The Party taught that the proles were natural inferiors

The Party's teaching that the proles were natural inferiors is one of the foundational rules of Ingsoc, the official ideology of Oceania. Its decisive function is to let the Party claim liberation and practice subjugation at the same time: the same doctrine that presented the Party as the emancipator of an oppressed class also decreed that the proles were subhuman creatures to be kept down like animals. Winston Smith, reflecting on the idea, can see that his own thought almost repeats a Party textbook, yet the doctrine's power lies in its being held without any sense of contradiction. It gives the rulers of Oceania permission to ignore the vast majority of their subjects as a matter of principle rather than of negligence.

The Doctrine and Its Contradiction

The official history taught that before the Revolution the proles had been hideously oppressed by the capitalists: starved and flogged, with women forced to work in the coal mines (women still did work in the coal mines, as a matter of fact) and children sold into the factories at the age of six. The Party claimed, of course, to have liberated them. Yet, true to the principles of doublethink, it simultaneously taught that the proles were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjection, like animals, by the application of a few simple rules. The two teachings were never reconciled, because for a Party member the capacity to believe contradictory truths at the same time was itself a requirement of orthodoxy.

The same structure of contradiction had a real-world analogue that Orwell identified around him while writing the novel. In March 1948, early in the revision of the first draft, he complained that nearly the whole of the English Left had been driven to accept the Russian regime as 'Socialist' while silently recognizing that its spirit and practice were quite alien to anything meant by 'Socialism' in England, producing a 'schizophrenic manner of thinking' in which such things as concentration camps and mass deportations could be right and wrong simultaneously. The Party's doctrine about the proles is a perfected, institutionalized version of that split: liberation and contempt are held in the same breath, and the contradiction is not an error but the point.

Work, Breed, and the Few Simple Rules

In practice the doctrine meant that very little about the proles needed to be known. It was not necessary to know much: so long as they continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, in the official view, they would revert to a natural condition, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, and a few simple rules would keep them in place. The Party's ignorance of prole life was therefore not a failure of surveillance but a principle of rule. The proles were to be managed, not understood.

The same instrumental logic governed the Party's regulation of the body generally. Its aim was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control; its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act, and not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. All marriages between Party members had to be approved by a committee appointed for the purpose, permission was refused, as a rule, to any couple who gave the impression of being physically attracted to one another, and the only recognized purpose of marriage was to beget children for the service of the Party. The same turn of mind that herded the proles like cattle also reduced Party marriage to a reproductive function.

Falsified Records and Statistical Fantasy

The rule of natural inferiority was also sustained by a falsification of reality that made the actual conditions of prole life unverifiable. Most of the material handled in the Records Department had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection contained in a direct lie: statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. The Ministry of Plenty's forecast estimated the output of boots for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs; the actual output was given as sixty-two millions; and Winston, rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. One knew that astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, but very likely no boots had been produced at all; nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared.

Behind this lay the work of the Ministry of Truth, whose function was to deny the memories of others and rewrite the past. From the totalitarian point of view memory was relatively easy to deal with: there was always some agency to ensure that history never happened, or happened in the way best serving those in power. The doctrine of prole inferiority therefore could never be checked against any record. The only contrary evidence, as Winston felt, was the mute protest in his own bones, an instinctive feeling that the conditions he lived in were intolerable and must at some other time have been different. The actual texture of life, he saw, bore no resemblance either to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens or to the ideals the Party claimed to be pursuing; its characteristic marks were bareness, dinginess and listlessness, not the cruelty and insecurity that propaganda described.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Winston's relationship to the doctrine testifies both to its hold and to the possibility of resisting it. After his dream of his mother, for the first time in his life he did not despise the proles or think of them merely as an inert force which would one day spring to life and regenerate the world: the proles had stayed human, had not become hardened inside, and had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. The insight was a direct repudiation of the Party's teaching, and it carried its own guilt, as when he remembered kicking a severed hand into the gutter as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.

Orwell's own politics give the episode its point. He had gone to Spain in 1937 to fight against Franco and his Nazi-supported fascists and had learned there the difference between real and phony anti-fascism; ten years later he wrote that every line of serious work he had produced since 1936 had been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism. His fictional doctrine that the proles are natural inferiors is an indictment of the contempt that totalitarian movements could carry inside their claim of liberation. It describes not what ordinary people are, but what power must assert about them in order to rule.

The full logic of the rule is finally spoken by O'Brien in the Ministry of Love, when he tells Winston that 'we are the priests of power', that the individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual, and that the Party controls matter because it controls the mind: 'Reality is inside the skull.' He even claims he could float off the floor like a soap bubble if the Party wished it, because the Party makes the laws of Nature. In this metaphysics the proles' claim to share in humanity disappears along with every other individual claim. If reality is whatever the Party holds to be true, then the Party's assertion that the proles are natural inferiors is not a lie but a fact, because the Party makes facts. The doctrine of prole inferiority is the social face of the deeper doctrine that power itself is truth.