Was Orwell a Communist?

Of course not. If he was, the humans would have liked the animals in Animal Farm, or the pigs would have been the good guys in the book.

Of course he's not! Animal Farm was an allegory of the Russian Revolution into communism and he totally craps on the idea of communism. Read Animal Farm and you can see that he is totally against the idea, in fact one of the themes of the book is the inevitability of totalitarianism. He was a socialist.

The British intelligence group Special Branch maintained a file on Orwell for more than 20 years of his life. The dossier, published by The National Archives, mentions that according to one investigator, Orwell had "advanced Communist views and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at Communist meetings". MI5, the intelligence department of the Home Office, noted: "It is evident from his recent writings — 'The Lion and the Unicorn' — and his contribution to Gollancz's symposium The Betrayal of the Left that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him."[91]

Is Trotskyist close enough? Or anarcho-syndicalist? If not, then he wasn't.

Orwell was a leftist, but not a leftist in the mold of the Bolsheviks of Russia. He advocated for socialism in the Road to Wigan Pier, he tried to picture communism not as a bad ideology but one that went horribly wrong in Animal Farm, and said that "Everything I've written from 1938 was directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism." If Leon Trotsky, who was expelled from the Bolshevik Communist party and killed (for being against Stalin), counts as a Communist, then Orwell was a communist, as he fought with Trotskyites in the Spanish Civil War. He did hate Stalin's Communism and the Communist Party though, so he was both a communist.... and an anti-Communist, at the same time. Unless you don't think Trotsky was Communist, in which case, he was a socialist and not a Communist.

Don't let the GOP brainwash you on this though, they will take a fascist and make him/her look like one of their own (cough cough Donald Trump). And never ask for advice on Yahoo.

"Ultimate moderate." Lmao, that is me. I still identify with the labor movement in general, but I'm as moderate as a leftist gets. I'm moderate in the international sense (i.e. open minded), not in the American sense (i.e. a cynic who doesn't believe in anything they are told and makes you smack yourself in the head). This places me to the left of social liberalism and a lot to the right of Orwell, the revolutionary leftist as opposed to my type of reform democrat, that is, small "d". (see Clement Atlee or Willy Brandt).

No. George Orwell was not a Communist--he was accused of being many things throughout his lifetime-a fascist, a communist, an anarchist--he was not any of these things. He was a journalist who attended meetings of the communist party and viewed the propaganda published by both the fascists and communists and was shocked to see that they worked together at times. George Orwell never gave himself to a political movement, but instead chose to be a journalist--the ultimate moderate and observer.

Orwell was against any totalitarian regime, regardless of political persuasion. That is why he wrote 1984 and Animal farm.

No. He was a practicing Anglican.

No, he was against communism.

No. No, no, no, no, no. No.

Chauncy - ROFL.