Modes of Production and the Betrayal of Revolution: Historical Materialism in George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Abstract

This article reads George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) through Marxist historical materialism and argues that the novel applies a materialist logic of ownership and control to explain why its revolution fails. Instead of treating Marx’s account of history as a fixed sequence of stages, the study works with the concepts of mode of production, relations of production, base and superstructure, and ideology, drawing on Marx directly and on Althusser’s account of ideological state apparatuses. It reads Manor Farm as a proprietorial economy in which animal labour is appropriated for the market, the Rebellion as a declared transfer of ownership, and Napoleon’s regime as a new ruling group that controls production and its surplus without dissolving the asymmetry between those who direct work and those who perform it. The analysis covers the windmill, the commandments, the ideological apparatuses, the executions, and the farm’s trade with its neighbours. The article proposes that the novel is better described as a materialist diagnosis of revolutionary failure than as a refutation of Marxism, and offers this as an interpretation of the text, not as a claim about Orwell’s intentions.