Is Big Brother necessary?

Last month's Socialist Standard has an essay titled 'Britain: An "Endemic Surveillance Society". Very Orwellian, possibly more so than the author of 1984 or Socialists back then might have imagined. One of many online articles this week concerning the multi-billion pound ID card scheme stated that it "may be used to carry out surveillance on people and that a new children's database may be used to identify likely future criminals." What is beyond doubt however is that a related article from the January 1984 Socialist Standard asks a poignant and provocative question: Was Big Brother Necessary?

"...Such conformity must have been achieved only through an enormous, comprehensive and costly state operation. Somewhere at the apex there must have been also an elite within an elite, a ruling class in whose interests the rest of the population were held in such terror. But there is one question which Orwell did not ask. Why did it all happen? Was there a need for a vast machinery of repression? What would the people have thought anyway, without the telescreens and the Thought Police and the rest?

The answer may be found when we consider how much of 1984 is reality today. Many politicans have represented themselves as, if not actually Big Brother, something very alike to him. During the last war Churchill's face looked out at us from huge posters, his features set in grim protectiveness. Harold Wilson once said that he would like to think of himself as the nation's family doctor. Margaret Thatcher poses as our Big Sister, firm and organising and forcing us to be taken care of by her.

Capitalism communicates through its own Newspeak in which important words take on a meaning almost the opposite of what they should be. Words like "freedom" in the mouth of Reagan; "disarmament" as spoken by Andropov; "economic upturn" as described by Thatcher; "socialism" as alluded to by Mitterrand. English workers have come easily to accept that their "enemies" in the last war are now their "allies" - defenders of "democracy" now. As they attest at elections, millions of workers freely put their living in the hands of a few political leaders on the grounds that these leaders, like Big Brother, know best. The rulers of Oceania could hardly have asked for more.

This conformity, this acquiescence in their own degradation, is given by the workers in conditions of comparative political freedom. In Britain, and many other advanced capitalist countries, workers can openly discuss ideas, form trade unions, political parties, protest campaigns. A socialist party, challenging the very basis of capitalism, can exist without any significant threat. Yet the working class use this freedom, which could be applied to establish socialism, to give their allegiance to capitalism and all its deceit and cynicism. There is no need for a Big Brother to force them; the workers do it all for themselves.

This does not happen through any tendency to cussed self-damage. All social systems erect a moral, legal and intellectual superstructure suited to the interests of the ruling class, like a shrub¨whose foliage and blossom is fashioned by the soil in which it stands. But at the same time a social system develops a conflict between its social relationships which can be resolved only through changing those relationships. Day by day, the experience of capitalism works to convince the world's workers that problems such as war and poverty will be eliminated only through a radical fundamental change in society - by revolution.

When that idea is sufficiently widespread the working class will need a political apparatus to implement their will for a revolution. That apparatus will be the socialist movement which, when socialism is established and its historic function has been fulfilled, will go out of existence. Until that happens, socialists everywhere work to speed the change in ideas, to increase the pressures of persuasion on the workers that a classless, moneyless, propertyless, peaceful society is the only way to eradicate all that is feared and hated and despised in modern - that is capitalist - society.

Socialists are not Big Brothers and do not wish to be, for there is no use in trying to lead or cajole or terrorise the world's people to socialism. We struggle to raise political awareness, to alert the workers to the need to replace capitalism with socialism and to the fact that socialism must come about through our own conscious action. In the socialist revolution, and the society which will follow, the world's workers will be sisters and brothers together together in a co-operative, abundant, peaceful and free human family."