Today our Book Club continues with Chapter 3, “War Is Peace.” Please leave your thoughts and questions in the comments and I’ll do an omnibus reply later this week.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
Ill-paid and hard-working, but with little human or physical capital.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world’s economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
A thoughtful concession, though even the “tempo” claim is debatable. Counting transportation costs, do these desperate workers even produce more than they cost to manage?
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society.
Orwell seems unaware of the textbook answer. What is to be done with surplus consumption goods? Cut their prices until people buy all you create! What if you can’t make a profit at these reduced prices? Then cut input costs or produce something in greater demand. What if even that doesn’t work? Then print more money.
In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient — a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete — was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen…
This is a good time to take a break from being depressed by Orwell’s dystopia and acknowledge that in the real world, this “vision of a future society” is our present. Or at least it was back in 2019.
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared.
Hardly. The case for economic inequality in the machine age remains as strong as ever. We need incentives for work, skill acquisition, and innovation. And incentives aside, the repression required to greatly reduce such inequality is terrifying. See “Harrison Bergeron” or the Khmer Rouge.
If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process — by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute — the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
A shocking concession for a socialist like Orwell. And note that the “automatic process” to which he refers practically has to be the free-market mechanism, which “distributes wealth” by driving down the prices of abundant products. Walmart is only the latest incarnation.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.
Orwell seems oblivious to the “rat race.” Once everyone has enough to eat, having enough to eat confers no distinction. But what you eat still does. We can’t show off by eating big bags of rice, but we can show off by eating in fancy restaurants. Distinctions have ye always.
It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.
It is also possible to imagine a society in which the necessities of life are evenly distributed, but luxuries are not. Nowadays, that’s basically every rich country.
But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. 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. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
Silly. The mere possession of ample luxuries rarely leads anyone to “think for themselves.” Humans don’t need poverty to “stupefy” them, because apathy and superficiality are deeply rooted in human nature. And if humans thought for themselves competently, they would realize that the “privileged minority” serves the vital functions of (a) providing skilled labor and (b) innovating.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods… The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
This ridiculous story brings a much more plausible one into focus. Namely: War serves the function of maintaining fanatical social cohesion. Stalin really did keep the Soviet people in constant fear of foreign invasion. And his motive was clear: Paranoid fear of outsiders rationalizes domestic oppression. “No one wants this suffering, least of all Comrade Stalin. Sadly, our foreign enemies have forced these drastic measures upon us. And anyone who questions these measures is an obvious lackey of our enemies.”
It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter — set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty.
If even the elite lives poorly, what’s the motive behind all the cruelty? Power-hunger, power-hunger, and more power-hunger.
And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
Quite sensible. There’s no need to appeal to silly stories about personal comfort somehow leading to critical thought.
War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way… What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.
Quite right. Notice, moreover, that this mechanism can easily function without a diabolical mastermind at the helm. Just say: Power-hungry leaders naturally tend to make enemies with other power-hungry leaders. And once conflict erupts, power-hungry leaders don’t have to be geniuses to realize that conflict helps reinforce their power by promoting fanatical social cohesion.
It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.
In the twentieth year of the War on Terror, this sounds strangely familiar. When you’re in the business of amassing power, numeracy is very bad for business.
READER COMMENTS
robc
Feb 15 2021 at 10:46am
The Stalin bit sounds like Castro and Cuba: “Cuba is poor because of the US embargo”, ignoring the fact that Cuba trades with everyone else, making the US embargo meaningless.
William Anderson
Feb 15 2021 at 8:15pm
I once asked the editor of Sojourners Magazine (the socialist Christian publication) how to rectify what seemed to me to be contradictory statements. It is the position of Sojourners that (1) Cuba is poor because of the U.S. trade embargo, and (2) the Third World countries are poor because they trade with the USA.
Obviously, the two statements are contradictory. Jim Rice of Sojourners actually replied to my question and said, “It depends on the terms of the trade.” In other words, he was clueless to his own cluelessness. What I have found is that leftists seem to be proud of their own economic illiteracy.
David Henderson
Feb 15 2021 at 1:11pm
Excellent analysis, Bryan.
Here are some of the comments I wrote in the margin.
The “bottomless reserve of cheap labour” made me think of Marx’s “reserve army of the unemployed.”
Your comment is excellent. I also wonder, though, whether he had the idea of satiation: once we have so many consumer goods, we won’t want more.
You commented correctly that we need inequality in order to have incentives. But there’s more to say. We are getting rid of human drudgery in the first world. Jobs at pretty much every level are much easier now. That’s distinct from inequality. Here are Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Myths of Rich and Poor, 1999:
Also, while you emphasize the role of incentives, it’s important to note that no one “decides” that there’s inequality. It’s the natural result of a market process in which people become various degrees of good at what they do. No one decided that Jeff Bezos should be the wealthiest man in the world. Instead, billions of voluntary transactions led to that result.
You take on Orwell on the issue of distinction and do it well. But there’s another point to be made. I’ll illustrate with 2 true stories. I had crab out of a can for my first time in my mid-20s. I had fresh crab for my first time at age 30. In both cases it was a luxury. I didn’t do it in either case for the purpose of “distinction.” In both cases, I just wanted something better.
You make a good comment. I thought of East Germany. When the Wall Street Journal had only one section, the middle column of the first page was usually my favorite piece. It took on a range of issues with really good reporting. I remember one story in the late 1980s about Katarina Witt, the famous East German figure skater. It told about how she had, are you ready?–her own apartment. Also, her own Trabant. This was luxury in East Germany in the late 1980s.
KevinDC
Feb 15 2021 at 4:37pm
Orwell is hardly the only socialist to assert that the poor are stupefied by their poverty. But this makes it clear now much of a moving target “poverty” is in these discussions. Orwell writes that once the masses “had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared.” Granted, private planes are still few and far between, but access to air travel generally is massively more common and less expensive than Orwell’s time (current plague notwithstanding). And nobody nowadays would consider having access to a bathroom or a refrigerator to be clearing some important hurdle of inequality. Imagine if we could revive Orwell and bring him into modern times. Let him see how those officially classified as “poor” in America or Britain have blown far past the threshold he describes, and in fact possess luxuries far beyond anything the wealthiest people in his day had available to them. Show him how even the poorest Americans have supercomputers in their pockets that can instantly connect to a wealth of easily accessible and freely available information in platforms like Wikipedia and Khan Academy. And after he’s taken all that in, let him browse Twitter and and listen to talk radio and attend some political rallies, and ask him if he still thinks it’s material poverty that keeps people stupefied.
Orwell is right by highlighting that this doesn’t depend on actually being in a state of war. It only requires a “consciousness of being at war” – you need only make people feel like the social issue de jour is akin to a state of war. Think of the War on Drugs, or the War on Poverty – the rhetoric of both was designed to try to create a “consciousness of being at war” as justification for the “handing-over of all power to a small caste.” And interestingly, Orwell held no illusions that the socialism he advocated wouldn’t entail the same thing. In his review of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, he said “in the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often – at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough – that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of.” The fact that socialist governments would also go on to abuse such power once they had it should have been easily predictable on the basis of *gestures broadly at all of recorded human history.*
Jason Ford
Feb 15 2021 at 9:31pm
“But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction — indeed, in some sense was the destruction — of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.”
Perhaps Orwell was on to a grain of truth. One hundred years ago, a town might only have a few college graduates. If old novels are to be believed, their status conferred a certain amount of respect. Today, how much deference does the average skilled laborer have for someone with a college degree and no other significant achievements? In my observation, very little.
I have a hypothesis. A big conflict in America today is that the “educated” portion of America is demanding respect that the rest of the country isn’t giving them. For example, “woke” ideology could be considered a way for the intellectual elite to assert its superiority. “Woke” ideology is simple enough that any reasonable intelligent college graduate can grasp it but has enough abstract reasoning that the portion of American not interested in abstract thinking has no use for it. “Woke” ideology generally only gains traction in groups with a lot of college graduates or where it’s imposed on an organization by force.
Those getting by but having the basic necessities of life seem to have a resentment of those who wish to be part of the elite. The election and near-reelection of Trump can be seen as a rejection of hierarchy. It’s true that Trump is quite wealthy, but he’s not culturally elite. His persona is closer to a car salesman than a college professor or elite artists.
I doubt it would be possible to establish a hierarchy in America that those on the bottom rungs of the hierarchy would take very seriously. If the Constitutional Convention happened today, for example, would most people be inclined to support a document written by a small group of the most educated Americans? It seems very unlikely. In short, Orwell might have been on to something.
j r
Feb 16 2021 at 5:56am
What you are describing is quite similar to what David Brooks call status-income disequilibrium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status%E2%80%93income_disequilibrium), which is itself a take on broader sociological ideas.
ps – If you think Trump is not elite, then you are falling for the PR. Used car salesman don’t get to do major real estate development deals in NYC. The man had his own show on network television for a decade. If Trump isn’t a member of the economic, political and cultural elite, then the word elite has no meaning.
I do believe that you are right in your larger point about Trump support being a proxy for anti-elite sentiment.
robc
Feb 16 2021 at 7:02am
Are you really elite if the NFL won’t let you in?
Jason Ford
Feb 16 2021 at 6:49pm
I don’t think we’re disagreeing. Trump is most certainly elite in terms of wealth. As. you said, people consider him anti-elite. Thanks for the links! Interesting stuff.
Mark Z
Feb 15 2021 at 11:25pm
One issue with Orwell’s take on war as a means of perpetually maintaining social cohesion is that people tend to get war fatigue after a while, and I think the example of the Iraq War is an example of this. The original enthusiasm had mostly dissipated after a few years and opposition was a big factor in the 2008 election. Both Russia and Germany faced increasing domestic dissidence as WW1 dragged on and this partly motivated their governments to seek peace. War seems an effective way to encourage social cohesion for a few years, but not indefinitely. I think eventually the war would become a domestic burden to the party rather than an asset.
Henri Hein
Feb 16 2021 at 1:27am
It always seems like socialists are more prone to Pessimism Bias. Or maybe it’s the other way around: those who do not have Pessimism Bias are less likely to be socialist.
Since 1984 was written in the late 1940s, did Orwell think capitalism had entered its late stage?
That sounds like the Socialist Modus Operandi.
BC
Feb 16 2021 at 4:37am
Except for the first few years after 9/11, I don’t think that one can make a very strong case that war, or even threats to “national security”, is used as an effective way to amass much power nowadays. Although we have deployed troops in the Middle East for 20 years, the War on Terror just doesn’t garner much mindshare anymore, and hasn’t for quite some time.
In 2020, the obvious pretense for “handing-over of all power to a small caste” is the War on Covid. Prior, and after, some desperately wanted, and will want, the War on Climate Change to fill that role, although thus far their efforts have been largely ineffective. Instead, the War on Systemic Racism and Sexism has been, and post-Covid is on track to continue to be, the all-consuming War that justifies everything. Just about anything — from abolishing magnet schools, to anti-meritocratic college admissions and hiring, to college sexual harassment kangaroo courts, to abolishing private credit rating agencies, to even rioting, looting, and declaring autonomous zones — can be justified if done in service of equalizing racial and gender outcomes. Indeed, the only “free pass” available to take a break from fighting the War on Covid has been to protest in the War on Racism. Of course, anyone who questions these measures may not be labeled an “obvious lackey of our enemies”, but they will instead be tarred with a label that in the 21st Century has come to be viewed as even worse: oblivious of their privilege.
Chris H
Feb 16 2021 at 3:11pm
I think we are currently in a situation that Orwell could hardly have imagined, running a war out of the petty cash drawer. Not that it isn’t expensive, but life in the U.S. goes on quite oblivious to it. There are — what? — two wars going on at the moment. Or does Iraq not count anymore? Or, does it count as a launching pad into Syria when we need it?
I have heard of the dislocation and alienation veterans feel these days coming back from combat at the complete normalcy of life back home, and complete ignorance that U.S. soldiers are fighting and dying somewhere — well, many wheres! (This overlooks many, many more casualties suffered by the inhabitants of the battle zones — and those are likewise largely ignored.)
I suppose the War on Terror still props up the powers that be by virtue of encouraging the masses to be frightened, and therefore turn to government power for protection. You could still get plenty of that, though, just by “sting” operations to convince some half-wit that he’s plotting to topple the St. Louis Arch.
I in no way mean to imply I miss some “good old days” of mass mobilization like WW2, or “war in our living rooms” like Vietnam. My preference is no war. It’s just bizarre that U.S. foreign wars get attention of the populace on about the same level of British football leagues. And I’m sure Orwell — or anyone in the late 40’s — would never have envisioned that.
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