I feel as though I need to preface this post. I’m writing this on a plane-ride across the country and I haven’t read Animal Farm or brushed up on economic systems/theory in years at this point. This is, quite literally, just a longer version of a thought I had in the bath a few days ago. There will not be citations because this is not an academic paper in any way. It’s just a blog post of me ranting.

Thinking back to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, I still often find it so ironically hilarious just how much each side of the economic ideological dividing line praised the book for its ability to masterfully display the terrible failures of the opposing side: the capitalists, the biggest fans of the novel, praised it for its ability to show how evil the bolsheviks that rose to power following the Communist revolution of Russia, and opposingly, many communists praised the novel for its ability to show how bourgeois capitalists so effectively exploit the labor of the proletariat class, reducing the majority class down to drones or animals while they lavishly consume the fruits of tired proletariat labor in extreme excess.

Both positions certainly have some amount of merit, but the underlying issue with both is that they lack such a vital awareness of the full scope of what the book is criticizing, and I’m certain that it is this core lack in understanding Orwell’s Animal Farm that explains many of the problems we see today in how people perceive economic theories entirely.

Now, personally, I went to high school in Texas in the United States and have lived in the west all of my life. Capitalism is fundamentally baked into my education, as from a very young age, the idea of communism was first introduced to us in school in the form of the concept of the command economy. Obviously, a command economy is a completely separate economic idea, but my public schooling curriculum never actually focused on providing a deep-dive into explaining the ideologies of communism (however, I doubt this was due to bias, but rather due to negligence, as I will get into later), and because of this, the definition of communism in the minds of my class became skewed. Every instance of the mention of communism or a communist state was less tied to the ideological definitions as presented by Marxist theory (such as in Das Kapital), but rather, it was presented in a sort of “practical-working-definition-of-communism” sense, where communism is moreso defined by the historical examples in which communism had played out in the world, almost all of which being long-time enemies of the United States, such as the USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea, numerous African and South American states, and much more. This sort of definition seems to be the one most commonly perpetuated by Americans, and I can definitely understand why. The most common comeback to any arguments for the adoption of communism is in looking to the past for how communism has turned out across numerous states, many of which are autocratic (and, ironically, outright Orwellian) or just completely failed entirely due to dissolving into countless internal conflicts. For example, one can look to many past USSR states, many of which dissolved into internal infighting following the split of the USSR into independent states.

However, here is where the core issue that I see in how capitalists view economic theory comes to light. There is something of a fallacy in the comparison between the real-world efficacy of capitalism and communism, and this is the fact that we believe capitalism to be correct because where all communist states that have existed in the past failed in a kind of mode that is entirely not by-design, capitalist states like the United States of America or Canada or Britain are actually entirely working as intended, but also not by the theoretical ideas of free-market capitalism. This is where I must return to my previous point about my public education not properly defining capitalism in a theoretical sense as well. Similarly to communism, capitalism is defined weakly, given short-sentence definitions (such as “capitalism is a system promoting free-markets and freedom for a man to own the fruits of his own labor”) alongside similar historical contexts where many of the states are largely successful and stable (and friends of the United States), such as the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and more.

The issue is that the capitalism that the theoretical definition of laissez-faire capitalism does not align with the working version of late-stage capitalism that we see in many countries today. To put it simply, much of the ways that capitalism works in practice, of which the west have come to defend from believing that it is capitalism all the same and opposing to the communism that they have seen fail again and again, are hardly that different from the failed communism we see in practice.

Going back to Animal Farm, what we see in the novella is what I like to call the “Prodigal Promise to the Proletariat,” as during the plot, we see an oppressed class that begins lacking rights (namely the right to own their labor in any meaningful way) have an uber-small, seemingly ideologically heroic rise to offer a solution of a revolutionary socioeconomic system to empower and enfranchise them, and in the end, this class grows greedy and betrays this class, becoming just as capitalistic as the masters they had initially overthrown. Where my issue lies in the interpretation of this book from capitalists and communists alike is in not recognizing just how it is that their side makes this very promise and follows in this trend in opposing ways. If we think historically, the ideology of laissez-faire capitalism largely became popular at the formation of the United States (as with the detachment from the English King also came the detachment from the Mercantilist system[1]). The core point to this is that capitalism was presented to the working class as a solution to reach a system of economic freedom and self-determination against an incredibly small, ruling, uber-wealthy class. This is exactly the same kind of prodigal promise to the proletariat that the communists make, with he difference being their implementation (how the government is involved, etc.).

Thus, my point stands. Both economic systems make, fundamentally, the same promise to the proletariat: under this economic system, you will be free. Whether by a brotherhood with all others through the abolition of private property and the communal ownership of all means of production or through the ability for any man to enjoy the fruits of his own ingenuity and success such that all people can be inspired to work hard and provide for themselves. Regardless of the method for which each system seeks to implement it, the selling point to the proletariat is the same, freedom.

And the issue I see in how both sides approach this discussion is that each is quick to point out how the other betrays this promise but neither willingly recognizes how they betray it themselves. Capitalists tout the freedom of ownership of the fruits of one’s own labor under capitalism, but the proletariat promise from ideal ideological laissez-faire capitalism requires market fairness, something that is incompatible with the greed that capitalists simultaneously tout as being the most historically successful driver of innovation and market activity. Fairness in the economy, that being the ability for an individual to be able to truly be able to be successful based on their own ingenuity and personal capability, is viewed as a ludicrous idea to modern capitalists. Innovation or other textbook intelligent business decisions are simply one kind of possible economic competition, but the greed is a kind of economic force that optimizes net profits for the amount of work put in, and this often includes methods that actively work against market freedom. Monopolization, for example, inherently kills innovation by destroying any chance of market competition, and despite perhaps owning the fruits of one’s labor under capitalism, systems such as the debt economy or the school-to-prison pipeline can still forms of systematic slavery.

Mark my words, however, this is by no means a justification or glorification of communism in the face of capitalism. Every description I have given to capitalism thus far was entirely in reference to the supposed evils of communism as has been described in school in the west: the development of an uber-wealthy minority that rule absolutely and oppress the proletariat.

My final closing point with all of this is that the consolidation of power and exploitation of the proletariat is seemingly eventual to both economic systems. Although Animal Farm used bolshevism as its case-study, I don’t see it as merely being a story about the evils of communism, nor is it about the evils of capitalism. It’s about the evils of human greed, and just how easily the proletariat can let themselves be tricked by false actors. The wars fought between the ideologies of capitalism and communism were not a war of freedom of the proletariat like either side believed. Rather, they were wars of control between two ruling classes to determine who would remain in power. That was all. It’s like a casino: the house, or the ruling class, always wins, and conversely, the guests, the proletariat, always lose.

[1] Okay, I know that this isn’t exactly true. If I remember correctly, it was really first pushed through Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” but it was most heavily popularized through its major adoption within the United States on its independence from Britain, and my point overall is just that it was developed out of a desire for economic freedom in the constrained systems that has existed from the medieval times.