From: Yoshie Furuhashi
George Orwell made working-class socialist intellectuals virtually invisible in _The Road to Wigan Pier_, because he wanted to create an image of "the ordinary working man" whose intellect cannot grasp "the deeper implications of Socialism" and contrast it with his image of the bookish "middle-class socialist":
***** For it must be remembered that a working man, so long as he remains a genuine working man, is seldom or never a Socialist in the complete, logically consistent sense. Very likely he votes Labour, or even Communist if he gets -clip-
^^^^^ CB: Wonder if Orwell would criticize the idea that the working class can only reach trade union consciousness on its own without an injection from the "outside" from , well,middle class intellectuals,who had trained themselves as professional revs.
Is there a rational kernel to be extracted from this petit bourgeois revolutionist's writing ?
I believe a number of the doublethink slogans in _1984_ are expressed by Orwell as obvious reversals of reality. "War is peace", "Freedom is Slavery" , "Ignorance is Strength" are efforts to get people to accept absurd illusions. Another of the famous fictional slogans, "Big Brother is Watching" doesn't seem to be in this same category, but what if Orwell meant that it was of the same type reversal of reality, statement of an illusion as the others, but more subtley ? In other words, with the omnipresent "television" screens in the novel _1984_, "You are watching Big Brother", the reverse of "Big Brother is Watching you ". Perhaps as much or more control was exercised by the former as the latter.
Similarly, Khruschev critcized the "Cult of the Personality" of Stalin. They didn't have televisions, but this was stargazing at Stalin as a method of control, some would say.
Perhaps prophetically, Orwell has anticipated in his novel that a main, U.S., bourgeois method of totalitarianism is getting people to television gaze at Big Uncle Sam Walmart, to join the corporate personality cults; and it is more efficient than trying to set up a system of spies with Big Uncle Sam with TopHat watching everybody.
Even if this is subverting Orwell, it's ok. That is one of the things we do here in postmodern left, literary criticism.
The Commodity Personality Cult of television , especially advertising, expresses commodity fetishism wherein commodities take on personalities. This is going wild in television advertising now, a clearcut expression of the reversal of reality which is commodity fetishism ( things are treated as people , while people are treated as things) I just saw a commercial last night in which a woman is breaking up with a bottle of beer as if it is her lover. Is that not giving beer in a bottle a personality ?
I am not objecting to the cheap sensuality or thrills of this fetish, although as to sensuality, I wonder about the poverty of the two-dimensional , illusional presentation of three dimensional visual and physical reality.