Animal Farm
Animal Farm (1945) is George Orwell's allegorical novella of the Russian Revolution betrayed: the pigs lead the farm animals' rebellion, then progressively appropriate power until "the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig... but already it was impossible to say which was which."
Content and use
- Characters map onto revolutionary history: Old Major (Marx/Lenin), Napoleon (Stalin), Snowball (Trotsky), Boxer (the proletariat).
- Its slogans ("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others") made it the West's favorite anti-communist text, alongside 1984.
- Orwell, a democratic socialist, intended it as critique of Stalinism specifically; Cold War propaganda universalized it into an indictment of socialism as such.
Marxist assessment
The left critique notes: Orwell's fable erases the actual achievements of Soviet industrialization and victory over fascism, reduces complex political struggles to barnyard villainy, and functions pedagogically to inoculate workers against socialism. Defenders note it accurately captures bureaucratization dynamics Marxists themselves theorized (Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, Djilas' New Class). Infrared treats it as ideological infrastructure of the Anglo Box — the reflexive equation of any attempt at working-class power with pig-rule.