The Ministry of Plenty Miniplenty
49 always of cabbage and bad lavatories. He seemed to see a vision of
London, vast and ruinous, city of a million dustbins, and mixed up with it was a picture of Mrs Parsons, a woman with lined face and wispy hair,
fiddling helplessly with a blocked waste-pipe p. 63.
On the contrary, news always tells that life continuously develops. In fact, the rate of living standard is always decreasing. Even the condition of this
moment is worse than the day before Big Brother leads the country. Day and night the telescreens bruised your ears with statistics proving that
people today had more food, more clothes, better houses, better recreations—that they lived longer, worked shorter hours, were bigger,
healthier, stronger, happier, more intelligent, better educated, than the people of fifty years ago. Not a word of it could ever be proved or
disproved p. 63.
Quotation above shows that the Minitrue substantiates the Miniplenty
claims by revising historical records to report numbers supporting the current, increased rations. In reality, only the members of the Inner Party enjoy all
privileges while the other sections of the society are conditioned to toil and consuming dilapidated stuff. While the proles and Outter Party live in low
standard and consume dilapidated foodstuff, the Inner Party member enjoys good foods stuff.
‘It isn’t sugar?’ he said. ‘Real sugar. Not saccharine, sugar. And here’s a loaf of bread—proper
white bread, not our bloody stuff—and a little pot of jam. And here’s a tin of milk—but look This is the one I’m really proud of. I had to wrap a bit
of sacking round it, because——’
... ‘It’s Inner Party coffee. There’s a whole kilo here,’ she said.
‘How did you manage to get hold of all these things?’ ‘It’s all Inner Party stuff. There’s nothing those swine don’t have, nothing.
But of course waiters and servants and people pinch things, and—look, I got a little packet of tea as well’ p. 115.
50 To Winston Smith, readjusting Ministry of Plenty’s figures is not even
forgery. Rather it appears like substituting one piece of nonsense for another because most of the figures mentioned do not have any connection with the real
world. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with
anything in the real world, not even the kind of connexion that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original
version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head p. 36.
For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of
boots for the quarter year at 145 million pairs. The actual output was sixty-two millions.
Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had
been over fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions.
Very likely, no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that
every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot p.36.
The economic system built by the totalitarian regime government through
Miniplenty makes the structural violence potentially occurs. Its unjust economic systems and structures harm, or kill people. There is an unequal power and
consequently unequal life chances which faced by the citizen. Besides that, the state’s institution Miniplenty guarantees economic privilege only amongst the
elite Inner Party members.
51