Orwell’s Mistakes

It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. (George Orwell, The Observer, April 9, 1944)

George Orwell got some things right; unlike most political partisans, he saw the problems with the position he supported. He also got quite a lot of things wrong. The quote is from Orwell’s review of two books, The Road to Serfdom by Friederich Hayek and The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus, a left-wing writer and politician. The conclusion of the review is that Hayek is right about what is wrong with socialism, Zilliacus is right about what is wrong with capitalism, hence that “the combined effect of their books is a depressing one.”

But Zilliacus was wrong about capitalism, as was Orwell, who wrote:

But he [Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter. (As I Please, pp.117-119)¹

The problem is that Orwell, like many of his contemporaries (and ours), did not understand economics and thought he did. Since he wrote we have had extensive experience with free competition, if not as free as Hayek would have wanted, and the result has not been the nightmare that Orwell expected. “The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them” sounds right only if you don’t actually understand the logic of a competitive market. In most industries organizational diseconomies of scale, the effect of more layers between the head office and the factory floor, limit the size of the firm to something considerably below the size of the market for what the firm produces. In some fields, such as restaurants or barber shops, the result is an industry with thousands of firms, in some five or ten, in only the rare case of a natural monopoly can one large firm outcompete all of its smaller competitors.

The effect of free competition is not the only thing that Orwell got wrong. Consider his essay on Kipling.² He gets some things right, realizes that Kipling is not a fascist, indeed less of one than most moderns, and recognizes his talent:

During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

But he gets quite a lot wrong. In arguing that Kipling misunderstood the economics of imperialism, Orwell writes:

He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.

In explaining his own view of the logic of empire, what he thought Kipling was missing, Orwell writes:

We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue.³

Britain let go of its empire, starting with India. British standards of living did not collapse; by the time all of the colonies were independent, the average real wage in the UK was 50% higher than when Orwell wrote. He could not know the future but he could observe that Switzerland, before the war, was richer than England, Denmark, with no significant colonies, almost as rich, Portugal, with an enormous African empire, much poorer. Whether Britain ran its empire at a net profit or a net loss is, I think, still an open question, but Orwell’s view of colonialism is strikingly inconsistent with the observed effects of decolonization.

Economics is not all that Orwell got wrong about Kipling; he badly underestimated the quality of Kipling’s work, due to having read very little of it. The clearest evidence is Orwell’s description of The Light that Failed as Kipling’s “solitary novel.” Kipling wrote three novels, of which that is by a good margin the worst. Orwell not only had not read Kim, Kipling’s one world class novel, he did not know it existed. In a recent post I listed eighteen works by Kipling that I liked. Orwell mentions only one of them.

Political Prophesy

Orwell repeatedly offered the failure of Britain to support the Republicans against Franco in the Spanish Civil War as evidence of the stupidity of the British ruling class:

At the time of the Spanish Civil War, anyone with as much political knowledge as can be acquired from a sixpenny pamphlet on Socialism knew that, if Franco won, the result would be strategically disastrous for England; and yet generals and admirals who had given their lives to the study of war were unable to grasp this fact. (My Country Right or Left, p. 72, 1941)⁴

He was wrong; Franco was happy to receive support from Italy and Germany but, when the time came to reciprocate, prudently refrained from letting the Germans through to attack Gibraltar. As Orwell conceded in the last essay he wrote, his review of Churchill’s Their Finest Hour.

He (Churchill) foresaw even in 1940 that the Germans would probably attack Russa, and he rightly calculated that Franco, whatever promises he might make, would not come into the war on the Axis side. (In Front of Your Nose, p.491)

Orwell’s political prophesy after the war was no better:

As far as I can see, there are three possibilities ahead of us:

1. That the Americans will decide to use the atomic bomb while they have it and the Russians haven’t. This would solve nothing. It would do away with the particular danger that is now presented by the U.S.S.R., but would lead to the rise of new empires, fresh rivalries, more wars, more atomic bombs, etc. In any case this is, I think, the least likely outcome of the three, because a preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

2. That the present ‘cold war’ will continue until the U.S.S.R., and several other countries, have atomic bombs as well. Then there will only be a short breathing-space before whizz! go the rockets, wallop! go the bombs, and the industrial centres of the world are wiped out, probably beyond repair. Even if any one state, or group of states, emerges from such a war as technical victor, it will probably be unable to build up the machine civilization anew. The world, therefore, will once again be inhabited by a few million, or a few hundred million human beings living by subsistence agriculture, and probably, after a couple of generations, retaining no more of the culture of the past than a knowledge of how to smelt metals. Conceivably this is a desirable outcome, but obviously it has nothing to do with Socialism.

3. That the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them. This seems to me the worst possibility of all. It would mean the division of the world among two or three vast super-states, unable to conquer one another and unable to be overthrown by any internal rebellion. In all probability their structure would be hierarchic, with a semi-divine caste at the top and outright slavery at the bottom, and the crushing out of liberty would exceed anything that the world has yet seen. Within each state the necessary psychological atmosphere would be kept up by complete severance from the outer world, and by a continuous phony war against rival states. Civilizations of this type might remain static for thousands of years. (Toward European Unity)

He also offers a fourth alternative, the one he wants but thinks very unlikely, a Socialist United States of Europe, ideally including Africa as well.

That did not happen either. The EU may eventually become a United States of Europe, although I hope not, but its economy is not, in Orwell’s terms, socialist, even if less capitalist than I think it should be.

On The Other Hand

Orwell was often wrong but he was admirably honest and fair minded, willing to say positive things about people he disapproved of, political but not personal enemies. Two examples:

About Winston Churchill

However much one may disagree with him, however thankful one may be that he and his party did not win the 1945 election, one has to admire in him not only his courage but also a certain largeness and geniality which comes out even in formal memoirs of this type… . The British people have generally rejected his policies, but they have always had a liking for him, as one can see from the tone of the stories told about him….At the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, for instance, it was rumoured that what he actually said, when recording the speech for broadcast, was: “We will fight on the beaches, we will fight in the streets…we’ll throw bottles at the bastards; it’s about all we’ve got left!” One may assume that this story is untrue, but at the time it was felt that it ought to be true. It was a fitting tribute from ordinary people to the tough and humorous old man whom they would not accept as a peacetime leader but whom in the moment of disaster they felt to be representative of themselves. (In Front of Your Nose, pp.494-5)

About G.K. Chesterton:

From either a literary or a political point of view these two are simply the leavings on Chesterton’s plate. Chesterton’s vision of life was false in some ways, and he was hampered by enormous ignorance, but at least he had courage. He was ready to attack the rich and powerful, and he damaged his career by doing so. (“As I Please”)

Not a bad description of Orwell himself, mutatis mutandis.⁵

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1. That free capitalism would ultimately fail was still Orwell’s view in 1947:

“In North America the masses are contented with capitalism, and one cannot tell what turn they will take when capitalism begins to collapse” (Toward European Unity)

2. Discussed in more detail in an earlier post.

3. As late as 1947, Orwell wrote:

The European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples. … (Toward European Unity)

4. The British ruling class … helped Franco to overthrow the Spanish government, although anyone not an imbecile could have told them that a fascist Spain would be hostile to England. (The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius)

It will be just as I said, Franco will play up his pretense of being pro-British, this will be used as a reason for handling Spain gently, and allowing imports in any quantity, and ultimately Franco will come in on the German side. (War-time diary: 1940, My Country Right or Left p. 365)

5. The best source on Orwell, and the one on which my view of him is based, is the four volume collection of his essays, journalism and letters edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. My cites are to the individual volumes.