Political Allegory In The Book Animal Farm
"Ideas play a part in any revolution, conflicting ideas is main reason why Revolutions
happens. " This is the platform that George Orwell used in his book " Animal Farm". The
political allegory in the story is mocking the Revolution that changed "Russia" into
the "USSR". This was the workings of Karl Marx. Marx was known for being politically
inspired by one idea. Marx wanted it to be that one class, the working class, and
against another class, the rich or higher class. The Revolution was started by men who
believed with Karl Marx's theory that the history of the world was the history of a
struggle between classes between oppressors and oppressed.
This happened in the book "Animal Farm by George Orwell" Orwell uses this example to base
his book on. He makes the characters personify the major players in the Russian
Revolution. Orwell uses this to form a well written piece of literature. In "Animal
Farm" The Democratic society led by Mr. Jones the original leader of Manor Farm was
overthrown by a policy called Animalism. Animalism was a theory concocted by the Old
Major a Pig. In "Animal Farm" the pigs were personified as the smartest and the best
among animals. The Pigs take control of the farm. The two major idealists Snowball and
Napoleon have conflicting ideas. These ideas break snowball away from the rest of the
group and make him leave Animal Farm. This lets Napoleon have total control. They set
up a set of rules called the seven commandments. In the beginning everyone followed
these rules such as no animal may kill another animal, no animal is better than another
animal. This makes the leader Napoleon want to break the rules so he makes him and his
fellow pigs more special, eating all the good food, wearing clothes, living in the
farmhouse, and not working. As for the other animals big or small get the same rations
of food, are not allowed to wear clothes, had to live in the barn, and were overworked.
Marx, like other socialist thinkers of the 19th century, denounced the cruel injustices
of industrial capitalist society as he saw it. He had a vision of ending "the
exploitation of man by man" and establishing a classless society, in which all
people would be equal. The only means to this end, he thought, was a revolution of
the exploited (the proletariat) against the exploiters (the bourgeoisie), so that
workers would own the means of production, such as the factories and machinery. This
revolution would set up a "dictatorship of the proletariat" to do away with the old
bourgeois order (the capitalist system) and eventually replace it with a classless
society. Lenin took this idea and further focused on the role of the Communist Party
as the leader of the working class.
When Lenin reached Russia in 1917 a first revolution against the crumbling regime
of the Czar had already taken place. The new government was democratic, but "bourgeois."
Lenin victoriously
headed the radical socialist (Bolshevik) revolution in October of that year. This
was immediately
followed by four years of bloody civil war: the Revolution's Red Army, organized
and led by Leon
Trotsky, had to defeat the "Whites" (Russians loyal to the Czar or just hostile to
the Communists)
and foreign troops, too.
At Lenin's death in 1924, there was a struggle between Joseph Stalin and Trotsky
for leadership of
the Communist Party and thus of the nation. In 1925, Stalin clearly gained the
upper hand; in 1927,
he was able to expel Trotsky from the Party. Later Trotsky was exiled, then
deported, and finally
assassinated in Mexico, probably by a Stalinist agent, in 1940. All this time, Stalin
never stopped
denouncing Trotsky as a traitor.
Power in the Soviet Union became increasingly concentrated in Stalin's hands. In
the 1930s,
massive arrests and a series of public trials not only eliminated all possible
opposition, but loyal
Bolsheviks and hundreds of thousands of other absolutely innocent Russians.
Still, people all over the world who felt the pull of Marx's ideal- an end to
exploitation and oppression, as they saw it- thought of the Soviet Union as the country
of the Revolution. It was
hard for many people on the Left (who think of themselves as on the side of the
exploited, and
want major changes in society to attain social justice) to give up this loyalty.
That's one reason why
Orwell wrote Animal Farm.
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