Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously.
Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences.
Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.
Firstly - I feel there are very few socialists today who would still support the old Soviet regimes (and other similar totalitarian implementations worldwide). In Orwell's time, this was much more common because it was a political situation people were living in, nowadays it's just something from history, so it's much easier to judge. I totally agree that anyone who is still looking up to Stalin today shouldn't be taken seriously.
Secondly - the supposed inherence of values that support capitalism is completely false. Every system has its way of promoting values that it is based on and can benefit from. In past regimes, this was mostly state driven propaganda, in modern capitalism it's popular culture. Anthropologists and sociologists can easily point to a bunch of cultures that developed value systems very different from ours, simply because they were isolated or affected by different influences.
Throughout history, the currently employed system always tries to assert itself as "the natural state of people" in order to be superior to anything else in comparison, but I firmly believe political discussions remain much more rational if we agree that every economic/political system is just a man-made construct.