Orwell became an engaged socialist as a young man based on his experience as being sent out as a colonial officer to Burma, and then as a consequence his exploration of the lives of the lower classes in the “developed” regions of Europe (primarily UK, France and Spain).* he wrote extensively of the inequities of capitalism and specifically of British social system.

By the end of the war his opinions had expanded as he understood the common thread of manipulation that ran through the governing systems of capitalism, fascism and communism. His subsequent, and final book, Animal Farm was about how communist systems, due to human nature, can tend to to end up just as bad as the others. It’s unclear to me if he ever gave up on his hopes for socialism (and if he had, if he despaired of any alternative) but it’s his weakest book in an extraordinary corpus.

1984 is often taken as a denouncement of socialism, but it’s more broad than that.

* Blair’s journey to socialism parallels the earlier journey that made socialism an acceptable doctrine in the UK at all, the trenches of WWI. That was the first time many of the upper class (all officers of course) had ever interacted closely with members of the lower classes and really developed even an inkling of what their lives were back home.