Orwell was a reactionary. I don’t understand why so many leftists continue liking the guy when he has a cesspool fanbase filled with rightwing bastards. Honestly if your books and works are deeply revered by so many reactionaries and crypto fascist scum, you’re doing something wrong n probably not what you think you are.

kropotkhristian:

I mean, depends on the book. Homage to Catalonia has a huge anarchist fanbase. Most people who read Homage to Catalonia end up sympathetic to anarchism. 1984 has been well accepted as a leftist critique of authoritarianism. The only book that really has a rabid right-wing fanbase is Animal Farm, and that is still mostly due to a horrible misunderstanding of the text.

The humans are capitalists. The “looming” bad in the book is still capitalists. The critique is that authoritarian communism becomes indistinguishable from capitalism – that is why Napoleon and the other pigs start looking like humans in the end. You can certainly disagree with his critique, but calling it reactionary seems a bit over-the-top when it is pretty clear that the problem is still capitalism or things like capitalism.

Reading Orwell as a defense of capitalism is just wild. It would be like reading a book that says “the flu is really bad, but the cold can sometimes look like the flu” and concluding that the flu is actually really good.