Orwell Rocks!

Well, really this is a review of Road to Wigan Pier, but since that title is supremely lame for the book itself, I couldn’t use it as the blog title either.

Wigan is a city in England, northwest of Manchester.  It is not on the coast, so the “pier” was just a riverfront with no access to the Atlantic Ocean, much less any beaches.   The title really says almost nothing about what the whole thing was about.  [All I knew about Wigan before this is that they have a soccer team.]

For those of you familiar with only 1984 and Animal Farm, let me clue you in.  Orwell had a substantial volume of nonfiction as well, and remarkably, his non-fiction is at least as entertaining as his fiction.  Mainly it’s because he had such a phenomenal way of describing things, a perpetual WTF attitude, that he could describe paint drying and it would be interesting. 

Up until this point I considered Homage to Catalonia, his “WTF” account of his brief experience in the POUM (non-Stalinist, socialist militia) in the Spanish Civil War, to be his best nonfiction.  He was in Barcelona in May 1937 when the various Republican factions – Fascists miles away – took shots at each other.  If you want to know about the Spanish Civil War, read this one.

Anyhow.  In Road, he goes up to northern England and visits different cities, notably Wigan, but also Sheffield (home of Def Leppard, not mentioned herein).  In particular he went into the coal mines to see what that was like.  As a tall guy, he had a hard time.  He came away with a much better understanding, tactically, of what coal miners do.  But he also came away with a better understanding of the bigger picture of working class relations in that part of the country.  There’s really no substitute for actually going somewhere to see with your own eyes, hear with your ears, smell with your own nose, taste with your own tongue, and feel with your own appropriate body part, what is actually going on. 

In the second half of the book, he takes issue with the contemporary socialist movement.  At that time – 1937 – Hitler and Mussolini were well in power, but so was Stalin in the USSR.  Capitalist democracies appeared helpless to fight the two extremes (what he would say once the US entered the war, might be something else).  One thing he noticed was that very few socialists were actually FROM the working class.  Most were bourgeois.  Another thing he noticed is that very few of these bourgeois socialists had ever even met, much less associated with, any members of the working class they professed to champion.  To the contrary, they could not bring themselves to shed their existing unease and contempt for these folk.  Moreover, on the few occasions in which they did, they could not resist acting as snobs, intellectual and otherwise, and using Marxist jargon, and going on about how great Stalin was and what a wonderful place the Soviet Union was.  The perverse result was that too many workers, whose interests were served by the socialists and opposed by the fascists - and were often even able to recognize that for themselves - were driven into the enemy's arms by the spectacularly poor job the socialists did of selling their cause.  Socialist Facepalm.  

I recall a Nation article ages ago written by Michael Moore.  Yeah, the fat “Roger & Me” guy.  He bitched about ivory tower socialist intellectuals who never come near a factory worker, wrapped up in Marxist ideology and jargon – “proletariat”, “bourgeois”, “class consciousness”, etc. – none of which means anything to the GM, Ford, and Chrysler workers who the socialists are trying to reach.   His advice (copying Orwell’s): “Hang out with them, go to a hockey game, go hunting with them.  Talk about how the company is screwing them over.  Whatever you do, don’t go on about Marxism.”  I assume Moore had read Road, as Orwell said the same thing to his colleagues in England in 1937. 

Orwell also reviews much of the contemporary socialist literature, plus H.G. Wells and Aldous Huxley (Brave New World).  Again, I found his analysis of the contemporary situation and his fellow socialists to be riveting.  What I find especially refreshing is his ability to concede points and play devil’s advocate. 

I’m not now, nor have I ever been a socialist, and I doubt I ever will be.  However, by far the most persuasive case that can be made, is made by Orwell.   His closest contemporary equivalents are Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and Michael Moore.  Neither are very persuasive; both are too arrogant, too stuck up, too self-satisfied.  I’m not aware they were coordinating on the same team, though Hitchens seemed to fight the more intellectual capitalists while Moore focused on the trenches, as it were.  I don’t consider either to be particularly effective.  Judging by the outcome last November, Moore did a poor job getting the American proletariat to oppose Donald Trump.  What’s even more remarkable, and what Orwell was noting in his own time, is that most of Trump’s opposition, and Hillary’s support, came from people we’d describe as bourgeois:  upper class white people.  In fact, much of what Orwell describes in 1937 could also apply to 2017 – a surprising amount.  I have to wonder how recently Bernie Sanders or Jill Stein have consulted Orwell.  Not recently, it seems…if at all.  Then again, I doubt Trump is even aware of Orwell’s existence, much less having read any of his books.

As for my own readers, I would advise everyone, socialist or not, to read this book if they haven’t already.  Orwell’s analysis is superb.  It’s witty.  It’s funny (far more so than 1984 or Animal Farm).  Non-socialists will probably enjoy reading Orwell take the piss out of his fellow socialists.  And the socialists among you may well enjoy Orwell’s wit and honesty. 

Or maybe not.  

Alan Moore

I mentioned The Watchmen in my blog about “Dark Knight”.  I’m not a big comic book fan, but I make an exception for Alan Moore – somehow his work is compelling, even if it is, sometimes, pretentious.  He’s done tons of stuff, but by far his most popular – and the only stuff I’m familiar with (!) – is listed below.

 The Watchmen (artwork: Dave Gibbons).  Of course, we have the plot by now, but for those of you who neither saw the movie nor read the graphic novel, which supposedly started this whole thing:  Dr Manhattan, the big blue naked guy, is virtually omnipotent, but he’s so intelligent that sometimes he’s a little clueless.  He’s so far above us all that he has trouble relating to us or talking to us as equals.  Thanks to his work in Indochina, the US won the Vietnam War, and Nixon was able to weasel 5 terms, so he’s still President in 1985, which is when the story takes place.  Another superhero, the arch-cynical Comedian, is killed, and his comrade Rorschach takes it upon himself to find out what’s really going on.  Ultimately they uncover a huge plot by Ozymandias – sort of Batman’s Bruce Wayne without the Batman part, and without Wayne’s high moral standards  – to solve the Cold War at the cost of several million lives and framing Dr. Manhattan.  Along the way, Silk Spectre – the token super hot superheroine, and daughter of the original Silk Spectre from WWII – and Nite Owl, himself a 2^nd generation Nite Owl – the nerdy but wealthy Batman type – hook up and help out Rorschach. This is one story where you’re unsure to be amazed and impressed with its complexity or disgusted by its sheer cynicism and weight.  It’s certainly different.

 V for Vendetta (artwork: David Lloyd).  Also turned into a movie, with Hugo Weaving (Elrond from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, and the computer nemesis from the Matrix movies) behind the Guy Fawkes mask and Natalie Portman as the girl.  This takes place in the distant future, where England is now a totalitarian dictatorship, very reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984.  One lone rebel, known only as V, and perpetually wearing a Guy Fawkes mask, takes on the hapless regime, with a surprising amount of success.  We don’t know who he is (or even if it is a “he”) but have some clue that this person survived torture and other atrocities at one of the regime’s concentration camps.  In some ways it actually seems like a sequel to 1984 – what if, instead of the hapless Winston, we actually had someone who had the guts and the intelligence to pull off an underground war, by himself, against the state.  Certainly Jon Hurt didn’t seem like that guy.

 The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (artwork: Kevin O’Neill).  Yes, turned into a movie, with Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain (H. Rider Haggard).  Moore basically picks famous, notable fictional characters from popular American and English literature, slams them together as superheroes, then sets them off on various sophisticated adventures.  The other heroes are The invisible Man (H.G. Wells), Dr. Jeckyll/Mr. Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson), Captain Nemo (Jules Verne), and Wilhelmina Murray (Bram Stoker).  The villains were first Professor Moriarty (Arthur Conan Doyle’s nemesis to Sherlock Holmes, who himself is absent) then H.G. Wells’ Martians from War of the Worlds.    

 Lost Girls (artwork: Melinda Gebbie).  I’m still waiting for the movie of this one, which is probably not going to happen.  Alice in Wonderland, Wendy (from Peter Pan), and Dorothy (from Wizard of Oz) find themselves together in a hotel somewhere in Europe (Austria?) in the spring of 1914, just before WWI is about to explode.  Alice, by this time, is an older, mature woman, Wendy is older but unhappily married (frustrated, as we can imagine), and Dorothy is still young and single, but has a boyfriend.  There is LOTS of sex here: 50% lesbian, 40% heterosexual (though some of that is incestuous) and 10% gay.  The artwork, as done by Gebbie, is meant to imitate a children’s book of the turn of the century, though clearly the content is well beyond any children’s book.  This was borderline erotic vs. interesting.

 Of course, Alan Moore, who is a big Simpsons fan, appeared as himself in a 2007 episode.  Funny, though – none of his stuff has been made into an animated film, it’s all been live action.  Perhaps Lost Girls can fill this role.

Communism vs. National Socialism vs. Capitalism

This is NOT a rehash of my GULAG v. HOLOCAUST blog, nor is it an attempt to apologize for or glorify National Socialism, but more of an overall discussion on a wider topic, authoritarianism vs. totalitarianism vs. capitalism.

Authoritarian regimes are typically the right-wing dictatorships and juntas, such as Brazil’s military from 1964-85, Marcos, Pinochet, Salazar, Batista, the various South Vietnamese governments from 1955-75, etc.  Really you just have a thug or general who wants power for its own sake, little excuse beyond that, and all he cares about it making sure he gets his “piece of the action” and enough pussy (or whatever his particular vice happens to be).  He has no grand vision, no big plans, no grandiose scheme or desire to micromanage the entire country down to the last molecule – and no pretensions thereof.

Totalitarian regimes are what we think of like 1984, where the state encompasses the entire society and attempts to control literally everything.  With the exception of Nazi Germany, they are invariably communist regimes: Soviet Russia, Red China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea.  From cradle to grave, the regime seeks to modify not merely our behavior but our very thoughts.  Unlike authoritarian regimes, which rarely bother to justify their existences, power, or authority, totalitarian regimes cloak their actions in the veneer of ideology and moral superiority.  “We represent the PEOPLE – if you oppose us, you oppose the people, and must be struck down.”

Class.  According to Marxist doctrine, there are three classes: the aristocracy (kings, queens, nobles), the bourgeois (merchants and capitalists), and the proletariat (workers and peasants).  Under feudalism, the aristocracy rules, with a small but growing bourgeois class.  Eventually the bourgeois overthrows the aristocracy and institutes capitalism, then sets about exploiting the proletariat until it too is eventually overthrown in a proletarian revolution - and we get socialism.  Eventually the state withers away to a point of anarchy called communism, and we all live happily ever after.  “Communist” regimes are actually socialist, as true communism has never been achieved in any country – nor is it ever likely.

Under a socialist dictatorship, the state is supposedly the legal representative of the proletariat.  The bourgeois are dispossessed and thrown into re-education camps to be rehabilitated into socialist society.  Without any class besides proletariat, such a society is, theoretically, classless.  By comparison, under the fascist/National Socialist dictatorship, all three classes are subjugated to the state, which represents the people.  Worker, farmer, businessman, industrialist, all are enslaved to the state.  For this reason, fascists and communists ostensibly hate each other and oppose each other vigorously, yet the reality is that they have far more in common than the theoretical ideological deviations would suggest.

In many countries in Western Europe, the socialist party has taken power, yet without installing the dreaded dictatorship of the proletariat.  Instead, they maintain the market system, individual rights, and otherwise a capitalist democracy, though with 90% taxes, free health care, free education, 40 hour work week, pensions, etc.  These are essentially capitalist countries with substantial doses of socialism added.

Stalin v. Trotsky.  Neither had much of any ideological differences with the other: Trotsky was merely the loser of the power struggle.

Cult of personality.  Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Ceaucescu.  Despite being about “the people”, communist regimes oddly focused on strong single personalities, individual leaders.  The reality was, none of these leaders cared about the people: they simply cared about power for its own sake, and were predictably brutal and ruthless about suppressing revolt even from within the proletariat.  Lenin dismissed reports of cannibalism among Ukrainian peasants by laughing that this meant they were too weak to oppose him.  The rare examples of sincere patriots inevitably became the first victims of the purges, in which the revolution weeds out the idealists in favor of the pragmatists - who are the only ones devious and ruthless enough to survive or prosper under such regimes.

1984 & Animal Farm.  George Orwell’s pair of books, each explaining these concepts in a different way.  1984 examines the nature of the state itself, which ultimately exists for its own sake, against its own people.  Ayn Rand once defined “dictatorship” as a war between the government and its own, legally disarmed, people.  And this is explained in even more detail in the book Winston reads, provided to him by O’Brien, who is pretending to be part of the resistance but is in fact an officer of the secret police.  Odd, though:  O'Brien turns out to be more of a source of information to Winston than the other way around, and the torture Winston endures is not to extract information - he knows far less than O'Brien does, and little of value - but to corrupt him, force him to betray his lover, and destroy him as a person and an individual.  Indeed, the movie "The Lives of Others", concerning a Stasi agent in East Berlin in the mid 80s, shows that the quality of life of the secret police really wasn't that much better than that of the poets, playwrights, actors, etc. who were the victims of the police state.  It was all one big  dark, depressing prison for everyone concerned.

            Animal Farm works on several different levels.  The animals sincerely want liberation from their human master, and were reasonable in following the pigs’ revolution.  But you can also see how the worker – Boxer, the horse – is ultimately exploited by the same revolution, and how the pigs eventually took over the same role as the human farmer.  Even the vicious, snarling, dogs act as the enforcers for the pigs.

Nazi Germany.  The notable exception, the only totalitarian regime which was not communist.  The Nazis had an ideology, a Final Solution, the SS, the Gestapo, and the will to carry it out.  Hitler had a master plan, as described (vaguely) in Mein Kampf, for anyone patient enough to read it.  Cloaked in German nationalism and anti-semitism, the Nazis terrorized not only the Jews and subject occupied nations, but their own people, as willing victims, co-conspirators in mass insanity as they may have been.  But while the world is fairly unanimous in challenging and condemning this form of totalitarianism, equally oppressive and evil forms – especially Soviet Russia – found no shortage of “useful idiots” apologizing for, or even supporting, their ideologies.  Tom Morello, I’m talking to you...

Statism vs. capitalism.  For all its faults, capitalism remains the ideal form of economic system.  Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes (Nazi and socialist) can be collectively referred to as statist or collectivist.  They boil down to the priority: individual vs. collective, the needs of the many vs. the needs of the few.  The cruel irony of collectivist regimes is that in their rampant and fanatic devotion to “the people”, “society”, “the collective”, etc. they completely negate the individual, yet society is, ultimately, nothing more than an aggregate of individuals.  The ultimate minority is, of course, the individual, who is the ultimate victim, the sacrificial offering to the sacred collective.  By destroying the individual as a person with any rights or importance per se, the collectivists ultimately destroy themselves.  Without freedom for the individual, there is no freedom for anyone.

The response to this, from most socialists, is that left to its own devices, capitalism produces various market failures: poverty, hunger, economic injustice, inequality of wealth and income.  Politics and economics, the distribution of scarce, limited and finite resources, is too important to be left up to the whims, caprices, and apparently random vicissitudes of at best an impersonal market and at worst an aggregate of sometimes monopolistic and oligopolistic markets.  Why leave this to chance, when there are highly intelligent planners who can redistribute wealth and income, and micromanage the entire country, far better?  If we need to do this by a brutal dictatorship, well, so be it – better than being run by Big Business, right?  Raise the spectre of a country run by GM, IBM, Ford, or Bill Gates to scare us into the arms of Big Brother.  (Comrade Moore & Comrade Nader will be happy to oblige).

Who are these geniuses?  They’re the socialists themselves.  Have we ever met an avowed socialist who was not highly intelligent AND fully confident in his or her intelligence and wisdom (e.g. Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, or Christopher Hitchens).  The one problem with their “brain the size of a planet” issue is that no two socialists can ever agree on anything (see “Life of Brian” for this symptom of continually splitting socialist factions).  Fortunately for us, that is.  But there were no shortage of highly intelligent opponents to collectivism, including, but not limited to, Ayn Rand, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ludwig von Mises.  Bottom line is that for all its faults, capitalism keeps us free – which is far more than can be said for its alternatives.