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How Is Marxism Portrayed in 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell?

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How Is Marxism Portrayed in 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell?
How is Marxism portrayed throughout ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell?

The main aim of Marxism is to bring about a classless society, and ‘Animal Farm’ is generally considered to be a Marxist novel, as all its characters share a similar ambition at the beginning. ‘Animal Farm’ represents an example of the oppressed masses rising up to form their own classless society, whilst offering a subtle critique on Stalin’s Soviet Russia, and communism in general. Orwell is, ironically, revolutionary in his work, as contextually in 1945, communism was a ‘taboo’ subject, punishable in post-war America by arrest and even death. It is clear from the political references in ‘Animal Farm’, that Orwell considered Russia, and consequently communism as a counter-revolutionary force that would inevitably become corrupted by greed and power. Every aspect of context is explored in ‘Animal Farm’, and the destructive and often contradictive nature of communism is explored in extraordinary detail and analysis. He represents ‘Animal Farm’ is an allegory of the situation at the beginning of the 1950’s and employs a third-person narrator, who reports events without commenting on them directly. . George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm portrays a reenactment of the Russian Revolution, with major characters cast as farm animals and communism renamed "Animalism." True to the historical story, the aristocratic players manipulate the proletariat, deluding them with illusions of dignity and improved living conditions

In terms of structure, ‘Animal Farm’ represents both the making and the breaking of communist society. The birth of the communist agenda in ‘Animal Farm’ is brought about by the character ‘Old Major’. Merely the name of this character indicates a level of importance. ‘Old Major’ is considered to be a subtle and distinct doppelganger of the German theorist Karl Marx, as well as arguably, Vladimir Lenin, the political economist who many thought a God after the Russian Revolution.

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