George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist

Essays by Ian Birchall, Paul Flewers, John Molyneux, John Newsinger, Paul O’Flinn and Peter Sedgwick

Collected and Introduced by Paul Flewers. Socialist Platform Ltd, London, 2005

George Orwell is almost certainly the only socialist to have suffered the indignity of being championed by large numbers of his political enemies. Rather than staking a claim upon him, Dr Flewers and his fellow contributors to this collection, Ian Birchall, John Molyneux, John Newsinger, Paul O’Flinn and Peter Sedgwick, critically assess Orwell’s works, especially Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and conclude that alongside his positive aspects – his clarity of observation, his quest for human decency and his condemnation of the abuse of power – he also demonstrated serious theoretical and political weaknesses that have enabled his legacy to be systematically and wilfully wielded as a weapon against the very ideas for which he fought during much of his adult life.

Contents

• Paul Flewers, Introduction

Orwell’s Socialism

• Peter Sedgwick, George Orwell: International Socialist?

Orwell and Totalitarianism

• John Molyneux, Animal Farm Revisited
• Ian Birchall, Orwell, Ideology and the Working Class
• Paul O’Flinn, Rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984
• Paul Flewers, ‘I Know How But I Don’t Know Why’: George Orwell’s Conception of Totalitarianism

Orwell and the World

• John Newsinger, ‘Pox Britannica’: Orwell and the Empire
• John Newsinger, George Orwell and the Revolutionary Left
• John Newsinger, Destroying the Myth: George Orwell and Soviet Communism
• John Newsinger, Orwell and the Spanish Revolution
• John Newsinger, George Orwell and Searchlight: A Radical Initiative on the Home Front

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