George Orwell’s short allegorical novel Animal Farm is often recommended as a warning about the dangers of communism and socialism. Earlier this year, Ken Griffin, the CEO of the Citadel hedge fund, offered to provide copies to every New York City 9th grader as a response to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s proposed tax hike.1 And after a widely panned animated adaptation came out this year, critics like Eli Lake excoriated the film for downplaying Orwell’s warning about the “false promise” of socialism.2, 3
Offering Animal Farm as a response to socialism is tragically self-defeating. Orwell was a self-proclaimed socialist and Animal Farm is not an anti-socialist or even an anti-communist novel. It is anti-Stalinist — but its critique of Stalin’s regime is actually pro-socialist. Here’s why — and where those looking for a genuinely anti-socialist novel should look instead.
Animal Farm’s pro-socialist message
Animal Farm portrays animals who overthrow Jones, the owner of their farm (who is widely taken to represent the monarchy of Tsar Nicholas II) and establish a new society in which “All animals are equal.” Importantly, Orwell portrays the socialist experiment on the farm as an immediate, admirable success:
In the end they finished the harvest in two days’ less time than it had usually taken Jones and his men. Moreover, it was the biggest harvest the farm had ever seen . . . All through that summer the work of the farm went like clockwork. The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. . . . With the worthless parasitical human beings gone, there was more for everyone to eat. There was more leisure, too, inexperienced though the animals were.4
The novel attributes this initial success to the animals’ collective effort to practice communist economic equality. At this time, two pigs — Snowball (seen as representing Leon Trotsky) and Napoleon (Joseph Stalin) — become the de facto leaders. However, when Napoleon forces Snowball into exile and seizes dictatorial power for himself, life on the farm gets progressively worse, and his cadre of pigs declares themselves “more equal” than the other animals.
The novel’s message is not that socialism is bad. If anything, it upholds the socialist ideal of creating a society of individuals who are to be rendered equal in all respects as far as possible, regardless of differences in capabilities and achievements. The pursuit of this sort of equality is entirely different from the political equality espoused by the American founding fathers in which all individuals are recognized as equal in their rights, as worthy of impartial treatment by the law — even as they may be unequal in many other respects. Socialist equality is rather the the egalitarian equality captured by Marx’s slogan “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Individuals with greater abilities are proscribed from benefitting from their use; the products of their efforts and abilities are to be redistributed to others to achieve equal outcomes for all. And because individuals have no inviolable rights, they may be sacrificed to collective ends like egalitarian equality.
Animal Farm’s claim about Stalin and dictators like him is that they turn a noble and workable socialist experiment into a contemptible dictatorship that undercuts the socialist ideal. But what does it look like to really practice this ideal?
The image Orwell paints of a happy, flourishing farm early in the story does not even resemble the real historical Soviet Union before Stalin. It was a brutal dictatorship that killed tens of thousands of suspected dissenters and sent many more to gulags.5 It also was, as socialism always is, an economic nightmare, rife with rationing, poverty and famine.6
Moreover, it’s just not true that Stalin betrayed the socialist ideal. According to his biographer Stephen Kotkin, Stalin was a true believer in Marxism whose private statements were consistent with his public beliefs.7 And one of Stalin’s most devastating policies was the collectivization of agriculture, a campaign that confiscated private farms and coerced peasants to work on collective farms.8 This policy was in part an attempt to fulfill the egalitarian, collectivist ideal of socialism, redistributing from those with the ability to produce to those with needs. But it resulted in millions of deaths. In both the Lenin and Stalin eras, Soviet Russia was dominated by poverty and oppression as a result of its leaders’ loyalty to socialism.
By portraying socialism as an idyllic success before its corruption by a dictator and suggesting that it wasn’t to blame for Stalin’s crimes, Animal Farm elevates Marxist ideals instead of criticizing them. Orwell implies that un-hijacked socialism would drastically improve human life, obscuring the reality that faithfully practiced socialism actually causes oppression and poverty. That’s a false and blatantly pro-socialist message. And in light of socialism’s devastating impact, it’s a dangerous message.
So business leaders who recommend Animal Farm have fallen for Orwell’s propaganda. Where can they turn for a true defense of freedom against socialism?
Ayn Rand’s depiction of the evil of socialism in Anthem
The pro-capitalism novelist Ayn Rand recognized the danger of Animal Farm back in 1946. She warned Leonard Read, the founder of the free-market organization Foundation for Economic Education, not to promote the novella:
As an advance warning, for God’s sake DON’T recommend “Animal Farm”. . . . It is a book against Stalin, not against Communism. In fact, it is the mushiest and most maudlin preachment of Communism (I suppose the author would call it Socialism, but there is no difference), that I have seen in a long time. The moral of the book is not: “Communism is evil,” but: “Stalin’s Communism is just as evil as Capitalism.” Don’t let’s help to preach that idea.9
Contrary to Orwell, who regarded socialism as a noble ideal that in practice is often corrupted, Rand regarded socialism as evil both in theory and in practice. Although famous for The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Rand also wrote a novella (about 100 pages) called Anthem, which, in contrast to Animal Farm, is genuinely anti-socialist in the most fundamental sense.
Anthem depicts a society in which the egalitarian, collectivist ideal of socialism has completely triumphed. The official policy of this society is to make everyone as equal as possible in all respects and to compel everyone to live solely to promote the good of the whole society. In other words, the society’s stated policies are similar to those of the Animal Farm before Napoleon’s takeover: “All animals are equal,” and all must work for the interests of the farm as a whole. Where in Orwell’s novel the collectivism is merely implied by the rest of the animals’ ideas and practices, the society in Anthem is explicit about its collectivist ideal in its official slogan:
We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.10
But Rand presents a very different portrait of the un-hijacked attempt to practice these ideals. The councils that rule Anthem’s society condemn and attempt to suppress all inequalities, including metaphysically given ones like height, raw intelligence and other forms of ability. Since it’s impossible to bestow greater abilities on the least able, the councils primarily seek equality by tearing down the most able. For example, they deliberately assign intelligent individuals to menial jobs — the protagonist Equality 7-2521, who has a brilliant scientific mind, is ordered to be a street sweeper. They strive to control all aspects of life, from work to meals to relations with others, according to their plans for the alleged good of the “great We.” As a result, they outlaw all individual initiative: everyone must act strictly as ordered.
They even attempt to suppress what enables individual initiative: independent thought and personal preference. From childhood, the people of this society are subjected to propaganda telling them that it is wrong to think anything that others do not think or to prefer a career, activity or person. Anyone who does not completely subordinate their mind and their capacity to value faces an agonizing conflict between the life they are compelled to live and, on the other hand, their own thoughts, desire and emotions — which they cannot even express without fear of punishment. Even an unstated question or a secret preference, kept hidden within one’s own mind, puts one in conflict with those in power.
In a society like this, it is impossible for anyone to be happy. Equality 7-2521 finds joy only when he figures out how to pursue some of his values — in secret defiance of the councils’ mandates. He observes that none of his fellow citizens are happy: He sees people who frequently cry without reason or scream for help in the night. “Fear walks through the City, fear without name, without shape. All men feel it and none dare to speak,” he observes.11
And this society’s suppression of the individual has caused it to regress from a modern, industrial society back to a primitive level of existence. Its prohibitions on individual thought and initiative quell any technology more advanced than the candle. Its citizens farm at a near-subsistence level, with life expectancy dramatically reduced.
The picture conveyed by Anthem: practicing egalitarian collectivist ideals consistently causes poverty and oppression. The problem isn’t “corruption” of the socialist ideal — it’s that the socialist ideal itself is corrupt.
And Anthem offers a value beyond astutely showing the evils of socialism. Its critique of socialism is inextricable from its depiction of the source of invention, progress and prosperity: the independent, individual mind, which pursues new truths regardless of the demands of authorities or the views of the majority. By defying the society’s prohibitions, Equality 7-2521 becomes a scientific innovator who creates a technology that promises to improve human life. Anthem contends that, to have a society where such people can succeed, one must reject the whole collectivist worldview and embrace the moral right of the individual to think freely, to pursue his own initiatives, and to pursue his own happiness.
Anthem, not the pro-socialist Animal Farm, is the short fictional antidote to socialist ideology because it reveals the evil of the socialist moral ideal. Those like Griffin who want to stem the resurgence of socialism would do themselves a service by reading and recommending it.
“Ken Griffin Says New York Doesn’t Welcome Success Under Mamdani,” Wall Street Journal, accessed July 23, 2026.
“Animal Farm,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed July 23, 2026.
“The New ‘Animal Farm’ Movie Is Less Equal Than the Book,” Free Press, accessed July 23, 2026.
George Orwell, Animal Farm (Signet Classics, 1996), 28.
James Edward McGoldrick, “Russian Communists Inaugurate the Red Terror,” EBSCO Research Starters, 2021..
Guoli Liu, “Lenin Announces the New Economic Policy,” EBSCO Research Starters, 2021.
Hoover Institution, “Uncommon Knowledge: Part 2: Stephen Kotkin Discusses Stalin’s Consolidation of Power,” hosted by Peter Robinson, featuring Stephen Kotkin, YouTube video, 16:09, October 13, 2015.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Collectivization,” Encyclopædia Britannica.
Ayn Rand, Anthem, Centennial Edition (Plume, 2005), 19.
Rand, Anthem, 46.
Image credits: Ayn Rand: Oscar White / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images
George Orwell: History / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Excellent comparison?