Chapter I: Ignorance is Strength, and Chapter III: War is Peace of "the book" are titled with Party slogans; O’Brien later refers to chapters featuring a programme for deposing the Party. (Chapter II, presumably titled Freedom is Slavery after the remaining Party slogan, is not detailed in the novel.)
[edit] Chapter I
Ignorance is Strength details the perpetual class struggle characteristic of human societies;[3] beginning with the historical observation that societies always have hierarchically divided themselves into social classes and castes: the High (who rule); the Middle (who work for, and yearn to supplant the High), and the Low (whose goal is quotidian survival). Cyclically, the Middle deposed the High, by enlisting the Low. Upon assuming power, however, the Middle (the new High class) recast the Low into their usual servitude. In the event, the classes perpetually repeat the cycle, when the Middle class speaks to the Low class of "justice" and of "human brotherhood" in aid of becoming the High class rulers.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the power-seeking Middle class dispensed with the pretence of pursuing justice for everyone: "In each variant of Socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. The new movements which appeared in the middle years of the century . . . had the conscious aim of perpetuating unfreedom and inequality"; because the true goal was to end history upon becoming the perpetual High ruling class — composed not of aristocrats or plutocrats, but of "bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians" originally from "the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class".
Moreover, by the mid-twentieth century, technology had rendered feasible a totalitarian society; electronic apparatuses, such as the telescreen (transceiving television) allowed continuous governmental espionage of the populace: "The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time". After the revolutionary period of the 1950s and the 1960s, society divided itself into the High (Inner Party), the Middle (Outer Party), and the Low (Proles); the first used technology to establish themselves as the perpetual ruling class. The Inner Party, collectively fixed their privileged command-status when the old-style Socialists failed to perceive that the Party’s assumption of societal command had only concentrated political power to fewer people than under the deposed capitalism. They believed that the abolishment of private property had established Socialism, when it, in fact, established economic inequality.
The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia