Making a Decision (2009)

From the January 2009 issue of the Socialist Standard

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”

This was the slogan of the dreaded Thought Police in George Orwell’s book 1984. It is today’s rulers’ slogan too, for the ruling class want to perpetuate their dominance. This is why their ideologues and media have redefined “socialism”; to maintain a class-divided society; this is why there are many career politicians claiming “socialism” to gain power. It is a pity that many follow them who have a genuine sympathy with suffering and seek to remedy the disease of capitalism. But, as Oscar Wilde said, “the remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it, Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease” (Soul of Man under Socialism).

Technology, science and human goodwill can solve the problems confronting humanity but only after removing the restrictions of the absurd market system.

The minority capitalist class promote the market system as it maintains private property, by which they gain ownership of wealth produced by the working class who actually run industry from top to bottom. The ownership of this monopoly must be taken from the capitalist class. How? We suggest that the socialist majority of society impose the democratically-expressed will for common ownership on the minority class. Then, with common ownership established, the whole edifice of the market, private property, wage labour, money, rent, capital, interest, for they are all interdependent, is abolished. It is replaced by a rational, classless, society with free access for all to the common wealth of society; and real human progress begins.

Conscious democratic control and application of shared available knowledge will allow the opportunity

of real true freedom. The evidence that everyone has equal power and an equal vote in every decision taken will be obvious within this future, stateless society by the removal of hunger – used as a subtle form of control under capitalism. Within this society of freely associating equal individuals, every woman, man and child will take what goods they need from a communal store. This free access, this freedom, is what will maintain real democracy and it will be possible because money will be non-existent and unnecessary. Our common sense will tell us not to waste what could be shared with others; this is what the early socialists expected.

As socialists we want to participate in a progression of the global community to free humankind’s real human potential. “Give us our world,” you will say. It will not be given; you must make it. Socialists are equal but are each different. We don’t accept leaders, Thought Police or career politicians, which is why we invite you to ignore leaders and Thought Police too. Begin to free yourself, be confident, be disobedient; think for yourself, ask questions and inquire after the case we suggest. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.

CB

Letters: Too much theory (1981)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Too much theory

Dear Editors,

I find your magazine very informative and stimulating and going in the right direction. But I am somewhat mystified by your interpretation of Marxism. You seem to be all theory and hope to convert the working class by reason and persuasion against ignorance, a biased education system and a totally subservient press and TV barrage of propaganda. Marxism, surely, is “praxis”, a blend of theory and practice. That means getting stuck in on the factory floor, workshop, office etc. and calling industrial action to foment the class war. Could you please answer this?

A. Chattin

Bolton

Reply:

You are correct in stating that the SPGB aims to convince our fellow workers of the need for socialism by reasonable means. It is our argument that the hard logic of the case for socialism is powerful enough to defeat the ideology of capitalism as presented by the education system, media, religion and so on. To get workers to understand socialism requires good, strong arguments — or theory. Of course, theoretical clarity is not enough. Hard work is involved in putting that theory to workers; and we in the SPGB are getting stuck in as often and as energetically as we can, bearing in mind our limited resources.

The working class has had a century of industrial action in which sections of the working class have confronted their employers over wages and conditions. While recognising the defensive role of trade unions, as socialists we urge our fellow workers go for revolutionary political action: not in order to “foment the class war", but so as to end it by the democratic victory of the working class. Revolution is necessary because it is the entire social system of capitalism which must be removed before the chains of wage slavery can be broken. This political task involves both theory and practice. (In connection with the latter, our correspondent may be interested to know that the Bolton branch of the SPGB will be working hard in the coming months in preparation for contesting the Bolton West constituency in the next general election and should he care to get “stuck in” with them they will welcome his assistance.)

Editors.

Fear of ‘1984’

Dear Editors,

I would like to support Jean Ure’s comments in your January issue.

1. The majority of serious-minded people (including politicians from all parties, upon whom you pour such scorn) would probably agree with your ideas, but fail to see how they can be achieved in the foreseeable future.

2. The world cannot rid itself of religious dogma and racial prejudice overnight.

3. The nations of the West will not initially be prepared to share their wealth equally with the Third World.

4. Granted that a socialist society was achieved, how could a modern society be organised on a world-wide scale with a workforce whose only reward is to serve one’s fellow human beings?

5. What would be the reaction of a small band of dedicated members performing skilled and essential services, to those merely paying lip service to a routine job in a factory?

6. Could people ever be made to work if they are unwilling?

7. My own feeling is that society would quickly degenerate into a nightmare similar to George Orwell’s 1984.

No doubt you will be able to give me some glib reassurance that my fears are unjustified, and that people will be conditioned to be socially responsible. However, my doubts will probably still remain.

R. J. Martin,

Wheathampstead.

Reply:

1. Politicians from all parties certainly do not accept the ideas of the SPGB, even though some may claim to do so. How many Tories support the idea of social equality? They say that human beings are inherently unequal. How many members of the Labour Party advocate the abolition of the wages system? Or free access to all wealth? Or the elimination of national frontiers? All other parties claim that the capitalist system is here to stay. We are alone in stating that the present system conflicts with the material interests of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population and must be replaced immediately by world socialism.

2. We have never suggested that the transition from mass acceptance of capitalism to majority socialist consciousness will occur “overnight”. Those who say that revolutions cannot happen overnight are usually trying to tell us either that ideas cannot change at all, or that, if they can, they will only change very slowly. The entire history of human society disproves such a conception of change ideas can, and frequently do, change very rapidly indeed. They change because human experience clashes with scientific developments in mankind’s control over the natural environment. Consider, for example, decline in religious belief in the last fifty years or changing reactions to sex roles.

3. Socialism means the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution by the entire world community. We all need each other in society and that is why people in Europe and people in Africa and Asia will recognise their common interest in a socialist society. Mutual aid or co-operation is the key to socialism; if it is claimed that humans are incapable of co-operative behaviour, we reply that co-operation will become an attractive idea when it is seen to be in the material interest of the co-operators. In capitalist society the working class is very cooperative — but with the master class and for their interests. Finally, socialism will not be a society of sharing, but one in which individuals will take freely from an abundance of wealth according to their need.

4. The reward in socialism will not be to serve others (which is what workers do now when they produce profits for an idle class), but to serve oneself by contributing to society.

5. Modern industrial society involves a complex division of labour in which diverse labour processes contribute to the overall supply of goods and services. In socialism the differing talents, skills and mundane contributions which people have to offer will be equally appreciated because people will realise that they are all necessary.

6. Why should any healthy human being be unwilling to work? It is understandable that when work means employment (wage slavery) workers may find work dull and meaningless. But given a society in which work is for one reason only: to provide goods and services for the use of humanity, why would people not want to give according to their abilities and take according to their needs? Of course, if you are correct and human beings cannot co-operate, then socialism will never happen. But the evidence is on our side: humans have a natural need to expend mental and physical energies in order to survive.

7. You give no reason for feeling that socialism will "degenerate into a nightmare” and so we are unable to re-assure you, glibly or otherwise, that your fear is unjustified. We assume that your fear of freedom is based upon what you have heard and read from the apologists for capitalism who warn workers to avoid the nightmare of a world without employment, poverty and war. lest we shatter their dreams. 

Editors.

Loss of faith

Dear Editors,

I have lost faith in the two main political parties. It has become the case of the lesser of two evils. I would like to know how much different you are.

1. Are you just a jumped up Labour Party? Why don’t you put up candidates in the area?

2. What would you do if you did come to power?

3. What would you do about the over-powerful unions? If you quelled them, would it be too much and to your advantage?

4. How much different are you from the Communist Party?

5. My husband and I have saved for our own house. Would we be penalised for it?

6. Would you go far enough to take money away from people who had too much and give to those with not enough? How are you going to do this?

I hope you don’t mind me firing all these questions at you, but 1 would like to know all about it. I don’t think joining a political party is something you can do half-heartedly.

D. Cowley, 

Frome, Somerset

Reply:

1. The SPGB is totally opposed to the Labour Party and has been since we were formed in 1904. Labour stands for the reform of the present capitalist system. The SPGB stands for the abolition of capitalism (production for profit) and its replacement by a system of society in which the means of wealth production and distribution will be commonly owned and democratically controlled by the whole community.

2. The SPGB does not want to obtain power. We want to see power placed in the hands of the working class once they are consciously and democratically organised for socialism. Once the workers of the world have taken over state power, they will use it in order to get rid of capitalism and establish a system of production for use.

3. The trade unions are not “over-powerful”. It is the small minority of the world’s population who live in luxury as a result of receiving rent, interest and profit — the capitalist class — who are the ones who enjoy social power at the moment; they enjoy it at the expense of the majority — the working class — whom they exploit. Trade unions are a necessary means of bargaining over the intensity of exploitation. But socialists want workers to go beyond trade unions (the industrial struggle) and use their political power to get rid of this exploitative social system once and for ail. There will be no trade unions in a socialist society, since there will be no economic classes and therefore no conflict of interest. The capitalist-run media hates to see workers using our power, even in militant trade union action. Socialists claim that workers have hardly started to flex their muscles. We have nothing to lose and much to gain from workers recognising their strength.

4. The Communist Party claims that there is socialism in Russia. We point out that it is a state capitalist dictatorship. The CP advises workers to reform capitalism to their advantage; we say this cannot be done and that the only solution to working class problems is political action to establish socialism. The CP stands for capitalism. We stand for socialism or communism. The two terms mean the same thing, when properly used.

5. We want a society where houses are built for humans to freely live in, not for sale. Why should you have to save up in order to have a roof over your head when society is now quite able to build adequate accommodation for everyone?

6. The SPGB does not stand for the redistribution of wealth, but for free access to all wealth within a society where the productive machinery is owned by everyone without distinction of race and sex. Society is now capable of providing an abundance of wealth to fulfil human needs without anyone going short. This will not require the rich to give to the poor, but the elimination of the inequality of class.

We agree that joining a political party is a serious business and we welcome your thoughtful questions. We do not put up candidates in Somerset because the SPGB is as yet weakly organised in the area. We look forward to seeing you help to change that situation.

Editors.

Where Orwell went wrong (1970)

From the June 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

For many decades now, the ruling classes have employed many devious methods in order to distort working class conceptions of Socialism, and have enjoyed a long success. One of the most successful attempts at distorting working class ideas about Socialism was George Orwell’s horrifying piece of literature 1984. Orwell, a sick and dying man, conjured up visions of a Big Brother state, which many were led to believe would be the result of a Socialist revolution.

Like millions of other people, Orwell’s conceptions were strongly influenced by the outcome of the Russian Revolution, which in actual fact, as all Socialists know, was a capitalist revolution.

The British ruling class did not waste any time in giving Orwell’s ideas widespread propaganda; for after the book was acclaimed by the capitalist press his misconceptions were perpetuated even further through the mass-media of television.

The effects of such harmful anti-Socialist propaganda were only too apparent. Many who had had any beliefs in Socialism became confused.

Orwell’s vision certainly was not of a socialist society where classes will be abolished. But there is now strong evidence to prove that what Orwell really envisaged was the monstrous power of state capitalism which is prevalent throughout the world today. Heavy policing is now being enforced by capitalist governments all over the world; C.S. gas is used against workers, and many other odious methods of repression are used. Demonstrations are photographed, names are recorded, while politicians mouth meaningless words about peace, freedom, and democracy. The exploitation of the working class by the capitalist class has become more and more scientific; in order to increase its wealth millions of workers are enslaved by their capitalist masters, and each individual is timed to the second. Often, when a worker cannot keep up to the speed required of him, his wages are slashed, and it is common for him to be persecuted by the foreman until he is driven out of his job. Workers are even timed when they visit the toilet. When we shop in a supermarket or department store we are watched on a television screen. Even out in the streets of a large city the public are under the watchful eye of Big Brother; the police have televisions on tall buildings. The ruling class have not yet introduced Newspeak, but the national press in Britain is controlled by a small group of milionaires, and the same lies are fed to the British masses daily in order to confuse them even more.

Those who had their ideas of Socialism destroyed by Orwell’s misconceptions should look around in nineteen seventy and they will realise very quickly that the horror of Big Brother has been brought about by the capitalist system of exploitation under which we are living now. The only way to eliminate Big Brother is to abolish the system which has fostered this suppression.

M.

Advertising by Stealth (1958)

From the November 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Slight Subliminal
There is proverbially no sentiment in business, and obviously no conscience in advertising. There is, however, a curious ethic of "fair play” which picks on one way of victimizing people among a thousand and demands that it be stopped. Thus at the present time “subliminal” advertising seems likely to be banned as too mean a method of what in any case is achieved in plenty of other ways.

The “subliminal” technique is a visual one, devised for the cinema and TV. In Chamber’s Dictionary it means “beneath the threshold of consciousness"; it consists of flashing a word or a symbol so swiftly that the brain registers without awareness that the eye has seen. Its first test in a cinema in America involved the words “ice cream,” and according to the Sunday Pictorial, which sounded a furious alarm (“Home Office Must Act”) on its front page on October 5th: “Ice cream sales in the interval took a tremendous upward leap, and the customers did not know why.”

It was announced in the House of Commons earlier this year that advertisers are forbidden to use subliminal suggestion on television in this country. There is, however, the promise of an American horror film in which nasty symbols and words like “blood” and “death” are flashed. Calling this "rape of the mind,” the Pictorial reported that "screams of horror are almost doubled when the symbols are used” because "without realizing it, the sub-conscious mind of the audience is flooded with thoughts of death.”

That this is low and objectionable could not be contested: what, one wonders, will future social historians make of the twentieth century? The suggestions made about it, however, extend far beyond those simple considerations. Through the subliminal technique, it is said, ideas and fears may be planted in the mind by stealth—it means, in fact, the beginning of thought-control. “Advisers to the Pictorial” made the demand for a ban indisputable by saying: “This is the sort of terror that George Orwell visualized in his book '1984.’ This is Big Brother’.”

Orwell’s earnest, mistaken book: what a lot it has to answer for! And, curiously enough, it never succeeded in showing any such terror. For all Orwell’s efforts, its horror lies chiefly in physical brutality; its Thought Police are simply plug-uglies, its hero hectored into seeing two and two as five ultimately not by suggestion but in fact by pain, privation and fear. One wonders, again, what the future could show the past in obtaining conformity, acquiescence, and self-deception. The Roman Catholic Church held millions in subjection for centuries without a single subliminal symbol; the Kaiser’s picture in the papers roused fury equal to anything in Orwell’s “hate week.”

Subliminal suggestion is undesirable, but there is no evidence to date—discounting the somewhat naive “tests” described in the Pictorial—that it is anything more than a new way of advertising. True, it carries the stigma of unfairness, of invading the person’s mind while his back, so to speak, is turned. Is that any more unfair or any more undesirable, however, than browbeating him into submission, which is what much modern advertising does? It is hard to see the difference between slipping a name into the subconscious and imprinting it by nagging repetition: few of us today will not carry the news of the New Blue Whitener to our graves.

Advertising has for many years employed techniques of suggestion; if the subliminal is rape of the mind, then these may be said to have tried taking liberties with it. The implications, for example, of all the symbols of masculinity and female desirability: Twice the Man on Whatsaname. What Makes a Woman Magnetic, Handsome Men are Slightly Sunbronzed. Where all suggestion techniques founder is on their own basis of competition. Presumably it is not difficult to rouse anyone’s wishes for strength, security, health or charm: what no advertiser has discovered, however, is how to make conflicting and contradictory claims effective on the subconscious.

It is all very well to find that more people bought ice cream after a subliminal flash, but the same effect could have been produced by any of half a dozen others means (overheating the cinema, for example). The real test is not whether they can be persuaded to buy more ice cream, but whether it will mean anything at all when they are told to buy four brands simultaneously, each one in preference to the others.

Every person in our society must always be on his guard against attempts to regulate his thoughts: government. press, church, school and advertisement are at it all the time. The facile common picture—Orwell’s one—of twentieth-century man as having less and less autonomy of thought is, however, completely untrue. It is the opposite which is true. For all the black patches, all the prejudice and cruelty and acceptance of things which ought not to be, man today is far more knowledgeable than ever before. That is not man in the abstract, typified by a few; it means man everywhere, walking the streets and going to work and reading the paper and watching the television. Knowing more, he is more critical and altogether more sensible than he has ever been.

The only really effective means of subjecting people’s minds is ignorance. The Catholic Church has already been mentioned; there are innumerable other examples— kingship, war propaganda, every persecution in history, including that of the Jews. While on the one hand new techniques of mass communication are developed and put into the hands of the few against the many, every day man grows in knowledge and so in ability to think for himself. It is worth reverting to advertising for a moment to point out that after forty years of mass commercial advertising a great many people remain more or less immune to it, and the growth of ventures for “consumer research” suggests that knowledge is far more effective than symbols.

“1984” has not come yet; nor will it This is not the trouble with the modem world. Much of its technical development points the way to the kind of world that could be; as things are, it is the organization of society now and nothing else which stands in the way of man’s full development. For that only a little more knowledge is needed. The enemy is ignorance.

Robert Barltrop

50 Years Ago: ‘1984’ unthinkable? (2005)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2005 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month an adaptation of George Orwell’s famous novel, “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” appeared as a  television play. The impact on audiences was generally agreed to have been startling—too startling, according to newspaper complaints about unsuitability and lack of “entertainment value.” The intention of the author, however,was not to horrify people, but to make them think and reflect, and certainly the play must have succeeded to a large extent in doing just that.

The story is set in London of the future, which has become Airstrip One in Oceania, one of three States into which the world is divided. These states are permanently at war with each other, though the actual fighting takes place in remote parts, in the jungle or the desert. The social structure in Oceania is a  hierarchy consisting of the Proles, the Outer Party and the Inner Party. At the bottom are the Proles, people doing purely routine work, ignorant, stupefied by abysmal and degrading conditions. Not very different are the Outer Party members, without privileges, living and working like automata, named and numbered on their clothing, rationed—and ceaselessly spied on by the two-way tele-screen through which the Thought Police watch and rule.

By contrast, the Inner Party members are the privileged, the givers of orders, the only people with  servants, with such luxuries as wine, and with freedom to switch off their tele screens when they wish. Above all stands the figure of the leader, Big Brother. Whether he is a real person is immaterial—he is the “expression of the Party.” (…)

All the most detestable aspects of the world today are enlarged and caricatured; the slogans like  “Ignorance Is Strength,” “War Is Peace”; the Ministry of Plenty announcing ration reductions as increases, the Ministry of Peace proclaiming “another great victor over our enemies,” the Ministry of Truth adjusting the facts of past history and “amending all records accordingly.”

The newspaper critics of this television play generally assumed that it was to be taken as a warning against totalitarianism as exemplified by Hitler’sGermany and in Russia today. When he wrote the book in 1949, Orwell doubtless drew inspiration from the Nazi regime and “Big Brother” Stalin. Yet the warning is not really against the tendencies and conditions in one “bad” part of the world sullying the “good.” It is against the actual and potential denial of human qualities that is implicit in the world set-up today. The theme is a powerful condemnation of the whole system of privileged and subject classes, of governmental control to preserve the system by crushing out any opposing idea. More than anything, perhaps, it is a warning of the effect of the mass-production of ideas on those who lose the desire to think for themselves, and who leave everything to “Big Brother.”

(From an article by “Stan”, Socialist Standard, January 1955)

Between the Lines: A Room with a View (1994)

The Between the Lines column from the August 1994 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Room with a View

   "Room 101", he said. There was a gasp and a flurry at Winston’s side. The man had actually flung himself on his knees on the floor, with his hands clasped together.
     "Comrade! Officer!" he cried. "You don’t have to take me to that place! Haven’t I told you everything already? What else is it you want to know? . . . Write it down and I’ll sign it - anything! Not Room 101!"

So goes a passage in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a passage which has provided the inspiration for a new scries on BBC2 (Mondays, 10.00pm) entitled, appropriately enough, Room 101. This programme invites a guest each week to pick his or her least favourite things — a sort of cynic’s Desert Island Discs. They are not encouraged to pick the real fear in life — in Nineteen Eighty-Four's Room 101 Winston Smith was confronted with the ultimate terror, for him, of being attacked by a cage full of rats. They are not asked to reveal that their personal nightmare is being eaten alive by piranhas or suchlike, only to reveal the everyday things that irritate them.

On the first programme the guest was Bob Monkhouse. Monkhouse, with a smile and a gulp and a glint of the eye, quickly built up a rapport with the studio audience which established that his prejudice were largely their own. The French, crap ventriloquists, Cilia Black, the usual suspects. All this set Between the Lines thinking. Why not choose a top ten of TV eyesores to be banished to Room 101? Why not indeed! The only difficulty would be in keeping it down to just ten, and sure enough this proved to be the case. With apologies to any grotesque televisional monstrosities that have been crowded out, here is the list - Between the Lines’s top ten of irritating TV, in time- honoured reverse-order.

The Countdown
10. Royal Ascot. Anything that brings together horse racing, the Royal Family, the dregs of the aristocracy on a day out and Eve Pollard doing a fashion commentary must be banging on the door of Room 101 with the worst of them.

9. Baywatch. Masturbation TV for frustrated teenagers. Why doesn’t ITV just show soft porn films and have done with it. Some of them are probably better made too, and with an intelligible storyline.

8. Party Political Broadcasts. Yes, they had to be there didn’t they? Aerial pictures of the British Isles on a summer’s day, fine British architecture, seagulls swooping, horses gambolling in fields and a deep husky voice whispering sweet nothings into the ear of the transfixed proletariat. The ultimate triumph of form over content, and generally for the unworthiest of causes. Makes the bile rise in your stomach.

7. The ’O' Zone. Currently running strong in the crap TV stakes. More teeny-bopper television, this time of the, er, musical variety. Rumour has it that it is soon to transmit an edition that doesn’t feature Take That. Don’t hold your breath, though.

6. Football Commentaries. The World Cup has been a boom for the . . . inspired and verbally-challenged, otherwise known as soccer commentators. John Motson seemed at the point of refusing to commentate on one match because the South Korean players "all looked the same". Unfortunately he pressed on for the full ninety minutes. As usual. South American teams display "typical Latin tactics", the Germans are "disciplined" but "arrogant", the Scandinavians are boring, the Irish physical and the ultimate accolade given to a player is that he might be good enough to play in the English Premier League. Nauseating.

5. ITN News. Tabloid TV journalism at its worst, especially during the lunchtime and early evening editions. John Suchet is a particular culprit — watch out for his stock question "what’s the mood like, Brian?" whenever there is an accident/bomb explosion/House of Commons vote making the headlines. Like the BBC, ITN is not averse to bias, either. In one recent bulletin during one of the rail strikes, Dr Ann Robinson of the lunatic Institute of Directors was interviewed to put the bosses’ view's for at least five minutes. She accused the signalmen of engaging in terrorism against the British public. Needless to say, no-one was interviewed to put an opposing view.

4. ITV Serials. Not Coronation Street, but the "blockbuster" variety, often imported from the US or Australia. Bubble-gum for the eyes. Fill up six hours a week though, don’t they?

3. ITV Sitcoms. The heady anti-working class vituperation of On The Buses and Love Thy Neighbour has been replaced with a banditry that could be construed as an improvement, but any semblance of humour seems to have been surgically removed from these programmes. Less interesting that Araldite, they are not be be recommended.

2. Religious programming. Aaargh! Harry Secombe and Roger Royle patronising children and old-age pensioners at the behest of a higher authority, like the BBC Board of Governors. An indictment of a "civilised" society.

1. EastEnders. ’Nuff said. Pass the Prozac.

Dave Perrin

The decade ahead — socialism or chaos (1980)

From the January 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Imagine a history book written one hundred years from now: “The 1970s was the last decade in which the majority of the world’s population acquiesced to what was known as the capitalist system. In the early eighties the world socialist movement began to grow, inspired by the insoluble contradictions of the profit system. By 1986 socialists were in a majority in most of the advanced capitalist countries. In no time at all they developed into a majority of the world’s population, and society was ready for the great revolution which marked the beginning of social civilisation.” We are free to dream of success in the coming decade, but reality presents us with the prospect of further frustration for our cause. Capitalism has a considerable capacity to reform itself and so to deceive workers that symptoms and not cause are the source of social problems. The means of communication are owned and controlled by our class enemy; to break their monopoly over the minds of the working class is a formidable task.

If this is not to be the decade in which social freedom is demanded by humanity, then it is inevitable that the majority of the earth’s population will continue to consent to capitalism. It will mean that, as in the 1970s, the years before us will be years of misery, degradation and exploitation for the working class. This is inevitable in a class-divided society in which one class possesses but does not produce and another class produces and does not possess. Without claiming the power of clairvoyancy, let us attempt to look forward into the 1980s and predict how capitalism may develop.

In the 1970s there was much talk of the unhealthy ecological consequences of industrial waste and pollution of the environment. The air in the big cities is filthy, houses are overcrowded and designed to be dull and cheap, and our lives are endangered by the unsafe development of nuclear energy. Reform groups like Friends of the Earth and the Ecology Party have made much noise about the need to make society clean, healthy and pleasant to live in. Some efforts, both technological and legislative, will no doubt be made to deal with the effects of pollution and waste. However, it can be said with certainty that any environmental improvements will come second to the accumulation of profits by the capitalist class. It is possible that by 1990 there will be a reduction in the pollution of the atmosphere, but this will be because ‘clean air’ is more efficient for capitalism, not because it is more pleasant for workers. With the present dangers involved in the production of nuclear power, the 1980s could witness minor — or even major — nuclear disasters. But why should capitalists invest money in alternative energy research, such as solar energy, when it is cheaper to carry on with nuclear power and risk human lives? Within the next ten years, urban poverty and deprivation will not vanish. Overcrowding, homelessness, alienated lifestyles, social insecurity and powerlessness over our local environment will still face workers everywhere.

The insane slaughter of people by people, called war (it is in fact legalised murder), will occur again and again in the next decade. It is not only nuclear war that socialists oppose, as if ‘conventional’ wars like 1939-45 and Vietnam are somehow acceptable. Every drop of working class blood which is shed in defence of the capitalists’ raw materials and markets is a profound condemnation of the profit system. Will Russia and China intensify their diplomatic skirmishes? Will America and Russia fight it out over the oil in the Middle East? How many of us will die in the process? Cambodia, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, Iran, the Spanish Sahara . . .  these today, where tomorrow? In Ireland we can be sure that the English capitalists who have investments to protect will not give up without a bloody fight. We can expect not only the ‘legalised’, ‘respectable’ violence of the capitalist states but the senseless terrorism of would-be powers like the IRA and the PLO. The 1980s could be the decade in which all of us, socialists and defenders of capitalism, workers and capitalists, are destroyed by the ultimate madness of the nuclear bomb. Only a society without the need of war can prevent the possibility of mass destruction, the alternative to it is to live in fear in the years ahead.

One-third of the world’s population is currently malnourished. Despite the existence of charities, which are always one step behind the growth of poverty, one can be sure that this problem will not be eradicated in the decade ahead. Think about what this means: there is a potential for the production of an abundance of food, enough to feed us all three times over on Western standards, but a third of humanity will starve because it is more profitable to destroy food than to give it to the hungry. Think of the hideous pictures of children dying of malnutrition and it will be impossible not to conclude that to allow capitalism to continue is to be responsible for such terrible suffering.

Poverty is not confined to distant lands which can only be observed on TV screens. In Britain workers are still faced with the problem of making ends meet. Of course the standard of comfort has improved, but compared with the life which is possible, can we honestly say that workers are better off? The social services which Labour politicians are constantly telling workers to be thankful for are presently being cut because the government cannot afford to pay for them. ‘Free’ health treatment, cheap school dinners and leisure centres are some of the social facilities which have been thrown as crumbs to the working class and are now being taken away. By 1990, how much of the so-called Welfare State will have been dismantled? When capitalism faces a crisis, workers’ conditions suffer. Capitalism itself will not collapse, for booms always follow slumps, but even if the 1980s is a decade of almost permanent boom (which is unlikely) this will not enable the politicians to solve a single problem mentioned in this article. If you or your relatives are sixty years old, employed and reasonably satisfied with your life at the moment, you might be seventy, living on a pittance of a pension and hardly able to survive in ten years time. Now is the time to do something about it.

Inflation has been one of the significant problems of the 1970s. As the Socialist Standard has consistently demonstrated, inflation is a government-produced problem, not an inevitable feature of capitalism. The present Tory government has so far been totally incapable of getting rid of inflation, and it is probable that governments will continue to inflate the currency as a means of temporarily side-tracking some of their economic problems. It is possible that the 1980s will see the final abandonment of the bogus theories of J.M. Keynes, but what will the economists put in their place? They will be forced to find another set of economic nonsense to enable them to produce incorrect predictions, theories which do not correspond with economic reality, and ‘solutions’ which invariably fail. Is it too optimistic to hope that more economists will turn to the writings of Marx and discover that the best remedy for economic problems is to abolish capitalism?

The 1980s will be the decade of the so-called New Technology. An article in the November 1979 Socialist Standard demonstrated the falsity of certain hysterical forecasts about the effects of the silicon chip. Ultimately, machinery designed to increase productivity will be introduced despite attempts by the unions to prevent it. What an absurd system of society this is, in which people suffer hardships because more can be produced more quickly. By 1990 there will still be unemployment (in Britain it it predicted to reach the two million mark in the first half of the decade) and there will still be politicians promising to bring about ‘full employment’. But in a society in which men and women are employed only when their labour results in profit for an employer there can be no avoiding fluctuating levels of unemployment. Some Tory MPs have suggested that unemployed workers should be ‘forced’ to accept any job offered rather than be given social security payments. So consider that if today you are employed in an average-wage, moderately satisfying job, by 1990 the system may make you unemployed and forced either to accept a marked fall in living standards or to accept an unpleasant occupation. The alternative to this is to consider not the eradication of unemployment but the abolition of employment as such.

Thirty-two years ago George Orwell wrote his classic political novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Many of the aspects of that frightening totalitarian state are present today: the power blocs, the invasion of privacy, the doublespeak, the creeping increase in police powers. In the state capitalist countries the similarity is even more striking — there, dissidents are tortured and the state machine is all embracing. The concentration of real power into fewer and fewer hands shows every sign of increasing up to and beyond 1984. The relatively innocent rise of punk rock and its lyrics of despair was the 1970s’ indication of the alienation and cynicism of youth; it could be a sign of more sinister movements to come. The two main political parties continue to defend the same system while pretending to be different. Whether the two-party one-voice system carries on throughout the 1980s or whether new pro-capitalist parties come into being, we can confidently predict that there will only be political dead ends so long as the majority class places faith in leaders.

The 1980s, like all other decades, will have no shortage of radicals, pseudo-socialists and working class heroes to suggest half-baked programmes based upon reformist demands and trendy ideas. The left, posing as political progressives, will continue to advocate their incoherent and anti-socialist policies, squandering the energies of those workers who join them in search of an alternative to the status quo.

It is for ordinary men and women like ourselves to determine the course of the 1980s. The choice is between pollution, housing problems, starvation, social service cuts, poverty, inflation, unemployment and war —all socially created problems - and the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production and distribution.

A happy (and socialist) New Year.

Steve Coleman

Editorial: Heralding 1984 (1958)

Editorial from the February 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Daily Herald, early in January, ran a series of articles by “experts” to answer the question whether 25 years ahead we shall be living in George Orwell’s nightmare, “with common man enslaved by the State” or will 1984 “be a year of dazzling brilliance of scientific promise—with common man enjoying the new fruits of the earth?” (Daily Herald, 6/1/58). Sir Miles Thomas foresees that travel will be faster, cheaper and safer. Sir Adolphe Abrahams does not think we shall have the 3½ minute mile; but football will still be the top national game, we shall still have the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race and the Cup Final will still be at Wembley. Jane Drew, “leading woman architect” thinks houses and streets will be more attractive, houses won’t be cold, and the “the TV set will take the place of the fireplace as the centre of the family circle.”

The Anti-Utopia Builders

Now the Herald is the organ of the Labour Party and claims to be socialist and the reader might well have expected to be told that 1984 would have seen the introduction of Socialism. The articles did not say that Socialism would be here or that it wouldn’t be here— the subject was just not mentioned. Several of the “experts” have either never heard of it at all, or, they think that it has nothing to do with their specialist subject; which goes to show just how little they know about Socialism.

In each of their supposedly isolated worlds the choice is between capitalism and socialism, there isn't any neutral no man's land. The kind of house you live in, the kind of vehicle you travel in and the kind of entertainment and sport you enjoy will depend on your position in society. If you are a wage-earner in a capitalist 1984 what you get will be what you can afford. All of this is a closed book to the Herald's writers and obviously doesn't have any importance for the Editor, or he would have directed his inquiries to the real question, whether Socialism will be here by then.

Capitalism, 1984 Variety

But one of the writers, Mr. Harry Nicholas, assistant secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, stands out from the rest, for he mentioned the word “socialist” His article, on the job situation, was the most deplorable of the lot. He answers the question very clearly, though without knowing he answers it. Capitalism it will be, with not a single essential feature altered. Not that Mr. Nicholas is pessimistic about it. He does not think “we will have any unemployment in the next 25 years, provided we have sanity in the financial sphere.” (He has clearly never examined the financial system if he thinks it isn't inherently idiotic). Automation, he says, will create jobs and markets. We shall be charitable and “in a good socialist way” we shall assist the backward countries and thus “create markets which will absorb the products of our industries” There will be fewer “'unskilled'” and more “skilled” workers, and higher standard rates of wages and less piecework. There will be more Company pension, sickness and other benefits to supplement the State schemes. Evidently Mr. Nicholas' optimism does not extend to the elimination of the wars that go with the struggle for markets. All he says in this field is that “because of the changes likely to take place in weapons of attack and defence, many of our Royal Ordnance factories and naval dockyards will have to be utilized for peacetime production.” He does not risk a forecast about the kind of weapons the other factories will be producing.

We may wind up by saying that while most of the contributions were useless, because the writers don't even know about the capitalist world we live in, Mr. Nicholas is pernicious as well because he has obviously heard about capitalism but sees no reason why or how or when it should be abolished: just like the Herald, and the Labour Party for which it speaks.

Minor distractions on the Road to Freedom (1998)

From the August 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

Paris erupts. 'At last - Victory Is Ours! We beat the world' And Chirac was wearing the team scarf. Who cannot be proud to be French tonight. asks the ecstatic newsreader. Old woman on the corner of the Rue de Rivoli throws her hat in the air and thinks of next week's rent. Liberty? Fraternity? Equality? Maybe not. but We won the Cup. Let the world gloat.

Of course, we should have played Gazza. Two men in a pub relive a battle in which they fought valiantly with six-packs and a remote control.The BBC should have played the fat Italian opera singer. Having Faure's music as the theme tune could only encourage the French. Beckham's name is spat with contempt. He robbed us of elusive victory. Forgive what Thatcher did to the miners and Blair's grin of the youthful oppressor as he picks on the disabled and single mums, but who can think welt of national treachery cheered only by Scots and Posh Spice?

Why Did Ginger Spice Leave? The nation demands to know. Man at the Job Centre with three kids and no prospects reads the Sun with latest revelations of Spice News. Which one is your favourite Spice Girl, then? When did we last hear the gossip about Fifteen-Hours-A-Day-In-A-Bangkok-Shirt-Factory Spice? Ad exec sighs; the name has no ring to it. The kids need a role model. Look at Barbie Doll: always smiling. She can take it. Why can't everyone?

Bowler-hatted bigoted know-nothing no-surrender boys demand inviolable right to pester neighbours. It's tradition, see? So, No Surrender. Three kids burned to death in their home. It's tradition, see' Burning kids alive will soon be forgotten. but never the triumph of 1690.Were they waiting for the Big Match, these harmless, innocent. defenceless children, before the psychotic patriots extinguished their lives? Blair condemns, with limp sincerity.

But what about the stink in his back yard? Yes, you Tony—you with the permanent ad-man's smile. Did young Draper promise to fix it for a yankee capitalist in return for a well-stuffed envelope? Mandelson lets Draper take the rap. Blair lets Mandelson take the rap. Clinton insists that Tony would never mess. Tony declares that Bill would never take advantage of no~one. The girl was only in his room to get a saxophone lesson. It was all a horrible misunderstanding. Honest, guy. The People Must Be Told. Did Monica inhale? Had Dodi and Di done the business before that fateful journey? Is Big Mac better than a Burger King Whopper? And why are William Hague and Baroness Thatcher never seen in the same room? lt's an old trick. Will. You can't disguise it by wearing your baseball hat and bopping to reggae. You're an octogenarian n the body of a young man. What do you think about these alien abductions? They wish for little else in Wolverhampton.

Have you booked your ticket for the Greenwich Dome? Why, what's there? Dunno—but I'm definitely going. Where will you be on New Year's Eve 999? Drunk as a skunk in an East End boozer reliving 1966—Geoff Hurst, Harold Wilson. the Kray Twins. They was harmless boys—only wanted to look after their mum and torture people. Wonder how Gerry Adams treats his mum. Isn't the Queen Mum wonderful! Won't we weep like babies when she finatly comes to terms with nature. Old women in tower block (Bevan Court, by name) decide whether to open baked beans or put on the heater. The blood gets thinner when you're old. Unless it's blue. Queen Mum always has a spare coin for the meter. They have her girl's picture on, you know.

What about this Euro, then? Give up the Queen's head on our flyers? Never! Lining up at the cash machine will never be the same. Sorry. But Your Request Has Been Referred To Your Bank. Young William Hague will lead a national crusade to save our currency.We remember the blitz, Fritz. Britons never never never shall be. Gissa Job, guv.

Irritating pictures on the news of starving kids in Sudan. It's wrong—it's just not right to show that kind of thing when people are eating their dinner. Isn't life miserable enough without that? Pass the Prozac, pal. They look like humans. In your nightmares they look like your own children. The newsreader says—some of the images in this report may disturb some viewers. But most of the images won't. They'll leave you alone and let the mind rot in maladjusted tranquillity. It's called Normality.

After Winston Smith had come out from Room 101 he could see everything much more clearly. Distracting thoughts of freedom had been cleared from his head. News came on to the telescreen. France has won! Rejoice! But England should never have dropped Gazza.

1984—Unthinkable? (1955)

TV Review from the January 1955 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last month an adaptation of George Orwell’s famous novel, “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” appeared as a television play. The impact on audiences was generally agreed to have been startling—too startling, according to newspaper complaints about unsuitability and lack of “entertainment value.” The intention of the author, however, was not to horrify people, but to make them think and reflect, and certainly the play must have succeeded to a large extent in doing just that.

The story is set in London of the future, which has become Airstrip One in Oceania, one of three States into which the world is divided. These states are permanently at war with each other, though the actual fighting takes place in remote parts, in the jungle or the desert. The social structure in Oceania is a  hierarchy consisting of the Proles, the Outer Party and the Inner Party. At the bottom are the Proles, people doing purely routine work, ignorant, stupefied by abysmal and degrading conditions. Not very different are the Outer Party members, without privileges, living and working like automata, named and numbered on their clothing, rationed—and ceaselessly spied on by the two-way tele-screen through which the Thought Police watch and rule.—By contrast, the Inner Party members are the privileged, the givers of orders, the only people with servants, with such luxuries as wine, and with freedom to switch off their tele-screens when they wish. Above all stands the figure of the leader, Big Brother. Whether he is a real person is immaterial—he is the “expression of the Party.” 

Against this background the story unfolds of one humble member of the Outer Party. Winston (why Winston?) Smith, perhaps the last of the rebels. He is a pitiable, harassed, uncertain and confused rebel, working in the Ministry of Truth, where information is "adjusted" as the State requires. He watches a propaganda film showing the enemy leader, Goldstein; and while the others shout hate at Goldstein, he hesitantly thinks "I hate Big Brother." He meets a member of the Inner Party who, he suspects, "works for" Goldstein, and offers his services as a conspirator. Questions are asked: Is he willing to lie to further the cause he believes in, to cheat, to murder—even to throw sulphuric acid in a baby's face if it will somehow help? He is willing.

A romantic interest is introduced when Winston meets a girl whose job is to operate a novel-writing machine that churns out stereotyped rubbish for the Proles to read. Since love is forbidden and marriage is by order of the Party, the couple meet in secret, at first in the country and later in a room above an antique shop in the Prole sector. Eventually, the shopkeeper betrays them to the Thought Police. There is a scene (perhaps unnecessarily long and detailed) showing the brutal methods used to break down the last vestiges of their resistance, so that they unquestioningly accept that 2 + 2 = 5 if the Party says it is right.

The elements in the story that most compel attention are the subtle touches of detail that illustrate the sort of world that the author suggests is possible three decades hence. The worker in the Ministry of Truth helping to compile a dictionary of Newspeak (the new distorted basic language) proudly claims that it will abolish shades of meaning and narrow the range of thought, that it will abolish ideas through the destruction of words to express them. This appalling outlook is seen in an Inner Party official's remark "We're not interested in the stupid crimes you've committed—only in the thought."

All the most detestable aspects of the world today are enlarged and caricatured; the slogans like  “Ignorance Is Strength,” “War Is Peace”; the Ministry of Plenty announcing ration reductions as increases, the Ministry of Peace proclaiming “another great victor over our enemies,” the Ministry of Truth adjusting the facts of past history and “amending all records accordingly.”

The newspaper critics of this television play generally assumed that it was to be taken as a warning against totalitarianism as exemplified by Hitler’s Germany and in Russia today. When he wrote the book in 1949, Orwell doubtless drew inspiration from the Nazi regime and “Big Brother” Stalin. Yet the warning is not really against the tendencies and conditions in one “bad” part of the world sullying the “good.” It is against the actual and potential denial of human qualities that is implicit in the world set-up today. The theme is a powerful condemnation of the whole system of privileged and subject classes, of governmental control to preserve the system by crushing out any opposing idea. More than anything, perhaps, it is a warning of the effect of the mass-production of ideas on those who lose the desire to think for themselves, and who leave everything to “Big Brother.”

Stan.

Between the Lines: News from Oceania (1989)

The Between the Lines Column from the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

News from Oceania

George Orwell's novel, Nineteen Eight Four, is about the most miserable social vision ever constructed. In 1984 there was much debate about how far society had gone down the road to Orwell's fascistic nightmare world. While "intellectuals" were weighing civil liberties on the Orwellian scales, picketing miners were feeling the truncheons of workers in uniform who were sent to break their resistance. What happened to the miners — the state brutality, government callousness and media vilification — was a stronger answer to the question of what kind of society 1984 was than any of the 19.50 hardback academics ever came up with.

Before 1984 there was much debate about quite what Orwell was attacking in his novel. Some said it was a critique of post-war England, bowed in spirit by the rationing and regimentation of the war years — that 1984 was really 1948 reversed and writ larger. Others suggested that Orwell was trying to attack socialism. Orwell was specific about the fact that his novel was not intended as an attack on the genuine principles of socialism (as he understood them). Writing to Francis Henson of the United Automobile Workers union in the USA, he explained that "My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on socialism  . . . but as a show up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism." In short, the novel was aimed at the drift towards the corporate state which so-called radicals of both the Left and Right had celebrated as liberation from capitalism in the years that Orwell lived and wrote.

Last month Channel Four showed the recent film version of the novel. It is open to criticism in that its depiction of a mass society of submissive ideological slaves presented the deluded victims as caricatures of conformity. They looked too much like extras in a film, told to look like conditioned subjects. In reality, conditioned subjects are less caricatured; it is precisely that humans are not robots, and yet can be made to think like programmed machines, that is sinister and frightening about totalitarianism. The "masses" in this film looked and sounded like robotic machines, and this diminished the horror of what had been done to them. It is the whistling Nazi and the Stalinist who loves his wife and children who are the really frightening characters. That said, it was important that the film was made and shown because within it is a reminder of the dangers inherent in dogmatic belief.

Nineteen Eighty Four is essentially about the power to make people believe that is not true. O'Brien tells Winston Smith, while he is torturing him, that thinking is all bout learning to discipline your mind to accept reality. And "reality" is what those above you — Big Brother, The State, The Party, conventional opinion — dictates it to be. Smith attempted to resist the social reality of the ruling elite. Like the Romantics of the last century, who sought to be true to their own feelings before they would defer to the abstract Facts of the Industrial Order, Smith believed that his duty was to obey his own feelings, not those of his dogmatic rulers with  their ideology of Ingsoc. Smith tells his lover, Julia, that it is not survival which is most important, but remaining human. He pleads with her not to betray her humanity. She thinks that by betrayal he means she should never confess to the state — never get caught. But betrayal means more than that: it means acquiescence to dogma, to ideas which are unrelated to experience. In the end Smith is forced to betray himself in both senses. Not only does he confess to thought crimes — that is easy — but he also succumbs to the dogma. He is afraid to have doubts. He learns to say and do what is expected of submissive subjects.

The novel, and now the film are not about 1948 or 1984 or the merits of socialism of the demerits of Stalinism; they are about the power of dogma to extinguish the sense of doubt which is the basis of all reason and the necessary accompaniment of all intelligent political conviction. When you stop doubting you are politically dead. Regardless of what orwell meant by his novel, and regardless of the demerits of the film as a depiction of the ideologically conditioned crowd, there is still importance in the message which tells us that minds can be controlled, resistance nullified by the very forces against whom we need to resist, and that dogma, in whatever form, is a fearful enemy. To pre-empt critics, we would add that this applies no less to socialist dogma. As Orwell said of his own vision, "The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: Don't let it happen. It depends on you."

Our enemies are our friends

News At Ten (6 April) urged us to welcome our new-found friend, Mikhail Gorbachev. He is a communist, you see. A communist with whom Mrs. Thatcher is very pleased to do business. A communist who is proud to invite the Queen to come over and tread on a few of his subjects. The cult of Gorby is very big right now. It was the Newspeak writers on The Sun who christened him Gorby. Over in Washington the CIA tried to put a damper on the visit by leaking the information about Russian sales of fighter planes to Libya. All part of the propaganda war. This is the dogmatic assault upon us today: when our rulers want us to believe that Russia is "the Evil Empire" and we must prepare to die destroying it, then the newsreaders will tell us what a despicable police state the dictator Gorbachev presides over (as he does); when commerce and international militarism require closer relations between the two old superpowers — so that perhaps they can prepare to make war on the new, up and coming superpowers — then Gorby is our man and pictures of Raisa being shown the Tower of London are the order of the day. It all depends what they want us to think. To accept what the servants of capitalist propaganda tell us is to fall into the trap which leads to the kind of world Orwell was writing about. That millions have fallen into the trap cannot be denied, but it is not too late to climb out. In an essay written in 1940, called Inside The Whale, Orwell made a comment which is worth keeping in front of you while watching News At Ten: "To say 'I accept' in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine-guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murders."

Steve Coleman

Orwell's Nightmare (1983)

From the December 1983 issue of the Socialist Standard

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face . . . Forever."

Surely no date has ever been awaited with such foreboding as 1984. The reason is George Orwell's novel of the same name which paints a nightmarish picture of a world divided into three huge superstates: Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. It is a world characterised by dreary squalor, permanent warfare, spying telescreens, the "thought police", and Big Brother:

"The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting – three hundred million people all with the same face."

In Oceania all hopes of social change, revolutionary or otherwise, have been systematically eliminated by the all-powerful totalitarian state. History has come to a stop.

George Orwell was born Eric Blair in Mothari, India, in 1903. He was educated at Eton and held a variety of jobs including an Imperial policeman in Burma, a private tutor, a school teacher, and a bookshop assistant, He is best remembered however as a writer and social commentator who presented, analysed and advocated political ideas. In 1947 in a short essay called Why I Write, Orwell spelled out his aims and motives as a writer:

"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice."

Not a bad starting point, but what were the political ideas Orwell advocated? They are difficult to pin down with any precision as Orwell did not wish to be compromised by commitment to a doctrine or programme – a subject he wrote about in the essay, Writers and Leviathan. His "socialism" was in fact little more than a moral stance, a call for "justice" and "liberty" and for a more humane and decent world. He attempted to live up to these convictions and in the Spanish Civil War enlisted in the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist-Unification), a popular militia fighting at the Front. Eventually, political expediency led to the POUM being denounced by the Communist Party as a "fascist fifth column". Persecution and executions followed, forcing Orwell and his wife to escape into France. It was these experiences (vividly recaptured in the autobiographical Homage to Catalonia) that led to both Orwell's anti-Communist Party attitude and his distrust of "intellectuals".

Orwell's writing life lasted less than twenty years. His book output was relatively small although it was bolstered by his numerous essays and journalism. In January 1950, aged 46, he died from tuberculosis from which he had suffered for some time. Since his death his growing reputation as a writer stemmed largely from his last two novels, Animal Farm and 1984 – both satires on totalitarianism. In a recently published book (George Orwell: The Road to 1984), P. Lewis says

"One of the many paradoxes about him is that thirty years after his death, his work is more alive than in his lifetime . . . He is increasingly read, becomes more influential and remains perfectly relevant."

The novel 1984 is an extremely influential book. It has appeared in more than sixty languages, its sales are in the millions, it has been put on the curricula of schools and colleges and was turned into a film and a television play (the latter, in 1954, caused one of the BBC's biggest controversies). The book's appeal stems from its dramatic treatment of important ideas; 1984 has influenced the way in which people think about society and the future. It has introduced into everyday speech a number of words and concepts: even people who have never read the book are familiar with "Big Brother", "Doublethink" and "Newspeak".

One of the main themes in 1984 is the use of language to corrupt and distort thought. History is written in the Ministry of Truth, facts inconvenient to the regime are pushed down the memory hole, and Newspeak is the official language rendering certain modes of thought impossible. All of this is epitomised in the three slogans of the Party: "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", "Ignorance is Strength". Today, the very term "Orwellian" has become an adjective to describe any institution or event which evokes oppression and organised lying. You may wonder why it is not used more often.

Since its publication in 1948 the novel 1984 has generated diverse theories to explain why Orwell should have written such a book. According to one view, 1984 is a deliberate and powerful attack on "socialism". Isaac Deutscher (the biographer of Trotsky) referred to the novel as an "ideological weapon in the cold war". While the novel has been used with great enthusiasm by the opponents of socialism, there is good evidence to show that even by Orwell's confused notions this was not his intention. When controversy surrounding the novel began he stated explicitly:

"My novel Nineteen Eighty Four is not intended as an attack on socialism, or on the Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show up of the perversions to which a centralised economy is liable, and which have already been partly realised in Communism and Fascism . . . . I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences" (Letter to F. A. Henson, l6 June 1949. CEJL, Vol 4, p. 564.)

What were these totalitarian ideas which Orwell was attacking? Firstly, they were the ideas of the "intellectuals", especially those on the left wing, who were prepared to distort history and obscure the truth in order to further their own ends:

"The truth is, of course, that the countless English intellectuals who kiss the arse of Stalin are not different from the minority who give their allegiance to Hitler or Mussolini . . . All of them are worshipping power and successful cruelty. It is important to notice that the cult of power tends to be mixed up with a love of cruelty and wickedness for their own sakes." (Raffles and Miss Blandish, 1944. CEJL, Vol 3, p.258.)

Secondly, they were the tendencies Orwell saw around him in 1948 – in particular the growth of central state power. Fascist Germany had been defeated but there was state-capitalist Russia, and a nationalising post-war Labour government in Britain.

Others have attempted a psychoanalytical explanation of the novel, believing it to be the cry of a disillusioned and dying man. An examination of Orwell's earlier writings shows quite clearly that this is not the case. 1984 is the fruition of a number of ideas and preoccupations which Orwell had been developing for a number of years. As his friend R. Rees says, ". . . he succeeds in packing into 1984 nearly all the ideas of his previous books". It is interesting to see how Llew Gardner of the Daily Worker (18 December, 1954) managed to combine both of these theories to attack Orwell (obviously unhappy to see the ugly face of Russian "communism" so accurately portrayed:

"When he wrote 1984, the anti-socialist work that shocked the nation on television, George Orwell was sick in body and mind, a fast dying man."

This must have a familiar ring to it, especially for the numerous Russian dissidents who are sent to hospitals for "psychiatric treatment".

Most ridiculous of all is the use of 1984 as a yardstick to measure future developments. For example, in September 1974, the Daily Telegraph magazine produced a special issue devoted to the novel. It had in bold print on the cover: "George Orwell predicted complete oppression by 1984, and a soul-less society, without love or freedom". A recent article in New Scientist by C. L. Boltz ("1984: A Passed Future") criticises Orwell for, among other things, not foreseeing the growth of feminism and the revolt of the young. This type of explanation not only misses the point of 1984 but attempts to turn Orwell into something he never claimed to be – a prophet. On the contrary, he said:

"I do not believe that the kind of society I describe will arrive, but I believe (allowing, of course, for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive." (Letter to F. A. Henson.)

Certain important criticisms must be made of 1984 arising from Orwell's limited understanding of the nature of class and power in society. For example, what are we to make of his vision of the "proles"? Can the class struggle be subdued so that nobody ever protests about the appalling conditions in Oceania? Most serious of all, can we really be expected to accept the central argument of the book that "power", as an end in itself, is the motive force of the whole social system?

Every study of Orwell sooner or later discusses his obsession with his own social background and upbringing. In The Road to Wigan Pier he describes himself as a member of the "lower upper middle class". Commentators talk of the "transformation" of Blair into Orwell as the rejection of his upbringing and the search for a new social identity. This may explain Orwell's attachment to what he considered "the working class". Yet Orwell never understood what class meant. Class is an economic condition, an objective social relationship, derived from an individual's relation to the ownership and control of wealth production. There are only two classes in capitalist society, those who possess but do not produce (capitalists) and those who produce but do not possess (workers). There is no choice in the matter; there are no alternatives. If you work for a wage or salary you are a member of the working class. It follows from the existence of a class-divided society that the two classes pursue antagonistic interests: there is a continuous class struggle. Yet although production continues in the class-divided society of Oceania with the "proles" doing all the necessary work social unrest, the other side of the coin, has disappeared. Orwell never explains why there are no more strikes, no more stoppages, no more disputes. Finally, it is because of Orwell's inability to explain class that he is unable to detect the real material force behind capitalist society – the relentless pursuit of profit.

Despite this criticism 1984 remains an important and stimulating book. And as for Orwell? We can apply the epigraph he uses for one of his own characters, George Bowling, in Coming Up for Air:

"He's dead, but he won't lie down."

Brian Rubin

The Political Ideas of George Orwell (1986)

From the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

George Orwell is the pseudonym of Eric Blair who was born at Mothari, India on 25 June 1903; educated at St Cyprian's preparatory school, Eastbourne where he won a scholarship to Eton and. after completing his education, worked as a policeman in Burma, attaining the rank of sub-divisional officer, a private tutor, school teacher and an assistant in a book shop. He fought against the fascists in Spain in 1935-37, worked for the BBC for a time during the Second World War and for Tribune after the war. From about 1930 he tried to earn his living as a writer, finally achieving outstanding success with his last two novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty Four (1949). His last years were dogged by tuberculosis and he died in London on 21 January 1950.

Orwell was a fine, though somewhat confused, journalist who became famous for the plain style of writing evident in his essays; his successful attempt to make political writing an art; his famous satires on totalitarianism; his search for objectivity and honesty in journalism depicted most graphically in Homage to Catalonia (1938). Many of Orwell's experiences are captured in his books and essays. Indeed any study of Orwell must keep in mind the fact that there is some fiction in all his autobiography and some autobiography in all of his fiction.

Orwell described himself as lower-upper-middle class, failing to realise that there are only two classes: the capitalist class which possesses but does not produce and the working class which produces but does not possess. Nevertheless, the myths that have sprung up about his poverty are incorrect. His father's pension was 438-10/- (438.50) a year compared with the average annual wage of about l00 for a skilled manual worker in 1913-14.

Some twenty years later Orwell was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to write about conditions in the coal mining areas of the industrial north with an advance of 500 spread over two years a considerable sum when Orwell himself stated that the miners earned less than 3 a week in 1934 (even allowing for expenses incurred in obtaining material for the book). Although Orwell did not make a great deal of money from his writing until the publication of Animal Farm in 1945, he was able to keep his head above water with a standard of living, although far from luxurious and certainly spartan by today's standards, that would have been the envy of many miners in the 1930s.

Throughout his novels, documentaries, essays and journalism Orwell relentlessly and uncompromisingly criticised imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, political dishonesty, power, totalitarianism, privilege and private education. He claimed to be a democratic socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party in June 1938 until after the outbreak of the Second World War, but his confused notions of socialism can be read in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) in which he states:

"In England there is only one Socialist party that has ever seriously mattered, the Labour Party. It has never been able to achieve any major change, because except in purely domestic matters it has never possessed a genuinely independent policy. It was and is primarily a party of the trade unions, devoted to raising wages and improving working conditions. This meant that all through the critical years it was directly interested in the prosperity of British capitalism."

Thus Orwell describes the Labour Party as "socialist" and continues in the same paragraph to describe, quite accurately, why it is not and cannot be socialist. He also suggested that there should be "Limitation of incomes, on such a scale that the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one", which even the majority of Conservatives would recognise as unsocialist. He also described Russia as "the only definitely socialist country", although it is true he had many harsh things to say concerning the perversion of socialism in Russia in many of his other books.
Nevertheless in this, arguably his worst book, Orwell describes the inefficiency and contradictions of capitalism when he wrote of British capitalists selling war materials to Germany:

"Right at the end of August 1939 the British dealers were tumbling over one another in their eagerness to sell Germany tin, rubber, copper and shellac - and this in the clear, certain knowledge that war was going to break out in a week or two. It was about as sensible as selling somebody a razor to cut your throat with. But it was "good business"."

In an article in the 1983 Socialist Standard, Brian Rubin argues that Orwell's "socialism" was in fact little more than a moral stance, a call for "justice" and "liberty" and a more humane and decent world. Rick Hales, in the 1980 Socialist Standard ("Literary lefties in the 1930s") claims that the literary left-wing tried to expiate their class-guilt mostly by becoming Communists or fellow travellers except for the two heretics of the left-wing Julian Symons, who became a Trotskyite, and George Orwell who became a tramp.

Orwell's imaginative writing was not as good as his autobiographical or documentary work, but it was in his political journalism and polemical essays that he excelled. He was not an original writer, however, and many of his ideas had been written about previously; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) in which he discovered poverty in the industrial north and Down and Out in Paris and London in which he became a tramp had been written about by Jack London in The People or the Abyss (1902) and W. H. Davies in The Autobiography or a Super-Tramp (1908). The section in A Clergyman's Daughter in which the central character, Dorothy, spends the night in Trafalgar Square with a group of tramps is an attempt to emulate the stream-of-consciousness style of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and fails artistically. It was an experiment which Orwell did not repeat. Bernard Crick, Orwell's biographer, has drawn attention to similarities between Jack London's The Iron Heel (1907) in which is written "By virtue of that power we will remain in power . . . . We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces", and Nineteen Eighty Four: "The party seeks power for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power . . . We know that no-one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it", and "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face for ever". Animal Farm owes much to Swift's satire and, indeed, Orwell wrote an excellent essay "Politics vs. Literature: an examination of Gulliver's travels" in 1946. Nineteen Eighty Four owes a debt to Evgeny Zamyatin's book We (1925), which Orwell acknowledged in a letter to George Woodcock (1967), in which he stated that he had only been able to obtain a copy of the book in French and was looking for an English translation. However, it would be unfair to accuse Orwell of plagiarism because he borrowed ideas. Most topics and human emotions have been written about previously and genuine originality is difficult to achieve. It is sufficient to say that most of Orwell's work was well written and all of his work has survived him.

A common view held by the political right-wing is that Orwell exposed the horrors of "socialism" by predicting what would happen under a regime of the Stalinist model which the right-wing claims to be representative of all socialist ideals, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was writing about state capitalism represented as socialism and that the book was intended to be satire and not prediction. Also conveniently ignored are his other writings depicting the evils of imperialism, the inherent unfairness of privilege and the inefficiency and self-interest of capitalism.

The Communists had good reason to detest Orwell for exposing their treachery in Spain, during the civil war, with the publication of Homage to Catalonia in 1938 in which he stated:

" . . . among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right . . . In particular, the USSR is in alliance with France, a capitalist-imperialist country. The alliance is of little use to Russia unless French capitalism is strong, therefore Communist policy in France has got to be anti-revolutionary."

In 1940 Orwell wrote, in his long essay Inside the Whale:

"The more vocal kind of Communist is in effect a Russian publicity agent posing as an international socialist. It is a pose that is easily kept up at normal times, but becomes difficult in moments of crisis, because of the fact that the USSR is no more scrupulous in its foreign policy than the rest of the great powers."

As a result, the Communists tried to portray Orwell either as a traitor who played into the hands of the right-wing or as the work of a disillusioned and desperately ill man. Brian Rubin quotes Llew Gardner of the Daily Worker: "When he wrote 1984, the anti-socialist work that shocked the nation on television, George Orwell was sick in mind and body, a fast dying man" (18 December 1954.) Although Orwell had been seriously ill with tuberculosis since 1947 and his health had not been good before that he acknowledged in a letter to George Woodcock that the book was gloomy because he had been feeling so ill when he wrote it it is a gross distortion to suggest that he was mentally ill. Orwell had been making plans for a further novel and arranging for treatment in a Swiss clinic when he had his fatal lung haemorrhage. Certainly, he was expecting to live a little longer. Apart from the obvious political tactic of trying to denigrate Orwell, to see Nineteen Eighty Four in psychological terms is to ignore the fact that the book draws together ideas that Orwell had been expressing for more than ten years.

Orwell had some harsh words to say about political careerists: ". . . the type who becomes a Labour MP or a high-up trade union official. This last type is one of the most desolating spectacles the world contains. He has been picked out to fight for his mates, and all it means to him is a soft job and the chance of bettering himself" (The Road to Wigan Pier). He also referred to "Labour Party back-stairs crawlers", and Bolshevik commissars as "half gangster, half gramophone". In the same book, Orwell criticised elitism: "The truth is that to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders".

The anarchists tend to hold Orwell in high regard, appreciating his criticism of totalitarian regimes of both the right and left and his understanding of imperialism and capitalist values which can be seen in his earliest books, In 1933 he wrote: "Why are beggars despised? for they are despised universally, I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living, In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic, the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable . . . Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised", and one of Orwell's characters, Bozo, the Parisian tramp tapped his forehead and said: "I'm a free man in here" (Down and Out in Paris and London).

Despite having strong words to say against authoritarianism, Orwell had an acute awareness of the dangers that could arise from the apparent renunciation of power and the nature of moral coercion and the force of public opinion. In 1946, in an essay entitled Politics vs. literature he wrote:

"In a society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else."

Animal Farm, the book that launched Orwell to fame, is a clever satire on the perversion of revolutionary aims. The plot of the book concerns the rebellion of the animals against their human oppressors and taking over the farm to be run for the benefit of animals. Gradually the pigs take over the management of the farm and make all the decisions, first publicly, but later in private. Eventually there is a power struggle between the pigs and Snowball is driven off the farm by dogs trained by Napoleon. Animals considered traitors are slaughtered and trade with other farms is re-established. The farm grows richer without making the animals richer, except for the pigs and dogs. At the end of the book when the men and pigs play cards and cheat leading to a quarrel the other animals, consumed with curiosity, look through the window: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which". The comparison with Stalinist Russia and the purge of Trotsky is irresistible. The book also introduced the famous and frequently quoted phrase: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others".

Nineteen Eighty Four depicts a nightmare future in which all the citizens of a totalitarian state live under constant surveillance from telescreens controlled by Big Brother. The central character, Winston Smith, embarks on a clandestine love affair with Julia, a party member, and joins The Brotherhood, an illegal organisation dedicated to the overthrow of Big Brother. He is caught, tortured and brainwashed. He ends up loving Big Brother. Orwell enlarged on the theme of the falsification of history in this book:

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed if all records told the same tale then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past', ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future who controls the present controls the past'.
And when memory failed and written records were falsified when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standards against which it could be tested."

The Nineteen Eighty Four theme of the two minutes Hate period each day had been written about by Orwell in 1939: "It was a voice that sounded as if it could go on for about a fortnight without stopping. It's a ghastly thing, really, to have a sort of human barrel-organ shooting propaganda at you by the hour. The same thing over and over again. Hate, hate, hate. Let's all get together and have a good hate. Over and over. It gives you the feeling that something has got inside your skull and is hammering down on your brain" (Coming Up for Air).

It is surprising that Orwell should get so near the truth in Nineteen Eighty Four by having Winston Smith read in The Brotherhood's forbidden book: "But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters", without drawing the conclusion that a socialist movement without leaders would solve the contradictions of power.

The importance of George Orwell as a writer lies in his questioning of institutions, power structures and political statements. The state, law, religion, charity, public schools, political parties and the media all came under his scrutiny. The morals behind individual beliefs were questioned in essays such as Raffles and Miss Blandish:

"People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it. A twelve-year-old boy worships Jack Dempsey. An adolescent in a Glasgow slum worships Al Capone. An aspiring pupil at a business college worships Lord Nuffield. A New Statesman reader worships Stalin. There is a difference in intellectual maturity, but none in moral outlook" (1944).

Despite Orwell's influence political journalism is as corrupt as ever. However, if we, individually, question what we read and try to be honest and objective in what we write then it is a start. Above all it is important that our socialism is not compromised and that we do not put our trust in leaders but our confidence in the power of the working class.

Carl Pinel