1985 by Anthony Burgess

lumbering old democratic process with its tolerance of opposition. A state machine that can pulp up the past and create a rational future. A very intellectual idea. There had been intellectuals who seemed ‘fascist’ to Orwell, in love with authoritarianism or at least tolerant of it – writers like Eliot, Yeats, Evelyn Waugh, Roy Campbell, even Shaw and Wells – but the intellectuals who were not fascist were usually communist, which – in terms of state power, repression, the one-party system and so on – amounted to the same thing. Terms like fascism and communism represent no true polarity, despite the war. They could both, thought Orwell, be contained in some such name as Oligarchical Collectivism.
    And yet any progressive idea is an intellectual creation. Without intellectuals, with their cries for greater social justice, removal of the profit motive, equal incomes, the death of inherited privilege and so on – would there be any progress at all?
    But is their talk of progress truly disinterested? Orwell knew enough, as Arthur Koestler did, of the springs of political authority in Europe. No man, it seemed to them, strove for political leadership solely out of altruism. Koestler had been sent to jail by the system he supported. Orwell fought for freedom in Spain, and he had to run for his life when Russian Communism condemned Catalonian Anarchism. Intellectualswith political ambitions had to be suspect. For, in a free society, intellectuals are among the under-privileged. What they offer – as school-teachers, university lecturers, writers – is not greatly wanted. If they threaten to withdraw their labour, nobody is going to be much disturbed. To refuse to publish a volume of free verse or take a class in structural linguistics – that’s not like cutting off the power supplies or stopping the buses. They lack the power of the capitalist boss on the one hand and the power of the syndicalist boss on the other. They get frustrated. They find pure intellectual pleasures inadequate. They become revolutionaries. Revolutions are usually the work of disgruntled intellectuals with the gift of the gab. They go to the barricades in the name of the peasant or the working man. For ‘Intellectuals of the world unite’ is not a very inspiring slogan.
    But why was Orwell frightened of the intellectuals? The intellectuals were not running the Labour Government in the late 1940s
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    No. The Labour leaders weren’t
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fanatics. They’d no desire to turn Britain into a miniature Stalinist Russia. But there was a whisper, perhaps more than a whisper, of the danger that comes from more and more State control, a bigger bureaucracy, the devaluation of individuality that inevitably follows a doctrine of equality. Strictly, a Socialist government can only fulfil its ideal of total public ownership if granted a perpetual mandate. The very notion of Socialism is undemocratic, if by democracy we mean opposed parties, a free vote, periodic general elections. Parliament has increasingly the task of pushing through party legislation and ignoring such issues as the rights of the individual, which Members of Parliament are primarily there to protect. Orwell didn’t live to see the compromise which English Socialism now represents – a minimum of public ownership, a social-security apparatus that costs too much, a mass of ‘equalizing’ laws not easily enforceable, and a necessary thwarting of individual, as opposed to collective, endeavour. But, not even in those first heady days of Socialism, could the concept of Ingsoc have begun to germinate – except in some university lecturer’s lodgings.
    You think it was purely an onomastic trick?
    Yes, the taking over quite cynically of an honourable name and then debasing it. Who, after Hitler, can ever mention National Socialism again without a shudder? The link between the English Socialism of 1948 and that of 1984