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Rating: "Animal Farm" by George Orwell (1945) remains one of the most read books of the last century and, several decades after its publication, a formidable tool for critical analysis of communist totalitarianism, composing an ideal diptych with the late masterpiece of the Scottish-born writer, that "1984" soon elevated to the very paradigm of the dangers of mass society and the centralized control of information by a Power intent on overthrowing the original value of the individual.
What makes these two books of sure interest to the scholar of political science and history, as well as to the casual reader of these quick observations of mine, is Orwell's own personality, an Anglo-Saxon intellectual close to social democratic positions, who at a certain point in his life had to necessarily come to terms with Stalinist totalitarianism, understood both as a betrayal of the Marxist ideals underlying historicism that so animates both communist and socialist thought, and as an insidious form of social control that, while affirming the liberation of Man from the slavery of the bourgeoisie, introduced no less worrying forms of social and economic coercion: replacing not so much the dictatorship of capital with that of the proletariat, but the dictatorship of the late 19th-century Russian oligarchy with that of new oligarchies within the party apparatus, resulting in a bureaucratization of Russia and the countries gradually annexed to the CoMeCon.
The story told in "Animal Farm" - which I focus on in my writing - is well known in its broad outlines to most, and easily retrievable on other sites: the animals of a farm (early 20th century Russia) band together in a league to follow the message of liberation from an old boar (Marx-Lenin: i.e., Marxism-Leninism), which rallies them against their own farmer (the Tsar). Following a revolt (the 1917 revolution), led by the boar Napoleon (Stalin) and his comrade Snowball (Trotsky), all the animals seize the farm, working at it to establish a new economic order, also through the exhortations of the pig Squealer (the Pravda and in general all pro-Communist intellectuals): their greatest representative, and the epitome of the animal who believes and sacrifices himself for the revolution, is the horse Boxer (Stakhanov, as a personification of the Russian worker), to whom the other animals follow suit, except for the skeptical donkey Benjamin (symbolizing the dissident intellectuals, but cowardly in the face of Power). With the precision of a clock, Orwell shows us how the original revolutionary impulses give way to the progressive concentration of power in Napoleon's hands, who in his delusion of omnipotence annihilates dissenting voices, distinguishes himself also by the artificial creation of nonexistent enemies (comrade Snowball himself), alters the very revolutionary principles through Squealer (most famously with the motto: "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others"), reduces to mere fodder those who work in good faith adhering to the Idea (Boxer), gets in cahoots and makes deals with the same enemies he claims to fight (humans, thus the West). I leave the courteous reader with the pleasure of discovering the mockingly ironic ending of the story, helped by the fact of knowing that of History (or at least one hopes, even if our educational institutions' programs, on this point, leave something to be desired). What I want to emphasize here is Orwell’s extreme skill in tracing the methodological duplicity of Stalinism (but, in reality, of every Totalitarianism that claims to act for the Good of Humanity, that is, of every totalitarianism spurious offspring of Marxism: from Maoist China, to Pol Pot's Cambodia, passing through Castro's Cuba, Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam up to North Korea), characterized by a conscious alteration of the relationship between means and ends. Initially, indeed, the new dictator imposes means of coercion of individual will and of massification of society to achieve the noble purposes of the ideology he refers to: with this, he guarantees himself a condition of supremacy over the masses from the start, reduced from a collection of individuals to a unitary subject under his rigid control; subsequently, he suppresses every dissenting voice, that is, any attempt to bring Man and his freedom back to the center of the political project; in a third phase, securing even through violence and terror the subjection of the masses to his purposes, he alters the very ends of his action, which transition from the immediate realization of the promised Revolution to the preparation of a future Revolution, to be realized in an economic "medium term" not coinciding with the life of the people subject to his power; ultimately, he empties the Revolutionary message of content, replacing it with practices of power that aim to legitimize the new oligarchy as the sole guarantor of the new social order. It goes without saying that the aggravating factor of these techniques of power assertion is the manifest disproportionality between the goals pursued in abstract and the reality created through violence and oppression: as if to say - reversing the message of a great Russian dissident intellectual like Bulgakov - that Stalinist Communism is equivalent to "he who wants Good, but eternally commits Evil", suppressing individual freedom, the very idea of people as a community of destiny, the free unfolding of socio-economic forces in history, and that conflict between classes and individuals which, in a Heraclitean sense, represents the matrix of Western progress, that is, a push to continuous innovation and continuous intellectual, economic, cultural renewal.
Orwell's message does not seem to me to have become any less relevant with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the historical falsification of Stalinism and communism (not of Marxist historicism, in my humble opinion), being - forgive the Nietzschean oxymoron - an eternally contemporary warning: one for which all of us, including the youngest, must adapt their moral action and daily commitment to the principle of reality, accepting its limits without the pretense of "revolutions" which, as physics already warns us, usually perform a 360° rotation bringing us back to the eternal starting point.
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