Written by Harman, with advice from Hilljack
Adapted from a Political Economy course essay
Animal Farm is more than an allegory for and satire of the Communist takeover of Russia. Much like Orwell’s later and larger work 1984, it is a warning to all humanity, except where the surveillance state of 1984 is slowly being implemented in our world despite being thoroughly disdained by all except the out-of-touch lawmakers responsible for it, Animal Farm depicts a rather idyllic society, one that surely is just as attainable as the surveillance state, and is perfect apart from the manipulative swine who take charge and gradually become the very parasites they had helped overthrow. If this aspect could just be avoided, then the animal society would be a model for the perfect human society; it is no wonder then, that human Animalism (id est, Communism) is far more popular among the common people than a surveillance state. But therein lies the problem: every society, every system of economics or government, even when the main method of decision making is common deliberation and cooperation (though there is very little of the former in Animal Farm), needs someone to take over and lead the rest, and even in societies which expect to maintain complete equality, with none holding power over another, leadership and thus inequality will naturally develop.
To understand the problem of the hogs in Animal Farm and what they demonstrate of the human condition, it is perhaps beneficial to analyze the character of humans in Animal Farm, particularly in the eyes of the animals, and compare them to the dreaded bourgeoisie of our world, and look at how well (or poorly, rather) Napoleon and Snowball live up to old Major’s advice on not mimicking humans. Mr. Jones is stated to not have always been a neglectful drunkard. As a farmer he was never outstanding in his field and was rough with his animals, but it was only when he had fallen on hard times and taken to drinking after losing a lawsuit that he became negligent. It is never stated what the lawsuit was over, however; perhaps some environmentalist or animal rights activist took exception to his occupation. His hired hands, though, were just as bad. With their employer too drunk to manage them, they allow the farm to fall into disrepair and no one steps in to feed the animals for some days, and until the day of the rebellion (which, admittedly, was more spontaneous than the planned February and October revolutions, although the latter at least saw the Bolsheviks meet very little resistance), when the animals were driven to starvation to storm the storeshed, many of them still had faith in Mr. Jones: “‘Mr. Jones takes care of us. If he were gone, we should starve’.”
As for how the animals view their condition and humans in general, it is largely stated by old Major in his speech. The life of a farm animal is “miserable, laborious, and short.” They are fed only the minimum to keep them alive, he says, and those that are capable of it (or, rather, were bred for it) are used as draught animals by the human, who takes the fruits of his animals’ labour for himself. Arguably, the market animals — the porkers in the case of Manor Farm — have it the worst, at least in regard to longevity; while the horse gets to live for years, as does the hen as long as she continues to lay eggs and the cow who continues to give milk, and the male piglet who gets chosen to keep his “tushes” and procreate, the market hog rarely lives to a year, and the market steer and feeder calf often live to two at most. Still, most animals will not be permitted to die naturally: Boxer the Shire horse will be sent to the knacker’s once his body finally gives up on him, and the dogs will be drowned in a pond when they have grown old and toothless.
Of course, there certainly is much to be said about this grim view of humans, and of their alleged cruelty, none of which is germane, but nonetheless, being compelled to put my own two cents in on the matter, I shall attempt to keep it brief, though I shall fail, for though I may hopefully not be quite so tedious as Adam Smith, I shall try to be fairly thorough, for it does matter to me that my reader understand everything I write about as I understand it myself….
Certainly Man’s concern, at least on the part of the animal husbandman, for the welfare of his animals is far better today than it was even fifty years ago, so I cannot write as to the treatment of animals in the early 1940s, but I find it difficult to believe everything which Major alleges. I cannot believe that a half-way decent farmer, such as what Mr. Jones had been at one time, would only feed his animals just enough to keep them alive; this story may have been written some decades before Temple Grandin professed that “what’s good for the cows is what’s good for business”, but it has never been in the farmer’s interest for his animals to be all skin and bones. Without proper nutrition, his horse cannot give him field labor, his hog cannot give him bacon, and his cow cannot give him milk. And perhaps some farmers did and do choose to drown their old dogs, because, as with all occupations, sadly not all farmers are terribly bright, but at least today most would try to nurse their old dogs, and when their dog’s time does come, who would drown his best friend, when a shot in the head or visit to the vet’s office would be far quicker and take less struggle?
And what of the products the animals create which Man takes for himself? Major tells the cows that the milk taken from them “should have been breeding up sturdy calves.” But the milk does go toward raising calves; even when they are taken from their mothers, the calves are still fed on milk for some time before they are old enough to drink water. And when the cows do not have calves? They still need to be milked, as they found out in chapter 2 of this story. Now, I understand it to be that if a cow stops having calves she will continue producing milk for as long as she is milked regularly, and should she go unmilked, her udder will shrink from disuse, but not without some discomfort from the milk that is still in her. And if she continues to be milked when she has no calves, what is to be done with the milk? She certainly is not using it. And what of the hens’ eggs? Man does not eat the fertilized eggs that have developing chicks. Eggs will not hatch just because the human left it uncracked for long enough. What are the animals going to do with the unfertilized eggs, then?
It is true that Man, at least in the ecology of agriculture, is “the only creature that consumes without producing”, but it is not as though Man can produce anything and simply chooses not to. If humans could produce their natural products (milk and eggs, I suppose) in such a size or quantity as to make them practical food sources, Major might be onto something. But unless Man wishes to hunt or forage to the extent that his ancestors did, and as all other animals still do, he must work to produce and gather his food, and to make his efforts more efficient, he has domesticated certain animals to help him, and in return, they are provided with food ready to eat, such as hay—and Heaven knows Man certainly is not cultivating that for himself—and grain without having to watch out themselves for toxic plants, fresh water, and shelter from predators and the weather. They have luxuries provided to them which no wild animal could ever dream of. If the horse is so bitter over his strength being “exploited” by humans, he is welcome to wait until Man finally adopts self-propelled harvesters and tractors that can turn left or right on their own and automobiles become more common, but then he would probably complain that his replacement by machinery was causing his species to dwindle in numbers….
Granted, animals in the real world do not have such strong reasoning abilities as the animals in Animal Farm, and perhaps that is best for them—it certainly is for us. So it would therefore seem foolish to argue with a fictional hog, when beyond her instinct to protect her foal, a real mare does not give one dam as to the fate of that offspring once it has been weaned from her, much less will it be around to take care of her in the retirement paddock, nor would any animal sit around thinking about how the human keeps it from living a long and happy life. But as long as humans continue to project human grievances onto animals and make half-way decent arguments in the process, I shall continue to argue with fictional swine.
And as it stands, the animals do not know the full story; a bit of sympathy ought to be afforded to them, for they clearly have enough reason to be aware of their less-than-ideal conditions and to question the injustice of it, as they are right to do; but they do not have the reason and knowledge of the art of animal husbandry as humans do, for they resent the castration of their males without understanding that it benefits them as well as the humans to not have too many in-tact males among them. And therein lies the problem insofar as these animals serve as an allegory for the strife of the Proletariat; it is essentially Hayek’s knowledge problem, at least in the premise that no one knows everything else that everyone else know, but here it has very different—though one might argue not entirely unrelated—implications here. Just as the animals are only aware of the injustices—those real and those perceived — of their condition, and are unaware of the condition of their apparent oppressors and their reasons for the perceived injustices, the Proletarian is not completely aware of the role of the Borzhuin. He does not see the work the Borzhuin puts into financing the Prole’s work place, or handling other responsibilities which even I am not entirely aware of.
That is not, of course, to excuse employers taking too much for themselves, or paying their workers as little as they can get away with, or not maintaining a safe and clean work place, any more than my refutation of Major’s speech is an excuse for animal cruelty and poor farming practices—far from it. I love a factory owner who is willing to join his workers on the assembly line, or a store owner working the cash register, and especially a small restaurant owner who waits on tables. But even when he does not partake in the manual labor, the business owner still has some sort of work of his own, too. I do personally believe that, in regards to the pay I think they deserve, the manual laborer is more valuable than the office worker, and than the business owner, who is worth more than the investor who has no connection to the company beyond investing in the company’s stocks. But in the end, the business owner takes the most risk in running the company. He invested in its creation, and if it should go under, he will take the greatest loss out of everyone working; unless unemployment is high, his workers will be able to find their next paycheck elsewhere while he is still recovering his losses, especially if his business failed before it could make back the money he put into it.
I once had a socialist of some sort come to me and argue that the workers would be better off getting rid of their employer and paying themselves off the profits of their goods. To that I say, if an entire workforce decided collectively to be the owners of their own business, then they could all quit their current workplace and go start their own business together. That, I think, is far better than violently forcing a capitalist out of the business which he himself poured his time and money into. If it is too expensive for the workers to start their own business, or they have too many legal hoops to go through to get started, that is an issue of government bureaucracy and crony capitalism, not of the free market.
But Animal Farm (as in the formerly-named Manor Farm), at least in the beginning, is not so much a business selling its goods in order to make a profit from outsiders, as it is a self-sustaining commune, so let us return there. It seems that everyone who is not in power would like to think that if he was, he would not be a cruel tyrant like he who is in power, yet somehow, well-intentioned (or seemingly well-intentioned) movements are nearly always taken over by incompetent or else despotic leadership, without fail. I have no doubt this is easily avoided, especially on the part of the despot, for he could easily choose to not be a despot. For a start, it surely has to be quite taxing to be a dictator. To illustrate this point, it may help to analyze the track record of the pigs, especially Napoleon and his co-conspirator Squealer.
Even before the revolution happens, the pigs are already rising to power. Because they are the most intelligent animals, the task of teaching the other animals in the principles of Animalism falls “naturally” upon them. After the revolution, they are the first to learn how to read and write like humans, and must teach the other animals to do the same, though few are able to grasp it so well as the pigs can. As an allegory, they initially serve as the intellectuals who had to stir the Proletariat into revolution, as well as the Communist Party’s efforts to improve literacy among the peasants in whichever country it conquers, and on the surface they serve overall as a satire of Stalin, Trotsky, and their cronies. However, there is far more to the pigs than just being a representation of early Soviet political history. Their superior intelligence gives them influence over the other animals, and allows Napoleon (Stalin-pig) to take more and more power for himself.
Napoleon’s reign is characterized by hypocrisy, gaslighting, and terror. Everything Major warned the animals against, he leads the other pigs into doing: “No animal,” Major said, “must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade.” Yet soon after he sent Snowball (Trotsky-pig) into exile, Napoleon moves with the other hogs into the farmhouse, and later on he has four pigs and various other animals executed. To get around violating the very rules proscribed to them all, and which the hogs had written down, they had to amend those rules. To “No animal shall sleep in a bed”, the phrase was added, “with sheets”, while “No animal shall kill another animal”, they specified “without cause.” The pigs are essentially like a faculty senate in which certain privileged members are repeatedly breaking the rules and the members in charge of those rules decide to keep changing them to retroactively pardon the guilty members, and they are able to get away with it thanks to the other animals’ illiteracy; because the animals cannot read well, they simply think that the new words were always in the rules and they must have forgotten them.
Napoleon also violates the very motto which his own sheep constantly scream out: “Four legs good, two legs bad!” A side note about the sheep: they are supposed to represent the Stalin supporters who during debates between Stalin and Trotsky, whenever it was Trotsky’s turn to speak, these pro-Stalin hecklers would shout over him. These sheep shout their slogan whenever Snowball tries to speak, usually on a topic unrelated to humans; they resemble today the left-wing NPCs who attend protests for which they are unable to answer as to their reason for attending. When a group of these NPCs see one of their own unable to answer questions while being interviewed by a bystander with a camera and microphone, the group will often come to their fellow’s aid by repeatedly shouting a specific slogan which may or may not even be related to the topic being discussed. Yet whenever Napoleon announces his plans to open Animal Farm to trade and commerce with humans, his NPC-sheep have no slogans to shout in opposition—it is up to the other animals to question his decisions.
The Animalist principle of “four legs good, two legs bad”, as with all the others, was first declared by Major, and he elaborated that all humans were enemies and the animals were not to act like them, and likely that they were not to interact with them either. Yet the hogs, as recounted, had disobeyed everything he told them, having tried to add exceptions to the Seven Commandments. Squealer, who serves sort of as a four-legged talking head, with the same purpose as the Soviet newspaper Pravda (that is, keeping the other animals quiet), has to explain to the animals that the pigs may sleep in the human beds so long as they do not use the sheets, because a pile of straw is just as much of a bed as a mattress. What the animals fail to remember—though had they pointed it out, Squealer would have questioned them about it—was that Major said “no animal must sleep in a bed”; he never made any distinction about using sheets.
Before Napoleon does away with Snowball, he is already scheming of taking for himself and the other hogs certain privileges never offered to the other animals. Even if Squealer had a point in the distinction of a bed with sheets, then the other animals ought to have just as much right to sleep in the house as the pigs do, but none pry, nor do the pigs invite anyone else to sleep in the beds. The cow’s milk and the windfallen apples, which the animals assumed would be shared among them all, were taken up by the pigs. Almost none partake in the manual labour around the farm; the most they ever do is supervise, and here is where Orwell demonstrates how Communist societies almost inevitably fall back into the Bourgeoise-Proletarian—the oppressor-oppressed—dynamic which they had worked to overthrow.
The pigs, like the bourgeoise capitalist, do almost no manual work; all the Borzhuin’s work is mental labor. When Squealer has to make excuses to the other animals for taking the milk and apples for themselves, he explains, “‘We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.’” Much the same language is used when Squealer has to excuse the pigs moving into the house. All the brainwork they have to do makes them so tired, he says, and so they need comfortable beds to sleep in. Oh, but do not worry, they’re not too comfortable! Does this not sound like the argument of someone in support of the capitalist class against the Communists who want to tax the rich or just plain destroy them? “They work just as hard,” I have argued for the business owner class: “They may not do physical labor, but they still work hard, too.” “Ours is a very different sort of labour,” the Capitalist running the business might say, “but it’s so much more important and we take on so much responsibility in trying to keep this business afloat, so we deserve more money and more luxury!” When they hear such arguments, the Communists of today remain unconvinced, yet they ask no questions when their hero Joseph Stalin or some other Communist idol affords himself certain special privileges.
It is no coincidence that Napoleon chooses Squealer as his public relations spokes-barrow, when “he could turn black into white” just by strutting and flaunting around. Not only does he employ the logos previously discussed, but his greatest persuasive gift is arguably his ability to gaslight the other animals. It is never revealed who has been changing the Seven Commandments, so it is entirely possible that it was not Squealer who did it, but regardless of who did it, the changes to the Seven Commandments tie into the gaslighting, as does the animals’ general low intelligence. When Clover looks to check the Seven Commandments and has Muriel read the fourth one and Benjamin the sixth to her, she assumes she had simply forgotten the “with sheets” and “without cause” phrases. This was how Squealer takes care of things when the animals resist Napoleon’s decision to open the farm to commerce, citing resolutions they had passed at the first meetings to never interact with humans, engage in trade, or use money. Squealer tells them that no such resolution had ever been suggested, let alone passed, and its supposed existence probably sprang from lies started by Snowball. When he still faces skepticism, Squealer asks them, “‘Are you certain that this is not something you have dreamed, comrades?’” as though they had all had the same dream of a meeting on the same day in which a resolution was passed about the same issue. He asks them if there exists any written record of the resolution. One might not expect that animals would see any need of keeping minutes, and in fact see it as a human thing, but it is implied that these animals do indeed keep records (though those records can of course be destroyed or falsified anyway, just as Stalin had done), otherwise the fact there was indeed no record of the resolution in question would not prove anything to the animals, yet its nonexistence puts their minds at ease.
Squealer is very clearly a master manipulator who knows how to use the animals’ low intelligence against them and make them question their memories. One of the biggest issues on which he gaslights the animals is of Snowball’s alleged betrayal. When he initially tries to convince the others that Snowball was a traitor, Boxer points out how bravely the Trotsky-pig fought at the Battle of the Cowshed, but Squealer tells him that bravery is less important than loyalty and discipline, and that they may in time find that Snowball’s part was exaggerated. Realizing, however, the skepticism they will be met with, especially while trying to frame him for the farm’s misfortunes, Squealer has to make up more, far greater lies in order to turn the animals away from Snowball. Boxer especially is skeptical, even as the most loyal of Napoleon’s blind followers, and he questions how Snowball could be a traitor, when he had been awarded Animal Hero, First Class. Squealer claims it was a mistake, that they did not know then about the (fabricated) documents which revealed Snowball’s plans to conspire with the humans from the very beginning. As to the battle of the Cowshed, he feigned valor as an attempt to lure the animals into defeat. Squealer tries to sell them a vivid story of Napoleon fighting in the battle, but it’s only when he says that Napoleon had stated categorically—”categorically, comrade”—that Snowball was aiding Jones from the beginning, somehow even before Major had uttered any idea of rebellion, that Boxer is convinced, for as he always says, “‘If Comrade Napoleon says it, then it must be right!’” Later on the animals were told that Snowball had never been awarded for bravery, but rather censured for cowardice, and when the animals questioned it, Squealer was there once more to tell them they had misremembered.
That is because the dictator and his state are very much an abusive partner. They go absolutely mad when their partner, the people, tries to move out, and they love to gaslight. They love to go back on their word and claim they had never made that word. They never said that. They have always done what they are doing. Their people must all remember wrong. Their partner must be crazy. The partner cannot trust their own judgement, the people must rely on the state to decide things for them.
The myth of Snowball not only serves as a chance for Squealer to practice his gaslighting, but as a chance to strike terror into the hearts of the other animals. One quick and easy way he keeps the animals in fear is to claim that Mr. Jones will return if the pigs fail to manage the farm because they could not maintain their health by sleeping in comfortable beds and taking all the milk and apples for themselves. Of course the animals are terrified, above all else, of becoming the subjects once again of Tsar Jones, and so that is enough to shut them up whenever the pigs swipe more privilege and power for themselves. To build up his cult of personality, Stalin had to convince the Russian people that their enemies were everywhere among them, and to protect themselves the people would have to cling to him and depend on him to keep them safe, even though in the end he was the greatest threat to their lives, greater than Trotsky or the damned Borzhuin. To keep the animals afraid of Trotsky-pig, Stalin-pig has to frame him for several misfortunes and strange occurrences around the farm. Destroying their produce, damaging the buildings, even the cows waking up empty of milk, is all blamed on Snowball lurking around the farm at night. The animals become so accustomed to blaming him that when they find a key that was claimed to have been dropped down the well by Snowball, it never throws Napoleon’s claims about Snowball into question, for the animals still believe it had been stolen by Snowball.
But Stalin-pig knows that though it may be working well enough for the moment, he cannot go on blaming everything on one animal alone, especially one that had run off and was living off the farm; he therefore needs to identify culprits among the animals still on the farm. Thus begins the Great Terror, Animal Farm Edition. He calls the animals together and has his NKVD-dogs drag to the front four barrows — the same porkers who were audacious enough to protest when Napoleon announced an end to the Sunday meetings. Terrified, they do not at all plead their innocence, rather quickly confess to having collaborated with Snowball in the night, before having their throats ripped out. But as well as these Old Bolshevik porkers, the Kulak hens are executed, and a grain-hoarding goose, and even some sheep are compelled to come forward and confess to crimes against the farm. One has to be amazed that none of the other animals question these confessions. Surely someone would have seen the two sheep chasing the old ram around the fire? Yet no one, not even the narration, states that they had. One can only expect that they had all confessed so easily because somewhere on the farm, Napoleon had his own version of Lubyanka Prison, in which these animals had been tortured into confession in secret. Information about Lubyanka, as with much else about the Great Terror, would have been kept secret, though, so it is unlikely that foreigners like George Orwell would have known about it, so the real-life confessions very likely would have appeared to be true, even truer to outsiders than to the Soviet people. The executions leave the living animals confused and terrified. Everyone, from the party leaders down to the party member who shouts the latest slogan without thinking about its meeting, is an enemy of the state, an enemy of the animals.
The animals are so confused as to how so many animals could secretly be conspiring against their own brethren, that Boxer, the Stakhanovite horse, internalizes that terror: “‘I would not have believed that such things could happen on our farm. It must be due to some fault in ourselves. The solution, as I see it, is to work hard. From now onwards I shall get up a full hour earlier in the mornings.’” The idea behind the gulags was that hard labour could be a method of reeducation; in a way, Boxer is not working as Alexei Stakhanov did, to exceed his work quotas (though the legacy of Stakhanov and his work performance is greatly questioned), but rather he has voluntarily committed himself to a labour camp in which, after being wounded in the Battle of the Windmill, he works himself near to death.
His shipment to the knacker serves as an allegory to the hard lesson many living under Communism have had to learn: no matter how diligently they work, no more how loyal they are to the state, no matter how hard they work on their character, the state sees them as useful idiots who are disposable once they can no longer work. Boxer was promised retirement, but instead died the very way Major had said he would have under human control: “‘the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.’” No animal on Animal Farm knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after Napoleon comes to power. No animal on Animal Farm is free. The life of each animal was misery and slavery; that was the plain truth.
When Squealer has to explain to the other animals why Napoleon acted opposed to the windmill when Snowball proposed it, if he was supposedly in favour of it the whole time, he explains it was merely a tactful maneuver to eventually get rid of Snowball, who was secretly dangerous. “‘Tactics, comrades, tactics!’” he cries Tactics, indeed, are precisely how the Berkshire Stalin-boar of Manor Farm is able to seize power, maintain it, and abuse it. To become an autocrat over a new society which was intended to be democratic and in which everyone was meant to work not by command, but by comradery and cooperation, he cannot do so without resistance. To suppress the questioning animals, Napoleon has to use terror and manipulation to keep them quiet. When resistance is made to be more dangerous for the common citizen than the eventual consolidation of power, the tyrant can take power far easier.
Perhaps the real tragedy of Animal Farm was that this power imbalance could have easily been avoided. I do not follow the common belief that power corrupts. Rather, corrupt people seek power. Neither Stalin nor his pig-sona came to power with the intention of ruling benevolently. Rather, he was already looking for power, when he came upon the Communist ideology, and not only recognized the drive for vengeance by which it is characterized, but saw in it how it could be exploited in order for him to gain a position of power over one third of the whole world. We cannot exactly say quite the same for Napoleon; no animal had ever considered rebellion until old Major had uttered the word, and unlike Lenin he died before the revolution, so no one sees how he might have ruled. For all we know he may very well have been more benevolent than Napoleon; Lenin is often viewed more favorably than Stalin by Communists and anti-Communists alike, being considered benevolent at least by comparison. Either way, Napoleon may not have had as much time as Stalin would have had to figure out how to exploit the animals, but it is evident that he had thought for a long time of abusing his fellow animals and/or becoming like the humans. The hogs taking leadership over the other animals is not inherently wrong — their superior intelligence naturally gave them a better aptitude for instructing and guiding the other animals to solve problems around the farm, just as the draught horses and especially Boxer having greater strength made them naturally better at performing the bulk of the manual labour. This leadership gives the pigs power over the other animals — that is what leads to the inevitable inequality, but inequality does not have to be bad; ideally, it is merely the best people for the job taking up their role. What was wrong with the pigs taking power was their decision to use their leadership as grounds to claim privileges for themselves, to silence the other animals, and to use their lower intelligence against them, all of which Napoleon and the other hogs could easily have chosen to refrain from.
It has always been my theory that ideologies such as Communism and Socialism, which are appealing in their promise for a better society for everyone but especially the down-trodden, are so attractive to aspiring despots because they see in these ideologies something of which they can take charge and people will be willing to follow them, but they also see in these ideologies something which leaves room for exploitation after the promised revolution has succeeded and the revolutionaries decide to make to put their leaders in charge. They seem in Marxism a desire for vengeance, which many aspiring despots seek, but Marxism also allows them to label even eager followers as counter-revolutionaries if they oppose one decision of the people in charge; they are seen as undermining the revolution and the efforts to build up the new utopian society, and so the Communist has a right to do away even with his own Comrade. This is precisely what Napoleon had chosen to do—he took an oppressed society and after that society overthrew its oppressor, he became a far worse oppressor. He saw in the Animalist revolution and the establishment of Animal Farm an opportunity to put himself in charge, and with a handful of tactics, a few yes-pigs, and a whole farm of useful idiots, he helped overthrow the Tsar-man so he could become the Tsar-pig he always knew he could be.