Homage to a Dream

“Many of the normal motives – snobbishness, money grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.- had simply ceased to exist. …. The ordinary class division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as master…..However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘camerade’ stood for cameradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality….. For the Spanish militias while they lasted were a sort of microcosom of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything, but no privilege, no boot licking, one got perhaps, a crude foretaste of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like.”

George Orwell
“Homage to Catalonia” 1952
P 104-105

Antithesis

“He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for real life…..the detached observer is as much entangled as the active participant; the only advantage of the former is his insight into his entanglement, and the infinitesimal freedom that lies in knowledge as such. His own distance from business at large is a luxury which only that business confers. That is why the very withdrawal bears features of that which it negates. It is forced to develop a coldness indistinguishable from that of the bourgeois”

Theodor Adorno
“Minima Moralia: Reflections On a Damaged Life’ 1951
Part One 1944 P. 26
Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott