“War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.” There are probably only a few of us who don’t recognise these sayings. To clarify, these lines are the three slogans of the Party in George Orwell’s 1984. Before last month, and I say this with great shame, I was one of the few who wouldn’t have recognised the slogans. Perhaps that is exactly what caused 1984 to have such a huge impact on me. The stories told by my peers who had already read 1984, the hailing of the novel being one of the greatest of the 20th century and the often made connection between 1984 and Brave New World (which happens to be one of my favourite novels) raised my expectations to a maximum. Often, high expectations only lead to disappointment or disillusionment. Orwell’s great dystopia, however, did not only live up to my expectations, it also blew me away.
Given the fact that so many of us have already read 1984, it seems illogical to portray merely a summary of it in this blog. Rather, I’d like to share with you my perception of the novel. First, for the ones who share the same shame as I did one month ago, let me provide a small summary. The novel is set in alternate reality 20th century London, which is now called Airstrip One and has been integrated into the greater nation of Oceania (the America’s, Australia, Great Britain and several other parts of the world). Oceania is ruled by the Party, an ultra-authoritarian government led by the mysterious and almost godlike Big Brother. The Party regulates and monitors every aspect of daily life: work, marriage, exercise, family and spare time. Even the history and language of Oceania are under direct influence and regulation of Party policy. By altering history and thereby altering knowledge, the Party has an incredible power over its subjects: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.” All in all, Oceania has become a nation which has abandoned freedom, rights and love as we know them. On the other hand, the nation has embraced domination, fear and hatred.

Orwell shows us the life of a simple Inner Party worker, Winston Smith. Winston works for the Ministry of Truth and is burdened with the task of creating and erasing history. More and more, Winston realises the brutality and cruelty of the Party and “inwardly rebels” against the life he is forced to live. Despite the realisation that rebelling against the Party will lead to inevitable death, Winston finds himself increasingly resisting the Party rule. Irrevocably, the Party, through its methods of monitoring and regulation, arrests Winston for his crimes against Big Brother. Finally and unfortunately , Winston has to pay the price for his unorthodox actions.

What struck me most about the novel was the extreme methods the Party used in observing, monitoring and controlling its population and the therewith involved consequences. It was not only the types of methods that disturbed me, but also the motivations and implications behind them. The portrayed denial of peoples’ rights, freedoms and privacy on such a scale and to such an extent made me realise that we should always remember to cherish those rights and freedoms that our predecessors have bitterly fought for. In the end, I assume this is what George Orwell intended with writing 1984: ensuring that we remember the importance of personal freedom and privacy. The irony here is that many of us don’t seem to realise that we are unconsciously already giving up many of our privacies through aspects of daily life. Take, for instance, the widespread registration of individual data connected to the OV-card (a card that has to be used for many parts of public transportation). Or another example: yesterday I was throwing away the trash with my little brother. Since two years, there is one location where to dispose of your domestic waste per street. Every household in the particular street is given an individual key to open the waste containers which are provided by the municipality. When walking back home after throwing away the trash, my little brother told me that the municipality registers every time trash is thrown away by a household. This is done through a chip put into every single key given to households. Of course, this is only a small and unimportant example of the giving up of individual privacy, but we should realise that small examples like these occur on a very frequent basis in daily life. Furthermore, we don’t only give up our rights through direct and possibly harmless government registration, but also through exposure by the use of public networks such as Facebook or Twitter. If a government had the ill will to monitor its citizens for wrong purposes, it wouldn’t even have to install the methods as seen in 1984: they would just have to check our Facebook updates. For now, enough cheesy talk of this undergraduate student with his naïve views on life. However, I would like to end this blog entry with a funny and ironic little screenshot I took today from my own Facebook page:

Jules van de Sneppen, 1st year student, LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.

Published in 1974, at the height of the Cold War, Le Guin shows us a possible third way away from the capitalist structure of America and the state-run enterprise of the USSR: a Stateless society. In The Dispossessed, the idealist anarchists, following the teaching of a certain ‘Odo’, leave the planet of Urras to form an utopia on its moon, Anarres. Urras, in turn, mirrors our world during the Cold War: A-Io is a wealthy nation driven on capitalism, with a clear hierarchical system based on the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. In Thu, they chose to follow the teachings of ‘Odo’, centered on freedom and equality, towards a authoritarian State ruled in name of the proletariat. These nations even fight proxy wars over nations that follow their ideological structure, as becomes apparent when in the second half of the book war breaks out in Benbili.
The society of Anarres is based on anarcho-syndicalism: the idea that you should not be a ‘slave to the wage’, but rather work for your needs. To this end, the Anarresti abandon the concept of ‘ownership’. You do not own your goods, as ownership means that you have control over that product, and can decide which people can and cannot use this product. This is problematic as this creates a power imbalance (opposing egality) and does not necessarily distributes goods according to what people actually need. Therefore, you do not own things on Anarresti, but you take what you, as an individual, need to survive. As a consequence, a societal norm exists that you also actively contribute towards the production of goods that can meet the needs of society. The anarchists furthermore eradicate ownership so completely that they construct a language, Pravic, that does not know these concepts in words. The usage of possessive pronouns, for instance, is eradicated. At birth, one is separated from its parents in order not to feel attachment, or stake a claim upon their parents. Characters stress that Anarres is a voluntarily society: all the work that is done, is done because the people want do these specific jobs (egoistically) or feel that they have a certain skill or aptitude towards a certain type of work that would suit the community (altruistically). The first mode of reasoning, however, is cancelled out by the societal norm which deems ‘egoizing’ to be the worst possible act.

The book is written as the story of the anarchist Shevek, a brilliant scholar of physics, who comes to visit Urras in an attempt to understand the society that his people have left behind and broke contact with. A second storyline unfolds in which his motivations for leaving Anarres – at least temporarily – become clear, and the tensions within this utopian society unfold.
Because it seems that a certain form of centralization is unavoidable when you effectively want to distribute goods and labours, and when you need to deal with foreign nations, and therefore a certain power imbalance will necessarily be created, and that issues arise when the economical and the collective take precedence over the social and individual desires, as humans value emotional ties more than ties towards the collective. But, more importantly, le Guin shows the problematic aspects of dogmatic reasoning. Shevek’s first inquiries into physics are frustrated by the senior physician, whose theory were developed in a conflicting field with Shevek’s, and therefore denies these theories publication. Discussing the social norm of collective altruism is also considered a taboo and frowned upon: challenging the status quo is straw manned as ‘egoizing’ by most people in Anarresti society. But also on Urras freedom of information is ostracized, with the newspapers being considered fodder for the lowly educated, and the upper class relying on insider information and mouth-to-mouth storytelling (One could argue that in this way the upper class ‘possesses’ information as well as material goods). This creates problems as it tempers the revolutionary spirit, it tempers the critical reflexion of the ideals that made the Anarresti go to Anarres in the first place, and it allows ideological flaws within the system to be sustained. In this way, le Guin shows us the problem of dogma in the era of McCarthyism.
Another pressing and prevalent problem in The Dispossessed deals with resource scarcity. Halfway through the book Shevek mentions that Odo’s ideas were specifically written with the resource-abundant planet of Urras in mind. In contrast, Anarres is a planet plagued with droughts, infertile soil and a lack of natural resources and biodiversity. This forces the anarchists to put the economical above the social ; it is a necessary evil for survival, because if you don’t co-operate, we all will die.

The question, however, is whether resource abundance would solve this problem. Le Guin remains vague on this, but I suspect myself that this is not the case: as the social norm against profiteering is more effectively coerced in times of need, when you realize the consequences of going against that norm directly, it could logically follow that people would not be so much bothered by the norm when they could leave the society and start ‘profiteering’.
But is this ‘third way’ then doomed to fail? No, not in the way that it is worse than the options known to men in 1974, or maybe even today. Because the Dispossessed does not deny – and certainly spends a lot of time in pointing out – the flaws that capitalism and communism have. The interesting omission, of course, is the role of liberal democracy within le Guin’s framework, as this form of government now used by an enormous amount of countries in the world is lacking in voice in this narrative. However, ‘liberalism’, might be the victorious voice in the end. Because the reader, having realized the imperfections of these State systems, is then introduced to the Hainish. This old alien society, the presumed ‘ancestor’ of the human civilizations, has ‘tried’ all State forms, and they too realized the imperfections of all systems. Their solution is daunting: the individual Hainish can all choose to try out the system they think suits them best. It is a solution that does not only need the eradication of a State, and of a social contract binding you to a State or society. It needs the dismissal of emotional ties, it needs to dismiss that we have a moral obligation towards caring for people who cared for us, or for the survival of the ones near to you. Le Guin’s final suggestion is that individuals need to be free in order to choose ones personal utopia.

Daan Welling, 1st year student, LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.

Imagine the world in the XXVII century. Imagine a society in which capitalism as a ruling system has given its way to the Brotherhood of Man. Now, imagine a diary written in 1932 has been found, the biography of a great revolutionist called Ernest Everhard, written by his beloved wife and fellow comrade Avis. You are then presented with a detailed account of the first revolutionaries' struggle to overthrow the Oligarchy, the Plutocracy, the Iron Heel which is the entity that controls the power and wealth of the United States.
The greatness of The Iron Heel is that it speaks on behalf of different people, first of all Ernest, the eloquent socialist hero; Avis, the highly educated girl converted to the Cause of Socialism, and finally the academic notations of a man who now leaves in the utopia envisioned by the revolutionaries.
Through Avis's passionate and subjective record of Ernest's talks on the injustices of the Iron Heel towards the members of the labour class, London creates a first layer of narration, through which he can express his critical analysis of the American class struggle, and possibly his delusion for the failure of the 1905 Russian Revolution. London actually writes the novel in 1908, a period of labour's struggle in the USA against the evergrowing power of corporations that constitutes the suffocating regime Avis and Ernest dream to overthrow.
The second layer of narrative, the perspective of the XXVII century scholar, serves as more than one function; firstly, it represents a utopian age in which the socialist dream has finally been achieved, when people don't even remember certain practises or they find them barbarian; secondly, it balances Avis's account by correcting or explaining certain facts or characters that she talks about. London uses this second narrative-framing voice, both as a device to take distances from Avis's story, but also as yet another way to criticise and to make bitter remarks about his own society.
Description of the utopian society of the XXVII century, that so critically describes those of the XX century, are only hinted in the foreword and footnotes, and the reader is not to know how the centuries' long struggle eventually positively ended with the establishment of the Brotherhood of Man – London is concerned with the description of the present conflicts and does not bother with the explanation of a reality that is, in its nature, utopic. Knowing that there is the future perspective of a fair society is enough to provide for a happy ending that Avis's story, abruptly interrupted in the middle of a sentence, actually does not have.
The Iron Heel is about injustices, violence, conflicts. London shows how these actions are perpetuated by both sides of the “enemy line”, as both Oligarchists and Revolutionaries adopt violent methods to confront each other. However, London's sympathy, and the reader's, cannot help but falling with the rebels, who are striving for change in face of the oppressive status quo.
The society that the Oligarchy shapes and controls through its power relationship and invisible claws still bears remarkable similarities to the present US society, where lobbies and trusts are able to influence government's policies, where freedom of speech is threatened by the laws made ad corporationes, where the poor are denied health insurance or good education. London's text shouldn't be read as prophetical, but as a starting point from which to reflect upon the status of our present society. Do we still live under the Iron Heel? Do we have to wait for other six centuries before getting rid of systems of oppressions? Is Capitalism THE best economic-political-social system we can think of, or is a (modernised) socialist Utopia still a suitable option for designing our society? Food for thought, my friends, but remember: the fight goes on.

Sofia Lotto Persio, 1st year student, LUC

Strikes, boycotts, “wild threats from anarchists” – the workers’ struggle was in full swing in late nineteenth-century America.[1] It had by this time become apparent to many of the country’s elite and oppressed alike that the rapid industrialisation of the preceding decades and the socio-economic system that resulted from it was far from perfect. Enabling a select group of individuals to live in tremendous wealth, it forced the overwhelming majority of the population into poverty. By the end of the nineteenth-century, this awareness had led numerous intellectuals to criticise the economic relations and social structures of the time, some convinced that they could not be changed, others presenting a way out of them. “Workers of the world, unite!” exclaimed Marx and Engels in their eloquently formulated attack on capitalism, The Communist Manifesto. Elsewhere, too, the socialist movement began to take flight – throughout the world the workers’ struggle expressed itself in strikes and boycotts, inspiring a sense of disdain and fear in the minds of the targeted bourgeois and a sense of hope and power in the minds of the proletariat. In Looking Backward (1888), the American novelist Edward Bellamy reveals what he perceives to be most pressing problems of the nineteenth-century – and how they are solved completely in an imaginary alternative society set a century into the future. Tellingly, this ‘perfect society’ is not the result of a violent class struggle or bloody revolution, but the result of capitalism itself – an end of the industrial evolution.

In this ideal society, the United States is prosperous because the old economy of private capital does no longer exist. Rather, it has evolved into an economy of publicly owned capital, a natural outcome of the “industrial evolution.”[2] Seeking to expand their businesses, merchants united into corporations and aggregated their capital and as such a smaller and smaller group of individuals and businesses controlled an increasingly large amount of capital. This process continued until eventually certain syndicates controlled larger flows of money than states. At this point, all business was nationalised in a final act of monopolisation: the nation became the greatest corporation of all, and its inhabitants became its employees – it is the year 2000 (though we are led to believe that the reign of selfish capitalism had ended decades before the time in which Bellamy sets this story). As the sole employer, the state owns all capital and rewards every employee. It divides the national product equally among its citizens, and is in charge of both the distribution and production of goods. Money has no use anymore, as private transactions have been abolished: everyone buys standardised products from great malls stocked by the nation with credit, an abstraction of money (which does not exist in material form). As such, no one is driven by greed for money; instead the population is driven by greed for honour – motivating every individual to work to the best of his ability.

From this brief description might have become clear that Bellamy’s utopian society shows many characteristics of a socialist society – private capital does not exist, and the entire society is organised in line with the maxim “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” Yet Bellamy repeatedly bashes the “followers of the red flag” in his novel, accusing them of hindering (social) change rather than promoting it. [3] As a representative of the American bourgeois, and writing to a bourgeois audience, he could not afford (nor did he probably want to afford) to make the parallels with socialism all too clear, as the many strikes, threats of violence and boycotts did not particularly inspire solidarity in the upper classes of society – those who could force change top-down. This distrust of socialism might also explain why Bellamy chose to set his novel in the future, rather than in an elusive, contemporary, terra incognita like his literary colleague Thomas More. Would he have presented it as an already existing society, his fellow countrymen might easily associate it with ‘the socialist threat’, a concern that may have been reinforced by the fear that the socialist revolutions in Europe could be exported to the American continent.

Yet there may be another reason (and numerous other reasons, for that matter) that Bellamy chose to set his novel in a future America. It showed his contemporaries that an alternative society, a society in which labour problems are impossible, is conceivable even without giving in to socialism, as a result of capitalism – and even in America (instead of an elusive country in another part of the world). Presenting an alternative to communism and the path to glory defined by Marx and Engels, Bellamy demonstrated to his readers that even if some of Marx’ assumptions were correct a class struggle would not be the only conceivable way out of the labour problems. As such, Looking Backward might be called a counter-narrative to The Communist Manifesto – a vision of the future that was probably reassuring to the workers and propertied classes alike (‘capitalism may not be all that bad’).

At any rate, Bellamy’s utopian novel has been a huge literary success, selling millions of copies even in the nineteenth-century. Inspiring countless political movements back in its day, Looking Backward is a perfect example of how utopian literature can both reflect and shape (political) reality. It is an extraordinarily detailed book, and I have not done it justice in this brief essay which focuses merely on the socio-economic aspects Bellamy highlights in the novel. I can recommend it to everyone – it is an easy, enjoyable read which offers an intriguing insight in the problems and (perceived) solutions in late nineteenth-century America. Just don’t expect to find a blueprint for a perfect society – you’ll find that you probably would not want to live in the society outlined by Bellamy (but then, this is not where the novel derives its power from in the first place).

Barend de Rooij (1st year student, LUC)

[1] Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, rev. ed. (1888; repr.,Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 2011), 163.
[2] Bellamy, Looking Backward, 36.
[3] Bellamy, Looking Backward, 163

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.

Thomas More - Utopia
The first book read for the Dean’s class is Thomas More’s Utopia, which could be seen as the start of the whole genre of Utopia’s. Written in the sixteenth century it clearly shows the clash between the ending feudal system and the starting modern age (with the building of the nation-state).
For me the most interesting part of Utopia was the way More tried to mix a strong normative view on religion with a humanist view on almost all other matters concerning society. As More himself was a devoted Catholic and eventually even died for his believe; in Utopia this is shown through his strong statements against; who he claims are not even human! So the person in question should be forbidden to speak in public and hold any public offices as well.

However on the other side we see More as a humanist and socialist, for he does not believe in social classes, which leads him to make all people shift jobs every 5 years or so with one another, thinks money irrelevant and believes that all people should be educated properly; from which also follows according to More that all people will be reasonable once they have received such an education.

In the end however, although More makes many reasonable points which are especially great when we realize the time in which he wrote them down (1516), I believe More was still too normative in his religious believes to come to a truly great society in his Utopia; for above all the humanistic and socialistic standpoints he put a religious domination (through morals that he believes all people should and would have in this society of Utopia, and the control over society and those morals he gives to the priests!) that limits basically all freedom and equality he gave to the people of Utopia in the other parts of his book.

Laura Pierik, 1st year student, LUC

The LUC Dean's Masterclass is run each semester for the students who made the honour roll in the previous semester.