Grim I was interested in your comments below in terms of the links between Hitchens’ views and revolutionary communist theory. Hitchens has of course renounced his youthful views, but through his great respect for Orwell, he retains links to the old left. If Chris is taking questions for Hitchens one area might be how his thought developed from left to right, and whether he sees his current outlook as aligned more with the left or the right.
There is a good article about George Orwell and his communist ideas in the New Yorker -
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/0 ... at_atlarge
Grim wrote:Robert Tulip wrote:The attractiveness of Leon Trotsky to impressionable youth was rather like the cult of Che Guevara, high on romance and low on facts. Orwell went the same path, fighting with the Trotskyite POUM in Catalonia and going on to write Animal Farm, which could almost be read as a Trotskyite work except that Orwell is too humane and sane to support Trotsky’s mad totalitarianism.
Yes, difficulty does arise when one is shifting from the theory of political philosophy towards its relationship to the functional practice of the political movement as unwittingly a disjunction inevitably occurs. Perhaps no small reason why Che is afforded a cult while Trotsky and Orwell are given the trust of dissimulators? Che was never a novelist where as Orwell and Trotsky were never more than intellectual revolutionaries.
I don’t have a high regard for either Che or Trotsky. Both were romantic revolutionaries lacking in clear vision of the consequences of their acts. Trotsky was more than an intellectual revolutionary. He was head of the red army in the civil war against the whites, responsible for setting the scene for the later tyranny.
This is important as in the cases of Trotsky and Orwell, with regards to the personal dynamism Che, the theory was able to substitute its own frames of references and suggestions without the need for all that detailed of an awareness as to specific sociological and political function within which it would necessarily operate as a emergent process. Functional process was Che's legitimacy.
Are you claiming that Che Guevara had a more functional theory than Trotsky?
In this sense, that the political theory of Trotsky and Orwell is a actually a simplified subset of rather particular assumptions opposed to a balanced theory tested in action, the projection of particular features onto disparate types of hypothetical situations based on preceding thought fostered a rather distrusting mutual development. Based on the almost implicit duplexity in creating a moral double standard rather than a more accommodating systems or meta-systems perspective concerning intraspecific competition within a community adopted by the pragmatic Che. Che and Orwell were different from Trotsky in many respects not the least in amount of respect they willingly afforded to alternative fields of thought and reasoning. The distrust of general intellectual reasoning (especially formal philosophy and philosophers) was a trait of Trotsky who saw action only in disregarding moral qualms. This results in a continual requirement for the taxation of a readers sensitivities towards a specific recognition that his works require careful reconsideration in light of its many presuppositions. Ignorance to what Trotsky represents may create an artificially stimulating read, but only through ignorance of the factors I have briefly outlined. To simply make the assumption that defining either Trotsky or Che as distastefully "low on facts" as constructive commentary constitutes an evasion regarding the reasonable nature and significance of association formed effectual responses to particular works, sentences, and words continually and more importantly dynamically as constructed and as identifiable in modern western society.
Trotsky and Che represented large social movements, but I don't think either of them had a good grasp of political and economic theory, hence the poor consequences of their policies.
