Eruditorum Press

Discontent creators

the state

Yay for voting! Ain’t democracy just peaches!

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Off out to vote today on who runs the civil service… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the police… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the army… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the corporations… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the media… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today on who runs the BBC… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?

Off out to vote today for a non neoliberal party with a chance of winning… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today for a big party staunchly opposed to imperialist warmongering… oh, no, hang about, there aren’t any are there?
Off out to vote today for a big party committed to saving us from environmental disaster… oh, no, hang about, there aren’t any are there?
Off out to vote today for someone who represents my relation to production… oh, no, hang about, we vote in geographical blocs, don’t we?
Off out to vote today on who runs the judiciary… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who owns most of the land and property in the UK… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who owns and runs the banks… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Off out to vote today on who gets to use economic clout to lobby politicians… oh, no, hang about, we’re not allowed to do that are we?
Yay, every four or five years I get to participate – very indirectly, if I’m lucky – in an electoral system rigged against the expression of unified working class interests! 
I get a tiny, very occasional say in choosing which team of essentially identical managers cares for neoliberalism under a vastly unaccountable government system hugely influenced by private interests!  
I get to slightly influence one lever of power, while almost every other lever of power in the system is nearly entirely undemocratic and unaccountable!  
This is what the Chartists fought and died for!  [It isn’t.]
Yay for democracy!
Remember, if you don’t vote, you’ve got no right to complain.


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“Go on, tell them,” says Jacko to Sean. 

“Tell them what? I’ll tell them nothing. They’re not people like us, they’re just a bunch of sardines.”

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

“You heard me,” jeers Sean, “Cold-blooded fishes. You haven’t got a drop of good red blood in your body.”

They don’t like that either.  They’ve been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it’s implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don’t make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

“A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!” Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say… Sean’s Irish, hence his “gift of the gab” (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

“All right, all right, all right,” laughs Sean, “Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?”

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he’s like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff’s regime.  He hasn’t been surgically mutilated, but he’s been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and… oh look, I’m reiterating.)

“Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?” asks Sean rhetorically, “It can’t be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That’s why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You’re men, aren’t you? Well, start the blockade right now!”

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people’s expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won’t attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people’s underwater strike is indescribable.  And that’s good.  It must be seen to be believed… and by that I don’t mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean ‘believed’ in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that’s good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It’s a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially. …

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9

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Wow.  Single figures.  Okay, time for some fun.

“I’m asking you to help yourselves,” says the Doctor. 

Revolution isn’t about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic.  It is, as Marx saw it, “the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority“.

“Nothing will change round here unless you change it,” says the Doctor.  Here is ‘freedom and necessity‘.  It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.

“What will we do with two guns against all those guards?” asks Veet.

“You can’t do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number.”

“It’s crazy talk,” says Goudry, “Rebellion? No one would support you.”  Capitalist realism.

“Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?”

The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak.  That’s how it works on Pluto.  Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.

The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.

“I was a B grade in Main Control,” says Mandrell, “The Doctor’s right. It could work.”

Until now, nobody has been more cynical.  But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.

The Doctor isn’t stinting on the revolutionary optimism.  He suggests taking over main control.  Mandrell thinks it could be done.

“What have we got to lose?” he asks.

“Only your claims,” says the Doctor.

Everyone is quite impressed by this.  It’s a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference.  The Doctor knows full well what he’s saying – and he’s not just punning.  Workers don’t usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world.  They have their ‘claims’ of course – claims upon democracy and human rights, etc… But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers’ ‘claims’ are essentially the same as ‘nothing’.

“Anything’s worth trying,” says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, “If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!”

“There’s no ‘if’ about it, Cordo,” says the Doctor, “We will.”

There’s ‘the actuality of the revolution‘ for you.

Robert Holmes is often called a cynic… but he was at least as much a romantic.  This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution.  The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders.  The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he’s a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter.  (Revolution changes people even as they change society – one reason why waiting until we’ve all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo.  You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.)  The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers’ state in about a day. …

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Skulltopus 11: Changing States

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Before the Skulltopus series moves on to the Baker years (and beyond), I feel the need to settle accounts with the Pertwee era, particularly with Peladon.  Also, I need to clarify something about the way capitalism is portrayed and perceived in – and by – Doctor Who.

The maggots in ‘The Green Death‘ are the Pertwee era’s last gasp of the Weirdesque.  ‘Green Death’ is also the last Pertwee story to properly notice capitalism.

Admittedly, there is some riffing on ‘greed’ in ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’; and ‘Monster of Peladon’ regurgitates (in a reduced form) the political semiotics of its parent story.  However, in these stories, while class is in evidence… class struggle even!… there is no tracing it back to anything recognisable as capitalist social relations.

I’ll get to this, but first I want to loop back to address something about ‘Carnival of Monsters’ that I should’ve mentioned previously: Vorg as an entrepreneur and how this relates to the society in which he finds himself.  Firstly, Inter-Minor isn’t recognisably capitalist.  The latent revolution in ‘Carnival’ – the imminent revolt of the Functionaries that President Zarb (the panicky social democrat) is trying to placate and Kalik (the fascist) wants to crush – tracks back to race (the story does some heavy riffing on race) but stops there.  It comes close… at one point mentioning a strike… but we get no sense of particularly capitalist relations.  There are no wages, no profits, no recognisable industrial workplaces and only the barest suggestion of a market at the very end.  Vorg, like other Robert Holmes creations, can be read as an embodiment of a more likeable version of free enterprise.  Like Milo Clancy or Garron, Vorg is a private operator, a colourful chancer, an individualist, a guy on the make who seems vital and amusing when stood next to grey statist authoritarians.  But Vorg’s polari version of laissez faire is ultimately judged harmless, or even constructive.  He gets some stick for keeping “livestock” in the scope… and it’s possible to read the scope itself as a metaphor for commodity fetishism, displaying how commodification of living people involves their compartmentalisation and alienation from proper awareness of the endless rut in which they circle.  However, I think this is far more about race as an artificial construct than it is about commodification (I’ll try to address this in another post some time).  And, ultimately, Vorg’s carny capitalism seems to be a potential force for change, progress and reform in the insular, ultra-statist backwater of Inter-Minor.  He ends the story fleecing Pletrac… but the tone the story takes with this implies that a dose of Vorg is just what the Inter-Minorans need.  To the extent that capitalism appears in ‘Carnival’, it does so through the rosy lens of Vorg.

Now, back to the post-‘Green Death’ Pertwee era.

‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ is a densely political text, hugely ambivalent and needing a great deal of unpacking.  There is, as I say, some harping on about the evils of ‘greed’ and an implied anxiety about industrial pollution… but, ultimately, the story essentializes the social dystrophies of capitalism into malformations in human nature, which are (it is implied) exacerbated when people go around believing things.…

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