Thread 24854631

>expected a dystopia (duh)
>got a fucking love story

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> expected a dystopia
Can’t see one when you’re living in one lil bro

on the topic of orwell, i don't know much about him but i've heard that he turned his back on the communist/socialist side after fighting with them during the spanish civil war for some reason and believed that england was well on the path to achieving socialism after world war two but i don't know any of the details about that or him or anything - can anybody explain?
t. non-knower

Reminder Julia is a whore and Winston is a degenerate cuck faggot. O'Brien was right to reeducate them

>>24854686
>O'Brien was right to reeducate them
Correct.

>>24854686
hot

>>24854642
In Spain he felt that the communists were more interested in shuting down, discrediting and weeding out suspected "trotskyists" (meaning anyone who didn't suck Stalin's dick) than fighting fascism and feared that he was going to be next.

>>24854883
but what about his feelings when he returned to england?

>>24854686
RAVENOUS CUK. Lmao

>>24854631 (OP)
Part 2 is the worst of the book. Don't let that stop you from reading part 3, which is the best.

>>24854642
>i've heard that he turned his back on the communist/socialist side after fighting with them during the spanish civil war
He specifically believed in a brand of democratic socialism (and also became sympathetic to the Spanish anarchists) and did not like the totalitarian version of socialism / communism in the Soviet Union. During the Spanish Civil War, there was a brief period of bloody fighting on the Republican side when the communists loyal to the USSR liquidated dissident anarchist and Marxist groups including a group called the POUM. Orwell had been in the POUM's militia and had to flee the country.

The closest British political party he had been involved in was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which was a relatively small group to left of the mainstream Labour Party. Orwell didn't like following any "party line" though.

>believed that england was well on the path to achieving socialism after world war two
Yeah I think so. At least he thought the old-style laissez faire capitalism was on its way out. He didn't automatically think this would be a democratic version of socialism. In 1984 there's a brutal, totalitarian version of socialism, or a kind of oligarchical slave society that calls itself socialist. But the idea that the future would be some kind of planned or semi-planned economy was not at all unusual in the 1940s. In fact the U.S. engaged in it to a considerable extent during the war.

Here's Orwell in 1941

>Socialism is usually defined as ‘common ownership of the means of production’. Crudely: the State, representing the whole nation, owns everything, and everyone is a State employee. This does not mean that people are stripped of private possessions such as clothes and furniture, but it does mean that all productive goods, such as land, mines, ships and machinery, are the property of the State. The State is the sole large-scale producer. It is not certain that Socialism is in all ways superior to capitalism, but it is certain that, unlike capitalism, it can solve the problems of production and consumption. At normal times a capitalist economy can never consume all that it produces, so that there is always a wasted surplus (wheat burned in furnaces, herrings dumped back into the sea etc. etc.) and always unemployment. In time of war, on the other hand, it has difficulty in producing all that it needs, because nothing is produced unless someone sees his way to making a profit out of it.

>In a Socialist economy these problems do not exist. The State simply calculates what goods will be needed and does its best to produce them. Production is only limited by the amount of labour and raw materials. Money, for internal purposes, ceases to be a mysterious all-powerful thing and becomes a sort of coupon or ration-ticket, issued in sufficient quantities to buy up such consumption goods as may be available at the moment.

>However, it has become clear in the last few years that ‘common ownership of the means of production’ is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. ‘The State’ may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.

>>24856037
>But what then is Fascism?

>Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and – this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism – generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.

>But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have ‘proved’ over and over again that only nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc. is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler's forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the ‘semi-apes’ as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.

>>24856039
>However horrible this system may seem to us, it works. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.

>All through the critical years British capitalism, with its immense industrial plant and its unrivalled supply of skilled labour, was unequal to the strain of preparing for war. To prepare for war on the modern scale you have got to divert the greater part of your national income to armaments, which means cutting down on consumption goods. A bombing plane, for instance, is equivalent in price to fifty small motor cars, or eight thousand pairs of silk stockings, or a million loaves of bread. Clearly you can't have many bombing planes without lowering the national standard of life. It is guns or butter, as Marshal Goering remarked. But in Chamberlain's England the transition could not be made. The rich would not face the necessary taxation, and while the rich are still visibly rich it is not possible to tax the poor very heavily either. Moreover, so long as profit was the main object the manufacturer had no incentive to change over from consumption goods to armaments. A businessman's first duty is to his shareholders. Perhaps England needs tanks, but perhaps it pays better to manufacture motor cars. To prevent war material from reaching the enemy is common sense, but to sell in the highest market is a business duty. Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac – and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was ‘good business’.

>>24856045
>And now look at the results ... England fights for her life, but business must fight for profits. You can hardly open a newspaper without seeing the two contradictory processes happening side by side. On the very same page you will find the Government urging you to save and the seller of some useless luxury urging you to spend. Lend to Defend, but Guinness is Good for You. Buy a Spitfire, but also buy Haig and Haig, Pond's Face Cream and Black Magic Chocolates ... But one thing gives hope – the visible swing in public opinion. If we can survive this war, the defeat in Flanders will turn out to have been one of the great turning-points in English history. In that spectacular disaster the working class, the middle class and even a section of the business community could see the utter rottenness of private capitalism. Before that the case against capitalism had never been proved. Russia, the only definitely Socialist country, was backward and far away. All criticism broke itself against the rat-trap faces of bankers and the brassy laughter of stockbrokers. Socialism? Ha! ha! ha! Where's the money to come from? Ha! ha! ha! The lords of property were firm in their seats, and they knew it. But after the French collapse there came something that could not be laughed away, something that neither cheque-books nor policemen were any use against – the bombing. Zweee – BOOM! What's that? Oh, only a bomb on the Stock Exchange. Zweee – BOOM! Another acre of somebody's valuable slum-property gone west. Hitler will at any rate go down in history as the man who made the City of London laugh on the wrong side of its face. For the first time in their lives the comfortable were uncomfortable, the professional optimists had to admit that there was something wrong. It was a great step forward. From that time onwards the ghastly job of trying to convince artificially stupefied people that a planned economy might be better than a free-for-all in which the worst man wins – that job will never be quite so ghastly again.
https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lion/english/e_saw

>>24854631 (OP)
>love story
No it’s really not. Winston’s romance has no response in her. He’s old and ugly, the sex is a mechanical escape or act of rebellion (respectively) and in the end it’s pointless and only exists so the regime can stomp on it and make them betray each other so they’re defanged and compliant.

If you actually want to see what 1984 would be as a love story starring a heckin liberated girlboss in the anti sex league (she totally fooled them all), read this.

>>24856106
It's an anti-love story, in that the state machine successfully breaks Winston's love for Julia.
Love doesn't conquer all; it's the state that conquers love.

>>24856106
>39
>old

>>24856176
OLD
BUSTED
ASHES AND DUST

>>24856176
He's a smoker with a poor diet. We find out at an early stage that he's barely able to touch his toes.

>>24856176
In a regime where he sleeps in no heat and gets to enjoy increased chocolate rations of -10grams and the only luxuries are white spirit gin and ciggies? Yeah man. 39 is old. He’s described as haggard with a lingering cough and flesh sagging off a bony body.

>>24854631 (OP)
it's symbolism

>>24856209
He also has what, five false teeth. He's a worn dishrag at 39.

>>24854631 (OP)
thanks for the heads-up, I'll avoid it

>>24854631 (OP)
>As he turned it occurred to him that the girl had only passed him three minutes ago and that by running he could probably catch up with her. He could keep on her track till they were in some quiet place, and then smash her skull in with a cobblestone. The piece of glass in his pocket would be heavy enough for the job.
Ah, young love.

>>24857750
>"I hated the sight of you," he said. "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobblestone."
True love.

>>24857758
Hey, it's meant to portray how fucked they are mentally from their state indoctrination, and even their having sex is a revolutionary act where they both fully acknowledge that they're doomed to torture and death that exact moment they think of it. And they are.

>expected a fart
>got a shit
DROPPED (into the toilet)