George Orwell and Double Speak

For a short while towards the end of the 1930s Orwell held a position on war similar to ours. See:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1990s/1997/no-1113-may-1997/george-orwell-spain-and-anti-fascismBut when the War broke out he reverted to type (Old Etonian and Colonial policeman) and came out as a British Patriot and War-supporter.

Although his notion of double think is well known, the underlying thesis is broken. His idea was that if you control language and what people say, you will control their minds; however, the apparent truth is that people shape their language through their behaviour, and if a word doesn't exist, they will make one.  Whetehr this is down to some innate faculty for language (as per Chomsky) is debatable (and slightly beside the point).The facts are that language is not a mirror of the world, nor is ity necessarily direct.  The linguistic philosopher Grice came up with his maxims of implicature, to demonstrate how we communicate by flouting or breaking linguistic rules.  That is, that context and discourse determine meaning more than the mere words in themselves.  This leads to the revolutionary import of the idea of Marx & Engels in the German Ideology, that social being determines social consciousness.By the same token, the logical positivist J.L. Austin noted that language is performative: we "do things with words".  Swearing allegiance to a flag or democracy, even with fingers crossed or with a snigger still remains a declarative perlocution (as the terminology goes), partly because, as noted, language is social, and meaning does not reside internally to the anunciator but in the relations between speaker and hearer: peopel react to our words, and we in turn react to their (or are affected by their choices based on our statements).Language, thus, takes the form of a struggle for meaning and inetrpretation, to define our words and to struggle for understanding of others'.What matters most is what people do with their words, not the words they utter in themselves: for example, a poet praising another's work may be in reality promoting and praising themself by assuming they have the right/capacity to critique (or by inference of similarity).  Commitment to high ideals become a means of self promotion, that neglect or forget the practice that underlies those ideas or their actual meaning.

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 Does this mean that our (the Party) objections to what we see as the misuses of  the word "socialism" are a waste of time? After all for the vast majority "socialism" is  what we call "state capitalism".

WARNING TO SOCIALIST PUNK. Post #5 above. Offtopic / flaming