4 ms·

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 Ci

by 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 3y 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.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them? Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written. Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: "Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.", while 1984 depicts why the pigs (the former Middle) just become the High with no real attempt to produce animal equality. Goldstein poses the question "why should human equality be averted? ... Here we reach the central secret. This motive really consists..." and after that cliffhanger we get the torture, in the frame story, of Part 3, revealing the answer (an answer which young EAB may have implicitly learned at his boarding school?) to Goldstein's question: the cruelty is the point.
  - andy99 3y ago
    I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent behavior)
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      I'll have to go back and look up O'Brien; you're probably right that he phrases it as power. However, I say "cruelty" because I was thinking of the Bartle taxonomy[0] for video game players, and the Killer ♣ quadrant. Both Killers and Achievers ♦ aim for power, but only Killers are cruel: Achievers aim for power over scores or things; Killers aim for power over other players. We call that "prey drive" when it occurs in other species; compare the roles the species play in Animal Farm. Horses are not carnivores and don't have the same prey drive as dogs, but they do have a dominance spectrum. If you put out 8 piles of hay for 10 horses, the 2 weakest won't get to eat. If you put out 10 piles of hay, there will be peace (this is the key insight to feudalism as a socioeconomic structure) if the dominant animal chooses a pile first, and so on in order to the co-dominant, but plenty of violence if it's done the other way around. Now, depending upon the herd, there still may be some violence, because even if there's enough hay for everyone, a dominant horse will, like the Inner Party, chase a weak horse away from their pile just to show they can. If you don't care about herd hierarchy, and just put out 11-12 piles of hay, there will be complete peace, because each time the weak horse gets chased away, there's always an undefended pile it can eat from: the strong get to play strong but the weak still get to eat (this is the key insight to social democracy). So, yeah, if only it were possible for us all to have lots of power over our environment[1] without seeking power over each other[2], that'd be great. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type... [1] I'd prefer moving a dozen tons of hay around with a frontloader all by myself, instead of bossing around lots of other people to do it a few kg at a time. As far as I can tell —or have merely been convinced?– the majority of humanity would prefer the latter. [2] "Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time." –Mrs. B N
pinewurst 3y ago
One can be a very devout socialist while being anti-communist, given the subsumption of that word by the evils of Stalin/Mao/etc. Look at the life of Norman Thomas for example.

by hnbad 3y ago

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 3y 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.
082349872349872 3y ago
Animal Farm is as well; what is a farm but a piece of geography containing multiple living beings but organised for the ultimate benefit of only a few of them? Remember: very few dystopias are as much about the other, as they are about the society in which they were written. Animal Farm is the book-length exploration of what in 1984 gets a single sentence: "Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.", while 1984 depicts why the pigs (the former Middle) just become the High with no real attempt to produce animal equality. Goldstein poses the question "why should human equality be averted? ... Here we reach the central secret. This motive really consists..." and after that cliffhanger we get the torture, in the frame story, of Part 3, revealing the answer (an answer which young EAB may have implicitly learned at his boarding school?) to Goldstein's question: the cruelty is the point.
- andy99 3y ago
  I thought power was the point and cruelty what the way of exerting power - at least that's roughly my memory of O'Brien's explanation. That's why I think it aligns so well with any bureaucracy, because they're all self-organizing towards gaining and exerpting more power for it's own sake. (The big difference of course being the conscious awareness of this the party has, whereas in real life it's mostly just emergent behavior)
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    I'll have to go back and look up O'Brien; you're probably right that he phrases it as power. However, I say "cruelty" because I was thinking of the Bartle taxonomy[0] for video game players, and the Killer ♣ quadrant. Both Killers and Achievers ♦ aim for power, but only Killers are cruel: Achievers aim for power over scores or things; Killers aim for power over other players. We call that "prey drive" when it occurs in other species; compare the roles the species play in Animal Farm. Horses are not carnivores and don't have the same prey drive as dogs, but they do have a dominance spectrum. If you put out 8 piles of hay for 10 horses, the 2 weakest won't get to eat. If you put out 10 piles of hay, there will be peace (this is the key insight to feudalism as a socioeconomic structure) if the dominant animal chooses a pile first, and so on in order to the co-dominant, but plenty of violence if it's done the other way around. Now, depending upon the herd, there still may be some violence, because even if there's enough hay for everyone, a dominant horse will, like the Inner Party, chase a weak horse away from their pile just to show they can. If you don't care about herd hierarchy, and just put out 11-12 piles of hay, there will be complete peace, because each time the weak horse gets chased away, there's always an undefended pile it can eat from: the strong get to play strong but the weak still get to eat (this is the key insight to social democracy). So, yeah, if only it were possible for us all to have lots of power over our environment[1] without seeking power over each other[2], that'd be great. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type... [1] I'd prefer moving a dozen tons of hay around with a frontloader all by myself, instead of bossing around lots of other people to do it a few kg at a time. As far as I can tell —or have merely been convinced?– the majority of humanity would prefer the latter. [2] "Oh, it's blessed are the MEEK! Oh, I'm glad they're getting something, they have a hell of a time." –Mrs. B N

pinewurst 3y ago

One can be a very devout socialist while being anti-communist, given the subsumption of that word by the evils of Stalin/Mao/etc. Look at the life of Norman Thomas for example.