by Peter Huber
Keep the Aspidistra Flying, for example, is an unrelenting diatribe against (in Orwell’s overhyphenated prose) money-stink, the money-sty, the money-god, the money-world, the money-priesthood, the money-code, money-civilization, money-business, and money-morality. In Orwell’s other books we learn that Building Societies (savings and loan banks) are a “huge racket,” insurance is “a swindle,” a competing merchant is a “tapeworm,” and the ruin of modern life is the “everlasting, frantic struggle to sell things.” All private property “is an obstructive nuisance.” Indeed, “the right to private property means the right to exploit and torture millions of one’s fellow creatures.” “Corpses” should not have the “irresponsible power” to “interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills.” “I don’t believe that capitalism, as against feudalism, improved the actual quality of human life,” Orwell writes in a 1940 letter. ” [W]e are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system,” he declares in a 1946 essay. Capitalism is a “tyranny”; fascism and capitalism are in fact “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” The “nature of the relationship between a man earning £50,000 a year and one earning fifteen shillings a week” is “that the one is robbing the other.”
The market robs the worker of his mental freedom too. Salvador Dali’s “diseased and disgusting” paintings, Orwell informs us, stem from the capitalist affluence of his patrons. Writers required to “tickle money out of the pockets of tired businessmen” produce nothing but “saleable drivel.” The freedom of the press in Britain is “something of a fake” because “money controls opinion.” In any event, the press has been ruined by the malignant influences of commercial advertising, “the dirtiest ramp that capitalism has yet produced.” Thus, “[a]ny writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society, . . . the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films.” “[I]f the news is not distorted by businessmen it will be distorted by bureaucrats, who are only one degree better.” Because of “centralised ownership,” the “much-boasted freedom of the British press is theoretical rather than actual.” The businessman, just like the bureaucrat, censors the news: “the fact that most of the press is owned by a few people operates in much the same way as a state censorship.”
As Orwell sees it, the free market despises intelligence, suppresses science, and undermines free thought. England’s “years of investment capital . . . produced like a belt of fat the huge blimpocracy which monopolises official and military power and has an instinctive hatred of intelligence.” Free markets “slow down the process of invention and improvement, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius.” Only the rich “can afford to be intelligent,” Gordon Comstock reflects bitterly in Aspidistra. “The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought.”
Yes, that’s it! Capitalists, like the Thought Police, kill thought. The machine is the enemy. The free market is the enemy too.
• • •
What Orwell wants instead of capitalism is “democratic socialism”— basic economic security for everyone and a reasonably high degree of economic equality. Occasionally Orwell does use “democracy” in what he terms the “narrow nineteenth-century sense of political liberty, independence of the trade unions and freedom of speech and the press.” More often, however, he insists that “democracy” necessarily includes “economic justice.” In his standard list of Orwellian horribles, unemployment typically lands midway between Hitler and the radio, right beside censorship or the Secret Police. In Orwell’s view, no political system that tolerates sharp disparities of wealth can be called “free” or “democratic.”
Laissez-faire capitalism, Orwell argues, has delivered real freedom only once, and then only for a short while, in early nineteenth-century America. That America, unlike the industrial America that was to follow, had a “wildness of spirit,” “not only innocence but a sort of native gaiety, a buoyant, carefree feeling.” It was the America in which “the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and may not be again for centuries.” Young artists did not starve, nor were they “always tethered to safe jobs,” so they spent their youths “in adventurous, irresponsible, ungenteel ways.” In that America, “the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State interference, had hardly come into being.”
At first these paeans to frontier America seem strange, coming as they do from Orwell’s left-wing pen. But the old America Orwell admires is really quite like the new democratic-socialist England he dreams of: a land of natural, unmachined abundance, where minds are free because food, jobs, and all other basic essentials are there for the taking. Freedom cannot possibly involve commerce, banks, insurance, merchants, or private property. Freedom simply does not include traditional “economic liberty” It does, however, include what socialists always include: enough wealth in every man’s pocket to cover all basic necessities and wealth spread around evenly enough to ensure social equality. Peace, freedom, flowers, happiness, and art flourish when economic times are so good that people don’t have to worry about money at all. One can almost hear Orwell, who loved biblical allusions, reading the lesson from Matthew 6:28: “Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.”
And who will tend the lilies in Orwell’s socialist garden? Well, the government, of course. The Ministry.
CHAPTER 7
The door was opened silently by a small, dark-haired servant in a white jacket. A second man followed behind, with a look of vapid wonder on his face.
“Come in Burgess, come in.” O’Brien’s expression was grim, but he spoke the words gently He rose deliberately from his chair and walked across the soundless carpet. His visitor clutched his hands together in uncertain embarrassment.
O’Brien moved closer, so that his solid form towered over the smaller man. The seconds marched past. Burgess was standing silently, his opaque black eyes fixed unblinkingly at a point somewhere below O’Brien’s collar. The man was solid Party timber, O’Brien thought, the kind of man who got a servile pleasure from lumbering deferentially forward when something was wanted by the Party, the kind of man who would suck up whenever he had the chance to suck up, whose hatred would always turn into a sort of cringing love at the first smile. Circus dogs jumped when the trainer cracked his whip, but the really well-trained dog turned his somersault when there was no whip.
“Burgess, thank you. Thank you for coming. I have asked you to come here because—”
O’Brien paused, realizing for the first time the vagueness of his own motives. He did not in fact know what kind of help he expected from Burgess. He went on, conscious that his words must sound remarkably tentative, coming as they did from a high-ranking member of the Inner Party.
“We believe there may be some kind of conspiracy to sabotage the network. The Party would like you to investigate.” O’Brien gave a faint smile.
Burgess took his cue. He spoke eagerly, saliva flicking from his lips, his fat cheeks wobbling.
“If there’s anything going on, Blythe’s behind it! I’ve said it for years: it’s time for the complete and final elimination of Blytheism.” This last sentence was barked out very rapidly, all in one piece, like a line of type cast solid. “And now he’s after the network, eh? What we need are sterner measures against thought-criminals and saboteurs!” His head was thrown back a little, and because of the angle at which he was sitting, his spectacles caught the light and presented to O’Brien two blank discs instead of eyes. “What lessons do we learn from such treachery? The lessons . . .”
“Burgess,” said O’Brien quietly. “Shut up.”
A look of fear flitted across the man’s face.
“The Party knows you’re a good man, Burgess. This is not a test of Party loyalty.” O’Brien turned back toward his chair and sat down heavily. A cough rumbled in his chest, and he suppressed it. “There really does seem to be some sort of problem with the network. We need to find out what it is. And if there is a problem, we need to fix it.”
O’Brien gestured toward a chair, and Burgess sat with an air of abject deference. He carefully did not look at the delicate, polished surface of the desk. To stare covetously at such a luxurious item would be suspect in a Party member. Exactly right, thought O’Brien. The man’s whole life was playing a part. Burgess understood it would be dangerous to drop his assumed personality even for a moment.
“I need first to understand a bit more about these telescreens,” O’Brien continued gently. “Perhaps you can help me.” He resettled his glasses on his nose, then continued. “Most telescreens are on permanently, of course. Tell me first, Burgess, how is it that members of the Inner Party are able to switch off their telescreens?”
Burgess brightened visibly. Something like eagerness moved across his face.
“Ah, that’s really quite straightforward. It’s in the manual, in fact. I can leave you a copy. You just approach the screen, and carefully say: ‘COMM-ONE-CLOSE, COMM-TWO-CLOSE,’ quite slowly and clearly, and that does it. Marvelous, really. It took me a while to get the hang of it too,” he added as a confidential afterthought.
For a moment O’Brien was certain he would send Burgess straight to the cells in the basement of the Ministry. It would be worth it—worth silencing one last pedantic fool, whatever the cost. But the thought passed. The Party needed Burgess, at least for the moment.
“Yes, yes, I know about that. You’ll notice that I’ve shut down my own unit.” O’Brien gestured toward the dark screen on the wall. “I also know that ‘COMM-ONE-OFFICE, COMM-TWO-HOME’ connects me from here to my office in the Ministry. What I’m trying to understand is why some units work like this and others don’t.”
O’Brien paused again, to let the thought register. “The screens in Victory Square, for example—the ones around the monument. No one can turn those on or off. From room 101 at the Ministry, we watch the people in the square. The people in the square of course see the Big Brother channel—news from the front, that sort of thing. What is it exactly that makes those telescreens work differently from mine? Are they different units?”
“No, they’re the same units,” Burgess replied slowly. “We install them differently. It’s all part of the installation. It’s in the manual, of course. The one B.B. wrote for us.”
“And how exactly do the installations differ?”
Burgess twitched, and his face drooped. “Well, it has to do with the blue box, you see. After the screen’s mounted, we use the box. To get the unit started, you understand. This part’s really quite complicated. But it’s in the manual—all in the manual.” Burgess brightened. “I could get you a copy. There aren’t many, but I don’t suppose we’d have much trouble locating one for someone in your position.” He chuckled hoarsely.
O’Brien felt the anger rising in his throat. Again he swallowed the urge to obliterate the man at once. “That might be helpful. Yes, certainly, I’m sure it would be. But do fill me in a bit more first. My men in the Ministry—how exactly do they go about selecting which screen they’re going to monitor? Suppose, for example, I was at the Ministry now, and I wanted to check up on—” O’Brien glanced down at his desk—“on comrade Blair, let us say, a chap who’s been having a spot of trouble with crimethink lately. Now if I were in the Ministry at this very moment, how would I arrange to take a quick look round Blair’s living room?”
Burgess looked gloomy. “It would be done with the blue box, I think. I’m really not exactly sure. It’s a very specialized application.”
“Then how about the offices?” O’Brien gestured again at his own telescreen. “My unit here connects up to the Ministry. I can also link up with Cooper, my personal secretary. Most people in the Ministry can connect with one or two other offices. How do you take care of that?”
“I think—” Burgess hesitated for a long moment. “I think we look after that part during the installation.” He stopped again, deep in thought. “They send us the order forms, you see. There are two numbers on them—it’s two most of the time at least. Then we follow the manual. That’s extremely complicated. But toward the end we use the blue box and enter the two numbers. Sometimes it’s more than two.” He looked uneasy. “I once did a unit in the Ministry with six!” he added brightly.
O’Brien sat silently. He found himself thinking of Orwell. Orwell had sat in this same room, in the same chair now occupied by Burgess. The memory came back to O’Brien with a sort of crystalline clarity, the kind of vivid memory of things long past that he had often had of late. Orwell had been trying to persuade O’Brien to approve the new network. He’d gone on and on about the technical details. And unlike this fool Burgess, Orwell had known what he was talking about. He had loved the gadgets, loved their complexity, loved the whole network. Orwell had an inventive faculty; he invented machines as naturally as the Polynesian islander swam. He also had a doggedly empirical habit of thought. Orwell had been a singlethinker, no doubt about it.
“These manuals that you use—” O’Brien hesitated again. “I wonder if there might be some simpler explanation of it all. Something for a nontechnical chap like me. Or do you suppose—better still—that we might locate one of the engineers who helped to write it? Someone from the ’80s, perhaps?”
Burgess gazed back expressionless. “We could look. Can’t say I’ve ever met any of the old guard. Most of them turned out to be saboteurs. Until the manuals were perfected those types did almost anything they liked with the network.” He spoke with increasing vigor, and the spittle began to gather at the corners of his mouth. “Completely unreliable, most of them. Not really Party men at all. Probably Blythe . . .”
“Thank you Burgess.” O’Brien spoke quietly, but his words again carried an unmistakable note of warning. Burgess froze, leaning forward on his seat, his arm stuck in mid-gesticulation.
“I know exactly what you mean,” O’Brien continued. “Still, if we could find one of the old engineers, we might perhaps be able to extract something useful from him. Find out a bit more about this blue box you use, ask him how it all fits together.” O’Brien resettled his weight in the chair. Burgess stared with obsequious concentration. “Perhaps you could pursue the matter. My aide at the Ministry will see to it that you are given whatever assistance you might need.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Burgess replied with sickly enthusiasm. “Be happy to. I’ll get right to it. And whoever it is that’s causing the trouble—well, I’m sure we’ll catch the swine. After all, B.B. has said—”
Burgess caught O’Brien’s look, and his mouth snapped shut. After only the shortest pause, O’Brien held out his hand. Burgess leapt to his feet. A moment later, he was gone.
A man of small intellect, O’Brien reflected, but tenacious, of unquestioned loyalty. He’d plod along, dig through the archives and the records, and in the end find what was needed. This kind of investigation required no real originality.
O’Brien turned back to the writing table with its green-shaded lamp and the wire baskets deep-laden with papers. His glance fell on the memorandum he had received the day before about Blair, and Winston Smith’s elusive diary.
THE MINISTRY
O’Brien works in the Ministry of Love, which houses the Thought Police. Nearby stands the Ministry of Truth, which spews out propaganda and falsifies history. Orwell of course despises ministerial Love and Truth more than anything else, except perhaps ministerial Peace. He knows that the Ministries of Love, Truth, and Peace deliver nothing but hate, lies, and war. When it comes to the marketplace of ideas, Orwell is as laissez-faire as Adam
Smith.
The Ministry of Plenty, however, is another matter. Such a ministry really could deliver Plenty—or so Orwell firmly believes, until the day he dies. Collectivism, Orwell knows, is far more efficient than the free market.
How does he know? First, the economics of “the machine” require it. As we’ve seen, the process of washing crockery, making an aeroplane, or building an atom bomb is “so complex as to be only possible in a planned centralised society.” When a new invention threatens profits, capitalists suppress it “as ruthlessly as the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius.” “Establish Socialism—remove the profit principle—and the inventor will have a free hand. The mechanisation of the world . . . could be enormously accelerated.” One can almost hear Orwell add: “Indeed, by 1984 . . .”
Second, Orwell cites modern economic experience. Capitalism, Orwell observes time and again in his many writings, is “in decay,” “dissolving,” “disappearing,” “doomed,” and “dead”—and it “will not return.” Businesses are collapsing into monopoly all around, and the rot of monopoly spreads year by year. “[T]he march of progress is going in the direction of always bigger and nastier trusts,” Orwell writes in 1928. “The combines” have squeezed the grocer and the milkman out of existence. “[P]rivate capitalism—that is, an economic system in which land, factories, mines and transport are owned privately and operated solely for profit—does not work. It cannot deliver the goods.” “There is little question now of averting a collectivist society,” Orwell announces in 1940. “[A] return to small-ownership is obviously not going to happen and in fact cannot happen.” “I don’t believe economic liberty has much appeal any longer,” he writes elsewhere. “A collectivised economy is bound to come,” he announces to the world in a BBC broadcast. Indeed, by 1984 . . .