1984: Anti-right wing, socialist, or what?

[mountaineer]

Saw this on twitter and wanted to save it. It's written by James Lindsay, author and Founder of NewDiscourses.com.   

https://twitter.com/ConceptualJames/status/1327686957170888706.

James Lindsay, I am a man  @ConceptualJames
For those who don't know, Orwell's 1984 was a thought experiment about what would happen if the Fabian Society gained the power of Stalin, which Orwell thought might happen by the year 2000. The Fabian Society was founded in 1884, hence the book's title.

It is a very widespread myth and misrepresentation among alleged "anti-fascists" on the left to believe that 1984 is a type of critique of right-wing excesses. It is, in fact, the exact opposite. Orwell (himself a socialist but neither Fabian nor Stalinist) made this quite clear.

Though Stalin was obviously ruling by might and the Fabians recommended incremental change and institutional capture, Orwell realized as a socialist that they shared the same problem: believing a very bourgeois revolution could achieve socialism instead of tyranny.

The Marxists (Orwell would have shared this view) criticize Stalinism for having created its own bourgeois revolution as a stage toward the full proletarian revolution, but this is going to be corrupt by design because the bourgeois are, frankly, corrupt by definition.

This is why Marxists say that "real communism/socialism hasn't been tried." People like Stalin and Mao end up creating a Party that seeks to co-opt bourgeois values for themselves, thus corrupting the whole thing. They then install tyranny to force the false revolution.

I don't think that Marx was right about the possibility of a true proletarian revolution, but that's beside the point. The point is that the Woke movement is certainly socialistic in design and is certainly both in bed with Woke Capital and predicated on wholly bourgeois values.

How can you tell the Woke movement is wholly bourgeois? Easy: try to keep up with their language and shifting demands. It's more than a full-time job. Only very bourgeois people have the opportunity, not workers, not real elites producing real value for society.

I also think Marx defined the bourgeoisie incorrectly by lumping the actual elite producers in society in with the bourgeois class that mostly produces worthless luxury opinions and beliefs to set themselves up as a kind of "performative elite." We have a lot of those now.

Again, I don't think that the Marxists are right about socialism and communism and tend to think that something like Stalinism or Maoism will happen every time, but their analysis of what causes Stalinism and Maoism to happen and be so awful is very insightful.

The Woke movement therefore bears every hallmark of being yet another experiment like the ones performed by Stalin and Mao, which, since it apparently needs to be said, DID NOT GO WELL FOR ANYBODY.

Circling back, Orwell recognized these problems from the socialist perspective, but he also was well aware of the idea of Fabian incrementalism (long-march-ism, you could call it) and was highly critical of the misinformed tin-pot dictators in the Fabian Society and their ways.

When you realize that we are currently in precisely the preconditions for a Stalinist or Maoist mistake that will be led by people who have espoused an ideology suited to ill-informed tin-pot dictators of the Fabian sort, you can start to see how 1984 was an apt prediction.

The various thought-control and administrative policy control mechanisms featured in 1984 are very much in the Fabian style. Orwell understood this well, and even as an ardent socialist, rejected it utterly for the guaranteed horror show that it is.

Orwell's 1984 is a thought experiment about "what if the Fabian society, founded in 1884, gains power over a century until it gets to a position to enact Stalinist excesses." The reason it feels so alarmingly apt in so many ways is because Orwell understood what he was looking at.

Most importantly, don't let anyone fool you into believing wrongly that 1984 was a critique of right-wing excesses running amok (those look like Nazis and the Klan). It's a critique of a particular type of left-wing excesses that we currently are staring in the face.    2+2=4.