George Orwell rejected USSR Stalinist policies and their interpretation and implementation of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. But Orwell certainly didn’t reject socialism. In fact, Orwell himself was a devoted socialist, and volunteered and fought in war for socialism. He said himself in his essay Why I Write,

“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Orwell wrote an entire book, Homage to Catalonia, about his experience fighting in socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist militias during the Spanish Civil War. In the book he says,

“Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no bootlicking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see socialism established much more actual than it had been before.”

In this sense, Orwell mentions his admiration of a classless society free of state coercion, which in many ways is a form of communism in its higher stage, as Marx defined communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society. In this way, you could argue that Orwell considered himself a democratic socialist, but that he was also sympathetic to anarchists who aimed to also achieve communism but through means that are not authoritarian. But he wasn’t totally anarchist. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell says on anarchism,

“I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.”

But he later elaborated,

”it is always necessary to protect peaceful people from violence. In any state of society where crime can be profitable you have got to have a harsh criminal law and administer it ruthlessly.”

In this way you can clearly see that while anti-authority, he is still in favor of some form of justice system, which is absolutely counter to anarchist theory.

Orwell seems instead to be opposed to totalitarian techniques to achieve communism, but was actually in favor of a communist society himself, as long as it was achieved through means that were not oppressive.

What many don’t understand is that the USSR was communist, meaning their goal was to achieve communism, but the USSR never claimed to live a communist society, because according to Marxist-Leninist philosophy, they were still in the dictatorship of the proletariat phase of socialism, and it wasn’t until the 1936 Soviet Constitution that the regime claimed to have effectively began their transition into socialism, the lower phase of communism, but they never made it to actual higher stage communism. This utilization of the state apparatus, and even strengthening the state to violently erode capitalism with the goal of it leading to socialism is what Orwell was opposed to. He was not opposed to the end goal of socialism or communism itself.

Orwell was a socialist until his death, and never rejected it later in life. The British MI5 even kept close tabs on him and for a long time considered him not just a socialist, but a secret Soviet-sympathetic communist. They would later retract this and claim he was not a communist, but still hold that he is a socialist. Much of the belief that Orwell rejected socialism later in life comes from his two essays Fascism and Democracy and Patriots and Revolutionaries which he wrote in contribution to the book Betrayal of the Left.

The essays outline Orwell’s break from the British Communist Party following the party’s backing of the Molotov-Ribbontrop Pact. Specifically, they were against the British Communist Party’s stance of appeasement and nonviolence with Nazi Germany, while Orwell and his partners believed that fascism must be fought and denied in every way possible, whenever possible. The British Communist Party took this stance of nonviolence toward the Nazis from the Marxist-Leninist belief, originating from Lenin, that the Soviets could not win or benefit from any capitalist war. Instead, like the Soviets at the time, the British Communist Party believed they must instead focus on internal struggle, or supporting internal communist revolutions in other nations. But they believed fundamentally that any direct war with a capitalist nation would only harm the cause. Again, this emphasizes Orwell’s fierce stance against Soviet totalitarianism and Marxist-Leninist philosophy as a whole, but maintains that he is still, and always was, a socialist.