Oligarchical Collectivism

Oligarchical Collectivism is the name inscribed on the title page of the forbidden treatise that circulates through Oceania mainly as rumour: The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism, attributed to the Party's arch-heretic Emmanuel Goldstein. Within Nineteen Eighty-Four the phrase means more than a book. It is the Party's self-description in disguise, a doctrine of permanent hierarchy whose instruments are the four Ministries, whose mental discipline is Newspeak and Doublethink, and whose final product is a Winston Smith who ends the novel loving Big Brother.

The Forbidden Book

The book reaches Winston Smith through O'Brien, the Inner Party official who recruits Winston Smith into the supposed Brotherhood, and it is delivered during the chaos of Hate Week: a stranger taps him on the shoulder, says that he has dropped his brief-case, and hands over one containing the volume. It is a heavy black book, amateurishly bound, with no name or title on the cover and a title page reading The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein. Winston Smith carries it for six days before he can open it, and reads it at last in comfort and safety in the room above Mr Charrington's shop, alone, with no telescreen. Later he reads it aloud to Julia, who falls asleep before the end. The book's deepest effect is recognition: it tells Winston Smith nothing he did not already know, but organises his scattered thoughts into doctrine.

The Theory of Permanent Hierarchy

The theory, which stands behind the official philosophy of Ingsoc, begins with a claim about all recorded history: there have always been three kinds of people, the High, the Middle and the Low, with aims that are entirely irreconcilable, and the same pattern reasserts itself after every upheaval. Its diagnosis of modernity is that the machine made equality technically possible and therefore made it dangerous. Once everyone could work short hours, wealth would confer no distinction; the masses would learn to think for themselves; the privileged caste would be swept away. The Party's remedy is to freeze the cycle at the moment of its own victory, perpetuating unfreedom and inequality, and to keep even the favoured groups near the brink of hardship so that small privileges retain their value. In such a society science and invention must stop or be confined to war and police espionage. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery; the empirical habit of thought cannot survive in a strictly regimented society; and the two problems the Party thinks worth solving are how to discover what another person is thinking and how to kill hundreds of millions in a few seconds. The doctrine's account of history is thus a theory of permanent oligarchy justified by the very technological abundance that once seemed to promise its end.

The Practice: Ministries, Memory and Doublethink

The doctrine is made concrete in the four Ministries whose names reverse their functions: the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Truth tells lies, the Ministry of Love tortures and the Ministry of Plenty presides over scarcity. The Ministry of Truth, with three thousand rooms above ground and corresponding ramifications below, supplies every kind of news, entertainment and instruction, and repeats the whole operation at a lower level for the proles. Within it the Records Department, the cell in which Winston Smith works, rectifies the past day by day: documents are dropped into memory holes and consumed by furnaces, superseded copies are hunted down and destroyed, and history is scraped clean and re-inscribed as often as the moment requires. Memory is the first target of the system, because the past exists only in written records and human memories. The psychological counterpart is a schizophrenic manner of thinking that Orwell first identified among the English Left's acceptance of Stalinism, in which words like democracy carry two irreconcilable meanings; in the novel this becomes Doublethink. The Ministry of Love, windowless and guarded by machine-gun nests, is the doctrine's final sanction, a place impossible to enter except on official business and terrible enough to be the novel's image of total power.

Power for Its Own Sake

In the Ministry of Love, O'Brien -- who has told Winston Smith that he himself collaborated in writing the book -- delivers the doctrine's frankest exposition. The Party, he says, differs from all earlier oligarchies in knowing what it is doing: the German Nazis and the Russian Communists came close to its methods but never had the courage to recognise their own motives, while the Party declares that it seeks power entirely for its own sake. Power is not wealth, luxury, long life or happiness but pure power; it is an end, not a means, and the object of power is power. It is exercised over the body and, above all, over the mind. Obedience is not enough, because only suffering proves that a man is obeying another's will rather than his own; power is in inflicting pain and humiliation, in tearing minds to pieces and remaking them in shapes of the ruler's choosing. The world this produces is the exact opposite of the hedonistic utopias imagined by old reformers: a world of fear, treachery and torment, founded on hatred, in which the only emotions are fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement, and progress means progress towards more pain.

The Converted Subject and Its Author

The doctrine's final proof is the man who has been broken and remade. In Room 101, with the rat cage closing on his face, Winston Smith betrays Julia with the cry "Do it to Julia!" and is later released into a half-life of Victory Gin and chess problems in the Chestnut Tree Café. A bulletin announcing a great victory releases him from the last equivocation. He reflects that it has taken forty years to learn what kind of smile is hidden beneath Big Brother's moustache; two gin-scented tears run down his nose; the struggle is finished, and he loves Big Brother. Orwell's own stated intention, formed in the Spanish war and reaffirmed afterwards, was to direct his serious work against totalitarianism and for the democratic socialism he believed in. The doctrine that ends with a man loving his tormentor is the extrapolation of that warning: a system of power pursued for its own sake, perfected from the materials of the world Orwell saw around him.