ABSTRACT
In the opening chapter of Animal Farm (1945) George Orwell makes Major, Mr Jones’s ‘prize Middle White boar’, explain the basic idea of Marxism in animal terms. ‘Man,’ he tells the other animals:
is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives them back the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labour tills the soil, our dung fertilizes it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin.
