In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. A Floating Fortress has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.
Yes, 'eat up any surplus' but this is only the logic of Oceania. Orwell somehow forgot that the West was capitalist (based on surplus production and expropriation by the elite), and that the Soviet Union was not tied to this vicious circle of production/destruction, that it was quite capable of distributing its surplus to its proles to improve their standard of living. 1984 posits three deformed ideologies (for Oceania, Ingsoc), where the proles inexplicably have to live forever in poverty. But the economic logic applied is capitalist, something that Orwell either overlooked or didn't really understand.
This is unforgivable, as capitalism was alive and well as he wrote, and we expect Orwell to be our "wintry conscience". America's commercial culture, full of sexy ads, was apparent to Huxley in the 1930s--Marcuse's repressive desublimation--the spider's web to keep the proles captive. Couldn't Orwell reflect on the sexy-sock ad and put two and two together?
Hoisted with his own petard
Orwell's Big Brother and Inner Party were made to order for Oceania after WWII, when the threat of revolution in western Europe was very real. A vaccine against communism was urgent. In our pseudo-reality, it's okay to be cynical and critical about capitalism, as long as you don't get infected with the socialist virus. The Thought Police used Orwell to vaccinate potential revolutionaries.
Late capitalism's wars, while partly to keep the proles in line, do have other motives, primarily control of the world's resource, which Orwell dismisses as passe. And the Cold War meant something very different to the Soviet 'enemy' and the struggling third world, who were fighting for their existence, not just as a whim of their "Inner Parties".
Commodity fetishism (the real virus) and the ability of capitalism to manufacture desires (and sort-of satisfy them) eventually infected the Soviet Union and provided a powerful weapon to Oceania in its war to destroy Eurasia. Eastasia (China) abandoned its communist character before it could be destroyed, and has now swamped Oceania with commodities, threatening Oceania itself.
Orwell has come somewhat into his own only with the collapse of his hated Soviet Union and especially since 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.... It is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and ... is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of DOUBLETHINK.
Missing the point
That Orwell misread political developments is an understatement. He was politically tone deaf. After returning from Spain in 1937, he adhered to the Independent Labour Party's pacifism, refusing to support efforts for a common front with the Soviet Union against fascism.
When the Soviet Union was finally a war ally, like the anti-communist Churchill et al, he was briefly pro-Soviet, while broadcasting pro-empire BBC propaganda to India (his first full-time job since he was a policeman in Burma) and writing his anti-communist screeds. His hatred of the Soviet Union now meant opposing the end of empire, as the colonies would turn to the Soviet Union as a model, and like Churchill, Orwell preferred they remain British colonies.
The staunch republican became a fervent monarchist, as protection against the possible rise of a dictator, fearing the totalitarian values of Hitler/Stalin. But were these dictators the real problem? We can now see that these regimes, which relied overtly on terror, were not so sturdy as Orwell's dystopia leads us to believe, that human values survive under fallible dictators. The real totalitarian threat was/is the rule of money and commodity fetishism.
Orwell failed to see that the final brick in totalitarianism's wall was an ideology not of hate and fear, but of sexy legs and smiling models enticing prole-consumers into pursuing will-o-the-wisp happiness in endless consumption. Big Brother's Victorian strictures are no match for repressive desublimation, especially when the proles are vaccinated by a healthy dose of Orwellian criticism. Orwell's anti-communist ravings fit the post-WWII West to a T.
Orwell became a model for writers such as Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451 (1953)), Angry-Young-Men John Osborne (Look Back in Anger (1957)) and Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)), Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange (1962)), Paul Theroux, John le Carre, and ex-communist Doris Lessing, all of whom had an Orwellian critical view of contemporary society where there is no exit, but--just as important--no alternative.
The perfect 'free' culture for capitalism, proudly secular, postmodern, but where TINA (there is no alternative) rules, as famously coined by Margaret Thatcher. Orwell's legacy proved flexible enough to allow neoconservatives to cite him as they invade countries where dictators are called 'totalitarian', or for liberals and leftists to cite him to support their (bland and hopeless) struggles for 'human rights'. Any evidence of Orwell's socialism has long been swept under the carpet.
When 1984 hit the stands in 1949, Isaac Asimov wrote in Pravda of Orwell's "contempt for the people, his aim of slandering man." James Walsh in Marxist Quarterly criticized his "neurotic and depressing hatred of everything approaching progress." Indeed, as Orwell depicts them, the various non-pig animals in Animal Farm and the proles in 1984 are easily misled and cannot be relied on. Only individuals, misfits like Winston/Orwell, can see through the cant, and the possibility of their prevailing is nil. They have no alternative.
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