Essay/Term paper: Political allegory in the book animal farm

Essay, term paper, research paper:  History Essays

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.