It is sixty years since George Orwell published 1984. Maurice Glasman asks whether it has really been as prophetic as it’s cracked up to be.
George Orwell’s 1984 has failed to stand the test of time. Twenty five years after its projected moment of realisation, the type of totalitarian repression he envisaged may help us grasp the condition of a Chinese Communist Party functionary who has fallen out of favour but does not give us the conceptual resources to capture the type of threats to liberty and integrity that confront us in Britain today.
As a conservative patriot working in a socialist tradition, Orwell was concerned with threats to the type of society Britain was becoming. ‘Big Brother’ is a scary concept but it is not at the heart of what is at stake here today. The booing of Andy Burnham at the Hillsborough Memorial at Anfield yesterday expresses a rage and contempt that people feel towards politics and politicians that is nowhere captured in 1984. The threats to society that people fear, such as environmental degradation, market failure, immigration or Islamic contestation do not feature.
It is true that millions of people live a life of atomised powerlessness when confronting forces that are definitively beyond their control. The force which confronts them, however, is not a Single Party Prison State based upon constant domestic surveillance, common activities and Supreme Leader devotions all co-ordinated through a central government of such integrated omnipotence and knowledge of each citizen’s secret fears that resistance of even the most personal type is met by the slavering jaws of wild black dogs that attack you in the night.
The force is something very different.
There is indeed a culture of almost constant surveillance and most of it is carried out by family members and friends who record as many moments of one another’s lives as they can. The police are held to account by a citizen’s army of mobile phone cameramen who document every moment. The State cannot hit its targets for teenage pregnancies or literacy, political participation or tests for cervical cancer. Even the might of the Great Hegemon’s Army is made to jump around Afghanistan by a bunch of enraged peasants with Kalshnikoffs. Blowing away three teenage pirates is heralded as a great success in a whole array of global wars. Meanwhile the State finds itself subordinate to the demands of finance even to the extent of using its own resources to keep them in their position of dominance.
The most effective forms of public manipulation and mobilisation are not to be found in the public sector, or politics at all, but in advertising campaigns and branding. The State is more than capable of losing personal data, but only the private sector will sell our most intimate financial details on to unscrupulous fraudsters for a profit. Totalitarianism is found far more forcefully in private sector team bonding sessions in which you either commit yourself publicly to obvious bullshit or risk losing your job. The obtrusiveness of line management and the risks associated with not being a team player are forged most furiously when making money is at stake.
The type of closed society that Orwell envisages is also inconceivable in a society characterised by internet access, satellite television and immigration. The black dogs that attack you in the night are far more likely to belong to people traffickers or drug dealers than the secret police. Orwell’s failure to envisage the power of the market, the incompetence and subordination of the state and the increasing insignificance of political parties in people’s lives deserves some reflection.
Orwell’s conceptual imagination was shaped and formed by the dreams and nightmares of the Left. From Wigan Pier to Catalonia, from Animal Farm to 1984 the concern is the same. If the problem for Conservatism has always been that of how to stop the market undermining the family, the locality and integrity of inherited institutions, then the problem for socialism has always been that of how to stop the State nationalising society and then making it redundant. Orwell envisages an entirely monopolistic state, a supreme leader leading a single party through the repressive apparatus of a dominant State with collective coercive power over all its citizens. Any form of Hard Left politics that had this type of political arrangement as a vision of the good is now only of any consequence in public-sector teaching Unions.
Orwell was right that society would become atomised and sedated, he was right that abstract forms of communication would feed a permanent sense of displacement and powerlessness and he was right in 1948 to observe that Statist socialism was the biggest show in town. Where he was wrong was in his assumption that capitalism had been beaten.
Maurice Glasman will be discussing the failure of such a dream for the Left and for our society as a whole with Phillip Blond in Red Tory vs Blue Labour, a debate organised by The School of Life next Wednesday 22nd of April at Conway Hall, London WC1. Find out more here.
Maurice Glasman will also be teaching the next Politics course at The School of Life starting Thursday evening 30 April. Find out more here.
Great points but then we're all slightly arrogant in assuming, in our semi-rational bubble, that capitalism has overcome repression for good. North Korea is a real live example of Orwell actually telling ageless truisms about the nature of power - it's certainly not a question of getting it "wrong". As Jeb says its a contemporaneous commentary relating to fascism. And we're also all forgetting that circumstances can change very quickly, so I wouldn't discount the totality of the prophecy just yet. I enjoyed Mr Glasman’s alternative viewpoint but did think the assertions relating to surveillance and advertising were far too flippant. Have we been forgetting our Adam Curtis-flavoured nuggets of wisdom?
Posted by: Cordeaux | June 05, 2009 at 02:07 PM
Could it not be argued that 1984 is such a powerful, widely read and influencial book that it may have helped to prevent the development of the society Orwell envisaged?
Also not sure that Orwell assumed capitalism had been beaten. Glasman equates capitalism with freedom. As Glasman notes, Orwell feared an "entirely monopolistic state, a supreme leader leading a single party through the repressive apparatus of a dominant State with collective coercive power over all its citizens", it is freedom and democracy Orwell fears the loss of, not capitalism.
Posted by: Ed | April 24, 2009 at 02:26 AM
Glassman misses the point in treating 1984 as a work of prophecy. The book was much more a commentary on the issues of Orwell's day.
Posted by: Jeb | April 17, 2009 at 08:53 PM