For Orwell (1989, p. 280), totalitarianism is represented by the image of 'a boot stamping on a human face-forever' whereas, for Peters and Waterman (1982, p. 37), it is the apocryphal story of 'a Honda worker who, on his way home each evening, straightens up windshield blades on all the Hondas he passes . He just can't stand to see a flaw in a Honda!' . As Kellner (1990) has argued, Orwell's vision of the future is flawed by the assumption that operant conditioning applied by brute force, rather than cognitive, hegemonic forms of conditioning would prove to be the more potent type of control technology. Nonetheless, a number of key themes -articulated in notions of doublethink and newspeak - are highly pertinent for gaining a critical purchase on the corporate culture phenomenon.
Louis Althusser.
Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs.
The statement "2+2=5", used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a Communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards, etc.[42]
The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany, who were ideological adversaries until the signing of the Treaty of Non-Aggression, which made them temporary allies. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped.
The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a goatee beard, evokes the image of Leon Trotsky. The film of Goldstein during the two-minutes hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating goat. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat.[43]
The omnipresent images of Big Brother, described as having a mustache, evokes the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.
The news in Oceania emphasized production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories (by "Heroes of Socialist Labor") was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexey Stakhanov, who set a record for Coal mining in 1935.
The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations,[44] including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly-lit rooms for days, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse (also depicted in the 1985 film GULAG[45]).
Orwell's "Spies", a youth organization taught to look for enemies of the state, appears to be based on the Young pioneers, who looked for "Enemies of the People", and denounced them to the NKVD. These activities were part of the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938.
The "Junior Anti-Sex league" was based on the Young Communists; the komsomol. While not explicitly celibate, the komsomol discouraged sexual and romantic involvement for its members, because these prevented dedication to the Party, which was seen as a way to build character. Members of the Junior Anti-Sex League wore red sashes around their waists, while komsomols wore red kerchiefs around their necks.
The random bombing of Airstrip One is based on the Buzz bombs, which struck England at random in 1944-1945.
The Thought Police is based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks.[46] The Thought Crime motif is drawn from Kempeitai, the Japanese wartime secret police, who arrested people for "unpatriotic" thoughts.
The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson and Jones are based on the show trials of the 1930s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky's direction.
The song "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me") was based on Glenn Miller's 1939 song of the same name ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree.") The song has its origins in the 1920s, when it was a camp song, sung with corresponding movements (like touching your chest when you sing "chest", and touching your head when you sing "nut"). The original title was ‘Go no more a-rushing’. Under these lyrics, the song was published as early as 1891.[47]
The "Hates" (two-minutes hate and hate week) were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began (two minutes hate), but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October revolution (hate week).
The contractions of words, in which "Ministry of Truth" was shortened to "Minitrue" and "English Socialism" to "Ingsoc" was inspired by the Soviet habit of combining words. Smert Shpionam ("death to spies", a sub-division of the NKVD) was shortened to "Smersh". Dialectical Materialism was similarly shortened to "DiaMat", and The Communist International was referred to as the Comintern.
"Vaporizing" criminals (a metaphor for execution) is based on the Soviet word "liquidation" a vague term that usually meant execution or "Internal Exile" to the gulag labour camps.
Doublethink, a system of thought that allowed people to believe two contradictory things simultaneously (the chocolate ration is cut to 20 grams and the chocolate ration is raised to 20 grams), is a literary re-working of Marxist-Leninist Dialectics, whose "laws" of the "unity of opposites" and "negation of the negation" allow a person to hold two different opinions in two different contexts. Marxist dialectics encourages its adherents to see the merits of theses and antitheses standing behind behind historical and political processes, allowing agreement with contradictory statements (The appearance of capitalism was a good thing, because it meant the end of feudalism. The end of capitalism is a good thing, because it ushers in the era of socialism).
Winston Smith's job, "revising history" (and the "unperson" motif) are based on the Stalinist habit of airbrushing images of 'fallen' people from group photographs and removing references to them in books and newspapers.[49] In one well-known example, the Soviet encyclopedia had an article about Lavrentiy Beria. When he fell in 1953, and was subsequently executed, institutes that had the encyclopedia were sent an article about the Bering Strait, with instructions to paste it over the article about Beria.[50]
Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name. A small collection of the more political of these have been published (together with his wartime speeches) in English as "On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union" By Joseph Stalin.[51][52] Like Big Brother's Orders of the day, Stalin's frequently lauded heroic individuals,[53] like Comrade Ogilvy, the fictitious hero Winston Smith invented to 'rectify' (fabricate) a Big Brother Order of the day.
The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's 1935 statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful
Works of art and literature are enjoyable to experience, so the audience is unaware of being swayed, which is dangerous.
According to Enotes "Multiple Perspectives" on 1984, there are 4 areas of focus in Marxist criticism:
• economic power
• materialism versus spirituality
• class conflict
• art, literature, and ideologies
1. Economic Power
• A society is shaped by its forces of production. Those who own the means of production dictate what type of society it is.
• Two main classes of society according to the Marxist framework are the bourgeoisie (the people who control the means of production and wealth) and the proletariat (the people who operate the means of production and are controlled by the bourgeoisie).
2. Materialism versus Spirituality
• Society is not based on ideals or abstractions, but on things.
• The material world shows us reality. The material world is the only non-subjective element in a society. Money and material possessions are the same by every measure within a society, whereas spirituality is completely subjective.
3. Class Conflict
• A Capitalist society will inevitability experience conflict between its social classes.
• The owners and the workers will have different ideas about the division of the wealth generated, and the owners will ultimately make the decision.
4. Art, Literature, and Ideologies
• Art and literature are vehicles for the bourgeoisie to instill their value system on the proletariat. The arts can make the current system look attractive and logical, thus lulling the workers into complacency.
• Works of art and literature are enjoyable to experience, so the audience is unaware of being swayed, which is dangerous.
AND here are the main areas of focus:
• Analysis of the power structures, real and apparent, throughout the story
• Examination of the interactions among the three social classes in Oceania
• Analysis of the power that the Inner Party holds over virtually everyone in the story
• Consideration of the ways in which the Party doctrines do, and do not, succeed in Oceania
The Commissar vanishes.
it was written in a specific context, where the struggle for freedom was present in the fight against Communism or fear of totalitarian orders. While Communism might have exited the world stage in terms of vying for dominance, I still think that there needs to always be a mindful and vigilant presence taken against what happens when there is a central authority that is unchecked in social and political realms. This is where Orwell's work has the most relevance. It operates as an extreme example of what happens when there is a lack of institutional limitation to government or external encroachment
Between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. Taken together, these ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production form what Marx calls ‘the economic structure of society’, or what is more commonly known by Marxism as the economic ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure.’ From this economic base, in every period, emerges a ‘superstructure’ – certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this; it also consists of certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology..
As the Russian Marxist critic Georgy Plekhanov put it: ‘The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age’s social relations. This is nowhere quite as evident as in the history of art and literature.’
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, of explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of an age. That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimised and perpetuated. Moreover, men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity – by the nature and stage of development of their mode of economic production.
To understand the complex, indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit – relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and form.
To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society.
As Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier regarding the relationship between the working and middle classes, “It is not a question of dislike or distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible.” He
distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible.
One of the main tenets of Marxism is ideology. Rejection of ideology.
For some months I lived entirely in coal-miners' houses. I ate my meals with the family, I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea under the princess's mattress. It is not a question of dislike or
distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible. Even with miners who described themselves as Communists I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me 'sir'; and all of them, except in moments of great animation, softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it. Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone.
Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
This is a standard to which neither Winston Smith nor the capitalist middle class measures up-hence the failure of Winston's rebellion and the depiction of capitalist individualism as the origin of Oceania-but, insofar as such moral elitism bears an uncanny, and for Orwell, intolerable, resemblance to totalitarianism itself, it is also a standard that cannot be represented at all, one that must be repressed from the narrative altogether.
Orwell's nightmare primarily illuminates his own historical epoch and does not anticipate the fundamental trends of social development in post-World War II capitalist societies.
the determining presence of Orwell's unconscious elitism is revealed when he tries to put this ideology of Good versus Evil to work in the form of fictional institutions, individuals, and events-when he attempts, that is, to represent the middle class of Oceania as both the agentand victim of totalitarianism, and therefore as both enemy and ally of the working-class proles. Ultimately, as I will show, the political unconscious of Orwell's socialism demands the impossible, a "middle-class hero" who will be both innately superior to the working class and morally superior to the ruling class. This is a standard to which neither Winston Smith nor the capitalist middle class measures up-hence the failure of Winston's rebellion and the depiction of capitalist individualism as the origin of Oceania-but, insofar as such moral elitism bears an uncanny, and for Orwell, intolerable, resemblance to totalitarianism itself, it is also a standard that cannot be represented at all, one that must be repressed from the narrative altogether.
Arendt, and other antitotalitarian "rebels" of Orwell's" hard-boiled" generation, whose "existentialist" vision of democracy--democracy of, for, and by "authentic" individuals-is again being deployed against those who dare, or dared once, to defend Marxism.s Finally, from what is only seemingly an opposing direction, Orwell's attempt to fashion progressive politics in terms of cultural values remains instructive in light of a new postmodern leftism that also asserts the autonomy of culture and the primacy of ideological over economic determinations of class. In short, the relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains surprisingly undiminished by the victory of capitalism over peasant-based revolutions in the so-called developing nations. Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
the determining presence of Orwell's unconscious elitism is revealed when he tries to put this ideology of Good versus Evil to work in the form of fictional institutions, individuals, and events-when he attempts, that is, to represent the middle class of Oceania as both the agentand victim of totalitarianism, and therefore as both enemy and ally of the working-class proles. Ultimately, as I will show, the political unconscious of Orwell's socialism demands the impossible, a "middle-class hero" who will be both innately superior to the working class and morally superior to the ruling class. This is a standard to which neither Winston Smith nor the capitalist middle class measures up-hence the failure of Winston's rebellion and the depiction of capitalist individualism as the origin of Oceania-but, insofar as such moral elitism bears an uncanny, and for Orwell, intolerable, resemblance to totalitarianism itself, it is also a standard that cannot be represented at all, one that must be repressed from the narrative altogether.
(Orwell and Marxism the political) It should also be remembered that Marxism enjoyed a position of considerable intellectual pre-eminence in the Western world in the fifty or so years after 1917. As a result of the October Revolution, which rescued it from the obscurity in which it had begun to sink, it came to be regarded by many thinkers as what Alick West once called ‘the intellectual power from which there is no escape.’ Even people who deeply disagreed with it often found it necessary to define their own ideas against it – and sometimes (as West pointed out) to appropriate its insights without acknowledgement and in
All the horror in the novel - continual and total surveillance, witchhunting of thought criminals, etc - only happens to the middle class. The "Outer Party", what we would call today the people with jobs in information and marketing, are the ones continually terrorised. The ruling class - the Inner Party - are allowed to turn their home telescreens off. And no-one gives a crap about what the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Oceania - the working class, the "proles" - think or do. The Party considers it impossible that the proles could ever revolt on their own - so as long as they prevent any potential rebellion within their own ranks, everything should be sweet.
In Robert Paul Resch’s article Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four6, Resch draws attention to a few, what he feels are, unexplored topics.
The novel's deep structure of democratic socialism, the place and function of the middle class within it, and the contradictions between its dystopian and utopian moments-Oceania is portrayed as invulnerable to progressive change, yet the "author" of Winston's story writes from a post totalitarian, socialist future-are all virtually unexplored topics.
Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
Peter Barry in his book Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory asserts that the main tenant of Marxist criticism is the issue over whether “the nature of literature is influenced by the social and political circumstances in which it is produced”
Orwell’s “difficult” relationship with Marxism was mainly due to his rejection of ‘ideology’.
Orwell’s hatred of ideology, Althusser, Hitchens, identifying with the proles, rejection of middle/upper classes (look up communist manifesto opinions). Orwell identifies himself with Winston. Both middle class. Both have affection for the proles, both trying to do something about it.
P163 – Ignorance is Strength.
Orwell’s class consciousness
http://www.lewrockwell.com/rothbard/rothbard32.html
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part47
There is a passage in 1984 which epitomises Orwell’s the , by the initial a similar place of refuge in the “Golden Country” where Winston and Julia are able to make love in peace (103). Once again, the idyll is short-lived: Winston and Julia are arrested, The next moment, it was hard to say by whose act, she was in his his arms. At the beginning he had no feeling except sheer incredulity. The youthful body was strained against his own, the mass of dark hair was against his face, and yes! actually she had turned her face up and he was kissing the wide red mouth. She had clasped her arms about his neck, she was calling him darling, precious one, loved one.
“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”
George L, The party has the real sense of class consciousness; it makes itself constantly aware of a proletarian or middle class rebellion and nullifies all attempts to do so.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE CLASSES.
hegemony
In 1984, George Orwell projected the future of totalitarian society. As everyone knows, the author of ANIMAL FARM had the Soviet Union in mind. Projecting the logic of totalization to the end, he foresaw Winston’s reintegration into the totality. In this context, reintegration is code for Winston’s dissolution. By the same token, the annihilation of Winston’s difference is the restoration of the pure positivity of Big Brother. The gesture of protest, Winston’s momentary refusal, is crushed with clinical, surgical, machine-tool precision.
With the ingenious novelistic device of newspeak, Orwell shows that the effect of a false totality is annihilation; the diminishment of language to the vanishing point. With newspeak and the ensemble of measures of techno-bureaucratic manipulation and domination, what is annihilated is the consciousness of freedom, rendering the appearance of a Winston, a Spartacus, or a Nat Turner socially impossible.
It would be remiss to not explore where Orwell’s complex and practically oppositional relationship with Marxism comes from and how it represents itself with subtlety and otherwise.
Orwell's writings clearly indicate an admiration for aspects of Marx: here he writes about how Marx identifies the relationship between moral values and the distribution of wealth, in a piece for Trbune in 1944:
It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.
The politicisation of literary form, that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstance is a notion some writers would remain ambivalent or ambiguous about, not Orwell, who asserts;
“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”11nice
“If there was hope, it lay in the proles! Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that that must be Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles.” The way Winston, who is a member of the Outer Party admires the proles is similar to Orwell being middle class and admiring socialism/the working class. He pins his hopes on the proles the same way Orwell has a quixotic view of socialism.
His experience in Spain made him realize that one can never ignore the intruding reality of politics and the possibility of betrayal. Later, in the novel 1984, there is a similar place of refuge in the “Golden Country” where Winston and Julia are able to make love in peace (103). Once again, the idyll is short-lived: Winston and Julia are arrested, and Orwell is able to show how the best possibilities of human nature are undermined by the overwhelming power of the political order that surrounds us.
Political purpose.–Using the word 'political' in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
Prole who can’t get pints anymore.
MOVE ON TO HIS MIDDLE CLASS BACKGROUND AND IT’S EFFECT ON THE NOVEL.
Orwell and Englishness:
The Dialogue with British Marxism
These writers had a major influence on English literary culture in the ten years or so after 1935 and were studied extensively by Orwell. The most famous were probably Alick West, Ralph Fox, Christopher Caudwell, Edgell Rickword, Jack Lindsay, and T.A. Jackson, though there were perhaps twenty others who also made an important contribution to English Marxist cultural theory. My argument is that their influence on Orwell was so profound that his cultural writings can in one sense be interpreted as a sort of a dialogue with them. Aware that the communists had achieved what turned out to be a temporary dominance of English cultural life, Orwell produced a body of critical writings which implicitly addressed their main concerns and provided a fresh perspective on their main ideas. I am not suggesting that Orwell was any less anti-communist than he is usually regarded as being, nor that the British communists were the only important influences on his cultural thinking. What I am suggesting is that English cultural Marxism provides an essential context (perhaps even the most important context of all) in which his work must be read. For a history of this generation of communist critics, see Philip Bounds, British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939 (Swansea: University of Wales PhD thesis, 2003).
The Lion and the Unicorn can reasonably be interpreted as a critical response to the communist orthodoxy. After briefly surveying the most important communist writings on Englishness, I will concentrate on three themes which bind the two bodies of work together: (1) the idea that there was a complex mixture of liberal and socialist elements in the political outlook of the English workers, (2) the assumption that the English workers were instinctively suspicious of theory, and (3) the idea that sections of the middle class were now ripe for conversion to the left.
Class consciousness, as described by Georg Lukács's famous History and Class Consciousness (1923), is opposed to any psychological conception of consciousness, which forms the basis of individual or mass psychology (see Freud or, before him, Gustave Le Bon). According to Lukács, each social class has a determined class consciousness which it can achieve. In effect, as opposed to the liberal conception of consciousness as the basis of individual freedom and of the social contract, Marxist class consciousness is not an origin, but an achievement (i.e. it must be "earned" or won). Hence, it is never assured: the proletariat's class consciousness is the result of a permanent struggle to understand the "concrete totality" of the historical process.[citation needed]
According to Lukács, the proletariat was the first class in history that may achieve true class consciousness, because of its specific position highlighted in the Communist Manifesto as the "living negation" of capitalism. All others classes, including the bourgeoisie, are limited to a "false consciousness" which impedes them from understanding the totality of history: instead of understanding each specific moment as a portion of a supposedly deterministic historical process, they universalize it and believe it is everlasting. Hence, capitalism is not thought as a specific phase of history, but is naturalized and thought of as an eternal solidified part of history. Says Lukács, this "false consciousness", which forms ideology itself, is not a simple error as in classical philosophy, but an illusion which can't be dispelled.[
“the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
After the revolutionary period of the fifties and sixties, society regrouped itself, as always, into High, Middle, and Low. But the new High group, unlike all its forerunners, did not act upon instinct but knew what was needed to safeguard its position. It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called 'abolition of private property' which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it thinks fit. In the years following the Revolution it was able to step into this commanding position almost unopposed, because the whole process was represented as an act of collectivization. It had always been assumed that if the capitalist class were expropriated, Socialism must follow: and unquestionably the capitalists had been expropriated. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport -- everything had been taken away from them: and since these things were no longer private property, it followed that they must be public property. Ingsoc, which grew out of the earlier Socialist movement and inherited its phraseology, has in fact carried out the main item in the Socialist programme; with the result, foreseen and intended beforehand, that economic inequality has been made permanent.
After the middle of the present century, the first danger had in reality disappeared. Each of the three powers which now divide the world is in fact unconquerable, and could only become conquerable through slow demographic changes which a government with wide powers can easily avert. The second danger, also, is only a theoretical one. The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed. The recurrent economic crises of past times were totally unnecessary and are not now permitted to happen, but other and equally large dislocations can and do happen without having political results, because there is no way in which discontent can become articulate.
Spurious.
Orwell's writings clearly indicate an admiration for aspects of Marx: here he writes about how Marx identifies the relationship between moral values and the distribution of wealth, in a piece for Trbune in 1944:
It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx's theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.
“It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy was collectivism.” (This is not against Stalinism, pal. This is against communism pure and simple. BTW, Ingsoc (English socialism), Orwell’s Bête noire, is NOT capitalism, ot ir would have been called Ingcap. Dodgy.
“The so called abolition of private property, which took place in the middle years of the century meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before, but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals….with the result that economic inequality has been made permanent.”
Quotes about socialism from A Road to Wigan Pier
Once again, here am I, with my middle-class origins and my income of about three pounds a week from all sources. For what I am worth it would be better to get me in on the Socialist side than to turn me into a Fascist.
A few years ago this might have seemed unimportant. It seems only yesterday that Socialists, especially orthodox Marxists, were telling me with superior smiles that Socialism was going to arrive of its own accord by some mysterious process called 'historic necessity'.
I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Yet, after all, why not? Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting. So you see he is still responding to the training of his childhood, when he was taught to hate, fear, and despise the working class.
You can see the same tendency in Socialist literature, which, even when it is not openly written de haut en bos, is always completely removed from the working class in idiom and manner of thought. The Coles, Webbs, Stracheys, etc., are not exactly proletarian writers. It is doubtful whether anything describable as proletarian literature now exists.
And this is so much the case that Socialists are often unable to grasp that the opposite opinion exists.
We need intelligent propaganda. Less about 'class consciousness', 'expropriation of the expropriators', 'bourgeois ideology', and 'proletarian solidarity', not to mention the sacred sisters, thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; and more about justice, liberty, and the plight of the unemployed.
Quotes about communism/Marxism
Here you come to the real secret of class distinctions in the West--the real reason why a European of bourgeois upbringing, even when he calls himself a Communist, cannot without a hard effort think of a working man as his equal. It is summed up in four frightful words which people nowadays are chary of uttering, but which were bandied about quite freely in my childhood. The words were: The lower classes smell.
A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously, living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his habits, his manners, his imaginative background--his 'ideology', in Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes Labour, or, when possible, Communist at the elections?
For some months I lived entirely in coal-miners' houses. I ate my meals with the family, I washed at the kitchen sink, I shared bedrooms with miners, drank beer with them, played darts with them, talked to them by the hour together. But though I was among them, and I hope and trust they did not find me a nuisance, I was not one of them, and they knew it even better than I did. However much you like them, however interesting you find their conversation, there is always that accursed itch of class-difference, like the pea under the princess's mattress. It is not a question of dislike or
distaste, only of difference, but it is enough to make real intimacy impossible. Even with miners who described themselves as Communists I found that it needed tactful manoeuvrings to prevent them from calling me 'sir'; and all of them, except in moments of great animation, softened their northern accents for my benefit. I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it. Whichever way you turn this curse of class-difference confronts you like a wall of stone.
As for the technical jargon of the Communists, it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook. I remember hearing a professional Communist speaker address a working-class audience. His speech was the usual bookish stuff, full of long sentences and parentheses and Notwithstanding' and 'Be that as it may', besides the usual jargon of 'ideology' and 'class-consciousness' and 'proletarian solidarity' and all the rest of it. After him a Lancashire working man got up and spoke to the crowd in their own broad lingo. There was not much doubt which of the two was nearer to his audience, but I do not suppose for a moment that the Lancashire working man was an orthodox Communist.
Mr N. A. Holdaway, one of the ablest Marxist writers we
possess, writes as follows:
The hoary legend of Communism leading to Fascism. ... The element
of truth in it is this: that the appearance of Communist activity warns the
ruling class that democratic Labour Parties are no longer capable of
holding the working class in check, and that capitalist dictatorship must
assume another form if it is to survive.
You see here the defects of the method. Because he has detected the
underlying economic cause of Fascism, he tacitly assumes that the spiritual
side of it is of no importance. Fascism is written off as a manoeuvre of
the 'ruling class', which at bottom it is. But this in itself would only
explain why Fascism appeals to capitalists. What about the millions who are
not capitalists, who in a material sense have nothing to gain from Fascism
and are often aware of it, and who, nevertheless, are Fascists? Obviously
their approach has been purely along the ideological line. They could only
be stampeded into Fascism because Communism attacked or seemed to attack
certain things (patriotism, religion, etc.) which lay deeper than the
economic motive; and in that sense it is perfectly true that Communism
leads to Fascism.
Socialism in Homage to Catalonia
I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little
professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the
idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. And it was here that those few months in the militia were valuable to me. For the Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society. In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before. Partly, perhaps, this was due to the good luck of being among Spaniards, who, with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge, would make even the opening stages of Socialism tolerable if they had the chance.
In Robert Paul Resch’s article Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four6, Resch draws attention to a few, what he feels are, unexplored topics.
The novel's deep structure of democratic socialism, the place and function of the middle class within it, and the contradictions between its dystopian and utopian moments-Oceania is portrayed as invulnerable to progressive change, yet the "author" of Winston's story writes from a post totalitarian, socialist future-are all virtually unexplored topics.
Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
Peter Barry in his book Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory asserts that the main tenant of Marxist criticism is the issue over whether “the nature of literature is influenced by the social and political circumstances in which it is produced”
Orwell’s “difficult” relationship with Marxism was mainly due to his rejection of ‘ideology’.
Orwell’s hatred of ideology, Althusser, Hitchens, identifying with the proles, rejection of middle/upper classes (look up communist manifesto opinions). Orwell identifies himself with Winston. Both middle class. Both have affection for the proles, both trying to do something about it.
P163 – Ignorance is Strength.
Orwell’s class consciousness
1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous. In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens. In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach. As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:
All the horror in the novel - continual and total surveillance, witchhunting of thought criminals, etc - only happens to the middle class. The "Outer Party", what we would call today the people with jobs in information and marketing, are the ones continually terrorised. The ruling class - the Inner Party - are allowed to turn their home telescreens off. And no-one gives a crap about what the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Oceania - the working class, the "proles" - think or do. The Party considers it impossible that the proles could ever revolt on their own - so as long as they prevent any potential rebellion within their own ranks, everything should be sweet.
There's more to this, of course. When our hero Winston Smith goes into the proletarian part of town to try to find someone who can remember what things were like before the Party took over. The old guy he talks to honestly doesn't seem to notice any difference. You can't get beer in pint jugs any more, and top hats seem to have gone out of fashion, but apart from that... Winston assumes that the old man is senile and confused, but perhaps there really is no difference between life under Big Brother and life under capitalist democracy, for the proles.
Noam Chomsky apparently said that it's always the middle-class intellectuals who fall easiest for propaganda. Perhaps our own rulers think like Orwell's big brother - that the solution is to keep the middle-class sweet and then they won't need to worry about anything, because proles can't think for themselves.
Arendt, and other antitotalitarian "rebels" of Orwell's" hard-boiled" generation, whose "existentialist" vision of democracy--democracy of, for, and by "authentic" individuals-is again being deployed against those who dare, or dared once, to defend Marxism.s Finally, from what is only seemingly an opposing direction, Orwell's attempt to fashion progressive politics in terms of cultural values remains instructive in light of a new postmodern leftism that also asserts the autonomy of culture and the primacy of ideological over economic determinations of class. In short, the relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains surprisingly undiminished by the victory of capitalism over peasant-based revolutions in the so-called developing nations. Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
the determining presence of Orwell's unconscious elitism is revealed when he tries to put this ideology of Good versus Evil to work in the form of fictional institutions, individuals, and events-when he attempts, that is, to represent the middle class of Oceania as both the agentand victim of totalitarianism, and therefore as both enemy and ally of the working-class proles. Ultimately, as I will show, the political unconscious of Orwell's socialism demands the impossible, a "middle-class hero" who will be both innately superior to the working class and morally superior to the ruling class. This is a standard to which neither Winston Smith nor the capitalist middle class measures up-hence the failure of Winston's rebellion and the depiction of capitalist individualism as the origin of Oceania-but, insofar as such moral elitism bears an uncanny, and for Orwell, intolerable, resemblance to totalitarianism itself, it is also a standard that cannot be represented at all, one that must be repressed from the narrative altogether.
(Orwell and Marxism the political) It should also be remembered that Marxism enjoyed a position of considerable intellectual pre-eminence in the Western world in the fifty or so years after 1917. As a result of the October Revolution, which rescued it from the obscurity in which it had begun to sink, it came to be regarded by many thinkers as what Alick West once called ‘the intellectual power from which there is no escape.’ Even people who deeply disagreed with it often found it necessary to define their own ideas against it – and sometimes (as West pointed out) to appropriate its insights without acknowledgement and in a distorted form. This makes it all the more likely that a young intellectual like Orwell would have tried to acquire a full understanding of communist doctrine.
His experience in Spain made him realize that one can never ignore the intruding reality of politics and the possibility of betrayal. Later, in the novel 1984, there is a similar place of refuge in the “Golden Country” where Winston and Julia are able to make love in peace (103). Once again, the idyll is short-lived: Winston and Julia are arrested, and Orwell is able to show how the best possibilities of human nature are undermined by the overwhelming power of the political order that surrounds us.
However, it is clear from Orwell’s account of their abjection, as well as his compassion for the proles in 1984, that such degradation may actually be preferable to the inauthentic and alienated life of the bourgeoisie or the mindless party member. Indeed, one striking passage from 1984 suggests that Orwell remained convinced of the basic moral goodness of the working class and the possibility of authentic forms of human encounter that were not mediated and hence distorted by ideological forms. As Winston Smith observes, What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an ideal, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to learn by conscious effort. (136) In the novel, this observation is presented as an important moment of insight for Winston Smith as he recalls the trauma of his mother’s disappearance. Perhaps, she was not especially intelligent or unusual, he reflects, but “she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside” (136). Such self-possession may be a core aspect of freedom; even so, it could still be argued that nobody is really free in this society, except in the sense that those who are truly dispossessed may be ready for anything since they have nothing left to lose.
T-he main character, Winston shows potential for resistance against this injustice, yet he never manages to spark a revolution.
When interpreting Nineteen Eighty-Four with Marxist theory, one can immediately recognize the existence of a class structure in the society of Oceania. Oceania is a totalitarian state, which is under the dictatorship of a ruler known as Big Brother. Big Brother is assisted by a very exclusive group of individuals known as the Inner Party; this personality cult makes up only about two percent of the country's population. Members of the Inner Party are quite separated from members of inferior social classes, and are also much more wealthy than those of lower classes. When he visits an Inner Party member named O'Brien, Winston is overwhelmed by the lavish lifestyle he lives. O'Brien lives in a spacious flat, tended by servants, which smells of good food and good tobacco, rather than the unpalatable В‘victory coffee' and В‘victory cigarettes' Winston is accustomed to. The middle class citizens of Oceania are known as Outer Party members. Although not as exclusive as the Inner Party, the Outer Party makes up only about thirteen percent of Oceania's population. Outer Party members do the majority of work in the Party, and are to never question the tasks assigned to them. The lowest social class in Oceania, making up about eighty-five percent of the population, is known as the Proles. They have even fewer rights. According to the Party, Proles are not human beings, and pose no threat to the government, despite their vast quantities.
To avoid such resistance, Big Brother takes advantage of the population's subservience to the state and constantly assigns jobs to the working class to keep them busy. As long as the working class feels productive, they will stay content
Winston tells Julia that she's "only a rebel from the waist downwards."
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=92OcBNK9bZ4C&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=party,+inner+party,+proles+marxism&source=bl&ots=wvtRUmHMbq&sig=lb6VAKw7sxl-t7neaZ7FMnf4Tqo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Bk1ZT9SiPJLL8QPxocnWDg&ved=0CFMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=party%2C%20inner%20party%2C%20proles%20marxism&f=false
Althusser and Ideology. Althusser argues that art cannot be reduced to ideology. P167 barry
Between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. Taken together, these ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production form what Marx calls ‘the economic structure of society’, or what is more commonly known by Marxism as the economic ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure.’ From this economic base, in every period, emerges a ‘superstructure’ – certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production.
2. Orwell’s rejection of Ideology? But the superstructure contains more than this; it also consists of certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate power of the ruling class in society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.
Orwell was a rare commodity, an eminent socialist from a middle class background,
My own view is that George Orwell was not a Marxist-Leninist and that indeed he had little interest in socialist theory. Certainly he was a socialist, but he reduced socialism to a relatively short list of practical measures--limitation and equalization of incomes, state ownership of the means of production, elimination of the elite public schools, independence for colonial peoples, etc., etc. All this seemed to him to be simple common sense.
A good deal of Orwell's writing on socialism is critical, often by implication and occasionally in so many words, of the typical socialist's obsession with socialist theory. Tempermentally, I think, he was one of those people who are immune to the attractions of ideology. That he was passionately engaged with the politics of his time yet repelled by the "smelly little orthodoxies" of the age helps to explain, I think, why his memory and his body of work lives on.
As the Russian Marxist critic Georgy Plekhanov put it: ‘The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age’s social relations. This is nowhere quite as evident as in the history of art and literature.’
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, of explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of an age. That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimised and perpetuated. Moreover, men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity – by the nature and stage of development of their mode of economic production.
To understand the complex, indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit – relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and form.
To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society.
, and ..
George Orwell's political satire Nineteen Eighty-Four is rightly lauded as a brilliant skewering of Stalinism and Fascism in particular and all administrative/bureaucratic power systems in general. But as Randall said in Clerks, I never noticed something about it until now.
All the horror in the novel - continual and total surveillance, witchhunting of thought criminals, etc - only happens to the middle class. The "Outer Party", what we would call today the people with jobs in information and marketing, are the ones continually terrorised. The ruling class - the Inner Party - are allowed to turn their home telescreens off. And no-one gives a crap about what the overwhelming majority of the citizens of Oceania - the working class, the "proles" - think or do. The Party considers it impossible that the proles could ever revolt on their own - so as long as they prevent any potential rebellion within their own ranks, everything should be sweet.
There's more to this, of course. When our hero Winston Smith goes into the proletarian part of town to try to find someone who can remember what things were like before the Party took over. The old guy he talks to honestly doesn't seem to notice any difference. You can't get beer in pint jugs any more, and top hats seem to have gone out of fashion, but apart from that... Winston assumes that the old man is senile and confused, but perhaps there really is no difference between life under Big Brother and life under capitalist democracy, for the proles.
Noam Chomsky apparently said that it's always the middle-class intellectuals who fall easiest for propaganda. Perhaps our own rulers think like Orwell's big brother - that the solution is to keep the middle-class sweet and then they won't need to worry about anything, because proles can't think for themselves. Under globalised competitive capitalism, of course, this entails far more carrot and far less stick than in Orwell's vision. But these people really seem to think that if they keep the 25% of the population who create ideology and media in shiny cars, designer salads and broadband internet then the majority won't even be able to think of rebelling.
And then they wonder why in the "less economically favoured" areas every major city in the world there is a continual slow-motion riot in the form of steadily increasing levels of crime against person and property, often exacerbated by the trade in illegal drugs and the occasional hostile meme such as racism or homophobia. You just can't keep this shit in the Third World or the domestic third world known as "the suburbs where nice people don't go". It ends up crawling into the downtown areas and the leafy suburbs, in the form of panhandling, burglary, etc. As Maurice Gee said, there are not two worlds with a bridge between. There is only one world.
Crime, properly understood, is a spontaneous inchoate rebellion against the economic deprivation, alienation and polluted infosphere in which the majority of us live. Another thing our rulers perhaps haven't thought about is that if they insist on enriching themselves too much, some of the "creative class" are going to drop off the bottom end of the scale and find themselves becoming proles themselves. When people trained in theory get into contact with masses of people itching for practice, that's when you get serious mass movements. Big Brother might have just lost control of the Outer Party.
It should also be remembered that Marxism enjoyed a position of considerable intellectual pre-eminence in the Western world in the fifty or so years after 1917. As a result of the October Revolution, which rescued it from the obscurity in which it had begun to sink, it came to be regarded by many thinkers as what Alick West once called ‘the intellectual power from which there is no escape.’ Even people who deeply disagreed with it often found it necessary to define their own ideas against it – and sometimes (as West pointed out) to appropriate its insights without acknowledgement and in a distorted form. This makes it all the more likely that a young intellectual like Orwell would have tried to acquire a full understanding of communist doctrine.
His experience in Spain made him realize that one can never ignore the intruding reality of politics and the possibility of betrayal. Later, in the novel 1984, there is a similar place of refuge in the “Golden Country” where Winston and Julia are able to make love in peace (103). Once again, the idyll is short-lived: Winston and Julia are arrested, and Orwell is able to show how the best possibilities of human nature are undermined by the overwhelming power of the political order that surrounds us.
However, it is clear from Orwell’s account of their abjection, as well as his compassion for the proles in 1984, that such degradation may actually be preferable to the inauthentic and alienated life of the bourgeoisie or the mindless party member. Indeed, one striking passage from 1984 suggests that Orwell remained convinced of the basic moral goodness of the working class and the possibility of authentic forms of human encounter that were not mediated and hence distorted by ideological forms. As Winston Smith observes, What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an ideal, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The proles had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to learn by conscious effort. (136) In the novel, this observation is presented as an important moment of insight for Winston Smith as he recalls the trauma of his mother’s disappearance. Perhaps, she was not especially intelligent or unusual, he reflects, but “she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside” (136). Such self-possession may be a core aspect of freedom; even so, it could still be argued that nobody is really free in this society, except in the sense that those who are truly dispossessed may be ready for anything since they have nothing left to lose.
Orwell mocks the middle class by subjecting them to a lack of personal freedom and simple pleasures which the Proles, whom he admires, are privy to.
Almost quixotic obsession with the idea of a fully realised socialist rule.
Orwell despised intellectual pretension and impractical theorising. It is actually more his rancour against the English intelligentsia than his positive identification with the English working man that shaped his self-image and reputation as an intellectual’s common man.
George Orwell: the politics of literary reputation
By John Rodden
P173, The Common Man.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe something like that. No ordinary man could be such a fool.” – Orwell on the leftwing rumour that America had only entered the war to end a British social revolution.
P180.
Utopia, Dystopia, and the Middle Class in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
Robert Paul Resch
“Middle class individualism” p139
the determining presence of Orwell's unconscious elitism is revealed when he tries to put this ideology of Good versus Evil to work in the form of fictional institutions, individuals, and events-when he attempts, that is, to represent the middle class of Oceania as both the agentand victim of totalitarianism, and therefore as both enemy and ally of the working-class proles. Ultimately, as I will show, the political unconscious of Orwell's socialism demands the impossible, a "middle-class hero" who will be both innately superior to the working class and morally superior to the ruling class. This is a standard to which neither Winston Smith nor the capitalist middle class measures up-hence the failure of Winston's rebellion and the depiction of capitalist individualism as the origin of Oceania-but, insofar as such moral elitism bears an uncanny, and for Orwell, intolerable, resemblance to totalitarianism itself, it is also a standard that cannot be represented at all, one that must be repressed from the narrative altogether.
Similarly, Orwell's anti-Marxism is of continued interest given the (latest) death of Marxist social theory, and the recent revival of the political theories of Albert Camus, Hannah
Arendt, and other antitotalitarian "rebels" of Orwell's" hard-boiled" generation, whose "existentialist" vision of democracy--democracy of, for, and by "authentic" individuals-is again being deployed against those who dare, or dared once, to defend Marxism.s Finally, from what is only seemingly an opposing direction, Orwell's attempt to fashion progressive politics in terms of cultural values remains instructive in light of a new postmodern leftism that also asserts the autonomy of culture and the primacy of ideological over economic determinations of class. In short, the relevance of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains surprisingly undiminished by the victory of capitalism over peasant-based revolutions in the so-called developing nations. Orwell demonstrates that, as long as capitalism dominates the world system, totalitarianism remains a real possibility, and the notion of a progressive alliance of the middle and working classes a chimera.
- a clear understanding of the theoretical concept under discussion
- a close and detailed application of your chosen theoretical approach to a reading of your chosen text
- relevant and correctly referenced wider reading
- sound scholarly style and presentation
In his 1946 essay Why I Write, Orwell explains that the serious works he wrote since the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) were "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism
One form of Marxist criticism is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is ‘consumed’.
The Dangers of Totalitarianism !
1984 is a political novel written with the purpose of warning readers in the West of the dangers of totalitarian government. Having witnessed firsthand the horrific lengths to which totalitarian governments in Spain and Russia would go in order to sustain and increase their power, Orwell designed 1984 to sound the alarm in Western nations still unsure about how to approach the rise of communism. In 1949, the Cold War had not yet escalated, many American intellectuals supported communism, and the state of diplomacy between democratic and communist nations was highly ambiguous. In the American press, the Soviet Union was often portrayed as a great moral experiment. Orwell, however, was deeply disturbed by the widespread cruelties and oppressions he observed in communist countries, and seems to have been particularly concerned by the role of technology in enabling oppressive governments to monitor and control their citizens.
In 1984, Orwell portrays the perfect totalitarian society, the most extreme realization imaginable of a modern-day government with absolute power. The title of the novel was meant to indicate to its readers in 1949 that the story represented a real possibility for the near future: if totalitarianism were not opposed, the title suggested, some variation of the world described in the novel could become a reality in only thirty-five years. Orwell portrays a state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought is against the law. As the novel progresses, the timidly rebellious Winston Smith sets out to challenge the limits of the Party’s power, only to discover that its ability to control and enslave its subjects dwarfs even his most paranoid conceptions of its reach. As the reader comes to understand through Winston’s eyes, The Party uses a number of techniques to control its citizens, each of which is an important theme of its own in the novel. These include:
The role of totalitarianism
Essential criticism p119 &
Similarities between telescreens and television culture, sexual revolution indicative of an Orwellian separation of love and sex, newspeak and contemporary forms of expression. Big brother.
the ruling class, use technology to manipulate needs, to indoctrinate, to integrate potential opposition, and to manage and administer society in accord with their own interests. In this sense, advanced capitalist societies are "totalitarian" because they are entirely controlled by the hegemony of capital. For in Marcuse's theorizing, capital controls the state, media, educational and ideological apparatuses, and social institutions while using them for its ends of maximizing profits and maintaining social control by eliminating opposition and integrating individuals into the capitalist system.
P500 orwell and politics
P167 – what Marxist critics do p barry.
The main tenet of Marxist criticism – that the nature of literature is influenced by the social and political circumstances in which is it is produced – might well be immediately accepted as self-evidently true. The difficulty and controversy lie entirely in deciding how close the influence is. Are you going to adopt a ‘determinist’ position, and argue that literature is the passive product of socio-economic forces, or do you take a more ‘liberal’ line and see the socio-economic influence as much more distant and subtle? Your main difficulty will be to show the operation of these economic forces (no matter whether you take the ‘strong’ or the ‘weak’ model) in a given literary work. What exactly do directly operating, or indirectly operating socio economic forces look like in a literary work?
These are difficult questions to cope with in the abstract, and you will find it helpful to think about them in the context of a specific example. Is a ‘determinist’ or a ‘liberal’ line being taken, and how is this indicated? Is the socio-economic influence seen by the critic in the plot content of the play, in the characterisation, or in the literary form itself, and if so how?
The originality of Marxist criticism, then, lies not in its historical approach to literature, but in its revolutionary understanding of history itself.
Base and Superstructure
Marx and Engels’s The German Ideology (1845-6)
Between the capitalist class who owns those means of production, and the proletarian class whose labour-power the capitalist buys for profit. Taken together, these ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production form what Marx calls ‘the economic structure of society’, or what is more commonly known by Marxism as the economic ‘base’ or ‘infrastructure.’ From this economic base, in every period, emerges a ‘superstructure’ – certain forms of law and politics, a certain kind of state, whose essential function is to legitimate the power of the social class which owns the means of economic production. But the superstructure contains more than this; it also consists of certain ‘definite forms of social consciousness’ (political, religious, ethical, aesthetic and so on), which is what Marxism designates as ideology. The function of ideology, also, is to legitimate power of the ruling class in society; in the last analysis, the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of its ruling class.
As the Russian Marxist critic Georgy Plekhanov put it: ‘The social mentality of an age is conditioned by that age’s social relations. This is nowhere quite as evident as in the history of art and literature.’
Literary works are not mysteriously inspired, of explicable simply in terms of their authors’ psychology. They are forms of perception, particular ways of seeing the world; and as such they have a relation to that dominant way of seeing the world which is the ‘social mentality’ or ideology of an age. That ideology, in turn, is the product of the concrete social relations into which men enter at a particular time and place; it is the way those class-relations are experienced, legitimised and perpetuated. Moreover, men are not free to choose their social relations; they are constrained into them by material necessity – by the nature and stage of development of their mode of economic production.
To understand the complex, indirect relations between those works and the ideological worlds they inhabit – relations which emerge not just in ‘themes’ and ‘preoccupations’, but in style, rhythm, image, quality and form.
To understand an ideology, we must analyse the precise relations between different classes in a society.
Orwell's nightmare, by contrast, completely eliminates democracy and shows bureaucratic domination run amok -- a useful warning, perhaps, against bureaucratic encroachment but one that does not provide useful perspectives for contemporary social theory. Moreover, Orwell equates state power with force and coercion per se, and makes it appear that bureaucracy is primarily a repressive and terroristic apparatus. Whereas this analysis provides a compellingly accurate picture of state terrorism -- either of the fascist sort or the Stalinist sort -- if taken as a model of the state and bureaucracy as such, it would cover over their contradictionary nature and functions in different historical situations, and the complex ways that the state, bureaucracy, and instrumental rationality can be vehicles of both social progress and/or oppression. Instead of simply seeing 1984 as an attack on a bureaucratic state per se (often used by conservatives to attack communism or even welfare state measures) one should thus see it as a warning about what might happen if a state bureaucracy is to run amok and completely eliminate the institutions of civil society, rule by law, balance and division of powers in the political sphere, and respect for individual rights and liberties.
Orwell's nightmare primarily illuminates his own historical epoch and does not anticipate the fundamental trends of social development in post-World War II capitalist societies.
In 1984 it is coercion, overt political repression, even torture and murder, which constitute the crux of the society's instruments and strategy of social control.
Louis Althusser.
Nineteen Eighty-Four uses themes from life in the Soviet Union and wartime life in Great Britain as sources for many of its motifs.
The statement "2+2=5", used to torment Winston Smith during his interrogation, was a Communist party slogan from the second five-year plan, which encouraged fulfillment of the five-year plan in four years. The slogan was seen in electric lights on Moscow house-fronts, billboards, etc.[42]
The switch of Oceania's allegiance from Eastasia to Eurasia is evocative of the Soviet Union's changing relations with Nazi Germany, who were ideological adversaries until the signing of the Treaty of Non-Aggression, which made them temporary allies. Thereafter, and continuing until the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, no criticism of Germany was allowed in the Soviet press, and all references to prior party lines stopped.
The description of Emmanuel Goldstein, with a goatee beard, evokes the image of Leon Trotsky. The film of Goldstein during the two-minutes hate is described as showing him being transformed into a bleating goat. This image was used in a propaganda film during the Kino-eye period of Soviet film, which showed Trotsky transforming into a goat.[43]
The omnipresent images of Big Brother, described as having a mustache, evokes the cult of personality built up around Joseph Stalin.
The news in Oceania emphasized production figures, just as it did in the Soviet Union, where record-setting in factories (by "Heroes of Socialist Labor") was especially glorified. The best known of these was Alexey Stakhanov, who set a record for Coal mining in 1935.
The tortures of the Ministry of Love evoke the procedures used by the NKVD in their interrogations,[44] including the use of rubber truncheons, being forbidden to put your hands in your pockets, remaining in brightly-lit rooms for days, and the victim being shown a mirror after their physical collapse (also depicted in the 1985 film GULAG[45]).
Orwell's "Spies", a youth organization taught to look for enemies of the state, appears to be based on the Young pioneers, who looked for "Enemies of the People", and denounced them to the NKVD. These activities were part of the Great Purge from 1936 to 1938.
The "Junior Anti-Sex league" was based on the Young Communists; the komsomol. While not explicitly celibate, the komsomol discouraged sexual and romantic involvement for its members, because these prevented dedication to the Party, which was seen as a way to build character. Members of the Junior Anti-Sex League wore red sashes around their waists, while komsomols wore red kerchiefs around their necks.
The random bombing of Airstrip One is based on the Buzz bombs, which struck England at random in 1944-1945.
The Thought Police is based on the NKVD, which arrested people for random "anti-soviet" remarks.[46] The Thought Crime motif is drawn from Kempeitai, the Japanese wartime secret police, who arrested people for "unpatriotic" thoughts.
The confessions of the "Thought Criminals" Rutherford, Aaronson and Jones are based on the show trials of the 1930s, which included fabricated confessions by prominent Bolsheviks Nikolai Bukharin, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev to the effect that they were being paid by the Nazi government to undermine the Soviet regime under Leon Trotsky's direction.
The song "Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree" ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you, and you sold me") was based on Glenn Miller's 1939 song of the same name ("Under the spreading chestnut tree, Where I knelt upon my knee, We were as happy as could be, 'Neath the spreading chestnut tree.") The song has its origins in the 1920s, when it was a camp song, sung with corresponding movements (like touching your chest when you sing "chest", and touching your head when you sing "nut"). The original title was ‘Go no more a-rushing’. Under these lyrics, the song was published as early as 1891.[47]
The "Hates" (two-minutes hate and hate week) were inspired by the constant rallies sponsored by party organs throughout the Stalinist period. These were often short pep-talks given to workers before their shifts began (two minutes hate), but could also last for days, as in the annual celebrations of the anniversary of the October revolution (hate week).
The contractions of words, in which "Ministry of Truth" was shortened to "Minitrue" and "English Socialism" to "Ingsoc" was inspired by the Soviet habit of combining words. Smert Shpionam ("death to spies", a sub-division of the NKVD) was shortened to "Smersh". Dialectical Materialism was similarly shortened to "DiaMat", and The Communist International was referred to as the Comintern.
"Vaporizing" criminals (a metaphor for execution) is based on the Soviet word "liquidation" a vague term that usually meant execution or "Internal Exile" to the gulag labour camps.
Doublethink, a system of thought that allowed people to believe two contradictory things simultaneously (the chocolate ration is cut to 20 grams and the chocolate ration is raised to 20 grams), is a literary re-working of Marxist-Leninist Dialectics, whose "laws" of the "unity of opposites" and "negation of the negation" allow a person to hold two different opinions in two different contexts. Marxist dialectics encourages its adherents to see the merits of theses and antitheses standing behind behind historical and political processes, allowing agreement with contradictory statements (The appearance of capitalism was a good thing, because it meant the end of feudalism. The end of capitalism is a good thing, because it ushers in the era of socialism).
Winston Smith's job, "revising history" (and the "unperson" motif) are based on the Stalinist habit of airbrushing images of 'fallen' people from group photographs and removing references to them in books and newspapers.[49] In one well-known example, the Soviet encyclopedia had an article about Lavrentiy Beria. When he fell in 1953, and was subsequently executed, institutes that had the encyclopedia were sent an article about the Bering Strait, with instructions to paste it over the article about Beria.[50]
Big Brother's "Orders of the Day" were inspired by Stalin's regular wartime orders, called by the same name. A small collection of the more political of these have been published (together with his wartime speeches) in English as "On the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union" By Joseph Stalin.[51][52] Like Big Brother's Orders of the day, Stalin's frequently lauded heroic individuals,[53] like Comrade Ogilvy, the fictitious hero Winston Smith invented to 'rectify' (fabricate) a Big Brother Order of the day.
The Ingsoc slogan "Our new, happy life", repeated from telescreens, evokes Stalin's 1935 statement, which became a CPSU slogan, "Life has become better, Comrades; life has become more cheerful
Works of art and literature are enjoyable to experience, so the audience is unaware of being swayed, which is dangerous.
According to Enotes "Multiple Perspectives" on 1984, there are 4 areas of focus in Marxist criticism:
• economic power
• materialism versus spirituality
• class conflict
• art, literature, and ideologies
1. Economic Power
• A society is shaped by its forces of production. Those who own the means of production dictate what type of society it is.
• Two main classes of society according to the Marxist framework are the bourgeoisie (the people who control the means of production and wealth) and the proletariat (the people who operate the means of production and are controlled by the bourgeoisie).
2. Materialism versus Spirituality
• Society is not based on ideals or abstractions, but on things.
• The material world shows us reality. The material world is the only non-subjective element in a society. Money and material possessions are the same by every measure within a society, whereas spirituality is completely subjective.
3. Class Conflict
• A Capitalist society will inevitability experience conflict between its social classes.
• The owners and the workers will have different ideas about the division of the wealth generated, and the owners will ultimately make the decision.
4. Art, Literature, and Ideologies
• Art and literature are vehicles for the bourgeoisie to instill their value system on the proletariat. The arts can make the current system look attractive and logical, thus lulling the workers into complacency.
• Works of art and literature are enjoyable to experience, so the audience is unaware of being swayed, which is dangerous.
AND here are the main areas of focus:
• Analysis of the power structures, real and apparent, throughout the story
• Examination of the interactions among the three social classes in Oceania
• Analysis of the power that the Inner Party holds over virtually everyone in the story
• Consideration of the ways in which the Party doctrines do, and do not, succeed in Oceania
The Commissar vanishes.
it was written in a specific context, where the struggle for freedom was present in the fight against Communism or fear of totalitarian orders. While Communism might have exited the world stage in terms of vying for dominance, I still think that there needs to always be a mindful and vigilant presence taken against what happens when there is a central authority that is unchecked in social and political realms. This is where Orwell's work has the most relevance. It operates as an extreme example of what happens when there is a lack of institutional limitation to government or external encroachment
Explaining Marxism
AUBERON WAUGH
Orwell & Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of
George Orwell
Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Totalitarianism redux
Utopia, Dystopia and Middle class in George Orwell’s 1984
Fellow Contrarians? Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell
The Return of Virtue: Orwell and the Political Dilemmas of Central European Intellectuals
Author(s): Ioan Davies
From 1984 to One-Dimensional Man:
Critical Reflections on Orwell and Marcuse
Section One
By Douglas Kellner
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? . . . Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten (Orwell, 1989, p. 55)
. Corporate culturism endeavours to secure control by managing the impression of respecting the distinctiveness and individuality of each employee. As Orwell (1989, p. 37) anticipated, this enables an idea - such as autonomy - to be repudiated whilst simultaneously laying claim to its reality : 'reality control' is secured through 'doublethink .'["I In this doublethink world, the benefits of participating in a strong corporate culture (and thereby further strengthening its totalizing effects) are sold by stressing the benefits for the individual employee who, it is claimed, not only enjoys greater practical autonomy but is transformed into a 'winner' :
Here there is a direct parallel between the discipline of strong corporate cultures and Party discipline in Nineteen Eighty-Four, exemplified in 'crimestop', which Orwell characterizes as: the faculty of stopping short as though by instinct at the threshold of any dangerous thought… of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction (Orwell, 1989, pp. 220-1) .
For Orwell (1989, p. 280), totalitarianism is represented by the image of 'a boot stamping on a human face-forever' whereas, for Peters and Waterman (1982, p. 37), it is the apocryphal story of 'a Honda worker who, on his way home each evening, straightens up windshield blades on all the Hondas he passes . He just can't stand to see a flaw in a Honda!' . As Kellner (1990) has argued, Orwell's vision of the future is flawed by the assumption that operant conditioning applied by brute force, rather than cognitive, hegemonic forms of conditioning would prove to be the more potent type of control technology. Nonetheless, a number of key themes -articulated in notions of doublethink and newspeak - are highly pertinent for gaining a critical purchase on the corporate culture phenomenon.
by
rachelkate93 (student)
