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Comment by moritzwarhier | Hacker News Reader

I think I agree with you.

I don't think that the integrity of elections and democracy are the main point of this essay.

Orwell wrote a lot about authoritarianism, and as you say, "communism" was the prime example at the time.

What he hints at here is not only the fragility of democracy. It's about the fragility of civilization.

It's about the "will to power" as defined by Nietzsche, and the power of belief systems, as well as the primal underpinnings of our society.

This essay makes me think about the authoritarian side of capitalism, "freedom" (to take what you can), slavery and many more topics.

My takeaway is that our contemporary masquerade of "capitalism=freedom=human rights" is nothing but an illusion of a select few.

But that's what makes Orwell great, everybody reads him differently.

I'm well aware that Orwell is favored for "anti-socialist"/"pro-freedom" stances and I have read 1984 and Animal farm.

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I must disagree.

Orwell is not the bible, or an if-by-whiskey politician. Everybody reads him differently because they're combining hearsay, random quotes and attributions.

If you read Orwell's essays or articles directly, he's extremely clear and unambiguous. The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

On capitalism as a belief system, Orwell was a critic. Not because of freedom, or lack thereof... but because he thought capitalist politics didn't offer enough hope. I can't find the quote but somewhere he goes into Socialist, Communist & even Fascist promises of a better future. Capitalism offered a very modest amount of hope on a very long timeline. Conservatism offered none, which is why (according to Orwell) Fascism succeeded it.

> The fact that people think Orwell agrees with them despite having polar opposite views is a testament to people's laziness, not Orwell's interpretability.

This is common and always amuses me. My favorite is Adam Smith, beloved of the most demonstrably ardent self-described “capitalists” who would be shocked and repulsed by what he actually wrote.

Sometimes this property is considered a feature, not a bug, in particular by Marxists and religious leaders, and doubtless by many more.

As it happens I really love Eric Blair’s writing even when I disagree with him.

Thanks for the reply.

I have read Down&Out and the odd essay in addition to the ones I mentioned.

I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist" often enough so that my reply partly argued against this simplification.

There's some hard-to-explain background for my comments:

1) The above-mentioned simplification: I grew up with socialism and fascism equally being put under the "totalitarianism" umbrella in media and education. In German we call it "Hufeisentheorie". There's probably some truth to this. But I incrasingly feel that for capitalism to appear "human", an exponentially growing amount of available natural resources and slave labour is needed.

2) The post-war generation of which i.e. my parents were a part; they were in a way the undertakers of mainstream leftism.

3) You hint at it: Fascism and capitalism tend to go hand in hand. We have just been brainwashed to forget about it. See US foreign policy in Latin America.

>>I have heard the shortened trope "Orwell was a socialist, even fought in the Spanish civil war, then became a vocal critique and disillusioned socialist"

I don't think the last part is true. ASAIK, Orwell remained a socialist all his life. I don't think he was disillusioned, because he wasn't a kool aid kind of guy at any point.

Orwell died young, before the cold war so he didn't really weigh in on that dialogue. The terms and cliches we tend to use came after he died.

In my opinion fascism courted, supported and leaned on capitalists, not really capitalism. The ideological view of capitalism (in the Rand/Hayek/Neoliberalism sense) was still new ATT.

Yes that all makes sense to me.

In hindsight I made some vague points partly because I misread your original comment.

I am myself annoyed by some popular misconceptions about Orwell and his work.

I had read some nuanced articles about him as well and they didn't all paint him in the way that I put in quotes.

Regarding capitalism and fascism, I misleadingly wrote "you hint at it", but maybe we disagree here at least partly.

True, Orwell has a worldview (though it evolves over time) and it connects his thoughts if you pick up a collection of his essays and study them systematically. But one does not need to agree with everything to find agreement with some particular elements and thoughts.

Slavery pre-dates capitalism. Slavery is more a product of feudalism. In fact, it was the capitalist successes of the northern states in the US that drove the defeat of the southern slave states.

Yep, it's convenient today to connect the two or to pretend that America's (or Britain's) success in the early day was largely a product of slavery. But even when slavery ended there was hardly a sudden decline in prosperity, that engine kept accelerating.

> Slavery didn't make America rich. It made a few Southerners rich and a few Northerners rich, but it didnt make the country rich.

> Another way to look at it is, the Confederacy was a loose collection of agricultural states. The real money was made by the industrial northern states. In the north were mills, factories, ship building, and steel mills.

https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-slavery-contribute-to-Ame...

American capitalism (and the labour movements that reacted to it) was built in the factories and mills, not the farms in the south.

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