George Orwell – the Politics of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the SurveillanceState

Section 1: the state in Nineteen Eighty-Four and comparison with thesurveillance state of today (moving to a focus on Australia)

Section 2: What is the purpose of the surveillance state? How do Orwell’spolitics help him to portray this accurately?

Section 3: What is to be done about the state? Why was Orwell so wrong, or atleast confused, about solutions to the problems of the state?

Section 1:

“Introducing a brand new way to share everything. No ads, ever. Unlimitedstorage! With the world’s largest data centre, share endlessly. 320 millionstrong! You’ll find every person you’ve ever known. Even grandma. No matterwhere you go, there it goes! Don’t ever worry about not sharing again!Purchases, internet searches, email, TV shows watched, photos, phone calls,texts and more! With key partners like Facebook, Apple, Skype and Google! GetPRSM.” This parody has appeared on several social media and memebasewebsites over the past few months and is a reference to the US NationalSecurity Agency’s spy program, PRISM. While making light of the topic, itindicates not only how invasive this spying is but also how these measures canseem almost farcical in their reach.

To some extent, this comes as no surprise, most people are at least vaguelyaware that the government is spying on their own population and have beenalmost openly for decades with programs such as ECHELON. However, theincredible extent to which they pry into people’s lives and how much this hasgrown since 2001 is simply staggering. Who has a Google Account? Or aniPhone? A Hotmail or Outlook address? Ever chatted on Skype or sent amessage through Whatsapp? Details leaked to the media by former NSAemployee Edward Snowden have revealed that PRISM stores data collectedfrom a range of companies who handle your email, phone records and internetusage. Its partner programs BLARNEY and the refreshingly honestly namedBoundless Informant help to collect metadata and provide summaries for NSA

managers in a strategy developed during the Iraq War of “collect it all”. The NSAis involved in the construction of the Utah Data Centre, to be completed nextmonth, which should hold exabytes (10^18) of data. For a sense of scale, itsestimated capacity is 100 million times that required to store every book everwritten in any language on Earth. In summarising the effects of these programsSnowden 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 canenter and get results for anything they want”.

The general public seems to have caught on to the fact that this sort ofgovernment spying is oddly familiar. No, it wasn’t said by any political candidatein midst of a debate, nor was it promised in any platform outline of partybrochure. Rather, it was written in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, whichskyrocketed from a sales rank of 12 507th to 80th in the world. It is a satire ofboth the totalitarianism of the Stalinist USSR and his own experiences in Britishsociety, particularly while working at the BBC. The protagonist, Winston Smith,lives in the superpower Oceania which is in constant war with the world’s othersuperpowers. Nothing is your own except the space inside your head and eventhat is under constant threat from Big Brother and the thought police. Winstonworks for the Ministry of Truth where he rewrites history for propaganda. Theirslogan is “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength” which peoplemay recognise as Tony Abbott’s election platform this year.

Perhaps most renowned for the maxim ‘Big Brother is watching you’, NineteenEighty-Four is filled with plotlines and quotes that read as if they were pluckedfrom the modern reality of the invasive surveillance state. This is clearest in theline “The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth withlies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty withstarvation.” Well, war, lies torture and starvation describe the Australian stateperfectly (particularly its treatment of Indigenous peoples and refugees.) OurMinistry of Defence invades the Pacific (and our privacy), our Ministry ofImmigration locks up migrants in PNG and the Ministry of Education keeps usblind and closeted with cut after cut after cut.

While the Snowden leaks have mostly concerned the US government, Australiais by no means a land of freedom and privacy. First, a lot of international datapasses through US infrastructure anyway since this works out cheaper for mosttelecom and internet companies. However, the Australian government is morethan 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 RussiaToday, the Australian Pine Gap facility, as well as three other Australianlocations and one in New Zealand, are involved in PRISM through a dealbetween the NSA and the Australian Defence Signals Directorate. For thisreason the Australian government, as well as organisations such as Get Up, haveproposed legal changes which would force Internet Service Providers to retainmetadata for up to 2 years, compel individuals to provide their passwords orface jail time and allow agencies such as ASIO to add, modify or deleteinformation on personal computer’s in the course of their investigations.

This is the reality of the surveillance state: if you have ever made a phone call orsent 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 whatit contained. When describing the truth-distorting effects of propaganda Orwellwrote about doublethink: “it means a loyal willingness to say that black is whitewhen Party discipline demands this…the power of holding two contradictorybeliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Nothingcould more perfectly describe the approach of governments worldwide. Theyclaim that “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” whilecondemning and convicting heroes such as Snowden, Chelsea Manning andJulian Assange for revealing the truth behind their spying, warmongering andwanton disregard for human life.

Section 2:

However, I think there’s a little more to why Nineteen Eighty-Four is soprescient and so in tune with our lives today. It goes beyond mere coincidenceor writing talent. It is Orwell’s politics which make Nineteen Eighty-Four speakso loudly to anyone with a distaste for the government or big business whichhappily assists them in spying on us. Contrary to his adoption by much of theright, Orwell was (and remained) a determined socialist, opposed to the horrorsof capitalism and the state which defended it. It was these political beliefs thatallowed Orwell to so accurately portray the state and its purpose such that itremains 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 peopleno 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. Notcoincidentally, Sedley was a judge on the British High Court and later Court ofAppeal throughout the War on Terror. This characterisation of Orwell simplydoes not stand up to scrutiny. Fortunately, unlike many writers, Orwell hasprovided us with one clear way to determine his reasons for writing his variousbooks: 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 warningagainst totalitarianism and a statement FOR socialism. Orwell’s socialist politicsstemmed directly from his first-hand experiences of imperialism and thedestitution 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 thathe quit in revulsion in 1927 when he realised what empire and policing are allabout. Orwell’s greatest work, Homage to Catalonia shows that he was furtherradicalised by his experiences in revolutionary Spain, defending the gains of therevolution against fascists, Stalinists and reformists.

Needless to say, these politics did not gel with the British establishment uponhis return home. In his work for the BBC he was outraged by the censorship andoutright lies the media propagated in portraying British decline as triumph forthe purposes of nationalism. Although he provided no concrete or materialreasons as to why, Orwell was adamant that the powerful elite of society usedthe state and its agents for their own purposes, to maintain the status quo andtheir own privilege. To this end, he wrote in the introduction to the Ukrainianedition of Animal Farm that the traitorous and manipulative pigs wererepresentative not merely of Stalinism, but of government in general when themass of people do not remain active and conscious.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not merely a warning of some hypothetical future. It isnot merely a description of totalitarianism and distant problems. It is acommentary on the capitalist state, the horrors that it defends and the tacticsemployed to divide and rule us. Capitalism is by its nature a system in which aprivileged few benefit from the exploitation and subjugation of the many. Thishas become ever clearer throughout the era of neo-liberalism and the War onTerror. Every way in which the state upholds this inequality finds expression inOrwell’s work. Orwell’s Oceania finds itself in perpetual war with Eurasia andEastasia; the capitalist state butchers millions in Iraq, Afghanistan andworldwide in the name of imperialism and plunder. Big Brother keeps theworkers uneducated and unknowing; our government cuts funding to highereducation and maintains its secrets are necessary for national security. Big

Brother demands unwavering loyalty and unquestioning compliance from theParty; Chelsea Manning is sentenced to 35 years for divulging that the USgovernment kills civilians and covers it up. Big Brother infiltrates resistancegroups to prevent any opposition to the status quo; the NSA monitors thephone and internet activity of anyone involved in the Occupy protests of 2011.

Orwell’s politics, and the politics of socialists everywhere, reveal the state forwhat it is. Mass surveillance and extreme hostility to opposition are not thestate ‘overstepping its bounds’, they are precisely what the state is meant to do.It is no coincidence that in country after country, increased surveillance, hypingof the War on Terror, vastly increased police powers and neoliberal so-calledreforms go hand in hand. In 2009, at Socialist Alternative’s annual Marxismconference, four years before the reveal of PRISM, Liam Byrne noted theuncanny similarity between Orwell’s work and the post-9/11 world: “A warwithout 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 themedia, doublespeak, the stripping away of civil liberties and constantsurveillance of our activities and crimes that do not actually need to have beencommitted for you to be found guilty of them.” Clearly the capitalist state is nota force for good.

Section 3:

All of this raises a good question: what can we do about it? If the state is sopowerful and so intrusive then what recourse is there? Patently, self-regulationby the state is laughable. Audits of the NSA’s operations or investigations by theAustralian Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security are nothing more thanposturing. According to Snowden, audits are cursory, uncommon and easilyfooled. After all, the people doing the spying are intelligence experts and thepeople doing the investigating work for the state which benefits from it. For thisreason we cannot rely on the law to save us. Testimony from brave whistle-blowers like Snowden suggests that civilian networks like universities andprivate businesses are illegally hacked by intelligence agencies almost routinely.So against the big, bad state and with the law provided no redress, what hope isthere?

It is here that we must go beyond Orwell’s 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 aresult he often fell into pessimism about the ability of the working class tochange the world. Yet it is precisely this section of society which can have boththe ability and the determination to bring about the world that Orwell wished tosee. For this reason Orwell has left behind a contradictory body of work: alwayshighly critical of the capitalist system yet sometimes unaware of how to destroyit.

The working class is portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four as the proles, a groupwhom the protagonist, Winston Smith, sees as the one hope for society.However (spoiler alert), Smith is eventually reprogrammed by Big Brother andlife goes on under the surveillance state. Some critics have claimed that Orwelluses the proles to provide false hope and heighten the tragedy of the story; thisignores both Orwell’s life experiences and his continual insistence that NineteenEighty-Four was meant not as a warning of the inevitable but as a politicalintervention against the right and against Stalinism. It is my opinion thatNineteen Eighty-Four, and Animal Farm, represent the contradictory elementsof Orwell’s thought. They combine both his thoughts from The Road to WiganPier, documenting the hardships and flaws of the working class, and the endlesswonder he experienced in Homage to Catalonia. He says of the Spanishworkers’ struggle that it was “…queer and moving. There was much I did notunderstand and in some ways I did not even like it. But I recognised itimmediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for”. It is this second side ofOrwell that provides hope for dismantling the surveillance state. Not the Orwellthat dismissed “old-fashioned class struggle”, caved to pressure and providedan 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. Youwere the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if youkept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secretdoctrine that two plus two make four.”

This power of the mass of people to change their circumstances and oppose thestate is not merely some literary fantasy, it has been borne out time and timeagain throughout history. For the sake of brevity, let’s look at just a couple.

During the Cold War and the division of Germany, East Berlin was a spy’s havenwith a Stasi agent managing to infiltrate the West German cabinet. Howevernone of this meant anything when democratic revolution came to town. A radiobroadcast 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 beopened, run and hide or face the justice of the people.

One of the most inspiring examples in recent history is that set by the EgyptianRevolution. While the situation in Egypt is currently plagued by the statecracking down on its citizens, if we take a broader picture of the struggles thereis much to be learned from. Mubarak’s dictatorial regime was one of the mostrepressive in living memory with the Egyptian populace stereotyped ascomplacent, apathetic and doomed to their drudgery. However, like Orwell’sproles, the potential for resistance was always there, bubbling beneath thesurface to one day erupt in revolution. In propping up the Mubarak dictatorship,the State Security Investigations Service engaged in torture, mass surveillance ofcivilians and planting agents in resistance groups (sound familiar?). During therevolution the government soon realised that their secrets would be exposedand took action. In early March dump trucks filled with shredded documentswere spotted leaving key SSI buildings — the protestors were not impressed.Protestors broke into government buildings in Cairo, Alexandria and Assiutemerging with documents and physical evidence of informants, orders fortorture and the names of details of ongoing surveillance operations. As a resultthe SSI was left in shambles, ongoing investigations were rendered futile andthe 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; whenthe people arise, communications infrastructure provides more help to themthan to government spies. From the Russian Revolution of 1917 to protestsagainst PRISM today, people power has always been the strongest opposition tothe surveillance state. There are countless other examples but people shouldbring 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 countingOrwell among their inspirations. It was precisely Orwell’s left wing viewsthat allowed him to capture the state so accurately

3) Despite this, Orwell remained confused and somewhat contradictory. Weshould remain clear: people power can topple the surveillance state andfight against capitalism

Stuff that got cut because I couldn’t decide if it was better in discussion:

The timing of the War on Terror, growth in police powers, tough anti-crimestance and neo-liberalism is no coincidence. While neo-liberalism is supposedlyanti-big government, the repressive arm of the state is always jacked up (link tothe Central Park Five and racism?)

British GCHQ destroying hard drives at The Guardian and detaining DavidMiranda

Restore the Fourth protests, Checkpoint Charlie protests, protests here inAustralia, etc.

Further details about Edward Snowden, Manning and Assange/Wikileaks