26 is still young enough to be idealist: Capitalism seemed to have no future, Communism, to the young would have seemed rather compellingly, to be the future. Ambitious young people like to get in at the beginning of a trend. Put yourself in that position. So the thing to be then, for young ambitious educated cool kidz in the west would have been communist, basically. As, perhaps for young, ambitious, educated people today, it probably seems rational to be behind Starmer for example.
Does this mean they cared about the working class? Does this mean he would not have dropped communism in a flash when this trend did not take off in the 1930s? What do people do today when they jumped on the wrong bandwagon? What did the Guardian do when they jumped on the Snowdon leaks then got angle-ground? They double down in the opposite direction to show their loyalty to the actual underlying trend or underlying power.
I guess this would be how I see Orwell: An intellectual who jumped on the wrong trend and self-corrected to the eventual satisfaction of the state. And he thenceforth occupied his rather modest position within the power structure and played his part.
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