The rebellion on Animal Farm, initiated by the revolutionary pig leader, Old Major, begins as a result of the farm animals’ discontent with “the tyranny of human beings,” as described in a speech that the revolutionary makes in the first chapter. After overthrowing Mr. Jones and others like him, Old Major contends, the animals will be able to enjoy the fruits of their own labor.

Initially, the animals’ contention with humans analogizes with the proletariat’s discontent with the ruling class during the Russian Revolution. As Animal Farm prospers, however, leading the pigs to form an economic alliance with neighboring farmers—a move that had initially been forbidden in the original Seven Commandments—the rivalry with the humans takes a new shape. After the pigs install themselves as a ruling class, to whom the other animals must answer, it is only the pigs who interact with the outside world. At this point, the rivalry is only really between pigs and humans and becomes a metaphor for the competition between the East and West and Communism versus Capitalism.

After the pigs, particularly Napoleon and Squealer, begin to mimic human behavior—walking on their hind legs and wearing clothes—the line of demarcation between the animals and humans becomes unclear. This becomes especially poignant at the end of the novel when a card game erupts into a fight after Napoleon and a neighboring farmer, Mr. Pilkington, both play an ace of spades. The fact that both play the trump card means not only that each side seeks to be dominant but that they are also willing to cheat each other to win (there can only be one ace of spades in a deck). The pigs have so expertly morphed themselves into human-like creatures that the other animals can no longer tell them apart. In his preface to the Ukrainian edition of the novel, Orwell noted that he did not mean for this moment to suggest reconciliation between the pigs and the humans. On the contrary, the conflict was meant to reflect his prediction that the détente that resulted after the 1943 Tehran Conference—a meeting of Josef Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill—would not last. The goals of the West, centered on their supposed emphasis of democratic values, could not be reconciled with the ambitions of a ruthless totalitarian regime.