1984 - Planet eBook

There is far less to-and-fro movement between the differentgroups than happened under capitalism or even in thepre-industrial age. Between the two branches of the Partythere is a certain amount of interchange, but only so muchas will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the InnerParty and that ambitious members of the Outer Party aremade harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, inpractice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. Themost gifted among them, who might possibly become nucleiof discontent, are simply marked down by the ThoughtPolice and eliminated. But this state of affairs is not necessarilypermanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Partyis not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aimat transmitting power to its own children, as such; and ifthere were no other way of keeping the ablest people at thetop, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire newgeneration from the ranks of the proletariat. In the crucialyears, the fact that the Party was not a hereditary body dida great deal to neutralize opposition. The older kind of Socialist,who had been trained to fight against somethingcalled ‘class privilege’ assumed that what is not hereditarycannot be permanent. He did not see that the continuityof an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause toreflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived,whereas adoptive organizations such as the CatholicChurch have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousandsof years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-soninheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view anda certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A