For those who believe in revolution by force, a question?
- Thread starter A380
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A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
I had forgotten Portugal, bit of a special case, but I would add it to my list of places I'd live.
I would say that killing about 20 million people a year worldwide because you can't financially profit from keeping them alive is the opposite of moderate myself.
Down and Out in Paris in London by Orwell also gives you some idea of the extremism and injustice of bourgeois democracy/capitalism.
HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
Tough shit!
HoratioCuthbert
Deep seated inconsequence
Or is it “may the most competitive ideology win- tough shit!”
Really incoherent lot of posts from you here.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
This is a country where the home secretary openly talks about pushing refugees into the sea.
Peter Painter
Well-Known Member
Absolutely!
I read 1984 when I was quite young and it blew my mind. I wondered how anybody could have gotten to a point in their mind that they could produce a work of such horror.
So then I read everything and anything I could find by Orwell. As you say, his experiences in Spain are key to his political development, and Homage to Catalonia is the text that marks the change in Orwell.
I loved the way, in HtoC, that he informs his readers that particular chapters are going to deal with the politics of the Spanish Civil War, and that if they're not interested in that then they should feel free to skip to the next chapter!
I didn't skip. But I didn't understand any of it that much. Then I ended up studying the Spanish Civil War and finally, many years later, I got it! I understood how he had reached the point where he could write 1984 (and Animal Farm too).
Homage to Catalonia isn't the only thing Orwell wrote about the civil war, there are essays and letters too. The more you read the more you understand how important the Stalinist treachery effected Orwell's political understanding.
There is a Penguin book that collects together all of his writings about Spain. It's called 'Orwell in Spain' and it was very useful to me when I was studying*.
* Apart from one letter in there that the editor has dated wrong. I lost about three days thinking, "this can't be right, he's talking about something that hasn't happened yet!" After extensive cross-referencing I found the letter and the correct date. This made for a great footnote where I explained that editor Professor Davison had got his dates confused!
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seventh bullet
sovietwave
It is a warning against the authoritarian tendencies that can emerge in western political movements (Stalinism imo is a marginal variation of western modernity) but the more absurd totalitarian aspects of life in the novel are to illustrate the cowardice and servility of intellectuals in the face of such power. This in part comes from his experience not just as a fighter but also a journalist, and the willingness of other leftwing journalists to spread lies about what was happening in Spain for the benefit of the USSR. He made the distinction, though, between ordinary Communist men and women fighting to defend the Republic and Soviet agents.
American Trot turned anti-Communist James Burnham, whose theorising of a coming new era of human civilisation as seen in The Managerial Revolution, was partly the inspiration for the future totalitarian world of 1984, ordered into continental superstates, ruled by bureaucracies without democratic input and perpetually at war with one another even as ideologically they become increasingly indistinct. Orwell noted that Burnham once saw the Nazi system defeating the Soviet and New Deal era USA as the most viable manifestation of this trend in modernity.
Peter Painter
Well-Known Member
You're quite right to mention the influence of Burnham on Orwell. He was definitely an inspiration for 1984. Here is an essay Orwell wrote about Burnham in 1946, three years before the publication of 1984:
George Orwell: Second Thoughts on James Burnham
Second Thoughts on James Burnham, the review of George Orwell. First published: summer 1946 by/in Polemic, GB, London
orwell.ru
You're also right to make the distinction between Blair the anti-fascist volunteer and Orwell the writer.
His experiences in Spain were key in his own political development but it was when he returned to England and discovered that the left-wing press had been telling lies about what had happened in Spain (events to which he had been an eye-witness) that he really lost his temper!
He'd been expecting the right-wing press to be guilty of such things but his suspicion that papers such as The Herald and the New Statesman and Nation were deliberately suppressing information about the Spanish Revolution from the British public was just too much. It became, for a while at least, something of an obsession for him. He was determined the truth be told and recommended that people should read this pamphlet:
Edit: link wasn't working but you can find the pamphlet (called, 'The truth about Barcelona') by following this link:
The Barcelona May Days, 1937
Spanish Civil War archives relating to the events in Barcelona during May 1937
warwick.ac.uk
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gosub
~#
Revolutions don't stop until they have eaten themselves.
Artaxerxes
Look out, he's got a gnu!
snip
hitmouse
music obfuscation technology
Is that link meant to be in your post? Or is the point like "Revolutions don't stop until they have eaten themselves, for instance in the form of a meal at this nice Indian restaurant"?Revolutions don't stop until they have eaten themselves.
gosub
~#
More: revolutions don't stop until they have eaten theselves. Meanwhile if you are looking for somewhere decent to eat in Cheltenahm
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
The UK kills 20 million people a year worldwide?
Idris2002
Christmas Eve, you know?
It does its bit.
No. But the capitalist system does.
danny la rouge
I have a cheese grater in the dishwasher.
What is my crime? Eating a meal? A succulent Indian meal?
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
You're going to have to show me your working on this one.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Apparently about 55m people died in 2015. So your 20m would be ~40% of the total. I'm not unsympathetic to your claim but it'd be nice to see your source
Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
Can't remember the exact figures but as I recall, around 40,000 children die every day as a result of poverty/malnutrician. That's a direct consequence of a society based on production for profit rather than need.
Malnutrition in Children - UNICEF DATA
Nearly half of all deaths in children under 5 are attributable to undernutrition; undernutrition puts children at greater risk of dying from common infections, increases the frequency and severity of such infections, and delays recovery.
data.unicef.org
Appalling figures: half of child deaths under 5 are due to malnutrition. Unicef data suggests 3.1 million children die annually from starvation and poverty, which equates to around 8.5K a day. Not quibbling about exact figures as the outcomes from late stage vulture capitalism are universally shaming.
ItWillNeverWork
Messy Crimbobs, fellow humans.
Is it really a direct consequence of a profit-based society though? A quick search threw up these:
Clearly we aren't any less profit-driven now than we were in the 60s or 90s, so how does that square with what you're saying?
Yeah, I'm sure it's outdated now. But the sources were UN Water and poverty.com.
I first saw the info here. But I think it has done the rounds elsewhere. I've seen it cited and discussed a fair bit online :
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What absolute nonsense
I can’t even…
Interesting post by seventh bullet up there. What do you mean by this tho
Substantial change can only ever be achieved through force because very few powerful privileged people ever willing give up power and privilege. And those people will always resist equality and equity in all forms because by definition that would eliminate power and privilege.
I know. Terrible use of decimal points.What absolute nonsense
I can’t even…
Interesting post by seventh bullet up there. What do you mean by this tho
Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
You do realise that the vast majority of famines are 'man-made'? Even with the few famines that that are not a direct result of human fuckups, the fact that we live in a system based on profit over need only exacerbates the suffering and hardship. The fact that, at times, the capitalist class and their governments are pressured into showing a more humane side (e.g. Corporate Social Responsibility and a bit of philanthropic endeavour) has no bearing on the fact that it is the system itself which is the major cause of this carnage. As long as the profit system exists, then poverty, hunger, malnutrion and famine will continue. In some years (and in some parts of the world) there will be fewer deaths and better public health, others more, but it will still be with us.
seventh bullet
sovietwave
There is an interminable debate/s regarding the nature of Stalinism. I have cowardly given myself a way of moving between sides (there are no two clear sides despite the crap that went on during the Cold War) with my use of the term marginal. In brief, there is a tendency (not a definitive one) to see Stalinism as a clear result of a pre-modern despotic tradition and political culture in Russian society, and more widely, a brutally subjugated, internally and externally colonised empire, and it is this that overpowered with its historical weight any western revolutionary input the Bolsheviks had in Russian political development.
In my unqualified view Stalinism was new but with caveats (me being a coward again). Stalin the man wasn't a Tsar in a khaki tunic only interested in naked power but the leader of a modern revolutionary political party, and throughout his leadership the USSR remained under a party dictatorship. And there's more, in the words of Jimmy Cricket, but I am suffering greatly from the symptoms of man flu, so later...
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