Fun fact: among the publishers who rejected Animal Farm was T. S. Eliot:
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.
The comment by T. S. Eliot reminds me of one of Orwell's critiques of Charles Dickens. Namely, that whilst he is very insightful about the ills of society, he offers no better solution than to hope for "good rich men".
> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as ‘human nature’. It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property ... His whole ‘message’ is one that at first glance looks like an enormous platitude: If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
I can't help but feel like Eliot's "public-spirited pigs" are the same thing as Dickens' "good rich men".
> If men would behave decently the world would be decent.
Which in turn reminds me of Federalist No. 51:
"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. "
The corpus of literature on designing systems to function smoothly and reliably when filled with mediocre decision makers is neither large nor well known nor inspiring. Hence, most people understandably ignore it or never even read it at all.
But these concepts are absolutely critical to ensuring the real world functions.
Checks and balances, electoral accountability, independent branches of government, multiple levels of governance (city, county/parish, state/province, national, global). Independent actors within and outside government.
The work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again.
That's a great quote, as "powerful interests" rightly refers to either government or corporate bodies. A country where the media is lobbied by business is less democratic for it.
There's a reason why I chafe greatly with viewpoints which focus exclusively or even significantly, on, say, corporate vs. government power as the greater evil or risk. I'll note that within the past century, religious power was a frequently-cited risk even amongst great power states (it's largely a factor in less-powerful states, though not entirely absent from today's stage).
The true concern is actually power itself, however that is manifested. That might be political, it might be commercial, it might be religious, it might be cultural or social, it might be technological. I'm informed here by the "four estates" (church, nobility, burghers, commoners), sometimes a fifth (press), as well as Lawrence Lessig's Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace: Law, Norms, Market, Architecture.
Ultimately, power devolves from some control nexus from which a lesser effort need be asserted than the benefit or result which comes from it.
it's an awesome aphorism, and continues (there are lots of versions and alleged authors):
Without men, there would be neither wars or skyscrapers; neither destruction or creation; neither hate nor love. We are not angels but we need not be devils, but without the devils as examples, how to choose right from wrong?
What's Orwell's own solution, though? The whole point of Animal Farm is that the existing order was overthrown, with the best of intentions, and some unscrupulous individuals, with support from naive idealists and selfish opportunists, turned the new order into something no better than before.
Sounds to me like an argument towards an argument exactly for focusing on "public-spirited pigs" and how to get them into power, rather than how to overthrow the existing order with something you don't know will work out or revert to something worse.
I think Dickens and Elliot are somewhat right and Orwell even demonstrates it in Animal Farm... there was a "public-spirited pig" bending the revolution toward fairness and decency, but it only took one other pig with a monopoly on physical force to overthrow him in an instant. Without "good people", human nature will corrupt any system.
It's the structure of the political and legal systems that really determine how well and fairly those resources are distributed. If you have a political system without checks and balances writing laws, and/or a legal system that does not apply the law equally to all its citizens, then you're going to have a bad time, no matter the economic system you use.
I think it also shows how tyranny manifests through a series of small pushes. Napoleon didn’t establish an autocracy as soon as old major died - it took him all the way until the end of the book to let the mask drop fully. There were dozens of small ways the other animals could have resisted his rise to power along the way - missed opportunities for good people, aka “the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.”
The Dickens/Elliot argument is simply the more acceptable form of an argument that in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".
All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well.
Not that "well" should ever be as well as those on top treat themselves ...
No. The argument is not that some people should be placed in a position of power, let alone an irrevocable one.
The argument is that that you cannot organize a society without having some people in positions of power of some sort. And if you explicitly try to avoid that, you'll end up with someone grabbing it anyway.
So it's better to instead think of how you can set up your society to explicitly give the greatest power only for a limited time, with transparency and accountability, and ideally find a way to give it only to competent and well-meaning people.
A process can replace a position. We don't have Judge Dredd positions of power because we have a process of separating Executive actions from Judicial actions. I believe this line of reasoning allows that we generate our democratically-governed systems in such a manner that governing "positions" of power don't have effective power over the position of the free-willed individual.
An example of this effect is how a US citizen has the right to own a firearm & defend themselves with it even though homicide and firing a gun in a city are illegal. The process allows for a person to govern themselves - self-organization occurs such that militias can rightfully exist, and there exists procedural allowances for these guns/militias (positions of power) to exist without being taken away by an official.
The greatest power is the individual's, and if your reference is to power that can be given or taken away after some time, this is not the greatest power and it also cannot be given away.
"God-given rights" means there are authorities (including the individual) who surpass the highest which any governing authority can claim or be given. This process only works when we recognize that nobody should ever be put in this position to supplant the power of "God".
>in it's less acceptable form would be "slavery would be fine if slave-owners were just nicer to their slaves".
Sure, if we're thinking in a vacuum. Even if we go religious, what's the difference between modern prison and the Garden of Eden? It's part of why we call tech environments with a lot of amenities a "walled garden".
Digression aside, we have millenia of knowledge to know that never ends well and millenia of knowledge to know that slavery is never about trying to treat people well to begin with.
>All are a from of argument that some people should be be placed in a position of irrevocable power over others (by accident of birth into a privileged race or class) ... and that's all OK if they treat their underlings well
In theory, yes. And like slavery we have millenia of knowledge on how NOT to run a country.
But unlike Slavery we have seen that the alternative to no government ends worse. So it's an unfortuante compromise needed for a society in that someone needs to make widespread decisions. The more modern (but not necessarily best) methods to prevent corruption is simply to make sure a person is never in that seat of power for too long.
Vanguardism on the left has been heavily critiqued by the Left. You should read Peter Kropotkin on mutual aid. We do not need to depend on public spirited pigs.
Or don't enable institutions that attract the worst elements of society and put them in positions of power over others. The nature of hierarchies is that they distill the power hungry at their top, and lust for the subjugation of others is fundamentally at odds with effective leadership. The taller the hierarchy, the greater the distillation, because those not driven by an intrinsic desire to hierarchy-climb will be weeded out.
I would recommend reading The Tyranny of Structurelessness. It's a great analysis of the feminist movement of the 70s by one of its members. Specifically it critiques the push to avoid explicit hierarchies within that movement as inevitably enabling implicit hierarchies that favor the in-crowd
Guess the moral of the story is hierarchy will always exist - it can either be visible or invisible. People who want power will seek it. Inevitably people will end up following/obeying them for one reason or another … and we have a person in power.
> The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
When he was in his 30's he joined up with Trostkyists to fight in Spain, but said he would have preferred to have joined the anarchists. Despite his capabilities as a writer, I wouldn't really turn to him for political advice.
Not understand - I know a bunch of anarchists and their view of anarchy is definitely not "helter skelter". What specifically would you critique about Orwell's politics?
The most convincing depiction of anarchy I have seen is Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed, where they have deep social conventions that make claiming any kind of power over others taboo. But that never seemed to me a sufficient safeguard against power-hungry people finding ways around it - let along external enemies.
If I understand it correctly, The Dawn of Everything argues that (many) Native American societies had those kinds of strong taboos and that was a workable model until acted upon by an outside force.
I loved the Dispossessed. I agree with the critique that her portrayal of anarchy is a bit utopian and glosses over what happens with unscrupulous actors. But, I appreciate that her point was about the problems that can exist even in the breast case scenario
It's a argument for better system design, aka a meat grinder driven by pigs for the pigs and a stationary government part with almost no power to act on its own, except in limiting decay to the meat grinder and restoring it's full functionally once it breaks down. A good working government is a horrible device for the power fool taxing them and reasoning them on all levels.
It's important to note that Orwell was a socialist. But he was an intellectually honest one. He pointed out the potential pitfalls of his values, as a means to seek a means to overcome them.
(asserting my own beliefs now) The fact that most of a century has passed during which we've seen those pitfalls repeated many times since, and no effective mechanism for protecting against them has surfaced, I think that the project of socialism must be abandoned.
I completely disagree with your last point. Social democracy has been wildly successful. Many socialist ideas work very well. The big problem with most "communist" countries is that they forgot the most important aspect: giving the workers a voice. They're supposed to be in the dictatorship of the proletariat phase towards communism, but none of them give power to the proletariat. They're a dictatorship of an elite, and there's nothing socialist about that.
And in the past century we've also seen the harmful influence of extreme capitalism on democracy, including social democracy. Clearly the power of money on politics needs to be limited.
But tue hardest problem is how to ensure that the voters are well informed. They need reliable news media, but the two obvious ways to finance that are through capitalism and the state, both of which are suspect.
Sure. You're talking about two different things here. When you're saying "social democracy", you're talking about "capitalism with a safety net". When you're talking about "Communist" countries, you're talking about a system in which the government controls the means of production. These are related but distinct ideas.
The thing is, in the "government controls the means of production", you necessarily cede to the government sufficient control of everything - news media and everything else: that is, by definition, totalitarianism. The government can easily use this to prevent "bad views" from being aired. It doesn't even require evil intent. The gov't can think it's doing the right thing by protecting people from "misinformation" - you can see this debate today in America, and I understand there's a debate today in Germany about actually banning an overly-right-wing political party. And when a government comes to view itself as being truly good, the only legitimate defender of the people, it'll be very tempting for them to stomp on media and even voting freedom even with those good intentions.
Socialism is not necessarily about the government controlling the means of production, though. It's about the proletariat, the workers, controlling the means of production. Government is one way to accomplish that, but that only works if the workers control the government, which was not the case in Soviet countries.
There are also other ways to have workers control the means of production to varying degrees. Labour unions, workers councils, etc share control between the workers and the owners. A democracy in which workers vote for a government that controls regulations is another. Co-ops are a great one.
And of course according to the communist ideal, there isn't even a central government to control the means of production.
The big questions are whether it's possible to reach that ideal, how, and whether it's even stable. Countries calling themselves "communist" in our world certainly failed dramatically. But social democracy has been fairly effective in giving at least some degree of control to the workers. Their big problem is that in a still fundamentally capitalist system, money still rules, and powerful corporations can often either control or ignore the government and take away the power of the workers. That has definitely happened in the US, and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, over the past half century.
Social democracy is way more than "capitalism with a safety net". It normally advocates a mixed economy in which the means of production may still be owned privately, but the state may have various overriding powers such as:
We've also known about the rampant pitfalls of Capitalism since before Adam Smith, and yet we seem absolutely chuffed to dive headfirst into those, time and time again. Stable governments seem to be a pretty rare fluke, regardless of model of governance.
“an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit”
So the alternative is state control and history tells us that only works with certain endeavours - e.g. military - and can be catastrophic when applied to things like agriculture (see collectivization).
That's honestly a pretty bad and misleading definition.
The key element of capitalism is not so much private vs. state ownership, it's ownership (and thus profit extraction) based on capital.
And the effect of is allowing control to be arbitrarily skewed towards wealthy individuals who don't need to work, while leaving others with no control at all, even over the work they do, while still needing to work to sustain themselves. Additionally, this skew tends to increase over time as capital accumulates profits exponentially.
The alternative is basing control on something other than capital. But that actually leaves a lot of different options, not just state ownership. What if the only legal form of corporation were the cooperative, with companies being collectively owned by, and profits distributed to, their employees, equally?
Thank you for digging up the quote and summarizing the sentiment. I've never been able to put my finger on this aspect of Dickens.
I personally share the same philosophy that morality swings above its weight in the grand scheme of society. It's fully within our control as individuals and therefore a worthy target for literary influence.
Good points. The New Yorker made somewhat the same points on Alger Horatio say in context of ragged dick. Horatio never dealt with racism or class hierarchies. And his villans are simplistic. There was no murder or rape. And it was implied that fraudsters (as one example) knew they were doing wrong almost as if they had internalized morals but ultimately never followed them. So again no serious engagement of human nature. Moreover dick was helped by a Christian rich person --- to the good in intent and result--- but it leaves a lot left unexplored too.
In this way lord of the flies is another take worth reading
Somewhat related, Churchill was very fond of pigs. He famously said (some variant of) "I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals."
I feel the someone might argue suggests that's not T.E. Eliot... but...
At the time there was a sizable movement not on political lines but one of emergent sociology that people could be conditioned en masses by (it seemed largely assumed) by conditioning. Take the book Walden Two written by B.F. Skinner during WWII years, (or Living Walden Two documenting places where it was tried and failed) of conditioning altruistic and intelligent societies, the not working out due to the positivist view of social truth, rather than social 'truth' being a much more dynamic, and endogenously generated, concept, perhaps, is it really ontologically 'is'. And to circle back on learning/reflection in technology, much effort being applied in AI to assist in grasping such 'truths' as repeating mistakes of the past (especially LLMs missing verticals of specialist knowledge), however I diverge.
>Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right.
It's more specific than that. Eliot has in mind the exile of Snowball (obviously Trotsky), and the betrayal of his ideals by Napoleon. One might, or might not, expect a Snowball-led farm to ultimately disintegrate into the same totalitarianism that Napoleon's farm (and all Communist societies in history), but we don't get to see that outcome, so Snowball remains the pure, unimpugned ideal. Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!)), or sarcastically as is more often done nowadays, is up to the speaker.
> Basically, it's "We've never seen true Communism in action"; whether that statement is said seriously (as actually has been done elsewhere in this discussion (!))
We’ve seen capitalism done better and worse in various countries, many times dissolving into dictatorship or fascism, and usually built on the backs of a downtrodden group (a racial minority, a migrant population, outsourced indentured labour, etc.). The idea the handful of attempts at communism (all while being besieged by the capitalist nations around them) shows that communism is a bad idea, is just as laughable as the idea that capitalism always succeeds.
So, not sure that’s exactly what you’re (!)-ing about here, but the truly intellectually curious position is not to oppose communism, but to wonder if there is a way to achieve its noble goals while avoiding the pitfalls that that the ussr fell into.
But Snowball the pig, who is presented much more positively, was clearly based on Trotsky so Eliot had a good argument that it was a Trotskyite book. It certainly wasn't a pro-capitalist book. The end was that the pigs could not be distinguished from the (capitalist) human farmers.
The European countries were not and are not democratic socialist countries. They're at best social democracies, and even that is an extreme stretch. They're mixed-market economies with social welfare programs.
Cold War era anti-communism did not draw distinctions between Soviet "socialism" and democratic socialism although the Soviets explicitly purged democratic socialist movements and organizations and preferred leaving Spain to the fascists rather than allowing them to come out on top.
Soviet "socialism" also isn't communism -- heck, the term "actually existing socialism" was coined to ridicule "utopian" leftists who wanted to achieve communism in Soviet-affiliated countries. Communism, a stateless society without private ownership, was always only considered the stated end goal of these countries, even when they actively took steps to prevent any progression towards that goal.
If Orwell's detractors have been right on one thing about Animal Farm it's that people on the right are too ignorant to treat it as anything other than a condemnation of all forms of socialism although he specifically wrote it to condemn the Soviet Union's corrupt bureaucracy and the exploitation perpetuated by all forms of statism, whether under the guise of fascism, Soviet "socialism" or capitalism. The actual morale is fairly straightforward: the pigs get corrupted because they try to replace the humans but the oppression stems from the system affording the humans (and pigs) their position, not their species. You can't replace one state power with another and hope this will result in the abolition of the state because the state exists to perpetuate itself.
Real communism is nothing more the state of being ruled by those who ostensibly pursue and aspire to achieving the state of communism (which is never and will never be real.)
He is right that the Soviets said that communism was the end goal they would inevitably achieve. But communism in that sense was never real. The real communism was being ruled by the people selling that aspirational fantasy.
Well, that's what vanguardism gets you. It's why e.g. anarchists are fundamentally opposed to vanguardism. The problem with vanguard parties is that once the vanguard party is in power it's now in its own interest to continue being in power and any step towards communism would be counter to that interest. Unless you happen to luck into having a benevolent dictator who somehow against all odds actually is a true believer in communism, isn't corrupted by having absolute power, doesn't fall victim to the bureaucracy and systems of power he commands (e.g. Sankara) and lives long enough to both get into power and use that power to deconstruct the entire system that enabled him, you just end up with a new political class replacing the owning class without also abolishing the working class.
If people didn't fall for people "selling an aspirational fantasy", we wouldn't have made it out of feudalism. Early anti-capitalists just severely underestimated how resilient capitalism is (i.e. most of them did not anticipate Disney selling you anti-capitalist messages as a product, or "late-stage capitalist recuperation"). Given how long Europe was stuck in feudalism it's not at all unreasonable to expect capitalism to be replaced by something better -- as long as you don't expect it to happen in your lifetime.
The Kibbutzes are indeed communes, but they cannot sustain themselves. They exist on subsidy from the state, funded by taxing the capitalist part of the economy.
America has, since its inception, spawned over 10,000 communes. None were successful.
The closest we are to real “communism” I would say is in Switzerland,
where people vote together on any issue in a direct democratic way. They seem to reject economical communism, where the means of production are owned together.
I agree that "capturing the means of production" is a red herring. The idea is to abolish private property, i.e. private ownership of "the means of production".
Arguably a reform stating something along the lines like, say, "non-publicly traded corporations above $1MM annual revenue for three years or employing at least 20 people must transfer ownership to a worker's council all employees automatically are members of for the duration of their employment" (this could be extended to take into consideration repayment of the initial investments of the founders as for any other loan) and similarly limiting publicly traded corporations while also offering government grants for founding employee-owned corporations (before hitting the revenue or employment cap) would pretty much tick that checkbox and I don't think that would really be "communism" in a meaningful way, even if I think it's an overall improvement for society.
I see communism as equivalent with anarchism so my definition isn't shared by all "communists" but the point isn't to "give power to the people" but to abolish the systems which give individuals power over other. That includes a lot of "SJW"/"woke" topics like white supremacism, cis-heteronormativity, ageism/gerontocracy (i.e. treating children as lesser beings rather than persons with intellectual and physical limitations), ableism (i.e. treating people with intellectual and physical limitations as lesser beings) and "the patriarchy", as well as capitalism. That's quite the laundry list so I'm fine with incrementalism.
Of course some communists like Engels conflate(d) hierarchy with the vague nation of "authority" to create a strawman against this notion of communism, i.e. that anarchists not wanting individuals to have power over others means they can't do violence in order to help bring about communism or defend it -- which of course is nonsensical because opposing systems of power does not contradict using power (i.e. violence) in opposition of those systems. There are other ideological disagreements too but it boils down to anarchism being "communism but more so" and Marxist-Leninists being of the opinion that that is worse and that therefore not being able to achieve that with their means (e.g. vanguardism) is not an issue.
"Communism" is a loaded term which means different things to different people, but if you mean the word as Soviet Marxism or Marxism-Leninism then it is an orthodoxy of political and economic thought with some very specific precepts, some of which do not really emphasise democracy.
I named some examples that might fit the bill in another comment: "Makhnovia" (wiped out by the Soviet Union), revolutionary Catalonia (wiped out by the Soviet Union and the Spanish fascists), Shinmin (wiped out by the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan), the Paris Commune (at least partially), Rojava and the Zapatistas (tho they would eschew any Western attempt at labelling them).
Most anarchists however tend to focus on prefiguration: creating environments in which communism can take hold when the superstructure collapses or goes away. This can take the form of mutual aid programs, weapons and first aid trainings, farming/housing cooperatives and so on just to name some of the more overt examples. Arguably the Black Panthers came closer to communism than the Soviet Union.
Yep, these whiny mfs always complain about something. One second it's workers rights, then it's extrajudicial assassinations by the government... Complain, complain, complain!
Think Walter, if anarchism and dem socialism is really doomed to fail, why would you the government need to assassinate leaders and perform regime changes :) surely it would be cheaper (and more effective) to let them crumble?
The US has had 10,000 communes. They have a 100% failure rate. How many had their leaders assassinated?
The usual cause for failure is people get disenchanted with living in a commune and leave. It usually takes 1 to 2 years for their communist zeal to be ground down by reality.
Capitalism is illegal in Cuba. Communes are legal in the US.
It's quite a distinction.
If you want to join a commune in the US, google for one and join it. Nobody is going to stop you or punish you for it. You can start one yourself with some like minded friends.
That takes a whole bunch of historical shortcuts that I'm not comfortable with. For starters, the communists in Western Europe advocated violent revolution and - no surprise there - the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it. If they couldn't get there through an election then it wasn't going to happen. Democratic socialism was the voice of reason next to the bloodlust of the 'true' communists.
Reform and revolution was an active area of debate between Western European communists. What made Western European communists lean towards revolution were the bans on socialist parties by various countries, and the subsequent repression. This convinced many communists that they would simply never be allowed to get elected and transition out of capitalism.
The second thing that ended reformism amongst Western communists was World War 1, which was used as a cudgel against any kind socialism and allowed the state to essentially use wars as a pretext to destroy communist movements and expel antiwar radicals from popular leftwing parties.
And the rest of people didn't want nothing to do with it. The SPD, when it was an explicitly Marxist and revolutionary part in Germany for example, got up to 35% of the vote.
It's after the expulsion from the SPD and the bans on various communist activities that Western European communists were decided on revolution. It wasn't because they were cartoonish bloodlusting villains.
Germany is just an example, the sentiments are common to many European countries pre-WWII.
The statement that "the rest of the people wanted absolutely nothing to do with it" is true in that most European countries never had majority support for revolutionary socialism. But in many countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain) it was a substantial block, in many places on par with support for more moderate socialists/social democrats.
Revolutionary socialism is a highly fringe political viewpoint today, but it was much more popular in the inter-war years. It took a long time for people to learn of (and start to believe!) the atrocities that occurred in the revolution in Russia.
It is true that it was much more popular then than it is today. But it still as far as I know never managed to gain more than a small percentage foothold. That doesn't mean that it was insignificant, it doesn't take a whole country to subscribe to something to change the course of history. But revolutionary socialism/communism did not come even close to being able to subvert the democratic process in those countries that already had a majority or coalition rule in place. Though there definitely were recorded attempts in almost every country they all fizzled out.
I'll say it again because apparently it didn't land: Germany != Western Europe. Germany had a lot of conditions that made it ripe for a vote like that which did not apply to any of the other nations in Western Europe at that time (or any other time, really).
In this case it is. Firstly, similar events transpired in other countries, and secondly, the German communist movement was by far the strongest and most influential one until the USSR happened. Secondly, prospects for a smaller country like, say, Belgium turning communist alone are very dim, and so for many smaller countries the plan for communist parties was more or less to wait until Germany or France became communist.
While a nice quote and possibly even true, Lenin's totalitarian "communism" is not the goal of socialism.
Communism was supposed to be a stateless utopia, and Lenin definitely did not get rid of the state. His wasn't even a dictatorship of the proletariat, it's a dictatorship by a small elite.
Social democracy is much closer to a "dictatorship" of the proletariat, because there workers actually have a voice.
It's important to realise that when Marx wrote his thing, many "democracies" still didn't allow poor people to vote. Marx would have been much happier about western capitalist denocracies than about Soviet communism. Although obviously the next step has to be to get money out of politics. And out of news media. Giving the people a voice doesn't help much if they're easily manipulated by the rich and powerful.
Lenin is not talking about democratic socialism there, but rather the full blown dictatorship of the proletariat, nationalizing all means of production, etc etc kind of socialism. When it comes to democratic socialism, Lenin was not a fan, to put it mildly. He is absolutely scathing of the concept in for example _the State and Revolution_.
We should just treat these so called communism as monarch communism, because every practical communism end up being having a monarch.
This is different from ideal communism or let's just call it fantasy communism. Because the ideal form of communism where everyone is equal and nice never happened and will probably never happen
> In other words, if you tried to "do a communism", you'd either be carpet bombed (or more likely have a fascist coup funded against you) by the US, or you'd be made an offer you can't refuse by the Soviet Union. The inevitable outcome of this was that the only "communist experiments" that were able to grow in that era of history were ones that instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or that were sufficiently non-threatening and irrelevant to both sides (and thus likely never showed up on your radar).
This isn't true, and many communist countries were openly hostile to the USSR. Yugoslavia went it's own way, China split with the USSR and had a war, Albania sided with China against the USSR, the Khmer Rouge were hostile to the USSR, North Korea tried to position themselves between the USSR and China. Even many countries that were aligned with the USSR weren't controlled by them (for example, Vietnam and Laos).
Saying "this isn't true" and then listing a bunch of countries which either explicitly sided with China, were aligned with USSR "but not controlled by them" or that literally have Wikipedia articles called "$Country-Soviet split" is a bit silly. I never said that they were vassal states. I said they instantly aligned with the Soviet Union or had to be irrelevant to both sides. Albania, China and Yugoslavia are "counter-examples" only in that they were initially aligned with the Soviet Union but then deviated from it.
The Sino-Soviet split pretty much occurred because the Soviet Union itself deviated from Stalinism and Mao didn't like that. China only got away with that because like the USSR it was extremely large and powerful. It literally split off to become a third superpower and its ideology was functionally indistinguishable from the Soviet Union with regard to its ability to achieve the supposed outcome of communism and its insistence on giving all power to the state in the meantime.
Albania initially sided with Mao in order to split from the Soviet Union because much like Mao, Hoxha disagreed with post-Stalinist reviosionism in the USSR. Its split with China in turn was the result of China's embrace of liberal market reforms under Deng, i.e. another round of revisionism.
Yugoslavia only survived its break with the Soviet Union because it (like China post-Mao) opened itself up to the US. However Yugoslavia's "communist" origins are directly tied to the Soviet Union, it's still downstream from Marxism-Leninism.
The Khmer Rouge were also downstream of Marxism-Leninism and directly funded by China. Vietnam is probably the most ridiculous example you could have thought of given that the entire Vietnam War was a thing (and Ho Chi Minh Thought is also of course downstream from Marxism-Leninism). Likewise North Korea with the Korea War and it nowadays pretty much only existing at the behest of China (its only serious ally).
I'm not sure what you were going for but if you wanted to disprove "if you tried to 'do a communism' you had to align with the Soviet Union or be bombed by the United States" the only thing you've accomplished is adding the nuance that you had to either align with the Soviet Union or, post Sino-Soviet split, China. The point remains that unless you were somehow compatible with Marxist-Leninism in one of its many forms, you were on your own against the United States and its economic geopolitical interests.
> A state exists to enforce private property claims by the few against the many.
And to defend the state's citizens & territory against outside threats. And to enforce some system of justice against those who break the group's laws & taboos (e.g. murder).
You don't need to do a state to do either of those things.
Arming and teaching every resident how to defend themselves and each other and how to organize a resistance against invaders is entirely sufficient to "defend against outside threats" and requires less firepower than a standing army capable of achieving the same (especially against, say, the United States). Of course having a geography that makes a land invasion difficult is a plus, historically.
You don't need a carceral system or police force to "deal with" internal problems either. It might be worth looking into the concept of Transformative Justice (which is distinct from Restorative Justice). I recall a historical example of a culture in which when a "crime" happened, the community would gather and instead of expressing their grievances and the harm of the criminal's actions, the group would give examples for positive things the accused had done in the past. The idea being that the act must have been an aberration, not a defining trait of their character. It was then the offender's mission to demonstrate they were the better person they had been in the past.
Of course a lot of "crimes" that exist in legal systems only exist because of hierarchical control (e.g. most offenses committed out of jealousy/impotence), desperation in inequality (e.g. most offenses commited for financial benefit) and lack of support structures (e.g. most drug-related offenses). "Murder" doesn't really exist in isolation and it's absurd that we should treat it as such.
I'm literally an anarchist. Calling anyone left of the US Democrats a "tankie" makes you sound like the person annoying helpdesk by continuously referring to anything with a cable on it as "the computer".
Heck, you could have read the first sentence of the Wikipedia article:
> Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to communists who express support for one-party communist regimes that are associated with Marxism–Leninism, whether contemporary or historical.
I also literally gave you examples for "fantasy communism materializing" (of course none of them meet the strawman of "everyone is equal and peaceful" because that's not in any definition of communism outside maybe a PragerU video).
I’m not certain that’s it. The best theory on why communism never caught on in Western Europe is that they were too developed. You need a lot of people that are in agriculture and Western Europe was beyond that.
I presume by "National socialists," you mean the Nazis. They weren't particular advocates of the free market, but they weren't socialist in a meaningful economic sense. The Nazis did consider Communists as enemies. Their argument that Communism was an extension of Jewishness would be farcical if it weren't so tragic.
But for their part, the Communists would have been perfectly happy to make peace with the Fascists. They (correctly) recognized liberal democracy as a common enemy to their authoritarian dictatorships. Stalin didn't ally with western democracies until Hitler's surprise attack.
The only people in the National Socialist German Workers Party who believed in something resembling a form of socialism were those supporting Strasser and he and his ilk were amongst the first killed during the party's purges.
There's even a famous political cartoon of Hitler emphasizing the words Socialist and Workers for one crowd (blue collar) and National and German for the other (aristocrats). A more sophisticated quip might have been "what about National Bolshevists?" (aka "nazbols") but the short answer to that too is that if you try and add some red to your brown, it's still just another brown.
No one spots the 'elephant in the room' in Animal Farm.
The novel is a thinly disguised morality play about aristocracy -- "humans" who own and govern 'their farms' ! -- with various types of humanity depicted as "animals".
The moral of the story is that regardless of the intelligence and abilities of the common man ("pigs"), the natural order of things is for 'Farmers' to own and run the 'Farm' and its 'Animals'.
Pigs joining Farmers actually occurred a couple of centuries earlier in England. It was called a "Corporation".
That's a possible interpretation but a more common understanding is that it's an allegory of recent (at the time) Russian history where the old aristocrats were overthrown to be replaced by communists with lofty ideals, however those ideals quickly fell away and the society went back to something similar to what came before, just with a different set of assholes in charge.
I think if you read more of Orwell's writing besides just Animal Farm, you'd see that he didn't think this was the only possibility. He was a democratic socialist and humanist.
If he was saying it's the natural order of things under monarchy and under communism, that doesn't mean he was claiming it to be the natural order of things under all possible political systems. His political views had a wider scope than just this one short story.
This forward hints at a missing puzzle piece for me, regarding history.
Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin? Was it because it would be by extension criticizing Communism which at the time was a popular idea among intellectuals? Was this the progress being referred to?
>Why did the English intellectuals want to avoid criticizing Stalin
The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
UPD. From Wikipedia:
>Orwell wrote the book between November 1943 and February 1944, when the United Kingdom was in its wartime alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, and the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem, a phenomenon Orwell hated.
There was, at the time, something of a doublethink going on. Whilst publicly friendly, the U.K. was privately discussing scenarios up to and including invading the USSR (Operation Unthinkable).
However, again, it was wartime. And not one of these wars where your professional army fights far from home against an asymmetrically weaker foe. People tend have fairly negative views of dissenters in that circumstance. Look at what happened in America after 9/11.
In many of the recent wars. Afghanistan/Iraq, or even others like Ukraine.
The US 'group think' is to not criticize the 'people' of the country.
The population is separated from the government. Most media is very pro - "The wonderful people of the country whom surely had nothing to do with the evil government we'd like to see defeated". Criticizing the population is not allowed. Even thought they must have had some influence on their government. Hence how it is very much not allowed to criticize Muslims.
Even in Ukraine, it is not allowed to criticize the "Russian People", who surely are with us against their evil government.
I mean, that was the consequence. The trigger was, I think, the greatest American loss of life on home soil since the Civil War. Imagine what America would have been like if Al-Qaeda had bombed all major cities on a daily basis for years, and the US had won with the help of Iran. I think pointing out reservations with the current regime there would be quite unpopular.
It was more than that among the Left. Yes, everybody on all parts of the political spectrum on the Allied side tolerated "Uncle Joe Stalin" during the war, as Germans fighting Soviet troops were Germans not fighting their troops, but this was just "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasoning. But until Khrushchev's leaked 1956 "Secret Speech" in which the crimes of Stalin were denounced, a large part of the Western Left really thought the USSR was a workers' paradise and that complaints about it were just right-wing propaganda spread by exiled Russian aristocrats bitter about losing their power and wealth. Trotsky of course had been telling the world about Stalin (until he got murdered in Mexico by one of Stalin's agents), but most people likewise assumed that he was just bitter for losing out in the competition to be Lenin's successor.
Right, people overlook the fact that Stalin was popular among many on the left (Che Guevara gave him a lot of praise).
Trotsky, for his part (as well as Lenin) was authoritarian himself. But all of the revolutionaries, including Stalin, were true believers in Communism, and acted accordingly. Orwell likes to present things as a few bad actors that just happened to betray the revolution, which suits his purpose, but that isn't an accurate portrayal.
Both the essay and Orwell's preface address this question directly. They say it wasn't wartime loyalty because the same people were perfectly willing to criticize their own government much more harshly than they'd criticize the USSR, and their love for the Soviets predated WW2 anyway.
A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents, to the extent that in the UK some of the people responsible for catching Soviet spies were themselves Soviet spies. The issue was the intelligence agencies recruited exclusively from Oxbridge. The actual working classes in Britain had no time for the USSR, but graduates did.
This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas. You can just search journal articles for mention of him to find them:
This article continues the conceptual work of developing a process-oriented perspective on belonging by taking up the active engagement of affiliation (and disaffiliation) as an undertheorised yet necessary aspect of accomplishing belonging. In developing the concept we draw on Marx’s notion of work as material activity in forms of life and the sociological concepts of face-work and emotion work.
> A blindness towards the realities of the USSR was common amongst the highly educated at that time. There's a reason the west had such huge problems with westerners becoming Soviet double agents
It was even worse than that. Both the British governments under Chamberlain and Churchill and the US government under FDR sympathized with the USSR. There were continuous sub rosa contacts going on (for example, FDR regularly sent emissaries like Harry Hopkins over to Moscow to confer with Stalin) that were, while not publicly known, officially sanctioned. This was why the USSR was able to end up in control of all of Eastern Europe after WWII--which to any objective observer meant that WWII failed to achieve its primary goal in Europe, which was to liberate Eastern Europe from tyranny. But nobody made any such criticism at the time; the USSR was praised as an ally even while they were shipping millions of Germans and Eastern Europeans to labor camps.
Hm was that the primary goal? I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA. Liberating France and other parts of western Europe was just a requirement of getting to Berlin.
Yes. The reason Britain and France declared war on Germany was that Germany invaded Poland and Britain and France had treaty commitments to defend Poland. (They also had treaty commitments to defend other Eastern European countries, which they decided not to honor when Germany invaded those countries before it invaded Poland, but that was because their governments erroneously believed that Hitler would stop invading countries if they appeased him.)
> I thought the primary goal (of the Allies) was to defeat the Axis powers because they were directly attacking the UK and USA.
Germany never directly attacked the US. (Japan did later on, but that was on their own initiative; they never discussed any overall war plans with Germany.) And when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Germany had not attacked Britain or France either. As I said above, they declared war when Germany invaded Poland.
Fair points! I did say Axis powers (to include Japan).
I think though, that the average Brit did not care so much about Poland. It was clear by that point that Hitler intended to take all of Europe and the exact event that triggered it was maybe not so important. After all it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next.
> the average Brit did not care so much about Poland
After the Nazis invaded France, I expect that's true, yes. But before that the only reason for Britain to be fighting was over Poland.
> it's not like France was wrong to declare war - it was obvious that they were going to be next
No, it wasn't at all obvious. Hitler's stated purpose, going as far back as Mein Kampf, was that Germany should expand to the east. His decision to move west instead was rather sudden and surprised a lot of his own advisors. And didn't happen until eight months after Britain and France declared war (the intervening period was called the "Phoney War" even at the time).
> This is still a problem! There are still a lot of academics publishing today who take Marx completely seriously and attempt to build on his ideas.
I don't think dismissing (all of) Marx because of Stalin makes much more sense than dismissing the idea of democracy because of the size of the US prison population or it's history of war crimes?
Perhaps if democracy was an American invention your comparison could hold some water, it doesn't really make any sense otherwise. Democracy's practiced by the majority of nations worldwide, I don't see what the prison population of a single nation has to do with that.
The reason myself and others are so dismissive of Marx's ideas is because time and time again, any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation. Every. Single. Time.
Many of us have grown weary of tankie types trying to shoehorn pro-Marxist viewpoints into these conversations and are pretty quick to identify the dog whistles ("But, but, America!") when we hear them.
They invented a democracy. Their democracy is of their own design, based on the historical work of philosophers. The constitution is not a plagiarized document stolen from the greeks. Marx was decades dead when 1917 happened.
Your point falls flat on its face.
> any time those ideas have been forcibly implemented amongst a population, the result is bloodshed and subjugation
You are one of today's lucky 10,000. Allow me to inform you of the genocide of native Americans, manifest destiny, the slavery of Africans, the toppling of the kingdom of Hawaii, the contras, operation condor, US Imperialism, etc..
Text book example of special pleading.
> But, but, America!
IDK, maybe you shouldn't make such weak fallacious arguments that don't pass even the lightest of scrutiny?
People living in glass Native American burial grounds shouldn't throw stones?
Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
> Maybe these """tankies""" are tired of all these first world dronies or diet white supremacists (IDK what you're suppose to be) spewing colonizer propaganda everywhere?
I don't think the notion of fair and equal representation is colonizer propaganda, but based off your previous comments, you're far enough down the rabbit-hole that it's not worth trying to lift you out. I'm not a "diet white supremacist" whatever that is, just someone whose family was murdered in the Holodomor and as a result has done a lot of reading on the USSR and its atrocities.
Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
> Be well, I hope someday you can put this hate behind you.
What's hateful about wanting to expand the benefits of democracy to the working class?
Multiple worse real genocides have happened to my people than your historically cyclical-until-1947 famine that's only talked about for the sole purpose of excluding the working class from a better form of democracy.
You yourself point out the real issue but instead focusing on the vague point of "Marx ideas".
Which is that the "revolution was ultimately forced down people's throat whenever they liked it or not.
And due to your vaguely defining "Marxs ideas" thar would then include the Nordic model or any state intervention/run enterprise if we were to stretch it.
And talkies in the modern age is defined as similar to those of the alt right where they either overtly or covertly support every aspect of the Ussr and in particular Stalin shamelessly.
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution."
If the man himself agrees that his ideas can only be implemented through a "forcible overthrow", isn't it safe to say that those who follow his teachings today are either purposely ignoring a big part of his message, or are merely biding their time for the next revolution?
It all reads the same to me. In the same way I consider every Nazi a Nazi, I consider every Marxist a Marxist.
Your quote without context does indeed proclaim "forcible overthrow"... of all existing social conditions.
If you read it with context in mind it becomes clear that the notion or idea of the revolution is multifaceted as the communist manifesto refers to different means as to how the revolution is spreading (france, germany and Switzerland) and said quote is meant to represent the unrelenting resolution to not conceded to the "bourgeoisie" terms of the social condition upon the working class/proletarian, hence forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions that primarily the working class had to suffer through.
Out of all the things you could pick to critic the communist manifesto this has to be the weakest one, you could bring up the flimsy and quite frankly speaking terrible argument for the abolishing of private property.
Or the assumption that capital is only defined by materialistic definitions.
And now you change your point.
Yes all Marxists are Marxists, tankies are not Marxists however, which is what you originally said.
But the core of Marx ideas are an analysis of value, labor, production and surplus. They have been very useful for analysing the global recessions and over-production crisis, the concentration of wealth and lowered wages that we see today vis-a-vis the 70s.
They're not some loonie ideas about the size of skulls or a master race.
They are, however, deeply flawed. The labor theory of value is the core Marxist economic principle, and it is incorrect. Marx also doesn’t deal with the knowledge problem, and he doesn’t adequately address the value of laborless resource. If we move on from there, his summation of the trend of history is also incorrect. Societies have not tended toward Communism but instead toward Fascism (corporate and governmental merger coupled with totalitarianism) at the level of countries, and toward a neo-feudal order globally.
Of course Marx is wrong, he's a scientist. The work is never "done". And everyone is ofcourse free to critique the theories - but I find it rather extreme to view his theories as deranged garbage on the level of eugenics or social darwinism.
This is absurd. Nobody would ever say “But the core of Nazi ideas are an analysis of genetics” as though that excused anything. The fruits of both ideologies were hellish disasters, and the oppressed/oppressor dichotomy of Marxist thought is every bit as poisonous as the aryan/non-aryan dichotomy of Nazism.
Marxism can easily be adapted to support any group's resentful revenge fantasies so it's seen with much better eyes than a German man's resentful revenge fantasies.
Please don't post like this here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Do you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131782? I haven't read it closely (I rarely read anything closely - moderation works on floats, not doubles) but that comment does not seem to me on the wrong side of the guidelines. If you had posted something half as substantive and thoughtful as that user, it would have been fine.
On the other hand, I agree with you in the sense that we don't really need a lot of "Marx was so wrong" comments on HN.
> The book was published in 1945, perhaps it was to do with the fact that USSR was an ally at the time?
I think it started before the war. Orwell wrote in 1938 that "today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism',"
Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2. So the answer to your question is in the social milieu of the 1920s-30s. Someone else will have to try a detailed explanation.
> Admiration for the USSR among English intellectuals predates WW2.
While this may be so — although I am sure there were enough intellectuals in both camps — it cannot explain the atmosphere that Orwell is describing:
> At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable.
What is this prevailing orthodoxy? How has it been reached and maintained? What happens to dissenters? What enforces the unprintability of the criticism? To achieve such a level of control, full government and media support is necessary.
It's worth bearing in mind that the West was pretty awful too with a vast quantity of appalling crimes that our rose-tinted spectacles might like to forget because the victims were "non-people". It was Imperial Britain with it's colonies, the US with it's viciously racist segregation, Leopold II of Belgium chopping of limbs in the Congo. Not cool.
It's not difficult to see that the early Soviet Union was actually better on a number of dimensions over both the Tsars and the West on basic equality and humanity when comparing against the life of an Indian or an African American. It had decriminalized homosexuality and was arguably less anti-Semitic than the West. The trajectory was utopian... but it nosedived into Stalinism which was, well..., a nightmare.
Ehhh...it's not like Lenin was much better. As soon as he was in power, he pretty rapidly got to "actually we should do some purges".
The history of Russia is one of an endless parade of terrible leadership which invariably decides that a quick round of death squads will solve all the problems.
Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism if people were starving in the streets, whereas ultimately the USSR liked to pretend they fixed that while just doing it to the Ukrainians, Polish and other Baltic states.
No. Claiming this underplays how appalling Stalin was. Lenin purging Mensheviks AFAIK, meant losing party membership and maybe emigrating to continue your political project, whereas Stalin's Great Purge killed a million people. This isn't a defence of Lenin, it's just that Stalin was on a different level entirely.
> Their biggest effect was external: most welfare systems were started in the West in response to the observation that it was a bad look for capitalism
This is kind of the basis of small-government advocacy. Whatever good the current person may do with said power, it is unlikely that the next person will be so benevolent.
Forced labour camps and secret police organisations were pretty ubiquitous. The Tsars had The Okhrana, forced labour camps and political repression (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin had all been exiled to Siberia). The Checka and Gulag were the Bolshevik versions of the same thing. Russia had the White Terror... and then the Red Terror. It all fucking sucks but the point remains, Stalin took things to new levels of psychopathic insanity where we start hitting 10s of millions of excess deaths.
If you don't like Gulags, then bear in mind they were created at roughly the same time the US setup forced labour camps in Haiti that led to 1000s of deaths and extra-judicial killings. Not something Americans talk about much. Should Woodrow Wilson be compared to Stalin too?
Yeah, fair point. Not to cast off the notion of personal responsibility for actions, but IMO monstrous individuals are a when, not an if, when the preconditions exist like that.
I don't know why I keep hoping mgmt will see that one day and decide not to have pretty bad things now that some later nutjob can turn into really especially bad things. It's not much of an up-side that the people who built the tools are often consumed by them.
There had been by that point a long-standing admiration among the British (and American) intelligentsia for Stalin, the USSR, and in general Soviet Communism; this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country and the aforementioned unprintability of any real criticism of it.
The best source for getting the picture of this is Malcolm Muggeridge's book Chronicles of Wasted Time; he was a reporter tasked with going to the USSR and telling the Brits about what it was like there, years before WWII. Having believed, like his friends, that it was paradise on earth, it was a shock to discover how terrible it was, and even more of a shock to see his honest reporting junked and to be told to make it out to be more of a paradise on earth.
> this coupled with a complete denial of the real state of the country
A mix of denial and ignorance, really - the atrocities were not known as clearly as they are today.
It’s easy to forget just how closed off the USSR was under Stalin. Respected western journalists were fully complicit in the denial of the Holodomor, and Stalin’s purges were not well publicised. The few people who escaped the USSR and tried to spread the word of Stalin’s atrocities were easy to dismiss as either angry capitalists, or as socialists who were just upset that they didn’t win the power struggle themselves (eg Trotsky).
It was only in the 50s under Khrushchev that what were previously rumours were confirmed as facts. The revelations devastated western communism - the Communist Party of the United States lost 30,000 members in the weeks after Khrushchev's secret speech was published in 1956. A year later it had 10,000 members, 1,500 of which were FBI informants.
Lots of them were admirers of USSR and Stalin himself. Sartre, one of the most admired intellectuals of the time, was openly a fan until the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956. Lots of people, and lots of intelectuals, firmly believed that the USSR was building an utopia.
The advantage for Orwell was that he went to Spain to fight for the left, but as a Trotskist, and he and his friend were violently prosecuted, some killed, by the comunist party. You can read about it in his book "Homage to Catalonia".
> Sartre, one of the most admired intellectuals of the time
Still pretty popular in philosophy classes when I was in college (class of 2009). Big fan of Castro too, our coursework included at least one picture of him checking out a Cuban collective farm.
Orwell wasn't a trotskyist, but democratic socialist. He probably leaned libertarian in his socialism, cause he admitted that he should join anarchist side and not POUM, which was some coalition of trotskyist and libertarian Marxists.
Read his treatise about the need for revolution in England ("The Lion and the Unicorn"), and it's clear he was firmly statist, not libertarian, but you're right he was certainly a democratic socialist.
Sure, but there are statists who dismiss libertarian leftism outright and there are ones who travel to fight for libertarian leftist project. Orwell was the second type clearly judging by his actions.
Absolutely agree with that. I think Orwell overall was sympathetic to any anti-authoritarian socialists, even though his own thinking was still caught up in the need for a state. E.g. what he argued for in Lion and the Unicorn [1] is more early (pre-Paris Commune) Marx, with his emphasis on nationalisation [2].
I've always found it curious that given both what he experienced in Catalonia, and his firm rejection of Stalinism in particular, but really the Bolsheviks as a whole, that he did not move further towards the libertarian socialist side out of fear of the power of the state. Instead he seems to think that the problem brought by the Bolsheviks was mainly the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", rather than the notion of a more powerful state in general.
As much as I love Orwell's writing, I don't tend to find him a very deep thinker. Animal Farm and 1984 are fantastic at ripping apart the surface problems, but juxtaposed against The Lion and the Unicorn, it feels like he just stopped delving deeper than the persons involved and the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and control of the press, and didn't think more about what e.g. allowed Lenin and Stalin to gain control of the Bolsheviks (e.g. he didn't delve into the split that created the Bolshevik faction itself, nor much into the effects of Lenins "democratic" centralism), as if he thought he had sufficiently solved the problem of what made them possible.
[2] "What is needed is that the ownership of all major industry shall be formally vested in the State, representing the common people. Once that is done it becomes possible to eliminate the class of mere owners who live not by virtue of anything they produce but by the possession of title-deeds and share certificates." -- George Orwell, Lion and the Unicorn, part 3, section II
Consider that he got shot through his throat in his 30's and died at 46 years old, so didn't have that much time to consider other approaches. When he was younger he had an experience as a policeman, which maybe is one of the reasons he was more pro-statist in his thinking that some could guess given his life experience.
In the 1930s you had the Soviets perpetrating genocide in Ukraine and people like Walter Duranty knew this and deliberately, consciously, spun lies to cover it up. These 'fellow travelers' weren't naive; they thought that mass murder was justifiable when ostensibly working towards their goals.
The affection precedes the Second World War. Victor Gollancz, a notable left-wing publisher at the time, wrote this mea culpae in 1939, after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact led to his disillusionment with the Soviet cause.
>Looking back, I think I erred more as a publisher than as a writer or speaker, and more by omission than commission. I accepted manuscripts about Russia, good or not so good, because they were "orthodox"; I rejected others, by bona fide socialists and honest men, because they were not. It was in the matter of the Trials that the inner conflict was greatest. I well remember a Christmas in Paris when I read the thousand-page verbatim report of one of them : it was like living in some urwelt of intellectual terror, where men had lost, or had never had, the pride of free and independent humanity. But every Tycoon in Britain was using that trial to stir up hatred of Russia, because, twenty-three years ago, she had abolished the exploitation of man by money. So I remembered Bolshevo, and the Red Corner in the Soviet ship, and the Prophylacterium, and the singing of the children when we went, in Moscow, to the Palace of Pioneers ; and I published only books that justified the trials, and sent the socialist criticisms of them elsewhere.
>I am glad to remember that, when directly challenged by questioners at public meetings, I always spoke my mind, giving the pros and cons as honestly as I could ; but I did not strive officiously to speak it, preferring to avoid awkward topics when the choice rested with me alone.
>I am as sure as a man can be — I was sure at the time in my heart — that all this was wrong : wrong in the harm it did to people from whom one was keeping some part of the truth as one saw it ; wrong in the harm it did to oneself (which was important, not because it was oneself, but because oneself was part of humanity) ; wrong in the harm it did to Russia, because that country, in which there is so much greatness and still more hope, can only be injured by a sycophancy that treats her as a spoilt child instead of as an adult with errors and crimes as grievous as our own ; and wrong above all in the harm it did to the sum total of truth and honest thinking, by an increase of which we can alone find the way forward.
Orwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.
Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight:
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
Really? I call. There has to at least be a shade even though I think he was incorrect.
Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power.
It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.
I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors.
Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system.
The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
I think you might be getting too caught up in people, rather than interests.
Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
But that's just replacing one system in the consideration for another. An organization isn't a person, much like a government is. While it might have persistence, it's a gestalt of the individuals fulfilling different functions within it.
The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.
The US is not particularly resilient. FDR got 3 terms and would have probably got a 4th, GWB pre-Katrina had enough political capital to abolish the 2-terms limit had he dared to do so... GWB also widely abused his presidential powers, and never faced any consequences. Trump had to resort to violence simply because he was too weak.
FDR did not have to do any maneuvering whatsoever to get his 4 terms - Grant had already run for a 3rd before him, as had Teddy Roosevelt. There was no rule against it an the people wanted him in power, so he stayed in power. Similarly, GWB didn't run for a third term, regardless of what he "could have" done. Neither of your examples are very strong here.
The point is that the US system, by itself, has no really-strong guarantees against tyrannical rule. The overall political culture of US voters is what produced the results they got, not the system by itself.
This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
You can read a lot of the old discussions between the founders Madison, Hamilton, etc. and the type of abuse they were worried about and how they thought the structures they put in place would reduce risk.
There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary.
> “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
My take away is that how societies function is deeply deeply ingrained. Now were going to do things different runs head long in people expectation on whats legitimate. In particular effecting change by wholesale murdering people tends to just make things worse not better.
YouTube video comments, Reddit subs, Twitt…er I mean X. Probably Facebook. Occasionally Hacker News. In my experience mostly ad hoc rather than one big town hall on politics, though those may exist.
"Industrialism" (I lack a better term) is the real bane here. But it's sort of more than that, right?
At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc...
Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.
Quoting: "We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state"
Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said.
Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone)
Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-;
"Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it.
"Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization."
# ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms)
> I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power.
You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible.
When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.
> Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
While Communists sometimes proclaimed that as a utopian future, it is hard to see how it could have come to pass. Firstly because communism would need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus for its ancillary goals like ensuring an end to religion and belief in the supernatural.
Secondly, that political philosophy put so much emphasis on the working masses as the class to support and identify with, that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses. I’m reminded of some Maoist literature I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, the book claimed that what separated Man from the apes was his ability to labor, and if a person did not work hard, he was not a true human being.
Leninist-derived forms of communists argue for a transitional period, but many other forms of socialism and communism argues it needs to come to pass by destroying the state, and Marx himself shifted towards that, e.g. when after the Paris Commune criticised them not for not replacing the state but for not going further in tearing down the old state (a shift that gave the basis for e.g. libertarian Marxism)
That was also the principal criticism against both Marx and later the Bolsheviks from the left: That rather than "need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus", given Marx own criticism of the state as a tool for class oppression you could not hope to reform or take over the state without risking a recreation of the same problems as the state tries to maintain its authority, but need to destroy the state immediately. A criticism that precipitated the anarchists leaving the First International, but also many later splits.
With respect to religion, the notion tend to be that ancillary goals like an end to religion would come simply from removing poverty and providing education, from the thinking that people flock to religion to seek comfort when their lives are hard, and so it's not necessary to do anything about it per se.
> that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses.
The very basis for the rise of socialist thought was the notion that the rise of capitalism made a level of productivity possible where the amount of labour necessary to sustain society would drop.
Marx spends the first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over the productivity increases made possible by capitalism and describes its downfall as coming from crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment - in other words a sharp reduction in the need for labour, but without the social structure to allow the labour and its proceeds to be shared.
So in that sense, maybe still "working masses" but masses no longer limited by a need to maximise hours of work to earn a living.
For me as an anarcho-communist, the problem with religion isn't believing in something supernatural per se, it's the fact that organised religion is just another hierarchical apparatus (like the state) which gives some people power over others. Christian anarchism is quite an influential strain for example, and I'm sure the other major religions probably have groups with similar ideas.
So I don't think ending religion would be a specific goal, not for me anyway. Of course, if someone starts some cult somewhere or starts telling people some god said they should be in charge well then that's a problem, but I think that goes beyond the specifics of religion.
It always comes back to hierarchies in my opinion. Whether it's racism, sexism, organised religion, capitalism, or whatever–the root of the problem is one group of people having power over others.
In such a future, what do you do, then, with people who actually want hierarchies? The most important virtue for a monastic, for example, is obedience, and myriads of people deliberately seek out that lifestyle.
Well as Marx stated, whoever doesn't have the proletariat mentality should be exterminated.
The practical problem (of course apart from the moral for the rest of us who are not Marxists) is, how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
> how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
Communism, and thus the state being left behind, cannot happen until post-scarcity is achieved. Once post-scarcity is realized, why would you care if some still hold that mentality? They are only considered to be a hinderance in the days leading up to post-scarcity becoming a reality and during that time there is still a state.
> Well as Marx stated, whoever doesn't have the proletariat mentality should be exterminated.
Citation? Multiple searches turned up nothing like this for me.
> That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
This presumes "collectivism", but many forms of socialism sees enabling extreme individualism as the goal. E.g libertarianism was founded by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque
"Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction."
What I never understood about communism is what's the point of adding it if you already have post-scarcity? Say you got there, just keep using what got you there. And if to get there you need an oppressive "temporary" state, then I don't want it.
The idea is that if that the capability to be post scarcity does not equal being actually post scarcity, and so bringing about actual post-scarcity means ensuring that what is produced actually gets into the hands of everyone one way or the other. One might imagine many different ways of achieving that, but it wouldn't magically happen.
What are you adding, exactly? Communism is just a thought experiment that imagines what the world will be like when post-scarcity is achieved. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation of the same thought experiment.
Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
I'm an anarchist, but you can read on for example council communism, which too is a libertarian socialism, it's Marxist and it is against Marxism-Leninism.
> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
If you think I missed the sarcasm, look in the mirror.
Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months.
You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
Ha. You’re right.
Sarcasm via text is, indeed, easy to miss (and probably more befitting Reddit than HN.)
I try to avoid snark on this site as it’s greatest value, to me anyway, is precisely it’s absence of same.
Mea culpa.
There is nothing subtle about Animal Farm's critique of Soviet Communism. From Wikipedia:
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
Honestly, English intellectuals are a good yardstick for how history will remember people and events. If the English intellectuals esteem someone or some event, then generally those people and events are widely considered disparaged two generations down.
Since English intellectuals at the time included both Orwell and TS Eliot (and I suppose Tolkien and Chesterton and Aleister Crowley) is it really fair to paint them with such a broad brush?
Animal Farm is a great and easy read, but for something much less metaphorical, Homage to Catalunia is a wonderful (and sad) book about Orwell's experience in the war, where both western powers and stalinists had tried to eliminate the smaller and more idealistic faction he fought alongside.
And Nazis allies against the West. Essentially a 3rd power that tried to win against both. And looking at how they helped Nazis/Germany before the war, they were one of the main actors to kickstart the war.
I noticed my dad had "Animal Farm" and it seemed to be about a pig, so I read it. I took it at face value as a good story about animals running a farm.
Many, many years later I realized it was an allegory about the Soviet Revolution.
Survivorship bias people in their 30s be like "My money stacks have bullet holes, better buy some armor for my money stacks" ignoring the corpses and poverty of their less fortunate peers.
> (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time)
Ha! That's exactly when everyone should care the most about censorship, it's when the stakes are highest for "both" sides. I assume he realized the error in his ways by the time he realized that we've always been at war with...
I don't think he's giving a blanket free pass on censorship during war time, but rather is acknowledging that there are necessarily censored fields of information during war that would otherwise be used to the enemy's strategic advantage. Anti-war protests should not be censored, but a news story specifying the production capacity of one's navy may very well be.
Anyone who takes such an extreme position during a war would be most likely conquered by the enemy. Ideally there should be no wars, but if there are, some compromises are necessary to win them. Besides, in a brutal war like the World Wars censorship is the least of anyone's worries. If your city is being bombed or you are fighting at a trench, controlling sensitive information is far more important.
"But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
I’m finding this surreal: hackernews standing up against censorship? But maybe it’s just the wording, or because it’s Orwell, since “free speech” became a dirty phrase around here a few years ago. As if people forgot that we have the nice things we have today because of all the forbidden things those before us were able to say, as if we can just stop with that rule since the left is the one in charge of public opinion now, as if free speech only applies to us and things we like
HN isn't pro censorship. HN is very much against government censorship.
It gets more confusing when you talk about a company censoring (as opposed to a government). HN gets schizophrenic here. Companies should not be forced to carry content they don't want to carry, but companies shouldn't be able to censor people because of company ideology or politics or whatever. HN is very conflicted on this issue.
But I don't think it's fair to be surprised that HN is not in favor of censorship, even the closed-minded groupthink self-censorship that Orwell was dealing with.
HN literally gave no fucks about the FBI threatening social media companies on a daily basis with a Section 230 repeal and anti-trust action if they didn't censor specific accounts. Zuckerberg called the federal government an existential threat to the company.
The waters get muddy when the government asks companies to censor on its behalf, as we've seen with social media in the past.
Moveover, a couple of years of go, it was a good thing "dangerous" ideas were censored, in the name of the greater good. Certain elections and viruses come to mind.
If you call it censorship, hn is against it. But if you call it free speech, in an act of doublespeak, hn is loudly against that for the last year or so
Historical Context: Animal Farm was published (per Wikipedia) in England on 17 Aug 1945. Nazi Germany had surrendered to the Allies (France, UK, US, USSR, etc.) on 8 May 1945. The great majority of the fighting and dying "needed" to achieve that victory was done by the USSR (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_Wa...).
Back in WWI, the UK had experienced 2X or so the number of deaths that it did in WWII. The UK's leaders were extremely aware of how bad a massive war, with a massive death toll, could be for a country.
Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy.
>"Regardless of Orwell's fuming about freedom of the press, pro-Soviet English intellectual fashions, and such - for the WWII-era British government, not "rocking the boat" with Stalin, when "his" USSR was still critical to winning the war with a less-horrific British body count, would be a "d'oh, obviously" policy."
On the other hand, we shouldn't forget that Stalin's USSR was also critical to starting the war as well.
In the smaller details, yes. But if the USSR of 1939 had been magically replaced with a idyllic nation of unarmed pacifists, Hitler's Germany would just as certainly have started the war.
> It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
It means 'don't do it' but with the passive voice, so as not to imply that the speaker is the one who should defend the instruction.
I think this is a pretty common construction in (especially older) british english. I think it is also the back reference the parent commenter notes, but I don't think it would have been unclear without that reference, especially at the time he wrote it.
I wonder if its mostly expressed in the negative form, because "the done thing" by itself is like an incomplete sentence and an ambiguous phrase. Kind of grammatically squishy in some fascinating way.
I don't think it seems incomplete or ambiguous. To me, it is pretty clear that it is turning the verb form of "done" - that is, not the adjective meaning "finished", but the past tense of the verb "do" as in "fishing is an activity that people have done for a long time" - into an adjective modifying "thing". So a "done thing" is just "a thing that is being done". Using that fishing example again, it shifts from "fishing is a thing that is done by people" to just "fishing is a done thing".
This "adjectivizing" technique is a common way that colloquialisms are created. (Maybe it's a bit weirder in this case because an adjective form of the word already exists, but has a different meaning.)
"Not the done thing" is an idiom meaning something that isn't socially approved or acceptable. It's more frequent in the UK and Australia than in the US or Canada.
Orwell was actually fighting FOR communism. Specifically anarcho-communist Catalonia. What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism, there are libertarian variants of communists too, for example anarcho-communism or council communism. Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question. Was USSR state communist? It was a state. That ideology postulated that it can impose communism top-down, which was always criticised by anarchist thought which operates on horizontalism and not hierarchy. Orwell was a democratic socialist till the end of his life, which a lot of people don't know. He was not a liberal or social democrat.
1. At the time, Orwell was a socialist, not a communist, and perhaps even more importantly, he was fighting against fascism, rather than for communism. You really should distinguish your 2nd and 3rd Internationals.
2. The USSR was definitely founded by Bolsheviks, the leaders of the 3rd "Communist" International. They even went so far as to put the word "communist" in the party's name, and kill dissidents.
3. Anarchism leads to a lawless society in which the strongest will rule. It leads to Dark Ages, as it has done before. It may be moneyless, but it will have very clear class and ownership concepts.
4. "It wasn't true communism". Just like China, North-Korea, the GDR, etc. Sure. If it wasn't true communism, you can draw the historical dialectic conclusion that we cannot reach true communism.
> 3. Anarchism leads to a lawless society in which the strongest will rule. It leads to Dark Ages, as it has done before. It may be moneyless, but it will have very clear class and ownership concepts.
Why? Because of one sentence quote from a book published in 1651? Or maybe you have no idea what you are talking about?
You'll have an easier time if you explain what anarchism is instead. Eg, "anarchism doesn't seek to abolish all power structures, it seeks to replace hierarchical power structures with horizontal ones; to narrow their scope of responsibility; and to form systems of accountability to ensure the power structures serve the purpose intended, rather than their own interests. The problem of power structures expanding to consume all of society is a result of the tendency of power structures to serve their own ends and expand their scope of responsibility (analogous to the classic quip about how every application will eventually send email)."
Discussions of political theory in a general audience, where you can't assume everyone is on the same page about what terminology means (and the term anarchism most especially), usually go better if you explain what you mean in long form rather than using the jargon term.
If you tell someone you're an anarchist and don't elaborate on what you mean, they're gunnuh think of Gavrilo Princip.
If nobody feels like organizing social power structures I’d probably just go ahead and do it myself. What are you gonna do when there’s ten of us and one of you?
Generally anarchists accept power structures are inevitable and want different power structures, organized on the basis of mutual cooperation and collective decision making rather than a hierarchical system where a small number of people (usually the people furthest from the "facts on the ground") deliberate and decide. More like direct democracy than a power vacuum.
Individual anarchist would disagree with quite a lot of of this, which is why I don't define Anarchism, for me it's about fighting against relations of domination and subordination. This school is very broad.
Certainly. If you have ideas about how to oppose systems of domination and subordination without creating systems to replace them, I'm always interested to hear about it.
I'm confused why you don't want to define it. You seem passionate about advocating for it. If you won't define it, how can you respond to a challenge like in the GGP comment? Why should anyone be convinced by your argumentation if you won't tell them what you're arguing for?
Keep in mind, you don't have to provide a complete definition, only a definition for what you mean by it and what you are advocating for. You can make it clear that others might disagree.
I would say my approach is fairly economical, if GGP doesn't want to justify their opinion on anarchism being the rule of the strongest with private property then I just wasted my time. I wouldn't be surprised if he considered anarchism as only anti-statist ideology, if he wrote that then indeed I would probably write something more about ideas that usually correspond to this ideology. On one hand I try to engage him, on the other indeed I do that confrontationally. I think this has advantages to writing a monologue abut what Anarchism means, or at least what it means to me.
I guess I just don't understand what your goal are and what you're trying to economize. If you don't want people to think it's merely antistatism, snapping at them will seem, in their minds, to confirm their preconceptions.
I certainly am not suggesting you write a monologue, but snapping at them isn't a dialogue either.
I cared for my community so you have 100 people against you. Even if you were in a SWAT police uniform because of internet trolls, while in current system I would be probably get legally murdered by such entity.
Ok. I'm current society you call police, in next 10 minutes you get to murdered. In an hour or 2 police comes and of your murderers were bad then they left evidence that makes them go to prison financed from other people taxes. You are dead.
It sucks that someone got murderer by police arresting the culprit and putting them into a publicly funded prison seems largely ideal plus or minus your view of the death penalty?
It tries to destroy incentives for these behaviors before they happen. You have to address that on case-by-case basis. A lot of acts we consider harmful stem from bad material situation, which is an inherent part of this system. System needs people in very bad situation to be willing to do the worst jobs. And anarchists overall think that you should put more action towards HELPING a person that got harmed than only punishing a persecutor of harmful act.
This is more or less the goal of every system of governance aside from strongman rule. You’ve proposed the common desireable end state with no explanation of how to get there, and then acted as if your solution is credible as a path to get there.
Governance is hard. And has problems. That doesn’t mean the opposite of governance is the answer.
As the slogan goes, "no government doesn't mean no governance." Anarchism is about a different way of doing governance where decisions are, as much as possible, made by the people directly effected by them, as close to the problem as possible. Anarchists are generally not opposed to governance, they're opposed to the particular form of governance represented by the state.
> Communism is stateless, classless and moneyless society so you can ask yourself a question.
Communism is a specific historic movement. As Nietzsche famously said, “all ideas, in which a whole process is promiscuously comprehended, elude definition; it is only that which has no history, which can be defined.” It also rhymes nicely with what Marx said, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”
> What you call Communism is actually ideology called Marxism-Leninism
Well, why what you call it is how it’s actually called and what someone else calls it is wrong? Language is arbitrary. I think it is a purely political question. Just like deciding whether to define racism as racial prejudice or as racial prejudice with power. It’s all about rhetoric, not about what’s something “actually called”.
Ok, so can you call it how I want from now, ok? Why am I supposed to submit to your newspeak that is just to attack all leftist as authoritarians and to ommit anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements? Imprecise vocabulary is great tool for authoritarian, that's why I write about these other meanings and ideologies.
> Why am I supposed to submit to your newspeak that is just to attack all leftist as authoritarians and to ommit anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist movements?
Well, it is simply a fact that in public discourse both left and right mainly associate communism with Marx and Lenin because of the early influence of Marx on communist movements and of later Bolshevization of the Comintern in 1920s. I don’t see what is newspeak-y about it, it is a natural linguistic and cultural development.
> Imprecise vocabulary is great tool for authoritarian, that's why I write about these other meanings and ideologies.
Yeah, that’s why I always look at “anarchists” with suspicion. They seem to consistently support measures that empower the government.
But that kind of state Marxism happened in other countries as well. The state Marxists might ask the anarchists how they expect to accomplish a sateless, classless, moneyless society. The state Marxists didn't succeed, but it does still pose a question toward anarchists. How do you get rid of the state? To that I'd add, what makes you think people want a classless, moneyless society?
Or another question would be, how do you have a revolution to overthrow the state and not just replace it with another state setup by whoever ends up leading the revolution?
You can read about Zapatistas, who ideologically are the closest to anarchist territory in practice. They have quite a bit higher standard of living then the rest of Chiapas, so it seems the experiment is successful.
A lot of people don't like liberalism anymore and because they think the only alternative on the left was Marxist-Leninism they slowly go in the direction of fascism. Anarchism is another direction.
Anarchist revolution wouldn't have leaders and it in theory wouldn't have to be violent - anarcho-syndycalists postulate that a general strike would be enough. Probably some violence would happen, especially from the state or fascist paramilitary groups but who knows.
Anarchist main strategy is prefiguration, so create spaces that are anarchist in nature and grow them from there, show as many people they don't need a state or private property or if you are a communist a money too.
When it comes to discussing anarchism I think a principle of physics - horror vacui - neatly translates to sociology. When there are no greater powers, there is every incentive to collaborate to create ones, so soon there will be greater powers, ruling the relatively powerless ones again.
I just cannot see how they could be successful in preventing power accumulation in the long run. Unless the thesis is that all (as in "each and every") humans by themselves want to prevent power accumulation, so nobody even tries. To me that does not sound very realistic.
It's enough for significant majority to strive for that type of society to stabilize this type of structure. Sure, some people don't like anarchist framework, that's why anarchists are propagating their way of thinking. Consider that we are from the beginning of our life indoctrinated into authoritarian structures like nation state, school, workplace and a lot of people go through the motion because they don't think alternative is possible. Probably not unsignificant fraction of slaves too thought that that's how it is. We know that slave owners were justifying slavery as natural, same as a lot of people justify liberalism as such. I would say anarchists want to create a world for anarchists and want to spread anarchists thought, because they think that there is actually nontrival part of humanity that would be to some extend interested in these ideas. Anarchism was very significant movement in the beginnings of XX century before it lost to Marxism-Leninism and these people were interested in these types of organization that prevent power accumulation. Marxism-Leninism damaged every anti-capitalist tendency in the west unfortunately in minds of big part of population, but I think it's still workable to spread the idea, especially considering that anarchists were repressed everywhere where Marxists-Leninists got to power.
There is a strong assumption here that those striving for an anarchist society will be able to subdue local collaborations of a different persuasion. This majority would need to be very well armed and at all times willing to risk their life to defend the non-order. This seems unlikely.
Also, this does not explain how that significant majority is supposed to come into existence. Some sympathy for those ideas in intellectual circles more than 100 years ago are not exactly a good indicator for current trends.
For me it's clear, that if these ideas don't grow in popularity then such a society will not come to existence. Then this movement is mostly a counter to various authoritarian tendencies and it functions mostly in small scale experiments and in fight against oppression inside other structures.
There has never been an anarchist "experiment" capable of sufficient coordination to produce modern (for its time) medicine, or the agricultural technology needed to feed current populations, or housing and infrastructure fitting of modern standards, and so on for many other goods and services we consider necessary to life today. Anarchism has almost sort of worked for a handful of small-scale, already-impovershed revolutionary/resistance groups, who can rely heavily on pre-existing infrastructure and some trade with capitalist or state communist industries, but there is little evidence to suggest it would be able to work on a meaningful scale. It also has a tendency (such as in Spain) to be co-opted by wannabe dictators anyway who simply establish oppresive state communist regimes regardless.
Soviet-style command economies are already notorious for being unable to match capitalist economies in terms of efficiency, due to the simple fact that it's far easier to use natural pricing (maybe with some interventionism) to reach equilibrium than equations and top-down production quotas. You can make an argument this could change with help from modern data science and machine learning but that's beside the point. With anarchism, you are taking all of the issues of soviet-style economies and making them even worse in that now each individual commune is responsible for coordinating with every other one it relies on. Even if you don't prevent natural currency systems from developing you still lose massive amounts of efficiency and still end up with inequality (due to resource, skill, etc. distributions being inherently different), though this time maybe you get lucky and the ienquality is between communes as opposed to being within them, between classes.
Also, there are practically no cases of lasting nonviolent anarchist revolutions. The haves tend to really not like giving up belongings and lifestyles to the have-nots when forced to. That's obviously not an argument against anarchism, though.
You make interesting assumption that centralization is more efficient then decentralisation but if that was the case then soviet style economy should be more efficient than capitalist market. In capitalism you effectively have a bunch of corporations with internal command economy that trade with each other. In Anarchism hypothetical companies are much smaller so you don't have in efficiencies stemming from these long chains of command with a lot of beaurocracy. Anarchism didn't have opportunity to create bigger project because the tendency is violently repressed by rulers of the current world. It actually eliminates the lot of losses of efficency of current society like economic rents which are proved to be negative to economy, just currently capitalism has relatively extremely strong violence potential and great propaganda machine. This obviously makes Anarchism a very hard and ambitious project but to me its clear that it would be more efficient in creating societies with higher standard of living than what we have currently.
Please consider that it can both have markets and currencies AND decentralised planning depending on what is better in specific situation.
If they practice anarchism, it is of a kind where everyone must work and they do seem to have clear power structures as far as I understand.
So they sound more socialist than anarchist to me with authoritian tendencies in reality. But it is hard to tell, as they are very closed up and not very open to outsiders. But for context, they do fight for survival in a hostile environment and that probably does not help with nice and clean solutions. Still, there seems to me a big discrepancy between their writings and their actions, so I would be careful with choosing them as a role model. But their slogan I very much like "The world we want is one where many worlds fit".
And it has been a while that I tried to find out more about them, but I mainly found it hard to get neutral sources at all. They are very closed up and you cannot just visit them. Or in some ways you can, but you won't get to see the inside structures. How they actually make decisions. At least that's what the people I read reported.
(But there is a study I just stumbled on, I will read later, maybe there is sonething more concrete inside:
They strive to reach consensus, if they cannot find it they make decisions through majority and they are federation composed of popular assemblies of around 300 families each.
Zapatistas are indigenous Americans whose culture was almost completely destroyed, but calling them tribalist is unfair I would say, given that e.g they promote sexual equality.
What has tribalism got to do with sexual equality?
Tribalism is a vague term, that describes societies that live in tribe like structures. Modern or ancient. But does not say much about how that tribe is structured.
Also about consensus: I think allmost all states and societies claim they try to find a consensus.
According to Wikipedia: "With a negative connotation and in a political context, tribalism can also mean discriminatory behavior or attitudes towards out-groups, based on in-group loyalty." I would describe their organization as federation of general assemblies, not tribalism.
Well, I did not use tribalism with a negative connotation.
And as far as I understand, their "assemblies" are pretty much reserved to members of their ethnicity/tribe. Thats why it is more tribalist to me, than anarchist, which is usually rather internationalist.
They seem to have closed borders which is not typically considered anarchists indeed. About assemblies - that's fine, anarchists postulate freedom of association so you don't have to let random people from outside inside your structures, still they seem to be some inspiration to the rest of residents of Chiapas and in practice there is nothing that could stop them from fighting for their self-determination too.
The core problem is how to have redistributive system, from each according to their ability, to each according to their need, without a dictatorship. Someone has to determine what the needs are and do the redistributing.
In the western world we already have many forms of wealth redistribution. Why wouldn't normal democratic government suffice for communism under right circumstances? You might as well say that the core problem of capitalist west is how to collect taxes without dictatorship. The people choose the government and give it the power to implement policies. Of course implementing communism wouldn't be easy if big part of society was absolutely against it (as civil wars have shown), but if enough people wanted communism and voted democratic communists into power, I can imagine democratic communism happening. If it would succeed in the long term is another question.
It's good to remember that in Russia (and most? other countries that were/are communist) there was never any real democracy. Not before communism, not under communism, and not now. I think the outcome could be different (less authoritarian) if communists were chosen by people who actually lived under democracy before.
Oh absolutely, of course that's the point and it's why Orwell was a democratic socialist. In democratic mixed economies we have some redistribution, and some private property, and some state capitalism all mixed together. In truth all 'western' economies are mixed, not even the USA is anywhere even close to being purely capitalist; not even the most socially minded European economies are anywhere even close to being purely socialist.
USA was financing coups and assassinating anti capitalists in Latin Americans even when they were elected, so just choosing them doesn't work. Capitalist power structure is fine with using violence to keep its hegemony even against Liberal rules.
That can work at a local level, I have a friend who was born into a Kibbutz, but what happens at the national level? Most Kibbutzim are agricultural, but there are some that operate capital intensive high tech manufacturing, including one that makes advanced military products, with huge revenue relative to the number of members. Somebody needs to allocate and manage strategic resources for big projects, and have the power to make it stick.
The problem with communism has always been accountability. This is why in the 1860s Bakunin was arguing that Marxist regimes would be one-party dictatorships unrepresentative of the actual proletariat, and that it would lead to the worst tyranny the world had ever known. He was saying this before Lenin was even born. Marx eventually kicked him out of the International for it. IMHO it's one of the most stunningly prescient political predictions of all time.
Zapatistas falsified your statement, Rojava is too argument against scaling issues. We can arbitrary move scales from these hundreds thousands or a few million for Zapatistas and Rojava, but I would argue that if these structures work on that scale then they should on scale of tens of million too. The trick is to add some federational or confederational structure where locals can easily undelegate chosen delegates. Currently in federational states its usually impossible or very hard to undelegate representatives and so they do what they want for a few years.
The Zapatista movement is almost entirely rural. What capital intensive industry have they built and run? In fact they are adamantly opposed to big infrastructure projects in their region. That's remarkably prescient because they would erode economic equality.
Of course communitarianism can absolutely work at the community level, I discussed that above, the problem always comes when you try to scale that up to more 'lumpy' and specialised economic activities. As soon as some economic and social activities have dramatically more economic and social consequence, or are dramatically more resource intensive than others, the problems start setting in.
The Marxist view is that communism can only work in industrial settings because Marx viewed it as about the control of capital. The actual evidence in reality is that it only works in culturally and economically homogenous societies, which mostly means rural ones.
I would say with both Rojava and Zapatistas we see very oppressed minorities who were fighting for self determination, I think that's one of of the reasons they are more interested in these horizontal structures. Revolutionary Catalonia was somewhat similar in their identity being questioned by Spanish conservatives. People in urban areas usually consider themselves privileged compared to inhabitants of rural areas so they are less interested in these modes of social organisation, even if they are usually still oppressed by capitalist mode of production as workers.
Dang, I really admire Orwell, he was such an excellent writer.
I liked this line the best:
>But at least let us have no more nonsense about defending liberty against Fascism. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The author of the article's commentary says it all:
>Many of us might also find key points of comparison between his situation and the shrill calls for censorship that we hear so often today.
Are we confident that this preface was actually written by Orwell? Is there testimony from that time that he had written such a preface?
Because it seems to me that the propagandistic exploitative value of 'finding' and publishing a preface supposedly from Orwell would be very high and that this preface could well be a fraud.
readers of this article should know that it was published by a website funded and operated by a conservative think tank called the discovery institute that promotes "intelligent design" (ie., that evolution is a myth and that humans were made as-is by god) and gave the world chris ruffo, the man leading the charge to ban books in public schools and libraries nationally.
It is easy to believe in the context of the world war, as the preface even mentions "our ally". You could criticise Stalin safely before Hitler attacked him but once the Red Army was fighting a bloody battle against the Nazis, it was not the same.
And the actual text comes from "orwell.ru". Not, apparently, censored there.
As for avoiding British criticism of Stalin during WWII, we have Churchill's remark:
"If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."
> What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. (This is true regardless of which ideology you favor, btw)
An important takeaway is to consider what's considered forbidden to discuss in supposedly enlightened 2023. The sad fact is that there are many more such topics now than in 1945 - but for the same reasons. These are topics which threaten a certain politically driven contingent, and this is enforced by the loyal minions of that contingent, including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged.
> including many so lacking in introspection that they accept as axioms, false and destructive ideas which should be honestly challenged
Despite the existence of people like this, it's generally not a good stance to consider those who disagree with you as lacking introspection. It's just a crutch to further validate your beliefs without any effort.
How much more developed would your thoughts be if you pretend that every opinion you encounter was thought through, and included as much life experiences and research as your own opinions do?
It is also naive to assume that everyone has good reasons to believe what they believe, when we live in the world where astrology is popular, and people believe things because they "feel deep inside that it's true!".
I agree with you, here's an expanded version of the buckets I think exist:
1. I'm genuine but I haven't thought this through
2. I'm genuine and I have thought this through (regardless if I'm right or wrong)
3. I'm adversarial and weaponise my opinion in order to advance some other agenda or push the overton window
My proposition is that if you assume everyone is in bucket 1, you never rethink your opinions and just think "poorly" of others which doesn't allow you to advance your thinking as fast as if you classify them as bucket 2. For people in bucket 3, you just have to trust that you'll spot a bad actor from their actions and inconsistent rhetoric over time so that you're not fooled over the long run. But similarly to people that choose to never find love for fear of having their heart broken, I wouldn't want to assume everyone is in bucket 3 because that's a shitty life to live.
I suppose parent is mainly thinking of issues grouped under the term "culture wars". Another, more urgent issue, is indicated by this quote in TFA:
And throughout five years of war, during two or three of which we were fighting for national survival, countless books, pamphlets and articles advocating a compromise peace have been published without interference. More, they have been published without exciting much disapproval. So long as the prestige of the USSR is not involved, the principle of free speech has been reasonably well upheld.
What current topics and ideas do you fear will be harmful to society in the long run then? What will the consequences be to individuals, communities, etc?
This is HN, we can discuss all sorts of deep insights. For that discussion to be able to take place please give examples and explain what you see based on your unique experiences.
That way you can win people over and slowly transform views of people, communities etc.
I don’t believe any ideas are harmful to “society” [1], but there are many that are “harmful” to the current paradigm of power.
Some that come to mind:
1) The illusion of authority. The idea that some people have the moral right to do violence to enforce arbitrary rules written on paper.
2) The root cause of suffering, which is a lack of true knowledge of self and the nature of reality.
3) The fiat money system, or the idea of money at all.
4) The inherent ability (and maybe desire) to do harm and commit violence to existing in every being.
5) The idea of self ownership, when it comes to choices such as what we consume, whether it be food, “drugs”, or media.
6) Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”.
7) Objective morality and natural law.
I could go on. All of these stem from a lack of knowledge of the self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality.
Of course these can be discussed in small groups, but widespread discussion of these, by “public figures” or “the media” is all but completely lacking.
Edit: I forgot to add a "citation" to my post.
[1]: I always wonder what people mean when they say society. Do they mean the current structure and way of doing things? Do they mean all people?
How do you define a conspiracy theory? If you break about the words, it simply means a theory about a group of people working together towards a common goal.
People who do engage with some wilder ideas do in fact take some actions that are harmful. It’s not the ideas that are harmful, but the actions taken without more complete knowledge that is.
A conspiracy theory involves a secret group, and in the usual context it's trying to affect a lot of people.
> People who do engage with some wilder ideas do in fact take some actions that are harmful. It’s not the ideas that are harmful, but the actions taken without more complete knowledge that is.
If indirect consequences like that don't count then it's not "“harmful” to the current paradigm of power" either, so I thought we were including those.
The “harm” is caused when people realize it is not moral for people to use violence against each other in the name of authority, and as a consequence cease to follow the commands of authority figures. No real harm is caused when this illusion disappears, hence the quotes. The power structure will disappear, and be “harmed”, but no human being will be.
Of course people are not mature enough to self govern yet. There would be chaos if all people playing the roles of police, military, etc stopped. That’s the primal terror and darkness we need to face individually, to confront the part of self that can do violence, and learn to govern it internally, and be the ruler of the kingdom of self.
When people are ready, these institutions will simply cease to exist, and be as absurd and illusionary any other superstition.
> The “harm” is caused when people realize it is not moral for people to use violence against each other in the name of authority, and as a consequence cease to follow the commands of authority figures.
I don't see how half of your bullet points lead to that, but in particular here I don't see how conspiracy theories lead to that. Especially with the wording of "Anything deemed a “conspiracy theory”", which would mean all conspiracy theories do this plus or minus rounding error.
I consider all three (self, morality, consciousness) inherently subjective topics with no objective foundation on which we can build any kind of "knowledge" of them. So when someone comes around and casually says "oh, these people just don't know [self, morality, consciousness]", I feel that they don't really aknowledge the inherent subjectivity of it, but instead hold their opinion on it as absolute and objective truth to which others are supposed to strive.
Which makes me angry, for some reason. That kind of attitude just rubs me the wrong way.
So if I'm wrong (and I would like to be wrong in this case), and the described attitude is not the one you have, please explain what you mean by "knowledge of self, morality, and the nature of consciousness and morality" - I will gladly read your answer and have it change my mind.
Sorry I didn't reply earlier. I an pretty disheartened with the "state of the world", or perhaps people's attitude towards it, and didn't even look at HN for a while.
I totally agree that my attitude may be off putting. I have a lot of trouble listening to people that speak with such certainty. How could anyone possibly know? What gives them the right to say such things? But what if some people really do know something? Should they couch every phrase with "I believe" or "it seems" or other words weakening their message? I'm sick and tired of that as well.
I am not really sure what is genuinely objective anyway. We as humans seek certainty and build models of reality, like the law of gravity, or model of the atom, so we can take actions with some certainty that that our actions will have the desired effects. In some fields, like physics, when confined to certain well defined "envelopes", the predictive power of our models appear to be about as objective as we can get. So far, gravity seems pretty darn solid. Of course, the boundary conditions are wild, once you start moving relativistically, or look at a sub-atomic scale. Let's not even start with quantum physics.
The only thing I know "objectively" is that I am conscious. I can observe, and I am experiencing something that we call reality. I appear to have senses, a body, thoughts, emotions, etc. However, this is also the most subjective possible claim, as it comes from me, the subject.
Now if I take this a bit further, can anything ever really be objective, when viewed from the position of a subject? I don't know. I observe and take in information and I believe this information changes my neurology, or perhaps something beyond (quantum interactions to a "beyond"), and I can use this information and the mental models to live my life and make decisions. If a lot of people use the same mental model, and show that with high probability it holds true (within an envelope of parameters of course), then we can considered it objective, but again viewed through our individual subjective points of view.
I can also say, I don't know if you, or anyone else I've interacted with is "real" or conscious. How could I? I only experience life through my own lens.
Spiritual teachers and books and knowledge passed on through the ages claim things like "We are all one consciousness", and all beings are in fact one. Maybe. I can't prove it, and I have not experienced it, even through lots of spiritual work such as meditation, plant medicines, other "energetic" practices.
Where does that leave me (or us), and the desire for "objective truth"? The way I approach it is that we must be extremely rigorous with our thinking and aware of the limits of rational thought. We must know what assumptions we are making and then use logic to slowly eat away at the foundations until perhaps truth will become self evident, as self evident as the undeniable (to me) knowledge that I am conscious.
I claim that morality is objectively true, because I do not wish to be harmed. You can't argue with me and claim that this isn't true. It is just true, within the bounds of my own experience. If I take that truth, and project it outwards, and make the assumption that you, and any other human is conscious, and make the assumption that they do not wish to be harmed, then I claim that that is the basis for morality. Anything is "right" as long as it does not go against the will of any other conscious being that has the ability to set boundaries. This can only be known but looking inward, and asking what morality means to you. I certainly hope this is true for everyone. It would be a good place to start.
The three words I used "morality", "consciousness" and "self" really describe the same phenomenon or experience I have, and have observed unambiguously within myself. I know I am conscious. It may be an "illusion", but even so it is 100% real to me, more real than any peer reviewed study or external knowledge. Even if a million or billion people say that morality is "doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people", I know that if that harms me, the harm is real. I experience it is real, and the only thing that would convince me otherwise would be direct experience of "the interconnectedness of all being", and through this experience realizing that I am not in fact harmed, and some "greater good" is in fact a greater good. Hoping, praying, doing scientific studies, measuring "happiness" or coming up with "objective metrics" of "the greater good" will never replace that inner knowing.
I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention taxes. As Thomas Sowell said, “What exactly is your ‘fair share’ of what ‘someone else’ has worked for?” For me this again is an undeniable truth. It is immoral to take from someone else what they paid for with their attention and effort. Imagine two men (or women) living on an island. Both are peacefully living isolated lives, eating coconuts. One of them gets hurt, and is no longer able to climb the coconut tree to get food. If the injured one does not get more coconuts, he will die. Is it okay for him to steal from the other? If you say yes, then I'm not sure we'll get much further :)
What if there are three? Or a hundred? What if by stealing one coconut, he can save 100% children from dying? Is it okay for him to steal?
I'd say it's perfectly moral to go to the other guy and say "Hey, I need a coconut. If you give it to me, we'll save a hundred children." At this point, it's up to the man with the coconuts to make his own moral decision. I'd hope he'd save the children, but it's wrong for anyone else to make that decision.
Even if I am wrong with all of this, I feel "in my heart" that if all people connected with this knowing within themselves, we'd collectively experiencing a very different eternal and internal world.
The chains of external government would become unnecessary and fall away if everyone governed themselves. I don't know what this world looks like exactly. I don't know specifically how people would organize and cooperate to do things that cannot be done as an individual, but I do know that taking the first step to not initiate force against any other being would go a long way.
What about the roads?
What about the gangs of not enlightened people that wish to do violence?
What about the weak/sick/poor people that cannot or will not take care of themselves?
A bunch of morally healthy happy people with all their needs met now have the opportunity and perspective to chose to help build roads, or protect the weak from the violent, and take care of the sick. They will not be forced to do so, but do so out of a place of compassion, strength and love.
We can try to coerce, force, and beat the world into submission externally, but how can we hope to achieve peace externally if we don't find it within first?
I hope that if nothing else, this is interesting to read. I don't expect, or even wish to "change you", just share my experience and my dream. I very much do wish to see a peaceful world, where humans collaborate on great works of art, travel to the stars, into the quantum realm, experience the fullness of reality, and cease to suffer. If any of this resonates, it's because a part of you has these same visions, same thoughts and same "conscious" experience as I do. Or put another way, you speak enough of the same language that a part of you recognizes a part of, and we realize we're not all alone, separate and different, but do share something fundamental and good.
Words are limiting, and I've done my best to share. If you want to read more of my writing, check out https://iamthatiam.org, or reach out on Matrix (see my website).
Taking this as a serious question, it wouldn't be hard to make a list of topics that get instant flagging on HN. I suppose the reason why people don't bother is they expect any attempt to explain would also be downvoted to oblivion.
Question the legitimacy of gender fluidity. Wonder aloud whether some traditional social norms have societal value, even if the religious rationales are absurd. Wonder aloud if violence (perhaps only against property) will be required to bring about radical political and economic change.
Speaking for myself, I will say HN is more tolerant of good faith debate on the subjects than places like reddit. But I mean the real world. Despite being liberal and tolerant, I feel I have to be extremely cautious who I speak to about any doubt around certain social movements. To express reservation in some circles would not being debate, but only accusations of bigotry followed by public shaming.
A lot of discourse about China on HN seems to get pulled into perpetual "but bad things have happened in the US too" whataboutism and a sort of mild muffling. Not to mention the weird stuff that happens with topics like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36946171.
I mean the piece isn't really about traditional censorship as such, but social forces working against the expression of particular topics and acting to reduce their visibility.
> The whole Covid fiasco can't really be discussed on HN.
"Covid fiasco" is not a monolith.
On one side, there are people with a position "Covid is much less severe than we though, we should have just let it spread through population, and go on with out lives as normal, like we do with flu. The fiasco is that we tried to control it at all."
On another side there is a position "Covid is a more severe disease than we realize. It affects multiple organs, and after repeated infections some people will get long covid for years, or permanently. We should still aim to restrict the spread of the virus, not anymore with lockdowns, but with clean indoors air, and keeping using masks is crowded situations and in healthcare. The fiasco is that we gave up on trying to control the infections."
The real question is not so much "can I do it on HN or other niche forum X" but "can I do it anywhere where people with polar opinions can have a reasonable debate", and even more interesting "can I say this in public, where my face is in punching distance" and then the ultimate "can I say this in an election campaign" (at which point even basic facts are off limits).
I would wager most folks on the keyboard warpath (or podium/camera) would be much more civil with their alleged target if they were sitting across the table from them.
Are you implying that internet giving voice to people without power to do violence is a bad thing? Should only strong and powerful be given freedom to speak?
This whole thread is beyond the point, since the original commenter asked which are the topics that you can't discuss on HN. Your replies only confirm that Covid is indeed a topic that you can't discuss on HN.
---
I'll reply for completeness anyway:
> I can see why a forum would want to control what topics are on and off topic.
There's a difference between banning flamewars and banning any kind of discussion. I am talking about the latter, not the former, which did indeed happen during Covid.
> Obviously you can say anything you like on unmoderated places like 4chan, but what does that prove?
Indeed, 4chan was the place where you could see discussion about the Covid policies and the media claims, from masks to lockdowns and mandatory vaccines - in fact, it was the one of the only places you could talk about it. Many of the things discussed there turned out to be true.
Transexuals are not women, abortion is murder, the US and/or Ukraine provoked the war, average IQ of different races and how it explains their behaviour. There you have four things that will earn you an instant flag (perhaps not in this thread for obvious reasons)
And yet I still see them debated regularly. They're not forbidden, they're unpopular. A consequence of having a system of voting and flagging is that you won't always agree with the way people vote and flag.
> Transexuals are not women
As an aside, I've noticed a pattern that people fret endlessly over trans women and don't really take notice of trans men. I don't know why that is, but there must be a reason why it's so remarkably consistent.
Is it just statistical? Maybe there are more trans women? Or they are more obvious/apparent online. But it any case it is almost a simple true scotsman fallacy. They are a woman iff that is your definition.
Accessibility tip: Hit the “X minutes days ago” link if this has gone too grey to read.
A consequence of having a system of flagging is that dang can avoid having to do any work by having users remove other users' comments, keeping the site in one side of the political spectrum. (Just to be clear, I don't think he particularly cares which side wins, as long as it allows him to avoid any responsibility)
I propose as an experiment, you go make an offensive left-wing comment on a relevant thread (maybe "ACAB" or "eat the rich"), and see if it gets flagged and downvoted.
I read a bunch of right-wing comments on HN (including ones making good arguments), the reports of left bias on HN are greatly overstated.
I can't say I agree, if someone made a high effort post arguing for eating the rich, I personally would still flag it because I flag all calls to violence, whether they are low effort or not. (Some people say "eat the rich" to mean "redistribute wealth through taxation," if I could tell that's what they meant I probably wouldn't flag it, other people uh, don't. Maybe the recipe you referenced is a policy proposal, let me know if I've misread you.)
How is advocating for eating the rich a call for violence though?
Are you assuming it's a call to kill them rather than a plea to not waste the protein?
The thing many people fail to realise about the Fore people in PNG was that their cannibalism was a mortuary rite of reverance for highly valued in group members that weren't killed for sustenance.
Now .. given you might have gained a snippet of new infomation, how do you feel about upvoting this comment about eating high value members of society?
Hmm - a self evident non sequitur that fails to address a real point about the actual world and the assumptions made by people about both violence and cannabalism.
That's a poor comment from yourself- I'd hoped for better.
If you'd like a higher quality response, sophistry and performative disappointment isn't the way to get it. I'm not going to give a serious detailed response to an unserious comment, I'm going to find a better use for my time.
If you need further clarification about why I don't take it seriously when I talk about a meme about a violent uprising and you pivot the conversation to ritual cannibalism, I encourage you to consult your preferred dictionary regarding "sophistry".
If you want to convince me that you're earnestly trying to have a real conversation, being insulting isn't going to help.
I didn't pivot at all, if you scroll back you'll see for a fact that it was yourself that introduced the topic of eating the rich.
You advocated for raising that as a thread topic.
I'm familar with several dictionares, nothing I have said has been false.
Be explicit - what exactly do you consider to be sophistry here?
We can talk about prion disease and its relation to eating brain matter (the Fore and mad cow disease), the history of funerary practices, the European fad for eating ground up mummies, the UK practice of eating parts of executed criminals, etc.
All of these relate to the topic that you suggested .. and the topic you apparently wish to tap out on when faced with someone happy to take it on.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not interested in taking the bait today. Good luck finding the kind of discussion you're looking for. Have a pleasant day.
On the off chance this is a genuine misunderstanding (which, given you indicated that you understood I was referencing slogans, that cannibalism is a nonsequiter to a discussion of HN's political bias, that my initial response to you contained further clarification I was referencing a political slogan, and that you then peppered me with insults and attempted to bait me into an argument, I don't believe to be the case, but I've been wrong before), here is the misunderstanding:
> "Eat the rich" is a political slogan associated with anti-capitalism and left-wing politics. It may variously be used as a metaphor for class conflict, a demand for wealth redistribution, or a literal call to violence. The phrase is commonly attributed to political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from a quote first popularized during the French Revolution: "When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich".
Remember, you're the one who introduced the brilliant idea of eating the rich into this conversation, and you're the one who replied even after you said you wouldn't, so you not only took the bait, you baited the hook with deliciously irresistible rich human flesh! Now that's some fine anthropophagic trolling!
> You do realize that sometimes rich right wingers advocate cannibalism too -- just not eating the rich
This book looks like satire. I have never met or heard of anyone who discusses "political cannibalism" literally. I think it's vanishingly rare.
> You're the one who introduced the brilliant idea of eating the rich into this conversation
I will not relitigate this. See above.
> You're the one who replied even after you said you wouldn't
Tend to your own knitting.
I'm a little confused why you took the time to respond to an old thread during the course of what looks like digging up receipts on a troll (which I have no complaint with, I agree with what you said about them). This is ancient history in my book.
Is there something specific you'd like me to take away from this? Did you just not like the cut off my jib? I honestly can't tell, I'm getting a chaotic neutral vibe.
ETA: I see, you feel that I am a troll, and you want to call me out for trolling. Well, noted. I disagree but it's not my proudest set of comments, I can't fault you for thinking ill of me because of them.
You are assuming that the topics I mentioned would be posted in the shape of short slogans, but they could be posted as long comments of several paragraphs and be flagged all the same.
Also there is no left bias. There is a progressive bias. Not exactly the same
That's not really what I meant re slogans, they were more examples of convenience. But I could have expressed myself better there.
When I see political comments get flagged, it's usually because they said something explicitly offensive or insulting. They'll sign of with an edit attacking downvoters, say something insulting about their political opponents, or reference a conspiracy theory. That will reliably get you flagged regardless of the position you are advocating.
> But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves…
Some things never change - this could have been written verbatim in 2021, and would still have been accurate.
If only I had a dollar for every time some apologist said "This is not censorship because it's not the government's Thought Police", or "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" whenever a large minority was silenced.
I always wonder why there is such a large and vocal support for thought police in these enlightened times. Do these supporters believe that they are exempt?
"For example, he offers us a significant insight in the passage above. The censorship he had to address was not a conspiracy or even a campaign; it was spontaneous. Every right-thinking intellectual somehow knew that a candid assessment of Soviet rule was, well, just not the done thing!…"
If freedom of speech is anything, that's freedom from consequences, it doesn't have any other meaning.
Even in the most repressive state you can definitely say anything, it's the consequences for saying it that make the difference. The first amendment of the US protects citizens from consequences from the state.
There is a related discussion to be had about social media and reach, but it pales in comparison to how easily people tend to dismiss freedom of speech. It's rather fitting that the expression "Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences" is so Orwellian.
> So, should we introduce freedom from consequences then?
I upvoted you because you make a good point with that question.
However, my point is that "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" is a meaningful expression used primarily by people who want to police the thoughts of everyone.
My point is not that everyone should be forced to associate with everyone else.
IOW, that expression is useful as an indicator that an individual is in a mob.
Whenever you think of something, ask yourself this "Would I be in favor of the KKK being able to do this to black people?" If the answer is no, then you shouldn't be in favor of doing it to the KKK.
Replace either of those groups with whichever groups are relevant and emotionally impactful to you.
The idea that tolerance 101 is about who you are able to discriminate is quite amusing. Especially in a thread about Orwell, doublethink and all that.
Either way, yes, if you actually care for freedom of speech you ought to respect that which you find abhorrent. You are supposed to trust that worthwhile ideas prevail while the rest don't. That in this scenario, since the KKK has terrible ideas and yours are better, you benefit from both being out in the open, since yours should surely win over.
> The idea that tolerance 101 is about who you are able to discriminate is quite amusing. Especially in a thread about Orwell, doublethink and all that.
"discrimination" in the literal sense isn't bad, it's just making choices. The amusement stems from the very different things people mean when they say "discrimination". And being clear about what people mean with these terms is part of the 101.
But more relevantly, I didn't use that word, which is a very easy way to avoid any possible doublethink related to it!
> That in this scenario, since the KKK has terrible ideas and yours are better, you benefit from both being out in the open, since yours should surely win over.
I didn't say I want them to hide their ideas. I don't.
> Either way, yes, if you actually care for freedom of speech you ought to respect that which you find abhorrent.
Respect what, specifically? I respect their ability to speak. Do I need to go beyond that?
Anyway in this scenario do I have to allow customers to personally insult me too if I want to maintain free speech, or is that different from saying that groups deserve nothing and stole everything they have?
He may be right that people self sensor to keep a clean image of themselves in the eyes of their peers, but Orwell did not live in a time of cell phones.
If you people still don't believe you're all under deep surveillance, after Assange and Snowden leaks, then you all are mentally ill.
We now know that this government is willing to subvert the first amendment by forcing shadowbans. Orwell's books doesn't come anywhere near what the current government does. Just because you all aren't in interment camps now doesn't mean they won't use the data they gather to be used against you in the future.
So now people that want to speak their minds are either censored by the sheep that downvote or the government that forces censorship.
Isn't it fun how we are moving to all antiutopias at once. Social media acts as big brother while simultaneously pushing us into brave new world, on top of that we are following the cyberpunk megacorp dystopias manual to the letter. Forever wars are in vogue again. The culture war is waged with almost religious zeal and self censorship is on the rise. And we are working on AI to plug us into the matrix ...
Sci-fi is reality, but exaggerated slightly in some direction. We've been moving towards them when they were written and we haven't stopped since. Dystopias that we stopped moving towards (example: anything involving nuclear annihilation) are no longer considered culturally relevant.
So I wouldn't call it funny, it's expected. It's what keeps those works of fiction alive, not the other way around.
Looking at the state of society, I think things are already fixing themselves. While the media, and partisans, continue to try to push 'left' vs 'right' divisions as hard as they possibly can, the reality is that the true divide in society is becoming much more like anti-establishment vs pro-establishment.
And 'establishment' is not a proxy for class or anything of the sort, but for a bucket of various "values" like: coercion vs persuasion, censorship, geopolitics > all, forever wars, ideological conformity, and so on. And it seems to me that anti-establishment is growing rapidly. And it's not just an America thing, but happening all over the world at the same time.
I don't think anybody can predict where this will lead, other than somewhere different. And given the way things are currently headed, it's hard to imagine that being a bad idea.
Also throw a potential ecological catastrophe in the mix
3) Look in the early/mid seventies around the oil embargo - this is when the cost disease really took off and I wouldn't be surprised if there was some subtle change in mentality that enabled a lot of the things we see now.
2) I think that the majority of people that are not profiting want to stop them, but the boiling frog effect is so slow that few do - and the brave new world is quite good at subduing the fighting spiring and inquisitiveness - think of it that way BG3 that is moving to become one of the highest rated PC games ever is just a basic very good game from the late 90s/early 2000s
1) I think we are in a really bad Nash equilibrium right now - so to change we need a really big external push. Never let a crisis go to waste. And there will be crisis. But it will require the right kinds of people to be near the power levers.
Are you open to the problem being "you"? Not just you specifically, but you, me, and every individual who lacks the connection to self, morality, true knowledge?
And with that, are you (and by extension), all people ready to do the inner work to self govern, and make right choices in the absence of an external motivation?
Of course it's me. But I am just a dwarf standing on the shoulders of the giants before me.
I think that communism real world performance destroyed in a lot of people the idea of greater good existing at all. So after it's fall we kinda lost the ability to unite for but mostly retaining the ability to unite against. On a larger scale the only thing that unites people is common enemy.
> Communism was taken seriously by many in the West, and was quite popular.
It is easier to understand the popularity if you imagine the support was for Marxism, since plenty of the intelligencia (mostly in humanities?) still publicly support Marxism.
The word "communism" has changed its meaning over time - especially in the USA.
Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not a supporter of communism - he used the word "socialist" for his beliefs and he fought with the "anarchists" in Spain. Both of those political words have changed their meaning too.
Animal Farm was written by him and his wife[1] as a satire of communism because a direct criticism was not palatable at the time. Eric also experienced the Soviet Union undermining a revolution - he wrote about this in Homage to Catalonia https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606380
The most bizarre story is the CIA funding[2] the UK animated version of Animal Farm so that they could change the script for propoganda purposes: "To meet the CIA's objectives, the ending was changed to show that only the pigs had become totally corrupt. The film ends with other animals mounting a successful revolt against their rulers. There is no mention of the humans in the film's conclusion."
> Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not a supporter of communism
Orwell fought for the POUM militias during the Spanish civil war. The POUM was a communist party opposed to the CPE - Communist Party of Spain (the CPE was part of the Comintern - that's an organization in faraway Moscow)
I think that Orwell identified with the politics of the POUM, from reading 'Homage to Catalonia' (also he could have joined an anarchist militia instead)
Now POUM was actually bigger than the CPE, until it was suppressed by the CPE and the NKVD (Soviet secret police, later renamed into KGB)
Communists is now the word often used to label Marxists . . . You are entirely making my point for me that calling him a communist is incorrect - I am fairly sure he doesn't use the word "communist" towards himself - he writes about socialism and calls himself a socialist (another word that has been debased in the US).
The POUM and PSUC were on the same team to begin with - later they fought against each other - see link in my previous comment. Your comment doesn't fit what I have read from the book: I have read Homage to Catalonia multiple times. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/george-orwell-homage... and here is a relevant section:
[He said] "Those are the Socialists" (meaning the P.S.U.C.), I was puzzled and said: "Aren’t we all Socialists?" I thought it idiotic that people fighting for their lives should have separate parties; my attitude always was, "Why can’t we drop all this political nonsense and get on with the war?" This of course was the correct ’anti-Fascist’ attitude which had been carefully disseminated by the English newspapers, largely in order to prevent people from grasping the real nature of the struggle. But in Spain, especially in Catalonia, it was an attitude that no one could or did keep up indefinitely. Everyone, however unwillingly, took sides sooner or later. For even if one cared nothing for the political parties and their conflicting ‘lines’, it was too obvious that one’s own destiny was involved. As a militiaman one was a soldier against Franco, but one was also a pawn in an enormous struggle that was being fought out between two political theories. When I scrounged for firewood on the mountainside and wondered whether this was really a war or whether the News Chronicle had made it up, when I dodged the Communist machine-guns in the Barcelona riots, when I finally fled from Spain with the police one jump behind me — all these things happened to me in that particular way because I was serving in the P.O.U.M. militia and not in the P.S.U.C. So great is the difference between two sets of initials!
> Communists is now the word often used to label Marxists
The leader of POUM was Andreu Nin, he was a communist, as most of the leadership in his party. That makes it a communist party, even if it was not allied with Moscow.
Marxist could mean all sorts of things: the early Marx is very different from the late Marx, so is the social democratic interpretation of Marxism.
i think that the distinction between Pro-Moscow and not Moscow based communist makes more sense, given these different gradations of Marxism.
Surely the more important piece of missing context is that Animal Farm was published in 1945, while World War II was still raging and the Soviet Union and the UK were Allies fighting Nazi Germany?
They were always odd bedfellows, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend (at least temporarily), and it's sensible not to antagonize your friend when you're both engaged in literal mortal combat against the enemy.
No. Much of the British and American elite (especially those not of the intellectual class), was still absolutely opposed to communism (Operation Unthinkable), they had supported the USSR with enormous amounts of war material, because they prefered Communism taking over large parts of Europe over Fascism doing the same.
(WW2 nominally started over the German/Soviet invasion of Poland)
On the other hand the british and american intellectual class saw the USSR as worthy of emulation. They wanted a Stalinist regime in Britain/America.
The difference is that you will find no shortage of criticism of capitalism in today's day and age, and regarding academia, you might even be shunned for declaring yourself a capitalist.
The other difference is that in capitalistic societies people can criticise the ruling ideology openly on public forums like HN and not be murdered for it.
Isn't that something that is rather supposed to be granted by democracy and republic? Sure such a regime can enact capitalist policies, but that is never mandatory nor exclusive: capitalism is also implementable in oligarchic plutocraty.
To be clear, I didn't mean that capitalism or communism is worst or even equivalent on all matters.
I'm unsure of what you mean with body count here, and have no clue of what metrics and quantifications it is supposed to show meaningful important differences.
Capitalism can be implemented through many different complementary political frameworks/regimes, and doesn't exist outside a political system that can enforce it. Just like communism.
Yes, I'm lucky. I was born a white man in an occidental country, which is admittedly a privileged position.
Also, I'm living in a country which still pretends to be a democratic republic, so blatant oppression of free speech is politically more complexe.
If capitalism plays a role in all that, it is more often to threat these liberties than anything else. Plutocrates are on the rise, and they want trade secret to protect their businesses from republican values and dream of always more defenseless labor forces that are not granted all that cumbersome rights that democratic freedoms grants.
Is capitalism a solid ground to critic CCP? Not necessarily, trade with China to access its cheap oppressed working force seems to be a good deal from some capitalist point of view.
And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
https://www.openculture.com/2013/11/t-s-eliot-rejects-george...
Eliot was surely wrong to call Animal Farm "Trotskyite" but that was probably his way of noting that Orwell's critique of communism was coming from the left, not the right. This fits with another fun fact: the most famous fan of Orwell's unpublished preface is Chomsky, who has been championing it for decades.