The movie is all style over substance, and pre-Thacher, pre-punk.
Anthony Burgess (the guy that wrote the novel) was an incredibly prolific writer, and a composer, an a savant - a bigger know-it-all than Clive James and Stephen Fry rolled into one. Clockwork Orange is imaginative and original, but he has done better. He was a huge Beethoven fan- and he has a quirky way of writing around classical music (another of his books, Napoleon Symphony is written in four 'movements' that mimic the structure of a classical symphony. It's an imaginative recreation of Napoleon Buenoparte's life.)
Clockwork Orange is a dystopian futuristic novel, written in 1962, set in the early seventies. Burgess described it as "a jeu d'esprit knocked off for money in three weeks" and blames Kubrick for its seeming to glorify violence and sex. I don't think Kubrick added anything that wasn' t already outlined - left things out, more like, but maybe Burgess felt a bit foolish at some of the predictions he had made of 'the youth of today', given that by the time Kubrick had made the film, it was clear that he had hardly been prophetic at all - he had sort of predicted the punk movement, but not the music, and the violent, vandalistic kids were not speaking any Russian-based lingo, but forming the one hundred percent English home grown blue collar fascist white supremacist British National Front (he did not learn though, and in the seventies wrote 1985, as a tribute to George Orwell's 1984).
He was a Tory, and a millionaire, anti-union, anti-labour, anti-socialist and his prejudices died hard. I don't recall his writing anything about Britain going to the dogs under Thacher, but that might be because he had moved to the continent for tax purposes (just like the Rolling Stones). He didn't see the Cold War ending in an outbreak of democracy and unbridled capitalism in the former Soviet states, with the free world caught on the hop, pouring money into arms for dictators like Pinochet and Mubarak, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and UNITA forces in Angola.
I think Clockwork Orange is at least partly exploring the idea of free will - what if a child is given complete free will, and can invent his own morality? What if he chooses evil rather than good? In the English version, Alex comes good in the final chapter, grows up respectable. The American publishers left that chapter out. So did Kubrick.
Anyway, Burgess is better at recreating a past than imagining a future (1984 still stacked up as a great and chilling novel in 1984, and now for that matter, but Clockwork Orange was doomed to be dated from the day it reached the shelves, in spite of being quite brilliantly written)
Kubrick is a genius too. Even though the sex is the unmistakeably misogynistic early seventies variety, and nowadays you can see from a mile off that all the male participants would rather be doing each other, the girls are a stylized window-dressing. Kubrick seems to see the tongue in cheek, camp aspects of the situation with a clearer eye than Burgess. He approaches it with an ironic humour and style that Quentin Tarantino apes shamelessly in movies like Kill Bill and Grindhouse. Still, the images (eg. the milk bar, Alex's costume and makeup, the eyeball-opening Ludovico apparatus) are still art - they have not dated, in fact they have become icons.