[Melodramatic]

Orwell seems like my kind of socialist

[daft punk]

His heart was in the right place but he never understood it completely.

[Ombrageux]

I think DP is partly right.. I mean, he understood human nature very, very well and give it form in his writing. He longed for a better world and, that time, "Socialism" was the name of the world ambitious good men might create. However, Socialism cannot exist as a qualitatively or fundamentally different thing from "capitalism", there are only variations on a theme. Orwell I think was too ambitious to settle for a "liveable/social democratic capitalism" but too insightful and honest not to see the contradictions of the Socialist idea. As such, he paid reverence to Socialism - it was his guiding star - but he never understood it because there was nothing to understand.

[daft punk]

what? It is you who clearly does not understand what socialism is. Why do you say it cannot exist as a fundamentally different thing from capitalism? Socialism is the negation of capitalism.

Orwell was ok, but he was no Marxist theoretician. He at least understood that it was the Stalinists who wrecked the Spanish revolution. The anarchists also wrecked it, I'm not sure what his opinion was on them.

[Lightman]

Orwell was ok, but he was no Marxist theoretician. He at least understood that it was the Stalinists who wrecked the Spanish revolution. The anarchists also wrecked it, I'm not sure what his opinion was on them.

If I remember correctly from Homage to Catalonia, Orwell fought in an anarchist unit during the Civil War.

[Ombrageux]

DP - We are in disagreement. I believe Socialism is imaginary and Utopian, which does mean that I don't admire many Socialists whose struggles have done so much to reform and humanize capitalism. I believe Orwell was intelligent enough to see what people then called "Socialism" was not intellectually rigorous or plausible but he was too wedded to the idea of fundamental progress to abandon the concept.

Lightman - He sided with the Anarchists and his criticism of the Stalinists - essentially as allies of bourgeois capitalism! - is uncompromising.

[ingliz]

Orwell fought in an anarchist unit

Orwell fought with units of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM).

[daft punk]

Code: Select allThe POUM or Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Catalan: Partit Obrer d'Unificació Marxista; English: Workers' Party of Marxist Unification) was a Spanish communist political party formed during the Second Republic and mainly active around the Spanish Civil War. It was formed by the fusion of the Trotskyist Communist Left of Spain (Izquierda Comunista de España, ICE) and the Workers and Peasants' Bloc (BOC, affiliated with the Right Opposition) against the will of Leon Trotsky, with whom the former broke. The writer George Orwell served with the party and witnessed the Stalinist repression of the movement, which would form his anti-totalitarian ideas in later life.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POUM

DP - We are in disagreement. I believe Socialism is imaginary and Utopian, which does mean that I don't admire many Socialists whose struggles have done so much to reform and humanize capitalism. I believe Orwell was intelligent enough to see what people then called "Socialism" was not intellectually rigorous or plausible but he was too wedded to the idea of fundamental progress to abandon the concept.

Lightman - He sided with the Anarchists and his criticism of the Stalinists - essentially as allies of bourgeois capitalism! - is uncompromising.

Well, he certainly criticised the Stalinists, in no uncertain terms, because they stopped the revolution from happening, as per usual policy.

Marx himself opposed Utopian socialism. He also opposed idealism. Hence Marxism is dialectical Materialism. Marx simply noticed that social structures are not fixed, but change over time, mainly driven by developments in technology. Capitalism developed after manufacturing came along, but it created the working class. Capitalism kicked out feudalism, and Marx predicted that the working class would try to kick out capitalism. He was proved right by the Paris Commune. He predicted that socialism could never happen in a backward country in isolation. He was proved right by Russia. So far socialism has never happened. It failed in Russia because of the failure of the German revolution. After it failed in Russia, there was no chance for the other revolutions like China because:

1. People like Mao were not even attempting socialism
2. They were all backward countries
3. The revolutions were not done along Marxist lines
4. Stalinism was trying to sabotage the revolutions
5. When they failed in their objective of capitalism, and slid over to the Soviet sphere, they were contaminated by Stalinism

[WorkandUnite]

Orwell was a democratic socialist and followed a different ideology from the one followed by the U.S.S.R he would be more aligned with say the Labour party in the United Kingdom.

[ozone]

Orwell's file in MI5 was 8 inches thick consigned to the dustbin of history when he was found to be working for KGB/NKVD as a triple agent. "You are an outstanding officer, _____"-KGB handler, whatever his codename was. So were Blunt, Philby and Maclean.

[MB.]

Orwell was a humanist. Injustice at the hands of unthinking monolithic socio-economic-political apparatus made him angry. His clearest defense of socialism, as I've mentioned elsewhere, comes from the second part of The Road To Wigan Pier.

Part Two
In contrast to the straightforward documentary of the first part of the book, in part two Orwell discusses the relevance of socialism to improving living conditions. This section proved controversial.
Orwell sets out his initial premises very simply
Are the appalling conditions described in part 1 tolerable? (No)
Is socialism "wholeheartedly applied as a world system" capable of improving those conditions? (Yes)
Why then are we not all socialists?
The rest of the book consists of Orwell’s attempt to answer this difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies 5 main problems.
Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle class socialists do themselves no favours by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate that large section of the population which is economically working class but culturally middle class.
Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. H.G. Wells in particular is criticised on these grounds.
Crankiness. Amongst many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people.
Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with “notwithstandings” and “heretofores” and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

[Ombrageux]

MB. - That's actually a very interesting and lucid analysis, if it is Orwell's, and one which remains true today to a T!

[ozone]

People during the time of Orwell were naive. It took spy agencies decades before they were able to imbibe conspiratorial plans and schemes that would make Orwell a great asset for them. If Orwell were of today, I am sure British spy agencies can dangle him with incentives to make him work for them including blackmail. But Orwell was a conspiratorial socialist, closet communist during his times. And he made a laughing stock of British spy agencies. If only you read his file. I did. A great communist!

[daft punk]

Orwell's file in MI5 was 8 inches thick consigned to the dustbin of history when he was found to be working for KGB/NKVD as a triple agent. "You are an outstanding officer, _____"-KGB handler, whatever his codename was. So were Blunt, Philby and Maclean.

Bullsh1t. Orwell was a socialist but he hated the Stalinist USSR, he had witnessed them crush the revolution in Spain.

[ozone]

These are the kind of persons allegedly indictable under the Russian National Security Act for DISCOMPROMISING Orwell and under CSIS Act for "1t".

I was joking, daftpunk.

[KXimines]

Orwell was very critical of communism in 'Homage to Catalonia'. But spoke very favourable of anarchsim. This would in turn make him a socialist as all anarchists are invariably socialist but not all socialists are anarchists.

[daft punk]

Orwell was very critical of communism in 'Homage to Catalonia'. But spoke very favourable of anarchsim. This would in turn make him a socialist as all anarchists are invariably socialist but not all socialists are anarchists.

Well, yeah anarchists are socialists, but they arent. Their goal is the same as socialism, but socialists as in Marxists think you need a workers state to defend against counter-revolution in the first few years, and anarchists SAY they dont believe in a workers state. So I take your point but I think it's a bit misleading to label anarchists as socialists. Socialists and anarchists are different. Socialists are basically Marxists and at some point they will clash with anarchists, maybe end up shooting some of them. Anyway, Orwell was a socialist, I've never heard him called an anarchist. He fought in Spain with the POUM which fought alongside anarchists, but both messed up their chances. The anarchists could have taken power but refused, on principle. Later they joined a capitalist-Stalinist government. The POUM were not really up to the job of revolution. They were however trying, sort of. For that they got hunted down and killed by the main anti-revoutionaries - the Stalinists.

[apparatchik]

George Orwell had completely the same personality as Rosa Luxembourg. They were "idealists" in their own generations. How can a hard-core Marxist Leninist like Rosa Luxembourg had the gall to go loggerheads with Vladimir Lenin when the latter is the icon of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union? Orwell, yes, wrote a satirical novel that took pun on Stalin. But these are outstanding personalities. Poland and Great Britain then were capitalist countries. There was the police state who fielded their own deep penetration agents to infiltrate communist parties. Basing them on the biography of one FBI deep penetration agent named Morris Childs, I come to the conclusion that Rosa and George were agents of the police state. They thought that it was impossible for the Communist parties to gain power. So they gave their best in paralyzing businesses through strike interventions, bankrupted mines by way of unreasonable demands in collective bargaining agreement, gave their best in propagating Marxism-Leninism until they have to put on the brakes because the Communist Party of SU was going to wreak havoc. That is the way I analyze how these agents operate. And so with the Communist Party of the Philippines. Agents burn company equipment to earn the animosity of the peaceful-oriented masses but decline to attack army detachmennts nowadays because of the strong leadership qualities that the ex-Chairman Sison has been showing...Everybody in the 'intelligence and security' industry is a good actor or actress in his/her own world. I am too. Here is an essay with quotes from the ex-Chairman of the Communist Party of Canada who is now a pariah for his liquidationist intentions to cause the CPC to be a moribund communist party in Canada. He almost did it. His mission was like that of Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible!! RCMP undercover agents, take note! Learn from my ex-father in law. (Trabaho lang).


http://thesparkjournal.blogspot.com/200 ... alism.html

[SolarCross]

1984 wasn't directed at the USSR or socialism, but just totalitarianism, it was the pundits and opinion-makers (read thought police) that put about the meme that it was a critique of the USSR and / or socialism. In Orwell's foreword he explains that the book was a critisicm of English literary society in that they are the one's that practice double-think and newspeak. Just to prove him correct that foreword was censored by his publisher...

[KlassWar]

He wasn't.

-> Out of his own free will, he became a colonial policeman. Nobody who wears a badge can be described as a comrade. Those who make that fateful choice are enemies.
-> He was a social conservative, and thus an irreconciliable enemy.
-> He pretty much helped shape the notion that Revolution and Worker Power==Totalitarianism. He's one of the founding fathers of the modern liberal hegemony. He was a tireless advocate for socialism to effectively surrender to liberal democracy. A traitor yet again.
-> He ratted out his fellow comrades to the pigs. There's a name for this, and it's treason. He became a rat voluntarily, which erases any claim Orwell might ever have had to human status.

The only good thing Orwell ever did in his whole goddamn life was fighting for POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He was a thoroughly despicable man.