George Orwell as a social theorist

George Orwell (pen name for Eric Blair 1903-1950) is recognized as one of the great English language prose stylists of the first half of the 20th Century.  His work incorporated linguistic precision with a passion for social justice.  He was equally passionate as an opponent of Stalinism and its pretensions to represent a socialist alternative to capitalism.  This passion was displayed in his two novels, Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) which savaged Stalinist Russia for the emergence of the new class of commissars and the repression and rewriting of history, respectively.  These books were among the largest selling of the 20th Century.  No one has (or likely ever will) matched Orwell's contempt for the abuse and distortion of language that the Stalinist regime was guilty of.

However, I want to emphasize a different aspect of Orwell's work in 1984, in particular.  When I first read the novel in the late 1960s, I was impressed by the geopolitical analysis it contains.   For those who have never read the book (Highly recommended) in 1984 the world is divided into three power blocks, Oceana, Eurasia, and Eastasia.  These are respectively, the Western Hemisphere (plus Great Britain as Airstrip One and some of the then British Commonwealth), roughly the Soviet Union (plus the satellites and Western Europe), and what is now the Peoples Republic of China.  In the novel, these powers were continually at war with each other (the better to justify their continuing repression of their peoples) in shifting alliances.  However, the warfare did not usually impact any of their main territories.  Instead, the fighting occurred in Africa, the Near East, and South Asia.  This is actually a brilliant description of the mid-Cold War geopolitical situation (although South America was definitely in play.)  Remember though, this was written twenty years before the actual situation on the ground developed.

Did Orwell offer other prescient insights?  I believe so, the great villain of the Party in the novel is Emmanuel Goldstein (a rather transparent stand-in for Trotsky.)  His book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism, explains the structure of the party as a new class.  This new class will be "...a boot stamping on a human face—forever."  Oligarchic collectivism does not discriminate on the basis of race, or other irrelevant criteria.  The Party as new class has a privileged, and much higher consumption level than the Proles who constitute the rest of society.

Now my leap forward, doesn't this sound a bit like the social system that has evolved in the US recently?  We have an oligarchy that can depend on government bailouts whenever its economic interests are threatened.  The rest of of us, not so much.  In fact, our living standards are under constant downward pressure.  We have a condition of permanent and unwinnable warfare.  And if we don't approach the levels of repression shown in 1984, there is certainly disquieting movement in that direction.

Please: Somebody reassure me that we are not on the road to Oligarchical Collectivism.