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'.
ideas are icepickproof
Showing posts with label state capitalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label state capitalism. Show all posts
Saturday, 7 February 2015
Wednesday, 23 July 2014
Koba the Ape
Post-Spoilerocalyptic.
I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Banalities first: A well-crafted film. Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as "Maurice"). Nicely acted by the principles.
Now.
In The Dark Ape Rises, the 'good' ape leader is Caesar and the 'bad' ape leader is Koba.
Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans. Koba is the nasty one who can't let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn't trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.
Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome. Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don't help him up and dust him down. No. You stand on his neck.
It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand. She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind... which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.
Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or - horror of horrors - winning. You're allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure. That's why Rosa Luxemburg - through no fault of her own, may I stress - is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.
There's been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well. Bollocks. Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy. He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.
Koba is certainly a bastard. You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar's benevolent dictatorship. As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil. The radical is, by definition, an 'extremist', and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.
Caesar isn't the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. 'Koba', you'll no doubt remember, was a nickname once used by Stalin. Hence the title of Martin Amis' truculently inconsequential book Koba the Dread.
It will be noticed that, after his insurrection succeeds, Koba immediately sets about herding humans into a gulag, killing any apes who defy his authority, and locking up any potential dissidents who may be too loyal to Caesar's old regime - presumably to await show trials. His revolt takes on the inevitable contours of any radical change - as told by the drearily predictable liberal view of politics.
Koba is, once again, the revolutionary as maniacal murderer, as traitor and tyrant, as cheerleader for slaughter, as the foaming radical who really just wants power. This characterisation sits perfectly happily alongside the efforts made in every other bit of the script to indicate nuance and complexity - precisely because, in the mainstream liberal view of politics, the depiction of the firebrand as instant tyrant is considered a nuanced and complex view (instead of, say, a childish, smug, ahistorical oversimplification).
There is simply no need for the text to explain how and why Koba goes from his entirely reasonable mistrust and hatred of humans (see below) to his conspiracy, his bid for power, his betrayal of his old comrade Caesar. It is so self-evident to this way of thinking that it requires no explanation. The opponent of 'peace' and 'stability' (i.e. Things As They Are) is, by definition, also the tyrant-in-waiting. The radical is, by definition, a psychopath.
But, until he fails to die the hero and thus lives long enough to see himself become the villain, Koba is objectively a better judge of what's going on that Caesar... or, apparently, the writers.
We're supposed to be watching a story about 'two tribes' who mistrust and fear each other, with 'extremists' on both sides who hate the other side unreasoningly. The idea is the standard liberal accounting for inter-group rivalry and violence. Ethnic differences + fear + extremism x misunderstanding = war. But in this movie, the equivalence between the two groups and their responses - which we are clearly meant to take for granted - is always false.
On the human side, the warmonger characters hate the apes because they started the Simian Flu which wiped out most of the human race (a view explicitly shown to be wrong and unfair by another human character), or because "they're animals" (thus bigotedly rejecting the apes' claim to fair treatment by disputing their sentience). That's it. On the ape side, by marked contrast, the warmonger characters - chiefly Koba - hate the humans because they kept apes in cages (true) and tortured them (true) and mutilated them (true) and experimented upon them (true), and because they're dangerous owing to their enormous stockpile of deadly weapons (true). The initial contact between Caesar's groups of apes and the human survivors in San Francisco comes when humans trespass upon ape terrirory (albeit unwittingly) and immediately shoot an ape without provocation, nearly killing him.
In measured response to this, Caesar decides upon a show of strength and a warning. The apes turn up on the humans' doorstep and say "don't come back". Whereupon the 'goodie' human character - Malcolm (played by some guy who isn't Mark Ruffalo) - goes back into the apes' forest, this time fully aware that he is trespassing and unwelcome. Okay, he's trying to prevent an attack upon the apes by Dreyfuss (the boss of the survivors, played by Gary Oldman)... but his aim is to get permission for his team to work on the dam situated in the apes' forest, and get power flowing back to San Francisco. Malcom tacitly accepts the premise that the apes must agree to human terms or be annihilated. He doesn't like it (you can tell because he frowns a lot) but he accepts it. He never gives any apparent thought to challenging Dreyfuss' authority. There doesn't appear to be any semblance of democracy in the human camp. Malcolm certainly never raises the possibilty of asking the people what they think. The film seems to work on the assumption that the ordinary people are a fearful mass who alternate between mindless panic and obedience to the guy with a megaphone... at least until they get too hungry, whereupon they will tear him to pieces. (An essential corollary of the 'two tribes' paradigm is that people are 'tribal' in the worst and most racist sense of that term, i.e. a cowering mass of ignorant savages waiting on the word of the Chief.) So Malcolm undertakes to explain to the apes that they must let humans fix their dam.
Gee, giving humans power. What could possibly go wrong?
Let me ask you something. If you were living in the ruins of a planet destroyed by the technology of a specific group of people, and that same group of people had kept you in cages, tortured you, experimented upon you, maimed you, dissected your kids and hunted you almost to extinction (or wrecked the ecosystem to the point where your people found it increasingly hard to survive), and that group of people was powerless... wouldn't you feel safer? And would you think it a tremendously attractive and sensible idea to let said group of people add a constant source of electrical power to their already existing stockpile of high-tech weaponry?
Okay, so I get that the human survivors in San Francisco are not specifically the same humans who are personally responsible for all that stuff... but the logic of the film depends upon that 'two tribes' thing I was just talking about, and thus depends upon the idea that we're seeing two groups with essentialised and generalised features who face each other across a chasm. By that logic, Koba's mistrust of humans as a group, or a race, is entirely reasonable. It's not how I look at humans (balls to collective responsibility - most of what's wrong with this planet is the work of a minority and their system), but it seems to be how the filmmakers do - and Koba has, quite reasonably, picked up on this facet of how his world works.
At the point where Koba tries to kill Caesar, Caesar is handing the humans access to electricity. Caesar is himself a despot, albeit a benevolent one from 'our' point of view (i.e. he is sympathetic to humans and wants peace... or, to put it another way, he's a reasonable negotiating partner 'we' can get round the table with... because that's all 'we' ever want, right?). When Koba shoots Caesar, it isn't like he's stepping that far out of the established ape custom of settling disagreements over status through fights. Yes, he's violating the commandment 'APE NOT KILL APE', but then Caesar is endangering the lives of the apes by helping the humans.
Let's be honest here. The humans, at this point, have a huge stockpile of deadly weapons, no semblance of a liberal democratic political structure, urgent needs for land and food, a miserable track record when it comes to apes, newly restored electricity and - as is soon shown - contact with other groups of armed humans! They are, by any sane definition, a deadly threat to the apes. It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise, even within the schema of the text. (Outside the schema of the text, such pretence depends upon complete ignorance of how armed modern Westerners behave towards small groups whom they consider 'primitive' and who happen to live on land they want.) Koba is, sadly, absolutely right in his judgement. It's all very well to shake one's head and say, echoing the movie's familiar tagline, "it was our last hope for peace"... but that view depends upon the idea that a few compromisers on either side can efface that fact that one group is the long-established historical oppressor and now, once again, has access to overwhelming strength.
In the end, Apefall is just another new reiteration of a very old American story: the struggle over land, with the role of Americans taken by humans ("there's humans and then there's Commanches") and the role of 'Indians' taken by apes. In the old days, the narrative was fairly simple and crude. Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties. These days we're more nuanced. Now it's Guilt-Ridden Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties, some of whom are almost as reasonable as 'us'.
(BTW - if you think I'm being racist when I compare the apes to, say, Native Americans... well, it was the film that started it. I'm just running with their logic. And you should note that it is a racial logic deeply embedded in the franchise. The original Charlton Heston movie is a 'satire' of the civil rights movement - via an employment of the 'world turned upside down' trope - in which black people are implicitly represented as apes.)
In yet another way, the idea that the two sides are balanced is untrue. The film tries to put roughly equivalent characters on either side of the human/ape divide. But Caesar's counterpart is Malcolm and Koba's is Dreyfuss. So on the ape side we have a well-meaning leader, and on the human side we have a well-meaning subordinate (thus effacing the important reality of power in favour of the value of intentions - a classic liberal mistake). On the ape side we have a psychopathic killer driven by personal ambition versus a human warmonger who is actually shown to be a well-intentioned leader. Dreyfuss wants to save the human race and is humanised via a scene where he cries over photos of lost sons. Thus an evil revolutionary is pitted against a misguided patriot - we even see Dreyfuss' old photos from his army days in the desert.
Even as the film strives to create a morality play about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and there being faults on both sides, etc, it falls back into ideology. It falls back into the classic ideological demonology of fearful liberalism: those who strive stumblingly for compromise versus the vicious zealot.
Koba is outnumbered. He has to shoulder all the burden of radicalism, and thus become a monster, while the rest of the protagonists - even the most bastardly of the humans - get at least partially absolved.
In Ape Trek into Darkness, as always, the oppressed are held to a higher standard of morality, forgiveness and forbearance than the oppressors (or, in this case, the erstwhile oppressors).
Koba's great crime is that he refuses the onus of greater moral responsibility foisted upon him by his former oppressors (and the filmmakers). He quite rightly tells them to go fuck themselves, and the pleas for peace they bring too late to the table, alongside their quest for back-up and juice. And then he starts fighting against what is, as I say, by any sane definition, a proven and deadly threat (I'm sure someone, if the roles were reversed, would call it a 'clear and present danger' and authorise drone strikes against it).
I bow to no-one in my loathing of Stalin. He was arguably the most despicable human being who ever lived. He is a smear of blood and shit on the good name of socialism. But he was the embodiment of class forces, and rose to power on his opportunistic co-optation of those class forces, not on a wave of charisma and evil stemming directly from his ideology or fanaticism. He was the most ruthless and well-placed representative of the bureaucratic layer in the Soviet government which filled a gaping hole in the power structure after the Russian Civil War (which was forced on the Bolsheviks by Western capitalist aggression) decimated the Russian working class, thus gutting the soviet system. He wasn't the bogey man. He wasn't Bolshevism in its true and terrible form, or any such ahistorical nonsense. He was the head of a bureaucratic state capitalist government (in which capital still existed, but as an exploitative relation between the worker and the state) which put Russia through a speeded-up and concentrated form of capitalist development and industrialisation. Russia did in the space of a couple of decades what the European capitalist powers had taken a couple of centuries to do. Stalin matched them point for point. All the horrors of primitive accumulation (the early stage of capitalist development) are represented in the Stalin years. In the West they were called the enclosures, in Stalin's Russian it was called 'collectivisation'. It was essentially the same thing: the state-enforced destruction of feudal property and the peasantry - and its transformation into capital of one kind or another - leading to dispossession, famine, the theft of common lands, the severing of people from direct access to agricultural production, and the forcing of people into wage labour. Stalin engineered terrible famines. The British Empire did exactly the same thing in Ireland and India. In Stalin's Russian you had the horrors of the Gulag; in Europe and America you had the horrors of plantation slavery, child labour and the industrial revolution. The state owned and controlled all capital in Russia, and it was administered by a class of bureaucrats. In rising European capitalist formations, the state played a less direct but no less crucial role in enforcing the 'rights' of private capital, and financially supporting the new system. Both Russia and the West engaged in ruthless imperialism to acquire territory, manpower and resources to feed into the system. If Russia was 'totalitarian', the Britain of Pitt was no democracy. Stalin was a monster because he was the dictator of a state engaged in industrialisation at breakneck speed. All the horrors of emergent capitalism were squeezed into the tight space of the rule of one man. Stalin is horrific because he is Russia's version of all the capitalists and prime ministers of Europe, fused into one bloated personage. That isn't to excuse him, any more than to point out that capitalism is a systemic evil is to excuse Rupert Murdoch, but it does put him in context. He may have been a psychopath, but millions didn't die solely because he was, and it wasn't Bolshevism that made him one. It was the logic of capital, albeit state capital. Industrialisation, squidged into a sliver of historical time, because - as Stalin himself pointed out - of the need for the Soviet Union to compete militarily and economically with the Western capitalist powers. (This, by the way, is why I find it beyond comprehension how anyone can fail to see the state capitalist nature of Stalin's Russia - if it competed economically with capitalist powers in a capitalist world system, how can it possibly have been anything other than some form of capitalism?)
(Quite apart from anything else, if we allow Koba the Ape to stand for Koba the Dread, this does the Dread a massive favour. Stalin was a nonentity and a workhorse in the early Bolshevik party, who played little significant role in the Russian Revolution, contrary to his own subsequent mythmaking. He certainly never charged at rocket launchers.)
It is, by the way, explicitly capitalism that the humans want to bring back. The dam is a symbol for holding back the tide of untamed and destructive nature (and/or time), and a vast engineering project of modernity that reshapes the natural world to human needs, and a way of providing water and power to settlements and thus making 'civilisation' possible. By 'civilisation', in Planet of the Apes 2.2: Age of Extrinction, we are to understand capitalism. The humans explicitly talk about wanting to bring back the life they once had. In other words, they want our world back - the very world that caused its own downfall in the first place. The film makes it aesthetically explicit that the return of capitalism is aimed at. When the humans manage to get their dam working again, and thus get power to flow back to San Francisco, they celebrate in the reactivated shell of a petrol station, and people dance through a relit shopping mall. Dreyfuss celebrates by turning on his expensive Apple rectangle for the first time in years and looking through his My Pictures folder.
It's only to be expected. Popular movies are currently absolutely stuffed with the motif of the hero and/or the world fallen and trying to arise. You don't need to be a particularly subtle critic to work out what that's all about (though, needless to say, it escapes most of the professionals). It stretches from Bond and Batman recovering their mojos, to the de rigeur device of the fallen paradise that must be reclaimed (Oblivion, Elysium, The Hobbit, etc). It is a current inflection of the perennially-popular apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie. The Apeit: The Desolation of Koba is no exception. It fits into the currently popular trope in a way similar to Game of Thrones, with its mantra "Winter is coming". A great crisis has come or is approaching (Game of Apes manages to at least make the crisis something of our doing... though there is something to be said for GRRM's great inevitable cycles of boom and slump that helpless people get caught in). In both, the legions of the disavowed will swamp us along with the glaciers or germs of doom. We squabble about the political organisation of structures that will soon be rendered obsolete by waves of inexplicable and uncanny and unappeasable apocalypses that steadily approach. The White Walkers are the unknowable shock troops of the big freeze that will paralyse the clockwork and the engines that we currently rely on. The apes, similarly, are the post-apocalyptic hordes, resentful and out for revenge. Again, in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, none of this is especially hard to parse.
Of course, by enjoying Koba's brave rebellion, I am only really doing something the text wants me to. The moral rhetoric of the narrative may not support him (even though the facts of the plot do), but the whole aesthetic logic of the film is predicated upon him and his war. We go to see films like this for the same reason that we recessionitizens go to see so many zombie films. We want to see the world smashed up by the monsters in a state of riotous assembly and insurrectionary carnival. It connects with a deep-seated desire to see the world turned upside down. Of course, the dominant ideology demands that the carnival of the oppressed be curtailed in salutary fashion. But even so...
I wrote here about how attractive villains are, about how they often appear to have an objectively better moral and political position than the goodies (who are often only good by default because they represent established power structures and their violence is institutionalised), about how seeing the monsters rip the world to bits can be very thrilling if you're not keen on the world as it stands, about how the villains shoulder the burden of perpetual defeat so that we can learn our lesson of obedience... but also so that we can get a charge from their rebellion against the status quo, and about how the evil objections of the villain often represent a garbled form of protest against the established order.
For instance, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents - like so many villains - the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger. He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes. However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the - to use a hackneyed phrase - ‘return of the repressed’. And repression is political. That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse. Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc. Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems. She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World. The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them. Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices. The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!) The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines. The happy ending involves one of the goodies being ‘appointed’ the new (unelected) Minister of Magic. Etc. It’s clear what this means. The only person fighting to change the Wizarding World was Voldemort. The baddie. The goodies were all fighting to, a few tweaks aside, keep it exactly the same. This is why I have a sneaking sympathy even with Voldemort. He was, at least, trying to change things. Like Koba, he represents the deep-seated assumption in capitalist media culture that any attempt at radical social change must be, by definition, evil: fanatical, twisted, dangerous, pathological, selfish, etc. Voldemort doesn’t espouse values I’d embrace… but I do feel a certain kinship even for him, as a figure within the text. Because he’s the guy who says ‘this society is broken and we need to radically change it’. His ideas about how it’s broken are noxious, but that’s because he’s a bourgeois echo - distorted and distant - of anyone who wants radical change. It’s like with Shinzon: he’s personally vile, but - being the leader of a slave rebellion which confronts the oppressing empire - he’s also a reflection (in a shattered mirror) of Spartacus.
Similarly, in Koba and the Deathly Humans, Koba is the only one fighting to radically change the status quo, the only one with a practical grasp of what needs to be done to keep the apes safe from the danger they clearly face, and the first one with the guts to pick up weapons and fight. If he has to trick the rest of the apes into following him, that just shows that the filmmakers are working on the same assumption about the 'ordinary' apes as they made about the 'ordinary' humans: they're sheep.
The passivity of the masses is a theme right the way through the film. There are a quartet of Alpha Males (of different styles) making all the running. The climax of the film depends upon two seperate sets of Alpha Males duking it out between them. (Incidentally, the only women in this film are... well... incidental. Malcolm has a girlfriend who is there to give people antibiotics and look sad and be supportive; Caesar has a mate who is there to have babies, be ill and then get better - much to his relief.)
It's possible that the Alpha Males, the submissive Beta Males and the Obedient Females are there on both sides as part of the declared strategy of showing the humans and apes mirroring each other, of showing how much they have in common. If so, its not really exceptional in terms of being reactionary and reductionist and biological determinist - these sorts of assumptions are widespread, especially in narrative culture - but it is noticeable how they do it without so much as whispering about evolution or common descent. Presumably this is from fear of incurring the wrath of America's Christian Creationist hordes (just goes to show how seriously they take ideological sensitivities when they sense box office impacts).
On a related issue, I personally found it irritating how undecided the filmmakers were about how to present ape culture. On the one hand they want the apes to be 'advanced' and human-like in their social organisation, yet they also want them to act like stereotypical apes. So you end up with a mish-mash. The apes are shown to have a literate culture, with written words and sign language alongside the few who can speak, and with a school for the little 'uns - complete with anachronistic lessons in chalk on an improvised blackboard (insert blackboard jungle joke here). They have midwives, buildings in their settlement, etc. Yet they have none of the broadly egalitarian social structure that you tend to see in real hunter-gatherer groups untouched or unmenaced by exterior threats. Of course, they're apes rather than human hunter gatherers... but then, with such intrusions of human social structure into the apes' society (including such wholly anachronistic ones as school and the nuclear family), why not also bring in egalitarianism? The answer lies in the overarching view of people as 'tribal' in the negative sense.
It's this view that ultimately underwrites all the stuff about Koba the demagogue, swaying the apes to become his whooping pawns in a race war. If people - hairy or smooth - are hierarchical, sheeplike, aggressive, fearful, passive, prone to obedience, naturally separated into Alpha Males and their subjects... and if they're prone to this because of their essentially apelike nature... then no wonder attempts to rebel against the status quo always end up with someone like Koba taking charge and becoming the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.
This is the logic of the work, and it has never been more necessary for the capitalist culture industries to peddle this message than at times of crisis. If you think I'm being paranoid, then you're missing neoliberalism's skill at regulating opinion using marketised ideology.
I hear that Andy Serkis (who plays Caesar in this film via motion capture) is going to be doing a CGI/mo-cap version of Animal Farm. Another retelling of that simplistic fable that puts an allegorical revolution into the world of the beasts, showing the inevitable course of that revolution from liberation to tyranny, from the charisma of the leader to the totalitarian rule of the dictator. In the film I just saw, the animal/tyrant is indirectly named after Stalin. In Animal Farm, the animal/tyrant who represents Stalin is called Napoleon.
Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin. The inevitable gravediggers of revolution* - as long as you ignore all context and look upon them as ahistorical bogeymen.
You see, you animals, where trying to change the world gets you every time?
*It's actually a bit more complicated than that in the case of the real Julius Caesar.
I went to see Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Banalities first: A well-crafted film. Cogent and coherent in terms of aesthetics and plot (though there is a pleasingly bathetic moment when, following lots of atmospheric shots of apes engaged in social interaction, one ape suddenly addresses another in sign language as "Maurice"). Nicely acted by the principles.
Now.
In The Dark Ape Rises, the 'good' ape leader is Caesar and the 'bad' ape leader is Koba.
Caesar is the reasonable one, the compromiser, who wants peace with the humans. Koba is the nasty one who can't let go of his resentment of humans, who doesn't trust them, who betrays Caesar and launches an all-out war against the humans.
Thing is, Koba is fucking awesome. Because, unlike Caesar, he understands that when you have the oppressor on the floor, you don't help him up and dust him down. No. You stand on his neck.
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| Here's Koba, riding straight at the enemy (who are armed with rocket launchers by this point) while simultaneously holding (and firing) two machine guns instead of the reins of his horse. Caesar never does anything this fucking spectacularly brave and principled in the entire course of the movie. |
It reminds me of what Philomena Cunk once said in reference to the revolution advocated by Russell Brand. She worried about it until she realised that it was a revolution in the mind... which is safer than a real revolution because nothing actually changes.
Revolutionaries are all very well, you see, until they actually start doing anything, or - horror of horrors - winning. You're allowed to be a radical or a rebel or a firebrand, as long as you are a noble failure. That's why Rosa Luxemburg - through no fault of her own, may I stress - is sentimentalised, whereas Lenin is the epitome of evil.
There's been much comment from the critiots that this film is good because there are no fully good or bad characters, and everyone means well. Bollocks. Koba might be portrayed as doing what he thinks best, at least part of the time, but he clearly becomes the bad guy. He even dies the traditionally spectacular/poetically-just villain death.
Koba is certainly a bastard. You see, he immediately turns into a psycho when he becomes a political rebel from Caesar's benevolent dictatorship. As usual, inhabiting a zone outside moderate compromise with the status quo and the oppressors is an instant ticket into psychological instability and evil. The radical is, by definition, an 'extremist', and the extremist is, by definition, both a fanatic and a nihilist, a dangerous utopian and a cynic, a zealot and a self-interested machiavel, a demogogue and an autocrat.
Caesar isn't the only ape in the film with a name that recalls a famous political figure from human history. 'Koba', you'll no doubt remember, was a nickname once used by Stalin. Hence the title of Martin Amis' truculently inconsequential book Koba the Dread.
It will be noticed that, after his insurrection succeeds, Koba immediately sets about herding humans into a gulag, killing any apes who defy his authority, and locking up any potential dissidents who may be too loyal to Caesar's old regime - presumably to await show trials. His revolt takes on the inevitable contours of any radical change - as told by the drearily predictable liberal view of politics.
Koba is, once again, the revolutionary as maniacal murderer, as traitor and tyrant, as cheerleader for slaughter, as the foaming radical who really just wants power. This characterisation sits perfectly happily alongside the efforts made in every other bit of the script to indicate nuance and complexity - precisely because, in the mainstream liberal view of politics, the depiction of the firebrand as instant tyrant is considered a nuanced and complex view (instead of, say, a childish, smug, ahistorical oversimplification).
There is simply no need for the text to explain how and why Koba goes from his entirely reasonable mistrust and hatred of humans (see below) to his conspiracy, his bid for power, his betrayal of his old comrade Caesar. It is so self-evident to this way of thinking that it requires no explanation. The opponent of 'peace' and 'stability' (i.e. Things As They Are) is, by definition, also the tyrant-in-waiting. The radical is, by definition, a psychopath.
But, until he fails to die the hero and thus lives long enough to see himself become the villain, Koba is objectively a better judge of what's going on that Caesar... or, apparently, the writers.
We're supposed to be watching a story about 'two tribes' who mistrust and fear each other, with 'extremists' on both sides who hate the other side unreasoningly. The idea is the standard liberal accounting for inter-group rivalry and violence. Ethnic differences + fear + extremism x misunderstanding = war. But in this movie, the equivalence between the two groups and their responses - which we are clearly meant to take for granted - is always false.
On the human side, the warmonger characters hate the apes because they started the Simian Flu which wiped out most of the human race (a view explicitly shown to be wrong and unfair by another human character), or because "they're animals" (thus bigotedly rejecting the apes' claim to fair treatment by disputing their sentience). That's it. On the ape side, by marked contrast, the warmonger characters - chiefly Koba - hate the humans because they kept apes in cages (true) and tortured them (true) and mutilated them (true) and experimented upon them (true), and because they're dangerous owing to their enormous stockpile of deadly weapons (true). The initial contact between Caesar's groups of apes and the human survivors in San Francisco comes when humans trespass upon ape terrirory (albeit unwittingly) and immediately shoot an ape without provocation, nearly killing him.
In measured response to this, Caesar decides upon a show of strength and a warning. The apes turn up on the humans' doorstep and say "don't come back". Whereupon the 'goodie' human character - Malcolm (played by some guy who isn't Mark Ruffalo) - goes back into the apes' forest, this time fully aware that he is trespassing and unwelcome. Okay, he's trying to prevent an attack upon the apes by Dreyfuss (the boss of the survivors, played by Gary Oldman)... but his aim is to get permission for his team to work on the dam situated in the apes' forest, and get power flowing back to San Francisco. Malcom tacitly accepts the premise that the apes must agree to human terms or be annihilated. He doesn't like it (you can tell because he frowns a lot) but he accepts it. He never gives any apparent thought to challenging Dreyfuss' authority. There doesn't appear to be any semblance of democracy in the human camp. Malcolm certainly never raises the possibilty of asking the people what they think. The film seems to work on the assumption that the ordinary people are a fearful mass who alternate between mindless panic and obedience to the guy with a megaphone... at least until they get too hungry, whereupon they will tear him to pieces. (An essential corollary of the 'two tribes' paradigm is that people are 'tribal' in the worst and most racist sense of that term, i.e. a cowering mass of ignorant savages waiting on the word of the Chief.) So Malcolm undertakes to explain to the apes that they must let humans fix their dam.
Gee, giving humans power. What could possibly go wrong?
Let me ask you something. If you were living in the ruins of a planet destroyed by the technology of a specific group of people, and that same group of people had kept you in cages, tortured you, experimented upon you, maimed you, dissected your kids and hunted you almost to extinction (or wrecked the ecosystem to the point where your people found it increasingly hard to survive), and that group of people was powerless... wouldn't you feel safer? And would you think it a tremendously attractive and sensible idea to let said group of people add a constant source of electrical power to their already existing stockpile of high-tech weaponry?
Okay, so I get that the human survivors in San Francisco are not specifically the same humans who are personally responsible for all that stuff... but the logic of the film depends upon that 'two tribes' thing I was just talking about, and thus depends upon the idea that we're seeing two groups with essentialised and generalised features who face each other across a chasm. By that logic, Koba's mistrust of humans as a group, or a race, is entirely reasonable. It's not how I look at humans (balls to collective responsibility - most of what's wrong with this planet is the work of a minority and their system), but it seems to be how the filmmakers do - and Koba has, quite reasonably, picked up on this facet of how his world works.
At the point where Koba tries to kill Caesar, Caesar is handing the humans access to electricity. Caesar is himself a despot, albeit a benevolent one from 'our' point of view (i.e. he is sympathetic to humans and wants peace... or, to put it another way, he's a reasonable negotiating partner 'we' can get round the table with... because that's all 'we' ever want, right?). When Koba shoots Caesar, it isn't like he's stepping that far out of the established ape custom of settling disagreements over status through fights. Yes, he's violating the commandment 'APE NOT KILL APE', but then Caesar is endangering the lives of the apes by helping the humans.
Let's be honest here. The humans, at this point, have a huge stockpile of deadly weapons, no semblance of a liberal democratic political structure, urgent needs for land and food, a miserable track record when it comes to apes, newly restored electricity and - as is soon shown - contact with other groups of armed humans! They are, by any sane definition, a deadly threat to the apes. It's ludicrous to pretend otherwise, even within the schema of the text. (Outside the schema of the text, such pretence depends upon complete ignorance of how armed modern Westerners behave towards small groups whom they consider 'primitive' and who happen to live on land they want.) Koba is, sadly, absolutely right in his judgement. It's all very well to shake one's head and say, echoing the movie's familiar tagline, "it was our last hope for peace"... but that view depends upon the idea that a few compromisers on either side can efface that fact that one group is the long-established historical oppressor and now, once again, has access to overwhelming strength.
In the end, Apefall is just another new reiteration of a very old American story: the struggle over land, with the role of Americans taken by humans ("there's humans and then there's Commanches") and the role of 'Indians' taken by apes. In the old days, the narrative was fairly simple and crude. Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties. These days we're more nuanced. Now it's Guilt-Ridden Manifest Destiny meets scalping parties, some of whom are almost as reasonable as 'us'.
(BTW - if you think I'm being racist when I compare the apes to, say, Native Americans... well, it was the film that started it. I'm just running with their logic. And you should note that it is a racial logic deeply embedded in the franchise. The original Charlton Heston movie is a 'satire' of the civil rights movement - via an employment of the 'world turned upside down' trope - in which black people are implicitly represented as apes.)
In yet another way, the idea that the two sides are balanced is untrue. The film tries to put roughly equivalent characters on either side of the human/ape divide. But Caesar's counterpart is Malcolm and Koba's is Dreyfuss. So on the ape side we have a well-meaning leader, and on the human side we have a well-meaning subordinate (thus effacing the important reality of power in favour of the value of intentions - a classic liberal mistake). On the ape side we have a psychopathic killer driven by personal ambition versus a human warmonger who is actually shown to be a well-intentioned leader. Dreyfuss wants to save the human race and is humanised via a scene where he cries over photos of lost sons. Thus an evil revolutionary is pitted against a misguided patriot - we even see Dreyfuss' old photos from his army days in the desert.
Even as the film strives to create a morality play about the road to hell being paved with good intentions, and there being faults on both sides, etc, it falls back into ideology. It falls back into the classic ideological demonology of fearful liberalism: those who strive stumblingly for compromise versus the vicious zealot.
Koba is outnumbered. He has to shoulder all the burden of radicalism, and thus become a monster, while the rest of the protagonists - even the most bastardly of the humans - get at least partially absolved.
In Ape Trek into Darkness, as always, the oppressed are held to a higher standard of morality, forgiveness and forbearance than the oppressors (or, in this case, the erstwhile oppressors).
Koba's great crime is that he refuses the onus of greater moral responsibility foisted upon him by his former oppressors (and the filmmakers). He quite rightly tells them to go fuck themselves, and the pleas for peace they bring too late to the table, alongside their quest for back-up and juice. And then he starts fighting against what is, as I say, by any sane definition, a proven and deadly threat (I'm sure someone, if the roles were reversed, would call it a 'clear and present danger' and authorise drone strikes against it).
I bow to no-one in my loathing of Stalin. He was arguably the most despicable human being who ever lived. He is a smear of blood and shit on the good name of socialism. But he was the embodiment of class forces, and rose to power on his opportunistic co-optation of those class forces, not on a wave of charisma and evil stemming directly from his ideology or fanaticism. He was the most ruthless and well-placed representative of the bureaucratic layer in the Soviet government which filled a gaping hole in the power structure after the Russian Civil War (which was forced on the Bolsheviks by Western capitalist aggression) decimated the Russian working class, thus gutting the soviet system. He wasn't the bogey man. He wasn't Bolshevism in its true and terrible form, or any such ahistorical nonsense. He was the head of a bureaucratic state capitalist government (in which capital still existed, but as an exploitative relation between the worker and the state) which put Russia through a speeded-up and concentrated form of capitalist development and industrialisation. Russia did in the space of a couple of decades what the European capitalist powers had taken a couple of centuries to do. Stalin matched them point for point. All the horrors of primitive accumulation (the early stage of capitalist development) are represented in the Stalin years. In the West they were called the enclosures, in Stalin's Russian it was called 'collectivisation'. It was essentially the same thing: the state-enforced destruction of feudal property and the peasantry - and its transformation into capital of one kind or another - leading to dispossession, famine, the theft of common lands, the severing of people from direct access to agricultural production, and the forcing of people into wage labour. Stalin engineered terrible famines. The British Empire did exactly the same thing in Ireland and India. In Stalin's Russian you had the horrors of the Gulag; in Europe and America you had the horrors of plantation slavery, child labour and the industrial revolution. The state owned and controlled all capital in Russia, and it was administered by a class of bureaucrats. In rising European capitalist formations, the state played a less direct but no less crucial role in enforcing the 'rights' of private capital, and financially supporting the new system. Both Russia and the West engaged in ruthless imperialism to acquire territory, manpower and resources to feed into the system. If Russia was 'totalitarian', the Britain of Pitt was no democracy. Stalin was a monster because he was the dictator of a state engaged in industrialisation at breakneck speed. All the horrors of emergent capitalism were squeezed into the tight space of the rule of one man. Stalin is horrific because he is Russia's version of all the capitalists and prime ministers of Europe, fused into one bloated personage. That isn't to excuse him, any more than to point out that capitalism is a systemic evil is to excuse Rupert Murdoch, but it does put him in context. He may have been a psychopath, but millions didn't die solely because he was, and it wasn't Bolshevism that made him one. It was the logic of capital, albeit state capital. Industrialisation, squidged into a sliver of historical time, because - as Stalin himself pointed out - of the need for the Soviet Union to compete militarily and economically with the Western capitalist powers. (This, by the way, is why I find it beyond comprehension how anyone can fail to see the state capitalist nature of Stalin's Russia - if it competed economically with capitalist powers in a capitalist world system, how can it possibly have been anything other than some form of capitalism?)
(Quite apart from anything else, if we allow Koba the Ape to stand for Koba the Dread, this does the Dread a massive favour. Stalin was a nonentity and a workhorse in the early Bolshevik party, who played little significant role in the Russian Revolution, contrary to his own subsequent mythmaking. He certainly never charged at rocket launchers.)
It is, by the way, explicitly capitalism that the humans want to bring back. The dam is a symbol for holding back the tide of untamed and destructive nature (and/or time), and a vast engineering project of modernity that reshapes the natural world to human needs, and a way of providing water and power to settlements and thus making 'civilisation' possible. By 'civilisation', in Planet of the Apes 2.2: Age of Extrinction, we are to understand capitalism. The humans explicitly talk about wanting to bring back the life they once had. In other words, they want our world back - the very world that caused its own downfall in the first place. The film makes it aesthetically explicit that the return of capitalism is aimed at. When the humans manage to get their dam working again, and thus get power to flow back to San Francisco, they celebrate in the reactivated shell of a petrol station, and people dance through a relit shopping mall. Dreyfuss celebrates by turning on his expensive Apple rectangle for the first time in years and looking through his My Pictures folder.
It's only to be expected. Popular movies are currently absolutely stuffed with the motif of the hero and/or the world fallen and trying to arise. You don't need to be a particularly subtle critic to work out what that's all about (though, needless to say, it escapes most of the professionals). It stretches from Bond and Batman recovering their mojos, to the de rigeur device of the fallen paradise that must be reclaimed (Oblivion, Elysium, The Hobbit, etc). It is a current inflection of the perennially-popular apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie. The Apeit: The Desolation of Koba is no exception. It fits into the currently popular trope in a way similar to Game of Thrones, with its mantra "Winter is coming". A great crisis has come or is approaching (Game of Apes manages to at least make the crisis something of our doing... though there is something to be said for GRRM's great inevitable cycles of boom and slump that helpless people get caught in). In both, the legions of the disavowed will swamp us along with the glaciers or germs of doom. We squabble about the political organisation of structures that will soon be rendered obsolete by waves of inexplicable and uncanny and unappeasable apocalypses that steadily approach. The White Walkers are the unknowable shock troops of the big freeze that will paralyse the clockwork and the engines that we currently rely on. The apes, similarly, are the post-apocalyptic hordes, resentful and out for revenge. Again, in the midst of the biggest recession since the 30s, none of this is especially hard to parse.
Of course, by enjoying Koba's brave rebellion, I am only really doing something the text wants me to. The moral rhetoric of the narrative may not support him (even though the facts of the plot do), but the whole aesthetic logic of the film is predicated upon him and his war. We go to see films like this for the same reason that we recessionitizens go to see so many zombie films. We want to see the world smashed up by the monsters in a state of riotous assembly and insurrectionary carnival. It connects with a deep-seated desire to see the world turned upside down. Of course, the dominant ideology demands that the carnival of the oppressed be curtailed in salutary fashion. But even so...
I wrote here about how attractive villains are, about how they often appear to have an objectively better moral and political position than the goodies (who are often only good by default because they represent established power structures and their violence is institutionalised), about how seeing the monsters rip the world to bits can be very thrilling if you're not keen on the world as it stands, about how the villains shoulder the burden of perpetual defeat so that we can learn our lesson of obedience... but also so that we can get a charge from their rebellion against the status quo, and about how the evil objections of the villain often represent a garbled form of protest against the established order.
For instance, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise represents - like so many villains - the distant and distorted echo of the snarl of radical anger. He is himself thoroughly unsympathetic, as Koba comes to be when he starts murdering other apes. However, even thoroughly unsympathetic villains like Voldemort (who, as the snobbish fuhrer of the magic-Nazis, is not someone I’d vote for) tend to represent the - to use a hackneyed phrase - ‘return of the repressed’. And repression is political. That which is oppressed is also repressed in mainstream discourse. Voldemort can ascend because he takes advantage of faultlines in Wizarding society that reveal deep, structural injustice and hypocrisy, ie the ethnic cleansing of the giants, the economic ghettoisation of the Goblins, the resolutely undemocratic and unaccountable nature of Wizarding government, the enslavement of the Elves, etc. Now, J.K. Rowling never really addresses these problems. She occasionally has goodie characters display a bad conscience about them (ie Hermione’s patronising SPEW campaign and Dumbledore’s occasional remarks to Harry about how badly Wizards have treated other races) but the addressing or remedying of these injustices is NEVER made crucial as a precondition of saving the Wizarding World. The Wizards never really have to face the consequences of these injustices, or change them. Harry & Co fight to reinstate the status quo that includes all these structural injustices. The happy ending involves no emancipation of the Elves, no change in Wizarding attitudes to giants (indeed, Rowling makes it clear that the Wizards are essentially right about the respectively servile and primitive nature of these races!) The happy ending involves no real tackling of the deep strain of racial prejudice about bloodlines. The happy ending involves one of the goodies being ‘appointed’ the new (unelected) Minister of Magic. Etc. It’s clear what this means. The only person fighting to change the Wizarding World was Voldemort. The baddie. The goodies were all fighting to, a few tweaks aside, keep it exactly the same. This is why I have a sneaking sympathy even with Voldemort. He was, at least, trying to change things. Like Koba, he represents the deep-seated assumption in capitalist media culture that any attempt at radical social change must be, by definition, evil: fanatical, twisted, dangerous, pathological, selfish, etc. Voldemort doesn’t espouse values I’d embrace… but I do feel a certain kinship even for him, as a figure within the text. Because he’s the guy who says ‘this society is broken and we need to radically change it’. His ideas about how it’s broken are noxious, but that’s because he’s a bourgeois echo - distorted and distant - of anyone who wants radical change. It’s like with Shinzon: he’s personally vile, but - being the leader of a slave rebellion which confronts the oppressing empire - he’s also a reflection (in a shattered mirror) of Spartacus.
Similarly, in Koba and the Deathly Humans, Koba is the only one fighting to radically change the status quo, the only one with a practical grasp of what needs to be done to keep the apes safe from the danger they clearly face, and the first one with the guts to pick up weapons and fight. If he has to trick the rest of the apes into following him, that just shows that the filmmakers are working on the same assumption about the 'ordinary' apes as they made about the 'ordinary' humans: they're sheep.
The passivity of the masses is a theme right the way through the film. There are a quartet of Alpha Males (of different styles) making all the running. The climax of the film depends upon two seperate sets of Alpha Males duking it out between them. (Incidentally, the only women in this film are... well... incidental. Malcolm has a girlfriend who is there to give people antibiotics and look sad and be supportive; Caesar has a mate who is there to have babies, be ill and then get better - much to his relief.)
It's possible that the Alpha Males, the submissive Beta Males and the Obedient Females are there on both sides as part of the declared strategy of showing the humans and apes mirroring each other, of showing how much they have in common. If so, its not really exceptional in terms of being reactionary and reductionist and biological determinist - these sorts of assumptions are widespread, especially in narrative culture - but it is noticeable how they do it without so much as whispering about evolution or common descent. Presumably this is from fear of incurring the wrath of America's Christian Creationist hordes (just goes to show how seriously they take ideological sensitivities when they sense box office impacts).
On a related issue, I personally found it irritating how undecided the filmmakers were about how to present ape culture. On the one hand they want the apes to be 'advanced' and human-like in their social organisation, yet they also want them to act like stereotypical apes. So you end up with a mish-mash. The apes are shown to have a literate culture, with written words and sign language alongside the few who can speak, and with a school for the little 'uns - complete with anachronistic lessons in chalk on an improvised blackboard (insert blackboard jungle joke here). They have midwives, buildings in their settlement, etc. Yet they have none of the broadly egalitarian social structure that you tend to see in real hunter-gatherer groups untouched or unmenaced by exterior threats. Of course, they're apes rather than human hunter gatherers... but then, with such intrusions of human social structure into the apes' society (including such wholly anachronistic ones as school and the nuclear family), why not also bring in egalitarianism? The answer lies in the overarching view of people as 'tribal' in the negative sense.
It's this view that ultimately underwrites all the stuff about Koba the demagogue, swaying the apes to become his whooping pawns in a race war. If people - hairy or smooth - are hierarchical, sheeplike, aggressive, fearful, passive, prone to obedience, naturally separated into Alpha Males and their subjects... and if they're prone to this because of their essentially apelike nature... then no wonder attempts to rebel against the status quo always end up with someone like Koba taking charge and becoming the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss.
This is the logic of the work, and it has never been more necessary for the capitalist culture industries to peddle this message than at times of crisis. If you think I'm being paranoid, then you're missing neoliberalism's skill at regulating opinion using marketised ideology.
I hear that Andy Serkis (who plays Caesar in this film via motion capture) is going to be doing a CGI/mo-cap version of Animal Farm. Another retelling of that simplistic fable that puts an allegorical revolution into the world of the beasts, showing the inevitable course of that revolution from liberation to tyranny, from the charisma of the leader to the totalitarian rule of the dictator. In the film I just saw, the animal/tyrant is indirectly named after Stalin. In Animal Farm, the animal/tyrant who represents Stalin is called Napoleon.
Caesar, Napoleon, Stalin. The inevitable gravediggers of revolution* - as long as you ignore all context and look upon them as ahistorical bogeymen.
You see, you animals, where trying to change the world gets you every time?
*It's actually a bit more complicated than that in the case of the real Julius Caesar.
Wednesday, 20 November 2013
9
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. Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement. It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour. Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly. Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about? This is cynicism about the powerful. If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.
'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system. But I have a question: how much tax does the Company pay?
It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do. There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states. The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business. They call this 'liberty'. They've already managed it to an astonishing degree. Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes. That is not a concern of the right. In fact, it's a priority.
This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state. But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state. What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own. The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.
As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx. He saw it as an emanation of class society. It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'. Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.
One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class. You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc. State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations. The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries. Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.
In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern. The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company. The state gathers and the Company collects. They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping. You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside. The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised. The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.
As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion. The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital. This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others. Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism. The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.
We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.
And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.
Well, I had 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. Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement. It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour. Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly. Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about? This is cynicism about the powerful. If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.
'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system. But I have a question: how much tax does the Company pay?
It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do. There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states. The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business. They call this 'liberty'. They've already managed it to an astonishing degree. Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes. That is not a concern of the right. In fact, it's a priority.
This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state. But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state. What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own. The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.
As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx. He saw it as an emanation of class society. It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'. Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.
One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class. You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc. State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations. The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries. Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.
In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern. The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company. The state gathers and the Company collects. They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping. You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside. The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised. The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.
As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion. The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital. This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others. Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism. The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.
We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.
And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.
Well, I had fun.
Monday, 18 November 2013
14
"I've known many times," says the Doctor, "some of them much more pleasant than others."
"Well, I quite like it here, I must say," interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, "Everyone's been most kind."
The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.
The Doctor, however, is unimpressed. He swills more wine. He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.
"Well, I met some people today who were far from kind," he says. He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller's utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.
"That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you," says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, "You must not jump to conclusions."
"Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard," snaps the Doctor, "Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"
We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime. It looked like a gulag. People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment. At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.
Grapes make wine, of course. Wine is strangely present in this story. Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles' wine cellar.
"That was not a factory, Doctor," returns the Controller mechanically.
"Oh? Then what was it?" The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.
"A rehabilitation centre. A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."
"Including old men and women, even children?"
"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor," says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate... but then, to people like him, it always is.
"Now that's an old fashioned point of view," says the Doctor "even from my standards."
I love that line, but it makes me feel sad. It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint. I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work... so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.
"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run," says the controller.
Note that. It's never been more efficient and more "economically run" than when the bloody Daleks are in control.
"People have never been happier or more prosperous," he continues.
"Then why," asks the Doctor, "do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"
This cuts right to the quick. It cuts to the delusion - still widespread on the left at that time - that 'really existing socialism' was in some meaningful way an improvement. But if it was so great, why was there a dirty big wall keeping people in East Germany? As Mark Steel once put it:
In many ways, 'Day of the Daleks' is a story about the failure of socialism or communism in the 20th century, and it confines itself to the predictable liberal assumptions. The Dalek economy looks like a gulag system. The terrible new world was brought about by the Chinese and Russians starting World War Three. Some revolutionary guerillas in fatigues try to change history with bullets and bombs and just make things worse (natch). Some of these "fanatics" (as the Doctor calls them) even have Che moustaches. (And let's not even get started on the racefails and politicsfails that come with having stupid, grunting, dark-skinned, low-browed aliens recycled from Planet of the Apes.)
And yet... as has been mentioned on this blog before, 'really existing socialism' or 'communism' were actually authoritarian and bureaucratic variants of state capitalism that arose for complex and contingent historical reasons. So you can ask the Doctor's question about social control in our society too.
I'm not an anarchist, though I have much sympathy with many anarchist ideas. One of the founding fathers of anarchism was Joseph Proudhon. I have my issues with him, but he did say something I love:
This is all still pretty much true where I am. I dunno about you. I expect the NSA knows you're reading this. The British government is currently engaged in a concerted effort to make public protest effectively illegal. And yet we live under capitalism, which we are constantly told is the best of all possible worlds. Even the recession is getting better, we're told.
What's the matter with us? Don't we like being happy and prosperous?
"Well, I quite like it here, I must say," interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, "Everyone's been most kind."
The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.
The Doctor, however, is unimpressed. He swills more wine. He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.
"Well, I met some people today who were far from kind," he says. He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller's utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.
"That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you," says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, "You must not jump to conclusions."
"Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard," snaps the Doctor, "Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"
We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime. It looked like a gulag. People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment. At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.
Grapes make wine, of course. Wine is strangely present in this story. Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles' wine cellar.
"That was not a factory, Doctor," returns the Controller mechanically.
"Oh? Then what was it?" The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.
"A rehabilitation centre. A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."
"Including old men and women, even children?"
"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor," says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate... but then, to people like him, it always is.
"Now that's an old fashioned point of view," says the Doctor "even from my standards."
I love that line, but it makes me feel sad. It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint. I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work... so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.
"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run," says the controller.
Note that. It's never been more efficient and more "economically run" than when the bloody Daleks are in control.
"People have never been happier or more prosperous," he continues.
"Then why," asks the Doctor, "do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"
This cuts right to the quick. It cuts to the delusion - still widespread on the left at that time - that 'really existing socialism' was in some meaningful way an improvement. But if it was so great, why was there a dirty big wall keeping people in East Germany? As Mark Steel once put it:
If you had a party, and discovered some of the guests secretly building a hot air balloon in an effort to escape, you wouldn't say, "Well that was a successful night."
In many ways, 'Day of the Daleks' is a story about the failure of socialism or communism in the 20th century, and it confines itself to the predictable liberal assumptions. The Dalek economy looks like a gulag system. The terrible new world was brought about by the Chinese and Russians starting World War Three. Some revolutionary guerillas in fatigues try to change history with bullets and bombs and just make things worse (natch). Some of these "fanatics" (as the Doctor calls them) even have Che moustaches. (And let's not even get started on the racefails and politicsfails that come with having stupid, grunting, dark-skinned, low-browed aliens recycled from Planet of the Apes.)
And yet... as has been mentioned on this blog before, 'really existing socialism' or 'communism' were actually authoritarian and bureaucratic variants of state capitalism that arose for complex and contingent historical reasons. So you can ask the Doctor's question about social control in our society too.
I'm not an anarchist, though I have much sympathy with many anarchist ideas. One of the founding fathers of anarchism was Joseph Proudhon. I have my issues with him, but he did say something I love:
To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.
This is all still pretty much true where I am. I dunno about you. I expect the NSA knows you're reading this. The British government is currently engaged in a concerted effort to make public protest effectively illegal. And yet we live under capitalism, which we are constantly told is the best of all possible worlds. Even the recession is getting better, we're told.
What's the matter with us? Don't we like being happy and prosperous?
Wednesday, 23 October 2013
Maximum Utility
The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it.
- Franco Moretti
People often compare the Borg, the cyborg gestalt from the Star Trek franchise, to Doctor Who's Cybermen. Both races were conceived as humanoids physically augmented with technology, hence a certain superficial visual resemblance, particularly between the Borg and the earliest Cybermen, from 1966's 'The Tenth Planet'... which has just been released on DVD, if you want some way for this post to be halfway relevant to anything.
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| Borg |
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| Cyberman |
Even so, the similarity of the Cybermen and the Borg is real, and rests upon kindred incoherent anxieties about capitalism.
1.
There's a real incoherence at the heart of the Cybermen. They are definitely communistic monsters, expressing a 'Soviet-version' of the associations between the loss of individuality and collectivism. They seek the total upgrade of the universe, working towards a chilly utopian telos lacking any inequality or freedom. But they are also deeply corporate monsters. They merged or allied themselves with International Electromatics in 'The Invasion'. IE was an expression of capitalist standardisation and mass production. Everything they make is the same, from their disposable radios to their CEO's offices. This is explicitly linked to capitalist production and business practices, and is implicitly linked with the uniformity of the Cybermen.
 |
| Someone's not a very efficienct typist. |
In many ways, the alliance between Tobias Vaughn and the Cybermen is a business partnership, with the invasion a hostile takeover. The partnership is possible because, in Vaughn's ultra-streamlined corporate context, there is a synergy with the Cybermen. In the new series, the alt-world Cybermen actually emerged from a corporation, Cybus Industries. They were a Cybus product, complete with a corporate logo on their chests. (With their divided nature, it's fitting that they take over Battersea Power Station, which began life as a venture of a private company, got nationalised and then closed down, and has since been waiting for a private venture to find a use for it.) The Cybus-Cybermen are linked with the internet, computer software and mobile phone technology, even acquiring the concept of conversion as an "upgrade" which expresses deep ambivalence about the frenetic rush of capitalist technology in the digital age, and the word "delete" (an everyday word now owing to home computing and text messaging) as a euphemism for 'kill'. Moreover, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine #410 (June 2009), the Cybermen behave like the psychopathic corporation described by the 2003 documentary film The Corporation, and the accompanying book by Joel Bakan. More than this, the Cybermen
conform to the lean mentality of business. Like so many companies, they use aptitude tests to secure the best candidates for Cyber-conversion: what else are the Tombs of Telos but a (somewhat unusual) recruiting station? The Cybermen's standardised functions sound suspiciously like a corporate hierarchy, with job titles (Controller, Leader) to match.
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| Yes, I'll go on the record: I quite like this. |
2.
I've written here about how the Cybermen are a Soviet version of the same set of associations that make the (Nazi) Daleks tick: namelessness, robotic/cyborg nature, collectivism, 'totalitarianism'. It's intially tempting to simply characterise the Borg as also an expression of the bourgeois liberal horror of collectivism, or of the widespread mainstream idea of collectivism, i.e. of communism. However, the Borg share much the same ambivalence as that already detected in the Cybermen. Indeed, in many ways, they express the same ambivalence much more clearly and completely.
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| You will be assimilated. Your culture will adapt to service ours. |
There is a deep sense of ambivalent confusion embodied within the Borg. While they undoubtedly speak to the horror of collectivism as widely perceived (loss of individual freedom, political tyranny, etc.) they also represent a lurking horror of capitalist rationality, of rationally self interested utility maximisers This is the de facto herd of individual rational actors who are supposed to make up the population in mainstream economics, all of them seeking their own rational self interest and thus giving rise to an unstoppable (and, for the late C20th left/liberal, sometimes destructive) market system. It isn't necessary for us to accept the scandalously absurd descriptions of capitalism offered by mainstream economics to acknowledge that many people do accept them, worry about them, or about what they perceive to be their effects. If our culture doesn't really run on rational self-interest and maximised utility, that doesn't mean that people can't perceive ruthlessly rational self-interest and utility maximisation in the system... and fear them.
Sometimes people fear the effects of capitalism and perceive then as the effects of what they think of as socialism. Such people are a constant source of titilated anxiety for liberals, as the obsession of American liberal publications with the Tea Party shows.
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| I didn't know this, but apparently Barack Obama is a Marxist. He's also black, which seems to worry some people. |
The fear of such mentalities usually coincides with an idea that they float freely in a society that is split, but not fundamentally divided on lines of class. Thus, the acceptance of anti-social ideas - or the pushing of rational ideas to anti-social extremes - is something that happens within decentralised pluralities. This liberal fear is of dangerous ideas spreading virally through society. The memetic view of religion pushed by Richard Dawkins is an example, albeit an example of dangerous 'irrationality'... but then, for Dawkins, it is the genes or memes which are the selfish rational actors, not the people who carry them... thus making the people a bit like drones. These kinds of fears are always tied to a fear of the decentralised crowd: the 'mob', in one form or other. Look at the view of consumerism that sees it as a kind of emotional disease which has infected all of 'us'. What is that but a fear of the decentralised crowd, mobilised en masse by a dangerously selfish rationale of consumption? This left/liberal complaint rests upon assumptions based in, or at least supported by, mainstream economics: that the movements of the market are determined on a large scale by the trends created by the small scale rational choices of selfish actors. This very decentralised crowd - an orderly mob - is the personality of the original Borg.
One essential trait of capitalism is the impulse to turn everything into more capitalism. It exists to convert all resources into commodities or productive forces, i.e. to turn everything into capital which then dominates further production, to assimilate everything and convert everything into itself. It is, as Q called the Borg in their debut, "the ultimate user", going after everything it identifies as something it can consume, utilise, transform and make into an image or aspect of itself. You don't have to be a Marxist to notice the ravenousness of the system. Indeed, non-Marxist currents of left/liberal thought in the 90s - often very much the same currents that were working out theories of consumerism - developed this idea further than the moribund, disoriented Marxism that was clinging on (at the extreme margins) at the time. (There is also the left/liberal unease at the Western cultural imperialism, itself piggybacking on neoliberal expansion in new markets... just look at the above image of the McDonalds in Moscow, an emblem of such processes in the 90s. The worry is about the assimilation and homogenization of other cultures. The relevance of this is obvious.)
It isn't necessary to accept as true the notion that the market 'works' because of atomised individuals flocking in formations of rational selfishness, or the details of the attendant left/liberal critique of consumerism, in order to see how these ideas - if accepted - might become a source of anxiety to liberals within a triumphant capitalist world. We can see how such liberal anxities - about an all-conquering capitalism, newly unrestrained, ravenous and consumerist, fueled by a dangerously selfish form of rationality which supposedly permeates society in a decentralised way - might well manifest as something like the Borg... something unstoppable, ruthlessly utilitarian, utterly self-involved, blankly arrogant, destructive, acquisitive and all-consuming, and manifested as a monolithic force composed of an aggregation of atomised individuals.
Liberalism - particulary C20th Liberalism - has always had the divided character that both supports capitalism, and capitalist notions, as liberating or at least optimal, while at the same time fretting over the imbalances, inequalities and injustices which seem - puzzlingly - always to beset the system. Liberalism in the 90s was uniquely placed to have bad dreams about this contradiction, about the horrors lurking within the best of all possible worlds, precisely because of the seeming final triumph of the 'market system'.
Speaking of liberal bad dreams, just look at the 'Descent' two-parter, which becomes a clunky parable about the rise of fascism (complete with red, white and black banners) by showing the disoriented, individualised Borg spellbound by a charismatic warmonger who offers them unity and purpose. Hands up anyone who spots the contours of the classic liberal interpretation of the rise of Hitler. The bewildered people, dizzy after a catastrophe, become mesmerised by the false promises of a demagogue. Here again, the Borg express liberal anxieties about the faultlines in the capitalist millenium.
The Borg are a nightmare that liberal capitalism had about itself.
This is, of course, why the Borg are a dark mirror held up to the Federation. If the Federation is the ultimate flowering of liberal hopes for capitalism (or, at least, Western liberal modernity) as a liberating, utopian force, then the Borg are the atavistic 'dark side' of the same system, repressed but - in the classic gothic move - returning with a vengeance.
3.
Gothic is, of course, very much the word. It can hardly be a coincidence that, as they evolve, the Borg develop features of previous such liberal nightmares about capitalism.... and that these features make them more and more openly gothic. They acquire the decadence of aristocracy, and with it the traits of vampires. The Borg gradually became the nomadic nosferatus of the Trek universe, spreading their plague with a bite and an infection of the blood. From Star Trek: First Contact onwards (i.e. from the moment they are shown to have a Queen), they are shown to shoot tubes into the neck (often leaving two little puncture marks) and assimilate by pumping Borg nanotech into the veins, which are often seen to ripple and turn greyish green beneath the skin as Borgness (i.e evil) flows into them. They become the Undead, the moment they start being lead by Countess Dracula.
This can hardly be an accident, this confluence of vampirism and aristocratic hierarchy. The greatest C19th Gothic vampire story - Dracula - traded on the disdainful, fearful, insecure, resentful, supercilious inferiority-complex felt by a rising professional middle class for aristocracy, something that Stoker took from the iconoclastic Byron's 'Lord Ruthven' and which ended up getting taken up by C20th vampire pop-culture. The vampire is nowadays quite unpicked from his/her previous semiotic entanglement with aristos, when he/she appears in his/her own person (the semiotic entanglement of female vampires with lesbianism is a whole different essay). Your actual fanged, blood-drinking coffin-sleeper can be an emo youth these days. But when vampirism is subtextually invoked in a disguised form - as in the later Borg - it also tends to bring its blue-blooded baggage with it, albeit in submerged ways. Hence, the Borg get a Queen when they get vampiric. (Of course, the Queen also comes from the bee-hive analogy... which is part of the 'surface level' of the semiotics of the Borg, the thematic miniscus that the writers consciously 'get'.)
Also, as has long been understood, the vampire is connected to fears of monopoly capital vs free trade. What can be more monopolistic than the vampire, converting everyone into copies of itself, threatening to infect the race with its bacillus and reconfigure us all in its own image? The vampire is a nightmarish figure of exponential expansion... to the point where one of the great mid-C20th vampire stories - Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - takes them to their logical extreme and puts them in the majority, their monopoly achieved, the last non-vampire brought to the point where he - the rarest of creatures - will become their folklore. It isn't hard to see that these vampiric traits and significations fit the Borg like a glove. The nightmare of capitalism as the great user, the great converter of everything into itself, becomes - in the liberal imagination - the nightmare of monopoly, restriction, control, all configured in terms of a return of the feudal and aristocratic. The Borg eventually slide perfectly into this set of associations.
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| "It's 3 for 2 on Dan Brown at Waterstones!" |
4.
The Borg drive to consume, adapt and utilise all technology they come across is also an echo of primitive accumulation, the process by which capitalism assembles the material and materiel it needs in order to function and expand. Capitalism achieved this, most drastically, via enclosures, which gradually brought the land out of feudal forms of ownership and control, and into the new bourgeois forms of property. Attendant on this process was the steady appropriation of the common lands, and the displacement of millions of people, no longer able to make a living from the land and thus forced into cities, into factories. Proletarianization. Essentially the same process was repeated in the great colonial empires of the C19th-20th, with mass deracination a constant product. Primitive accumulation was also built on the ruthless suppression of women, pushing them into new roles that accompanied the atomised bourgeois family, subjugating unpaid female labour to the reproduction of employable workers (both in terms of the creation of new people and the maintenance of already existing workers, ie husbands who needed feeding). Primitive accumulation reached its horrific apogee in the slave trade, with millions of Africans abducted, traded, bought, sold, dragged in chains to plantations in the 'New World, sold again, and forced into the work upon which the 'New World' was 'opened' to the conquest and expansion of Western capital. The genocide of native peoples in these 'New Worlds' - as in the gradual expansion of the United States across the American West - was a similarly crucial aspect of the rise of the modern capitalist world. The shockwaves of these epochal crimes still reverberate today. Modern sexism and racism are creations of this era, to name only the most obvious such legacies. Capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" as Marx puts it. If we decide (as I think we should) to see Stalin's Russia as a 'state-capitalist' form, in which a bureaucratic class of managers takes the place of private capitalists but, essentially, still runs a capitalist economy (with wage labour and surplus value) albeit a heavily state-controlled one, then we can see just the same process of primitive accumulation and disposession taking place when Stalin industrialises Russia. Ironically, the 'failure' of 'communism' thus helps prove Marx's analysis of the nature of capitalism. And the very 'mirror-image' aspect in the relation between Western 'free market' capitalism and Soviet state capitalism... especially for those liberals who, like Chomsky, see Western capitalism as also statist in a different way... is part of how figures like the Cybermen and the Borg develop with these incoherences and ambivalences within them, especially their dual capitalist/collectivist (Soviet) nature.
There are problems with relating the Borg to capitalism, partly engendered by such incoherences. Capitalists are not a collective intelligence, much as they share underlying class interests and allegiances. They are, as Marx put it in Capital vol.3, "hostile brothers", constantly at each other's throats, compelled to competition. Indeed, capitalists have personal interests that are at war with the capitalist class as a whole, let alone their direct competitors. But remember, the idea is not that the Borg correspond directly to capitalism, but that they express ways in which capitalism is perceived, particularly by sections of liberalism. It certainly looks, much of the time, as though capitalists share a single mind, especially when they flock to the same investment opportunities.
But even this hive-minded collectivity can be seen as expressing liberal anxieties about capitalism. It certainly functions much in the way I described here (as an elision of the nameless, the robotic, the cybernetic and the collectivist... reliant upon the assumption that all alternatives to capitalist freedom lead straight to totalitarianism) but the thing about the collectivism of the Borg is that they collect people as a workforce. To become part of the collective is to become a drone, a worker. In this way, assimilation echoes that proletarianization of humans which took place during primitive accumulation. The Borg appropriate human bodies, acquire an incoherent and heterogenous mass of people, and assemble them into a concentrated mass of drones (i.e. workers), crowded together and co-operating in a factory-like area of technological and industrial production. A hive of activity. This collecting of drones can be read as a retelling of the historical process whereby peasants were forced off the land and into the towns and factories, of how complex social and familial ties were destroyed by the coming of a more atomised (and supposedly more rationalised) society, of how human labour was violently reorganised into massively concentrated and complex sites of industrial or intellectual work (i.e. the factory system, the office). And don't think that the element of compulsion invalidates the analogy. The story of the creation of the proletariat is the story of centuries of ferociously violent and venemous compulsion. Even 'free labour' (ie those other than black people dragged to plantations in chains) found that they had to submit to capitalist wage labour or starve... and if they tried to find 'unlawful' ways to avoid starvation, they found themselves liable to be tortured and murdered by the state. For centuries, anyone considered to be resisting the drive to the assimilation of all workers - ie tramps, bandits, beggers, those who clung to the forest or the land, those who refused in any way the imperatives of working for the new system - were considered objects of terror and evil, whipped and beaten into line, or executed. There was a lot of this, because the transition to wage labour was bitterly resented and resisted. It still is, in every place where it continues today as neoliberalism restructures the world. But there is no alternative. The "archaic culture" (to use Borg phraseology) of the pre-capitalist world was "authority-driven" by God and Church and King, Headman and kin-group, season and harvest and tide... but the new culture smashes all such distinctions, all such old ways. (Of course, capitalism is authority-driven in different ways... but then so do the Borg prove to be.) All that is solid melts into air. The culture of the people must adapt to service the capitalist system. Freedom is irrelevant. The worker, separated from the land and thus from any way of producing the means of life for him/herself, has the freedom to work or starve. Death is irrelevant, since the workers are an amorphous mass of 'hands', each instantly replaceable. And, as we've seen, capital spread across the globe. From 1989-onwards, it really looked as if there was no way left for anyone, anywhere to resist it. Resistance is futile.
Even as some of the anxieties the Borg express rest upon a classless view of society, formed of a decentralised 'mob' (one way of seeing the uniform Borg), so other anxieties they express rest upon a deep awareness of the reality (and potential threat) of the working class. This shouldn't surprise us. The gothic has never been internally consistent; indeed, part of its unique power is its ability to allow dialectical oscillations of meaning within single signs. The 'assembledness' of the Borg, mirroring the same assembledness of the proletariat, is deeply gothic, in that a very similar thing occurs in Frankenstein. The monster is a proletarian monster, assembled just as surely as the proletariat was assembled, a collective whole constructed from heterogenous parts artificially brought together in the process of production, made from the assembled fragments of the poor (the kinds of people who were dug up by grave robbers and sold, on the C18/19th 'corpse economy' to anatomists). Maybe some of the paupers who furnished Victor Frankenstein with parts were hanged for 'crimes' that amounted to violations of private property, or refusal to meekly accept entry into the wage labour system (see above). To quote Moretti:
Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of 'a Ford worker'). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature.
Denied a name and individuality, the assimilated person is a Borg drone, like 'a Ford worker'. Collective; in the capitalist workplace, quite different to pre-capitalist forms of collectivity from which the proletariat were drawn. Literally collective, in the case of the Borg, but also bodily concentrated, like the proletariat, in a totally 'rationalised' space. Artificial; a new class, surrounded and dominated by machinery (ie capital). Literally artificial in the case of the Borg; a newly synthesised race, surrounded and penetrated by technology (ie capital).
So, once again, the Borg express liberal anxiety over capitalism. Once again, the anxiety is ambivalent. And, once again, the anxiety is both relevant to the 90s context and a reiteration of older liberal anxieties. The faceless, mindless, collective entity: the mob. Engulfed in the horror of labour under capitalism. To be pitied. Also to be feared. This ties directly in with the faultlines in the Godwinian liberalism with which Frankenstein is soaked (Godwin was Mary Shelley's father). Godwin's Political Justice and Caleb Williams demanded democratic reform, and savagely criticised injustice and inequality, but recommended fireside chats with educated people as the only form of agitation. He begged Shelley not to get drawn into organisation among the proletariat themselves, saying "Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!". Mary's monster is many things, but among these he is the terrifying threat of the monstrous proletariat, back for revenge for the way he has been abused and mistreated. Also, remember the fear that makes Frankenstein finally and irrevocably reject his creature: the fear that, by making him a mate, he will allow this new race to breed, expand and cover the world. Conversion and monopoly again. As noted, there is ambivalence and incoherence embedded in the Borg, and it's deeply gothic. The liberal terror at capitalist monopoly, expressed by the vampire, has a flipside in the liberal terror at proletarian takeover, expressed by Frankenstein's monster. The Borg reiterate both. In so doing, they express perhaps a submerged fear of the 90s liberal: that he faces either the eternal, capitalist 'end of history' (an unstoppable juggernaut) or, in the absence of Soviet style communism as a domineering force on the left, some new and unknown and uncontrollable way in which the disavowed and repressed underlings of the world will return to express their displeasure. The Borg become the system, and its own internal gravediggers, in one.
5.
This penetration of the body by the machine is explored far more thoroughly by the Borg in the various Star Trek
franchises. The Borg episodes, and the movie, repeatedly focus on
machinery that infibulates and conjoins with the body. We see cables
plugged directly into head sockets (very 90s, via Cyberpunk) and various
body parts removed and replaced by technological appendages. As noted,
the Borg insert tubials into their victims and inject their essence,
causing the skin to turn zombie-grey. Indeed, the Borg adopt something
that is only obliquely hinted at with regards to the Cybermen: cellular
bio-mechanics, ie nanobots that restructure the body on a cellular
level, and which allow technology to grow and sprout and breed like an
organism. This is all deeply connected with perennial fears generated
by capitalist modernity: the fear of bodily invasion and mutilation.David McNally's brilliant book - Monsters of the Market - states and explores this topic in greater detail (and if you find what I'm saying here interesting then you should totes go and read McNally because I'm getting tonnes of it from him). Pared right down to the bone, the idea is that capitalism not only disciplines and punishes the body of the worker (see above), it also breaks up her life experience, dividing labour, subjecting her to the rigours of a new kind of measured and organised time, dissecting her life into sections of work (whether at home or 'at work'... because home isn't a workplace, oh ho no). There is, for instance, the working day, and then the various subdivisions of the day. The day is made up of "dead time", when the worker must labour for the capitalist to make her wage. This is the alienation of life activity from the worker, just as the products of her labour are alienated from her control. The result is that the workers experience working life as a kind of living death. The intersection of dissected life and dead time finds literal expression in the "corpse economy", ie the punishment of proletarian bodies even after death in the dissection halls of the ruling class, often via the theft of bodies by 'resurrectionists' and their sale to anatomists. This was fiercely resisted by the London crowd of the C18/19th (that ever-present mob of bourgeois nightmare) at public executions, when riots would break out as people attempted to stop the bodies of the pauper criminals being handed over for further, posthumous, punishment. The cultural expression of all this is in tales of evisceration, dismemberment and anatomisation... and in the various nightmares of capitalist modernity which centre upon terror of (and terror of becoming) the living dead. It stretches right back from that evening in 1816 when Frankenstein and the Vampyre were simultaneously born, right up to today as we swim in a cultural sea of zombies.
Again, it isn't hard to see how the Cybermen and the Borg tie into this. If, as I've tried to show, both (most explicitly and clearly the Borg) are totally products of liberal anxieties about capitalism (as both unstoppable system and generator of the terrifying mob) then the mutilation fantasy implicit in both can be interpreted in light of McNally's ideas. Capital not only surrounds and controls the worker, embedding the worker within technology and the factory and the office, etc., it also penetrates the worker physically, looms over the worker as a force that historically and potentially violates/punishes the working body. The product of this violent interpenetration is the creation of an army of the walking dead.
(By the way, there's a lot more to be said about this issue with relation to other Doctor Who stories and monsters. I'm getting dizzy just contemplating how to apply these insights to 'Revelation of the Daleks' or 'Parting of the Ways'. Let alone most of the Hinchcliffe era... which fumbled its one attempt at Cybermen inexcusably.)
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| Look him in the eye and tell him he's not gothic. |
This is all gothic, you see. It's gothic all the way down. Listen to the language we're compelled to use. It's the language of death. Gravediggers, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, zombies. The Cybermen are steeped in it too. Think of their first appearance, wrapped in bandages like mummies, their white faces skull-like with their big round empty eye sockets and their inexpressive straight mouths. Think of their appropriation of the cursed-Egyptian-tomb narrative in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'. As I've noted in the past, whatever its flaws, 'Attack of the Cybermen' is probably the best Cyberman tale of the 80s because it remembers that the Cybermen are bodily imperialists who convert you into a zombie... and also because it seems more in tune with wider society than other later-Cyberman tales. It hooks into the decade of Thatcher, with its smash 'n' grab crooks run by a suave pinstriped businessman (Lytton), and its decidedly more anxious post-Falklands approach to militarism than 'Earthshock' manages (depicting the Cybermen as military conquerors of the Cryons). It's better, if still pretty weak. But at least it reconnects the Cybermen with work, bodily mutilation and economic factors.
6.
The Cybermen never quite attain the clarity and force of the Borg, precisely because of the different circumstances of their production (I mean, their TV production) which means that, once they're out of the 60s, they never again hook directly into the anxieties of their age the way the Borg do. Indeed, the Cybermen have lots more decades to try covering than the Borg did. Born into the post-Cold War world, the Borg had a field of distinct cultural anxieties to connect with... and, in many ways, they manage it. The Cybermen are a product of the 60s. Alongside those left/liberal anxieties about the self-interested rational actor that we mentioned earlier (expressed by the Cybermen as "logic"), they are also born from worries about the "white heat of the technological revolution", about technocratization (not least, of the Labour Party), about computerization, about the ambivalent potentialities of new tech that (50 years on from Wilson's speech) has indeed proved to have deeply ambivalent legacies. This was the post-war boom world, worrying about exactly what kind of utopia was going to be built, given that it was ostensibly going to be built by exactly the same kind of scientific instrumentalism that also built Auschwitz and Hiroshima. You might be tempted to bring up the word Luddite... but, of course, the Luddites were fighting the dispossession and disenfranchisement brought by just such ambivalent new technology. And Luddism is a profound inflection within Frankenstein; not in the crude sense of worry about 'the dangers of science' and 'playing god' (the mainstream philistine view of the book) but in the sense of worry about the failure of the Enlightenment project, of modernity itself, in the face of social injustice. None of which is to say that the Cybermen don't contain some pretty reactionary anxieties about the future of technology... not least their Soviet inflection.
This incoherence and ambivalence - found within the Cybermen and Borg - expresses the liberal anxiety over the splits in society (fundamentally, we're talking about class), and the desire to heal them, to resolve them. The splits are forced together into one (splitless; classless) form, a monolithic threat that must be destroyed... and yet, when destroyed, the monolith becomes a great mass of equally-threatening rubble within which totalitarianism will plot against democracy (cf 'Descent'). So even the liberal fear of 'extremism', unleashed by any challenge to the system, finds expression in the Borg. There is something about the splits that always adapts to any attempt (within Liberalism) to contain or eradicate it. Parenthetically, this may be way the concept of 'adaptation' is so central to the Borg threat, with their seemingly endless ability to adapt to new assaults (while also, of course, hinting at unease about the constant revolutionising of production... something hinted at in the evolution of the Cybermen and their latter-day concept of the "upgrade").
We know that the years since the recession have produced a slew of zombies. Indeed, Time Magazine called zombies "the official monster of the recession", and there's been lots of talk about "zombie banks" and "zombie economies" and "zombie capitalism". The economy continues after its death. As noted, the zombie has, in the past, stood for rather conceptually dodgy ideas about consumerism run amok... which has an obvious relevance to the credit crunch, if a superficial one that tends to blame the victims. But, as also noted, the zombie was also an expression of horror at slavery, at the reduction of the worker to labouring meat. (There is, by the way, a resurgence of zombie tales in those parts of Africa being restructured and socially demolished by neoliberalism... including Nigeria. Ahem. See McNally, again, for details.) In zombie cinema, the zombie runs riot and smashes up the world. And, if the world as it stands is not to your liking (if, for example, you're not a fan of recession, neoliberalism, imperialism, austerity, corporate rule and drastic inequality), there is pleasure to be taken in this spectacle, this violent carnival. The zombie is the faceless, mindless, proletarian mob of bourgeois nightmare, in open urban rebellion. Which we could do with, to be honest. That's why it's a shame that the Borg have disappeared from our age. In the absence of any apparent desire on the part of present-day Doctor Who to make the Cybermen engage with this crisis, the Borg would be uniquely placed to exploit it and express it. In many ways, having been born at the moment when capitalism seemed (to many) to have achieved a triumphant 'end of history', the Borg really ought to come back now, at the moment when capitalism-in-crisis seems to have begun a catastrophic version of the same thing.
*
It's only fair to acknowledge that this post is deeply indebted to the work of Franco Moretti and David McNally... indeed, any genuine insights here are almost certainly theirs; I've just adapted them to my topic. It's also necessary to stress that I diverge from them in my own directions, that I fail to do their ideas justice above, and that any consequent errors are entirely my own.
*
ADDENDUM: I should've made it clear somewhere above that ambivalence and anxiety were built-in to the idea of the 'end of history' from the start, even in the work of Fukuyama. That's important.
CORRECTION 4/12/13: It wasn't Byron who created Lord Ruthven, it was Polidori. Duh.
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