Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak.
>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”
>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"
The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves
> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."
However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.
I completely agree. His review [0] of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom [1] illustrates his capacity for nuance combined with his willingness to face those unpalatable truths.
As a sample, he was a socialist who also wrote this:
It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.
The article also quotes this line, the next paragraph for context:
> Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to ‘free’ competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.
I'm not sure why more democracy doesn't solve both issues, while retaining the benefits of both, which seems to be where most modern nations are broadly headed, in fits and starts.
Most of the world has settled on capitalism because it solves a specific class of coordination problems really well, and targeted intervention can stave off the externalities enough to make the system bearable.
Slumps and unemployment aren't, like, an avoidable curse, but they're pretty damn hard to avoid, and so far no system has had real success.
But you're wrong. If you look at economic records going back to the middle ages, you can see the effect of Keynesian economics, central banks, social safety nets, social security systems, etc. Have had on reducing slumps and unemployment. We've gotten very, very good at it. In the 1600's, there were great depression-style crashes every 5 years or so. Despite massive wars, pandemics, geopolitics, and automation, economic slumps and unemployment have been incredibly moderate the past 90 years or so, and they have gotten milder as a function of time over that timeframe.
I didn't downvote you but .. it can easily be argued that the reduced slumps is because of the liberalisation of trade and reduced central control of money. e.g. floating currencies.
It has also been plausibly argued that the great depression was lengthened (and possibly deepened) by things like the New Deal.
In my view it’s because democracy is somewhat orthogonal to capitalism or collectivism, and masses are easily controlled anyway (they can live with the illusion of being in control). A democracy loses something central to the concept when a restricted group has a very concentrated power (be it political, as in the case of pure collectivism, or economic, as with pure capitalism). In my opinion there can’t be true democracy when there are strong imbalances in a society, even when there are regular democratic elections.
"A democracy loses something central to the concept when a restricted group has a very concentrated power (be it political, as in the case of pure collectivism, or economic, as with pure capitalism)."
Yes, it's concentrations of power which are the real enemy.
Unfortunately, no matter how many dictatorships, oligarchies, monarchies, theocracies and kleptocracies the world suffers through, we never seem to learn that lesson.
Orwell wrote that review at pretty much the same time as the Bretton Woods system of international monetary exchange was implemented, which the largest single piece of the Keynesian economic foundations for 25 years of economic growth with a high level of stability and a low level of inequality in the US-centric world.
There were good reasons why Bretton Woods failed in 1970, but the subsequent ascendance of Hayekian neoliberalism doesn't look so good 40 years on.
Hayek himself used the term "neo-liberal" to describe the "movement" of liberalism to which he belonged [0]. The historian Quinn Slobodian [1] advocates using the term "neoliberal" for the intellectual history surrounding the Mont Pelerin Society. In this context, it is sensible to distinguish between a Hayekian strand and, say, Wilhelm Röpke's version of neoliberalism.
Those two statements are only in contradiction if you believe there are only two choices for how to organize a society: A Red one and a White one — and both built on hierarchical power. Orwell clearly didn't believe that. As he wrote:
"Had I gone to Spain with no political affiliation at all I should probably have joined the International Column and should no doubt by this time have had a bullet in the back for being "politically unreliable", or at least have been in jail. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists."
– George Orwell, "Letter to Jack Common [October? 1937]", in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940, eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (New York: Harcournt Brace Jovanovich, 1968), 289.
I read the article and had the same feeling. The details are interesting but the arguments seem weak, particularly his argument about how self-contradictory Orwell was.
> "It is often the contradictions in an individual’s character that give it distinction; in the case of Orwell, these were more marked and more numerous than in most, but it is not clear whether he was even aware of them."
I gave up right there, this was so grossly condescending to its subject. Orwell was not aware of his own contradictions? Has the author ever actually read any Orwell?
I think they also got confused with the differences between communism, socialism, social democracy, and democracy. Granted we often conflate these terms but there are differences, especially in authority and where that power lies or who it belongs to. Orwell strikes me as a person who was afraid of authority and how power corrupts, or how quickly it can corrupt. Seems like a good reason to criticize communism. Seems like also a good reason to be afraid of the status quo. But you can also be critical of authority and think some is necessary. I think many for a long time have sought to find the balance of authority and democracy. I don't think anyone has found the solution, if one exists.
I think it has to deal with how people think of optimization problems. Many people think there are global solutions. What we've learned over the last 200 years is that most problems are non-convex, lie in high dimensions, have long and coupled causal chains, are long-tailed, not-gaussian, non-zero summed (many positive, many negative), and are probabilistic in nature, but we assume the opposite of all these things (mostly due to approximations).
Needless to say, things are complicated. It's why we created specialization in the first place, but at the same time we expect people to be experts in many subjects (generalists). Because of this thinking many people will assume someone is being contradictory when they can criticize different things. The nature of reality is complex. No matter how you side on complicated issues there are reasons to critique different sides (Israel/Palestine, China/US, Communism/Socialism/Capitalism/xism, and so on). Simplifying things just causes us to argue over things we have no qualifications to argue over, but we'll do it with self-righteous indignation instead of as a way to learn or update our views. This is strange because arguing, debate, criticism, and self reflection are so important to democracies. It is far more important to critique your own philosophies (the ones you are fighting for) than those you oppose, since those are the things you have control over the direction of.
Sometimes it isn't about contradictions, sometimes (most of the times) we're just dumb and over simplifying.
Increasingly I think arguments are in public and recorded for posterity, making the social cost of a mistake (or being poorly informed, etc) much higher. Given that, I think we're seeing many arguments that are more about group belonging and performance rather than a genuine effort to learn via debate and dialog.
Throw in some radical oversimplifications and that's a pretty strong recipe for polarization. One that's actively cultivated and amplified due to media profit incentives. Unfortunately it's a vicious cycle that seems to make us dumber and oversimplify even more.
The problem with a lot of conservative journos is their inability to make the distinction between left-wing political thoughts, tending to lump everything under "socialism". This renders them unable to understand why Orwell was a left-wing anti-communist and in particular anti Stalin.
This is like dealing with the kind of writer who thinks that java and javascript are the same thing.
Similarly part of what makes Orwell both interesting and entertaining to read is him skewering some of the excesses of the left of his time, without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism. It's criticism because he wants a better left, not a non-existent one.
I don't think he was. He was anti-Stalinist, stemming from anti-totalitarianism, but I don't he was generally hostile to communism.
> without fundamentally being hostile to egalitarianism
Which puts it much less forcefully that you could. Orwell was a socialist. He fought with the Marxist POUM in the Spanish Civil War. He was fundamentally pro-egalitarianism and dedicated his life in a big way to egalitarianism as realised by Socialism.
The article talks about how contradictory Orwell was, and lists a bunch of examples. But I don't think a single example shows any contradiction at all. It simply showed that Orwell didn't live his life in black and white.
I think all of this says a lot more about the people who try to write about Orwell than it does about Orwell. He was not exactly a "both sides have their merits" sort of person. The guy literally joined a militia to throw grenades at fascists.
You only find contraditions in his life if you try to apply tests of ideological purity rather than trying to meet him where he was.
Could anyone summarize what the author is likely to mean by this part:
> Why, then, did he determine that it was a fight worth fighting? Bravely, and at some cost to his health, he fought an unwinnable war for a unrealizable cause. But he still believed it was right to have fought and to have gone on encouraging others to continue doing so. Despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary, the issue, in his view, was simple: “Shall the common man be pushed back into the mud, or shall he not?”
> This explanation, entirely bereft of historical and cultural context, is bound to strike anyone half familiar with the history of the conflict as simplistic in the extreme, even simple-minded. Orwell wrote: “I myself believe, perhaps on insufficient grounds, that the common man will win his fight sooner or later . . . . That was the real issue of the Spanish war . . . and perhaps of other wars to come.”
I mean, it's fair to say that any one sentence summary of a war is going to be somewhat simplistic, but if one side has monarchists, fascists and military dictators on it, then it seems reasonable to me. Just the way the author writes it, I feel I should know of some alternative take that it seems like I don't.
What do the "mountains of evidence to the contrary" suggest (in this author's view)? Presumably something along the lines of fascism being better than risking communism, which seems to a strangely recurring historical motif.
The author claims Orwell had plenty of evidence the conflict wasn't winnable, which means it's a waste of life to fight it. Also that collectivism would have produced a worse tyranny, and potentially endangered representative democracy in Western Europe, given Spain would have had close ties to Moscow.
The thesis of the article is that Orwell is admired so much by all political sides because of his contradictions. He was against fascism, but he also recognized totalitarian tendencies in communism. Thus the line about some animals being more equal than others in Animal Farm.
Instead Spain became a fascist power with close ties to Berlin. Hardly less of a threat to representative democracy. Spain was a dictatorship until 1970.
Collectivism might have also produced tyranny but it's not a good thing that a fascist won.
But loss would have not been good for representative democracy either in Spain. People speak now as if Western Europe is some bastion of Democracy, Spain and Portugal were not within living memory.
Because a unified 'side of the common man' is an illusion. The article even explicitly mentions how Stalinist communists later on brutally suppressed the POUM, the group of communists Orwell served with, even though they were 'on the same side'.
The Russian civil war after the 1917 revolutions had something like a dozen different socialist factions fighting each other. There's plenty to disagree about (to the point of going to war) even if you agree on "big picture" stuff.
>How to account for the enduring interest in Orwell’s life and work?
I actually have a fairly uncharitable take on why he's so popular in the English speaking world. One reason is Orwell's inherent technophobia and parochialism which is arguably the dominant theme in American and English speculative fiction, what Leo Marx dubbed 'the Machine in the Garden' myth. It's about the idea of modernity, industrialization and urban society intruding an idealized agrarian culture. You find in in LOTR, Brave New World, 1984 with its waxing over natural chocolate and ink-pencils. Asimov addresses this in his pretty scathing critique of the book[1]. It also still pops up in virtually every English-language piece of dystopian fiction.
Another reason is the political aspect of his work in the US in particular. Orwell's politics was to a large degree a personal feud with Stalinism due to his experiences in the Spanish civil war. This unorthodox critique of Soviet communism coming from a socialist made him pretty much the ideal figure in the anti-communist discourse of US 20th century politics on both sides of the political spectrum. Rebellious enough to appeal to the liberal side, but actually pushing deeply conventional, conservative ideas. Also mirrored in Hitchens personal trajectory, who was a big admirer of Orwell.
>By my unscientific count, more words have been written about George Orwell than any other writer in the English language besides Dickens and Shakespeare.
I suppose it depends on whether you, like the author of the linked article, implicitly define "words written about" as synonymous with "the flow of publications", translated to sales of mainstream hard-copy published books. Google Trends is one way, sure, but there's also Fanfiction.net, which contains some 8,932 entries in the Harry Potter category. Some of those are compilations, some are just a couple thousand words, but many are super-novels at hundreds of thousands of words. You don't have to do much math to realize that's orders of magnitude larger than five biographies and 'several' publishers eyeing the 20-year expiration.
I think the internet favors newer books, as most people favor books by authors that are contemporaneous with them, and the internet allows all that writing that in previous generations would have been ephemeral and have a very short distribution to perhaps have greater permanence (perhaps not) but definitely a much wider distribution.
"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." -- George Orwell
I mean what do you call long term. There are a lot of democratic socialist countries that don't even seem to be eeking towards totalitarianism. If anything, the EU is going the other way.
You hear it a lot from left-anarchists who oppose Communism as practiced by the USSR, and they mean it differently from the way the Economist means it. They would say that under the USSR, the state owned the factories but the workers had no more power than they do in a western capitalist country: like the ending of "Animal Farm".
Now Britain is moving towards state capitalism, with "Great British Railways". This is in the tradition of British "lemon socialism" - have the government run the troubled industries. In the 1950s, the government owned the steel, coal, and rail industries.
"How Asia Works", by Joe Studwell, is worth reading. How East Asia moved into the 21st century is detailed, country by country. There were two startup phases: 1) Fix agriculture so it doesn't take most of the workforce, 2) Get export industries going.
Countries which got those two right did well, and those which did not, didn't.
Getting it wrong often involved the military running businesses, usually for the benefit of generals. The "Asian tigers" are now past that. It's not as clear on what the next phase is.
China has formal five year plans. Currently, the 14th five year plan, 2021-2025, is in progress. Unlike the USSR's five year plans, China's plans from the Sixth Plan (1981-1985) forward have been generally successful. The current plan has, as usual, a number of components. One is to catch up in some specific areas - aircraft, advanced semiconductors. That's coming along well. Another is "dual circulation" - building up internal demand and not being so dependent on exports.
The US generally avoids the government actively running businesses, but it's not that rare in other countries.
The first half of the 20th century was when none of the economic systems worked. Capitalism had the Depression, communism wasn't working all that well, and near-anarchy collapsed quite rapidly.
We still don't know how to make an economic system that works anywhere near optimum, but have so much excess productive capacity that it doesn't matter as much.
Orwell addressing his inner contradictions:
'I have no particular love for the idealized ‘worker’ as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.'
>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”
>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"
The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves
> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."
However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.