Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton wrote an extremely impressive and surprisingly sober book "Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism" on the torture methods used in mainland China. He interviewed victims that had just escaped to Hong Kong (then still a safe harbor for civic freedom).
This book has much more detailed, personal impressions of what "struggle" means. Struggle in torture prisons is a sequence of absolute physical and psychological destruction, followed by the attempt of the tortured to break and destroy their old selves, to denounce what they identified with, loved and fought for, to try and re-model themselves into model citizens. Only, what exactly the party demands model citizens to be is often left vague.
I was left with the impression that the extreme violence exerted on individuals cannot be left out of any high-level analysis of what totalitarianism does.