Red Kangs Are Best

I very much enjoyed the latest episode of the Pex Lives​ Podcast, which looks at 'Paradise Towers'.  During it, Kevin and James' guest Jane (of achairforjane​ and many fascinating comments - and an amazing guest post on Lost - at Phil Sandifer's blog) suggests a Marxist reading of the story in which the Rezzies are the consumerist bourgeois who ascend a few levels via the system which later consumes them.  Totally valid and satisfying reading.  (And I'm grateful for the lovely shout-out, as always.)

I think, however, that it illuminates a certain interesting ambiguity about what constitutes a  'Marxist reading' or a 'Marxist analysis'.  I know Jane and the Pex Lives boys already know this, so this isn't in any way meant as a criticism of any of them, but I think a 'Marxist analysis' would really have to constitute more than finding some way in which aspects of the narrative function as an allegory of some aspect of the class struggle.  I hold my hands up: that's often what I do here, and it doesn't really cut the mustard.

To do that is to bring Marxist categories to a text, but still to treat a text as something that exists somehow outside its own origins and function within the forces of production.  A more proper sense of the term 'Marxist analysis' would be to critically evaluate the story in the light of the circumstances of its production - in individual terms, in terms of material/technical circumstances, in terms of the overall system of capitalist cultural production, and then also in terms of broader Marxist categories like 'the culture industries' or 'ideology' or 'hegemony' (with different Marxists probably stressing this or that aspect over another).  I personally would want to argue that a proper Marxist analysis of a text, or any artifact of cultural production, would also focus at least as much upon the social circumstances of its consumption, circulation, distribution, exchange, commodification and financialisation.  For my money, too many Marxist critics (of lots of things including - but also beyond - texts) have overstressed the node of production, which is only one node in the circuit of capital.

I'm often said (by people who kindly link to me on social media, for instance) to have written a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis' of this or that.  This makes me more than a little uneasy, to be honest, because I'm not usually anything like as rigorous and scholarly as I would need to be to meet even my own standards for such a thing.  Generally I just react to texts in a very individual way, with my Marxist views inevitably forming the backbone of my response.

I worry that people with, perhaps, no other exposure to Marxism than me, might take me as a meaningful representative.  Ye gods, I hope not.  I am an amateur and, despite having gone to University, I consider myself effectively an autodidact.  One of my purposes here (beyond simply amusing myself and indulging my vanity) has been, via the conduit of a popular TV show, to maybe bring a bit of Marxism (or just critical leftiness generally) into the thinking and reading of people who might otherwise not encounter it in our barren age.  I worry that someone out there might read me and then think they know what 'Marxist criticism' is.  I may be vain, but I know my limitations, and I hate the idea of doing my own beliefs a disservice, even in a very small way.

I've reacted to 'Paradise Towers' in a way that is actually a bit more properly Marxist than I usually manage.  In this post, I at least gesture towards a proper Marxist contextualising of the story (i.e. I mention the dawning neoliberalism of 1987 as a context for the production of the story, for the way it references modernism, which I also historicise very briefly.)  Even so, I'd hesitate to claim the status of a 'Marxist analysis' for that post.

And I wouldn't want to claim that I always even do as well as I do in that piece.  My 'essay' about Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, for instance, has been called a 'Marxist reading' or 'Marxist analysis'.  I'm really not sure it qualifies.  It gestures in that direction towards the end, but I think of it as a personal reaction which has a background in my Marxist convictions - something quite distinct.

Going back to 'Paradise Towers', and addressing some of the things said in the podcast...  Jane doesn't actually say that the Rezzies represent capitalists or capitalism, but she nevertheless uses the word 'bourgeois' to describe them.  Now, that's right - I agree.  They clearly (through their aesthetic representation - something Jane is very hot on) signify a certain stereotypical middle-class, middle-brow social position which is deeply associated - and not inaccurately - with a strata of people in bourgeois society who combine the passive, the complacent, the ressentimental, the reactionary and the aspiring.  But we should remember to separate the 'bourgeois' from the 'bourgeoisie'.  The Rezzies are not capitalists.  (To be clear: Jane doesn't say they are.)

Similarly, neither are the Caretakers.  Here I have a more serious quibble with Jane, because she says they are the proletarians in Paradise Towers.  I don't think that's right... or rather, I think it needs nuancing.  Jane mentions elsewhere in the podcast that the Caretakers are costumed in military style... but they are explicitly not the military, because the military took all the rest of the males away to war.  The Caretakers are the police.  And the police are not proletarians.  In capitalism, the police are ultimately aligned with the class interests of the capitalist class.  They are, essentially, defenders of private property (and of the peace of the system which normalises and legitimises private property) against people who don't own anything.  (This is one big reason why the end of 'Paradise Towers' clangs for me, at least politically.  If you wait for the police to align themselves with anybody other than their masters, you will wait forever.)

Jane goes on to say interesting things about how, if viewed as proletarians who have achieved positions of authority, the Caretakers can be seen as an illustration of how power corrupts any class.  And that's true too (as long as we expand a bit on what we mean by 'power').  Jane takes this observation on to see a polemic against Stalinism lurking within the story, with the Caretakers as being a kind of nomenklatura, and the Chief Caretaker as a General Secretary.  I think it'd be dangerous to generalise that into any kind of ahistorically-detached model, but it isn't inaccurate as a description of what happened in the Soviet Union.  A segment of the working class achieved political power and then, detached from the rest of the class (owing to historical circumstances that 'Paradise Towers' almost acknowledges via the business of the male population disappearing into a war), they become a bureaucratic tyranny.  (Jane also stresses - in an almost neo-Trot way - that the Stalinists are merely posturing as being in charge while capitalism still runs the show in a hidden form below the surface.  All lovely stuff, and music to the ears of someone like me who accepts the argument that Stalinism is the political expression of authoritarian, bureaucratic state capitalism.)  But I don't think you need to go as far as post-Civil War Soviet Russia to see what the Caretakers represent.  In capitalist society, the police are just what Jane describes: a layer of the working class that is detached from the class position (and therefore the class interests) of the rest of the workers.  Even in openly capitalist society, the Caretakers are there.

Kroagnon, by the way, doesn't really convince me as a manifestation of capitalism... though, as a representation of the authoritarian inner-core of some variants of modernism, he obviously reflects capitalism because modernism is part of the cultural logic of early-C20th Euro-American capitalist culture.

For me, 'Paradise Towers' is not really a picture of a capitalist dystopia so much as a picture of a post-industrial one.  The theory of the post-industrial is about to be massively in vogue in Britain as 'Paradise Towers' appears.  It's an idea that is aloft on the postmodernist wind.  It ties in with certain non-Marxist or pseudo-Marxist Left impulses to declare that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of classical Marxism.  And it also ties in with impulses within the burgeoning neoliberal Right to claim that capitalism is changing beyond the ken of even old-style social democracy.  The response of the anti-Thatcher Left is to point to post-industrialism as a kind of social dysfunction.  An understandable (if ultimately unsatisfactory) position which, I think, we see mirrored in 'Paradise Towers'.  None of this makes 'Paradise Towers' any less angry and wonderful (I adore it, by the way), but it marks the circumstances of its production as being within the cultural context of early-neoliberal Left thinking.  It also allows us to loop back a tad and join this ramble up in a notional loop of logic... because it illustrates the distance between finding a Marx-friendly allegory within a narrative, and actually analysing said narrative using a material-dialectic method (not that I'm claiming to have done more than gesture vaguely towards that here.)

Oh, one more thing.  During the podcast, Jane asks James if he thinks Mel has changed at all during the course of the story.  James says she's learned a Moral of the Week.  I agree, and I've been trying to think how to formulate the Moral of the Week that she learns.  I've decided that it would be best expressed as: 'a monomaniacal obsession with swimming pools can be fatal under certain extremely specific circumstances'.

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.  In a world in which magic is possible, nothing could ever really make any kind of practical sense.  Such a world would be slippery to the point of being uninhabitable.  That's the tautological and anthropic (and true) reason why magic isn't real.  Any world that could produce real magic, couldn't actually be a coherent world capable of processes like, say, evolution.  Magic isn't real because it isn't... and any world in which it was wouldn't produce people who could even ask the question.

Less cosmically, the whole concept of rules and cheating becomes meaningless in a wizarding world.  Take Quidditch.  Wherein lies the skill that makes a Seeker?  How exactly does one exercise prowess on a broomstick?  You don't pedal it.  It doesn't move by physical laws.  You don't have to know about aerodynamics.  Aerodynamic laws would make it plummet to the ground immediately.  Your ability to be a great Seeker seems, in Rowling's world, to stem from two factors: whether you have it in your blood and how expensive your broom is.  Harry is a great Seeker because his Dad was (yes, a fucking family of tedious jocks - I know the types) and because various fawning adults keep giving him expensive brooms (spoiled little teacher's pet).

But this leads to the question of why is one brand of broomstick better than another?  What are the qualities of the expensive one that make it better than the cheap one?  It can't be anything technical, since there's no technique anywhere to be seen.  They're not 'operated'; they're sat on and commanded.  Moreover, it can't be to do with the quality of their design or construction, because their flying abilities do not stem from thence.  They're not like machines, i.e. efficient to the extent that they are well designed and constructed to obey and exploit the physical laws of the universe in the performance of certain tasks.  They fly because they're magic.  Magic, by definition, is the breaking of the physical rules.  Why cannot a cheap broom be endowed with greater magical properties than a pricey one?  Just twiddle your wand and impart some extra magic to the budget model!

I expect something like that would be considered to be in some way 'cheating'... like when Hermione thinks Harry has given Ron the luck potion just before the big match.  But what can 'cheating' possibly mean in this context?  Ron's 'cheating' because he's taken a luck potion?  But isn't that kind of 'cheating' THE WHOLE FUCKING POINT of potions?  Of all magic?  Isn't Qudditch itself ALREADY ENTIRELY DEPENDENT upon such magical cheats?  Magic broomsticks, for instance?  Magical being-good-at-Qudditch-family-blood?  Magic flying balls with wings?

And if rules and cheating are meaningless, why have rules at school?  Why have school?  Why learn?  Take a potion instead!  Why frown on those rule-breakers like Voldemort?  Why work the long way round for anything?  Why, as I was asking before, labour?

People do seem to work in Potter's world.  They have jobs working for banks.  Mums do housework.  And so on.

Incidentally... Mrs Weasley washes the dishes... by casting a spell that makes them wash themselves.  Okay.  But where do the dishes come from?  Are they magicked into existence?  Or are they physically produced, the way dishes are in our world?  Does that mean there are factories with people doing physical productive labour, despite having magic wands in their pockets?  In fact, we know that there are workplaces in Potterland, though they seem to be the kind where middle-class professions are pursued.  Teaching.  Banking.  Ministerial bureaucracy.  Etc.  Or they tend to be small businesses.  Petit bourgeois traders abound, with a panoply of pubs and shops.  We do see some people in lower status jobs.  There's a moronic bus conductor who later turns to evil.  Hagrid is a gamekeeper.  But notice something.  Even the lower status jobs aren't about manufacturing.  The only people in the stories who actually seem to make anything are... yes, you're ahead of me... the Elves.  And they're non-human slaves.  In other words, working-class productive industry has been, to a large extent, edited out of the picture... just way money has been edited out of Trek.

The answer to the question 'why work in a world where work is not needed' is that, in Potterland, work that is directly productive seems to either not happen at all, or to happen off stage.  It's hidden.  This is essentially because the necessity of productive work is being implicitly denied.  The answer is a denial of the premises of the question.  The only kind of work that is acknowledged and praised is distributive, bureaucratic or academic.  The need for production is endlessly deferred, like a dreaded chore.

And yet there is wealth.  There are commodities.  There is even conspicuous consumption... though it is viewed with a certain distaste, some of the time.  The emphasis upon the quality (expensiveness) of things like Harry's Quidditch kit clashes markedly with the professed moral disapproval of material wealth in the stories.  Draco Malfoy is constantly depicted as a despicable little shit precisely because he thinks he (or rather his father's money) can buy status, success, respect, power, etc... and yet Harry is also wealthy and also gets loads of unearned help.  He wins using a sooper-dooper broom and that's dandy.  Draco tries the same and we're meant to hate him.  The difference appears to lie in their social class.  Harry is a nice, middle class boy.  Draco is an aristo.  The implication is that Harry's money was earned by his parents (though not through production, natch) whereas Malfoy Snr's was inherited.

There are few examples of Harry using his stash of gold in Gringotts to benefit others, or even to benefit himself. The nicest is in the first book, when he buys the entire sweet trolley for him and Ron to share, simply because Ron doesn't seem enthusiastic about his sandwiches.  He gives away his prize money from the whole Goblet of Fire clusterfuck... but he does this because he feels that the money is tainted (by having been earned?).  It's telling that Fred and George use this money to become shopkeepers, hence the book's approval.  In short - the validity of using money to gain advantage is smiled upon only when the money has been not inherited, not generated by finance, not directly earned through work, but used in or created through small-scale enterprise and initiative... the petty bourgeois ideal.  Ironic, given what BIG business Potter became.

Actually, there are creatures in the stories who make things - the Goblins - but their productive activity seems to be entirely in the past.  They are said to have a peculiar and inhuman view of property relations.  To them, the person who makes something, owns it.  Quelle horreur!  They don't consider that somebody owns something just because they paid for it.  Now, can you imagine anything more threatening to the middle-class, petit bourgeois world (wizarding or otherwise) than doubts about the validity of property based on payment rather than production?  Essentially, what the Goblins doubt is the whole concept of the commodity.  And the commodity form is the basis of bourgeois society.

And yet, these days, the Goblins are not productive workers but bankers.  They are presented as ruthless, acquisitive, greedy little hoarders.  Their near-communistic failure to understand and appreciate the human truth of the commodity form doesn't translate into a refusal to engage with money... indeed, if money is, as Marx said, the 'universal equivalent', then this makes a strangely perverse kind of sense.  If the Goblins do not comprehend the nature of the commodity (i.e. the concept of the exchange of value) then they see the world of commodities from an - as it were - money's eye view.  Money is fundamentally unreal.  It is the commodity that stands in for all others, that can represent all others, that can be equivalent to all others.  It undermines the reality of distinctions between commodities.  From the point of view of money (so to speak) all commodities are the same... so the idea of exchanging one for another looks meaningless, irrational, even insane.

However, I think Rowling's reasoning is cruder than this.  I think hers is a classic, confused, petit bourgeois distrust of 'finance' as being, in some way, conspiratorial... while also attributing an unhealthy cast to any failure to understand and embrace the eternal validity of trade.  It's interesting.  I seem to recall another group of people - real people in history, I mean - who were accused, nonsensically, of being both communists and conspiratorial capitalists and bankers.  It's worth remembering that, to the extent that it was a mass movement, fascism was always a movement mainly of the middle classes and petit bourgeoisie.  Hitler had good machiavellian reasons to target Jews - he could sell them to disaffected workers as evil capitalists and to irritated businessmen as evil Marxists - but he genuinely believed his own vile piffle... and his vile piffle was heavily influenced by classic middle class / petit bourgeois distrust of financiers and bankers and bigshots.  The European petit bourgeois distaste for finance goes all the way back to the idea of moneylending and usury as a kind of unnatural procreation (money auto-breeds)... and the association of this kind of thing with Jews goes right back too.

This is a bit of a tangent... so let's loop back to what we were talking about earlier: the inconsistent but unavoidable way that things in the Potterverse seem to acquire value literally by magic. If we take 'magic', in Rowling's model, to be equivalent to what Marx called use value (i.e. the actual ability of the commodity to satisfy some need or desire) then, in the wizarding world, value ceases to have its basis in physicality and becomes something idealist rather than materialist, something that humans can imagine into existence, that they can create and confer at will out of thin air.  Use value collapses into a blobby sameness with what Marx called exchange value (i.e. the quantity of value imparted to the commodity by humans) except for one vital distinction.  For Marx, exhange value was created through labour; it was the amount of socially necessary labour time that went into the creation of the commodity.  In the wizarding world, labour is unnecessary and nobody is ever seen doing any productive labour... or the place of productive labour is taken by magic wand waggling.  Exchange value vanishes into use value and use value is magically generated.  Labour gets no look in.

If the Goblins are the guardians of money, they become the arch-representatives of exchange as a magical process.  (Marx, by the way, was profoundly hostile to the commodity form, of which money is the ultimate example, precisely because it is so immaterial, so unreal, so anti-sensual, so 'magical'.)  This is probably why the Goblins no longer produce anything, despite once having been makers of artefacts.  Aside from the way Rowling draws on old petit bourgeois anxieties about 'big finance', it's probably why they also have this threatening lack of comprehension of the validity of exchange.

In other words, Harry Potter is bourgeois to the core.  It's central premise - of a world which has commodities that are bought and sold for money after their one value (utility) is created out of nothing without the involvement of work - is essentially bourgeois. It denies the role of labour in the creation of value, thus degrading humanity by removing their essential nature as productive creatures.  It sees value as one blob - utility - that comes from needs externalised rather than work crystallised.  It treats the commodity form as eternal and squares the circle of the immateriality of the commodity - especially money - by treating all value as immaterial.  It fetishizes commodities (swanky broomsticks, invisibility cloaks, etc.) while editing labour out of the picture, or showing it only as either willing serfdom (the elves) or as petit bourgeois enterprise (Diagon Alley) or middle class professional activity (everyone else).  It recycles old shopkeeper fears and prejudices about finance and aristocracy.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of humanity at the heart of all this.  What's missing is an awareness of humans as, essentially and fundamentally, producers rather than simply 'actors'.  Arguably, this same mistake is at the heart of many reactionary views of the world, including the bourgeois economic theories that the metaphysics of the wizarding world mirror so amusingly.

The serious point here, the thing that should worry us, is not that Harry Potter is reactionary... it's that bourgeois economics is based fundamentally on magical thinking.  In this worldview, advantage and success and moral superiority flow from utility, which comes from the conjuring skill of the economic actor... from the 'wealth creator', you could say.  It doesn't make any difference that economic structures like that would actually be as impossible as natural selection in a world where magic was real.  For capitalism, economic miracles seem to be just that: miracles.