Ben Judah isn’t a fan:
Orwell was no visionary when it comes to economics, either. Recall his Floating Fortresses in 1984, explicitly designed to eat up the surplus production of a population. His inability to meaningfully reflect on the dynamics of capitalism (beyond moralising condemnation), let alone imagine a consumer society, is a fascinating wooly mammoth frozen in ice from the postwar era. It is a reminder of how utterly written-off by European intellectuals the market economy was immediately after the war—and what a shock the 1950s consumerist takeoff in living standards proved to be.
