Care to explain your assertion in any detail? Just so you know I'm very familiar with Orwell and his work, he's no particular hero of mine but that doesn't mean I haven't read his work and yes the slogans you spout are very ORWELLIAN.
If you were legitimately "very familiar with Orwell and his work," you wouldn't be asking me to "explain [my] assertion"; you'd be exceedingly familiar with it yourself. But I can understand your sentiments; you're of the school that has blatantly mischaracterized Orwell's anti-Stalinism. The only other historical figure who's been so badly mischaracterized is Adam Smith, perhaps. What I refer to is the blatant distortion of the political philosophy of George Orwell by free marketers, who erroneously cite him at every turn in order to justify their failed philosophy and criticize "socialism," which is misidentified as everything from government preservation of capitalism to Soviet state capitalism.
Excerpts and quotes from
Animal Farm and
Nineteen Eighty-Four provide a basis for an effective misappropriation of Orwell's work. Orwell was an ardent anti-authoritarian and anti-Stalinist, of course, but free marketers with little knowledge of political economy often mistakenly use his advocacy on that front to "argue" against libertarian variants of socialism, an enormous irony given Orwell's own democratic socialism and support of the anarchists and other libertarian socialists in the Spanish Revolution, combined with his military service in the Spanish Civil War. In Orwell's
Homage to Catalonia, he expresses support for the aforementioned social revolution, in which horizontal federations of anarchist collectives were formed in several regions of Spain, and the means of production were collectivized and a libertarian socialist economy was established. He has this to say of the heavily anarchist region of Aragon.
I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.
His support is not isolated to the region of Aragon, as he has similar words of support regarding the
anarchist region of Catalonia, and the city of Barcelona, then placed in the control of anarchist workers and citizens rather than capitalists or Stalinists. Here's another passage that's indicative of his support for an economic program of libertarian socialism.
More than that, Orwell is known to have served in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM in Spanish), an anti-Stalinist libertarian Marxist militia that was later disbanded by the "democratic" government. Orwell is believed to be the tall figure near the back in this photo that stands a head above his comrades.
Assuredly, you'll be hard-pressed to distort Orwell's clear advocacy here if you wish to maintain any semblance of credibility, though I don't doubt that you'll attempt it nonetheless.
In Volume 50, pp. 115-157 of
Social Indicators Research, authored by Bruce Headey, Robert E. Goodin, Ruud Muffels and Henk-Jan Dirven, subjected to peer review shortly after submission and prior to publication in 2000, in keeping with the rigorous academic standards of
Springer Netherlands publications. We of the empirically-minded sort refer to it as
Is There a Trade-Off Between Economic Efficiency and a Generous Welfare State? A Comparison of Best Cases of `The Three Worlds of Welfare CapitalismÂ’.
That said, I'd still refer to the failures of social democracy to eliminate the inefficiencies spawned by a capitalist economy. Only a legitimately socialist economy and the radical re-organization of property rights that it entails could ensure that.
It's indeed true that the capitalist economy is characterized by an unfortunately high prevalence of information asymmetries, and thus, the related agency problems (adverse selection, moral hazard, etc.), that would not exist were less imperfect information available, but that's not especially relevant to my observation about capital accumulation being based on theft through the unjust extraction of surplus labor. To support that point, I'd merely note that the economic framework of capitalism involves a scheme in which the private ownership of the means of production (acquired through a coercive process of "primitive accumulation") and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus labor from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation. In visually pleasing terms:
You merely continue to expose your ignorance of the historical record by making such blatantly fallacious remarks. The nature of the sharp divergence between Marxism and anarchism is well-known by all informed analysts of socialism (which inclines me to believe that you are not one, obviously), and was most critically illustrated by the expulsion of Mikhail Bakunin and the other anarchists from the First International by Marx and his followers. Bakunin was instrumental in forming an early anarchist critique of Marxism and the state capitalism that he believed would emerge from it. As he wrote in his 1871 manuscript
Statism and Anarchy:
If I were you, I'd commit some more time to study and appropriate consultation of the historical record before making such flagrantly inaccurate assertions about the relationship of Marxism and anarchism.
Your anti-libertarian propertarian delusions are all based on precisely that, and are based on the coercive establishment of hierarchical and authoritarian institutions. Capitalism is necessarily antithetical to freedom. The hierarchical organization of the capitalist firm (a necessary demand of the financial and coordinator classes), necessitates the subordination of workers under bosses and higher-level employers, depriving them of the right to democratically manage a major aspect of their own lives. Nor is answering "you can simply change jobs" a sufficient response to this criticism, because just as the right to migrate between an island chain of kingdoms but not outside of them would not free one from monarchy, neither can the right to select specific masters in a capitalist economy free one from that tyranny. As accurately noted by Bob Black:
The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phoneys and hypocrites. . . You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. . . A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called 'insubordination,' just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. . .The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are 'free' is lying or stupid.
Nor are external economic conditions based on freedom, so long as privileged and elite segments of the population (namely the financial class, as they have more dominance than the coordinator class outside of the internal structure of the firm), to make decisions that affect the rest of the population without their democratic input. After the unjust consolidation of the means of production and the resulting power that comes as a result of it during a stage of primitive accumulation (the state had a major role in class creation), the financial class, characterized by a small and elite segment of the population is thereby able to use their control over the means of production to drastically affect the vast majority of the population in whatever way they please, which is obviously a significant rationale for collectivizing the means of production, decentralizing them, and subjecting them to direct democratic management. The fact that even the confused propertarian would condemn a state of affairs wherein a tiny and privileged elite control such vast resources as the means of production as an authoritarian one were it manifested through the vessel of a state and the tiny elite were a ruling party only lends credence to my analysis.
In our present state of affairs, this private ownership of the means of production permits the aforementioned utilization of wage labor, which is a critical element in the coercive nature of capitalism. Since the means of production are privately owned, large components of the public have no alternative but to subordinate themselves under an employer. The best way to illustrate this form of authoritarianism is to use the "robbery analogy." If a person were to be violently tackled by an assailant and have his/her valuables torn out of his/her pockets, we would accurately call this a robbery. Now, if the assailant were to instead point a gun at the victim and demand that the valuables be surrendered, we would still call this a robbery, as coercion was used to gain the valuables, if not outright physical violence. The fact that the victim technically "consented" to surrender his/her valuables is not pertinent, since it was consent yielded while under duress. The former example represents the direct tyranny of statism, often blunt, direct, and brutal, whereas the latter represents the more subtle tyranny of capitalism, specifically wage labor, in which a person technically "consents" to work for an employer, but does this only because he/she has no other alternative for sustenance.
Your entire propertarian philosophy is based on misappropriation of legitimate libertarianism. As I've so often mentioned, the term "libertarian" was first utilized by anarcho-socialists to circumvent French anti-anarchist laws; the first written usage of the term is attributed to the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in an 1857 letter that he wrote. Conversely, the U.S. "Libertarian" Party has only existed since the early 1970's, which effectively means that socialists used the term "libertarian" as a self-describing label a century before its misappropriation. And the authoritarian social hierarchies that capitalism involves necessitates that libertarianism and all principled libertarians be opposed to its establishment and nature. Conversely, you and your propertarian ilk are merely inconsistent and confused rightists, and lend credence to the observation of a fellow socialist of mine that most American "libertarians" are merely conservatives seeking an exotic label. For example, this socialist comrade recommended a look at Tilman (2001, Ideology and Utopia in the Social Philosophy of the Libertarian Economists, London: Greenwood Press). An insightful analysis is provided by Toruño's (2002, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 36 Issue 1, pp 211-213) book review:
The Libertarians, Tilman argues, are driven by a vision of society that is so unrealistic that it can only be defined as utopian, while at the same time providing such elaborate rationalizations for the distribution of material privilege that one has no choice but to define them as ideological. What's more, and contrary to their professed commitment to freedom and democracy, the Libertarians are actually elitists who are unsympathetic to majority rule, hostile to political movements that push for the expansion of civil rights, and predisposed to support right-wing dictatorships...Perhaps his most damaging criticism is that Hayek's and Friedman's "road-to-serfdom" thesis is imprecise, tautological, and inaccurate. Both of them argue that expanding government beyond the minimal, night watchman, functions, would have the effect of eroding economic freedom and, consequently, all the other freedoms they believe depend upon it. But the problem with this argument is that they never specify the thesis by making it amenable to empirical testing. At what point does government expansion begin to erode freedom?...The most delicious part of this book is when Tillman turns the tables on the Libertarians by exploring the role which self-interest has served in their own lives. After all, since Libertarians insist that behavior must be explained in terms of self-interest, the same should apply to them. Yet, when explaining their own motives they often claim that they're driven by a sense of civic duty, desire to influence public policy, or aesthetic pleasure, suggesting that self-interest applies to everyone but the Libertarians. But a more telling inference can be made by noting that the lucrative fellowships, grants, and endowed chairs in free market economics are overwhelmingly funded by wealthy individuals, conservative foundations, and rightwing corporations.
In the future, please attempt to consult the historical record and the empirical literature to a greater degree.
