The grave of Eric Blair (pen name George Orwell) in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire. Photograph: Mark Hodson/ Alamy
While doing research for a recent project on urban landscaping in Fascist Italy, I came across a book that at first seemed like an interesting diversion, but which has stayed in my mind, needling me about how to approach both history and the present: Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit.
I’m not a Rebecca Solnit stan. In fact, this may be the only book of hers I’ve ever finished. Her meandering style — shot through, admittedly, with beautiful descriptive writing — always seems to converge, tediously, on herself, and I dislike the tone of resigned certainty with which she puts forth her ideas of literature and the world. In this regard Orwell’s Roses is no different, but the book is enlivened by Solnit’s trenchant analysis of Leftist politics in the twentieth century, in which she separates Socialists and Communists into sheep and goats, writes extensively about the Soviet-created Ukrainian famine of the 1930s and the disaster of Lysenkoism, and condemns western communist sympathizers for at best ignoring and at worst bolstering the cult of Stalin.
However, Solnit doesn’t take the crucial next step of applying her analytical framework to Leftist politics in our own time. Her critiques of the Soviet Union are fair; it’s easy enough to call mid-century western Stalinists craven, boot-licking, power-mad, brainwashed, or what have you, but that’s low-hanging fruit, and in leveling these accusations Solnit hardly distinguishes herself from Senator Joseph McCarthy. What’s most important, and what she pointedly leaves out, is the question: Why? Why did western intellectuals support the Soviet Union? Was it to meet boys, like my grandmother? (Reader, that’s a joke: I don’t believe for a minute that was the real reason my grandmother Josephine Nordstrand joined the CPUSA.)
Excerpt from “The Rise and Fall of Militant Interracial Solidarity on the Milwaukee Waterfront, 1934-1942” by Michael Billeaux (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 2022)
Or was it that, as Arthur Koestler put it in his essay in the 1949 book The God That Failed:
I became converted [to communism] because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith . . . [Upon reading Marx,] something had clicked in my brain that shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had “seen the light” is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows, regardless of what faith he has been converted to.
Rebecca Solnit is an activist as well as a writer, with prominent commitments to climate change and feminism. Her 2012 Guernica essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” later published as a book, is believed to have been the genesis of the popular term “mansplaining.” Lately, however, she’s fallen afoul of the new leftist Popular Front, the pro-Hamas umbrella that has gathered all progressive activism under itself.
And yet Orwell’s Roses, if only they would read it, has pointed questions for pro-Hamas progressives in the west as well. Why are feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, and socialists demanding a ceasefire in Gaza, after Hamas violated the one that was in place on October 6 and stormed across the border, massacring 1,200 peacenik Israelis and taking 200 hostage? Why is this same coalition calling the war thus provoked against Hamas genocide, when in fact, in spite of all the evil horrors of modern warfare, it has nothing in common with actual genocide, i.e. the deliberate destruction of an ethnic group or people? (Reminder: Israel’s war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people, whom Hamas has been using as human shields for decades). Why is it so easy for us to look at the well-intentioned leftists of a few short decades ago as misguided fools, while we see ourselves — fueled by the putative power of instantaneous transmission of information (if not of truth) — as the smart ones?
The premise of Solnit’s book — and it’s a lovely one — is that George Orwell loved beauty, and that beauty is the truest form of resistance. The title refers to six rose bushes from Woolworth’s that Orwell planted in his garden in 1936 before going off to Spain to join the Loyalist cause. While in Spain, Orwell fought for the POUM — The Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, a heterodox, anti-Stalinist communist breakaway cadre — but became disillusioned when the Communist Party took it over along with all the other disparate socialist groups that made up the Popular Front, and turned what had been a war against Fascism into a pro-Soviet colonial struggle for control of Spain. Here, Solnit suggests, is where Orwell’s anti-Communism, the prominent theme of Animal Farm and 1984, began; she makes sure to note, however, that Orwell was on the right side of history by being merely opposed to Stalinism, while remaining a socialist in his heart.
This parsing of good v. bad socialism, I fear, is too subtle for those who style themselves socialists today. Bad socialism is, apparently, Stalinism, with its lust for power and love of the Strong Man, and there is surely a sexual aspect to it: as Susan Sontag noted in a 1975 essay, “Extreme . . . movements, however puritanical and repressive the realities they usher in, have an erotic surface” (incidentally, I read Sontag’s essay in connection with a review of the aesthetics of Tom of Finland). Good socialism, on the other hand, eschews the hypermasculine milieu of virile jackbooted thugs, be they Fascist or Communist, and extols instead the softer, more feminine atmosphere of green spaces, handicrafts, veganism, and the collective.
Untitled (Tom of Finland, 1974)
Orwell planted roses in his garden — that quintessential English flower, redolent of the bourgeois pleasures of the cottage and the tea-table — before taking up arms against Fascism in Spain. Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984, buys an old glass paperweight enclosing a piece of coral in a junk shop, and this middlebrow, non-utilitarian object inspires him to resist the totalizing influence of The Party. The so-called “Bread and Roses” strike of textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912 was centered around the poignant demand that workers be given not just bread, but roses too — in other words, the necessary leisure time to develop their inner lives, to cultivate the love of beauty, and to thus be acknowledged as fully human.
Striking textile workers, Lawrence, Mass., 1912.
There is a real cognitive dissonance between contemporary progressives’ vaunted love for the natural world, for what they believe is the harmonious structure of indigenous societies, and for oppressed groups, and their calls for the complete eradication of the state of Israel. George Orwell wrote in my favorite of his books, The Road to Wigan Pier, an exposé of the horrific living and working conditions of miners in the North of England:
I had reduced everything to the simple theory that the oppressed are always right and the oppressors are always wrong: a mistaken theory, but the natural result of being one of the oppressors yourself.
The currently-construed Left would do well to read Orwell, and to plant a few rosebushes.