Ninth Three-Year Plan

The Ninth Three-Year Plan is the official economic planning period of Oceania during the opening of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, a scheme whose sixth quarter is the fourth quarter of 1983. Within the novel it never appears as production or prosperity at all: it exists as a set of documents, forecasts and pledges that are silently rewritten in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth. The plan is the book's most concentrated image of an economy run entirely on forgery, in which statistics are manufactured, quotas are claimed to have been overfulfilled, and the material world recedes behind a screen of paper.

The Plan and the Ministries

Oceania's entire apparatus of government is divided among four Ministries: the Ministry of Truth, the Ministry of Peace, the Ministry of Love and the Ministry of Plenty, the last being responsible for economic affairs and known in Newspeak as Miniplenty. It is the Ministry of Plenty that presides over the Ninth Three-Year Plan, whose sixth quarter falls in the fourth quarter of 1983. On the nineteenth of December 1983 the Times published the official forecasts for the output of consumption goods in that quarter; by the time the next issue appeared, the actual output was known, and the forecasts were in every instance grossly wrong. Winston Smith's task is to rectify the original figures by making them agree with the later ones. The same routine applies to promises as well as numbers: in February the Ministry of Plenty had issued a "categorical pledge" that the chocolate ration would not be reduced during 1984, yet the ration is in fact cut from thirty grammes to twenty at the end of the present week, so Winston substitutes a warning that a reduction may be necessary at some time in April.

The Boots That Were Never Produced

The falsification is not a matter of correcting honest errors. As Winston re-adjusts the Ministry of Plenty's figures, he reflects that what he is doing is not even forgery, but merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. The forecast had estimated boot output for the quarter at a hundred and forty-five million pairs; the actual output was given as sixty-two million; and Winston, in rewriting the forecast, marks the figure down to fifty-seven million so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been over-fulfilled. In any case, sixty-two million is no nearer the truth than fifty-seven million or a hundred and forty-five million. Very likely no boots had been produced at all, and even likelier still that nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All that is certain is that astronomical numbers of boots are produced on paper every quarter while perhaps half the population of Oceania goes barefoot. Every class of recorded fact fades into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year becomes uncertain.

Why the Plan Lies

The deception embedded in the plan is not a side-effect of incompetence but a deliberate expression of Party power. Winston later reads in Emmanuel Goldstein's The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism that the machine had made it clear that the need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared, and that hunger, overwork, dirt, illiteracy and disease could have been eliminated within a few generations if the machine were used deliberately for that end; in fact, over a period of about fifty years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the machine had greatly raised the living standards of the average human being. Instead of building on this possibility, Oceania had let scientific and technical progress fail because the empirical habit of thought could not survive in a strictly regimented society, so that the world as a whole grew more primitive than it had been fifty years earlier and the only inventions that continued to appear were devices connected with warfare and police espionage. O'Brien later states the underlying creed without disguise: the Party seeks power entirely for its own sake, not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness, but power, pure power, and unlike earlier oligarchies it knows what it is doing. The Ninth Three-Year Plan, with its phantom boot quotas and broken chocolate pledges, is one of the instruments by which that pure power is exercised over material life.

The Lived Reality Behind the Numbers

Behind the plan's numbers lies a social reality of bareness, dinginess and listlessness. Winston reflects that the truly characteristic thing about modern life is not its cruelty and insecurity but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness; great areas of it, even for a Party member, are neutral and non-political, a matter of slogging through dreary jobs, fighting for a place on the Tube, darning a worn-out sock, cadging a saccharine tablet and saving a cigarette end. The same drive to shape human material extends to the body and to desire itself. The Party's aim is not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control, but to remove all pleasure from the sexual act: marriages between Party members have to be approved by a committee, the only recognised purpose of marriage is to beget children for the service of the Party, and sexual intercourse is to be looked on as a slightly disgusting minor operation. The economic plan and the sexual regimen are parallel projects, both attempts to drain life of its unplanned, private satisfactions.

A Paper World and a Thought Crime

The plan is processed through the machinery that sustains the Party's version of reality. When a message requires attention, Winston dials 'back numbers' on the telescreen and calls for the appropriate issues of the Times, which slide out of the pneumatic tube after a few minutes' delay; once he has dealt with a message he crumples up the original and drops it into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames. All history, he knows, is a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. The Records Department is itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job is to supply the citizens of Oceania with every conceivable kind of information, instruction and entertainment. The transaction is routine; messages are disposed of before the Two Minutes Hate interrupts the morning. Behind his back the telescreen babbles about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan, but he has already understood that the street patrols do not matter, only the Thought Police matter. His quiet work of making the plan's figures agree with themselves is part of the same system of lies that will carry him to the Ministry of Love; at the end of the novel, sitting in the Chestnut Tree Café, he gazes up at the enormous face and knows that the struggle is finished. He has won the victory over himself. He loves Big Brother.