Foreword,Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Terrance asks: What kind of society?
> 
> I take it as axiomatic that, one way or another, the writer can only
> write about what he knows. As always, the question is: how do we know
> what we know? More accurately: what do we think about what we think we
> know? The commissioning editor, whoever, effectively 'labels' Pynchon as
> one of Orwell's heirs. This is a guy who has the same kind of interests.
> Hence the (erroneous) assumption that Pynchon's 'job' is to remind us
> that Orwell 'got it right' - which view Pynchon duly mocks in what he
> actually does write in the Foreword. For to argue that Orwell got it
> right is to argue that his novel, 1984, was the same kind of prediction
> as naming the winner of a horse race. I've never suggested that, so to
> dispute what I've written on the grounds that my economic history is
> off-the-wall is, well, off-the-wall.
> 
> Orwell writes about what he knows. That is, he writes about what he
> thinks he knows. He is suspicious of socialism. Because of the Soviet
> Union. Because of the Labour Party in Britain. Because of the way
> capitalism has always been able to reinvent itself: in Britain, within
> 50 years or so, the Labour Party of Keir Hardie has become the Labour
> Party of Attlee, dedicated to managing a capitalist (mixed) economy more
> competently than Churchill's Conservatives. The rest, you might say at
> this point, is history. However, that is to accuse Orwell of making
> predictions.
> 
> The key question for the engaged intellectual (and few are more engaged
> than Orwell) is: what about the workers? How have we got from, eg, the
> General Strike in 1926 to the Welfare State twenty years on? When the
> results of the 1945 election started coming through, someone (an
> aristocrat) said: "They've elected a Labour Government. The people will
> never stand for it." This quaint version of us-&-them is usually cited
> as an example of, and a joke against, upper-class ignorance. But of
> course the fear for many socialists was that the people wouldn't stand
> for it, if 'it' meant revolutionary change. British socialism (ie as
> represented by the Labour Party) was never anything more than
> social-democratic reformism, based on the idea that a Labour Government
> would improve social conditions and make everyone, in effect,
> middle-class. That has always been the problem with working-class
> people: they're just not middle class, dammit!
> 
> So to point out that 85% of the people in 1984 are proles is simply to
> point out that Orwell begins with a (fictional) situation in which class
> differences have been eradicated or, as I put it earlier, masked. The
> other 15% of course are the meritocratic elite.

If  Nazism and Communism (and you have yet to explain or provide an
example from the text that Capitalism is also in the mix--the currency
is a clue) provide the material for Orwell's political satire (not sure
you agree that 1984 is a satire?), with both having been more or less
defeated, why is this novel of interest today? Why is Pynchon interested
in this book? As I asked when we were speculating about why P would
write an Introduction or Foreword to 1984:  what the hell is P going to
add to the critical industry that has been built around this novel? 

1984 is not a crude propaganda novel. Animal Farm is not a crude
propaganda novel. Both are fictions. If we don't deal with them as
fictions first (acknowledging all along that Orwell claimed that his aim
was "to make political writing into art"), if they only serve our
political purposes, if we read them as the  prophecy of a penitent
Leftist (the common reading in the USA after publication), if Ingsoc
equals the British Labor Party, if ... or it ... Capitalism (Technopoly,
Postman's term) is the target, in short, if we put politics in front and
then aim at a political/econmoic bull's eye  we risk missing  the target
altogether. The target, it seems to me, is a totalitarianism that cuts
across all ideologies, a general indictment of all those forces in
society that make for dehumanization. His warning (not his prophecy) is
that humanity itself will be annihilated if any System, any government,
of whatever political persuasion, assumes absolute power and control.
And Orwell  identified his audiance--the British people. He warned them
that evil empires and axes of evil may emerge in the East and in the
West.