On the massive use of George Orwell’s shallow leftism to sell racist, anti-communist stereotypes

Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four,” read by a huge portion of u.s. citizens in public high school, was written in 1948, a year before the Chinese revolution took state power.

In the book, the totalitarian governing system that “Eastasia” is said to have is called “Death Worship” or “Obliteration of the Self.”

I wonder where so many people in the u.s. get the idea that the revolutionary movement in China was a mass, cult-like movement of unthinking, insectoid, Asiatic hordes?

And remember, Orwell called himself a leftist, so surely that would make the imperialist u.s. government *very* reluctant to embrace any book he wrote!

Surely Orwell calling himself a leftist could never provide ideal cover for casting racist slander on the largest liberation movement of the twentieth century, encompassing hundreds of millions of people!

Surely this super-duper subversive book ends up in the curriculum of so many u.s. public schools on its sheer poetic and philosophical value alone, despite the imperialist u.s. government’s strong reluctance.

It could *never* be because it’s the ideal mechanism for making people believe they know something about socialism despite not reading any actual historical accounts of day-to-day life in a socialist society–right?

On the ruling-class theft of infinity from the masses

I saw a video of Kermit the Frog singing the very good song “Once in a Lifetime” by the Talking Heads and started reading people’s explanations of the lyrics on songmeanings.net, and I got immensely sad. I do my very best to keep my nose to the grindstone. The time since I moved to Austin has hurtled by. The work feels deeply valuable to me moment by moment, and I know for a fact that I am where I need to be. But still I am rarely all the way present, and my life is passing quickly. As e.e. cummings wrote, “My father moved through dooms of love.”

 

Then I read this line in someone’s explanation: “Most people always live in fear of running out of time, and they feel that they are waiting for things to get better, not realizing that everything they image will exist in the future is right in front of them.”

 

And then I became very angry. Not at that writer, but because the masses have a good reason for life to rush by them. People have a good reason to miss the infinity that is in front of their noses—we live in hell.

 

So now I am furious at this system, and at its apologists, who tell the masses that infinity is right in front of them, but then continue to advocate for this system that keeps the masses in a continuous panic, emotionally frayed at all times. The infinity really is there, it is for a fact technically available at all times. But not to those whose labor makes the world run. Not to those who weave the clothes, mine the iron, harvest the crops, and raise the children. The masses move through dooms of love. The conquest of bread and the final destruction of all ideological state apparatuses are the expropriation of infinity from those who expropriate it from the people moment after hurried moment.

The role of the people’s party under socialism in the masses’ conscious transformation of themselves: A metaphor with holograms

Only when the people have [a people’s] state can they educate and remold themselves by democratic methods on a countrywide scale.
—Mao Zedong

The other day I was in a study group and tried to use holograms as a metaphor to talk about the crucial role played by the people’s party under socialism in the process of the masses consciously transforming themselves and all of society.

The aspect of holograms I was talking about was the fact that..

“Every part of a hologram contains the image of the whole object. You can cut off the corner of a hologram and see the entire image through it. For every viewing angle you see the image in a different perspective, as you would a real object. Each piece of a hologram contains a particular perspective of the image, but it includes the entire object.” (http://bit.ly/29Ve2MK)

So for instance, with a mass campaign to end patriarchy, the people’s party encourages and creates room for the gender-oppressed masses in every last corner of society to rebel–in every farm and factory, school and university, village and city, in every home and commune, relationship and family, and in the people’s party itself–to rebel against their oppression, to fight it and name it and struggle to understand it and end it.

Patriarchy plays out differently in each corner of society, but it pervades them all. If you study each different case you will learn new details about how, concretely, the *whole system* of patriarchy functions and reproduces itself. So the people’s party gathers people’s experiences from as many cases as possible, and then–and this is crucial–*concentrates* and analyzes the incredible diversity of experiences it has gathered to tease out the finest possible nuances, to draw out the subtle and deep general from the countless particulars.

**The more sections of society it hears from, and especially the more it hears from the most oppressed sections**, the higher “resolution” the “image” will be–that is, the clearer its understanding will be of exactly and concretely how patriarchy operates.

Then, it provides this deeper, more concentrated, more powerful feminism back to all women, non-men, and LGBT people–including those in the party itself–who then take what they find valid and useful in it and use it as a tool and weapon to even more thoroughly, confidently, and powerfully push forward their revolution against patriarchy.

And this sharpened struggle will again play out in an incredible diversity of ways in all the various corners of society, as previously un-grasped and un-attacked manifestations of patriarchy are now struggled against. And once again all these diverse experiences will be gathered back up, and the people’s party will then formulate an even deeper picture of what patriarchy is, and re-transmit this even sharper feminism back to society, and so on, over and over.

Let no one gainsay it–this process is totally essential to curing humanity of patriarchy, white supremacy, and all other forms of systemic oppression. We have no chance of extinguishing them without it.
—

For a slightly bigger-picture description of this process, check out the earlier post “A fatal criticism of the anarchist road to communism based on the necessity of the party for transforming society after the revolution” and be sure especially to check out the links to two additional resources at the bottom of that post.