Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Terrance]

What concern with Capitalist society? What capitalist society are you
referring to?

What about the society in Orwell's novel? Is it Capitalist? Democratic? 

85% of the people are Proles. There is a war in progress. The government
drops bombs to remind the people that they are at war. If there is a
shortage of goods is it because there is war in progress and a war
economy, controlled supply and demand, produces artificial shortages and
surpluses. This doesn't sound like a capitalist democracy to me. Unlike
any capitalist system in the world then or now, there is no unemployment
and no inflation. What kind of Capitalist System has Orwell created?
What kind of Democracy? The marginalized have made there way into the
Party: Jews, Blacks, South Americans of pure Indian blood have positions
of the highest rank in the Party. There is no more street crime. There
are no stupid, language challenged, fumbling village idiots in politics,
there are no political debates where a JFK can smile for the camera and
Nixon needs a shave, there is no revolution in the air, no instability,
no inefficiencies. There is universal acceptance of the System. 

When a Man, one man, questions the System, he is not expelled from the
Garden, he is not hung at Tyburn, he is not shipped off to America. The
cold steps of Melvillean Charity are warm and compassionate and so they
will cure him of his sickness. Orwell recognized the Weberian Charisma
(it's important to remember that this term, as Pynchon applies it to
Blicero in GR, is Weber's and it is a religious term, a gift of the Holy
Ghost) in Hitler and his brand of Socialism for a people humiliated by
inflation, crime, unemployment, a folk bereft of national pride and
self-respect. The system is decidedly not a capitalist one. It is not a
democracy. It is an oligarchical collectivism and it is building a world
of hate against the world of love thy enemy. Isn't it? 

 


Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> I'm prepared to accept I might have expressed myself a tad more clearly.
> I said Orwell's writing might be considered prescient. I meant that his
> concerns with, the way he constructed, the role (to be) played by
> technology in a capitalist society foreshadowed (in what I at least
> consider interesting ways) the modernisation/convergence theories of the
> 1950s and 1960s. At no point did I write, or I hope imply, that 1984 was
> a prediction concerning current world leaders and their unsavoury
> habits. It isn't a question of anyone seeing tomorrow or the day after
> that.
> 
> As regards my off-the-wall economic history, all I can say is that it
> wasn't intended as economic history. Having reread what I wrote, it
> still fails miserably to come across as economic history. What I
> intended was the briefest of references to a range of writing(s) that
> construct social change in a particular way. Orwell's work links him to
> Adorno in the 1930s and Williams in the 1960s, on the left, and Bell, as
> well as Rostow and Kerr, in the 1950s and 1960s, on the right - in their
> different ways, all these writers deal (at times, they write about other
> topics as well) with consumption in a capitalist society. I believe
> Rostow is usually considered an economic historian (even if what he
> wrote is, arguably, bad fiction). I don't know about Bell or Kerr, but
> certainly Adorno and Williams cannot be so described.
> 
> One of the impressions I get from Pynchon's foreword is that he's trying
> to deconstruct conventional notions of left and right (as produced in
> and by the cold-war rhetoric that has accompanied 1984 down the years)
> as a means to reconsider, constructively, what Orwell actually wrote.
> Discursively, Orwell's writing is of its time - hardly a contentious
> statement, I believe.