> What's Orwell's own solution, though?
Democratic socialism. Humanism. Anti-fascism.
In his early years, anarchism. But I think not so much in his later writings (correct me if I'm wrong).
Democratic socialism. Humanism. Anti-fascism.
In his early years, anarchism. But I think not so much in his later writings (correct me if I'm wrong).
(asserting my own beliefs now) The fact that most of a century has passed during which we've seen those pitfalls repeated many times since, and no effective mechanism for protecting against them has surfaced, I think that the project of socialism must be abandoned.
According to Cambridge dictionary, Capitalism is,
“an economic and political system in which property, business, and industry are controlled by private owners rather than by the state, with the purpose of making a profit”
So the alternative is state control and history tells us that only works with certain endeavours - e.g. military - and can be catastrophic when applied to things like agriculture (see collectivization).
The key element of capitalism is not so much private vs. state ownership, it's ownership (and thus profit extraction) based on capital.
And the effect of is allowing control to be arbitrarily skewed towards wealthy individuals who don't need to work, while leaving others with no control at all, even over the work they do, while still needing to work to sustain themselves. Additionally, this skew tends to increase over time as capital accumulates profits exponentially.
The alternative is basing control on something other than capital. But that actually leaves a lot of different options, not just state ownership. What if the only legal form of corporation were the cooperative, with companies being collectively owned by, and profits distributed to, their employees, equally?
And in the past century we've also seen the harmful influence of extreme capitalism on democracy, including social democracy. Clearly the power of money on politics needs to be limited.
But tue hardest problem is how to ensure that the voters are well informed. They need reliable news media, but the two obvious ways to finance that are through capitalism and the state, both of which are suspect.
The thing is, in the "government controls the means of production", you necessarily cede to the government sufficient control of everything - news media and everything else: that is, by definition, totalitarianism. The government can easily use this to prevent "bad views" from being aired. It doesn't even require evil intent. The gov't can think it's doing the right thing by protecting people from "misinformation" - you can see this debate today in America, and I understand there's a debate today in Germany about actually banning an overly-right-wing political party. And when a government comes to view itself as being truly good, the only legitimate defender of the people, it'll be very tempting for them to stomp on media and even voting freedom even with those good intentions.
There are also other ways to have workers control the means of production to varying degrees. Labour unions, workers councils, etc share control between the workers and the owners. A democracy in which workers vote for a government that controls regulations is another. Co-ops are a great one.
And of course according to the communist ideal, there isn't even a central government to control the means of production.
The big questions are whether it's possible to reach that ideal, how, and whether it's even stable. Countries calling themselves "communist" in our world certainly failed dramatically. But social democracy has been fairly effective in giving at least some degree of control to the workers. Their big problem is that in a still fundamentally capitalist system, money still rules, and powerful corporations can often either control or ignore the government and take away the power of the workers. That has definitely happened in the US, and to a lesser extent in parts of Europe, over the past half century.
- Enforcing worker regulations (min wages, max hours etc) - Provision of essential utilities (water, fuel, education, transport, healthcare etc) - Fiscal policies (corporation taxes, infrastructure spending, customs duties etc)