Pigs to power!

Alexander Raskatov's dark adaptation of George Orwell's novel returns to the Vienna State Opera in June. A play about greed for power and populism, totalitarianism and violence, revolution and hope.

4. May 2026: State visit by US President Donald Trump to Beijing. On Tiananmen Square, where the Chinese people's democracy movement was violently crushed by the communist government in 1989, a successful staging takes place on this May Day: Cheering children jump up and down waving flags - Chinese and American, of course - and greet the President of the United States. This is followed by a military parade: precisely choreographed, perfectly executed - a demonstration of Chinese efficiency, discipline and military strength. The aim is to impress the guest, but also to flatter him: a big stage, a good show, a large audience - just the way Trump likes it.

The men sitting at the table during the negotiations are those who determine the fate of the world today: Elon Musk, Apple boss Tim Cook and Jensen Huang, head of chip manufacturer NVIDIA. As the main beneficiaries of the liberal, capitalist West, they are there for one thing above all: improving trade relations with the aim of maximizing their own profits. The agenda does not include talks about Russia's ongoing aggression against the population in Ukraine or discussions on how to combat a climate crisis that is being driven by leading market economies such as China and the USA, or considerations on how to de-dynamize a spiral of poverty into which more and more people are falling as a result of turbo-capitalism. Instead, there is haggling over tariff increases and reductions, new sales markets are being fought for and trade barriers are being renegotiated.

When it comes to the Iran war, Trump is primarily concerned with releasing the oil that is still stuck in the tankers in the Strait of Hormuz and which he so urgently needs to appease the growing voices of protest in his own country - if the crisis suddenly hits your wallet, you can raise an objection. Not a word is said about the ongoing oppression of women's rights, which have not seen any significant improvements despite the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement, triggered by the violent death of Mahsa Amini in 2022. And as a matter of course, world domination is being negotiated there at the big table, which will undoubtedly be determined in the future by the leading nation in the field of AI and in which China and the USA are currently by far the leading military powers. So perhaps Jensen Huang was not so wrong when he described the summit as "one of the most important in human history". But this has nothing to do with humanity.

If we look from our little corner of the world to the left and to the right, there seems to be hardly any difference politically. Capitalism has found its way into every corner of the globe, and the kleptomania of world leaders is devouring any attempt to draw political boundaries between the liberalist-minded West and the socialist-minded East. Trump's ongoing flirtation with the world's leading autocrats - Putin and Xi - proves that in a country that until not so long ago waged a fierce ideological and military struggle against communism, it is now easy to align oneself with those "enemy" nations without encountering any real resistance. A community of values based on the preservation of human dignity and rights, ethical behavior, international cooperation and mutual respect is being replaced by a "me first" culture that is exclusively concerned with personal enrichment. These are the new values that unite the former East and West today. The Iron Curtain no longer runs vertically, as it did during the Cold War, but horizontally between perpetrators and victims, those who exploit and those who are exploited.

This is actually nothing new. The fact that greed for power - beyond political ideologies - unites is precisely what Orwell is able to show in his fable published in 1945: the animals of Manor Farm are fed up with their oppression by the farmer Jones. The old boar Old Major tells the farm animals about his dream at a night-time meeting: together they would revolt against the exploitative rule of humans and lead a self-determined life in which all animals are equal. A few months later - Old Major has already died - an unexpected revolution takes place and the animals drive Jones off the farm. At first, everything seems to be getting better: everyone contributes what they can to the community, food is shared out fairly, nothing is sold and trade is frowned upon. But gradually the pigs take over and suppress the other animals. They order more work, expropriate the hens, whose eggs they confiscate for sale, ration the food of the others and enrich themselves in return. The political opposition in the form of the pig Snowball is chased off the farm with brute force and denounced as a traitor who would have collaborated with the humans during the revolution. The propaganda pig Squealer (which means "squeal/screech", but also "snitch") nevertheless convinces the animals that they are always better off than before among the humans, thereby justifying the pigs' supremacy. The reversal of the actually revolutionary idea is ultimately concentrated in the change of the supreme law of animals by the pigs: "All animals are equal" becomes "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal".

This last commandment sounds dangerously disturbing at a time when, after years of war, an entire system has just been defeated that was based precisely on the ideology that some people are better than others. Although Orwell's fable is not so much a critique of National Socialism in general, but of the exploitative capitalism as such, which the people stand for, and the terrorizing Stalinism, which the new pig rule stands for, Orwell's own anti-fascist and anti-imperialist roots are a central aspect of his biography and his artistic work: in 1936, the British Indian-born writer travelled to Spain to fight alongside the Republicans against Franco's fascist putschists in the civil war there. He joined the POUM militia, which formed part of the Marxist Workers' Party and united mainly anti-Stalinist communists for a common purpose. The idea for Animal Farm was already born at this point: The aim was to write a work that would convey a real picture, especially in the West, of what actually took place in the USSR under Stalin - from new exploitations, excesses of violence, deportations to mass deaths in the gulags - and to which the West had long turned a blind eye.

Orwell's novel ends with the pigs, who are now cooperating with the humans after all, being observed playing cards with one of the surrounding farmers by the other animals, who can no longer distinguish between pigs and humans. Under Stalin, Marx's communist dream of abolishing class society and enabling an equal, fairly distributed life for all was transformed into a new exploitative system that could no longer be distinguished from that of capitalism, from which the animals had previously tried to free themselves. In his preface to the Ukrainian edition, Orwell describes that this final moment alludes to the Tehran Conference, where the three Allied superpowers (USA, UK and USSR), represented by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, met for the first time to work out a joint war strategy against fascist Nazi Germany.

The mechanisms of power that Orwell describes in his fable - from disinformation campaigns, propaganda and fear-mongering as political leverage to the liquidation of political opposition, extreme cults of personality and the consolidation of power by a few (rich!) men - are spreading today in yet another disturbing way. Narcissism and greed seem to rule our world, be it autocrats waging unlawful territorial wars (in Ukraine as well as China's efforts to annex Taiwan), presidents openly flaunting their greed to the world and being celebrated for it, or filthy rich corporations who want nothing but money from us and to whom we willingly sell our souls (let's say: data).

Sometimes it seems difficult to find hope. But perhaps that's being far too snivelling again. After all, here in the West we live in abundance rather than hardship, and despite everything that seems broken at the moment, it has to be acknowledged that we are, in a sense, living at the height of prosperity here.

In his Notes in Germany (1934), Max Horkheimer describes class society in the form of a skyscraper: at the top the trust magnates, managers, liberal professions as well as employees, military personnel, academics, then the proletariat, below them the poor and the sick; but only then the real misery: the mass poverty in the former colonies, many of which have still not recovered from their exploitation, and then the animal suffering below that. I think we know where we belong.

So let's look for the spark of hope where Orwell placed it: in the dream of a better world, for which we have the strength to fight if we want to.