1984 (1,7) The Capitalists

[monk222]

Our Winston is still at his diary, and after all but giving up on the proles, as much as he loathes the world in which he lives and the Party that runs it, he reflects on what life may have been like before the Revolution and Big Brother. Is it possible that the Party has improved social conditions and enriched people’s lives, like the Party says it has?

He happens to have on hand a children’s history text book from Mrs. Parsons that ostensibly goes into the supposedly dreary and dour life of the pre-Party world:

In the old days [it ran] before the glorious Revolution, London was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dark, dirty miserable place where hardly anybody had enough to eat and where hundreds and thousands of poor people had no boots on their feet and not even a roof to sleep under. Children no older than you are had to work twelve hours a day for cruel masters, who flogged them with whips if they worked too slowly and fed them on nothing but stale breadcrusts and water.

What sort of evil could hold such sway over Anglos?

But in among all this terrible poverty there were just a few great big beautiful houses that were lived in by rich men who had as many as thirty servants to look after them. These rich men were called capitalists. They were fat, ugly men with wicked faces, like the one in the picture on the opposite page.... The chief of all the capitalists was called the King.

Winston knows the adult version, too, that these fat capitalists, for instance, even enjoyed the privilege of being able to bang any woman who worked for them. But the question that preys on his mind is whether it just might be true. Might the Party be better than the devil they had before? His instincts rebel against the idea that life could never have been better than this, but he just cannot know for sure, and he would dearly like to know.

Winston’s musings put the reader in an interesting position, especially if you are not one of those Ayn Randian libertarians, because we know that those old stories about the capitalists, while drawn with a broad brush, are not entirely false, especially when you go back before major social reforms such as America’s New Deal, while we also know that Big Brother is not the white knight who came dashing in on his high horse to save the country.

I imagine that we are left to have an appreciation for a little freedom, while recognizing that we have always lived in a fallen world that is more harsh than golden.