Libertarian Animal Farm

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JoeMulk

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What happens if the animals rise up and overthrow the farmer who steals from them there hard earned wages and then implement a libertarian paradise?
 
What happens if the animals rise up and overthrow the farmer who steals from them there hard earned wages and then implement a libertarian paradise?

Then it wouldn't have been written by Orwell. Despite Animal farm being anti-soviet, Orwell himself was a socialist.
 
To you mean, literally what happens within the story line, or as in what the wider impact and context of Animal Farm is if its a critique of libertarian capitalism instead of Stalinist socialism?

Either way I feel this will quickly turn into a flame-war and get moved into chat :eek: ;)
 

JoeMulk

Banned
To you mean, literally what happens within the story line, or as in what the wider impact and context of Animal Farm is if its a critique of libertarian capitalism instead of Stalinist socialism?

Either way I feel this will quickly turn into a flame-war and get moved into chat :eek: ;)

either I guess, and I eagerly anticipate the flames and popcorn:D
 

Tovarich

Banned
Mr Pilkington and Mr Frederick dynamite the farm, as the parasitic animals clearly didn't realise how exceptional Mr Jones was, and failed to fufil his vision.
They also rape Muriel the goat, who appreciates this attention from such superior men.

(Yeah, yeah, I know Libertarianism & Objectivism aren't totally interchangeable.)
 
To you mean, literally what happens within the story line, or as in what the wider impact and context of Animal Farm is if its a critique of libertarian capitalism instead of Stalinist socialism?

Either way I feel this will quickly turn into a flame-war and get moved into chat :eek: ;)

Was libertarianism even widely known enough in 1945 to have a political book like Animal Farm written promoting/critiquing it?
 
Was libertarianism even widely known enough in 1945 to have a political book like Animal Farm written promoting/critiquing it?

Perhaps Orwell reads The Fountainhead in late 1943 and is so repulsed he adopts his early manuscript for Animal Farm into a rebuttal.
 
the animals overthrow the farmer, they then speak a lot about the oppressiveness of the farmer's rule and the necessity of freedom in the early days after the revolt. one of the animals becomes their leader with a guarantee to protect the freedom of all animals, the others quickly fall into niches as well with most labouring and a few directing that labour, ostensibly so as to maximize efficiency, and redistributing the products among themselves and the labourers and trading away the surplus. the directors, as a general rule, are cut out for directing and the leader of the animals is a reasonable choice, if somewhat doddering and indecisive. but there are those who end up in the lower strata of this new order who would be perhaps better suited to leading and directing, a few of them become lieutenants of the directors and the leader but by and large those ranks are filled with the gullible and the blindly faithful. as time wears on the directors begin to feel that the products that they deal in are more the product of their own direction than the actual labour of the workers that made them, after all, anyone can do such menial tasks, but not everyone is cut out to direct, that takes someone special. it follows from this that they begin to feel entitled, they become greedy, keeping as much for themselves as they can and giving as little as possible back to the workers. as they then grow rich and fat the directors claim their great prosperity as proof positive of the astounding success of the new ideology. they exalt the leader with praise, he is the tireless guardian of the animals' beloved freedoms, the freedoms that have brought them such prosperity. they lavish the leader with gifts and ingratiate themselves to him, he begins to view the directors as his true friends, and as true patriots as well. the leader begins to rely heavily on the advice of the directors, they are true patriots, and their success is proof of their great intelligence and insight. and finally, the directors advocate the protection of the leader, they claim that it is wise leadership that is vital to the success of their society and that if the leader were to come to harm it would be disastrous. the leader is screened from all but the highest level of society. meanwhile, things have not gone quite so well for everyone else, the directors buy the loyalty of their lieutenants by giving them enough to at least live modestly on. the law enforcers are bribed only with power, which they relish as it sets them apart from the rest of the masses, they often abuse their power to feel better about their own conditions. the rest of society, the workers, is left in desperate poverty, breaking their backs the to feed clothe and shelter themselves. the overwhelming majority have had their spirits broken by the hard work and squalid conditions, rather than fight back they drown their sorrows in the unregulated means of self destruction that the directors place on offer. those who rise up are quickly put down for trying to infringe upon the freedoms of the directors, and then there are those who gather on the edges of society and talk endlessly about rising up but never do. crime is rampant among the working class as they, driven to feed their families and addictions, prey upon each other. very little actually is a crime, the generalities of theft and willful bodily harm covering essentially everything that is illegal. officially all crime is to be swiftly and brutally punished, but the police respond with a great deal more alacrity when the victim is wealthy, and none at all when the perp is wealthy. the directors then claim from their comfortable perch that the conditions of the lower class prove its inferiority, but in their heart of hearts they know that t be untrue.
 
In a different world, Whittaker Chambers wrote it in response to Atlas Shrugged. There should be more attempts at outlining this alternate version of the plot, though.
 
Libertarian in the modern American sense (as a synonym for anarcho-capitalism) or in the traditional sense (as a synonym for socialism)?

Assuming it's the latter, it is perhaps possible to imagine Orwell writing a utopian allegory in which the Animalists don't betray the revolution, showing how society should be reorganised for the better and without a simple reinvention of authority.

But 'Animal Farm' isn't really about political beliefs. Although, by the time he wrote it, he had shifted to a more libertarian socialism after hanging out with people like Bevan and Foot, the story is about the personal and ideological conflict between Trots and Stalinists that Orwell was involved in during the 1930s - an allegory of specific individuals, events and factions from the Soviet Union and the Comintern.

If it's a dystopia of Randian libertarianism you want, one of the big influences on Orwell's writing was Jack London's 'The Iron Heel'. This tells the story of an unrestrained capitalist oligarchy establishing totalitarian control in reaction to socialist progress. It was written a generation before Rand came along but quite neatly prefigures her concept of Rugged Individualism, with the oligarchs establishing a walled city called Asgard.
 
Perhaps Orwell reads The Fountainhead in late 1943 and is so repulsed he adopts his early manuscript for Animal Farm into a rebuttal.

Highly unlikey, Orwell read Road to Serfdom and didn't even consider it a possibility. To Orwell, that the future wouldn't be socialist was simply ASB.

Oh, could W.W.A.F.T. redit his post with punctuation please.
 
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