1984 is a classic and widely read novel of “totalitarianism.” It describes a simple, stark world in simple, taut prose. The details this totalitarian world are drawn from Stalinist Russia and from the Western world of Orwell’s day. A single Party controls the omnipresent media and constantly changes official facts to suit it’s purposes.
1984 was written and conceived as mass media and bureaucracy generally gained greater and great power. But in it’s simplicity it creates a mythical world – some time in the future, the Party will grain absolute power and history will have ended.
Despite the extremism of the scenario, it’s easy to notice many similarities to the modern world; the view screens, the vacuous pop-songs, the rewritting of the past and the notions of doublespeak, doublethink, crimethink and so-forth. Ideological fervor is guiding force; The Party of 1984 mirrors the Communist Party of the USSR; it controls it’s low-cadre first of all. The actual proles are too stupefied to need discipline and are merely herded with peppy tunes.
Perhaps this simplicity has allowed to stay on high school and college reading lists for decades. And this wide exposure has meant that as our modern gains more and more resemblances to 1984, the text becomes more like political guidepost than a novel for many people. With this so common, it is useful to say what’s wrong once a person start to use the book as something like a political model.
Counter Points
1. The reader of Orwell learns that history is suppressed by a totalitarian regime but doesn’t actual learn any history. The absolute power of the Party in 1984 is a-historical in its perfection and so those worried about the “Orwellian regime” start out with nothing to compare it to.
2. While one can find absurd right wing examples which equate corporate multiculturalism with Orwellian control, the politics, even mainstream anti-Orwellian thinkers often devolve into asking when the totalitarian moment will arrive, when the actual situation is choice, freedom and control are constantly being reworked in modern capitalist relations.
3. What makes 1984 is compelling is that the present is totalitarian. This is a strong truth of the present and one that makes ordinary civics texts seem tame and unreal. Every part of the life sold by the modern is a part of a giant machine for buying labor and selling back augmented survival. All of the dominant ideologies play a part in this.
4. Of course, as a practical matter, history and the organization of life, can’t be entirely suppressed. The process of totalitarian manage of life involves a cost-benefit analysis around how much control of what each corporation wants. Google is far more interested in the average person’s shopping habits than their political ideas because this can be used.
It is worth remembering that Stalinism suppressed history because so many key historical events had occurred immediately before Stalin – defending the USSR’s claim to represent the working class while suppressing the working class required active and constant repression. And if the US has presented itself as more freedom and choice than the USSR, the situation offered definite advantages to it’s rulers and capitalist class.
5. Totalitarian element of modern life is not a matter of simple, authoritarian control but a matter of a entire manufactured landscape. Technology make surveillance and control easier but the state searches only for the single dissident at the point that the dissidents’ ideas are actually dangerous to the state.
6. But just as much, an expanding capitalism has an incentive to create apparent choice in it’s system. The rise of the Internet came in the context of a capitalist society with an extraordinarily effective mass media propaganda system. The Internet allowed an almost unfettered access to ideas and nearly costly published but this situation only barely threatened the broad system given capitalist relations manufactured the conditions of people’s daily life (it should be noted that the Internet adopted universally after a much more controlled, Al Gore’s Information Superhighway, failed to get off the ground).
TL;DR; It lets a person imagine that at some point “tyranny will arrive” and then that a single individual can denounce it and lead a charge of the people. And allows one to imagine a shift to a completely stage-managed, solipsistic world.
Kill The Ism 