Someone suggested in class that Orwell was strongly opposed to socialism. But it’s worth noting that not everyone reads him that way--including, for at least much of his adult life, Orwell himself.
He fought against the Facists in Spain, and after seeing the Stalinist tactics of the Soviet-supported Republican army against groups like the anarchist & syndicalist militia of the POUM, with which Orwell fought (on the same side, that is, against the Fascist National Front, which had narrowly lost the 1936 election), he became strongly anti-Stalinist and anti-totalitarian. But he continued to identify as a socialist. (Brief bio here )
In The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), in which he reports on the lives of miners in Lancashire and Yorkshire, he argues that
Indeed, from one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.And as late as 1946 in “Why I Write” he wrote that
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it(also w/o italics here. I don't have a print text handy, so I don't know which is more reliable).
That was still before writing 1984, so one might argue that his views changed. But many read it as consistent with his earlier positons. So, for instance, Robert Resch in Boundary 2 reads 1984 as both socialist and anti-Stalinist:
Because Orwell’s democratic socialism is explicitly and militantly anti-capitalist, his concept of totalitarianism must be distinguished clearly from that of his cold war appropriators.According to Paul Foot in Socialist Review
George Orwell was the earliest and most eloquent British writer to call himself a revolutionary socialist and yet denounce the influence and propaganda of the most powerful force to describe itself as socialist - Stalinism.More Orwell, of course, at the library.
