George Orwell's Comign Up For Air
I got familiar, learnt, and accepted Marxism from early age in my own way ...
In my environment, the 2000s in Iran, there was not any room for leftist thinking. Left, as a word has been dramatically altered in political lingo. It meant to be a supporter of the reformist, pro-western section of the Iran government, and of course, with emphasis on the free market. There wasn't any room for thinkers such as Gramsci. My current goal of life, to be an intellectual living in the free western environment, is created in that period.
I got familiar with Marxist through the opponent of Stalinism. As a devoted book reader, I am well familiar with Orwell books such as Animal Farm and 1984. I could understand, vaguely, these stories are about the evil scary USSR. The last drop was the Master and Margarita book. The unfairness towards Bulgakov made me even more anti-Stalinist.
I never read anything from Lenin or Marx. Never heard of Engels or Luxemburg. A pro-US and pro-capitalism person by the age of 17.
Then I got familiar with the book trilogy: Isaac Deutscher s Prophet. I read about it in one of Akbar Ganji. He used to quote many paragraphs of this book. Finally, I found the trilogy. I got them and started to read about the life of Leon Trotsky. Fortunately, the translation was perfect and very well polished.
I wish I could explain the lighting effect of the book on me. This phenomenon anti-Stalinist book was the gate to a new world for me. By the end of the book, I couldn't stop to read about Marxist. This time, the book was written by Karl Marx himself.
It was a great area for internet users in Iran, somehow. The internet was slow (it still is) but very free. You could check any sites.
I Googled Karl Marx and Engels and Leon Trotsky. Guess what? The Persian version of Marxist.org, run by an Iranian Trotskyist group led by Maziar Razi, collected and even translated many of Marxist writers work and uploaded them in PDF.
I read the Manifesto first, then Revolution Betrayed, then What Is be Done to Be Done. I was a kid in a Chocolate shop. Didn't know where to start and wanted to read everything! It was fantastic!
It was a beginning of a beautiful, fulfilling, and thrilling relationship! Why thrilling? Communists face death penal in Iran.
Reading those docs were illuminating, but the real trigger was something else on the streets of my city.
The last textile factory in the downtime, with nearly one century age, was closed. The city was dramatically changing. The city hall wanted the malls and parking, and not the factories. What would they do with all those cheap imported goods then??
The factory was closed for some time, but the workers had a small public assembly with banners like (still waiting for our salaries) and so on. Police came and hit them ruthlessly. Throw them into a bus and took them.
It was a beginning of a lifetime devotion.
However, after almost ten years, I’ve the book again: this time in the original English. And although I enjoyed as much as previous times, I’m not 100% agree with Orwell anymore.
Orwell is over pessimistic. Maybe his experience in Spain (he wrote in one of his essays that the history ended there) or just monstrous elimination of intelligentsia by Stalin in the Soviet Union and shameful accusations and pathetic fights of left-wing parties in the West, made him to a grumpy old man. The disgusting world, he introduced as the time before the war (WWII) and his perspective about the coming dark epoch after the war is super pessimistic. It is not even alarming but sounds like a gambler who bets and hopes for the loss of his/her favourite team.
Nevertheless, the book is like a freshening breeze for any lonely but concerned mind.