George Orwell the Politics of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Surveillance

State
Section 1: the state in Nineteen Eighty-Four and comparison with the
surveillance state of today (moving to a focus on Australia)
Section 2: What is the purpose of the surveillance state? How do Orwells
politics help him to portray this accurately?
Section 3: What is to be done about the state? Why was Orwell so wrong, or at
least confused, about solutions to the problems of the state?
Section 1:
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PRSM. This parody has appeared on several social media and memebase
websites over the past few months and is a reference to the US National
Security Agencys spy program, PRISM. While making light of the topic, it
indicates not only how invasive this spying is but also how these measures can
seem almost farcical in their reach.
To some extent, this comes as no surprise, most people are at least vaguely
aware that the government is spying on their own population and have been
almost openly for decades with programs such as ECHELON. However, the
incredible extent to which they pry into peoples lives and how much this has
grown since 2001 is simply staggering. Who has a Google Account? Or an
iPhone? A Hotmail or Outlook address? Ever chatted on Skype or sent a
message through Whatsapp? Details leaked to the media by former NSA
employee Edward Snowden have revealed that PRISMstores data collected
from a range of companies who handle your email, phone records and internet
usage. Its partner programs BLARNEY and the refreshingly honestly named
Boundless Informant help to collect metadata and provide summaries for NSA
managers in a strategy developed during the Iraq War of collect it all. The NSA
is involved in the construction of the Utah Data Centre, to be completed next
month, which should hold exabytes (10^18) of data. For a sense of scale, its
estimated capacity is 100 million times that required to store every book ever
written in any language on Earth. In summarising the effects of these programs
Snowden claimed in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc.
analyst has access to query raw SIGINT [signals intelligence] databases, they can
enter and get results for anything they want.
The general public seems to have caught on to the fact that this sort of
government spying is oddly familiar. No, it wasnt said by any political candidate
in midst of a debate, nor was it promised in any platform outline of party
brochure. Rather, it was written in George Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four, which
skyrocketed from a sales rank of 12 507
th
to 80
th
in the world. It is a satire of
both the totalitarianism of the Stalinist USSR and his own experiences in British
society, particularly while working at the BBC. The protagonist, Winston Smith,
lives in the superpower Oceania which is in constant war with the worlds other
superpowers. Nothing is your own except the space inside your head and even
that is under constant threat from Big Brother and the thought police. Winston
works for the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites history for propaganda. Their
slogan is War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength which people
may recognise as Tony Abbotts election platform this year.
Perhaps most renowned for the maxim Big Brother is watching you, Nineteen
Eighty-Four is filled with plotlines and quotes that read as if they were plucked
from the modern reality of the invasive surveillance state. This is clearest in the
line The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with
lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with
starvation. Well, war, lies torture and starvation describe the Australian state
perfectly (particularly its treatment of Indigenous peoples and refugees.) Our
Ministry of Defence invades the Pacific (and our privacy), our Ministry of
Immigration locks up migrants in PNG and the Ministry of Education keeps us
blind and closeted with cut after cut after cut.
While the Snowden leaks have mostly concerned the US government, Australia
is by no means a land of freedom and privacy. First, a lot of international data
passes through US infrastructure anyway since this works out cheaper for most
telecom and internet companies. However, the Australian government is more
than happy to spy on us and pass this information along to the UK, US, Canada
and New Zealand as part of the Five Eyes Alliance. As revealed by Russia
Today, the Australian Pine Gap facility, as well as three other Australian
locations and one in New Zealand, are involved in PRISM through a deal
between the NSA and the Australian Defence Signals Directorate. For this
reason the Australian government, as well as organisations such as Get Up, have
proposed legal changes which would force Internet Service Providers to retain
metadata for up to 2 years, compel individuals to provide their passwords or
face jail time and allow agencies such as ASIO to add, modify or delete
information on personal computers in the course of their investigations.
This is the reality of the surveillance state: if you have ever made a phone call or
sent an email then ASIO or the DSD are able to determine who it came from,
who it was sent to, when it was sent, where it was sent and in many cases what
it contained. When describing the truth-distorting effects of propaganda Orwell
wrote about doublethink: it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white
when Party discipline demands thisthe power of holding two contradictory
beliefs in ones mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. Nothing
could more perfectly describe the approach of governments worldwide. They
claimthat you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide while
condemning and convicting heroes such as Snowden, Chelsea Manning and
Julian Assange for revealing the truth behind their spying, warmongering and
wanton disregard for human life.
Section 2:
However, I think theres a little more to why Nineteen Eighty-Four is so
prescient and so in tune with our lives today. It goes beyond mere coincidence
or writing talent. It is Orwells politics which make Nineteen Eighty-Four speak
so loudly to anyone with a distaste for the government or big business which
happily assists them in spying on us. Contrary to his adoption by much of the
right, Orwell was (and remained) a determined socialist, opposed to the horrors
of capitalism and the state which defended it. It was these political beliefs that
allowed Orwell to so accurately portray the state and its purpose such that it
remains relevant even today.
Rt. Hon. Lord Justice Sir Stephen Sedley claims that point of Nineteen Eighty-
Four was to prove that socialism, in whatever form, offers the common people
no more hope than capitalism, and that the inefficient and benign rule of
capitalism, which at least keeps the beasts in check, is a lesser evil. Not
coincidentally, Sedley was a judge on the British High Court and later Court of
Appeal throughout the War on Terror. This characterisation of Orwell simply
does not stand up to scrutiny. Fortunately, unlike many writers, Orwell has
provided us with one clear way to determine his reasons for writing his various
books: he wrote entire essays detailing how left wing they were! In Why I Write,
Orwell made it clear that he had written Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning
against totalitarianism and a statement FOR socialism. Orwells socialist politics
stemmed directly from his first-hand experiences of imperialism and the
destitution of the British working class documented in The Road to Wigan Pier.
Orwell began his career as a member of the Burmese Imperial Police, a job that
he quit in revulsion in 1927 when he realised what empire and policing are all
about. Orwells greatest work, Homage to Catalonia shows that he was further
radicalised by his experiences in revolutionary Spain, defending the gains of the
revolution against fascists, Stalinists and reformists.
Needless to say, these politics did not gel with the British establishment upon
his return home. In his work for the BBC he was outraged by the censorship and
outright lies the media propagated in portraying British decline as triumph for
the purposes of nationalism. Although he provided no concrete or material
reasons as to why, Orwell was adamant that the powerful elite of society used
the state and its agents for their own purposes, to maintain the status quo and
their own privilege. To this end, he wrote in the introduction to the Ukrainian
edition of Animal Farmthat the traitorous and manipulative pigs were
representative not merely of Stalinism, but of government in general when the
mass of people do not remain active and conscious.
Nineteen Eighty-Four is not merely a warning of some hypothetical future. It is
not merely a description of totalitarianism and distant problems. It is a
commentary on the capitalist state, the horrors that it defends and the tactics
employed to divide and rule us. Capitalism is by its nature a system in which a
privileged few benefit from the exploitation and subjugation of the many. This
has become ever clearer throughout the era of neo-liberalism and the War on
Terror. Every way in which the state upholds this inequality finds expression in
Orwells work. Orwells Oceania finds itself in perpetual war with Eurasia and
Eastasia; the capitalist state butchers millions in Iraq, Afghanistan and
worldwide in the name of imperialism and plunder. Big Brother keeps the
workers uneducated and unknowing; our government cuts funding to higher
education and maintains its secrets are necessary for national security. Big
Brother demands unwavering loyalty and unquestioning compliance from the
Party; Chelsea Manning is sentenced to 35 years for divulging that the US
government kills civilians and covers it up. Big Brother infiltrates resistance
groups to prevent any opposition to the status quo; the NSA monitors the
phone and internet activity of anyone involved in the Occupy protests of 2011.
Orwells politics, and the politics of socialists everywhere, reveal the state for
what it is. Mass surveillance and extreme hostility to opposition are not the
state overstepping its bounds, they are precisely what the state is meant to do.
It is no coincidence that in country after country, increased surveillance, hyping
of the War on Terror, vastly increased police powers and neoliberal so-called
reforms go hand in hand. In 2009, at Socialist Alternatives annual Marxism
conference, four years before the reveal of PRISM, Liam Byrne noted the
uncanny similarity between Orwells work and the post-9/11 world: A war
without end, designed to be without end so as to prop up a corrupt ruling elite.
A war based largely upon fictional enemies. The mass corruption of truth in the
media, doublespeak, the stripping away of civil liberties and constant
surveillance of our activities and crimes that do not actually need to have been
committed for you to be found guilty of them. Clearly the capitalist state is not
a force for good.
Section 3:
All of this raises a good question: what can we do about it? If the state is so
powerful and so intrusive then what recourse is there? Patently, self-regulation
by the state is laughable. Audits of the NSAs operations or investigations by the
Australian Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security are nothing more than
posturing. According to Snowden, audits are cursory, uncommon and easily
fooled. After all, the people doing the spying are intelligence experts and the
people doing the investigating work for the state which benefits from it. For this
reason we cannot rely on the law to save us. Testimony from brave whistle-
blowers like Snowden suggests that civilian networks like universities and
private businesses are illegally hacked by intelligence agencies almost routinely.
So against the big, bad state and with the law provided no redress, what hope is
there?
It is here that we must go beyond Orwells politics in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Although Orwell was a socialist, he was never a Marxist and always saw himself
as somewhat external to the plight and struggles of the working class. As a
result he often fell into pessimism about the ability of the working class to
change the world. Yet it is precisely this section of society which can have both
the ability and the determination to bring about the world that Orwell wished to
see. For this reason Orwell has left behind a contradictory body of work: always
highly critical of the capitalist system yet sometimes unaware of how to destroy
it.
The working class is portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the proles, a group
whom the protagonist, Winston Smith, sees as the one hope for society.
However (spoiler alert), Smith is eventually reprogrammed by Big Brother and
life goes on under the surveillance state. Some critics have claimed that Orwell
uses the proles to provide false hope and heighten the tragedy of the story; this
ignores both Orwells life experiences and his continual insistence that Nineteen
Eighty-Four was meant not as a warning of the inevitable but as a political
intervention against the right and against Stalinism. It is my opinion that
Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Animal Farm, represent the contradictory elements
of Orwells thought. They combine both his thoughts from The Road to Wigan
Pier, documenting the hardships and flaws of the working class, and the endless
wonder he experienced in Homage to Catalonia. He says of the Spanish
workers struggle that it was queer and moving. There was much I did not
understand and in some ways I did not even like it. But I recognised it
immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. It is this second side of
Orwell that provides hope for dismantling the surveillance state. Not the Orwell
that dismissed old-fashioned class struggle, caved to pressure and provided
an infamous black book of names. Instead, the Orwell who wrote of the proles:
Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You
were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you
kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret
doctrine that two plus two make four.
This power of the mass of people to change their circumstances and oppose the
state is not merely some literary fantasy, it has been borne out time and time
again throughout history. For the sake of brevity, lets look at just a couple.
During the Cold War and the division of Germany, East Berlin was a spys haven
with a Stasi agent managing to infiltrate the West German cabinet. However
none of this meant anything when democratic revolution came to town. A radio
broadcast gave the signal: All my little ducklings, swimming on the lake. This
was a coded message to the Stasi spies: the Stasi archives would soon be
opened, run and hide or face the justice of the people.
One of the most inspiring examples in recent history is that set by the Egyptian
Revolution. While the situation in Egypt is currently plagued by the state
cracking down on its citizens, if we take a broader picture of the struggles there
is much to be learned from. Mubaraks dictatorial regime was one of the most
repressive in living memory with the Egyptian populace stereotyped as
complacent, apathetic and doomed to their drudgery. However, like Orwells
proles, the potential for resistance was always there, bubbling beneath the
surface to one day erupt in revolution. In propping up the Mubarak dictatorship,
the State Security Investigations Service engaged in torture, mass surveillance of
civilians and planting agents in resistance groups (sound familiar?). During the
revolution the government soon realised that their secrets would be exposed
and took action. In early March dump trucks filled with shredded documents
were spotted leaving key SSI buildings the protestors were not impressed.
Protestors broke into government buildings in Cairo, Alexandria and Assiut
emerging with documents and physical evidence of informants, orders for
torture and the names of details of ongoing surveillance operations. As a result
the SSI was left in shambles, ongoing investigations were rendered futile and
the agency head was arrested on suspicion of ordering the deaths of protestors.
In fact, during this period the regime shut off internet and phone service; when
the people arise, communications infrastructure provides more help to them
than to government spies. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to protests
against PRISM today, people power has always been the strongest opposition to
the surveillance state. There are countless other examples but people should
bring these up during the discussion.
So what can we take away from this?
1) The state is bad. Pretty basic.
2) Nineteen Eighty-Four is not an instruction manual. Right wingers like
Andrew Bolt and Stephen Sedley should think twice before counting
Orwell among their inspirations. It was precisely Orwells left wing views
that allowed him to capture the state so accurately
3) Despite this, Orwell remained confused and somewhat contradictory. We
should remain clear: people power can topple the surveillance state and
fight against capitalism
Stuff that got cut because I couldnt decide if it was better in discussion:
The timing of the War on Terror, growth in police powers, tough anti-crime
stance and neo-liberalism is no coincidence. While neo-liberalism is supposedly
anti-big government, the repressive arm of the state is always jacked up (link to
the Central Park Five and racism?)
British GCHQ destroying hard drives at The Guardian and detaining David
Miranda
Restore the Fourth protests, Checkpoint Charlie protests, protests here in
Australia, etc.
Further details about Edward Snowden, Manning and Assange/Wikileaks