What do you think about George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm?

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It was the Jews, now it's boons to society.

farewell boons to society

Retarded fash, I obviously wrote boons to society. Gtfo.

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Bye bye baboon

proofs

They’re both good (Animal Farm made me a commie), but you should read them for what they are. Animal Farm is basically just a shitpost, it was a toungue and cheek satire from a ⛏️rotskyist perspective. 1984 based a lot of its aesthetic on the Soviet Union, but in reality it’s about totalitarianism in general, a path that Orwell feared all countries were headed down. Much of its content was inspired by Orwell’s experience at the BBC propaganda factory rather than his perception of the USSR.

His possibly TB fuelled snitching notwithstanding, Orwell was at worst a misguided ⛏️rotskyist, and at best made some modest contributions to western socialism/Marxism.

Orwell was genuinely a socialist but he didn't want the kind of socialism that existed in Russia. He actually hoped, and wrote in favor of, some kind of social revolution in England. He believed that socialism was the only real way forward and that to win a conflict like WW2 governments needed to deliver real social change to working people. He joined a socialist militia in Spain during the civil war and actually took part in action. He only left when it seemed like the Republican govt (or just the Communist faction?) were beginning to arrest internal "enemies." Some of those arrested were actually Orwell's comrades. This, I think, more than anything that was happening in Russia, turned Orwell as the USSR since he saw it as a counter-revolutionary force. (The political line at the time of the Spanish Civil War was to put off the revolution until the war was over, which Orwell saw as a mistake.)

Nineteen Eighty-Four was basically a slightly more dystopian version of what daily life was actually like during WW2 in many countries. The constant threat of being bombed, living in dilapidated conditions, poverty, constantly changing narratives of who are the good guys or bad guys, not being able to trust anything you read in the news, etc.

Animal Farm was just a cartoony version of what happened in the USSR. The irony is that he didn't criticize socialism - he criticized the fact that the people in charge were actually the same as capitalist pigs.

Anyway, I would recommend Homage to Catalonia like the others said, as well as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. These were all written during the 1930s. Orwell's goal was, in some sense, to show the working class in a sympathetic way and to argue that capitalism was outdated.

With all due respect George Orwell was an idiot who wrote ambiguous nonsense. He should have kept revolutionary spirit he had when fighting against fascist in Spain and wrote anti crapitalist and anti authoritarian books rather than anti socialist authoritarian.

He did. 1984 isn’t anti socialist. Neither is anything else he wrote.

If people like OPs teacher's think that his books are anti-socialist, then, unfortunately it is to ambiguous .

Yes, so it is important to be blunt and direct. Right -wingers have mastered it.

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I mean prager-u make 2 minute videos dissing socialism, while leftists make 20 minute videos dissing other leftists.

it got Christanon evicted from his friend's house.

/thread

This

Good, fuck Potato-eaters. They managed to starve on an island surrounded by fish.

pic related is a better animal farm than animal farm

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This. Not perfect, but good start (as compared to whatever else Anglophones have access to).

Unironically based and redpilled.

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Reminder that Stalin wasnt the one that wanted to Invade your Bandit territory state that wasnt a state it was icepick

cringe

Not an Argument!

Could one make the argument that Animal Farm was a telling of the french revolution and the rise of liberalism where the feudal lords are overthrown by the masses, but the lords just get replaced by the bourgeoisie?

No, it’s pretty obviously about the Russian Revolution, since Old Major, Snowball and Napoleon all mirror Lenin, ⛏️rotsky, and Stalin pretty clearly. It’s just a ⛏️rotskyist satire about how the USSR started out great but was singlehandedly ruined by Stalin. I’m sure Orwell wasn’t thick enough to actually think that, Animal Farm was probably more of a shitpost if anything.

it was specifically written to criticize Stalin's Russia but you could use it as an analogy for any class society.

[citiation needed]

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Based.

He was born there dipshit, he went back to live with family. He joined the Burmese colonial police when he was in his early 20s and his experiences there laid the foundations for his later works that explicitly denounced Britain’s presence in India.

This is pretty inexcusable, but there is the fact that he was dying of TB which can cause mental degradation.

Animal Farm isn’t anti communist in the slightest, unless you are dumb enough to unironically think that Stalin’s Soviet Union was either a flawless or the only possible incarnation of socialism. The entire point of the story is that the revolution and the path to socialism were fundamentally good, but the revolution was betrayed. Besides, Animal Farm is at least partially satirical, it exaggerated and simplified on purpose.

"Hey George we're setting up a propaganda department who do you think would be a good choice to help us?"
"Well I don't know but let me give you this list of public figures who support Stalinist Russia so you don't hire any of them by mistake."
"Thanks."

"Hey, why don't I, a socialist, give socialism a bad name and make people think a state under socialism means being in some sort of a tyrannical dystopia by writing two books about Socialism that will impact every generation after me? Though they are a critique of Stalinism, they're written in such an ambiguous way that people not very familiar with history won't understand that and will think socialism can never be good instead!"

What a fucking idiot he was for not haveing 20/20 hindsight and while pandering his writing to brainlets at the same time. Literally Hitler.

There’s nothing ambiguous about Orwell’s writing if you actually pay attention to it and are aware of the general body of his work. It’s not his fault that people are illiterate retards.

"Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."
George Orwell, Why I Write
orwell.ru/library/essays/wiw/english/e_wiw

WHAT DID HE MEAN BY THIS

as much as i dislike trotfags, it's not really orwell's fault here

Orwell was a thorough anti-communist, animal farm was a smear campaign against the headquarters of the revolution and was used as a tool in the UK and US to quell support for the USSR post-ww2. Also, like most trots, he ratted-out communists to the bourgeoisie government.

Спасибо товарищ.

A revolution that Orwell believed had already been lost, and he wasn’t entirely wrong, although he obviously exaggerated and oversimplified.

It’s not Orwell’s fault that porkies chose to distort his work and that people were dumb enough to fall for it.

Obviously no excuse for this, but be honest about what exactly he did. He gave a list of names of people he didn’t want the BBC to hire, it’s not like it was a kill list or the people on it got black bagged in the night.

What always cracks me up about that list is that a future Labour leader is on it: Michael Foot.

They need to be taught/assigned with Homage to Catalonia so the kids have some background on where the hell he's coming from.

I don't care what some self-proclaimed socialist believed, he didn't base his "critique" on anything other than imperialist propaganda and undialectical trot "arguments", he never lived in the USSR either. You cannot vilify the headquarters of global socialism and call yourself a socialist

There is no need to distort his work, since his work echoes the bourgeoisie rhetoric of the soviet union being some kind of dystopia.

He maintained contact with the secret services for many years. This isn't something new either, be it US/UK trots or european trots (archeiomarxists for example), they have a well documented tradition of ratting out communists and collaborating with bourgeoisie governments

Except the basis of his critiques were totally legitimate. The Soviet Union was politically repressive in general, not just towards reactionaries. Political power was dominated by the party elite and bureaucrats, one man management of workplaces still predominated, and there was no real democracy or working class rule. These critcisms are totally legitimate, and while I don’t think the USSR was beyond saving, I could see how somebody would think that they had completely betrayed the ideals and aims of the revolution.

You can if you genuinely believe that state to be anti-worker and antithetical to the goals of socialism. Even if you don’t buy into that view, the worst you could say about Orwell is that he was woefully misguided, not malicious or with the intent of opposing working class rule or socialism.

Except his work is equally inspired by the West as it is by the USSR. 1984 is just as much about Britain under capitalism as it is about Orwell’s fears of Stalinism.

Again, be honest and specific. Your intentional vagueness is clearly intended to make him seem worse than he was. He prevented some people he saw as ☭TANKIE☭s from working at the BBC. While it’s still shitty I wouldn’t call it unforgivable.

[citation needed]
Every position within the party was democratically filled, there was no one who didn't get voted in the positions they held. Counter-revolutionaries were obviously persecuted, as is logical.
Wrong. Every prole had the ability to get elected in the supreme ruling bodies (the party, supreme soviet) and all bodies followed the principal of democratic centralism.
It betrayed absolutely nothing. The only argument that "stands" in your "criticism", meaning the only argument that isn't based on some vague notion of political repression you cannot source on any facts, is that the factories weren't ran communally but with a centralized structure that obviously included managerial positions. Self-management of production units by the workers in a communal fashion was never the aim of the revolution, this is an anarchist idea that goes against the goal of a socialist planned economy.
Your genuine anti-communist beliefs don't become less anti-communist because they're genuine. When you reproduce imperialist propaganda and skew the scales in favour of the class enemy, you are an anti-communist.
Animal farm was a crystal clear allegory for the USSR and painted the USSR as a dystopia. It's not dialectical critique of the USSR, since it's not based on facts but on imperialist propaganda.
I'd be more specific but I lack anglo sources and I don't like talking out of my ass. His list wasn't just any list, but a recommendation list for a propaganda ministry, a list to help them create better anti-communist propaganda.

Purged of anarchists, trots, Bukharin’s faction etc. The banning of strikes in the 80s and repression of worker demonstrations in Germany in the 50s. Just a few examples off the top of my head.

Right, except that the ban on factions meant that deviating too far from the party line would end your career in politics. Press censorship meant that only the party line, or lines sufficiently similar to it, were circulated publically. Democratic centralism meant that it wasn’t really possible for decisions to be challenged or criticized after they had been made. Finally the party Congress, the only time rank and file members could influence the makeup of the party leadership, only happened every five years, and all the candidates were subject to the previously mentioned pressures, stifling any real chance of challenging the leadership. In other words there was no real possibility of the average person significantly influencing public policy.

Lmao and you are calling me an anti-communist. The goal of socialism is the rule of the working class, both in the workplace and in the state. Instead you had workings slaving away under unelected managers appointed by unaccountable politicians.

Except the party elite WAS a class enemy, at least Orwell thought so. Again, conflating a misguided position with an actual hatred of the working class and sympathy for capitalism is intellectually dishonest. Orwell clearly thought that a worker ruled, socialist planned economy was superior to capitalism. He simply thought that the Soviet Union failed utterly in that regard.

Yes, a dystopia that corrupted a fundamentally good thing (a socialist revolution) into something that was just as bad as capitalism. The entire point of the story is that socialism is good, but that the USSR is just capitalism under another flag. Again, that’s a misguided position imo, but obviously not an anti-communist one. That’s also just Animal Farm. 1984 is largely based on Britain, it just borrows some aesthetic elements from the USSR. The rest of his work is explicitly pro-socialist.

Anarchists were and still are a reactionary petty-bourgeoisie element. The revolution was never of an anarchist nature and it's logical to squash gangs of organized bandits inside your country.
Treacherous fractionists that ran an active campaign of undermining the party because their revisionist ideas were rejected by the vast majority
There is no point in striking within a socialist system, since there is no one extracting surplus value from the workers to strike against. Striking in a socialist system is effectively sabotage
Firstly, the ban on fractions came into place while Lenin was still alive through a democratic process, hence it's neither authoritarian nor Stalin's doing. Secondly, what you wrote is plainly wrong, disagreeing on major issues (like for example the position the USSR should take in ww1) has been well documented and even opinions that didn't get voted got circulated so that all opinions voiced were heard and recorded. Democratic centralism simply meant that after a position had been democratically reached, everyone had to adhere to it, something ⛏️rotsky and his revisionist lackeys didn't like
Again, not true. There were numerous newspapers, both on a national level and at a local level that often voiced criticisms on policies.
Yes, because the majority was the one that made them. Revolution means class warfare and a united front is a necessary requirement.
The congress wasn't the only administrative organ in the USSR. There were workers' councils on many levels, from local to the supreme soviet.
Again, you cannot source these claims. You are speaking out of your ass, thinking that the vague image of a repressive USSR is based on historical fact when you cannot source any of these claims on anything other than oral anecdotes inside western propaganda works.
Again, not true. The party on all its levels was comprised by "average people", no one inherited any power and no one could keep his position without being elected to it.
The goal of socialism is the unification of mankind and the establishment of a classless society free of exploitation. For that to occur, specific phases need to pass, one of them being the socialist phase. When the class enemy controls the biggest and most advanced economies in the world, the goal of the revolutionary proletariat is to maximize their ability to spread the revolution globally, hence maximize productivity within the territory they control. Your point of view is purely petty-bourgeoisie, looking at the subject through the prism of "how well the soviet workers had it" instead of "how could the revolutionary proletariat help their subjugated comrades".
The "party elite" was proletarian and owned no private property. saying "orwell thought so" doesn't change this. His reasons for being an anti-communist don't change the fact that he was one
Comparing capitalism to early-stage socialism is by itself capitalist propaganda, this is what i'm telling you. Saying that from x point forward the USSR "betrayed the revolution" is an undialectical, historically inaccurate position that serves the imperialist smear rhetoric
You cannot be against existing socialism but claim to be a socialist user, it's a dishonest position. If there was one fireman in a burning forest and your position was that "he's no real fireman but let's support the fire, i am pro-firemen though just not pro-the only fireman that exists", your praxis is pro-fire and not pro-fireman. I don't know how else to make you understand this simple fact

Why do you keep coming back here? Heed the ban and stay gone you rat.

So basically you are saying that there wasn't any repression, except for all those times that there were. You are basically admitting that the Soviet state repressed anybody who deviated from Marxism-Leninism. You should also be aware that it wasn't just anti-Stalinists that faced repression, Maoists did as well.
afoniya.wordpress.com/2013/07/25/towards-the-history-of-maoist-dissidence-in-the-soviet-union-an-article-by-alexei-volynets-part-1/
So then why were there strikes? If the system functioned as you say it did, ie a genuine worker's state and worker's democracy, then why did these strikes occur at all?
I didn't say that there was no dissent, I said that there was no dissent beyond a certain point. The spectrum of acceptable opinion was exceedingly narrow, and whatever differences people did express and campaign for were constrained to a pretty specific interpretation of Marxism. Deviation from these could and did result in prominent examples of expulsion from the party, which meant expulsion from Soviet politics.
Yes and they were all state owned, and once again dissenting opinions were limited to ML perspectives only. PDF related.
Not at the expense of the integrity of working class rule and proletarian democracy. This is especially abhorrent when you consider the strength the USSR achieved in the postwar years. By the Brezhnev era any excuses of the USSR being a weak, backwards country under siege by the whole world are laughable, and there could easily have been a relaxing of repression without endangering the Soviet state.
Yes and they were all dominated by the party, in a single party state, where the party had internal mechanisms for shutting down dissent and maintaining the supremacy of the leadership.
You yourself admitted that there was repression of leftists who took lines that differed too greatly from those of the party. Censorship was a fact, the ban on factions and expulsions from the party was a fact, and democratic centralism shielded the leadership from criticism after their rigged process vindicated their decisions.
I'm looking at it from the point of view of establishing a genuine worker's state, and the implications of failing to do so. If a genuine worker's democracy cannot be established, then by definition the state in question cannot be governed by the workers, and thus cannot truly act in their interests. It's impossible to export a revolution that hasn't realized its ideals within its own borders.

On paper yes, but in practice they held special privileges and had political power that alienated them from the Soviet people. Were they a class in the Marxist sense? Hard to say, but what is certain is that they were not accountable to the public, and had a vested interest in making sure things state that way.
Horseshit, socialism is the next stage of human development. By definition it is supposed to provide the working class with greater freedom and prosperity. The Soviet Union's failure to do this was arguably not the fault of its earlier leaders, but it failed nonetheless, and should not be exempt from criticism for its failures.
You can if you think that this existing socialism is completely failing in its goals. That's like saying that criticizing the shortcomings of the first airplane means you are anti-flight. In order for this position to make any sense at all you would have to unironically think that there was nothing in the USSR worth criticizing, that its leaders were infallible, and that no mistakes were made in the execution of Soviet socialism. All that is clearly ridiculous.

If you read Marx, Engels, and even Lenin you'll see that what the USSR had was not socialism. They were possibly moving towards socialism at some future date but they never achieved it. Marx & Engels stated that in socialism there would be no commodity exchange, money, wage-labor, profit, etc. And they were speaking of the lower phase, which was called 'socialism' by Lenin.

The USSR had all of those things. Not only that, they also failed to meet the standards of a worker's state as defined by Lenin. Instead of a people's militia they had a professional army. Instead of armed workers they had professional police. Instead of being a radical democracy that kept control of the state via officials subject to recall they had a government bureaucracy unaccountable to the ordinary workers. During the period of collectivization Stalin personally visited different parts of the country and removed party leaders who were unsatisfactory to him. Likewise, at the end of the 1930s the party congresses stopped happening and the Central Committee only met 6 times even though it should have met 48 times. This is not how a radical democracy operates. This was an autocracy.

It was Stalin and the USSR, not Orwell, who decided to disband the Communist International. It was Stalin and the USSR, not Orwell, who sent shipments of vital materials to the Germans allowing them overrun half of Europe. In Spain, it was the USSR, not Orwell, who convinced the Spanish Republicans to hold back revolutionary sentiment until the war was over. Look at the early leaders of the revolution. Nearly all of them had either died or were executed by the end of the 1930s. Orwell didn't kill communists - Stalin and his bureaucracy did. These were all counter-revolutionary acts.

The thing I often think about 1984 is it shows some of Orwells beliefs about exploitation and oppression in society, and also shows how misguided he was because he perceived everything through his narrow perspective of anti-authoritarianism. When he writes in the in-universe book by Goldstein, he writes about how in a dystopia the state conducts war as a means of keeping power over it's own population first and foremost. He writes about how production becomes focused on the war industry, which manages to funnel the increase of production efficiency and technological progress into a sphere that cannot improve people's quality of life.

What I think he misses is all the economic factors which spur war on, how imperialism is interconnected with capitalism and causes war for the purposes of profit. He becomes focused on the state and it's oppression as the sole significant actor which is the opponent and enemy of the people. He even writes that in the past of the world businessmen and entrepreneurs and everyone just sorta murged into the state, so he can avoid writing about it. That, I think, shows how obsessively he was focused on state tyranny and could not see the distinct entity of capital as an independant and alltogether dangerous thing. He simply had nothing to say about anything that he couldn't connect to his favourite subject.

I also like to mention Smedley Butler's "War Is A Racket" from the decade befor 1984 came out as an interesting book with an altogether more anti-capitalist critique of war than Orwell's.

And if you understand what you've read, then you'll see that Soviets did have Socialist mode of production as the dominant mode of production.

And if having Capitalist mode of production as the dominant mode of production is sufficient to call nation economy Capitalist, then having Socialist mode of production as the dominant mode of production is also sufficient to call nation economy Socialist.

AMONG PRODUCERS

Main problem of LeftCom is that they don't understand what they read.

That’s what I’ve been saying this whole thread. 1984 is not about Stalinism specifically, it simply borrows much of its aesthetics from the USSR. However I think it’s pretty obvious that Orwell is talking about any state other than a genuine socialist democracy, since a lot of the concepts he explores (the use of language to control people, quasi religious political ceremonies like the two minute hate, the use of war to legitimize the state, etc) are common to most governments.

That’s not true at all. He didn’t say much about capital specifically in 1984 because that’s not what the book was about, but he wrote about his thoughts on imperialism and capitalism itself in his other works.

1984 is about totalitarianism. I.e. an idea that you can have political oppression for no reason. Orwell presents society where economy does not influence anything.

his idea was that the ruling class of each super-state maintained itself via a system of economic and social privileges for each class, and any extra production was destroyed by the never-ending war. so instead of eliminating poverty they kept it at a controlled level to induce people to work, fight, obey, etc.

it's not as absurd as it sounds since during the Great Depression there were governments (like in the United States) that simply paid people not to produce certain goods (like agricultural products, for instance.)

About 1984, how many anons in here believe in the Hermit Kingdom Oceania theory?

That’s not what totalitarianism is. Totalitarianism is simply the most extreme possible method of state repression, which can be used by a state for a number of reasons. Orwell said many times that he worried that all states, both East and West, were heading down this path, and that it would be a tool of repression against the people by a ruling class. This is evident in the book, since Oceania has a clear class strucuture with three distinct tiers.

tl;dr

Animal Farm is a retelling if the Russian Revolution from a ⛏️rotskyist perspective and a warning against bureaucratic opportunism.

1984 was a look into state suppression and control based, not on the Soviet system or any fascist system, but in Plato’s Republic. It’s a three tiered society (Inner Party = Guardians, Outer Party = Auxiliaries, Proles = Producers) with a strict censorship regime, the employment of the “Noble Lie” to justify the social order, etc. It wasn’t a condemnation of any one system and indeed, Orwell thought that all nations would end up something akin to it.

I think this should be contrasted with the way Burgerland has used them as propaganda, where Animal Farm is instead turned into a parable about why socialism always fails and 1984 is a depiction of the enemies of the American political regime (foreign nations hostile to the US are basically Ingsoc/Oceana and domestic and foreign agents hostile to the American political establishment want Ingsoc IRL.) The enemies of the American political establishment are almost always painted as “totalitarian”, often in ridiculous ways with wild accusations against said foreign regimes which are almost always promptly forgotten about if military intervention is used on said countries. Anyone remember Sadam’s torture circuses? Or any of the other shit he was accused of by “human rights” organizations while he was in power?

i remember a story about a meatgrinder he'd throw people into and watch get minced

brainlet

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Except there was commodity exchange between producers, that's precisely the problem.

in the SU?
you're talking about the collective farms that weren't developed enough?

I think it was more a hatred of Catholicism that the Irish themselves.

The irony of using Orwell’s work as a propaganda tool is that they are effectively proving the points he makes in 1984, especially regarding censorship, mass hysteria in the form of indoctrination, and politics as a quasi religion.

It's not that he was ambiguous, but that right wingers are revisionists.

I've read 1984 and it's good shit, haven't read Animal Farm yet but it sounds interesting. Orwell probably should have acknowledged how reactionaries could so easily appropriate the superficial themes of his novels to make them seem like an advocacy of their politics though.

Alright, but incredibly basic. They're babby's first political allegory and their messages are very simple and unprofound, not that that hasn't stopped people from failing to understand them.