Foreword,Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

Terrance asks: What kind of society?

I take it as axiomatic that, one way or another, the writer can only
write about what he knows. As always, the question is: how do we know
what we know? More accurately: what do we think about what we think we
know? The commissioning editor, whoever, effectively 'labels' Pynchon as
one of Orwell's heirs. This is a guy who has the same kind of interests.
Hence the (erroneous) assumption that Pynchon's 'job' is to remind us
that Orwell 'got it right' - which view Pynchon duly mocks in what he
actually does write in the Foreword. For to argue that Orwell got it
right is to argue that his novel, 1984, was the same kind of prediction
as naming the winner of a horse race. I've never suggested that, so to
dispute what I've written on the grounds that my economic history is
off-the-wall is, well, off-the-wall.

Orwell writes about what he knows. That is, he writes about what he
thinks he knows. He is suspicious of socialism. Because of the Soviet
Union. Because of the Labour Party in Britain. Because of the way
capitalism has always been able to reinvent itself: in Britain, within
50 years or so, the Labour Party of Keir Hardie has become the Labour
Party of Attlee, dedicated to managing a capitalist (mixed) economy more
competently than Churchill's Conservatives. The rest, you might say at
this point, is history. However, that is to accuse Orwell of making
predictions.

The key question for the engaged intellectual (and few are more engaged
than Orwell) is: what about the workers? How have we got from, eg, the
General Strike in 1926 to the Welfare State twenty years on? When the
results of the 1945 election started coming through, someone (an
aristocrat) said: "They've elected a Labour Government. The people will
never stand for it." This quaint version of us-&-them is usually cited
as an example of, and a joke against, upper-class ignorance. But of
course the fear for many socialists was that the people wouldn't stand
for it, if 'it' meant revolutionary change. British socialism (ie as
represented by the Labour Party) was never anything more than
social-democratic reformism, based on the idea that a Labour Government
would improve social conditions and make everyone, in effect,
middle-class. That has always been the problem with working-class
people: they're just not middle class, dammit!

So to point out that 85% of the people in 1984 are proles is simply to
point out that Orwell begins with a (fictional) situation in which class
differences have been eradicated or, as I put it earlier, masked. The
other 15% of course are the meritocratic elite.