Marxism and Animal Farm

" However, this apparent atmosphere of cheerfulness and extreme satisfaction with life conditions at the farm run counter to the actual situation of the animals. The latter, as the narrative reveals in earlier sections, suffer from hard labor, hunger and rigid laws engendered by the newly developed tyrannical rule of Napoleon. This clear discrepancy between reality and the attitude of animals suggests that the latter have evolved into self-controlled beings that have opted for self-discipline as a survival mechanism in the new political regime. .
             The animals internalization of these attitudes, despite Napoleon's absence from public scenes, indicates their conforming to the image of prisoners in Foucault's panopticon. The Panopticon was a design for a prison produced by Jeremy Bentham in the late eighteenth century which grouped cells around a central viewing tower. Despite the invisibility of the guardian in that tower to the prisoners, the latter where constantly seized by the feeling that they are watched and therefore should abide by certain rules of conduct. Foucault uses this model as a metaphor to deal with the operation of power and surveillance in contemporary society. Indeed, Napoleon's newly acquired invisibility seems to offer him better position to maintain an unquestionable authority over the animals. The relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed in the farm rests upon the dichotomy of visibility of the animals and the invisibility of Napoleon, that is of the power of the latter and the powerlessness of the former.
             In the same vein, in his essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," (Notes Towards an Investigation, 1972) the French philosopher Louis Althusser uses a Marxist perspective to study the relationship, in the modern context, between the governed and the governor. The latter, for him, makes use of ideology as a mediator between individuals and the system of power.