[tim.....]

to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since
whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging
a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By
their labour the slave populations allow the tempo of continuous warfare to
be speeded up. But if they did not exist, the structure of world society,
and the process by which it maintains itself, would not be essentially
different.
The primary aim of modern warfare (in accordance with the principles
of doublethink, this aim is simultaneously recognized and not recognized by
the directing brains of the Inner Party) is to use up the products of the
machine without raising the general standard of living. Ever since the end
of the nineteenth century, the problem of what to do with the surplus of
consumption goods has been latent in industrial society. At present, when
few human beings even have enough to eat, this problem is obviously not
urgent, and it might not have become so, even if no artificial processes of
destruction had been at work. The world of today is a bare, hungry,
dilapidated place compared with the world that existed before 1914, and
still more so if compared with the imaginary future to which the people of
that period looked forward. In the early t