The Gilded Cage: Language, Ritual, and Institutional Capture in Animal Farm
Article Sidebar
Main Article Content
Abstract
George Orwell’s Animal Farm stages how revolutions can reproduce the very hierarchies they promise to uproot. Reading the novella through Marxist concepts of false consciousness, alienated labour, and ideological control, this paper traces the mechanisms, language, ritual, and institutional form, by which new elites normalize inequality. It is argued that Orwell’s fable provides a diagnostic frame for contemporary Philippine politics: securitized governance, the practice of red-tagging, and campaigns framed as emergency measures work like Squealer’s rhetoric to shrink civic space and reallocate public resources away from social provisioning. Close textual readings of key scenes (the Seven Commandments; Boxer’s maxims; the windmill) expose how propaganda and bureaucratic consolidation hollow out egalitarian rhetoric. The paper concludes that vigilance over language and institutional design is necessary if reform in the Philippines is to avoid recycling domination.
Article Details
Section
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
How to Cite
References
Heydarian, R. J. (2018). The rise of Duterte: A populist revolt against elite democracy. Springer.
Johnson, D. T., & Fernquest, J. (2018). Governing through killing: The war on drugs in the Philippines. Asian Journal of Law and Society, 5(2), 359-390. DOI: 10.1017/als.2018.12
Marx, K. (1844). Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
Marx, K. (1867). Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1). Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1845). The German ideology. Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1848). Manifesto of the Communist Party. Marx/Engels Internet Archive.
Orwell, G. (1945). Animal farm. Penguin Classics
Pandan, M. S. A. (2024). The Memory-Method-Perspective Model: Three Dimensions to Thinking Historically. Journal of Contemporary Philosophical and Anthropological Studies, 2(4), 38-52. https://doi.org/eiki/10.59652/jcpas.v2i4.391
Pernia, R. A. (2019). Human rights in a time of populism: Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte. Asia-Pacific Social Science Review, 19(3), 6. https://doi.org/10.59588/2350-8329.1240
Siahaan, S. (2018). Marxist’s Ideology and Revolution Analysis of George Orwell’s Novel “Animal Farm”. Anglo-Saxon, 9(1), 42-53.
Teehankee, J. C., & Kasuya, Y. (2020). The 2019 midterm elections in the Philippines: Party system pathologies and Duterte’s populist mobilization. Asian Journal of Comparative Politics, 5(1), 69-81. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057891119896425
Tugade, R. R. L. (2022). Persistent red-tagging in the Philippines as violation of the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law. Philippine Law Journal, 95, 560.
Velasco, B. (2023). Using Marx to understand the working class in the Philippines. Philippine Journal of Public Policy: Interdisciplinary Development Perspectives, 1-33. https://cids.up.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Velasco.-Marx-and-the-Working-Class.pdf