 |
George Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 
Orwell had considerably knowledge of anarchism and anarchists, most notably from his period as a combatant in the
Spanish Civil War, described in Homage to Catalonia (1938 & 1953), where the anarchists are described very favourably.
Though after 1939 he distanced himself from anarchist views, he became a good friend to anarchists. During and after
the Second World War he came into personal contact with the anarchist movement in Britain, mixing with them at
Freedom Bookshop and in pubs, and developing friendships with well-known British anarchists of the day;
in 1946 he was billed to speak to the London Anarchist Group on Russian foreign
policy (though it's not certain the talk took place); he
contributed a book review to Freedom, and in 1949 donated a typewriter to Freedom Press, also giving financial support
to NOW, George Woodcock’s anarchist publication. ‘At most, he was an anarchist fellow-traveller, but he was one of the
best.’ (NW 1981: 4; Goodway: 346-7)
Nineteen Eighty-Four has been seen by some anarchists as a vindication of Bakunin’s opposition to the Marxist view of
the state (Woodcock 1966: 49). Like most people, anarchists have seen the novel as a masterpiece (Woodcock 1953: 150,
P.S. 1983). For Herbert Read it was ‘the most terrifying warning that a man has ever uttered’ (Read 1950: 105). For
Woodcock ‘what gives 1984 its peculiar force is the way in which it accepts Zamiatin’s hints of the continuity between
the present and the possible Utopian future, and shows that these may be not merely signs of direction, but actual parts
of a new social structure even now forming around us.’ (Woodcock 1956: 97) Anarchist writing as the year itself
approached and passed noted how accurate some of Orwell’s prognosis had been, especially how Britain had indeed
become no more than Airstrip One, an eastern outpost of the American Empire (PS 1983, Albon 1984). ‘The most
important insight of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he shared with the anarchists, that the urge to power is more durable
and more dangerous than all ideologies, has been abundantly borne out with the decay of ideology in Russia and the
increase in the number of regimes in the modern world that depend wholly on naked power.’ (Woodcock 1984: 20)
The anarchist activist Albert Meltzer, who admittedly only met Orwell once, was
less impressed with his writings: "To be honest, I thought Orwell a lot wittier
than his writings, which I found usually, and at that time always, a dreadful
bore. Such an opinion became literary heresy." (Meltzer
1996)
The book tied for the Libertarian
Futurist Society Hall of Fame Award in 1984.
|