The Future Belongs to the Proles

In 1984, Orwell has Winston Smith believe that the future belongs to the proles. Smith it seems has a vestigial romantic socialist notion of the proles as a sleeping beast that will awake one day and overthrow the party to create a new society. Perhaps when the middle and upper classes - the inner and outer party - have destroyed themselves through their stagnation and lost what it is to be human through their theorizing, then – Smith believes - the proles will take over.

However, the future belongs to the proles could just as easily be not a promise, but a threat.

The left since its beginning always had a Romantic idealised view of the working class. This is hardly surprising as a major strand of left thinking grew out of Romanticism, the strand of Romanticism that saw the then modern industrial world as some sort of corrupting monster that was gorging itself on a helpless working class.

However, democracy – despite its no doubt good points – does tend towards the Tyranny of the Majority with the seemingly inevitable ‘dumbing down’ that results from that tyranny. Therefore, ‘the future’ could ‘belong to the proles’ just through sheer weight of numbers and the passage of time rather than through any historical inevitability or some sort of social justice. It certainly does sometimes seem like that nowadays, where the manufactured prolefeed that passes for popular culture these days seems ubiquitous and all-consuming. But then the post-60s fashionable adoption of anti-elitism (itself a very pernicious form of snobbery) by the middle classes themselves helped establish this situation. That anti-elitism has also permeated what used to be called the working class too, who now seem to have a pride in their own ignorance that was lacking in the days of the Workers’ Institutes* and so forth of Orwell’s era. Those in power - to keep the masses ignorant as left theory implies - did not necessarily impose this indifference and ignorance of the majority. It does seem that Smith in 1984 does eventually see that the proles are keeping themselves down, either through indifference or ignorance or a combination of both.

These days though that ignorance and indifference has not only become entrenched in what is now the underclass, exacerbated by an educational and benefits system that seems more intent on a form of containment rather than any notion of lifting people out of a squalid dead-end lifestyle. These attitudes have also seemingly permeated up into what was the upper working class/lower middleclass - which Orwell defined in 1984 as the Outer Party - due to the anti-elitist snobbery outlined above, and to the general educational and aspirational malaise that only sees improvement in material terms, so that we are all slowly turning into proles now.

So, perhaps Winston Smith was right, perhaps the future does belong to the proles after all, because in the future we will all be proles.

*This place mentioned in the article was just down the road from where I now live.