Following is an excerpt from a letter of the alphabet from George Orwell to Dwight Macdonald, written in Dec 1946, presently later on the publication of Animal Farm in the US. According to the editor of the letters, Peter Davison, who also supplied the footnotes, Macdonald wrote Orwell that

anti-Stalinist intellectuals of his acquaintance claimed that the parable of Animal Farm meant that revolution ever ended badly for the underdog, "hence to hell with information technology and hail the condition quo." He himself read the book as applying solely to Russian federation and not making any larger statement virtually the philosophy of revolution. "I've been impressed with how many leftists I know make this criticism quite independently of each other—impressed considering information technology didn't occur to me when reading the book and still doesn't seem right to me. Which view would yous say comes closer to you ain intentions?"

Orwell'south reply volition appear in George Orwell: Life in Letters, to be published by Liveright in August.

Re. your query virtually Animal Farm. Of form I intended information technology primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. Merely I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously ability-hungry people) can but lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions but effect a radical improvement when the masses are alarm and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter take washed their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt).i If the other animals had had the sense to put their pes downward and so, information technology would have been all right. If people remember I am defending the condition quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism. In the case of Trotskyists, there is the added complexity that they feel responsible for events in the USSR upward to about 1926 and accept to assume that a sudden degeneration took identify nearly that appointment. Whereas I recollect the whole procedure was foreseeable—and was foreseen past a few people, eg. Bertrand Russell—from the very nature of the Bolshevik party. What I was trying to say was, "You can't have a revolution unless yous make information technology for yourself; at that place is no such matter as a chivalrous dictat[or]ship.2

Copyright © George Orwell. First American Edition 2013.

George Orwell

George Orwell (1903–1950) was the writer of Animal Farm and 1984, amongst many other works of fiction and journalism. dwight macdonald was an editor of Partisan Review and the founder, during World War II, of the magazine Politics, which he edited at the fourth dimension of his correspondence with Orwell. Peter Davison edited the twenty volumes of Orwell'due south Complete Works, the Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript of 1984, and The Lost Orwell.