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This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared to d

This is exactly the point. He was a socialist who was able to call out other socialists. Most socialists of the time (and even today) were/are not prepared to do this (why I don't know - and I suspect some Russian control on elements of the British socialist mainstream at the time may have played a role). This one of the reasons that people on the right of the political spectrum think that socialism is a dirty word. The reality is that socialism itself is not bad but that the implementation as seen in the USSR was terrible. The principle needs to be separated from the poor implementation. HOWEVER, how to implement socialism well? Any implementation would have to account for people's inherent selfishness etc. I don't have an ideas for how to overcome this and I don't think anyone ever has yet. Therefore I prefer that we stay with market driven capitalism (which deliberately uses people's selfishness and in a pure from has very simple implementation) for the foreseeable future.

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MatekCopatek 12y ago
I disagree with 2 things. Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously. Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences. Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.

deleted 12y ago

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MatekCopatek 12y ago

I disagree with 2 things. Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously. Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences. Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.