Eruditorum Press

Pounded in the butt by dialectical materialism.

Jack Graham

About Jack Graham

Jack Graham wrote about Doctor Who and Marxism, often at the same time. These days he co-hosts the I Don't Speak German podcast with Daniel Harper.Support Jack on Patreon.

Posts by Jack Graham:

The Power of the Zargoids (Reconstructed)

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What follows is a substantially rewritten version of something I wrote AGES ago and originally posted at my old site. The original version struck me as woefully inadequate (and embarassingly gushy… which is a fault of mine) when I reread it recently.

Is ‘The Power of the Daleks’ a parable about a democracy destabilised by fascists or about an authoritarian society destabilised by liberals, or even people who think of themselves as leftists? Well… the answer is, of course, yes.

If this is about the rise of fascism, there are some problems with it. Bragen works as a sort of fascist, scheming to replace a relatively soft regime with an authoritarian one which he will rule with an iron fist. But the presence of the Daleks muddies this, separating the barbarism of fascism from fascism as a political movement. The Daleks have always been symbols of totalitarianism so, when they turn on the astonished rebels, it makes it hard to see the rebels as analogous to the Nazi party. If the rebels are Nazis, it should be they who are persecuting the ethnic minority in the colony… and that’s the Daleks! And the depiction of fascism is inadequate anyway because it is depicted as the work of one man acting on his own psychological motives. The story manages to notice that fascism emerges from social democracy, that it is a mass movement which can mobilise some popular support and appear radical… but predicates it on one man’s ambition and offers no context for it, no recognition of the fact that it is a form of class war waged at times when the capitalist system is (or perceives itself to be) under intense threat from crisis, instability and rising working class resistance and mobilisation.

But a full analysis of fascism as an actual historical phenomenon isn’t what the story is trying to do. And, in any case, the rebels are never conclusively identified as a fascist movement… and nor is the Governor’s regime ever conclusively identified as democratic. It might be an unelected oligarchy, for all we know. It has military undertones, almost like the colony’s social superstructure is built upon the ranks and hierarchies of a military expedition. Hensall seems happy for Bragen to acquire more and more police muscle as long as he thinks they’re his to call upon. Hensall’s government certainly seems to operate very much behind closed doors amongst small groups of plummy-voiced men… but then so does ours and we’d call ours a “democracy”, meaningfully enough as long as all we’re doing is distinguishing it from places like Saudi Arabia. In any case, it’s perfectly possible that the rebels are a liberal or leftist movement reacting to an authoritarian regime.

The rebels don’t seem to be an ideologically revolutionary organisation. They certainly behave like one… although they may simply be a non-revolutionary organisation forced into clandestine meetings by authoritarian repression… though, the guards who’d do the repressing are commanded by the rebel leader, so…. hmm, it’s all a bit confusing.…

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The Book of Pecksniff

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All the extracts from Blair’s book that I’ve been reading in the papers… they’ve reminded me of why I used to always refer to Blair as “Pecksniff”. It was my special name for him, even back at the start (I’m proud to be able to say I never voted for him).

Pecksniff is described in Chuzzlewit as “a direction-post, which is always telling the way to a place, and never goes there.” That what Blair is. An utter hypocrite. A series of empty gestures towards morality, probity, mature realism, conviction, progressivism, etc. But you follow the gestures and see that they go absolutely nowhere. And then you turn back to the gesturer and, just for a second, you catch the smirk.

The unctuous self-righteousness that leaks from every pore even as he ruthlessly furthers himself with every word and deed; the pained sincerity with which he winces over the foolishness of those who are misguided enough to disagree with him or doubt his word; the Christian piety with which he carpet bombed population centres. And all of it fake. Even now, it’s clear that his dominant emotion concerning the Iraq war, and the subsequent fall out, is self-pity.

But the man is soaked in blood… and he knows it. All this “ooh, the scary thing is that he really believes it” bullshit. You can’t write material like that forensically picked over here without knowing that you’re being studiedly dishonest. The irony is that his own obfuscations and shifty evasions reveal the utter moral bankruptcy of the man better than anything else ever written about him. In a way, with the book’s artifice concerning the case for the war, he’s finally admitted the truth.

And we’re supposed to care that all the royalties of the book are going to charity! So what? The bastard could give every other million he owns to charity and hang himself in Fallujah and it wouldn’t make any bloody difference.

Oh, er… he’s a bit like a Cyberman or something. There, that’s made this post relevant to this blog. I’m covered.
…

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Hartnellical Materialism

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Gallibase has relaunched ‘Timelash’ as a story-per-day affair. Along with others, I’ve managed a review (ranging from a terse comment to a bloated essay) for every story. It goes without saying, I don’t have a girlfriend.

Anyway. Today, we got to ‘The Tenth Planet’ and so I thought I might post my comments here – or the more interesting ones anyway (everything being relative) – and make it a regular thing every time we finish with a Doctor. Basically, I’m very bored.

As you will see, my view of the Hartnell era is much influenced by the work of V. Gordon Childe, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism in general, the wobbly ‘permanent arms economy’ theory, William Morris, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Edward Said and lots of thinly veiled class hatred. There’s also some stuff in here that might remind you of the About Time books… but, with all due respect to Miles and Wood, I’d already thought of it all before I read them. When I mention something that I got from them, I acknowledge it.

‘An Unearthly Child’

It’s been said before but its true: the first episode is amazing, the other three are disappointing… but only by comparison.

The first episode really is extraordinary; an example of pure TV alchemy. A fusion of literate sci-fi, children’s fiction, folklore, the aesthetics of ‘everyday life’ drama, urban gothic and the uncanny. Somehow, everything comes together to create something fascinating, suggestive, oneric and scary.

The stuff with the tribe is rather grim and plodding by comparison… yet, note how seriously it demands to be taken. And note the thought that went into the themes.

To the Doctor, Ian and Barbara are savages… just as the tribe are to Ian and Barbara. Fire is technology, the future… to be acquired by a society struggling in cold and darkness… just as the TARDIS is a symbol of the same quest for power through technology. The reluctant crewmates of the TARDIS find themselves forced to be a tribe, to be a society in miniature.

Note, also, the characterisation of the Doctor. His intellect (which is ruthless and cold) is undermined by his emotional reactions. When he doesn’t think too hard, he reacts with instinctive compassion. “If he dies, there will be no fire!” And then he proceeds to deduce who murdered The Old Woman (nice character for an actress to be offered) and ruthlessly engineer the coup against Kal.

Note also, how many of the series long running concerns are already present: technology, tools, political struggle, tyranny, literacy, death, social and universal and technological entropy…

Really, this story libels tribal societies. Hunter-gather societies (in which humans lived for the vast majority of their history) were almost certainly very egalitarian and probably dominated by social altruism. Certainly, most tribal societies that survived into the modern era demonstrated startling ethics of fairness and sharing. They didn’t behave like the Tribe of Gum, who are ruthless and selfish throatslitters, preying on each other, yearning for hierarchical domination and unable to understand compassion.…

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Law & Order: Special Sarcasm Unit

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As a fan of both Mark Steel and old Public Information Films, I like the clip below.

The wonderfully shifty, disreputable-looking spivs and wideboys in the old film are the direct ancestors of the hoodied happy-slappers who rampage through the urban warzones of Tunbridge Wells and Wootton Bassett in the fevered nightmares of modern Daily Mail readers.

Still, at least in the olden days you could call the bobbies whenever you saw a cockney loitering near a car… in these days of totalitarian Political Correctness, call the police and you’ll probably be prosecuted under EEC health and safety laws (in case, y’know, the policeman who answers the phone hurts himself picking up the reciever… or gets offended because you’re not a Muslim or something…)

Also, we no longer have those handy boxes everywhere (see 2 minutes 10 seconds into the video above… the bit that makes the video vaguely relevant to this blog). But then, if we did they’d all be carted away under the cover of darkness by tragic geeks with enough space in their spare rooms.

Oh, just give me an Abso for sarcasm and we’ll call the matter closed.…

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Mything the Point

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What’s the difference between RTD and Moffat?

RTD, for all that he’s an atheist, has a fundamentally religious view. I mean that, while he may not have any belief in an actual god, his basic outlook on life (at least as it finds expression in his writing) is religious in tone and is informed by religious mythology. RTD can’t think about concepts like ‘the end of the world’, or ’saving the world’, or ‘regenerating’, or any of this stuff (all very much the bread and butter of pulp fantasy fiction, which is all Who is really) without connecting it, maybe subconsciously, to religious concepts and stories. (Well, he can, but for the purposes of this theory, I’m going to pretend that he can’t. So there.)

‘Bad Wolf’/’Parting of the Ways’, ‘Gridlock’, ‘Voyage of the Damned’, ‘Sound of Drums’/’Last of the Time Lords’ and the other season finales… they’re all soaked in religious language and imagery, in Christian symbolism. And the theme of fiery judgement is never far away, nor is the idea of someone sacrificing themselves to redeem the world. Isn’t ‘The Ark in Space‘ supposedly his favourite classic story? No wonder.

I might also mention the fact that his most Whoish work prior to Who (much more Whoish than either of those kids’ fantasy serials he wrote) was about the second coming of Christ. This isn’t unusual. Douglas Adams was another atheist sci-fi writer obsessed with religion. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapleton, Arthur C. Clarke… in fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a half-decent sci-fi author who doesn’t spend a large amount of his time thinking and writing about religion in one form or another.

Moffat, on the other hand, has no such underlying religious conception. He plays with these concepts on a technical level. He’s much more interested in playing around with plot for its own sake, twisting it around like origami. But there are some problems with this.

Firstly, he doesn’t tune into the mythological/religious basis of science-fiction (which is a reiteration of mythology in the secular age of technology). Secondly, he seems to lack any real interest in evil… which is problematic because Doctor Who, like religion (and, incidentally, like Shakespeare), is absolutely obsessed with evil (and not always in a simplistic way). You might be tempted to bring up Jekyll now… but I’ll remind you that, in Moffat’s conception, even Mr Hyde turns out to be an expression of the fierceness and danger inherent in love.

Consequently, his stories tend to be about malfunctions. They’re about things going wrong, usually technology. Nanogenes, automatic repair systems on spaceships, etc… but also chronology (any supposedly linear, predictable system, really)… and, when dealing with chronology, he can use that as a way of playing around with plot for its own sake.

The problem with playing around with plot for its own sake is that you tend to tie yourself into narrative knots that are very hard to cut through while retaining dramatic values.…

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The Megropolis 1 Budget – at a glance:

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The Gatherer today unveiled harsh new plans to deal with the economic crisis caused by loss of investor confidence after Pluto was ruled to no longer be a planet.

The Medical Tax on Q-Capsules is to raised to 20%. Also to be raised is the Medical Tax on all other types of capsules ranging from A to P. And from R to Z. Also, purchase of these capsules is to be made compulsary. It is hoped that the energy boost provided by a steady diet of these capsules will contribute towards higher productivity.

Cider-flavoured pills remain exempt, much to the relief of the Usurian Cider-Flavoured Pill Production Company.

A new 20% tax is to be levied on extremely plummy accents in all PCM plant workers.

The tax on ill-fitting, pastel-coloured clothes is to be increased to 20%.

All co-workers with names that sound amusingly (but rather arbitrarily) like a double act of comedy female impersonators are to henceforth have all their taxes raised. By 20%.

A 20% suicide tax is to be introduced for all D-Grades, to compensate the Company (praise the Company) for loss of profit (and tax revenue) resulting from the self-inflicted deaths of those who refuse to pull their weight.

The current 0.2% tax on ludicrous hats is to be scrapped. This will stimulate the ludicrous hat industry.

To help business, a new 100% tax immunity is to be introduced for people with no head hair. Scissors, razors and old age to be banned.

The suns to be privatised. At below cost price. Regulation of prices of UV-rays to be abolished.

Tough but fair. Remember citizens… we’re all in this together. Until things are going well again, whereupon fuck you. Praise the Company.

(This was originally posted after Osbourne’s budget. You guessed that, didn’t you?)…

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Decimate! Decimate!

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There (was) one of those ‘10 worst Doctor Who stories ever’ threads currently doing a brisk trade over at Gallibase at the moment and, yes, the fires of list fever and whingeaholism burn in my geek heart also, so here’s mine.

My criteria are nothing to do with bad acting, bad effects, shakey plots or anything like that. I can usually tolerate those with a grin on my face. I’m looking for stories that betray the central ethos of the show, that embody or exhibit cynicism, crass commercialism, cliché, group-think, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism and silence or ignorance about things that matter.

Here are my ten rotten eggs, in no particular order.

1. ‘Victory of the Daleks’ – or, to give it its proper alternative title – ‘Merchandising of the Daleks’. Of course, the Daleks have always been an intensively milked cash cow, but this squalid episode brings the cynicism involved to a new subterranean low. The production team have not only redesigned the Daleks, they parade the (ugly) redesign in a selection of vibrant, collectable primary colours. Gotta catch ‘em all, kids. This sort of thing has always gone on, but to see it done with such obvious and slick calculation by the people actually writing the scripts… well, it turns the stomach. Plus, this story presents mass-murdering terrorist, aristo class warrior and racist imperialist Winston Churchill as a twinkly old rogue with whom the Doctor can be an uncritical hug-buddy. What’s next, an episode in which the Doctor teams up with his old pal General Pinochet to fight an army of sentient novelty mobile phone covers? Utterly revolting. Not even the close-ups of Karen Gillan’s freckles can save this one from the lowest, hottest circle of Who Hell.

2. ‘The Shakespeare Code’ – sub-Blackadder clichés take the place of any real attempt to portray a fascinating man in a fascinating place at a fascinating time. Ignorant bardolatry takes the form of a depiction of Shakespeare as a hyper-intuitive Gallagher brother celeb/yobbo. Martha relapses into cypherhood for the course of this story. Dreary doggerel masquerades as lost Shakespeare material. Reality is saved by lines of J. K. Rowling while no real attempt is made to engage with Shakespearean material, to express why it is so valuable. The kids are simply told: Shakespeare was a GENIUS… which is a good way to keep them thinking that his work must be unapproachable. Even the title is stupid – it’s a riff on that excremental “novel” by Dan Brown… for absolutely no reason, unless it is covert self-mockery. Which I doubt.

3. ‘The Unquiet Dead’ – At the height of a reactionary media scare about immigrants, this episode (accidentally) presents us with an anti-asylum seeker parable in which Charles Dickens learns that the message of A Christmas Carol was deeply mistaken: charity to the downtrodden isn’t necessary for the full development of the human soul after all but is, rather, a foolish and dangerous extravagance on the part of the self-serving and guilt-ridden.…

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From Our Skaro Correspondent

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(This was originally written in the aftermath of the election. I read Private Eye, you see.)

In the recent elections held by the surviving Kaled Elite (scientific and military), neither Davros nor Gharman recieved a full majority.

Gharman felt that his performance in recent debates within the Kaled bunker had increased his surport, yet this failed to translate into the “complete landslide against any further development of the Daleks” that he had been expecting. “It seems that, in these trying times… what with the Kaled Dome being destroyed and the rest of our race being exterminated and everything… people decided to stick with what they know” he said yesterday.

“We have a hung Elite,” said Davros’ trusted deputy, Security Commander Nyder, “which is precisely what we ought to do to all members of the Elite who betray Davros: hang them. Slowly. With piano wire.”

However, after several rounds of negotiations, a deal has been struck between the Davros and Gharman factions.

“We’ve had to make a few concessions,” said Gharman. “Firstly, Davros will remain as leader. And we’ll carry on trying to kill all the Thals. And that weird bloke with the scarf whose been hanging around here lately will have to be caught and executed. And, yes, development of the Daleks will continue. However, Davros has partially agreed to our key demand that the creatures should have a moral sense, a judgement of ‘right and wrong’. In a major concession, Davros has agreed to give the Dalek creatures fully half of our proposed set of moral instincts. They’re going to get ‘wrong’. But this is a place to start. From here, ‘right’ is something we can work towards. I want to stress that, while some in our faction might be uneasy about this, I feel that we’ve scored a major victory. After all, I am now Davros’ deputy leader, Kavell will become Minister of White Tunics, and Kravos – our young star – has been made Under-Minister of Heart Pumps.”

Terry Nation is 80.…

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Workers of the Whoniverse

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(This was originally written for May Day.)

Some people think Doctor Who is inherently left-wing. This is bullshit. But… like much bullshit, there’s a fibrous grain of truth in there somewhere if you don latex gloves, break the crust and delve deeply enough into the contents of the pat.

Doctor Who started just before the worldwide explosion of dissent and protest that represents the real point of what is called (inaccurately) “the 60s”. It ran through the years of the Vietnam war, the end of the post-war economic boom, the worldwide wave of protests by students and workers, France in ’68, the Prague Spring, the height of the civil rights movement, the ascendancy (and murder) of Martin Luther King Jnr., the rise of the women’s movement and feminism, the rise of the gay liberation movement, etc. It ran during interesting times. It reflected the massive changes in social attitude that were transforming Western culture – how could it not, being a product of Western culture? It reflected something amorphous and overhyped (but real) that we call “the liberal consensus”, which is easy to take for granted now but which was a drastic change in the whole nature and consciousness of Western capitalist society, brought about by the struggles of kids, students, minorities, oppressed people and workers. It was, for the most part, shaped by creative people who were interested in their world and had a tendency to be open-minded, liberal and tolerant in their outlook, i.e. people like Barry Letts. And, later, it reflected the backlash against these changes which were lead, on this little island, by Margaret “Evil Edna” Thatcher, a backlash of which a younger generation of lefty/eco/liberals like Andrew Cartmel were strongly disapproving.

Moreover, the show was originally a product of a state-funded public service broadcaster that didn’t have to compete in the marketplace in order to survive and had a mandated role to reflect the entire nation. Beyond wanting there to be someone for the kids to identify with (and Dad to lust over) there wasn’t much time spent on demographics and other such marketing preoccupations (at least not compared to today). Reith may have been a reactionary old patrician, but Reithianism in the abstract is almost a quality-not-quantity ethic with paternalistic distortions. And the cheap-and-cheerful nature of the old series gave it a strange freedom, at least some of the time. The BBC always used the show as a cash cow, but it has only become so near-crucial to BBC prestige and revenue in recent years. And there is also the philistinism of management to remember – a BBC bigwig might send an angry memo to a producer if he thinks an episode is too scary for the nation’s chidlers while missing the fact that the same episode is sub-textually critiquing Western imperialism.

Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle.…

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FYI

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I’ve deleted my original attempt at a Shabgraff blog. Firstly, people were getting Trojan Horse alerts when they visited it. Secondly, the dashboard at that site was hard to use and fiddly. Hopefully, Shabgraff will find a final resting place here at Blogger.com. I’m going to repost the entries from the old blog (and take an entirely cynical opportunity to alter bits of them that I’ve thought better of since their original appearance).

Like so……

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