Nice! 
Coincidentally, It is a bright cold day in April right now.
I’m not commenting on the facts or the geopolitical world as described in 1984. I am saying that when a western reader reads the novel 1984, he is imagining the Soviet Union as the state.
Of course, from 1984 to fairly recently, the Soviet Union was the world’s most prominent authoritarian state known to most of the people who’d have been reading the book, so it’s natural they’d think of that.
As it was in Orwell’s time so it is forgivable, if not correct, that a person might think that 1984 was commentary on left wing authoritarianism, e.g. the Soviet Union.
No one who read the book would think that, given that it was explicitly set in Britain (aka Airstrip One).
I know it was set in the UK. That isn’t the point. It could have been set in the US. The idea was that Soviet-style shit had come to the free world. I don’t think that is in dispute.
The Party’s program was called IngSoc, which was a contraction of “English Socialism.”
Orwell was trying to warn his fellow leftists that their idealism could be corrupted to serve a dictatorship just as bad as any fascist.
Well, that’s fair enough I’ll grant. And the book is commentary on the Soviet Union to an extent. But it’s very clearly not just about the Soviet Union. I would in fact argue that even more than being about the Soviet Union it’s a warning about western societies becoming indistinguishable from the Soviet Union.
I agree. The commentary was about the then current Soviet Union. The message was that any society, left or right, could become this way. It just so happened that Orwell’s 1984, to go back to the OP, was a commentary on the left wing Soviets, but could also be applied to any society, although that was not an option in the poll. 
Any leftist or rightist government, given total power, tends to resemble 1984.
If Trump and the GOP had had total power in 2020, for instance, there can be zero doubt that they’d try to cover up Covid and pretend like nothing was happening.
How do you posit that might have happened? A national internet shutdown?
George Orwell in general was definitely afraid of left-wing authoritarianism. I haven’t read any of his non-fiction books, but from what I know of them they clarify a lot of his beliefs as a socialist who was vehemently opposed to Stalinism.
Wikipedia has some good summaries/exerpts from Homage to Catalonia, his memoir about his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the POUM, a communist paramilitary that wasn’t alligned with the Soviets.
On 1984 specifically, while I think it’s a general commentary on authoritarianism first and foremost, I’m pretty sure Oceania is intended to be the dream country of British and/or American imperialist conservatives.
1984 and Animal Farm are both designed to work for a reader who read them as solely having general themes with no reference to specific political movements, but also have direct references to the times Orwell was living in.
Animal Farm is fairly obviously a direct reference to the rise of the USSR, but 1984 is slightly more complicated. I think the giveaway in 1984 is that the government that lies about everything calls itself socialist - which indicates that of course it must not actually be socialist. It’s still valid to read this as similar to Orwell’s views in Animal Farm - that the state founded with the intention to be socialist became bastardized. However, I personally think with Eurasia being the Bolshevik superstate it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Oceania to also be a state that was intended to be socialist but lost its way. I think it makes more sense as an imperialist state that just called itself socialist on a whim the way they decided which other superstate to be “at war” with.
The conclusion from all of this on a surface level is that communist, fascist and capitalist governments can all be authoritarian on a surface level. I think you have to go slightly deeper to get the real message which is that the ideology of totalitarian governments is entirely superficial and it misses the point to categorize them as left or right.
This. Don’t forget that the “S” in NSDAP stood for “sozialistische” (socialist), though that party and regime was hardly socialist too. It’s been a while since I’ve read “1984” the last time, but I know it well and studied it thoroughly in school. My main course in Abitur was English, and the subject of my English exam was that novel (I got a straight A, FWIW)). I’ve never doubted that it’s a parable about modern authoritarian dictatorship in general, left or right, with Nazism and Stalinism as the contemporary models for the regime described in the book.
In 1948 Britain was ostensibly a ‘socialist state’, with a proactive nationalisation campaign. 1984 was very much a critique of the British situation at the time.
No, it wasn’t, and the genesis of this line of argument seems to come from the rationale that the title was a reversal of the last two digits of the planned publication year so as to ‘conceal’ the critique. As others have pointed out, Eric Blair was a committed democratic socialist whose criticisms were focused on authoritarianism, and in particular the manipulation language to control thought, and the use of patriotic fervor and specter of national conflicts to instill blind devotion to authority. With the political erection of the “Iron Curtain” and defining Soviet/Western Europe conflicts purely in ideological terms, Orwell’s real focus was how these were being used to polarize public opinion and secure power for those in authority irrespective of political ideology.
Somewhat ironically, the modern cultural association with Nineteen Eighty-Four and “Big Brother” is as a shorthand for omnipresent state surveillance, and while that is certainly an aspect presented in the novel it is the erasure of history and retooling of the language to prevent “thoughtcrime” that is the real focus of the story, with both Julia and Winston eventually broken as individuals with freedom of thought to the service of the state. The constant warfare, the everpresent threat of terroristic bombing, and paranoia about elements within disrupting the control by the state, with the apparently fake or co-oped ‘Goldstein’ used to cultivate and lure potential freethinkers. All of these are strategies used by regimes today of all ideological bents to control public opinion and manufacture consent, and can be seen in various initiatives from the Red Scare of the ‘Fifties and the “Domino Theory” of why the US needed to engage in military conflict and covert manipulation around the globe to the “War on Drugs and the “War on Terror”; ‘wars’ with no possibility of success or conclusion that exist to stoke a constant state of public anxiety, support increasing militarization of law enforcement, and justify progressive erosion of civil rights in the name of national security and cultural stability.
Orwell certainly had strong criticisms of Soviet-style centralized authority (and the lies that necessarily accompany it to cover for corruption and incompetence) that are found in the news announcements about ‘increases’ in production ratios that are actually reductions, but you can find analogous claims in explicitly right-wing regimes, e.g. how the Italian Fascists “made the trains run on time”. British nationalization of automotive and other industries, while ultimately an economic and industrial failure, never aspired much less achieved anything like that degree of control of propaganda, and certainly not even at its nadir by the time Blair succumbed to tuberculosis. Orwell’s allegorical criticism in Animal Farm and quite accurate prognostications in Nineteen Eighty-Four were about authoritarianism in any form and the mechanisms used to maintain control and pacify public dissent. When a government official says, “Now is not the time to question your government” with the implication that doing so will put the public at risk, they are engaging in the type of tactics Orwell was criticizing.
Stranger
We may examine what is written in the book:
In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the regime arises in the Soviet Union or the U.K. or Germany or China; the only difference is that they will include/exclude words like “socialist” in order to pretend they are on the left or right, but it is all bullshit anyway. Real-life examples abound, just as they did in 1948.
Furthermore, (just as in real life) these Parties exploit genuine revolutionary sentiment and social movements in order to rise to power.
I can’t agree with this at all. Indeed- at a far right board I sometimes visit, they make the same argument- authoritarian can only be left wing because conservatives hold freedom as a core value.
No matter who says it, it’s bull.
I don’t think so (about that last part, being a dream country for conservatives), mostly just because the inner party are not nearly wealthy enough to satisfy conservatives. So while I do think 1984 is strictly anti-authoritarian (left/right immaterial), I think Airstrip One as shown is more an extension of the British welfare state, and so of socialism and the left, than conservatism.
Now that said, we have no reason to believe that conditions on Airstrip One are representative of Oceania as a whole. I mean, it probably is the case that the bulk of the population is under heel and living a life of comparable misery, but it might just be that beyond Airstrip One, in say the former USA, there really are a bunch of mega-capitalist oligarchs who run the show and are ultra wealthy (not unlike a present day Russian oligarch), but that’s not easily divined from the text.
We have to consider that as bad and unreliable as the information we have on Airstrip One is, we know even less about the wider Oceania.
But then we don’t really need to. Because the point is it’s about opposed to authoritarianism in all its forms, and so it is enough just to show us life from the perspective of a common man living in an ultra-authoritarian state.
You’re forgetting the pursuit of revolutionary “purity”, which isn’t necessarily about becoming rich and a ruling class, more about consolidating the power of the “pure” by eliminating splittists, dissidents, “enemies of the people” - anyone who doesn’t toe the line with sufficient enthusiasm and/or shows signs of independent thought - as with Robespierre, Stalin and Mao.
To be pedantic, 1984 is about totalitarianism rather than authoritarianism: in the latter, you may well be allowed to think what you like, maybe even say what you like as long as you present no threat to those in power, whereas in the former, everyone must be, and be seen to be, conforming with what power wants, in thought, word and deed. Hence Orwell’s observation “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.” The potential is always there in some forms of human nature.
I definitely think that’s a valid read. Thinking about it again, 1984 works in both contexts. IngSoc as an actual socialist movement that turned corrupt being “at war” with other superstates that were ostensibly essentially the same ideology works for the message just as well as a conservative superstate rebranding itself as socialist that winds up functioning nearly identically to a communist superstate that turned into an authoritarian empire.
My read on Orwell personally is that he was hyperattuned to the authoritarian tendency among the left, but I don’t think he specifically had any problem with welfare. Also while he was a socialist, my take from his life and his other writing (which I’ve heard about but haven’t actually read in fairness) is that he had more of a problem with imperialism than capitalism.