There is a pathetic incident when Boxer, the sturdy and loyal old work horse, is sent off to be slaughtered and turned into dog food and bone meal, under the pretext that he is being hospitalized. Just what part of Soviet history corresponds to this?”.

While this reading is overly literal, it is the one readers are almost always encouraged to adopt – but not too far. X = Y when it works, but when Z = A, B and a bit of C, then we must not over-simplify, this is a parable after all. That’s having your cake and eating it surely?

If the ‘message’ or moral of ‘Animal Farm‘ is that all violent revolutions are doomed to failure, Orwell fails to tell us why. They just are. The animal’s revolution is betrayed because the pigs are greedy and selfish, and at the same time cleverer than the other animals. There is little here to help the reader understand the inherent problems with revolution itself. In this reading Orwell is presented as arguing for the status quo, with perhaps some incremental improvements in the lives of the animals/worker to be granted by the bosses when it suits them. It is hard to square this reading with Old Major’s scathing analysis of the wrongs animals suffer under Mr Jones.

“And even the miserable lives we lead are not allowed to reach their natural span…. no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end. You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. To that horror we all must come—cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone. Even the horses and the dogs have no better fate. You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds. As for the dogs, when they grow old and toothless, Jones ties a brick round their necks and drowns them in the nearest pond.” (1.10)

This is not demagoguery, it is genuine passion, even if the comments about Boxer foreshadows his eventual fate at the hands of the pigs.

Major has a vision of what life might be like free from human oppression:

“Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labour would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: Rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know, as surely as I see this straw beneath my feet, that sooner or later justice will be done. Fix your eyes on that, comrades, throughout the short remainder of your lives! And above all, pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious.”

This message, the argument for revolution, for never giving up, resonates just as strongly as the conclusion that all revolutions will ultimately fail. It carries more conviction and passion. Orwell obviously wasn’t a revolutionary socialist, but he wasn’t a conservative either, even if his texts are sometimes used to support right-wing positions he would not have agreed with. Famously he wrote in 1946 that:

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 (i.e. since his involvement in the Spanish Civil War) has been written ….against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.” (Why I Write).  In 1946 the left had been profoundly compromised by its support for Stalinism, and history has come down on Orwell’s side on that issue. In reframing the choice – between totalitarianism and democratic socialism – when most thoughts were focussed on the battle against fascism – Orwell was ahead of his time. In 2018 we face a different set of choices. Few people now have any illusions about what was the USSR, but the “evils of this life” remain as pressing as ever. What Orwell would have made of Trump and Brexit I can’t imagine.