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George Orwell and Karl Marx
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I just finished re-reading The Communist Manifesto and I have a couple of comments.
Karl Marx wishes the Proletariat to enact a revolution against the Bourgeoisie. He says that the Proletariat is the only political force capable of being the source of such a revolution. He also says that the Proletariat can only triumph over the Bourgeoisie if they are united and that they only become an effective force for revolution after they have developed to a mature state. But this development owes its existence, according to Marx, to the Bourgeoisie.
Take these premises to their conclusion and you can see that the Proletariat will not adhere after the revolution. Even if you accept Marx's sometimes paranoid, sometimes ahistorical, historical narrative you have to deal with the fact that the members of the party that he wishes to be the only party in existence do not have a cohesive quality to one another without the much-hated Bourgeoisie. Marx seems never to ask himself what is going to happen to these people once they are no longer united against the Bourgeoisie. Will some of them become a clerical class again? some a nobility? some an aristocracy? or, more likely, another Bourgeoisie.
Lionel Trilling said that he thinks that Animal Farm was overrated, but it seems to make this very important criticism. T.S. Eliot rejected Animal Farm for publication, and according to some drecently released private documents he thought that the criticism of the work might from a Trotskyite perspective, calling for more "public-spirited pigs." Refusing to publish a book because you don't like the politics of the author suggests that T.S. Eliot might have benefited from some of Orwell's other writings as well.
Back to Marx, with an explanation of the "sometimes paranoid" comment above.
Marx writes about the Bourgeoisie as if they are enslaving mankind. The truth about capitalism is that people enter into it by choice. I know some people who live in the country. They spend weeks of each year making their own soap. The soap lasts them a year and they are quite happy to live like this. The Bourgeoisie lives in small areas (like NYC) and they build up. There is a lot of country left and at anytime laborers in the cities are completely free to leave the cities and their factory jobs and move to the backwoods of Maine, for example. But people choose to move to the cities because they would rather have factory jobs which don't give them a lot of money but enough to just buy soap any time they like.
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