Chapter III
Economic War is Peace
The splitting up of the world into three great super-states was an event which could be and indeed was foreseen before the middle of the twentieth century. With the absorption of Europe by Russia and of the British Empire by the United States, two of the three existing powers, Eurasia and Oceania, were already effectively in being. The third, Eastasia, only emerged as a distinct unit after another decade of confused fighting. The frontiers between the three blocs are in some places arbitrary, and in others they fluctuate according to the fortunes of war, but in general they follow geographical lines.
Eurasia comprises the whole of the northern part of the European and Asiatic land-mass, from Portugal to the Bering Strait.
Oceania comprises the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.
Eastasia, smaller than the others and with a less definite western frontier, comprises China and the countries to the south of it, the Japanese islands and a large but fluctuating portion of Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet.
In one combination or another, these three blocs are permanently at economic war, and have been so for the past twenty-five years. War, however, is no longer the desperate, annihilating struggle that it was in the early decades of the twentieth centary. It is a warfare of limited aims between combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference. This is not to say that either the conduct of war, or the prevailing attitude towards it, has become less bloodthirsty or more chivalrous. On the contrary, war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against immigrants which extend even to drowning and burning alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious.
But in a physical sense economic war involves very small numbers of people, mostly highly-trained specialists, and causes comparatively few casualties. The fighting, when there is any, takes place on the vague frontiers whose whereabouts the average man can only guess at, or round the Financial Centres which guard strategic spots on the money lanes. In the centres of civilization economic war means no more than a continuous shrinking of purchasing power, and the occasional dumping of a foreign output which may cause a few scores of bankruptcies.
Economic war has in fact changed its character. More exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the great economic wars of the early twentieth century have now become dominant and are consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war --for in spite of the regrouping which occurs every few years, it is always the same war-- one must realize in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of the three blocs could be definitively conquered even by the other two in combination. They are too evenly matched, and their natural defences are too formidable.
Eurasia is protected by its vast land spaces. Oceania by the width of the Atlantic and the Pacific, Eastasia by the fecundity and industriousness of its inhabitants.
Secondly, there is no longer, in a material sense, anything to fight about. With the establishment of self-contained economies, in which production and consumption are geared to one another, the scramble for markets which was a main cause of previous wars has come to an end, while the competition for raw materials is no longer a matter of life and death. In any case each of the three blocs is so vast that it can obtain almost all the materials that it needs within its own boundaries.
In so far as the economic war has a direct economic purpose, it is a war for labour power.
Between the frontiers of the blocs, and not permanently in the possession of any of them, there lies a rough quadrilateral with its corners at Tangier, Brazzaville, Darwin, and Hong Kong, containing within it about two fifths of the population of the earth. It is for the possession of these thickly-populated regions, and of the southern ice-cap, that the three powers are constantly struggling. In practice no one power ever controls the whole of the disputed area. Portions of it are constantly changing hands, and it is the chance of seizing this or that fragment by a sudden stroke of treachery that dictates the endless changes of alignment.
All of the disputed territories contain valuable minerals, and some of them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods. But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies.
The inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more, to capture more market share, to control more labour power, to turn out more, to capture more market share, and so on indefinitely.
It should be noted that the fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous territories which in fact are largely uninhabited and unexplored: but the balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms the heartland of each bloc always remains inviolate.
Moreover, the labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since whatever they produce is used for consumptive purposes, and the object of waging an economic war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another economic war. By their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous economic warfare to be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society, and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially different.
The primary aim of modern economic warfare (in accordance with the principles of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by the directing brains of the Inner Technocracy) is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
Ever since the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of destruction had been at work.
The world of today is a bare, hungry, dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of that period looked forward.
In the early twentieth century, the vision of a future society unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient --a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete-- was part of the consciousness of nearly every literate person. Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.
As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with the military-industrial complex, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the slump of the nineteen-nineties have never been fully repaired. Nevertheless the dangers inherent in the machine are still there.
From the moment when the machine first made its appearance it was clear to all thinking people that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared. If the machine were used deliberately for that end, hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy, and disease could be eliminated within a few generations. And in fact, without being used for any such purpose, but by a sort of automatic process --by producing wealth which it was sometimes impossible not to distribute-- the machine did raise the living standards of the average human being very greatly over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction --indeed, in some sense was the destruction-- of a hierarchical society.
In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction.
It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable.
For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
To return to the agricultural past, as some thinkers about the beginning of the twentieth century dreamed of doing, was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more advanced rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This happened to a great extent during the final phase of industrial capitalism, roughly between 1980 and 2000. The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.
But this, too, entailed economic weakness, and since the privations it inflicted were obviously unnecessary, it made opposition inevitable.
The problem was how to keep the wheels of finance turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Money must be created, but it must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous economic warfare.
The essential act of economic war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. Economic war is a way of splitting up into peanuts, or pouring into the financial stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the national debt, capital which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when financial instruments of economic warfare are not actually destroyed, their engineering is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Financial Centre, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would restore several hundred shantytowns. Ultimately it is scrapped as too risky, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous brainwork another Financial Centre is devised.
In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Technocracy lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter --set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Technocracy, and the members of the Outer Technocracy have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call 'the proles'.
The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at economic war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
Economic war, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are yoked steadily to the work ethic, but the morale of the Technocracy itself.
Even the humblest Technocracy member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph.
In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of economic war. It does not matter whether the economic war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of economic war should exist.
The splitting of the intelligence which the Technocracy requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes.
It is precisely in the Inner Technocracy that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Technocracy to know that this or that item of economic war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire economic war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Technocracy member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world.
All members of the Inner Technocracy believe in this coming conquest as an article of faith. It is to be achieved either by gradually acquiring more and more markets and so building up an overwhelming preponderance of power, or by the discovery of some new and unanswerable commercial weapon.
The search for new commercial weapons continues unceasingly, and is one of the very few remaining activities in which the inventive or speculative type of mind can find any outlet. In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Doubletalk there is no word for 'Science'. The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Laissezfaire. And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance --meaning, in effect, war and police espionage-- the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated.
The two aims of the Technocracy are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Technocracy is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. Insofar as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter.
The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with real ordinary minuteness the meaning of opinion polls, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, bombshell news, advertising, and manipulations; or he is chemist, physicist, or geneticist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.
In the vast laboratories of the Ministry of Peace, and in the experimental stations hidden in the Brazilian forests, or in the Australian desert, or on lost islands of the Antarctic, the teams of experts are indefatigably at work.
Some are concerned simply with planning the logistics of future economic wars; others devise larger and larger dumpings, more and more powerful marketings, and more and more impassable trade barriers; others search for new and deadlier gases, or for soluble poisons capable of being produced in such quantities as to destroy the vegetation of whole continents, or for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies; others strive to produce a financial vehicle that shall roam the world like a submarine under the water, or a foreign subsidiary as independent of its parent company as a spying-drone; others explore even remoter possibilities such as focusing the sun's rays through lenses suspended thousands of kilometres away in space, or producing artificial financial upheavals and inflationary tidal waves by tapping the hidden face of international finance.
But none of these projects ever comes anywhere near realization, and none of the three blocs ever gains a significant lead on the others.
What is more remarkable is that all three powers already possess, in money printing, a weapon far more powerful than any that their present researches are likely to discover. Although the Technocracy, according to its habit, claims the invention for itself, fiat money appeared as early as the French Revolution, in 1789, and was first used on a large scale about two centuries later. At that time a dozen of devaluations were triggered against financial centres, chiefly the City, Wall Street, and Singapore.
The effect was to convince the ruling groups of all countries that a few more devaluations would mean the end of organized society, and hence of their own power.
Thereafter, although no formal agreement was ever made or hinted at, no more currency attacks were launched. All three powers merely continue to issue their money supplies and regulate them against the decisive opportunity which they all believe will come sooner or later.
And meanwhile the art of economic war has remained almost stationary for thirty or forty years. Temps are more used than they were formerly, chain stores have been largely superseded by online retailers, and the fragile mortgage business has given way to the almost unsinkable one-stop e-broker; but otherwise there has been little development. Contracting-out, relocations, prison teleworking, even Asian sweatshops and illegal workers are still in use. And in spite of the endless trimmings reported in the Press and on the telescreens, the desperate battles of earlier economic wars, in which hundreds of thousands or even millions of men were often sacked in a few weeks, have never been repeated.
None of the three blocs ever attempts any manoeuvre which involves the risk of serious defeat. When any large operation is undertaken, it is usually a surprise currency raid against an ally. The strategy that all three powers are following, or pretend to themselves that they are following, is the same. The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining, and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of majority interests completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a trade agreement with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time products and services at a discount can be stored up against all the strategic markets; finally they will all be marketed simultaneously, with effects so devastating as to make retaliation impossible. It will then be time to sign a trade agreement with the remaining world-power, in preparation for another attack.
This scheme, it is hardly necessary to say, is a mere daydream, impossible of realization. Moreover, no trade fighting ever occurs except in the disputed areas round the Equator and the South Pole: no invasion of enemy market is ever undertaken. This explains the fact that in some places the frontiers between the blocs are arbitrary. Eurasia, for example, could easily conquer the British Isles, which are geographically part of Europe, or on the other hand it would be possible for Oceania to push its frontiers to the Rhine or even to the Vistula. But this would violate the principle, followed on all sides though never formulated, of cultural integrity. If Oceania were to conquer the markets that used once to be known as France and Germany, it would be necessary either to lay off a sizeable part of the working population, a task of great political difficulty, or to assimilate a population of about a hundred and fifty million people, who, so far as technical development goes, are roughly on the Oceanic level.
The problem is the same for all three blocs. It is absolutely necessary to their structure that there should be no contact with foreigners, except, to a limited extent, with immigrants and coloured dogsbodies. Even the official ally of the moment is always regarded with the darkest suspicion. Immigrants apart, the average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign ideas.
If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.
It is therefore realized on all sides that however often Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Sri Lanka may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except exports.
Under this lies a fact never mentioned aloud, but tacitly understood and acted upon: namely, that the conditions of life in all three blocs are very much the same. In Oceania the prevailing philosophy is called Laissezfaire, in Eurasia it is called Neo-Fascism, and in Eastasia it is called by a Chinese name usually translated as Death-Worship, but perhaps better rendered as Obliteration of the Self.
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually the three philosophies are barely distinguishable, and the social systems which they support are not distinguishable at all.
Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine creed, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare. It follows that the three blocs not only cannot conquer one another, but would gain no advantage by doing so. On the contrary, so long as they remain in conflict they prop one another up, like three sheaves of corn.
And, as usual, the ruling groups of all three powers are simultaneously aware and unaware of what they are doing. Their lives are dedicated to world conquest, but they also know that it is necessary that the economic war should continue everlastingly and without victory. Meanwhile the fact that there is no danger of conquest makes possible the denial of reality which is the special feature of Laissezfaire and its rival systems of thought. Here it is necessary to repeat what has been said earlier, that by becoming continuous economic war has fundamentally changed its character.
In past ages, an economic war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, economic war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All executive officers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their subordinates, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair economic efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Hard facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing current liabilities or net income they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for competitiveness was inimical to illusions.
Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and business books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practised today would have been impossible. Economic war was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While economic wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
But when economic war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When economic war is continuous there is no such thing as social necessity. Social progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called econometrics are still carried out for the purposes of economic war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even financial efficiency, is no longer needed. Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the StraighThought Police. Since each of the three blocs is unconquerable, each is in effect a separate universe within which almost any perversion of thought can be safely practised.
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(Cont'd on next post)
Copyright Gustave Jaeger 1994-2000 |
