All Is Orwell
newcriterion.com
newcriterion.com
>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”
>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"
The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves
> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."
However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.
As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this:
It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.
[0] https://maudestavern.com/2008/10/09/george-orwell-review/ (Not sure where to find the original, but I've read it several times, and this looks like a faithful copy)
> Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.
I'm not sure why more democracy doesn't solve both issues, while retaining the benefits of both, which seems to be where most modern nations are broadly headed, in fits and starts.
Most of the world has settled on capitalism because it solves a specific class of coordination problems really well, and targeted intervention can stave off the externalities enough to make the system bearable.
Slumps and unemployment aren't, like, an avoidable curse, but they're pretty damn hard to avoid, and so far no system has had real success.
It has also been plausibly argued that the great depression was lengthened (and possibly deepened) by things like the New Deal.
Social safety nets and technological progress do improve life outcomes a lot.
Yes, it's concentrations of power which are the real enemy.
Unfortunately, no matter how many dictatorships, oligarchies, monarchies, theocracies and kleptocracies the world suffers through, we never seem to learn that lesson.
ask an investor if they would rather invest in a monopoly or not a monopoly.
seems like the only thing standing in the way of a world full of monopolies is corporate founders egos not willing to sell out for more profits.
There were good reasons why Bretton Woods failed in 1970, but the subsequent ascendance of Hayekian neoliberalism doesn't look so good 40 years on.
That very concept is a nonsensical. No Hayekian economist or ideologue calls themselves neoliberal.
[0] The Freeman, 1952. https://mises.org/library/freeman-july-1952-b
[1] Globalists. The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism.
"Had I gone to Spain with no political affiliation at all I should probably have joined the International Column and should no doubt by this time have had a bullet in the back for being "politically unreliable", or at least have been in jail. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
– George Orwell, "Letter to Jack Common [October? 1937]", in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcournt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 289.
I gave up right there, this was so grossly condescending to its subject. Orwell was not aware of his own contradictions? Has the author ever actually read any Orwell?
Needless to say, things are complicated. It's why we created specialization in the first place, but at the same time we expect people to be experts in many subjects (generalists). Because of this thinking many people will assume someone is being contradictory when they can criticize different things. The nature of reality is complex. No matter how you side on complicated issues there are reasons to critique different sides (Israel/Palestine, China/US, Communism/Socialism/Capitalism/xism, and so on). Simplifying things just causes us to argue over things we have no qualifications to argue over, but we'll do it with self-righteous indignation instead of as a way to learn or update our views. This is strange because arguing, debate, criticism, and self reflection are so important to democracies. It is far more important to critique your own philosophies (the ones you are fighting for) than those you oppose, since those are the things you have control over the direction of.
Sometimes it isn't about contradictions, sometimes (most of the times) we're just dumb and over simplifying.
Throw in some radical oversimplifications and that's a pretty strong recipe for polarization. One that's actively cultivated and amplified due to media profit incentives. Unfortunately it's a vicious cycle that seems to make us dumber and oversimplify even more.
This is like dealing with the kind of writer who thinks that java and javascript are the same thing.
Similarly part of what makes Orwell both interesting and entertaining to read is him skewering some of the excesses of the left of his time, without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism. It's criticism because he wants a better left, not a non-existent one.
I don't think he was. He was anti-Stalinist, stemming from anti-totalitarianism, but I don't he was generally hostile to communism.
> without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism
Which puts it much less forcefully that you could. Orwell was a socialist. He fought with the Marxist POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He was fundamentally pro-egalitarianism and dedicated his life in a big way to egalitarianism as realised by Socialism.
You only find contraditions in his life if you try to apply tests of ideological purity rather than trying to meet him where he was.
> Why, then, did he determine that it was a fight worth fighting? Bravely, and at some cost to his health, he fought an unwinnable war for a unrealizable cause. But he still believed it was right to have fought and to have gone on encouraging others to continue doing so. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, the issue, in his view, was simple: “Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?”
> This explanation, entirely bereft of historical and cultural context, is bound to strike anyone half familiar with the history of the conflict as simplistic in the extreme, even simple-minded. Orwell wrote: “I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later . . . . That was the real issue of the Spanish war . . . and perhaps of other wars to come.”
I mean, it's fair to say that any one sentence summary of a war is going to be somewhat simplistic, but if one side has monarchists, fascists and military dictators on it, then it seems reasonable to me. Just the way the author writes it, I feel I should know of some alternative take that it seems like I don't.
What do the "mountains of evidence to the contrary" suggest (in this author's view)? Presumably something along the lines of fascism being better than risking communism, which seems to a strangely recurring historical motif.
The thesis of the article is that Orwell is admired so much by all political sides because of his contradictions. He was against fascism, but he also recognized totalitarian tendencies in communism. Thus the line about some animals being more equal than others in Animal Farm.
Collectivism might have also produced tyranny but it's not a good thing that a fascist won.
I actually have a fairly uncharitable take on why he's so popular in the English speaking world. One reason is Orwell's inherent technophobia and parochialism which is arguably the dominant theme in American and English speculative fiction, what Leo Marx dubbed 'the Machine in the Garden' myth. It's about the idea of modernity, industrialization and urban society intruding an idealized agrarian culture. You find in in LOTR, Brave New World, 1984 with its waxing over natural chocolate and ink-pencils. Asimov addresses this in his pretty scathing critique of the book[1]. It also still pops up in virtually every English-language piece of dystopian fiction.
Another reason is the political aspect of his work in the US in particular. Orwell's politics was to a large degree a personal feud with Stalinism due to his experiences in the Spanish civil war. This unorthodox critique of Soviet communism coming from a socialist made him pretty much the ideal figure in the anti-communist discourse of US 20th century politics on both sides of the political spectrum. Rebellious enough to appeal to the liberal side, but actually pushing deeply conventional, conservative ideas. Also mirrored in Hitchens personal trajectory, who was a big admirer of Orwell.
James Joyce.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=Orwell,Rowling,Sh...
An interesting term not heard much nowadays. The Economist applied it to China’s governance model, back in 2012:
https://www.economist.com/special-report/2012/01/21/the-visi...
"How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell, is worth reading. How East Asia moved into the 21st century is detailed, country by country. There were two startup phases: 1) Fix agriculture so it doesn't take most of the workforce, 2) Get export industries going. Countries which got those two right did well, and those which did not, didn't. Getting it wrong often involved the military running businesses, usually for the benefit of generals. The "Asian tigers" are now past that. It's not as clear on what the next phase is.
China has formal five year plans. Currently, the 14th five year plan, 2021-2025, is in progress. Unlike the USSR's five year plans, China's plans from the Sixth Plan (1981-1985) forward have been generally successful. The current plan has, as usual, a number of components. One is to catch up in some specific areas - aircraft, advanced semiconductors. That's coming along well. Another is "dual circulation" - building up internal demand and not being so dependent on exports.
The US generally avoids the government actively running businesses, but it's not that rare in other countries.
We still don't know how to make an economic system that works anywhere near optimum, but have so much excess productive capacity that it doesn't matter as much.