Lenin never wrote about what happens when chickens and horses do manual labour and pigs get drunk.
oh no my arms are full of links and I can’t carry them all, I’m about to drop one!
Obviously communism won’t work because racism is correct
- this book
Your ideology sounds cute, but I made up a story about animals in which your ideology doesn’t work, CHECKMATE
we have no choice but to abandon socialism
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Was it over when the Japanese sieged Stalingrad? HELL NO!
I wonder how to reconcile Orwell’s warnings in 1984 & animal farm considering that m/l theory is seemingly being proved right in slow motion since Reagan/Nixon and the trickle of CIA secrets over the decades.
Was he prophetic or just another well spoken liberal?
He was yet another in the long line of people accurately identifying the abuses of capitalism but attributing them to communism.
i wonder then if their inclusion into american’s grade schoolers’ reading lists is indicative of anything.
i mean it’s clear that it supports america capitalist/imperial perspectives, but other titles that “american patriots” label as subverse and try to ban over and over again like “i know why the caged bird sings” and “catcher in the rye” are on those same reading lists as well.
He was yet another in the long line of people accurately identifying the abuses of capitalism but attributing them to communism.
I don’t know if that’s really fair characterization? I know Orwell in pop culture has essentially been a CIA op but having read Animal Farm I think its more accurate to say that he was accurately identifying the abuses of capitalism and claiming that communism under Stalin had essentially become a mirror image of them.
Now obviously that’s a take I know many on this site would heavily push back on but still…what I know of Orwell strikes me more as being the quintessential “westsplainer”. IE: the equivalent of modern day leftist thinkers in the west who denounce China for being not real communism and/or doing the thing wrong.
Genuinely curious how you see Orwell criticizing capitalism in Animal Farm? That would be a level of nuance that I didn’t take away from it when reading it as a kid, and certainly not one I have ever seen from anyone who considers it an important work. It has always been presented to me as a pretty straightforward critique of the Stalinist USSR.
The allegory gets dicey when you consider the distinction between Capitalism and Feudalism but: the story begins with the revolution against the Farmer Mr. Jones who obviously is a symbolic stand-in for the ruling class. The story ends with the pigs under napoleon playing cards and drinking with the local human farmers from the surrounding areas and the other animals watching them and finding human and pig being literally and figuratively indistinguishable from one another. The essence of the story is a cautionary tale about how revolutionary politics can end with the same systems of oppression and class being replicated and reinstated. Orwell I think was pretty explicit in his critique of the USSR and Stalin, but the entire reason why Napoleon and the Pigs in Animal farm are the villains is that they ultimately betray the spirit of the revolution and choose to enrich themselves and effectively become no different than the ruling class they overthrew.
That makes sense, I guess. I think it’s generous to Orwell to read this as any kind of meaningful criticism of capitalism, when his focus is so clearly on those who betray the revolution, rather than what came before the revolution. But I guess this reading does track with Orwell being a favourite read of Trots and other purity-obssesed western leftists who would rather support a capitalist system (or even outright fascism) rather than an imperfect socialist one. It’s essentially a cautionary tale that revolutions aren’t worth it, because they’re corruptible.
Reposting this.
Orwell had an excellent understanding of what living in a modern empire was like; He was a colonial cop in occupied India after all. He saw and participated in the British oppression of India and, like all good liberals, he took the things he saw there and sublimated it onto the Enemy. When he was writing the Enemy was the Soviet Union but he could have just as easily written it about France, Germany, Japan, America, or any other state that the British propaganda apparatus was designating as the Enemy when he was writing his book.
Don’t feel bad about quoting Orwell to describe the sort of state he lived in. That’s what he was taking inspiration from, even if he didn’t realize it. He certainly wasn’t inspired by the Soviet Union, how could he be? He had never even been there, he had only had it described to him.
Don’t feel bad about quoting Orwell to describe the sort of state he lived in. That’s what he was taking inspiration from, even if he didn’t realize it.
I’ve read 1984 several times as a younger lib, and I was 100% certain that it was describing the future that my capitalist country was moving towards.I can’t imagine anyone that would read it today and think that socialist societies would be any more “totalitarian” than our present capitalist states.
Fuck, I’d happily have a “social credit score” vs the reality that masked secret police are arresting and disappearing people off the street.
social credit score
My favorite bit about the social credit score is to point out we essentially have the exact same thing here in the west also…we just don’t have the social part of it. In practice your credit score still typically defines where you can live and what resources you have available.
I’ve been saying this for a long time. Compounded by things like your zip code of birth being indicative of whether or not you escape the poverty trap.
It’s all
Pigs already get drunk.
I really like the chicken’s expression in this drawing.
