Orwell's Revenge (11 page)

That was a curious thought, Blair reflected—hope for England, hope for Airstrip One, because the proles still dared to maintain their stalls. In the midst of all the bustle, he marveled at the civility of the place. It was deliberate Party policy to tolerate, perhaps even promote, every manner of vice and
criminality among the proles. Proles were expected to be thieves and prostitutes, crack peddlers and racketeers—it was their natural condition. Yet among themselves, the proles seemed to agree quite readily who owned the cornucopia of wealth that spilled over the edges of the stalls and was often piled on the street itself.

Officially, no one owned it. Private property had been
abolished long ago. Factories, mines, land, houses, transport—everything had been seized. Party histories taught that in the days of the capitalists, private
property had been an obstructive nuisance. The very thought of private property was inimical to Ingsoc. Property depended on a system of reliable memory, on deeds and records, or at least recollections, to track who had cleared the land, or planted the corn, or built the oaken chest. The Party's business was to burn books—deed books along with all the others—and so obliterate private memory. Only the Party could build an oaken chest, so a carpenter who claimed it as his own must have stolen it. Private Property Is Theft, the Party taught. It was just one more piece of the Party's vast scheme to rewrite history at will.

Even if people did maintain hazy records of who had created what, “ownership” was an empty concept in the absence of loyalty, reciprocity, and a culture of mutual promises to respect tomorrow what each had accomplished today. Private promises had been abolished by the Party; they had in fact been the first thing to go. Building Societies had been denounced as a huge racket, and shut down. Private insurance had been
officially labeled a swindle. A private contract of any kind represented a subversive attempt to control a
private future. The future, like the present, like the past, belonged to the Party.

Blair threaded his way through the press of people, retracing his steps from the day before. A minute later he was back at the stall. He saw the razor blades at once, carefully set to one side on the top shelf. For an instant he felt a surge of affection for the stallkeeper.

Unable to suppress a smile, Blair handed over a bag containing three light bulbs. The bulbs worked; they had come from the hall outside Blair's office at the Ministry. Blair had removed them, one by one, over the space of several months. Each good bulb had been carefully replaced with a dead one. Blair took the blades and thrust them deep into the pocket of his overalls.

“Might I get some more from you when I run out?” he asked casually.

“Any time, guv. We can always get some sent down. Wiv the screens,” he added amiably.

“With the screens?” Blair said blankly.

“Yeah, them telescreen gadgets. That feller comes along to turn it on, and then I tells me mate in Ipswich what I need, see, then his bruvver drives down wiv it next day. It's got the business movin' nicely.” The stall owner glanced back at the pillar and grinned. “Don't exactly know the feller's name. Some calls 'im ‘
Fronky' Others call 'im the phreak. But 'e's an exceptional bloke orl right. One day 'e jes arrives, and next thing we know, 'e's doing amazin' things with them gadgets. Saved me no end of time, 'e did. I had them blades sent down for you special this morning, all the way from Ipswich.”

Blair stared back at him. The proles didn't use telescreens. And even if they did, a telescreen could not deliver razor blades from Ipswich.

“Ah-h-h,” said the stallkeeper, reading his look. It was a long, drawn-out sound, a sound of satisfaction with just a hint of conspiracy behind. “You'd have to be asking 'im about that now, woun' ya. I coun' begin to tell you 'ow it works, but it does. Used it last night. I says to me mate Fred, I need them blades tomorrow morning sharp—told him over the gadget, y'a see—an' I'll pay for 'em in bulbs later. And Fred sent 'em right down.”

Another prole elbowed his way to the front of the stall. With a wink and grin, the stallkeeper turned away.

Blair stepped back and allowed himself to be carried along by the crowd. As he drifted down the street he saw other traders exchanging odd items just as he had done—an old hammer, a piece of cloth, things salvaged and stolen from who knew where. They received in exchange eggs, sugar, white crumbly stuff that must be cheese, and little paper packets, the contents of which he did not recognize. He went to a trestle table where the packets lay, and timidly picked one up.

“That's first class sage, the missus'd love some for 'er cooking,” said the stallkeeper helpfully “Have a sniff.”

Blair opened the little flap at the top. Inside were a few brittle gray-green leaves. He put his nose to them tentatively, and was surprised by the strong aroma.

“First class,” he agreed, and retreated, leaving the sage on the table. How did the proles know about things like sage? Blair was not aware that any Party canteens used it, and the food that Mrs. Wilkes cooked never smelled of anything but cabbage.

He wandered on. Some of the proles did not seem to offer anything to the stallkeepers. They exchanged a few words, and goods were handed over. As he passed the chocolate stall he saw a man open the silver wrapping of a chocolate bar and break off a small square. Blair could smell the rich, dark chocolate, and his empty stomach contracted with longing.

He reached the niche between fence and building where he had paused the other day There was the telescreen above him. Was it really connected to Ipswich? How could the proles know anything about the telescreen when it was clearly a mystery to a trained technician like Burgess? He noticed that the screen was opaque— another one broken.

Blair turned to find the elongated, tweed-jacket-clad youth beside him, climbing up on to the fence again. The man was so thin that his shabby trousers seemed about to fall down, just suspended by his protruding hip bones. His elbows stuck out, knobbly and pale, as he lifted himself up. When he was balanced on the fence, he leaned down and took the bag. Nobody was taking any notice.
The phreak was a silhouette against the yellow evening sky, perched on the fence with his arms raised and his head turned upward.

Clutching his blades, Blair headed back toward home. Out of the proles' part of town, the bustle, grime, and conversation of the market gave way to gray dust and gray people, hurrying silently past the decaying buildings. As Blair pushed through the glass doors into his building, a syrupy voice was reading out a list of figures over the telescreen.

He arrived back in his apartment and checked the drawer of his desk. Smith's diary was gone.

No, the market in
1984
has no stalls glowing with fine lurid colors; no hacked, crimson chunks of meat; no piles of oranges; no green and white broccoli; no stiff, glassy-eyed rabbits; no live eels looping in enamel troughs; no plucked fowls sticking out their breasts
like guardsmen naked on parade.

There are, admittedly, little shops: stationers' shops, junk shops, cafes, and so on. There's even a street market, which is “
generally crowded and noisy” But
1984
's market is a dismal place. The men are interested in nothing but the lottery. For millions of proles, the lottery is the principal reason for remaining alive. Where the lottery is concerned, “even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and
staggering feats of memory.” There is “a whole tribe of men who ma[ke] a living simply by selling systems,
forecasts, and lucky amulets.”

And the women? Winston Smith walks down a crowded street and hears “a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices—women's voices.” It is “a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep loud ‘Oh-o-o-o-oh'” that goes “humming on like the reverberation of a bell.” Smith's heart leaps. It has started! The proles are rioting, breaking loose, rising up against the Party! But no. It is only a mob of several hundred women fighting over some stallkeeper's cooking pots. “Two bloated women,
one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same saucepan and were trying to tear it out of one another's hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and
then the handle came off.”

And that's all there is to the market in
1984
—no friendly intercourse, no mutual benefit, no shared profit, nothing but covetous greed. Orwell hates it, of course. Elsewhere in
1984
he satirizes the anticapitalist Party propaganda, which portrays the shoeless poor, seven-year-old factory workers, cruel masters, servants, frock coats, and top hats. He reminds us repeatedly that
1984
is a world in which
shopping means rations
and vouchers, not cash and carry In
1984,
private property has been abolished. The dollar (which has replaced the pound sterling) buys almost nothing.

This is not to say that Orwell likes the alternative. He hates the degenerate socialism of
1984,
but he hates the free market just as much. His essays and his other books are littered with
criticism of markets, money, and every form of private wealth. Orwell wants people to have what they need; he just doesn't want them to work or compete or sell to get it. Orwell wants people to consume things—in moderation and in roughly equal amounts—but not to own them.

Keep the Aspidistra
Flying, for example, is an unrelenting diatribe against (in Orwell's overhyphenated prose) money-stink, the money-sty, the money-god, the money-world, the money-priesthood, the money-code, money-civilization,
money-business, and money-morality. In Orwell's other books we learn that Building Societies (savings and loan banks) are a
“huge racket,” insurance is
“a swindle,” a competing merchant is a “tapeworm,” and the ruin of modern life is the “everlasting,
frantic struggle to sell things.” All private property “
is an obstructive nuisance.” Indeed, “the right to private property means the right to exploit and
torture millions of one's fellow creatures.” “Corpses” should not have the “irresponsible power” to “interfere with living people
by means of idiotic wills.” “I don't believe that capitalism, as against feudalism, improved the actual quality of human life,”
Orwell writes in a 1940 letter. ” [W]e are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system,”
he declares in a 1946 essay. Capitalism is a
“tyranny”; fascism and capitalism are in fact “
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” The “nature of the relationship
between a man earning £50,000 a year and one earning fifteen shillings a week” is “that
the one is robbing the other.”

The market robs the worker of his mental freedom too. Salvador Dali's “diseased and disgusting” paintings, Orwell informs us, stem from
the capitalist affluence of his patrons. Writers required to “tickle money out of the pockets of tired businessmen” produce
nothing but “saleable drivel.” The freedom of the press in Britain is “something of a fake” because “
money controls opinion.” In any event, the press has been ruined by the malignant influences of commercial advertising, “the dirtiest ramp
that capitalism has yet produced.” Thus, “[a]ny writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society, . . . the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of
monopoly on radio and the films.” “[I]f the news is not distorted by businessmen it will be distorted by bureaucrats,
who are only one degree better.” Because of “centralised ownership,” the “much-boasted freedom of the British press is
theoretical rather than actual.” The businessman, just like the bureaucrat, censors the news: “the fact that most of the press is owned by a few people operates in much
the same way as a state censorship.”

As Orwell sees it, the free market despises intelligence, suppresses science, and undermines free thought. England's “years of investment capital . . . produced like a belt of fat the huge blimpocracy which monopolises official and military power and has
an instinctive hatred of intelligence.” Free markets “slow down the process of invention and improvement, because under capitalism any invention which does not promise fairly immediate profits is neglected; some, indeed, which threaten to reduce profits are suppressed almost as ruthlessly as
the flexible glass mentioned by Petronius.” Only the rich “can afford to be intelligent,”
Gordon Comstock reflects bitterly in
Aspidistra.
“The first effect of poverty is
that it kills thought.”

Yes, that's it! Capitalists, like the Thought Police, kill thought. The machine is the enemy.
The free market is the enemy too.

•  •  •

What Orwell wants instead of capitalism is “democratic socialism”— basic economic security for everyone and a reasonably
high degree of economic
equality. Occasionally Orwell does use “democracy” in what he terms the “narrow nineteenth-century sense of political liberty, independence of the trade unions and
freedom of speech and the press.” More often, however, he insists that “democracy” necessarily includes “economic justice.” In his standard list of Orwellian horribles, unemployment typically lands midway between Hitler and the radio, right beside
censorship or the Secret Police. In Orwell's view, no political system that tolerates sharp disparities of wealth can be called “free” or “democratic.”

Laissez-faire capitalism, Orwell argues, has delivered real freedom only once, and then only for a short while, in early nineteenth-century America. That America, unlike the
industrial America that was to follow, had a “
wildness of spirit,” “not only innocence but a sort of native gaiety,
a buoyant, carefree feeling.” It was the America in which “the great plains were opened up, when wealth and opportunity seemed limitless, and human beings felt free, indeed were free, as they had never been before and
may not be again for centuries.” Young artists did not starve, nor were they “always tethered to safe jobs,” so they spent their youths “in adventurous,
irresponsible, ungenteel ways.” In that America, “the twin nightmares that beset nearly every modern man, the nightmare of unemployment and the nightmare of State interference,
had hardly come into being.”