I read too much Orwell as a teenager. His personal politics outside of fighting in Spain are fairly shit. Most of Orwell is incredibly boring and simplistic, but I think there are a few deeper parts of it are glossed over especially by libs who think 1984 is a book about communism instead of a book about power.

For example everyone knows the quote:

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever”

Which everyone is like “omg gommunism” to.

This appears in a passage in the book is where O’Brien is explaining the operation of power politics as it relates to parties to Winston as he’s torturing him.

‘I told you, Winston,’ he said, ‘that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism. But you are mistaken. This is not solipsism. Collective solipsism, if you like. But that is a different thing: in fact, the opposite thing. All this is a digression,’ he added in a different tone. ‘The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.’ He paused, and for a moment assumed again his air of a schoolmaster questioning a promising pupil: ‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’

Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always – do not forget this, Winston – always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

‘And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands – all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph. The more the Party is powerful, the less it will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon and yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during seven years will be played out over and over again generation after generation, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the heretic here at our mercy, screaming with pain, broken up, contemptible – and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the world that we are preparing, Winston. A world of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the nerve of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.’

Winston had recovered himself sufficiently to speak. ‘You can’t!’ he said weakly.

‘What do you mean by that remark, Winston?’

‘You could not create such a world as you have just described. It is a dream. It is impossible.’

‘Why?’

‘It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.’

‘Why not?’

‘It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.’

‘Nonsense. You are under the impression that hatred is more exhausting than love. Why should it be? And if it were, what difference would that make? Suppose that we choose to wear ourselves out faster. Suppose that we quicken the tempo of human life till men are senile at thirty. Still what difference would it make? Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death? The party is immortal.’

As usual, the voice had battered Winston into helplessness. Moreover he was in dread that if he persisted in his disagreement O’Brien would twist the dial again. And yet he could not keep silent. Feebly, without arguments, with nothing to support him except his inarticulate horror of what O’Brien had said, he returned to the attack.

‘I don’t know – I don’t care. Somehow you will fail. Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you.’

‘We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you have returned to your old idea that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are helpless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside – irrelevant.’

This is a Blue No Matter Who society. This is a society pure party politics, a society of us and them. Ironically many liberals cannot see the “us” in the “them” of the book. Liberals on their loss literally went online to reclaim their power by gloating about genocide, by gloating about the coming abuse of minorities, and by gloating about the coming economic instability. They were denied the thrill of victory, the thrill of stomping their enemies, so they must recuperate that feeling of power in another way. This is why every few months they start posting about Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, Muslims in Deerborn, Gaza Activists, or for those who are older Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Ted Kennedy, or the eternal of evil non-voters.

The Democrats like O’Brien love creating fake enemies to rile up their base. They use the threat of their “enemies” to their “base” in the same way that in 1984 there’s always a Goldberg terror cell around every corner.

Ironically the whole “cruelty for cruelty’s sake” is a hilarious denial of the core of the whole book which states “cruelty is the expression of political power”. Which they themselves do politically (e.g. Blue team owns the leader board in cleansing brown people from the core and in the periphery) and socially when they’re in and out of power. Yet they still love citing it.

But of course Orwell was wrong about the form, there’s no 20 Minutes of Hate that’s conveniently isolated and ignored if like Winston you find it icky. It’s a Unending Hate that’s dispensed through a voluntary capitalist media system that hooks you into the feeling. Infinite Scroll is 20 Minutes of Hate. 24 Hour News cycles are 20 Minutes of Hate. Hollywood Movies and Sports Games sponsored by the Department of Defense are 20 Minutes of Hate. They serve the same social purpose. They just have a different and less baby brained form, so the baby brains who love this book cannot make the connections.

We live in a power society. Our O’Briens are capitalists. To the O’Brien and Elon Musks of the world there is no difference to torturing you or forcing you to listen to shitty internet jokes from 2009, to them it’s an expression of power that demands reverence. Musk knows he’s not funny. He knows he constantly eats shit. He does his little shows anyway because he knows people are forced to pay attention to him. They must suffer him because of his station. The entire capitalist system is built that way. You must suffer them, that is the social relation devoid of economics.

There are some ideas that Orwell got right. There’s not many of them, and they’re just constantly ignored and misapplied.

The work is a near trotskyite ode to Lenin and Marx and a condemnation of the Soviet Union. That’s just true regardless of your feelings about Orwell. The claim is not that the farm animals are too dumb for communism, but that the communist leadership is corrupt and gradually reforms itself away from communism to something indistinguishable from capitalism. It’s not subtle, it’s not a deep work. That’s why it’s used as a polemic for children.

Beyond that I won’t argue Orwell with you.

No, the book very specially has socialism working. Then comunism is showing being just as bad as capitlaism. Implying both are bad. So while he is kinda ideologically incoherent in the way of all reactionaries we should understand the actual text of the work.

I think you’ll find many anarchists disagreeing with your last point there.

But if your argument is simply that it’s anticommunist because it attacks AES, then fair enough. But I still find it valuable to remember that the American cultural mileau is so anticommunist that the criticism had to extend to the ideas of communism itself being bad, not merely that implementation was bad/unrealistic.