• @TheConquestOfBed
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    43 years ago

    If we’re going to be honest. I don’t really care what either of them wrote about. They were both cranks whose works became enshrined by neoliberals and then led to nothing of note. I only talked about them to stay in context.

    The reason I think this whole conversation is silly is that you’re attempting to steer it toward these model societies that a. don’t exist b. by your word are complete fabrications of the authors.

    In following this assertion, one cannot examine the intrinsic and inseperable social relationship between an economy and the political system that supports it. You call dialectical materialism pure ideology, yet this thought experiment is like examining the power structures in Harry Potter. It’s a complete waste of time.

    • @ttmrichter
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      13 years ago

      The only “steering” I’m doing is away from the nonsense that dystopias are intrinsically based on capitalist futures. That is all. The two biggest names in dystopia aren’t capitalist futures in any meaningful sense. (Neither are they socialist nor communist nor … they are as, to use your lovely simile, real-world as the power structures in the Potterverse.) This makes a claim that dystopias are “believable” because they are “capitalist futures” ludicrous on the face of it.

      I tend to agree with you that Huxley and Orwell are both cranks. Huxley had a thing about hedonism and Orwell saw control freaks wherever he turned his head. Their novels are thus constructed around the futures they saw happening based on their hobby horses, not around what J. Random Socialist sees as “evidence” of “capitalist futures”.