marx
Grinding Engines
The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.
– Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820
Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won.
He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.
– Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.…
Legless in Legoland
I’ve become mildly obsessed by this image:
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| “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!” |
How do you get a Lego figure to look traumatised by the death of the woman it loves, and the supposed deaths of its newborn children, and the loss of its legs, and third degree burns over all of its body?
And what kind of a culture is it that even tries?
(Of course, as Richard Pilbeam – who brought the image to my attention in the first place – remarked, the Lego figure does a better job than Hayden Christensen.)
It strikes me that, the more Lego tries to cope with reconstructing scenes from movies – especially from movies like the Star Wars prequels or the later Harry Potter movies, that are self-consciously ‘dark’ – the more it has to bring in elements of painful ‘realism’, i.e. scars on Anakin’s face… but the addition of such features to the Lego aesthetic has an unfortunate effect… it starts to make it look like they’re taking the piss, South Park style, by representing things like serious injuries in crude, cartoon form.
This is particularly evident in the way the figure above simply has no Lego legs provided. Is there any child who ever played with Lego who didn’t, at some point, hold up a Lego torso/head combination without the legs attached and scream, on behalf of the figure, something along the lines of “AAAARGH! WHERE ARE MY LEGS????”, thus causing themselves wild hilarity? I know I did. (I hope I’m not telling you things about myself that I shouldn’t… but, to be honest, I write a blog that tries to subject Doctor Who to Marxist analysis, so, realistically, what have I got to lose in terms of being taken seriously?) The thing is that this exact same strategy – the leaving off of the legs – is now being deliberately employed by Lego to depict horrific mutilation.
Partly this is to do with the fact that a generation who grew up watching Star Wars are now writing and filming stories… and, in common with the fan mindset everywhere, they want to do the same kinds of stories, but better… more serious, more ‘dark’, etc. This is a double edged blade. It gave birth to the good and bad of the Virgin New Adventures, the good and bad of 2005+ Who, the good and bad of modern SF/fantasy fiction and film making. The apotheosis of the bad may be the awkward attempts to do ‘realist’ but bloodless and politically illiterate depictions of urban terrorism in the Nolan Batman films, with the urban terrorist opposed by a moralist ninja in a ‘realistic’ bat outfit. One side effect of this is that, increasingly, SF/Fantasy tries to be ‘serious’ and often tries to do this using what we might call The Gatiss Manoeuver, i.e. it tries to bring in pain and suffering.
Of course, there is a big dose of knowing, sly-winking, in-on-the-joke irony inherent in the whole Lego Star Wars / Harry Potter / Pirates of the Caribbean thing, the toys and computer games and film-recreations.…
Skulltopus 8: Society of the Tentacle
The quasi-tentacular returns in ‘The Claws of Axos’. Big time.
What’s more, this story is an orgy of strange flesh… to the extent of looking like a precursor to John Carpenter’s The Thing.
Now, if my idea is right – that, in the 70s, Doctor Who starts invoking Weird tentacles as a kind of evasion/signification of capitalism when it veers too close to potential systemic critique – then this really, really should show up in ‘The Claws of Axos’.
Not to keep you in suspense: it does.
Taking it on the Chinn
Now don’t get me wrong. I’d hate you to get the idea that I was claiming that ‘Claws’ is ‘subversive’ or anything. I’m not. It isn’t. As political critique goes, objectively, ‘Claws’ is feeble. Yes, it is very cynical about the government, but that in itself doesn’t amount to subversion. After all, Clear and Present Danger (to take an example more or less at random) features a secret plot by the President, the White House Chief of Staff and high-ranking CIA people to launch a covert war in South America – but Clear and Present Danger isn’t remotely subversive… indeed, it is a highly reactionary film that entirely supports the specious ideological assumptions of the American empire. This is slightly unfair to ‘Claws’, since it has, well, sharper claws than Tom Clancy via Hollywood (‘Claws’ is cynical about establishment power, while CaPD depicts the cynicism of powerful people as a danger to a fundamentally well-meaning establishment), but it does illustrate the point that simply depicting the wrongdoing of the state does not necessarily or automatically amount to a radical critique.
With its bourgeois patrician hero, its stiff-upper-lipped and self-sacrificing scientist/peer, its bog-standard sexist representation of Jo as dollybird-in-need-of-saving, its depiction of the American lawman (FBI? CIA? …something like that) as a square-jawed straight-arrow, the comic neutralisation of the issue of poverty, the implication that people starve because there is a lack of food rather than a lack of profit in feeding them, and many other such representations, ‘Claws’ is as well integrated into capitalist ideology, and as likely to ‘manufacture consent’, as any other Doctor Who story, the vast majority of which are straightforwardly and entirely unthreatening to the status quo. What political critique there is consists, for the most part, of moralistic liberal finger-wagging about greed, nationalism and xenophobia, which is itself compromised by the Axons turning out to be evil, shifty, bogus asylum seekers (that sort of thing didn’t start with Gatiss, sadly). Such moralistic liberal finger-wagging is inherently non-subversive and non-radical because it is inherently reformist rather than revolutionary, i.e. vote out the reactionaries, and get the common herd to be less materialistic, and capitalism will be fine and dandy.
However, everything is relative and context changes things.
The fact is, ‘Claws’ has probably the most straightforwardly, explicitly, non-metaphorical depiction of the British state as cynical and machiavellian of all Pertwee stories (though the impact is softened by Chinn’s comic incompetence). In ‘Claws’, the problem isn’t one slimey bureaucrat, one idiotic authority figure, one cowardly warmongering parliamentary private secretary… the problem is Chinn and his boss and the government they work for. …
Skulltopus 5: Fair Exchange, No Robbery
Erato the Tythonian in ‘The Creature from the Pit’ doesn’t much resemble an octopus, but nevertheless he/it is a shapeless, amorphous creature that extends a probe which is (briefly) a bit tentacular… though this tends to be obscured by the fact that it also supposedly resembles a cock:
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| If this picture reminds you of your genitals, seek immediate medical advice. |
Neither seems to have been the writer’s intention. Indeed, in the novelisation, it is specifically stated that “you couldn’t call it a tentacle”. The probe is repeatedly described in terms of hands, fingers and fists. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Erato is meant to be a kind of giant, disembodied brain.
However, the probe is a long, flexible, green, non-humanoid limb… so let’s not fear to call it a quasi-tentacle, whatever Fisher says.
In any case, the Tythonian is – at least until it starts talking – reminiscent of the Weird… if only via its unstable and amorphous blobbiness.
In this post, I suggested that ‘Spearhead from Space’ erupts into tentacles at the end partly as a way of obscuring something else that is going on in the story, namely a convergence of various themes towards a potential critique of modern British capitalism as a system of hierarchy, racism, imperialism, sexism and exploitation. (Click the link and read it if you think I’ve gone mad.)
I’m planning, in forthcoming posts, to suggest that Doctor Who in the 70s adopts the tentacular as a recurring way of simultaneously fleeing from and signifying capitalism. There is a prelude to this: the Weirdish ab-crabs in ‘The Macra Terror‘. There’s also a transitional story at the other end, just before the semiotic connection largely dies out in the 80s. This transitional story is the final story of the 70s to feature the tentacular even as a suggestion.
Transitional Form
Philip Sandifer, at his TARDIS Eruditorum blog, has described ‘The Creature from the Pit’ as “a proper anti-capitalist screed”. He describes Adrasta as “a selfish arch capitalist who is perfectly happy to thrive while everyone else suffers” and notes that Tat Wood and Lawrence Miles are wrong to write off as anachronistic the idea that Adrasta could’ve been intended as a Thatcher figure (the story was written during the election that she went on to win). However, his argument is considerably more sophisticated than this and rests more especially on something he identifies in the script: the subversion of the (by now) standard Doctor Who ‘evil ruling class vs. rebels’ trope. Sandifer identifies this story as coinciding with the great shift in the ‘centre ground’ of British politics that more-or-less coincided with the advent of Thatcherism.
…The key thing is… the way in which both sides of an apparent political debate were in one sense indistinguishable because they both adhered to the same premise… [For example] the way in which the trade unions, Callaghan, and Thatcher all took for granted that maximizing profit was the right thing to do. The idea that they were opposing sides in many key ways serves more to cut other perspectives out of the debate entirely than it does to actually describe a fundamental philosophical difference between them.
The Empire of Vanilla
Some things I’ve noticed about ‘Spearhead from Space’
There’s a lot of wood in this story.
This suggests a contrast, a conflict even, between older forms of production – the appearance of the hospital, and the Seeleys’ cottage, suggest artisanship – and newer industrial technology and mass production, represented by the factory and the evil plastic which creeps out of it.
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| Mullins, one of the many wage labourers in this story… seen here in the act of labouring for his wage. |
There are the workers in the plastics factory.
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| I don’t know, but I’d guess that these women – together with the male worker seen earlier in the episode, operating heavy machinery – are actual workers in the factory where these scenes were filmed. One of the women is Asian, which is a pretty big clue that she’s a ‘real person’ rather than an extra. |
Some of the workers are ‘fake’. There are Auton Porters who help kidnap the Doctor. There’s an Auton secretary at the factory. Note how the Nestenes still employ a young woman in a short skirt as a secretary, even if she is made of plastic… but then such women are usually treated like mannequins in practice anyway.
These waxen-faced, blank, zombified workers strongly suggest an extreme form of alienation: line hypnosis, a psychological condition where people are lulled into passive, unresponsive fugue states by constant repetition of the same mechanical tasks – found most famously in people who perform extremely simple tasks at conveyor belts. More broadly, it suggests the deadened, flattened affect of people who find their Fordist jobs dull beyond belief.
Think this is a stretch? But the story makes a point of commenting upon automation. The monsters are called Autons. We see, as noted above, faceless factory workers at their tedious, repetitive, assembly-line jobs. And General Scobie, the swaggering old reactionary establishment figure par excellence, upon hearing that the plastics factory has become largely automated (which means a load of people have lost their jobs), makes a crack about automation being a splendid idea because “you don’t find machines going on strike!” In other words, workers should be treated like and behave like machines…. and replacing them with machines is the next best thing.
There is much literal commodification – often of people – in this story. Ransome is paid off… even his name suggests a payment for a person. Seeley tries to sell his “thunderball” and nearly gets his wife killed. Mullins sells the Doctor to the journos.
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| “I understand you pay for stories?” |
But ‘Spearhead’ really harps on about life being commodified… most particularly by its concentration upon production.…
Harry Potter and the Labour Theory of Value
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
– Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto
In this post, I noticed that Star Trek portrays the society of the future as essentially capitalist (in all but name) despite the fact that the people of the Federation have ‘Replicators’ that can summon material objects out of pure energy. Such a development of the forces of production ought to have banished scarcity of any description, thus also banishing any need for the exploitation of labour, the extraction of surplus and the existence of class, along with many other features of capitalism which persist (open or half-hidden) in the Roddenberry/Berman utopia. In short, given the technology it possesses, the Federation ought to look a lot more like ‘the Culture’ of Iain M. Banks’ (though, actually, the Culture is as much a liberal vision as it is socialist or anarchist… with its dependence upon the benevolent dictatorship of super-smart AIs and its liberal imperialism… but that’s a different essay).
There is a similar problem for the ‘wizarding world’ of Harry Potter, for all Rowling’s hasty and hamfisted improvisations about it being impossible to magic-up food. We know that magic allows wizards to transform goblets into rats. Why then do 11yr old wizards, preparing for their first year at Hogwarts, have to go to Diagon Alley and buy rats (or cats or toads or cutsey owls) from a shop? In a world where magic washes the dishes, there can be no need for labour.
If one can make things without labour, why labour? Why produce, distribute and exchange? Why teach? Why make or do anything?
Labour – making things, doing things, thus changing your environment – is perhaps the most essential aspect of human nature. In the wizarding world, this essential human quality is degraded and potentially denied. Maybe this is why so many of the inhabitants of the wizarding world seem to empty and sterile and dull… they are deprived of any real meaning and content to their activity as human beings.
Yes, I know it takes a lot of work to make a potion in Professor Snape’s class… but the question remains: why not just magic-up a potion from thin air? Or just magic-up the desired effect of the potion? Is this impossible? Okay… then the immediate next question is: why? The wizards can magic-up light from nowhere by just muttering “lumos”. Light is material, remember? Why is this material summonable ex nihilo while others are not?
The cynical answer is to do with J. K. Rowling being a lazy hack.
The cuddly answer is to do with it just being a bit of fun for kids (okay, fine… but somebody please remind Rowling, yes?)
The interesting answer is that there is no answer and cannot be. …
A Bad Rep
“They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.”
– Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
I like it when people rip this quote from Marx out of context to prove he was an authoritarian who thought the little people had to be ruled from above… because in so doing they demonstrate their own ignorance and/or dishonesty (I give Edward Said a pass, for various reasons).
Marx is talking about a specific group of people: French ‘small holding’ peasants in the mid-19th century. He’s not saying they’re too inherently dumb. He’s saying that their way of living (small, self-sufficient, private agricultural property) makes it hard for them to be a unified class, to assert united interests, etc. He’s saying they’ve had revolutionary demands beaten or bribed out of them by the bourgeoisie. Consequently, they end up ready to be represented by an Emperor.
It’s a sound analysis that inherently recognises the ability of ordinary people to represent themselves under conditions other than the ones Marx is describing, and which puts those conditions in historical context rather than attributing them to any unavoidable destiny.
As usual, Marx is accused of doing and saying the exact opposite of what he actually did and said.…
It was such a massive task to establish the Roman race
“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.
Colonial system, public debts, heavy taxes, protection, commercial wars, &c., these children of the true manufacturing period, increase gigantically during the infancy of Modem Industry. The birth of the latter is heralded by a great slaughter of the innocents. Like the royal navy, the factories were recruited by means of the press-gang.
With the development of capitalist production during the manufacturing period, the public opinion of Europe had lost the last remnant of shame and conscience. The nations bragged cynically of every infamy that served them as a means to capitalistic accumulation. …[I]t is trumpeted forth as a triumph of English statecraft that at the Peace of Utrecht, England extorted from the Spaniards by the Asiento Treaty the privilege of being allowed to ply the negro trade, until then only carried on between Africa and the English West Indies, between Africa and Spanish America as well. England thereby acquired the right of supplying Spanish America until 1743 with 4,800 negroes yearly. This threw, at the same time, an official cloak over British smuggling. Liverpool waxed fat on the slave trade. This was its method of primitive accumulation.
Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature’ of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers, into ‘free labouring poor,’ that artificial product of modern society. If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”
– Karl Marx, Capital vol.1, Chapter 31. My favourite bit.…
