A Marxist reading of George Orwell's 1984
1) INTRODUCTION
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a science-fiction novel that recreates a pessimistic future world divided in three superpowers, namely, Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, being constantly in war between each other, although they don’t always share the same positions in the struggle.
Particularly, the action is set in Airstrip One (what we know as England), and more specifically in London and its outskirts, which is an important part of the territory of Oceania, where there is an extremely totalitarian regime based on the principles of “Ingsoc” (the acronym for “English Socialism”).
The dominant organization is called The Party and its leader is the Big Brother, a charismatic character, object of admiration, although his real existence it’s not very clear. He is the personification of God in a society in which religion has been abolished.
The power is shared by four ministries dedicated to four different tasks that are directly opposite to their official name (The Ministry of Love deals with torture and punishment, the Ministry of Peace deals with war, the Ministry of Plenty ensures the poverty of the ‘proles’ and the Ministry of Truth deals with censorship and falsification of history).
The central character of the novel, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department, in the Ministry of Truth, he is therefore a member of the Outer Party (society is stratified in three basic layers: The Inner Party (the elite), the Outer Party and the “proles”).
This essay is trying to carry out a Marxist reading of the book, since there are several points in which it is worth making some comparisons. Given the socio-political and economical nature of Marxist theories in general and of the book itself, it is predictable that the analysed area will be focused on the context, rather than merely in the main character of the novel and its own experience.
2) WAR IS PEACE. The economical base of society.
If there is a constant in the regime illustrated in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is war. Bombs don’t stop falling in the city of London, but their origin does not matter at all. Whether they are thrown by Eurasia or by Eastasia, the important thing is that they keep on being thrown. The question is: given that the aim of war it’s not to conquer a territory, why does it never end?
In a totally dehumanised society, guided by collective hatred , in which individual emotions are persecuted, a continuous war period praises these vehement feelings that replace the lack of sensations like fraternal love, faith, etc. People’s impetuous — though intermittent— patriotism is used by the Party and its own interests.
This could seem enough reason to justify the continuity of war, however it is only a secondary cause and even a mere consequence.
Of course the major reason for war is also closely related with people’s manipulation and with the attempt to preserve the hierarchic structure of society, but this one has an economic nature.
In Marxist terms, given that man is a social human being and has to get or build his own living tools, it is necessary for him to work in order to live. “Work is the result of man’s confrontation with nature” (Borja Caballer, 10). Therefore, work is an inherent and indispensable feature of mankind.
Party leaders and theoreticians are conscious about that, and they are also aware of the fact that the result of work is the production of goods. And if work is something necessary, progress is unavoidable in the same way. “Human progress develops itself thanks to the impulse of social work.” (Borja Caballer, 10).
The problem is that human progress is contrary to the interests of the Party: they can’t allow the enrichment of people to which production of goods would lead, but they can’t avoid this production, so they have to stop the process in another stage. Goods have to be destructed and the way of doing this is war, an everlasting war that, because of its continuity, loses its condition of “war” as a momentary event, and becomes “peace”.
Nevertheless, the Party is not interested in the possession of material goods, but in power by itself. The hierarchical structure that they want to preserve is not based on wealth, but in the assurance of their control. Maintaining people on the verge of poverty is only an stratagem to assure their ignorance, the possibility of manipulate them and, consequently, the dominion of the Party.
“For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away” . (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 154).
Therefore, we see how the control of the Party is guaranteed by the poverty and the consequent ignorance of people, which is at the same time caused by the destruction of consumable goods to which war, given the incapacity of stopping the economic process, leads. So it is not too risky to state that the political system shown in Nineteen Eighty-Four is almost totally, or at least remarkably, built upon an economic base (or the negation of it), fact that seems to prove the basic principles of Marxist Historical Materialism, according to which aspects like social structure or political history can be explained by the process of production of a given epoch.
3) FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. History and class consciousness.
“Freedom” is a concept very susceptible of creating controversy. It is a complex and ambiguous term and that is the sense in which the Party uses it in its slogan: “Freedom is slavery”. We are going to explain, in Marxist terms, why this contradiction should not be taken as meaningless.
This “freedom” we are talking about only affects the “proles”, members of the Party are excluded (they are not actually free), but we will talk about them in the next section.
People’s “freedom” is based in their already mentioned ignorance (people are free to think because they don’t think). However, we have not clarified all the causes of that ignorance. It is now convenient to talk about concepts like history or class consciousness.
Marxism states that class struggle is the motor of history (Borja Caballer, 15). Power
has been in different hands throughout all the historical process due to the changes that class struggle has cause. These changes, which have an economical nature, have produced the different epochs in history. But it will come a moment in which no more changes will happen as, after the revolution, proletariat will take the power, and that will involve the elimination of social classes, as there will be only one. History will stop in a moment of social equality, after a natural and inevitable process in which social consciousness plays the most important role.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four an actual stop of history takes place, but it is an artificial and forced stopping , not natural, as the one we have mention. The aim of the Party is to create an everlasting present in which the hierarchical organization of society stays untouchable. They impede that history takes its own course, trying to avoid at any price class struggle (we observe, again, an artificial modification of a natural process that reminds us of the destruction of goods we talked about earlier), and that implies to erase the past, to rewrite history.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is not future fiction because, very precisely, there is no future toward which the inhabitants of Orwell's society can progress.” (Adam Roberts, online version).
People are deprived of any comparative pattern to look at and therefore, they become unable to develop their class consciousness, as the only information they receive is related to an adulterated present which is its only view of the world. Consequently, they are not aware of the possibility of changing things, of carrying out a revolution, of restart history.
“'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 199)
“If the past and the present exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable- what then?” (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 68)
Then, the “proles” are free to think whatever they want, but they are slaves of their own ignorance, they are slaves of the present.
4) IGNORANCE IS STREGNTH. Alienation in the labour process
Ignorance is not a disease that affects only to the ‘proles’. Party members (we are referring here to the Outer Party) are also victims of a loss of consciousness induced by the elite of the Party and its own organization.
The control exerted upon Party members has to be much more intensive, because it is not only that they are in direct contact with the process of manipulation that is taking place (proles can be kept away from it) but that they do take part in it. They are more able to become aware of the sham. That is the reason why they are unceasingly watched by the “telescreens”: any movement can reveal a traitor of the Party, a thought criminal that must be vanished. In order to avoid thought criminals, the Party has to make sure that their workers carry out their job gratifyingly but unconsciously.
Talking in Marxist terms again, we have to explain the role that the division of work, something inherited from capitalism, plays in this wish to prevent the worker from becoming aware of his work.
The four ministries in which Party members work function as ramifications including numerous departments that are, at the same time, divided in more sections. Workers spend their working day carrying out the same simple and repetitive task, like in an assembly line (Winston, the protagonist, serves us as an example). The worker becomes alienated from his work, as he is not totally conscious of what his labour contributes to. He does not know the whole, but only a small part, and this is cleverly used by the Party in order to ensure an unquestioned obedience.
Work division separates the physical activities (although some jobs like Winston’s do require some mental effort, but this is solved by “doublethink”¹) from the intellectual activities. Doing mere corporal activities does not entail thinking or knowing how to do complex tasks.
“Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him”. (Communist Manifesto, chapter I, online version)
Although the division of work is not the only reason for the Party members’ lack of a critical view (we have already mentioned doublethink), it has an important explicative value since alienation in the labour process, applied to Party members, determines their alienation in respect to the whole political and social system in which they live. In this case, their ignorance is the strenght of the Party and of the principes of Ingsoc.
It is convenient to conclude saying that the world created in Orwell’s novel could be defined as “non-natural”. In each section of this essay we have seen how the permanence of this particular totalitarian regime is supported by a manipulation of natural processes, mainly of economical nature, that we can describe following Marxist theories. We have also seen how alienation works in the world of Ingsoc and how economical aspects can induce the ignorance upon which 1984’s dystopia is built.
¹ doublethink: a kind of manipulation of the mind. Generally one could say that Doublethink makes people accept contradictions, and it makes them also believe that the party is the only institution that distinguishes between right and wrong (Mike Gerenser, “George Orwell's 1984 with summary, essays, and more at Enotes”, online version)
Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell. Penguin Books Ltd. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England, 1954
Manifiesto Comunista. José Vicente Borja Caballer. Editorial Diálogo, 2003
Communist Manifesto. Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels. Online version. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/
“George Orwell's 1984 with summary, essays, and more at Enotes”, Mike Gerenser. Online version.
http://www.gerenser.com/1984/analysis.html#Anchor-political
“Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as Evolutionary Fantasy”. Adam Roberts. Published on September 2003 @ http://www.thealienonline.net/columns/rcsf_orwell_jan04.asp?tid=7&scid=55&iid=2142