mental plane as the Nazi "Jew," and the vicious irony of the end of Boxer the
workhorse is perhaps really great satire. On the other hand, the satire on the
episode corresponding to the German invasion seems to me both silly and
heartless, and the final metamorphosis of pigs into humans is a fantastic
disruption of the sober logic of the tale. The reason for the change in method
was to conclude the story by showing the end of Communism under Stalin
as a replica of its beginning under the Czar. Such an alignment is, of course,
completely nonsense, and as Mr. Orwell must know it to be nonsense, his
motive for adopting it was presumably that he did not know how otherwise
to get his allegory rounded off with a neat, epigrammatic finish.

Animal Farm adopts one of the classical formulas of satire, the corrup-
tion of principle by expediency, of which Swift's Tale of a Tub is the greatest
example. It is an account of the bogging down of Utopian aspirations in the
quicksand of human nature which could have been written by a contempo-
rary of Artemus Ward about one of the cooperative communities attempted
in America during the last century. But for the same reason, it completely
misses the point as satire on the Russian development of Marxism, and as
expressing the disillusionment which many men of goodwill feel about
Russia.The reason for that disillusionment would be much better expressed
as the corruption of expediency by principle. For the whole point about
Marxism was surely that it was the first revolutionary movement in history
which attempted to start with a concrete historical situation instead of vast,
a priori generalizations of the "all men are equal" type, and which aimed at
scientific rather than Utopian objectives. Marx and Engels worked out a
revolutionary technique based on an analysis of history known as dialectical
materialism, which appeared in the nineteenth century at a time when meta-
physical materialism was a fashionable creed, but which Marx and Engels
always insisted was a quite different thing from metaphysical materialism.

Today, in the Western democracies, the Marxist approach to historical
and economic problems is, whether he realizes it or not, an inseparable part
of the modern educated man's consciousness, no less than electrons or
dinosaurs, while metaphysical materialism is as dead as the dodo, or would
be if it were not for one thing. For a number of reasons, chief among them
the comprehensiveness of the demands made on a revolutionary by a revolu-
tionary philosophy, the distinction just made failed utterly to establish itself
in practice as it did in theory. Official Marxism today announces on page one
that dialectical materialism is to be carefully distinguished from metaphysical
materialism, and then insists from page two to the end that Marxism is never-
theless a complete materialist metaphysic of experience, with materialist
answers to such questions as the existence of God, the origin of knowledge,
and the meaning of culture. Thus, instead of including itself in the body of

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