4 ms·

I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation

I did not like the article, it was like the author was trying to connect the environment Orwell experienced to the book. IMO this is just guesswork, speculation and worst of all denying the author the intellectual prowess. Think about it, if you were to write a book you would not want the circumstances to affect the work and you’d be conscious about it. Saying that author somehow slipped in text because of the condition he was in paints him as a moron. These sort of biography inspired essays are just BS, dragging us with a promise of a bit of mystery and mysticism. The truth is that nobody knows and we try to satisfy our curiosity with the best sounding/fitting story. Animal farm and 1984 and others have something that resonates well with us. And we get the gist and we are a bit more careful and vigilant in our lives thanks to it.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
082349872349872 3y ago
If you read much Orwell, you'll see most of the elements that went into 1984 are present in his earlier writing as well. "Such, Such Were the Joys" is obvious; other influences I recall are bits of "You and the Atomic Bomb", Down and Out.., Homage..., "Notes on Nationalism", "The Spike" and probably a few I'm forgetting. What surprises me is how many people think Smith is meant as a sympathetic character; recall what crimes he's willing to commit!
hnbad 3y ago
It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia. Where it falls apart is when people try to analyze his works as critiques of communism from the right because while he hated the Soviet Union, that didn't make him anti-communist, quite the opposite. Maybe this explains why his works still resonate with people (at least by pop cultural reference, as most people citing 1984 don't seem to have actually read it): because they're critiques from the left, they also lend themselves to critiquing capitalism (surveillance capitalism and tepid liberalism in particular).
- andy99 3y ago
  > Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the solution, but we mostly all agree the Party and the world it creates are bad, as are the similar things we see in real life, which again aren't really party specific but are part of all systems of government.
  - hnbad 2y ago
    When I say "from the left", I'm specifically referring to "to the left of the Soviet Union". There was a lot of active debate when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia on whether to support them or not because they were creating the first "communist project" at that scale. The disagreement was largely ideological and the criticism was eventually proven correct when the Soviet Union sided against the anarchists in Spain (as well as when they went after "Makhno's army" in Ukraine, as well as early on when they disbanded syndicalist groups and worker cooperatives, as well as later on when they went through rounds of ideological purges and so on). The most well-known discourse around this seems to be from German communists, where it was cut short by the killing of the Spartacus group. When you say 1984 criticizes "political systems in practice" that is exactly right: the criticism of the Soviet Union wasn't that their stated goals were bad, in fact most of the left agreed on the ultimate goals. The criticism was that, like the pigs in the animal farm, by merely picking up the weapons of the oppressors they recreated the same oppressive power structures (i.e. systems). Anarchists on the other hand wanted to disband the power structures and replace it with one built from the ground up. When you say "all systems of government" however, it's clear that you're likely unaware of anarchist theory: the problem is not government, the problem is the state. And it doesn't matter whether that state is a conservative or reactionary oligarchy, a liberal or Soviet bureaucracy, or an "anarchocapitalist" corporate board of capital owners: they all share the same structural problem of moving power from the subjects to the state and then using it against the subjects to legitimize the state's authority through violence. In other words the point of Animal Farm isn't that oppression is inevitable but that switching out who's in charge won't make an oppressive system any less oppressive, it will just recreate the same oppression eventually.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

082349872349872 3y ago

If you read much Orwell, you'll see most of the elements that went into 1984 are present in his earlier writing as well. "Such, Such Were the Joys" is obvious; other influences I recall are bits of "You and the Atomic Bomb", Down and Out.., Homage..., "Notes on Nationalism", "The Spike" and probably a few I'm forgetting. What surprises me is how many people think Smith is meant as a sympathetic character; recall what crimes he's willing to commit!

hnbad 3y ago

It's really not subtle. Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. Orwell fought on the side of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War and the betrayal by the Soviet Union soured him on the prospect of its interpretation of communism. This doesn't even require reading his biography, he explicitly wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia. Where it falls apart is when people try to analyze his works as critiques of communism from the right because while he hated the Soviet Union, that didn't make him anti-communist, quite the opposite. Maybe this explains why his works still resonate with people (at least by pop cultural reference, as most people citing 1984 don't seem to have actually read it): because they're critiques from the left, they also lend themselves to critiquing capitalism (surveillance capitalism and tepid liberalism in particular).

andy99 3y ago
> Both 1984 and Animal Farm are critiques of the Soviet Union from the left. I'm sure this is accurate and I've heard it before. In practice though, at least 1984 feels like a non-partisan criticism of power hungry bureaucracy run amok. I think that's why it's timeless, it criticizes political systems in practice more than making any argument for a particular ideology. There's would be lots of disagreement on the solution, but we mostly all agree the Party and the world it creates are bad, as are the similar things we see in real life, which again aren't really party specific but are part of all systems of government.
- hnbad 2y ago
  When I say "from the left", I'm specifically referring to "to the left of the Soviet Union". There was a lot of active debate when the Bolsheviks took over in Russia on whether to support them or not because they were creating the first "communist project" at that scale. The disagreement was largely ideological and the criticism was eventually proven correct when the Soviet Union sided against the anarchists in Spain (as well as when they went after "Makhno's army" in Ukraine, as well as early on when they disbanded syndicalist groups and worker cooperatives, as well as later on when they went through rounds of ideological purges and so on). The most well-known discourse around this seems to be from German communists, where it was cut short by the killing of the Spartacus group. When you say 1984 criticizes "political systems in practice" that is exactly right: the criticism of the Soviet Union wasn't that their stated goals were bad, in fact most of the left agreed on the ultimate goals. The criticism was that, like the pigs in the animal farm, by merely picking up the weapons of the oppressors they recreated the same oppressive power structures (i.e. systems). Anarchists on the other hand wanted to disband the power structures and replace it with one built from the ground up. When you say "all systems of government" however, it's clear that you're likely unaware of anarchist theory: the problem is not government, the problem is the state. And it doesn't matter whether that state is a conservative or reactionary oligarchy, a liberal or Soviet bureaucracy, or an "anarchocapitalist" corporate board of capital owners: they all share the same structural problem of moving power from the subjects to the state and then using it against the subjects to legitimize the state's authority through violence. In other words the point of Animal Farm isn't that oppression is inevitable but that switching out who's in charge won't make an oppressive system any less oppressive, it will just recreate the same oppression eventually.