I Often Wonder...

How many people out there finish "Animal Farm" and "1984", and they takeout is that the book about the importance of class solidarity against a totalitarian authority is somehow against socialism?

And I know that Red Scare propaganda is a factor here, but even then, in the age of information you would think more people would do more than just repeat what they were told in school.

Comments

[Herrzog]

People will read into those books what they want to get out of them, a validation of their existing views.

It doesn't help that many so-called 'socialist' states have devolved into dictatorships after their aspirational beginnings, whose popular uprisings were exploited by some charismatic figure or other to ride the wave to power before instituting policies that criminalized dissent, as happened to the Marxist revolutions in Russia and China. The class war was won by the lower classes, who came to power and became what they fought against.

[Magenta Cat]

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On the other hand, examples of socialism working are often brushed aside as unimportant (Chile before the dictatorship, Vietnam, Portugal) or somehow attributed to capitalism (all of Scandinavia, New Zealand, Ireland). But then, again because of the Red Scare, there's the idea that socialism must be the result of a bloody revolt and subsequent totalitarian regime.

And on the other, other hand, I always find it weird they never point out to things like Russia's oligarchy being modeled as a neoliberalist system, or the disaster that was the implementation of neoliberalism through the US supporting dictatorships in most of Latin America. Those aren't as associated to capitalism/neoliberalism as the CCCP and China are to Marxism/Communism/Socialism.

But changing a bit of the topic, I recently came to meet a new way to misread "1984" that honestly baffled me. A friend once was more interested in the concept of the telescreen and how innovative it was for Orwell to think about it 1948 since it could be an analog of the smart screen that's so dominating of modern life.

I find it one hell of a misfire in reading a dystopia and being more impressed with the sci-fi aspect. But more so when it happens on a larger scale, like with Foundation's deconstruction of the pioneer's myth and Snow Crash pretty much stopping at moments to remind the reader the corporatization of the public space is wrong. Yet, you see people, especially those who study and work at STEM, who seem to not even see those aspects and are more interested in how they translate in Musk's private space program, or Zuckerberg's metaverse.