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.Yet the impression this passage leaves sits awkwardly beside anotherimpression Orwell cultivates later in the text.Here Orwell is exploring the The Price of Poverty 53housing shortage, and he tells a little story about a conversation he hadwith a miner.The salient passage goes as follows:Talking once with a miner I asked him when the housing shortagefirst became acute in his district; he answered, When we were toldabout it, meaning that till recently people s standards were so lowthat they took almost any degree of overcrowding for granted.This, he said, was the kind of thing people would put up with till theywere told about it. (Ibid.: 64 5)Orwell hastens to add that he does not know whether this is true, though ithas a degree of plausibility about it.Perhaps he would have liked it to beuntrue because he wanted to think that the poor are aware of and sensitiveto their misery.People forced to live eleven in a room should surely knowthat this is an indecent hardship, and Orwell wanted to impress his readerswith the idea that the people forced to endure such deplorable conditionsare not blind to their fate.Unlike, say, Down and Out, this was part of hisliterary agenda in Wigan Pier.His better-off readers must now give upthe belief that the deplorable conditions that accompany poverty are not the same for them as it would be for us (Ibid.: 18).It is just the same,and the poor know it.Yet this view of the matter merely makes the question of the politicalpowerlessness of these people all the more urgent.If the miners of Wiganare aware of their sorry predicament, they are still not disposed to do muchof anything about it.The reason, moreover, seems built into Orwell saccount of poverty in Down and Out and Aspidistra.Poverty numbs themind to such an extent that those who suffer, and perhaps knowingly suffer,from it are incapable of thinking sufficiently to become angry over theirsituation.The poor are caught in the grip of a power vice, and they have noidea how to break loose, even if they seriously entertained the desire tobreak loose.They are the prisoners of circumstance and unable to controlor even influence the forces that impose upon them a condition that theydetest.The fatalism Orwell encounters in Wigan is again underscored bythe limited horizons of the mind of the people condemned to live lives ofdrudgery and poverty.Even if they are aware of their plight, they endure itbecause it is all they have, all they know.Their consciousness does notextend to the realm of politics or to more theoretical reflections on what isand what, with a little political effort, might be.But in Wigan Orwell also noticed how these horizons of the mind are con-strained by silly diversions and the bric-a-brac of modernity.He documents 54 ORWELL, POLITICS, AND POWERwith derision the way the poor of the north were occupied by transientpleasures and mindless activities.Unlike the dishwashers of Paris, theyhave enough spare time to entertain themselves with simple palliatives.With apparent amazement he tells of a moment that made a lasting impres-sion on him.I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland.Hitler, Locarno, Fascism and the threat of war aroused hardly a flickerof interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stoppublishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell theFootball Pools) flung all of Yorkshire into a fury.(Ibid.: 89)5This marks the demise of Orwell as a conspiracy theorist, though hecontinued to attribute an obsession with the need for control of the lowerclasses to the upper class.But the rich and powerful need not work overtlyto protect themselves from the mob.The circumstances of modernity havetaken care of this.He develops this thought in a manner worth noting atlength:Of course the post-war development of cheap luxuries has been avery fortunate thing for our rulers.It is quite likely that fish and chips,art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ouncebars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Footballpools have between them averted revolution.Therefore we aresometimes told that the whole thing is an astute manoeuvre by thegoverning class a sort of bread and circuses business to holdthe unemployed down.What I have seen of our governing class doesnot convince me that they have that much intelligence.The thinghas happened, but by an unconscious process the quite naturalinteraction between the manufacturer s need for a market and theneed of half-starving people for cheap palliatives.(Ibid.: 90)There is a thin line, it would seem, between complacency and content-ment.The working poor, with no background to help them think otherwise,find a bit of contentment in their lives.They have things that matter tothem; they find solace in the diversions that blind them to the reality oftheir situation.Granted, these things are rather close to home, but they stillmatter.Orwell found a bit of nobility in the simplicity and dedication ofthe working folk he encountered in Wigan, but he also found them dread-fully stupid.They have no inclination to rebel because they have no political The Price of Poverty 55consciousness.As they see it, they have tinned salmon, the football pools,gambling, and alcohol to meet their needs and fill up their few moments ofleisure.They are the victims of an indecency they cannot begin to recog-nize.They are powerless because they are oblivious.And their powerlessnessis not the product of deliberate oppression by a tyrannical upper class butthe consequence of an unconscious process. Their entrapment is the resultof the power grid of events the kind of uncontrolled and unmanagedpower that was of concern to Foucault.5All this will seem familiar enough to students of Nineteen Eighty-Four.Orwell s account of the proles parrots almost exactly the view of the work-ing poor he develops in Wigan Pier.But we move too quickly if we concludethat the lower classes simply factor out of Orwell s political theory at thispoint.For there remains the inspiring moments he experienced in Spain.InSpain, Orwell tells us, he fought against fascism and for common decency(Orwell, 1952: 47).But there is little surprise in this; he fought for commondecency his entire life and against fascism once he recognized its politicalpresence.And it was also in Spain that he experienced what he called equality in fact
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