Why did Orwell remain a socialist?
[NOTE: Recently I came across an old post of mine on Orwell and decided to repeat it in edited form, because I think it’s still interesting and timely, maybe even more than before. So here it is.]
Commenter “Nick” wrote this about Orwell and Animal Farm:
Orwell was a socialist. His problem with the pigs was that they became no different from the neighboring farmers; his problem with Soviet Marxism was that it acted just like capitalism.
Orwell self-identified as a socialist, and “Nick” makes a thought-provoking point, but I disagree with it. Animal Farm isn’t about Orwell’s own complicated and contradictory political stance. It’s a parable that was meant to illustrate some of the evils inherent in Communism. Yes, economic exploitation by those in power towards the workers (all in the name of a false “equality”) was part of it. But the focus was on totalitarianism, lack of liberty, and statist control – problems he located in the left, not in capitalism.
That said, it is also true that Orwell was very much against income inequality. In fact, that’s the main reason he identified as a socialist. His socialism was a strange beast, however, and he himself recognized the inherent contradictions and difficulties of adherence to it:
As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”
Orwell (Eric Blair) was a brilliant man, and he struggled to reconcile his wish for a certain type of world with his knowledge that such a world could probably never come to be as he wished it. Much of his writing was devoted to the horrors of failed attempts to achieve that world.
Animal Farm is a critique of Stalinism/Communism, and although capitalism as an exploitative system plays a role at the beginning of the book, by the end the astute reader sees Communism as at least as bad or even worse. Orwell was also aware of the strong possibility that liberty and socialism of any sort (not just Communist Stalinism) could not be reconciled, as the above quotes from him indicate. It is my opinion that Orwell came very close to understanding that his vision of a planned economy plus freedom could not come to pass, that the contradiction was basic, and that socialism would always sow the seeds of its own destruction. I just think he couldn’t fully face and embrace that knowledge because to do so would have meant renouncing a lifelong dream. So he clung to some notion of a kinder gentler socialism without the totalitarianism, while at the same time he wrote tirelessly about the evils of Communism.
More:
Socialists have also raised some interesting questions about what Orwell seems to be saying about Lenin and the rise of Stalinism. In fact, Orwell has suggested elsewhere that Trotsky and Lenin are partly responsible for the rise of totalitarianism in Russia and that Bolshevism itself contained elements of authoritarianism. Molyneux, the British socialist, has written a compelling article with a very close reading of the plot and characters of Animal Farm, and concludes that Orwell equates Lenin with Stalin (morphed into the single Napoleon character). Molyneux argues that Orwell gives no way to understand the reasons for the revolution’s failure except human nature (as opposed to insufficient material conditions). All this leaves the book with the reactionary message at the heart of it – that all revolutions fail.
…Even in his best political writing, and his sharp exposés of aspects of capitalism, Orwell was never sure whether a real alternative was possible. Whatever Orwell’s intentions, his most famous books undoubtedly reflect these frustrations and despair. Writing as an isolated intellectual removed from day-to-day struggle, (with the notable exception of his participation in the Spanish Civil War), Orwell never regained the hope for workers’ power he experienced while in Spain.
And that’s coming from a pro-socialist, writing in a socialist periodical.
We’re boxing books for a move, so I can’t look up references, but Orwell at several times pretty much said that a sort of civil libertarian socialism was the only possible hope. He also, in his review of Road to Serfdom, says that free markets are simply not the way the world is headed. The latter is something he said often, about various conservative positions; he did have the fault of looking at current trends, and reading them as going on for longer than they needed to. Oddly enough, this is a fault he picked out in James Burnham.
Generally, we should remember that to very many people, “capitalism” means “industrial oligarchy”. I’m not sure our own use of it for free market systems is wise. A friend argues for “economic freedom” in its place.
He died in 1949. See Norman Podhoretz’ article on this subject. A number of NP’s confederates among the contributors at Commentary had been young Trotskyists. They, unlike Orwell, got to see how the next 35 years turned out.
And, of course, one must remember that politics is tribal. One of the critics of Podhoretz thesis offered that Orwell was unimaginable as a Thatcherite tory.
“…while in Spain.”
Spain is the key.
This is where he discovered Stalin’s murderous policies, where he experienced Soviet savage intrigue and naked totalitarianism up close and personal.
Where he saw that the Soviets’ first priority was to establish themselves as THE LEFT in Spain, and to do that they had to first consolidate their power by eradicating all other parties of the Left—the “opposition”: Socialists and the Anarchists. (Eliminating Letist rivals before right-wing enemies was Soviet MO over and over again all over Europe. Moreover, foreign Socialists—and even Communists—who decided to “live the dream” by moving to the Soviet Utopia were often suspected as spies, sent to the Gulag and/or killed almost outright.)
Knowing that the Soviets targeted other Leftist “opponents—Orwell was lucky to get out of Spain alive—likely enabled him to justify remaining a socialist (he harbored no illusions regarding Trotskyism) along with the following “first causes”:
As a member of the educated intelligentsia—those who saw themselves as ethically aware, concerned and active—he believed that socialism was a necessary, redemptive response, the only organized, humane answer to a capitalism that was believed to have reached its historic dead end, blamed for causing widespread unemployment, poverty and hopelessness following the 1929 crash.
The same antipathy was felt for colonialism, which Orwell had witnessed first hand—had participated in—as a member of the British Raj’s Indian Police Force, in Burma, for several years in the mid-1920s.
He understood that he had to battle totalitarianism whether of the Nazi or Soviet variety, but it would have been almost impossible for him to jettison his views of socialism, even if he may have believed there was a possibility, perhaps even a tendency, to lead to totalitarianism.
He saw how dreary and deadening ENGlish SOCialism was following WWII (though Britain was truly in dire straits economically in the first 10-15 post-war years)
Had he not died in early 1950 (aged 46 and a half), he may, with his active iconoclasm, have ultimately changed his mind about socialism being the wave of the future.
Possibly.
The history of aristocracy and class barriers in Britain surely contributed to a feeling that people were mostly locked in to the economic level at which they were born, with the only possibility of movement being through mass action.
He saw how dreary and deadening ENGlish SOCialism was following WWII (though Britain was truly in dire straits economically in the first 10-15 post-war years)
The immediate postwar years were harsh in Britain. OTOH, at no time during the post-war period was per capita product lower than it had been in 1939. Over the period running from 1947 to 1960, per capita product grew by 31%. It grew by 29% in the United States. For whatever reason, food rationing persisted in Britain after the war. The last of it was not discontinued until 1954. British cooking, of course, remains unimproved.
He was a deeply observant and deeply honest man. It’s hard to overstate my respect for him and his clear-eyed reporting of what he saw wherever he went.
I think David Foster has it just about right. But I think there’s a subtlety he didn’t mention. Despite the history we all ‘know’, there always was a degree of upward social mobility for the very able amongst the working class. So it wasn’t as if life at the bottom was without hope for the capable with the poor luck to be born there. Jude the Obscure is a novel, after all.
But there’s another angle overlooked: Downward Mobility. Orwell was from a downwardly mobile background. Things had been getting worse for them over the preceding generations. According to someone he once described his background as Lower Upper Middle Class. And definitely Colonial Policing was *not* any kind of social apogee.
People like to go on about the English Class System. But the thing is that the worst most neurotic place to be in any class system (forget about just the English one) is the Middle Class: between a rock and hard place. I won’t draw a picture. Most readers will get it.
I can’t help wondering if Orwell’s compulsion to write so much about degradation, misery, filth, humiliations sprang at least in part from his own life-long downward trajectory. It wasn’t a precipitous plunge, but he was no Remarkable Rocket during his lifetime.
Anthony Powell has a great caricature of Orwell in his Dance to the Music of Time. In it he takes some artistic license and makes the analogous character much higher born, always with substantial means, but with a growing fetish for dirt, self-abnegation, and greyness.
I posit that there was a bit of late stage tertiary civilizational syphilis in the man. Like Maupassant it helped in the production of works of genius.
The history of aristocracy and class barriers in Britain surely contributed to a feeling that people were mostly locked in to the economic level at which they were born, with the only possibility of movement being through mass action.
Emphasis on ‘feeling’. Henry Fairlie’s description of the matter was thus: America has classes, but it does not have a class system. Fairlie remained in the United States after 1966 because ‘it was the first time in my life I’d felt free’.
OTOH, you have to ask yourself how much it mattered push comes to shove. Look, for example, at the list of people who’ve sat in the prime minister’s chair since 1902. There have been about two dozen prime ministers in that time. IIRC, only Churchill and Lord Home were men out of the peerage and gentry. Several (David Lloyd-George, Ramsay MacDonald, Edward Heath, James Callaghan) came out of the wage-earning strata and MacDonald was borderline lumpenproletarian. Others have come from solid petit or village bourgeois backgrounds (Bonar Law, Wilson, Thatcher, Brown, May). John Major might qualify as ‘sketchy bourgeois’.
Re existential sufferings of the middle classes: Americans of a certain age (OK, Boomers) won’t all necessarily get this. They lived during a magical aberrational historical bubble or Lagrange Point, or whatever.
Believe me the Gen X, Y, Z.. *do* know what I am talking about because History with an H is back in town and ready to rumble.
Honestly, if anyone wants to study the important C20 history of Britain up until the 1960s, A Dance to the Music of Time will teach you more about what happened and what went wrong among the ruling classes and intellectuals than wading through a bunch of histories (largely written by leftist enemies of various ilks). Hobsbawm and Schama come to mind, but there were plenty of others of all extractions and backgrounds.
Toute nation a le gouvernement qu’elle mérite.
[Every nation gets the government it deserves]
Joseph de Maistre most visionary of France’s early counterrevolutionaries
@Art Deco:
Podhoretz == Hack, to be kind.
Had Stalin not moved against the Soviet Jews post Golda Meir’s 1949 visit to Moscow, and had this repression not continued in gentler forms after Stalin’s death, he and most of his fellow supposed Bronsteinites would likely have had very different political trajectories.
And I do agree that there is no way that Blair (to be fair ;P) would have become a Thatcherite: he’d have been getting dressed up as a Gaucho in 82. Man was honest and pure of heart, but wired a bit awry.
Orwell’s fiction is brilliantly written. I exclude the themes, but refer to the writing.
the “legs bad” chant and its context are terrifying and could be so in some kind of mystery set on the Burma border.
At one point, Edgar Wallace’s fiction was said to be read by more Brits…more volumes, not just more titles…than any other in the UK. Decent fiction could pay a man’s grocery bills with a good bit left over. Or not even “decent”. See the surfeit of the lords-and-detectives genre.
He could have used a pen name, for all the good that does one, I suppose.
Was he too involved in his themes? Did he want to be seen as “pure”?
If he was wishing for all good things to happen, perhaps the centralizing processes of socialism looked, as if in a dream, as the only way to get there. You just needed good people at the helm and a way to see only good people succeeded them and…….there goes the dream but……what else was there?
WRT the class system. When my father was in Europe–WW II–he spent some time talking to a Brit lifer noncom. The guy said the social distance between officers and enlisted men was greater than between English and Indians when he’d served in india
Dad said the Canadian and Australian troops hated the Brit officers’ hauteur and made it a point to call their own officers by their first names when Brits were around.
Point is, a life time at the lower end of this system could accumulate a lot of minor resentments.
Socialism is a cult and the socialists claimed they could create heaven on earth. Remember, the late great USSR was the socialist workers paradise. If you were a socialist true believer and you were told that you are a fool and you can’t create heaven on earth and you have wasted you life supporting this fantasy, are you going to believe that? Nobody wants to admit they were fooled.
Podhoretz == Hack, to be kind.
I’m just waiting with bated breath your assessment of his literary criticism.
Had Stalin not moved against the Soviet Jews post Golda Meir’s 1949 visit to Moscow, and had this repression not continued in gentler forms after Stalin’s death, he and most of his fellow supposed Bronsteinites would likely have had very different political trajectories.
Norman Podhoretz was never a Trotskyist nor, bar a brief period ca. 1965, an advocate of any strand of thought that was out of the ordinary on the American political spectrum. He cut his teeth in political debate as one of Lionel Trilling’s seconds in his public exchanges with F.O. Matthiesen.
Irving Kristol abandoned the left gradually, beginning with his departure from the Socialist Workers Party in 1942, around when he was inducted in the military. He’s discussed his reasoning in print on this. He was known for decades as the editor of The Public Interest which offered critiques of social policy. Nathan Glazer, Seymour Martin Lipset, Irving Howe, Daniel Bell – none of these people were known to write much of anything on the Near East, or, indeed, on foreign affairs generally. It was only after 1971 that foreign relations began to displace discussion of social policy in the published writings of the circle around Podhoretz and Kristol and Israel assumed a particular prominence in those writings only during the Carter Administration.
You might consider limiting your commentary to subjects with which you’re somewhat familiar and uttering something that doesn’t sound like recycled silliness from the Unz Review‘s comboxes.
Centralized economic planning, which requires socialism for its complete incarnation, is a very seductive idea even to people who are not wild utopians. It just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.
It takes a certain amount of thought and subtlety to understand why the idea is unworkable. There’s a very important and well-written book…Red Plenty…about the Soviet Union’s economic planning efforts as seen from the inside. The characters include factory managers, economic planners, mathematicians, computer scientists, and “fixers,” and it gives one a tangible feel for the real problems with such efforts.
I reviewed the book here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/60918.html
Art Deco: “British cooking, of course, remains unimproved.”
_______
Well, Orwell didn’t think it needed improvement. See “In Defence of English Cooking.”
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/cooking/english/e_dec
FWIW, Norman Podhoretz remains a Trump supporter. He actually compared him to King David.
“As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”
Planned economies cannot by definition tolerate freedom of the intellect because independent thought must include freedom to act as one sees fit or “freedom of the intellect” is simply mental masturbation.
Nor does capitalism lead to “dole queues” that’s the province of planned economies, as the Soviet Union consistently demonstrated.
As for “scramble for markets” economic competition may indeed be bad for the loser but greatly benefits the consumer.
As for war, that’s the result of that portion of humanity that lusts for control of others, along with that portion of humanity that wants others to tell them what to think and do.
Which leaves collectivism’s “concentration camps and leader worship”… camps operated by those who lust for control and ‘worship’ by those who want to be controlled.
If you’ve read the four volumes of his collected letters and essays, two things stick out:
He was quite naive about economics. He thought, for instance, that in a socialist society that there would no problems with the supply of boots, because the government would just order them to be made, whereas now you needed a capitalist to profit from it. He didn’t realize why all typewriters (now second hand) were more expensive during WWII. He was aware that you had to let writers go and risk getting some of what you didn’t want, but didn’t realize that could apply to another other field.
He flipflopped. Up until the outbreak of the war, he argued that the fascists and the democracies were exactly the same. In “My Country Right or Left”, he recounts his flipflop and in the second volume, he argues against exactly the claims he made in the first. Another one was not laid out so clearly, but in the third volume, he argues against Koestler because he was saying that progress didn’t happen, and in the fourth, he argues against someone arguing for progress on the grounds it meant that they could kill mankind with atomic bombs.
Speaking of Koestler…although he turned against Communism, and denounced Communist totalitarianism eloquently in ‘Darkness at Noon’ (among other writings), he never renounced socialism.
Mary Catelli…”He (Orwell) was aware that you had to let writers go and risk getting some of what you didn’t want, but didn’t realize that could apply to another other field.”
That’s an important point. Intellectuals who have understood the importance of academic freedom in their own field have largely been unable or unwilling to understand why similar freedoms are not needed in other fields.
(Although lately, they haven’t been all that enthusiastic about *academic* freedom, either…)
The contradictions all stem from what I call the “egalitarian fantasy”. But, no matter how hard you might wish it, all men are not equal. Hell, on any given day, I am not even equal to the man I was yesterday. Yet this prima facie absurdity is responsible for a very large fraction of the political woes of the last century.
“He also, in his review of Road to Serfdom, says that free markets are simply not the way the world is headed.” Eeyore
And the reason why is that free markets only work effectively under Judeo/Christian principles, which Europe abandoned after WWI. This is so because economic principles are amoral and open to abuse, with there being no other satisfactory feedback mechanism than the quality of an individual’s moral compass.
Ray,
Lenin observed that, “The goal of socialism is communism.” He correctly understood that socialism, given its rejection of both key aspects of human nature and fundamental economic principles is unsustainable without ever greater coercion and control, which inescapably leads to communism.
Nor is it just an unwillingness of advocates to admit and accept having been so deeply wrong. What, having rejected God as capitalism’s necessary governor, can for them the alternative be? Robber Baron capitalism?
David Foster
“Centralized economic planning, which requires socialism for its complete incarnation, is a very seductive idea even to people who are not wild utopians. It just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.”
Von Mises’ “Road to Serfdom” explicitly and inescapably lays out why central planning is not nearly as effective (overall) as those many millions of decision-makers making their own separate decisions turns out to be. History repeatedly makes clear which is the superior system.
Centralized economic planning, which requires
socialismcommunism for its complete incarnation, is a very seductive idea for people who are in a state of arrested emotional development, whose deepest motivation is “that’s not fair!”.Thus they are unable to process Churchill’s aphorism; “Capitalism’s vice is the unequal sharing of blessings, Socialism’s virtue is its equal sharing of misery”
A society’s choice is binary, life’s inherent winners and losers with societal progress or societal decline.
From the “Orwell Your Orwell, “ book endorsement quote, “This…puzzle [ie, Neo’s topic, is] convincingly solved in Dr Steele’s masterly account”:
The answer is simpler than folks make it. Orwell believed that capitalism was in decline and had no future. He didn’t leave socialism because he thought capitalism had no future. If there was rising socialism and a capitalism on its death bed, then there was no real, live alternative.
Put differently, Orwell died in 1950 and could not foresee the return of capitalism.
I believe this is the substance of a recent book on the matter, “Orwell Your Orwell” by David Ramsey Steele. (His authors page presents further details and links to his many writings for free.)
I say “I believe” because while his book is on my eager to read list, I have not yet read it: I’m relying on “Academy of Ideas” highest recommendation for it, as well as his 8 minute video contrasting Huxley and Orwell on their deeply unsettling views of hedonistic corruption on society and totalitarianism.
Here is the “Academy of Ideas” posted recommendation of Steele, directly addressing the subject of Neo’s thread:
The above posted below “Academy of Ideas” video here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37N0aFmO19o
Who is this David Ramsey Steele? He has been an editor at Open Court, a small publishing house for books on philosophy for decades in Chicago.
He was a Marxist and had been working towards his doctorate in sociology at a British University when he was exposed to Mises book on socialism and grasped his impossibility of economic calculation thesis.
He became a libertarian, frequently publishing on Mises and this problem, and wrote probably the best of the many books on the Economic Calculation problem (and finished his PhD, I think.) (I also dated his first wife Laurie, but before they met.)
David Foster: “Centralized economic planning, which requires socialism for its complete incarnation, is a very seductive idea even to people who are not wild utopians. It just seems to make sense that such planning would lead to more efficiency…less waste…and certainly less unnecessary human suffering than an environment in which millions of decision-makers, many of them in competition with one another, are making their own separate and uncoordinated decisions, resulting in pointless product redundancy, economic cycles driving unemployment, and lots of other bad things.æ
Geoffery Britain: “Planned economies cannot by definition tolerate freedom of the intellect because independent thought must include freedom to act as one sees fit or “freedom of the intellect” is simply mental masturbation.”
Mary Catelli: “[Orwell] was aware that you had to let writers go and risk getting some of what you didn’t want, but didn’t realize that could apply to another other field.”
Roy Nathanson: ’The contradictions all stem from what I call the “egalitarian fantasy”. But, no matter how hard you might wish it, all men are not equal.’
George Gilder, interviewed by Mark Levin, pointed out that everything around us—computers, cameras, buildings, chairs, snacks, clothes, television, the internet, etc.,—was made up of “stuff” that was around the caveman, too, just in a different form; the difference is that the things around us, and all other products and progress, was created by “surprise”. By a bunch of individuals puttering about in the freedom of the intellect, being surprised.
No centrally planned economy can command surprises.
Wow. Both Mary Catelli and Roy Nathanson, I believe your points are spot on, correct.
Orwell was naive about economics. Many people, most people even today are.
The equality fantasy indeed. Some examples? I’ve been looking at workplace training videos at YouTube. There are many, many of them on the subject of “Equality (or equity or fairness – often all three) and diversity” in the management of HR and company productivity.
All this org psych muscle behind pushing a fantasy world of equality! It seem none got the memo that Heather MacDonald wrote: there’s no evidence at all that this is true and works. Or even matters.
Worse, these are contradictories rooted in the category mistake. You can have formal equality or else you can have diversity among employees. You can’t have both.
To expect and demand both means abusing people and imposing a Procrustean tyranny on people, which is Evil incarnate!
The Babylon Bee interviews hoax studies exposer and anti-SWJ and anti-Cult of Woke writer, James Lindsey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5arM0Hk63O0
“I was not prepared for the country to melt down into wokeness…” Fresh Hell horror stories at the link, eg, mixed race couples breaking up over crazy Woke “racist!” accusations, and wokplace worse, eg, a trans….UUGh!
I agree with Eeyore that “capitalism” isn’t the best word for conservatives to use, especially since so many huge “capitalist” corporations have thrown in with the Left. Some people like the term “free markets” instead.
I’m also tired of people calling Democrats “liberals”. Not much really “liberal” about them to me. Their leaders are libertine, and the party does like to “liberate” other people’s property. I suggest we call them Left-Wingers or Leftists.
On socialism in general — Doc Zero discussing the universal basic income that is high on the left’s wish-list — and because it ties into the BLM in Chicago post
(all of the political landscape is Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel):
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1291715414695841792.html
Orwell always remained an anti-Semite too, not a vicious genocidal one but an anti-Semite nevertheless. In his earlier writings about his experiences abroad and being “Down and out in London and Paris” he described Jewish people in the most physically unflattering ways possible. He never mentioned the Holocaust in his writings about the war although he was well aware of it. Orwell was anti-Stalinist, not anti-Socialist but neglected to see that Socialism is the final step to Communism which leads inevitably to Stalinism.
“…always remained an anti-Semite…”
Actually, no.
While it is true that in his earlier writings, he expressed some commonly held (and distasteful) opinions—and tropes—regarding Jews, his attitudes DID change with the rise of fascism in the 30s and he did not shy away from expressing these opinions.
For example:
1. His essay, “Anti-Semitism in Britain” (in “As I Please”, 1943-45)
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/antisemitism-in-britain/
2. In general, see the Wikipedia entry on Orwell, and search for the strings “semit” and “Jew”. You will be surprised—pleasantly, I hope—at what you find.
File under: “Justice, justice…”
I was wryly amused to learn that Orwell, over the last couple of years of his life, engaged in an accounting scheme to prevent the U.K. government from taxing away most of the revenues expected from sales of ‘Nineteen Eight-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm.’ Obviously, he was trying to provide for his widow-to-be and his young son, but it might be thought revealing to find he was determinedly conservative about holding onto ‘his’ money. Never mind. A little hypocrisy in a good cause can be endearing.
As [Orwell] describes so well in “Capitalism and Communism: Two Paths to Slavery”: “Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect.”
The problem with that, of course, is that if you have intellect, you know exactly why a planned economy can never work.
Outstanding reminder. Industrial oligarchy is a particularly good formulation, and conveys the historical notion of a self-serving oligarchy composed of industrialists and other economic monopolists about as well as any two word phrase could.
What will arise to supplant it as legally privileged and immunized information technology and financial organizations constitute an ever larger percentage of the economy, I could not say. Technocracy, doesn’t quite do.
“Speaking of Koestler…although he turned against Communism, and denounced Communist totalitarianism…he never renounced socialism.”
But Communists are socialists. The people running the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) called themselves communists. The Communists, Fascists and Nazis were all socialists. It’s like the Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians are all Protestants, despite doctrinal differences.
Orwell’s deficiency was Marx’s. He saw inequality in capitalism/free enterprise system. The 80/20 rule was in place. What he didn’t realize was that this has nothing to do with capitalism. This is true of all systems including systems in nature. E.g. the dominant bull enjoys the vast majority of mating opportunities.
His biggest problem with capitalism was really an argument against nature.
Ray on August 11, 2020 at 9:32 pm said: Nobody wants to admit they were fooled.
Which is why communism will win through feminism…
As for “scramble for markets” economic competition may indeed be bad for the loser but greatly benefits the consumer.
not true… the society with economic competition is the one wealthy enough that the winners make arrangements for helping the losers… where else and what other system would allow for great wealth and fat poor that have cell phones, large screen TV, digital lines and almost free medical care?
Orwell wrote a book review of Mein Kampf. In 1940, after England was at war with Germany. Before the USSR was at war with Germany.
Discussed here.
https://youtu.be/LA4gI69CMsg
Thanks for that link, JimNorCal. So, Orwell had a weird liking for Hitler (SEE 7m) — as seen in unexpurgated lines in his review.