>>2182810It's more about James Burnham who wrote The Managerial Society, which was published in 1941. It's Orwell's argument with Burnham. O'Brien in the novel is basically Burnham, is espousing Burnham's views, or how Orwell saw them. Also the part in Nineteen Eighty-Four about the proles consuming cheap tabloid crap – that's very British and un-USSR.
BTW, Orwell wrote an essay called "Second Thoughts on James Burnham." I'd read that. Burnham was a Trotskyist who turned on communism and became a conservative, and held that politics is just about power hunger and power struggle and it's very cynical. And that's also true for Stalin, but unlike people who stuck with Trotskyism, Burnham saw Stalin as Lenin's legitimate heir – it's just that Lenin was also just about naked force and power. Democracy has never existed and will never exist. It's by nature oligarchical and the masses, if they participate in a revolution, are really just been bamboozled by some other group who wants to install themselves into power and get all the privileges. At the same time, Burnham liked to talk about Stalin as a "great man" primarily on account of his ruthlessness and ability to dominate other people. So for Orwell, Burnham was clearly admiring Stalin for all the wrong reasons.
Orwell didn't like Stalin either, because he didn't think Stalin was particularly socialist and he had set up a dictatorship. But he thought Burnham betrayed an admiration for Stalin for the same reason.
BTW, that was after Burnham predicted a German victory over the USSR and made all these arguments that the Nazi regime was going to win because it possessed strength and vitality. Also democracy and socialism are dying and what will replace all that crap is a "managerial society" based on rule by "managers." That is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers. These people will eliminate the capitalist class, but also crush the working class, and organize society so all power and economic privilege remains in their hands, effectively abolishing private property but not establishing common ownership. Also they will form super-states organized hierarchically and then fight among themselves, but will probably be unable to conquer each other.
That's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Yeah, anyways. Burnham was an American, but Orwell believed that Burnham was openly expressing the secret wishes of English russophile intellectuals. Those intellectuals would've repudiated Burnham, but they really – according to Orwell – became attracted to the Soviet Union in large numbers once it gone in a totalitarian direction under Stalin. Because in such a society, whether or not that was how the society operated, those intellectuals could imagine themselves being the leaders and ordering everybody around, which they could not in England where they felt cramped by a society in which aristocratic privileges were still strong. Not workers but "middling" people, that is, "they are not managers in the narrow sense, but scientists, technicians, teachers, journalists, broadcasters, bureaucrats, professional politicians."
I see somewhat like George Galloway being like that. He would be Big Brother in Oceania. Because he doesn't actually have any principles at all and does not believe in that egalitarian stuff in socialism, and when he does take an interest in other regimes like Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, it's the point when it becomes an open dictatorship and he'll shill for it all day long.