Power and Oppression in George Orwell's Animal Farm: A Marxist Literary Analysis

Abstract

George Orwell's Animal Farm tells a deceptively simple story, a group of farm animals overthrow their human master, only to watch a new tyranny grow up in his place. Beneath that simplicity sits one of the more unsettling arguments in twentieth-century fiction, namely that revolutions do not fail because their ideals were wrong but because power, once it exists, tends to find someone willing to hold onto it. This study set out to trace how that argument is built, scene by scene, inside the novel itself, paying particular attention to the methods Napoleon and the pigs use to seize and keep control, and to the way propaganda, fear, manipulation, and material inequality work together rather than in isolation. The analysis was carried out as a qualitative, text-based reading grounded in Marxist literary theory, which treats fiction as a place where class conflict and ideology get worked out in miniature, and it drew on Michel Foucault's account of power as a complementary lens for understanding how the pigs' authority becomes woven into the daily texture of farm life rather than resting on a single dramatic act of conquest. Twenty-six passages were selected for close reading, covering the rebellion itself, the pigs' assumption of leadership, Napoleon's expulsion of Snowball, the raising and use of the guard dogs, Squealer's propaganda campaigns, the executions, the successive rewriting of the Seven Commandments, the exploitation and eventual betrayal of Boxer, and the final scene in which pig and human become indistinguishable. What emerged from this reading is a picture of oppression as something cumulative and self-reinforcing: the animals' revolution against Mr. Jones does not abolish hierarchy so much as relocate it, Napoleon's authority is built less from any single seizure of power than from an accumulation of small institutional advantages, and Squealer's language does not so much lie outright as retrofit justification onto privileges the pigs have already quietly claimed. The paper closes by arguing that Orwell's target is not Stalinism alone but a structural pattern that recurs whenever political authority, controlled information, and economic inequality reinforce one another, which is part of why the novel has outlived the specific history that first inspired it.

Keywords: Animal Farm, George Orwell, power, oppression, propaganda, Marxist literary theory, allegory