I’m mostly talking about Animal Farm and 1984, not only because they are more well known, but also because Orwell drew inspiration from the USSR in writing them.
I’m a beginner at communism, I’m not exactly the most well-read, and in trying to broaden my horizons, I read these two.
I’m simply curious to see what all of you have to say about them.
Negative. Orwell is an alleged sex pest, and a confirmed snitch.
Animal Farm, when read critically, essentially amounts to an aristocratic view of workers that sees us as stupid, gullible, and doomed to forever follow the whims of charismatic leaders with no critical thinking of our own. It erases our class interests and replaces class analysis with the idea that there are smart people, and there are workers, and the majority of smarter people will be unable to educate workers and so will inevitably abuse and take advantage of them.
1984 isn’t as bad as Animal Farm, but it’s not great either. It’s still founded on Orwell’s aristocratic view of humanity that focuses on “Great Man Theory” above all.
I recommend reading On Orwell, A Critical Read of Animal Farm, and Isaac Asimov on 1984.
If you want to read more about communist theory, I also made an introductory reading list, feel free to check it out! You could also wait until @Edie@lemmy.ml begins a weekly reading group for it over on Hexbear.net in a couple of weeks, and discuss the works on it with others!
I particularly enjoyed " A critical read on Animal Farm". I am deeply grateful to have been bestowed with all this knowledge. Thank you.
No worries!
Jones Manoel is an amazing communist (marxist-lenilist) intellectual, author, agitator, and has recently been elected to the Brazilian congress. one of the few good things to have happened in this election cycle.
I hate youtube’s auto-dub, but I’ll put up with it if it means he can reach more people
Thinking about the parenthes you put around marxist-leninist, what exactly constitutes a ‘communist’?
I was just being specific. But there are many communist traditions. Some care more about the class structure (Marxists), some about power structures (anarchists). And then the subdivisions multiply like fruitflies.
Besides the class / power divide there’s the utopian / materialist divide. The only communist movements that achieved anything so far have been ML and ML-Maoist (MLM), both materialist lines. Anarchists are usually utopian, like, I agree with anarco-communists’ philosofical positions and what the end goal should be, but how does one protect its people and revolution without the Autority and Power of the State? The proletarian state can only be abolished (practically) after all couter revolutionary states have been abolished
uh, and now I realize I copletely avoided your question. Honestly, idk. I can list some gloabal characteristics, and anti-characteristics, but that’s about it. I can also tell you that if a first worlder say they are a commie I find it highly suspicious, 9/10 they don’t know what they’re talking about
In addition to the great links ppl already posted below:
What’s so bad about George Orwell?
- He’s antisemitic, homophobic, and racist. Specifically, he snitched out Jews, Black people, Homosexuals, and communists to British Intelligence. His list, here, includes him writing:
- 8 variations of “Jewish?” (Charlie Chaplin), “Polish Jew, (Tom Driberg)” “English Jew,” or “Jewess.”
- Paul Robeson - “ROBESON, Paul (US Negro) …Very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter.”
- Paul Robeson wasn’t anti-white, just look at the welsh coal miners for whom Robeson Campaigned.
- The testimony of Paul Robeson (one of the people Orwell snitched on), to HUAC (House of Unamerican activities committee) during the red scare.
- Stephen Spender - “Sentimental sympathiser… Tendency towards homosexuality”
- Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish nationalist poet, and anti-imperialist.
- George Padmore, Trinidadian journalist and anti-imperialist campaigner.
- His books Animal Farm and 1984 are used widely as anti-communist propaganda in schools in the US and UK. So much so that his animated animal farm film was funded by the CIA. There’s a reason they teach George Orwell in schools and not Franz Fanon, Che, Huey P Newton, Malcolm X, Lenin, CLR James, etc.
- In 1941, illustrator Elias Gertrude approached Orwell, then an editor for the British Ministry of information, with an idea for a satirical cartoon film, portraying the Nazis as pig characters ruling a farm in a kind of dysfunctional fairy story. He told her that there was not much call for her idea, stole it, changed the name from A Fairy Story to Animal Farm, and changed the pig-nazis into Communists.
- Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down..
- Orwell, anti-communist: A criticism of Orwell and his Work - By Isaac Asimov.
- Orwell - “I have never really disliked Hitler.”
- He attempted to rape one of his first courtships: “Previously the young couple had kissed, but now, during a late summer walk, he had wanted more. At only five feet to his six feet and four inches, Jacintha had shouted, screamed and kicked before running home with a torn skirt and bruised hip. It was “this” rather than any gradual parting of the ways that explains why Jacintha broke off all contact with her childhood friend, never to learn that he had transformed himself into George Orwell.”
- Redsails - On Orwell.
- Orwell worked as a British imperial cop in Burma for 5 years. His short story, Shooting an Elephant, uses ethnic slurs and denigrates burmese people.
- A reddit thread on George Orwell, Thread #2.
Is there some place where I can see all of these posts of yours in some sort of indexed format?
Thank you very much!
Also here’s a top level one: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/
I was also just about to comment this, lol.
Thank you for your comment. This information is all news to me. Unfortunately, your first link is dead. I’d really love it if you could please either give me the name of the article, or provide a functioning link.
https://archive.md/QxSs8 Found it on archive. @dessalines@lemmy.ml You should probably replace the link with this one or better.
Thx, I’ll fix that now.
- He’s antisemitic, homophobic, and racist. Specifically, he snitched out Jews, Black people, Homosexuals, and communists to British Intelligence. His list, here, includes him writing:
I thought Animal Farm was about the US when I read it in 8th grade. 😅
I thought it was about communism as a kid, but even then I thought it was horseshit propaganda. For some reason I still enjoy the book :/
❤️
Here’s Asimov’s review of 1984: https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
Asimov was in no way a communist, of course, but he was right about 1984, that’s for sure!
Always makes me laugh that when people pointed out to Assimov that he’d essentially invented Marxism from first principles(psychohistory) he was like “what? nooo”
I’m convinced that Asimov was familiar with historical materialism and concocted psychohistory from that knowledge. He was a native Russian speaker born a year after the Bolshevik revolution.
During the Cold War, science fiction publishing in the Anglosphere was gate kept by cold warriors, so you couldn’t hope to get anything published that put Marxism in a favorable light. So even if Asimov had wanted to introduce historical materialism, he couldn’t have.
I saw an interview with him in later life (in the 1980s I think), and he repeated most of the then-popular anti-communist/USSR talking points (with an almost coerced smile that was psychologically self-enforced) . It seemed like years of being a US citizen (and the desire to still be able to publish books there) wheedled him into those positions, even if earlier in his life he was more sympathetic to the USSR and educated on Marxism-Leninism.
Its certainly intellectually dishonest, but people are people and sometimes they don’t want to fight a david vs goliath fight in the heart of empire, and they take the road with the least resistance.
Absolute libbed up idealist reactionary
“Doublethink” is too good of a concept to have been thought up by an aristocratic rapist snitch mad about the USSR in 1942. The guy was an alleged socialist but all his books show a massive contempt for the proletariat. It is no wonder that Animal Farm was turned into a movie by the CIA and 1984 was dropped like leaflets over East Germany
To be fair, he didn’t come up with it, Freud (who would have a field day analyzing Orwell’s books) had the concept of Verleugnung (“denial” or “disavow”). Scott Fitzgerald, of Great Gatsby fame, once wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”.
Heck, if we squint a little we could track back a lot of concepts of 1984 all the way back to Hobbes.
I moreso meant the word. It is very descriptive
Still, it’s surprising just how unoriginal Orwell was. The idea of pigs running an animal farm as an analogy to an authoritarian state was stolen, the world of 1984 was just a bastardisation of the USSR transposed to London, and even the concept of doublethink, so central to the novel, was plagiarized. I’m starting to think this man had nothing original to say. Just a professional copy machine.
I never quite understood his blind hatred of nothing but the USSR.
He hated Stalin. Eric Blair (George Orwell) fought in the Spanish Civil War and joined the Trotskyites.
To be honest, Stalin wasn’t an angel either. Its just blind hypocrisy. No equivalent dislike for the fascists.
They’re carefully-crafted anticommunist works that trick liberals into thinking they’re learning.
Similarly went to read these as my first foray into “communism” in like 2021. Animal Farm was absolutely trash and I dropped it 50 pages in then started reading State and Revolution by Lenin. If you want anarchist or communist fiction Ursula K Le Guin is a far better choice.
Its pretty OK
But holy shit is orwille fucking misogynistic right in the beginning there’s a whole insert about how he wants to rape and torture women who go on his nerves
Devoid of context, I think 1984 is an ok story with good concepts, bad worldbuilding and double plus ungoodly written characters.
With context, it’s a barely disguised anticommunist propaganda piece portrayed as as “anti authoritarian”
1984 has a special place in my heart because i had to write a thesis about it in school. And i majorly fucked it up … So not great.
Independently of his personality and his intentions with the books, they do more harm than good because they are too easy to see as critics of socialist countries. Especially animal farm. Even though 1984 is essentially our reality.
I’ve read them and they’re basically on the level of a Harry Potter, which i suppose makes it inevitable that some people were going to hold it up as the alpha and omega of their political understanding.
Isaac Asimov wrote a pretty funny review of them too, he wasn’t a fan.
It’s slop.
I liked both books as a young man, without knowing the history of the author. They say to never meet your heroes. I guess they’re right. This does beg the question…can you separate the artist from their art?
