Animal Farm - George Orwell

In 1943 when George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, his caustic critique of Stalin’s Russia, the Soviet Union was so popular in the United States and Great Britain that he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel. In fact, the Russians were so strongly associated with the fight against the Nazis that it wasn’t until 1945, when the Second World War was over, that Animal Farm was finally published. After reading the manuscript Orwell sent him, TS Eliot wrote a letter of rejection actually explaining that an anti-Russian novel would not fare well in the political atmosphere of the moment. He also said that the novel’s allegory was “unconvincing” and suggested that if Orwell’s goal was to make a case for Trotskyism he should’ve created “more public spirited pigs”.

Indeed, while he was a socialist, Orwell was more enchanted by Trotsky than his counter-part Stalin because he knew about Stalin’s unchecked political power, and the length he was willing to go to maintain it, first-hand. “We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive,” Orwell once wrote, and he wasn’t talking about the skirmishes he was involved in against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, rather; he was talking about the politically charged violence the Stalinists brought with them from Russia when sent to support the Spanish democracy. In Spain, Orwell was in a Trotskyite band of soldiers and later wrote that, “Many of our friends were shot, and others spent a long time in prison or simply disappeared,”

After witnessing the range and scope of Stalin’s growing political power and the brutal force he utilized to maintain and expand it, Orwell produced Animal Farm, his biting satire of an animal rebellion on an English farm and the subsequent internal power struggle between two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, to fill the vacuum of authority left by the farm’s ousted owner. In  Orwell's fairytale, clearly an allegory for the Soviet Union, symbols of Stalin’s Russia, its rituals, its recent political history, and its social institutions of control abound. Orwell brilliantly anthropomorphizes the animals on Manor Farm and shapes them into characters symbolically representing the many players in Stalin’s Russia. Whether it’s the mind-numbing crowd of sheep, the naïve yet indefatigable workhorse Boxer, or Napoleon’s vicious police dogs, the allegorical picture of Stalin’s Russia is there spread out before the reader.

It’s easier to determine who some of the animals are intended to represent than it is for others. Take, for instance, the great boar Old Major. He’s the first to call for a rebellion and clearly represents Karl Marx. His philosophy is at the root of the initial rebellion and it’s his revolutionary teachings that are later perverted and bastardized by Napoleon and his cronies. Napoleon, on the other hand, is supposed to stand in for the iron-fisted despot Stalin himself. Finally, there is Snowball, Leon Trotsky’s parallel in the fable, who throws himself whole heartedly into further developing the ideology of Animalism but who, in the end, is no match for Napoleon’s brutal political tactics.

Napoleon’s smooth-tongued accomplice Squealer represents not just one person, like Napoleon and Snowball do, instead he represents an entire social institution of power with which Orwell is deeply concerned. Just as 1984, his following novel, grapples with language and memory as its principle concerns, so does Animal Farm. Squealer the pig, working in conjunction with the violence and intimidation provided by the police dogs, is a propaganda machine. He constantly manipulates language in order to reshape the collective memory of the farm’s animals and ensure their obedience. At times he simplifies language, similar to New Speak in 1984, to the point that debate and dissenting thoughts are impossible (“Four legs good, two legs bad!”) and at other times he crams his speeches so full of vocabulary, jargon, and statistics that the animals are psychologically overwhelmed and, since they cannot understand what Squealer is saying, tacitly consent to allowing the pigs to think for them. It’s the calculated and strategic manipulation of language by the pigs that distorts the memory and ideology of the Animal Farm and perpetuates the pigs’ oppression of the other animals. The other animals can no longer think for themselves without the pig intelligentsia arbitrating and guiding their thoughts.

It is precisely the mastery of reading and writing that gives the pigs the tools they need to manipulate and control the other animals on the farm. Furthermore, the pigs are able to re-narrate and reshape the history of the Animal Farm to fit with their constantly changing political stance by confusing the other animals with semantics, and secretly altering the seven commandments posted on the barn in the darkness of night. In truth, it’s their knowledge and command of language, along with their cleaved hooves acting as surrogates for opposable thumbs, which distances the pigs from the other farm animals socially and eventually transforms them into the very creatures they once loathed.

This brings the reader to Orwell’s other principle concern—the corruptive nature of political power. While the rebellion initially occurred for the right reasons, once Napoleon tasted political power, it intoxicated and corrupted him. His purpose shifted from providing a better life for all of the other animals to expanding and maintaining his power over all of the other animals. In this way, Napoleon is Orwell’s mirror for Stalin; like Stalin, Napoleon willfully misinterprets ideology, persecutes his rivals, proliferates propaganda, holds show trials, and uses violence and betrayal as he sees necessary. This is Orwell’s critique, not only of Stalin, but of all despotic rulers throughout history universally and is, to be sure, the critical metaphor that runs throughout his novel.

Like Squealer, Boxer the workhorse also represents a broader symbol than simply one person. In fact, Boxer represents the proletariat as a whole. Already naïve by nature, and lacking the intellectual tools needed to see the hopelessness of his predicament, and to emancipate himself from the oppression of the pig intelligentsia, Boxer is fully indoctrinated by the pigs and exploited for his labor. He lives by simple maxims like, “I will work harder” and “Napoleon is always right” because they place him in the good graces of the pigs while simultaneously serving as simple answers to all of his doubts and questions. However, just as the elite often betray the working class in real life, the pigs betray Boxer once he is no longer of use to them. It’s a sadly applicable metaphor for the way that the elite have historically taken advantage of the working class and then discarded them after they’ve served their purpose. Like Boxer, they are simply expendable parts of a larger machine.

At a time when it was not particularly popular to criticize Stalin or the Soviet Union, Orwell provided the literary world with perhaps one of the most biting and accurate political satires ever written. Animal Farm is a work that continues to resonate throughout the world to this day. Its brilliance lies in the fact that it’s able to specifically allegorize Stalin’s Russia while, somehow, it also manages to remain so universal that it can be applied to almost any tyrannical regime either preceding or following the novel. In some ways, Animal Farm’s commentary on the corruptive nature of political power and the power of language as a tool of ideology and control rings so true that it continues to play out in the political world as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Perhaps nothing rings more true however, than Orwell’s chilling observation that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Surely, this is a maxim the world has lived by for far too long.

More about Orwell:

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