It is believed by many that Animal Farm is a warning about Communism, but this ignores one very important key feature of the story–Animalism (the stand-in for communism) in its purest form works. During the first year (a lifetime for many species) of Animal Farm’s existence things are clearly better than they were and what problems exist are clearly just growing pains that could be solved with experience (mostly). It is only when Napoleon (Stalin) takes over, when he starts perverting Animalism for his own ends, that things take a turn for the shitty. Animal Farm is the story of a revolution betrayed–the Soviet Union being a large, prominent, recent, relevant-to-the-author’s-life example of this made it the natural choice for a model.
But how did Napoleon come to power? He sicced a bunch of dogs on Snowball (Trotsky). Where did the dogs come from, and why did this work? Here we get to why I qualified that statement about Animal Farm’s pre-Napoleon problems with “mostly”, for there was an original sin of Animalism:
The pigs (the bolsheviks) decided that the other animals were too stupid and impressionable to meaningfully contribute to political discourse and altered the power structure so that the pigs would decide things among themselves and the other animals would then vote on whether or not the proposal was good. With this small tweak to electoral procedure, they made themselves a ruling class, tasked with “defending” democracy from, well, itself–the American founding fathers (who literally made property ownership a prerequisite for voting) would be proud.
This, then, is the true lesson of Animal Farm: that revolutions are delicate things. That the slightest whiff of corruption, left unchecked, can bring the whole thing crashing down and leave you worse off than you were before. That, as Marx himself said, if you go into a revolution without a clear plan for the future you’re just going to end up recreating the system that came before.
These are lessons that are going to be of extremely practical utility in the near future.
