I guess I was being a little facetious. At the risk of inciting boredom, as you know, Goldstein was modelled on Leon Trotsky, and Orwell himself basically had this idea that, although Trotsky was vastly preferable to "Big Brother" Stalin, he was in a sense tainted with the same brush. This is reflected in the language which Goldstein actually uses in "the book". Orwell has Winston reading Goldstein's book, in which Goldstein provides an analysis of the system of oiligarchical collectivism, how it works - but precisely only up to the point where Goldstein discusses doublethink (this is, in part, Orwell's satire on Stalinist dialectics; in part it refers possibly also to the ability for metaphorical communication, which constructs at least two layers of meaning which are systematically linked, such that a lie is used to convey the truth).
Winston has a bit of hanky-panky with Julia, and then stands by the window, musing while watching a prole woman that he sees outside. "Without having read to the end of the book, he knew that must be Goldstein's final message. The future belonged to the proles. And could he be sure that when their time came the world they constructed would not be just as alien to him, Winston Smith, as the world of the Party ? Yes, because at the least it would be a world of sanity. Where there is equality there can be sanity. Sooner or later it would happen, strength would change into consciousness. The proles were immortal, you could not doubt it, when you looked at that valiant figure in the yard" (p. 188; Winston makes explicit the link in his ill-understood world between "sanity" or rationality and "statistics" several times). Winston then concludes, "we are the dead" and Julia repeats what he says, like a brainwashed drone, whereupon the Thought Police apprehends him, saying "you are the dead". So, point is, in the book, we never get to hear about Goldstein's plan or strategy for the overthrow of Big Brother, beyond a message of hope, which Winston had already concluded himself earlier, in chapter 7, when he proffered his thought that "If there is hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within" (p. 64). As I mentioned, Winston, the prole, preferred to read books which confirmed what he already knew anyway. Winston's political conclusion sounds remarkably like Ernest Mandel or Tony Cliff, who likewise had no real plan for the overthrow of bourgeois society and the making of a socialist society, but plenty hope in the revolutionary potential of the working class and in the socialist project, and collected statistics on the size of the working class (I researched a bibliography of Mandel's writings in 1984, and published his essay on hope in the journal Historical Materialism 10/4). The difference between Mandel and Cliff is more that Mandel still thought he could win over part of the cadre of the Party, whereas Cliff placed his hopes exclusively on the unorganised proles, and their ability to decipher the Socialist Worker newspaper, regarding the Party as capitalist and evil. The passage the relevance of which you question, is of course another metaphor, another allegory, but the key statement is Goldstein's thesis that "War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair". Now, we need to ask, under what conditions could war be a "purely internal affair ?". The character Goldstein explains this himself clearly: under the conditions of a globalised society, under conditions of globalisation, of world-wide domination in which there are no "external" areas, where everything is "internal". This is not unlike the perspectives of the "anti-globalisers" and the Hardt/Negri thesis, to which Mandel's Fourth International responded publicly with new globalisation theories as a consistent development of long wave theories, seeing in globalisation a useful, non-sectarian contemporary theme, that could bring people together in a pluralist and environmentally friendly way, to form international networks and organisations, to fight capitalist globalisation. According to Emmanuel Goldstein, the wars still being fought are essentially irrational and meaningless, nothing is really gained by them, and nobody really wins, but they perform a useful social function, in uniting and disciplining the proles against an imaginary enemy, thereby preserving the social and political hierarchy. In the tripolar power situation, either Eurasia is at war with Oceania, or with Eastasia, but it doesn't really matter, and this conflict can suddenly change, so that former Ally suddenly becomes a Foe, a bit like seducing one of two girls, who are both friends with each other, as a decision-making exercise. The point is that the war SEEMS to be against an external enemy, but Goldstein says, IN REALITY it functions to bolster the power of the monolithic regime internally in each of the three empires, each of which is controlled by an elite which sends out its minions to do a pointless "battle" with each other, in order to evaluate decision-making strategies (the cleverest proles might be recruited into the Party hierarchy, willingly or unwillingly). The question could be raised, why would Orwell as political analyst resort to fiction to make his socialist political viewpoint clear ? Apparently, because he felt that the truth resided only in the heresies, and that there was no possibility of rationally debating with the warring leftist forces in his time over a coherent programme, with a healthy political culture, never mind uniting those forces. Political debate was dead, the future seemed one of monolithic domination, and only in fiction could living expression be attained. Orwell's "true socialism" could only be articulated in a piece of science fiction, because he considered his idea transcended his own time, as it were, and only in this way, he maintained his ideal. On this score, Raymond William comments as follows: Orwell "...remained a democratic socialist. He gave most of his political energies to the defence of civil liberties over a wide front. But in his deepest vision of what was to come, he had at once actualised a general nightmare and then, in the political currents of the time, narrowed its reference until the nightmare itself became one of its own shaping elements. (...) It is strange that Orwell could oppose the [sexual] controls and the perversions[of the Party] with nothing better than the casual affair between Winston and Julia. (...) It is not the ordinary and continuing love of men and women, in friendship and in marriage, but a willed corruption of indifference - 'the simple undifferentiated desire' - that is presented as opposed to, though it is usually part of, that joyless world. Winston's marriage is a cold and miserable routine; only with hint of corruption can the pleasure come. Of the many failures in Nineteen Eighty-Four, this is perhaps the deepest. All the ordinary resources of personal life are written off as summarily as the proles. The lonely fantasy of 'mighty loins' of the future is joined by the lonely confusion of the adolescent - so guilty about lovemaking that corruption of the object is a necessary element of its pleasure. Winston Smith is not like a man at all - in consciousness, in relationships, in the capacity for love and protection and endurance and loyalty. He is the last of the cut-down figures - less experienced, less intelligent, less loyal, less courageous than his creator - through whom rejection and defeat can be mediated. (...) the question about Nineteen Eighty Four, as about Orwell's earlier novels, is why he created situations and people that, in comparison with his own written observations, are one-dimensional and determined. This is not primarily a matter of politics, but of a more extended experience of self and society. Under the strength and sense of his only successful character, 'Orwell' - a man physically and intellectually alive and conscious and tough and persistent - moved these feebler and less conscious figures in an undifferentiated theatrical landscape. The central significance is not in the personal contradictions, but in the much deeper structures of a society and its literature. In making his projections, Orwell expressed much more than himself." (Raymond Williams, Orwell. Fontana, 3rd impression 1978, p. 68, 80, 81-82). Note: in the Beatles double album, the so-called White Album, John Lennon included a song called "Julia", whom he calls the "Ocean child". This referred in the first instance to his absent mother. But Lennon was aware of Orwell's book 1984. Sometimes he referred to himself as Winston, or "Winston O'Boogie" (as in his rendition of the Lloyd Price number ""Just Because"), because Winston was his second name. Jurriaan
