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Posted by Stories like this in which people are turned into robots are rooted in a fear of actual ways in which humans are instrumentalized, turned into mere objects of production or value for someone else. Without trying to put too much of a specific political spin on it (as certainly everyone will try to adopt the metaphor as their own, just as "freedom" is about as ambivalent concept as you can imagine these days), Robotnik creates a world where people are reduced to nothing more than workers and the world is reduced to nothing but raw materials--all of which are used to create weapons which are used to reduce people to workers and the world to raw materials, ad infinitum.
Orwell was a committed socialist who had gotten to see the first major successful Marx-inspired uprisings get coopted by a poltical-capitalist class in Russia, which in turn (Orwell believed, iirc, though this is a subject of much left-wing acrimony and backbiting) sabotaged the anarchist revolt that triggered the Spanish Civil War to protect its own ends, all in the name of worker's freedom. There's a reason he was fascinated with language losing its ability to denote.
- Captain Sorzo likes this
