By Michael Grossberg
Of the many reviews of the flawed new film version of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, perhaps the most insightful is one that broadens its critique to examine Orwell himself.
Richard M. Salsman, an economist and visiting assistant professor of political economy at Duke University, goes deeper than most other writers in contextualizing Andy Serkis’ widely panned animated film version.
With disturbing clarity, Salsman explains how Orwell’s evolving views led him to reverse his initial conception of Animal Farm as a critique of capitalism – but also how the British democratic socialist remained faithful to some of his deepest underlying assumptions.
This is a powerfully illuminating review and essay that deserves to be read in full at The Daily Economy, a publication of the American Institute for Economic Research.
But I also want to highlight some of Salman’s key insights, because they are so relevant to the themes and world view that shape the Prometheus Awards.
Salsman begins by making a point common to most reviews:
“This movie recklessly inverts Orwell’s original theme even beyond the public relations billing. Like his more famous, later work — the novel 1984 (which appeared in 1948) — Animal Farm is anti-authoritarian. It vilifies not capitalists, but communists. This movie effectively reverses Orwell’s moral framework and vilifies not communists (or even collectivists) but capitalists,” Salsman writes.
A DEEPER CRITIQUE
But Salsman’s knowledge of history and economics allows him to go deeper in his critique than any other review that I’ve read – and I’ve read quite a few.
“Not only is the original (anti-communist) theme of Animal Farm clear to anyone who bothers to read it, but Orwell himself was clearer still in his 1947 preface to the Ukrainian version, that ‘its various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution.’ Orwell also knew, of course, that the 1917 revolt in Russia was not of workers against capitalists but of Bolsheviks and disgruntled (because unpaid) soldiers against the royalist-Czarist regime. Although Bolsheviks were inspired by Marxism and Marx was anti-capitalist, it didn’t follow that the Bolshevik Revolution was an overturning of capitalism. Russia in 1917 was more feudal-agrarian than it was capitalist-industrial,” Salsman writes.
What makes this review worth highlighting on the Prometheus Blog are the things I learned from Salsman that I hadn’t previously known about Orwell, one of my favorite writers and a major influence on my thinking – especially his seminal essay on “Politics and the English Language.”
Orwell is one of the few writers to have more than one work inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame. His Nineteen Eighty-Four received our recognition (appropriately enough) in 1984, while Animal Farm was recognized by Libertarian Futurist Society members in 2011.
In my view, that recognition arguably was overdue, given the mythic and enduring power of Orwell’s animal fable.
Salsman’s review helps explain why:
‘In his essay for the Times of London in 2023 — “Animal Farm is Still Horribly Relevant Today” — A.N. Wilson described the novella as an “incomparable masterpiece” that still “resonates today” and “not just as a terrible indictment of left-wing idealism and Communist tyranny” — as it illustrates ‘exactly what Lenin, and then Stalin, did to the population of the USSR’ at the beginning of the last century — but because like many people still today, the characters exhibit ‘a pathetic weakness to believe political mantras.’ Again, it’s an obvious indictment of socialism, not capitalism,” Salsman writes.
HOW ORWELL’S THINKING EVOLVED
Salsman then explains how Orwell’s life and the evolution of his thinking led him to write Animal Farm.
“Orwell (a lifelong Englishman, born Eric Arthur Blair in 1903) said he was apolitical in his youth, then saw poverty and became a democratic socialist. This committed him to being anti-fascist, but he was also candid enough to criticize non-democratic, oppressive forms of socialism. His mistake was to believe that mere voting could soften socialism’s blows. In the 1930s German voters elected the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) and soon got years of tyranny. Conveniently, Orwell blamed that not on the democratic or socialist part of the mix but the nationalist part,” Salsman writes.
“In 1998 (and a few times thereafter), Venezuelan voters elected democratic socialists and before long, also got tyranny. They still suffer it. What would Orwell say about that? Probably something close to what’s now said by the Democratic Socialists of America: Venezuela isn’t ‘genuine’ socialism. As New York City mayor and democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani has said, an ideal, ‘genuine’ socialism remains the goal, such that America must ‘replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ Orwell warned of the ‘excesses’ of collectivism, but being socialist surely undermined his message.”
A CRITIQUE OF CAPITALISM?
Surprisingly, Orwell conceived the story initially as a critique of capitalism.
“Returning to Orwell’s preface to the 1947 Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, we learn that he did, in fact, initially envision the novella as a parable about the evils of capitalism. He recalls that the ‘details of the story did not come to me for some time, until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength, we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.’
Given Orwell’s intellectual coming of age, it’s fascinating to realize how his growing understanding of the evils of Soviet communism led him to change his mind – and change the focus of the parable.
“How then did Animal Farm become instead a parable not about capitalist “exploitation” but about socialism gone awry? As mentioned, Orwell says the novella’s episodes were taken from the Russian Revolution and its disastrous aftermath. ‘Up to 1930, I did not look upon myself as a Socialist,’ he recounts, as he had ‘no clearly defined political views.’ He says he “became pro-Socialist more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical admiration for a planned society.”
Although Orwell admirably recognized and condemned Stalin’s “gruesome, murderous” purges at a time when most leftists were in denial of it or worse, excused it, he remained a democratic socialist until he died at 50 from tuberculosis.
Salsman explains:
“To experience all this was a valuable object lesson,” (Orwell) recalled (in the 1947 preface), for “it taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. I saw innocent people being thrown into prison merely because they were suspected of unorthodoxy.” “I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the Western Socialist movement.”
“Notice how he refused to critique socialism per se,” Salsman writes.
“He insisted that its authoritarian versions should not be counted as genuine versions. Socialists have made this unsubstantiated assertion repeatedly since 1917. For some odd reason, Orwell didn’t consider such brazen, defensive, apologetic whitewashing as part of what he labeled “totalitarian propaganda to control opinion.”
Salsman’s conclusion may well seem disillusioning and disturbing to libertarian fans of Orwell, but seems valid, well-documented and rooted in both his thinking and his words at the time:
“It may be said that Orwell’s two main books weren’t really warnings about the dangers of socialism but rather attempts to salvage its terrible reputation, which he somehow presumed was unearned,” Saltsman writes.
“In the 1930s, per Orwell, ‘it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the U.S.S.R. was progressing towards anything that one could truly call Socialism. On the contrary, I was struck by clear signs of its transformation into a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason to give up their power than any other ruling class.’”
“It’s fair to conclude,” Salsman writes, “that Orwell’s self-admitted motivation for writing his two anti-authoritarian books in 1945 and 1948 was a worry that socialism wouldn’t advance in his native Britain, where he lived from 1928 onward, as long as Stalin’s Soviet Union was seen as the role model.”
Salsman then returns to the animated film and Serkis’ defense of it, in an interview with Reason magazine.
“Serkis insists that his version’s theme isn’t different from the original novella but merely ‘broader,’ as it’s about the “corrupting nature of power.” What does he mean by ‘power?’ As is common among socialists — Orwell included — Serkis improperly conflates opposites: economic power (the power to produce) and political power (the power to coerce),” Salsman writes, highlighting a key libertarian insight.
“In effect, Henry Ford and Joseph Stalin are both deemed dangerous because ‘powerful.’ If you can so easily conflate opposites, you can also easily invert story plots and characters, switch the good guys and bad guys. Serkis does both…. Anything goes.”
I haven’t seen a more devastating critique of the film or a sadder explanation of the limits of Orwell’s ideology even as he admirably recognized harsh truths that other leftists of his era denied.
Perhaps it’s relevant here to mention that the Prometheus Awards are based exclusively on the merits of each winning work – regardless of the avowed views of their authors. “There’s no list of official libertarian authors, or of unacceptable antilibertarian authors. A work can be considered if it attempts to envision a free society, or to show a path that might lead to increased freedom, or if it shows the dangers of authoritarianism as such, or deconstructs an earlier work based on antilibertarian assumptions,” LFS President William H. Stoddard explained in an important Prometheus Blog post, “What Do You Mean ‘Libertarian’?”
With that context clear, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are classic anti-authoritarian works that stand on their own merits and deserved Prometheus Awards recognition – and arguably have libertarian themes that transcend the political motivations of their author and his era.
Note: Visit Salman’s own website at richardsalsman.com to explore his books and articles for Forbes, The Hill, the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, The Objective Standard and other publications.
* Read the previous blog posts in this series about Prometheus winners on screen.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
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