[PEN-L:32543] RE: Animal Farm parodied;

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Title: RE: Animal Farm parodied;

I wrote:> SNOWBALL'S CHANCE sounds like a good book, but it's wrong to see ANIMAL FARM as the Cold Warriors did, i.e., as a simple anti-communist book. As seen in the summary below, at the end of ANIMAL FARM, the animals can't tell the difference between the pig rulers and humans. Orwell seemed to be saying that the "communist" society had ended up being much the same as capitalism. <

Louis:>Yes, this fit in nicely with the "end of ideology" tilt of the late 1940s, early 1950s. Although I wouldn't try to overburden Orwell's fable with a lengthy exegesis, I would say that it does encourage a rather fatalistic view of society. Look, some high school teacher might say, this is what happens when you meddle with the natural order. You end up with a worse state of affairs. <

With the continued disaster in the USSR at the time and (more importantly) the failure (or non-occurence) of the revolutionary surge of the working class he expected after World War II, along with his own physical problems (TB?), it's true that Orwell was quite fatalistic. In the end, he was so fatalistic that he finked, as is well known.

(I'm pretty sure the "end of ideology" is more of a late 1950s thing, since that's what ex-socialist Daniel Bell referred to in his 1962 book. The post-WW2 period era was more one of the "god that failed," where a bunch of ex CP members and the like decided to go with the anti-communist/pro-capitalist flow, partly in response to the perceived failures of the CP.)

>By the time this book was written, Orwell had forsaken all of his earlier revolutionary beliefs and was quite amenable to democratic capitalism, a contradiction in terms if there  ever was one.<

It's a contradiction in the real (class) sense: the working class fights for democracy, while the capitalists fight for capitalism uber alles. Luckily the capitalists haven't won completely, but it's getting close...

JD