This is an excerpt of "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism" by Emmanuel Goldstein, the 'book within a Book' from George Orwell's 1984), with some edits and ommissions.
The primary aim of modern warfare 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. In the early twentieth century, the vision of future society was unbelievably rich, leisured, orderly, and efficient -- a glittering antiseptic world of glass and steel and snow-white concrete. 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 many.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened to end hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had the necessities of life, and had access to quality healthcare and education, wealth would confer little distinction. It was possible to imagine a society in which capital was 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 a literate society would realize that the ruling 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 was not a practicable solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any deindustralized country was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly, by its more militarisitc rivals.
Nor was it a satisfactory solution to keep the masses in poverty by restricting the output of goods. This has been tried to a great extent; 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 military weakness, and since it was obviously unnecessary, it made popular opposition inevitable. The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.
In practice, the best way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
The essential act of war is destruction-- not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or burning into the atmosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which otherwise would improve the masses' standard of living and, in turn, create an educated population. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything of social benefit. A aircraft carrier, for example, sequesters the labor and material effort that would have otherwise built several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete and with further enormous labours another aircraft carrier is built. In principle the war effort is tuned to consume anything beyond the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of 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. Job insecurity makes workers less likely to protest their conditions, quit their job, or organize strikes. And at the same time the percieved danger of wartime makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.
War accomplishes the necessary destruction of wealth 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 kept steadily at work, but the morale of the priveleged. It is necessary for the priviledged to 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 war and economic competition. It does not matter whether the 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 war should exist. And the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked this fanaticism becomes.
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