Animal Farm (1954) - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By Prue
#14926910
My understanding is that this is a parody of Communism.
In the USSR this film was banned, but at the same time they claimed it was an attack upon Capitalism.
Go figure.

It's interesting. America's richest man might have been Rockefeller. He would have been as rich as the
four richest Americans today. It's said he held nearly 2% of the total wealth of Americans (though this
money flowed through the economy)
One has to wonder how much "wealth" was held by Stalin or Mao for instance. These two more or less
owned their entire nations, and with the "right" to kill whomsoever they wished.
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By One Degree
#14926952
‘Animal Farm’ is so well known and so well critiqued, yet we learned nothing. So many are still oblivious to those changing the writings on the barn wall.
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By colliric
#14926956
One Degree wrote:‘Animal Farm’ is so well known and so well critiqued, yet we learned nothing. So many are still oblivious to those changing the writings on the barn wall.


Humanity has a history of not learning things.....

Ive watched both One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Gaslight lately.

It's obvious the Psychiatric profession didn't actually give a shit about either film. Nothing's really changed at all
By Sivad
#14926968
Today, we can take a relaxed view of Soviet communism as something awful which became dingily third-rate before imploding. We can thus deplore the excesses and hysteria of "anti-communism". But Orwell died in 1950 - in Stalin's lifetime. He had been witness to the Soviet-directed persecution and murder of POUM people in Catalonia. He was writing 1984 at a time when the takeover of Hungary by fraud, disappearances, packed meetings and, above all, infiltration of non-communist parties, especially the Socialist Party, had been briskly followed by the same process in Czechoslovakia.

Yes, of course Orwell was anti-communist. In that context, what should he have been?

The left really must come to terms with the acreage of naivety, well-wishing and looking on the bright side in which so many men of the left indulged when Stalin was killing everyone he felt like.
https://www.newstatesman.com/node/151419
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By Rancid
#14926969
Sivad wrote:Yes, of course Orwell was anti-communist. In that context, what should he have been?


NOt exactly true. He was a socialist. He rightly worried that Animal Farm would be high jack by conservatives and twisted to make it all about communism. What happens in Animal Farm can happen under just about any type of government/system.

This is similar to how conservatives act as though Adam Smith was a rabid capitalist because he wrote The Wealth of Nations. In reality that book is his attempt at an objective analysis of capitalism, it's supposed to be taken as an endorsement of capitalism.
By Sivad
#14926978
Rancid wrote:He was a socialist.


He was, he went to great pains to point out that Soviet gulagism was not socialism and that the gulagists were discrediting socialism by associating it with their red fascism.


He rightly worried that Animal Farm would be high jack by conservatives and twisted to make it all about communism.


He was right to worry. Chomsky often points out that both the capitalists and the gulagists relish conflating gulagism with socialism. The capitalists do it to discredit real socialism and the gulagists do it to justify their bloody repressive tyranny.

What happens in Animal Farm can happen under just about any type of government/system.


Any illiberal, authoritarian-collectivist system anyway.

This is similar to how conservatives act as though Adam Smith was a rabid capitalist because he wrote The Wealth of Nations. In reality that book is his attempt at an objective analysis of capitalism, it's supposed to be taken as an endorsement of capitalism.


By Sivad
#14927004
Re. your query about Animal Farm. Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job. The turning-point of the story was supposed to be when the pigs kept the milk and apples for themselves (Kronstadt).1 If the other animals had had the sense to put their foot down then, it would have been all right. If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism. In the case of Trotskyists, there is the added complication that they feel responsible for events in the USSR up to about 1926 and have to assume that a sudden degeneration took place about that date. Whereas I think the whole process was foreseeable—and was foreseen by a few people, eg. Bertrand Russell—from the very nature of the Bolshevik party. What I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship. - George Orwell to Dwight Macdonald, written in December 1946
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By One Degree
#14927006
To say his writings only apply to illiberal societies, because that is who he was writing about is to demean his work. The fact we can see it has wider applications than perhaps even he saw at the time is a credit to his insight and his work. It doesn’t limit it’s application.
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By anarchist23
#14927018
It's not just a condemnation of communism in Russia but it can also apply to any hierarchical system of government.

#15011853
Prue wrote:My understanding is that this is a parody of Communism.
In the USSR this film was banned, but at the same time they claimed it was an attack upon Capitalism.
Go figure.

It's interesting. America's richest man might have been Rockefeller. He would have been as rich as the
four richest Americans today. It's said he held nearly 2% of the total wealth of Americans (though this
money flowed through the economy)
One has to wonder how much "wealth" was held by Stalin or Mao for instance. These two more or less
owned their entire nations, and with the "right" to kill whomsoever they wished.


Practical communism is capitalism on steroids.
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By Wellsy
#15120659
An interesting interpretation of Animal Farm.
https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08854300.2017.1327133
The prominent contemporary Soviet-Russian philosopher Sergey Mareev (a student of Ilyenkov) notes that after translating George Orwell’s 1984 in the mid-1970s, Ilyenkov concluded that Orwell’s “communist anti-utopia wonderfully demonstrated the evolutionary tendencies of a society of private property holders, even though Orwell himself ascribed it to ‘communism’” (Mareev 2015: 281). These words are Mareev’s summary of what Ilyenkov said to him after showing him the typewritten pages of his Orwell translation. To the extent that the pervasive alienation painted by Orwell was present in Soviet everyday life, Ilyenkov took it to indicate the continued presence of specific remnants of bourgeois society – rejected by the socialist revolution, but as yet not fully overcome in everyday life. In fact, such thoughts were already on his mind long before translating Orwell. For instance, Ilyenkov writes in his 1966 essay Marx and the Western World:

The nightmares of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are in fact – independent of the illusions of the authors of these anti-utopias – painting not at all the evolutionary perspectives of socialist societies, but rather the terrifying perspective of development of the private-capitalist forms of property holding. By painting “contemporary communism” through external signs and symptoms, these authors are in fact drawing out the actual line of drift of the commodity capitalist formation/order of life. This is precisely why these nightmares are so scary to the humanist-intellectual of the “western world.” Us they don’t scare. We understand these tendencies as our previous and not yet completely lived through yesterday. (Mareev 2015: 283–284)

It is easy to accuse Ilyenkov of excessive optimism about Soviet intellectuals being deeply aware of the risks and political dangers posed by lingering ideological and economic structures from the capitalist past. But one can easily detect in his other writings, written for a different context, a deep worry about the seemingly persistent Soviet inability (especially in political thought) to overcome these vestiges of the pre-revolutionary society. In a gloomy entry written in January 1968 to his close friend Yuri Zhdanov, Ilyenkov is repeatedly apprehensive about the emergence of a “rotten timelessness” in everyday life:

... [when] everyone who can do something interesting retreats in their burrows, and all kinds of uncouth evil crawls out, not having forgotten anything, nor having for that matter learned anything; it crawls out hungrier, angrier and more bastardly than ever before. (Mareev 2015: 280)

Ilyenkov never ceased to ponder the political dynamic of Soviet society, a dynamic inseparable from the question of the movement towards socialism, but also explicitly connected to questions of hegemony and ideology, even if expressed (as in these passages) through the lens of Marxist political economy. Though not a frequent user of the word “alienation,” Ilyenkov understood the movement towards socialism as emerging out of the need to transcend the problematic of “alienation” rooted in capitalist property relations. As Mareev explains (2014: 281 – 282), “in the first stage of this process, by rejecting private property, in its ‘private form’, it gives birth to private property in its universal (general state property) form, intensifying alienation.”

I take it this is a continuation of Marx's point about the marks of the old society in the new.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.

Although Marx's context is about the value and compensation of labor to disrupt the socially necessarily labor time which drives capitalist production and Ilyenkov is focusing on how the culture based in everyday living isn't being radically transformed and is shifting back to the views of a capitalist society such as neopositivism.
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By Crantag
#15120848
A great piece of literature. You know what they say about Orwell. He is every leftist's favorite leftist, and every right winger's favorite right winger. He is nuanced, actually. But he did go fight in the Spanish Civil War on the anarchist side, and ended up getting shot in the throat. I am not sure if it was by the POUM (communists who turned on the anarchists) or the fascists, don't quite recall. Read Homage to Catalonia. He had no love for communists.

I had a complete volume of his works before, but it was one of the books I abandoned in a heap in Tokyo (in my university, where people would scavenge the books). I had to do that with a lot of books. I spent like a grand to send back the most special ones. And I spent days cutting and digitizing as many as I could on the university's equipment (not like they've done me much use, as I prefer to read on paper, personally. Ebooks are good sometimes, but I'm more of a paper guy.)
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