Orwell and Marxism

[ostsibirien]

At present I write an essay about George Orwell. I read a lot from and about George Orwell (even a lot of letters and political writings like "The Lion and the Unicorn" or "Why I joined the Independent Labour Party" or "Notes on nationalism"), but I still have one question.
Orwell was reading Karl Marx (he used to have a dog called by this name), I know. But I did not know his exactly position about marxism. I do not mean the position about the so called "Communism" in the soviet union, only the theorethical base. Orwell wasn't very philosophical and did not like ideologies, but I think he made some concret thinkings about this topic (especially the theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotzki et cetera).
Can anyone help me to find some texts or writings from or about George Orwell depending on this subject "marxism"?

Thank you very much

[ennison]

Orwell was a 'left-wing' thinker and practically this took the form of supporting the UK Labour party and during the Spanish Civil War of joining the POUM.

[ostsibirien]

Yes I know, but I mean essays or things he published in newspapers and so on. Especially about the Russian Revolution and Trotzki. I did found an essay called "Notes on nationalism", here he talked about trotskysts (and much more).
How did he think when he noticed the russian revolution 1917? And did he ever talk about Lenin, Marx e.g.

[The Atheist]

Try Politics and The English Language - essay - if you haven't already. I'm pretty sure that's where he covers how he and his school contemporaries felt about the Revolution. Certainly, as a schoolboy, Orwell was a Marxist-Leninist as, he felt, were most boys of reasonable intellect at that time. I recall he gives a count of the boys who listed Lenin in their top ten men in the world.


And you must have read Animal Farm?

[ostsibirien]

Thank you very much, I will look in G.O.'s collected essays after this article.
Animal Farm I have already read (2 times in German and one time in english).

If Orwell was a Marxist-Leninist I did not know, but I mean to remember that he said after leaving school, he was some kind of "Tory Anarchist" ;)

[TomGr]

My own view is that George Orwell was not a Marxist-Leninist and that indeed he had little interest in socialist theory. Certainly he was a socialist, but he reduced socialism to a relatively short list of practical measures--limitation and equalization of incomes, state ownership of the means of production, elimination of the elite public schools, independence for colonial peoples, etc., etc. All this seemed to him to be simple common sense.

A good deal of Orwell's writing on socialism is critical, often by implication and occasionally in so many words, of the typical socialist's obsession with socialist theory. Tempermentally, I think, he was one of those people who are immune to the attractions of ideology. That he was passionately engaged with the politics of his time yet repelled by the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the age helps to explain, I think, why his memory and his body of work lives on.

[Turk]

Marxism and Socialism are not same thing. George Orwell was a socialist.

[Thinkerr]

Socialism is mainly people power or redistributing wealth. Communism is where the government controls all businesses or industry and really resembles fascism more than socialism.

[MonHosteur SARL]

I think that you are misguided by the theory of Marxism.. Orwell is a known journalist as well as a novelist.. His novels talks about the hardships of the people during the WWII and during the revolution.. I want you to know that Marxism is against the thought of capitalizing on the poor.

[The Atheist]

I think that you have been misguided because Orwell in a journalist and most of his writings (novels) are about the life and hardship of life during world war and this does not prove anything about marxism.

Sorry, but you're completely wrong; very little of Orwell's writing was about WWII.

Homage to Catalonia - Spanish Civil War
Down & Out - pre-war
Animal Farm - Russian Revolution & Marxism/Leninism
1984 - totalitarianism
Coming up for Air - pre-war
Keep the Aspidistra Flying - pre-war
Road to Wigan Pier - pre-war
The Clergyman's Daughter - pre-war
Burmese Days pre-war, colonial Burma & India

One of the great joys about Orwell is that he not only wrote, he tells us why he wrote.