For those trapped behind the Iron Curtain, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed more a documentary than a work of dystopian fiction. How did a man who had never traveled to communist Russia get so much so right?
This is a reconceived version of 'Fascism and Anti-Fascism'. In this text, Dauvé shows how the wave of proletarian revolts in the first half of the twentieth century failed: either because they were crushed by the vicissitudes of war and ideology, or because their “victories” took the form of counter-revolutions themselves, setting up social systems which, in their reliance on monetary exchange and wage-labour, failed to transcend capitalism.
A few months after the Spanish Civil war broke in 1936, George Orwell travelled on the pretense of covering it but, his true intention was joining the fight against fascism. He...
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