Communism and Socialism in Animal Farm

Communism and Socialism

     A little knowledge of communism will aid one's understanding of Orwell's Animal Farm, for he is beastly in attacking the communist doctrine in the work. Communism is a political doctrine.

Its aim is classless society. This establishment, is dared by revolution. According to the communist doctrine, goods and the means of production including factories are commonly owned. This view stemmed from Karl Marx and Lenin's interpretation of his ideas. During the times of Stalin communism developed into a worldwide network adhering to the political line laid down by the Soviet communist party. After the death of Stalin, the world witnessed deviations in countries where communism was the main thread of administration. In China communism was and continues to be very severe toeing the lines of Mao Zedong. There was and there is direct confrontation between communism and capitalism. China condemned the Soviet's friendliness with the west as 'revisionism'. Karl Marx pronounced that communism was unavoidable as it would be the zenith of socialism. Marx set out his principles in 1848. Engels declared that communism would unfetter the workers. They would get a world to win. He exhorted the workers all over the world to unite for a chainless future.

Communism and Economic System

       As an economic and social system communism makes workers the owners of production, distribution and exchange. But they are all controlled by the communist party and State in the name of workers. The communist system has a planned economy. But today in China, there is a combinatory system of communist party control with a market economy.

Socialism

      The doctrine of socialism rests on removing all kinds of social inequality apart from propagating the collective ownership of producing and distributing goods. Karl Marx saw it as a socialist ideal. According to him socialism is a transitional stage between capitalism and communism. Socialism as a doctrine and practical solution started rejecting revolution as a means of achieving it. In Britain, the Labour party became socialistic in the sense it started looking after the interests of the working classes from 1900 onwards. However, in most western parties concerned with socialism, from the 1980s there had been a move closer to social democracy aiming at social and liberal reform. Radical or revolutionary change was not favoured.

Orwell, Communism and Socialism: 

   It is impossible to appreciate Orwell's work fully without understanding his political views, although he was an outspoken anti-communist, he was also an ardent socialist all his life. The failure to distinguish between socialism and communism causes the confusion. Socialism refers generally to any economic system based on the ownership of goods and property collectively (by all or a large part of society) rather than by individuals. The idea was described at least as early as Plato's Republic (fourth century B.C.) and was practised by the early Christians. In its modern forms, those developed from the 1830s on, socialism preaches government ownership of goods and control of their production and distribution. It does not usually insist on the abolition of private property, though it seeks to regulate this insofar as it affects public interests. Many variations of socialist beliefs and practice exist.

Communism is a specific form of socialism, developed from principles laid down by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1847) and Das Kapital (1867-94). Although recent decades have seen some variations arise in its methods and politics, it always seeks the abolition of private property. And it advocates, at least in theory, the wresting of ownership, production and control of goods by violent revolution. Socialists, on the other hand, seek to obtain the means of production by legal and relatively peaceful means. Socialism has a long and respected tradition in Great Britain and many parts of Europe, where it has attracted the allegiance of many thinkers and artists, as well as politicians, for well over a century. In mild forms, it is often the policy of legitimate political parties and democratically elected governments.

Since about the 1890s, many of Great Britain's intelligentsia have been socialists; indeed, during the 1920s through the 1940s socialism was almost the norm in many artistic circles.. Surely, they thought, there must be a better way of organizing a world that was suffering the aftermath of World War I, growing industrialization, the great Depression (and several smaller, earlier ones), the rise of fascism and the bitter Spanish Civil War. There was much disagreement about specifics, however, and great theoretical battles were waged among the literary adherents of various schools of thought.

One problem for these Western socialists was how to react to communism as it was evolving in Soviet Russia after the Revolution of 1917. It was, at that time, the only government in the world based on completely socialistic principles, and many socialists elsewhere felt they had to give it some support, even if they disagreed with part of its theoretical basis. As history unfolded, Soviet propaganda, secrecy and isolation made it difficult for others even to know what was going on in Russia. Rumors drifted out, but they were just that-rumors. It is difficult for us to realize today that until the 1950s the world did not know the truth about the outrages committed by Stalin or the shape communism had taken. And, when the Soviet Union entered World War II on the Allied side, many people thought that it might be better not to know, or that communism's opposition to fascism was so important as to be worth ignoring other facets of the theory and its practice. Orwell disagreed, as he showed in writing Animal Farm and then 1984. But he had been disagreeing with many other socialists for much of his adult life. Even before he wrote these books, much of his writing, especially his essays and newspaper articles, had involved criticism of socialism as well as advocacy of it.