THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF
OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
by
Emmanuel Goldstein
Winston began reading:
Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength
Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of
the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the
world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been
subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different
names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude
towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the
essential structure of society has never altered. Even after
enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same
pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will
always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way
or the other.
The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable. . .
Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate
the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He
was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous
impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his
hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From
somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children:
in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice
of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his
feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was etemity. Suddenly,
as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one
will ultimately read and re-read every word, he opened it at a
different place and found himself at Chapter III. He went on
reading:
Chapter III
War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great
super-states was an event which could be and indeed was
foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the
absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the
United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and
Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third,
Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade
of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three
super-states are in some places arbitrary, and in others they
fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they
follow geographical lines. Eurasia comprises the whole of the
northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from
Portugal to the Bering Strait. Oceania comprises the Americas,
the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia,
and the southern portion of Africa. Eastasia, smaller than the
others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises
China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese
islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria,
Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three super-states
are permanently at war, and have been so for the past
twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate,
annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the
twentieth centary. It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no
material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine
ideological difference. This is not to say that either the
conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has
become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary,
war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and
such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the
reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals
against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying
alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed
by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But in a
physical sense war involves very small numbers of people,
mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few
casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the
vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only
guess at, or round the Floating Fortresses which guard
strategic spots on the sea lanes. In the centres of
civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage of
consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb
which may cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed
its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged
have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were
already present to some small extent in the great wars of the
early twentieth centuary have now become dominant and are
consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war -- for in
spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is
always the same war -- one must realize in the first place that
it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three
super-states could be definitively conquered even by the other
two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their
natural defences are too formidable. Eurasia is protected by
its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and
the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and indus triousness of
its inhabitants. Secondly, there is no longer, in a material
sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of
self-contained economies, in which production and consumption
are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a
main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the
competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and
death. In any case each of the three super-states is so vast
that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs
within its own boundaries. In so far as the war has a direct
economic purpose, it is a war for labour power. Between the
frontiers of the super- states, and not permanently in the
possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral
with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong
Kong, containing within it about a fifth of the population of
the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated
regions, and of the northern ice-cap, that the three powers are
constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls
the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly
changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that
fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the
endless changes of alignment.
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. The inhabitants of these areas, reduced
more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually
from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal
or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more
territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more
armaments, to capture more territory, and so on indefinitely.
It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond
the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow
back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern
shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and
the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by
Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between
Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three
powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are
largely unihabited and unexplored: but the balance of power
always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the
heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate.
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.
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. At present, when few human beings even have enough to
eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not
have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction
had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before
1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future
to which the people of that period looked forward. 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, partly because of the
impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions,
partly because scientific and technical progress depended on
the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a
strictly regimented society. As a whole the world is more
primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward
areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way
connected with warfare and police espionage, have been
developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped,
and the ravages of the atomic war of the nineteen- fifties have
never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in
the machine are still there. 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. 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
humand being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at
the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth
centuries.
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. 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. 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. To
return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the
beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a
practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards
mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout
almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which
remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense
and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its
more advanced rivals.
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