[Marxism] RE: GLW on Orwell

["Tom O'Lincoln" <suarsos@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>Between us we may have laid the deception of Orwell as a progressive.
As a writer he had talent. But in was in the service of reaction -
George Anthony<<

I suppose you mean "laid to rest"? Not really. I've read two of the
articles. Phil Shannon, acknowledges Orwell as an "anti-stalinist
leftist" at his peak, and as someone soured by the defeat of the Spanish
revolution and Stalinist betrayal in later years (none of which is
really news) but still not without a certain "dwindling faith" in the
proles. This is a seriouis analysis of "paradoxical politics". Phil sees
more than one dimension, and approaches the topic dialectically and
materialistically, unlike the one-eyed attackers on this list.

Which is not to say I agree with everthing he says. It seems to me the
main reason the right wing can seize upon Animal Farm is that there WAS
a tragic degeneration of the Russian revolution into stalinism, which
the bulk of the left foolishly covered up. It is silly to blame Orwell
because he didn't offer a correct Marxist analysis of something most
Communists of the era misunderstood much worse than he did.


________________________________________________
YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.
Send list submissions to: Marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism