Subject: Re: EVEN GEORGE ORWELL SAW FASCISM AS SOCIALISM

From: [email-masked] (Neil Alasdair McEwan)
Date: 15 Sep 1996 20:54:42 GMT

Calvin Bruce Ostrum ([email-masked]) wrote:
: In <[email-masked]>,
:    [email-masked] (Neil Alasdair McEwan) wrote:

: | : take George Orwell's warning about 1984 seriously. Orwell warned that a
: | : crude and brutal totalitarianism would come from the Left of politics and
: | : subvert the liberal democratic freedoms we are all supposed to enjoy. ...
:  
: |      Yes he did, and with good reason.  He saw that the fatal flaw of 
: | socialism is that you cannot have centralized economic power with a 
: | correspondingly centralized political power to enforce it, and this 
: | guarantees that any truly socialist state will be a police state. 

: If Orwell saw all this, then why did he consider himself a socialist?

     It's not a matter of "if" -- he actually *did* see it, if you read 
his review of Hayek's 1936 book "The Road to Serfdom".  My only guess as 
to why he remained a socialist is because capitalism remained so 
unpalatable to him that he kept hoping for a miraculous solution that 
would bring socialism without a loss of freedom.  And after all, many of 
today's socialists are in the same position -- for every hundred of them, 
it seems as if only one or two is willing to put forward a coherent 
proposal for an alternative system.  The rest simply have "reactionary" 
views: they know what they don't like, but they're not sure what to do 
about it.

: | I have
: | read many leftist fulminations in my lifetime but I have never read any 
: | that resolved this dilemma in the slightest.

: Have you read David Schweickart's "Against capitalism", or Robert Dahl's
: "Preface to economic democracy?" or Carol Gould's "Rethinking democracy",
: or Frank Cunningham's "Democratic theory and socialism"?

     No indeed, tho' now that you mention it those titles have been duly 
noted.  Still, let's keep this interesting during the time I run off to 
my local library, get the books, and read them: why don't you summarize the 
views of these authors for me and we'll take this discussion from there?  

: |      Was it "the Right" that eliminated democracy in China?  In Russia?  
: | In the Ukraine?  In Byelorussia?  In Poland?  In Latvia?  In 
: | Czechoslovakia?  In Lithuania?  In Estonia?  In Bulgaria?  In Romania?  
: | In Albania?  In Georgia?  In Kazakhstan?  In Kyrgyzhstan?  In Armenia?  
: | In Azerbaijan?  In Hungary?  In Moldova?  In Tibet?  In Cuba?  In 
: | Cambodia?  In Vietnam?  In North Korea?  In Mozambique?  In Angola?  In 
: | Ethiopia?  Get a clue, you moron.

: Orwell warned about what could happen with totalitarian states and probably
: would have predicted what happened in many of these locations.  So why
: do you think he still considered himself to be "on the left" and a 
: socialist?  Do you have any ideas on this at all?

     Yes I do.  In the first place, it's extremely difficult to deal with 
having been wrong, and in Orwell's case having been *publicly* wrong, for 
such a long time.  My father-in-law is a staunch NDP supporter from 
Ontario, and since the late 1960s was personally acquainted with many NDP 
figures there.  He worked his whole life just to see the NDP in power in 
Ontario.  Now the NDP government has come and gone -- and what was the 
result?  Incompetence, corruption, bad economic policies, and staggering 
unpopularity.  Now, this man is in his fifties, and everything he worked 
for turned out to be a joke.  But he's not going to admit that he's been 
wrong, even though what happened depresses him very much.  You see, 
socialism is not so much a political programme as a quasi-religious 
philosophy.  Unlike capitalism, it demands faith, since according to 
socialists there never has been a "true" socialist state.  Utopia is like 
heaven, you have to believe in it, and you have to dedicate your life to 
bringing it about.  Naturally like any other religious conception of the 
world this is very hard to shake off.  After years of believing that your 
ideological opponents are greedy self-interested moralizing hypocrites, 
which is more or less the standard Left view of capitalists, it's very 
difficult to all of a sudden turn about and say that perhaps *they* were 
the ones with the right idea -- it's a bit like Pat Robertson coming 
around to the conclusion that maybe Satan just had bad PR.  My conclusion 
is that Orwell saw what was wrong with socialism but was nowhere near 
being ready enough to turn back and endorse capitalism.  Instead, near 
the end of his life he began to lay more of an emphasis on common decency 
and morality, rather than on grand social schemes.  I think he was on his 
way to becoming a liberal, believe it or not -- a person who believes 
that "cruelty is the worst thing we do", as Rorty put it.  But he had not 
yet reached that stage when he died.

: | universities are effectively dead when they allow ideology to override 
: | and eliminate truth -- especially when it's the truth of mass murder.

: |      There's no such thing as "corporate welfare".  What you are 
: | referring to is the money that corporations legally earn and avoid having 
: | to fork over to the government.  Real welfare by contrast is a handout 
: | from the government to the recipient.  When a mugger tries to take all of 
: | your money and you manage to save some for yourself, he has not given you 
: | "welfare".  Got it?

: Is this an example of the "truth" that you feel has been overridden and
: eliminated by "ideology" in the universities?

     Yes.  If you disagree, say so and explain why.

Le meas,

Neil A. McEwan
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