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.

Life and Taxes

Here is George Monbiot, on possibly the most scandalous domestic story of the year (which, in the age of the ConDems, is really saying something).  Please read this.  In a sane country, this issue would trigger an Egypt-style revolt.  It's essentially a government conspiracy to help massive corporations and banks (you remember how helpful they've been to the world in recent years?) defraud the country of perhaps unprecedentedly vast amounts of money.  It may even amount to the effective abolition of taxation upon the wealthiest organisations in society.

Here's a sample:

At the moment tax law ensures that companies based here, with branches in other countries, don't get taxed twice on the same money. They have to pay only the difference between our rate and that of the other country. If, for example, Dirty Oil plc pays 10% corporation tax on its profits in Oblivia, then shifts the money over here, it should pay a further 18% in the UK, to match our rate of 28%. But under the new proposals, companies will pay nothing at all in this country on money made by their foreign branches.

Foreign means anywhere. If these proposals go ahead, the UK will be only the second country in the world to allow money that has passed through tax havens to remain untaxed when it gets here. The other is Switzerland. The exemption applies solely to "large and medium companies": it is not available for smaller firms. The government says it expects "large financial services companies to make the greatest use of the exemption regime". The main beneficiaries, in other words, will be the banks.

But that's not the end of it. While big business will be exempt from tax on its foreign branch earnings, it will, amazingly, still be able to claim the expense of funding its foreign branches against tax it pays in the UK. No other country does this. The new measures will, as we already know, accompany a rapid reduction in the official rate of corporation tax: from 28% to 24% by 2014. This, a Treasury minister has boasted, will be the lowest rate "of any major western economy". By the time this government is done, we'll be lucky if the banks and corporations pay anything at all.

Now, being an utter nerd, there's always a little bit of my brain at the back (not as little or as far back as it should be) that is thinking about some film or TV series or book with monsters in it.

I simply cannot help thinking about 'The Sun Makers' when I read this.  One of the most hilarious myths in Who fan culture is that 'Sun Makers' is a right-wing allegory about the horrors of the big state and punitive taxation.  This is to misunderstand the story but also, more important, it is to buy into one of the centrepieces of reactionary ideological bullshit pervading our culture: the idea that conservative politics is about the liberty of the individual while socialist politics is about the power of the state.

The truth is, conservatism needs the state.  It loves the state.  The core of conservatism is the ideological commitment to using the state to further the direct interests of big capital.   Conservatism understands, even if many so-called socialists don't, that the state is theirs.  It's an emanation from the capitalist system.  Law, order, the courts, the police, the government... they're there to protect private property, to guard the people who own it all from the people who own relatively nothing.  It's an apparatus of force and coercion, built to enforce the dominance of the people who own and control the means of production. 

Liberals and professional Labourists are eager enough to use the state to enforce the rule of the capitalists, to promote the interests of business, etc.  But conservatism sees this as its sacred mission... and, since the age of neoliberalism was ushered into practice by Pinochet and Reagan and Thatcher, they see it as the very least they can do.  Conservatives now, and our own government is an example par excellence, wants to wage all-out class war on behalf of the very biggest and the very richest.  They are engaged in smash and grab policies, designed to sell off everything that isn't nailed down... and then prize up the nails.

In 'The Sun Makers', Robert Holmes is not just satirising "the UK tax system", as fan guidebooks usually inform us.  He's satirisng the symbiotic link between the state and big business.  Yes, the Collector's personal guard are called the "Inner Retinue" (which sounds a bit like "Inland Revenue"... thus implying that the Vat man is a bit of a brutal thug, geddit???) and there are are corridors called the P45, etc.  But all this occurs under the absolute domination of an organisation called "The Company", run by a guy in a pinstriped suit, who is clearly doing this for the profits.  Where do the profits come from?  From the ludicrously exorbitant taxes (i.e. "breathing tax") paid by the population to the Gatherer, who is the ultimate state official but is grovellingly subservient to his corporate master.  So, the state gathers and the Company collects.  Really, how much clearer could this possibly be?

It's sometimes objected that the society in the story is more like a Stalinist dictatorship... because it's got torture chambers, prison camps, a news service that broadcasts government propaganda and lots of bureaucrats.  Well, the capitalist world has torture chambers, prison camps, utterly subservient news and bureaucrats aplenty.  (Our leaders are currently trying to lever a torturer into power in Egypt who's been complicit with them in rendition flights, all in the name of stability.)  Indeed, corporations themselves function on bureaucracy, misinformation, propaganda and absolutist pyramidal power structures.  They are themselves command economies.  Many of them are now bigger, in terms of GDP, that some nation states.  And then there's the fact that Nazi Germany was a capitalist country (albeit one with heavy state involvement).  And then we have endless examples of capitalists being more than happy to do lucrative business with brutal, repressive regimes... IBM in Nazi Germany, Murdoch in China, etc.

Neoliberalism uses the state as a way of distributing largesse from the poor and from ordinary working people to the rich and the corporations.  That's our current government's project.  One way of doing this is through taxation.  Put very crudely, you raise taxes on the ordinary schmoes and lower them for the rich, or simply fail to collect them.  Meanwhile, the government splurges money on protecting the interests of banks and big business, with bail outs from the treasury when they totter, or by selling off the public sector to them at knockdown prices and then continuing to use taxpayer money to prop things up when business ruins them.

This is what has happened in 'The Sun Makers'.  The Company has, effectively, bought out the government... or merged with it to the point where they have become one... though, of course, the Collector reveals their intention to simply leave the humans in the lurch once they've made as much profit out of them as they can.  They artificial suns will run down without Company maintenance and the humans will die.  "We're all in it togther" in a nutshell.  In the meantime, the humans work to provide the Company with surplus.  They work in factories and foundries (obviously making stuff, which must then be sold on the intergalactic market) and, if they get sent to the Correction Centre for defying the Company, they end up working for free... a bit like the denizens of America's system of privatised slave gulags stuffed with the (mostly black) poor.

Of course tax is unfair and places a burden on 'the little guy', restricting her or his freedom.  But don't join the Tea Party in protest.  The problem is in capitalism itself, particularly now in its neoliberal phase.  Regressive taxation is an inherent part of the capitalist state, and the capitalist state is now (more than ever before) being consciously turned into a system for providing the very richest, most powerful, least accountable private tyrannies on Earth with staggering largesse, all at the expense of you and me.  And our kids.  And our forests and climate and public services.  At the expense of the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, the depressed, the women who've been raped or are trapped in abusive marriages.  At the expense of the drudges, the guys who work their lives away and, in the end, haven't saved enough to pay for a decent funeral.  'The Sun Makers' realises this.  Perhaps Holmes was looking at New York City or Chile.  Who knows.

I wish more people outside fandom were familiar with this story (why is it one of the few Tom Baker stories still not out on DVD?).  It really is, despite its jokiness and shlockiness, quite a powerful diagnosis of where we are and where we're headed.  It's not "anti-tax", it's anti regressive taxation, taxation that leaves the Company untouched while filling its coffers with the fruits of the labour of the many.  It's against the state that stifles individual liberty, not by failing to reward enterprise and initiative, but by forcing people to pay through the nose for the privilege of not starving to death because no corporation will stoop to buying their labour.  It's against a system that can build mini-suns but can't (or won't) give working people a decent standard of living.  It's against a system that asks you to "Praise the Company!" as though its a deity or a force of nature.  It's implicitly against Cameron and his band of zealous market fundie class warriors.

The problem with tax is not that it hinders wealth creation by punishing those whose dynamism breeds success.  (Is any theory in human history now more discredited than "the trickle down effect"?)  The problem with tax is that it constitutes a system of exploitation within a system of exploitation.  It nickels and dimes everybody who isn't vastly wealthy in order to fund states that then feed the rich who sit with their mouths open like baby birds in a nest.  And the rich are usually rich in the first place on the profits from industry (i.e. value created by workers) or from speculation with hallucinatory money that exists only in financial markets.  You can't reform that away.  Ed Labour, if it gets in, will just be a slightly kinder version of the same thing.  Surely, nobody can doubt this... what with Tony Blair still poncing around the globe, spending his blood money and backing New Labour suits like Ed's brother?

In other words, the way to tackle the outrageous business going on in that Monbiot article is not tut about this bunch in government and try to curb them (though I don't discourage you from doing so). We need to take a leaf out of Citizen Cordo's book.  Let's not jump.  Let's have a jelly baby instead.  And then lets remember that, as the Doctor says, "human beings always have to fight for their freedom" and we have "only our claims" to lose.

Empires Toppling

There is a long and venerable tradition in Doctor Who of portraying revolutions sympathetically.  It does this many times.  It isn't an unbroken run of support... but for every 'Reign of Terror', in which the French Revolution is given the full Baroness Orczy treatment, there is a 'Sun Makers', in which a full-scale workers' revolt topples a corporate tyranny.  For every 'Monster of Peladon', where reform is touted as a solution to chaos created by extremists on both sides (right-wingers in government and looney-left wingers amongst the miners), there is a 'Happiness Patrol' in which the Doctor and Ace encourage a united rebellion by factory workers, aboriginal aliens and dissidents.  Fantastical, they may be... but these depictions are also surprisingly candid about the amount of mess, pain and trauma involved in popular uprisings, while retaining a forthright sympathy.

As far as I know, this track record is unique amongst television programmes.

In light of interesting and inspiring things going on in the world at the moment, I thought it might be fun to post some of my favourite televised revolutions....


The Ood kick some sorry corporate ass.


Street protests, in which dissidents defy the security forces and trap them in the knots of their own ideology, kicking off a process that will lead to the fall of a brutal, repressive government and the attempted flight of a dictator.


The Doctor confronts a neoliberal hobgoblin and, with the vital help of the "work units"... sorry, I mean "the people", he foils a plan to put down a rebellion.  He confuses his pin-striped capitalist foe into submission by means of a growth tax leading to "negative surplus" (i.e. no profit). 


Sadly, the radical message of 'The War Games' sputters a little when the Doctor calls upon the Time Lords for help... but still, here we see "the Resistance" (a unified force of soldiers of all nationalities) storming the baddie's control centre and putting an end to their cynical, fake wars.

Solidarity!

Economic Miracles

This is my Timelash II stuff on the subject of Graham Williams' tenure as producer... it's a bit thin because I've either posted about several stories from this era elsewhere or because I'm planning to.  Also, to be honest, some of the stories simply don't yield much grist for my mill.  That isn't to knock the Williams era, which contains some of the most politically interesting Who stories ever made (which is partly why they needed - or need - posts all to themselves).  Notice, for instance, how the stories glanced at below seem obsessed with fuel, economics and questions of prosperity vs. austerity... s'what comes of making Doctor Who in the context of the late 70s I guess...


I've written about 'Horror of Fang Rock' here and 'Image of the Fendahl' here.


'The Sun Makers'

This is from elsewhere on this blog, but it's part of a wider article.  I thought it could tolerate repeating... especially since 'Sun Makers' is a favourite of mine, for reasons which should be obvious.  I don't think, by the way, that this story has ever been more relevant than it is now.

Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.

Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.

The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.

Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).

The state gathers and the Company collects.

This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?

But the key thing is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.

Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.

The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.

And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful. 

'The Ribos Operation' is examined in scarily extensive detail, here.


'The Pirate Planet'

There is a satirical aspect to Douglas Adams' debut Who story which anticipates the satire inherent in much of Hitch Hiker's... but whereas Hitch Hiker's presents a kind of farcical search for God and/or meaning in a universe of comic incompetence and small mindedness, 'Pirate Planet' seems more directly political in its preoccupations: at times its almost like Adams is having a go at imperialism through the analogy of piracy.

In 'Pirate Planet', Zanak is a culture of indolent and complacent and unquestioning people who kick jewels around their streets whenever their leader simply announces a new golden age and the mines just fill up again... and all because their world grabs others, crushes them, sucks them dry of their wealth and then moves on. The people don't know because they don't care to know. Rome never looks where she treads, as Kipling put it. You don't get political comment quite like that in Hitch Hiker's (at least not until Infinidim Enterprises arrive in the last novel); you're far more likely to get satire at the expense of bumbling bureaucracy and plodding literal mindedness (one of the preoccupations of 'Shada' a little later, once Adams has found his voice).

In 'Pirate Planet', a young man with lots of talent is writing his early, angry stuff... and instinctively fitting in with the ethos of a series that almost reflexively critiques Power in moral terms. Trouble is, Adams is rather too flippant to quite make this story work as a polemic... though he is plainly influenced by Bob Holmes' way of creating witty and knowing stories that let political comment ride along happily with jokes (i.e. 'Carnival of Monsters' and 'The Sun Makers').

Still, it contains one of my all-time favourite one-liners from Who.  Asked if he thinks it's "wrong" for mines to just fill up with minerals all by themselves, the Doctor replies: "It's an economic miracle; of course it's wrong!"

Tom Baker (in one of his greatest late performances) both revels in the smartass comedy and latches onto the underlying seriousness of some aspects of the story. By doing so, he creates an opportunity for himself to turn his great 'angry scene' into a moment when, for all the multicoloured glitz and jokey dialogue, he portrays a man genuinely aghast at a crime almost too awful to comprehend. And it's riveting stuff.


'The Power of Kroll'

Robert Holmes might’ve been pissed off about having to write about a very big monster, but he was (apparently) even more pissed off about the treatment of Native Americans, racism and big business exploiting the environment. This could have been disastrous if it weren’t for the fact that Holmes is also intelligent about these things. Nothing is all that simple in this story.

The Swampies (or the People of the Lakes, if we’re being PC about it) are more than just victims. We are invited to sympathise with them and direct parallels are drawn with the plight of Native Americans when the Doctor calls their moon a “sort of reservation”. Now that their moon looks commercially exploitable, they’re liable to be forcibly evicted again. But, while clearly the victims of an historic injustice, they’re not portrayed as particularly virtuous or wise. Unlike the Kinda (who have the whiff of gift-shop dreamcatchers about them), the Swampies are flawed and naive. This is rather refreshingly unpatronising. Ranquin is a blinkered religious bigot who is not above using Kroll as a means of getting his own way. Nor is he above a spot of politically-expedient murder. He even has his own face-saving political myth about the Swampies leaving Delta-Magna of their own accord.

It’s interesting to see how Holmes deliberately makes the humans and the Swampies into mirror images of each other. Thawn and Ranquin are both the same kind of deceitful, callous, bullshit artists. Also, Fenner and Varlick are similar types. Both are happy to sanction killing when they disapprove of the victim, but neither is without conscience. They are both troubled by their leader’s behaviour but grumble and procrastinate while still obeying.

The treatment of racism is also intelligent. Thawn is clearly a racist but, when accused of hating the Swampies by Fenner, he denies the charge and simply restates his economic imperatives. This is right on the nail. The motivations behind all organised persecution of minorities is always fundamentally economic. The supposed ethnic and cultural difference of Africans was merely a pretext that was fashioned into a political ideology of slavery; the underlying motive was commercial. The supposed savagery and primitivism of Native Americans was simply an ideological justification for imperialistic conquest and theft. Modern racism has its roots in economics as much as in any deep-seated xenophobic impulse. Nobody in ‘The Power of Kroll’ mentions the fact that the Swampies are green (apart from the Doctor, ironically enough) but Thawn is constantly on about the fact that they’re in his way.

Meanwhile, the exploitation of the natural resources of the lake creates an unforeseen ecological effect; the awakening of Kroll is caused by the Refinery raising the lake’s temperature and shooting off orbit shots. I’d hesitate to call Kroll a metaphor for environmental disaster, but all the same… he is a runaway by-product of the refinery.

Also, the nonsense spouted by Ranquin and Varlick’s growing realisation that Kroll is nothing but a big animal, constitutes another poke at religion… though not without putting the Swampies religious narrative within a political context of oppression and alienation, and entirely without portraying them as inherently culturally backward.  This guy was a natural radical, whether he knew it or not. To think he used to edit John Bull Magazine! (Sometimes I see strange similarities between Holmes and Orwell. Holmes was a copper, wasn't he? Just as Orwell was a colonial policeman in Burma.)

Meanwhile, we have Tom Baker giving one of his best performances. No, I’m serious. Is there any moment during his tenure more blissful than his deadpan inquiry to Thawn: “Will there be strawberry jam for tea?”. Watch the way he looks embarrassed when asked stupid (to him) questions about the refinery. Watch him glare at Thawn’s treatment of Mensch and smirk at Fenner’s unironic use of the all-purpose word “progress”. Then there’s the “aren’t you going to say ‘don’t make any sudden moves?’” scene. This Doctor is a bumbling fartaround, a dilletante, a muckabout, a sophomoric clown... but with a deep, ingrained sense of rage at injustice and cant and bigotry. He's a satirist of the powerful and callous; he allows the despicable to write him off as a looney. This is my Doctor. None of that lonely god rubbish. No burning at the centre of time like fire and ice and blah blah blah. Just a rogue radical, a wry scientist, an activist eccentric. He quite simply rocks.

Yeah, okay, the Swampies look stupid and their chant is rubbish… and yeah, the monster looks utterly fake… and yeah, Episode 3 is nothing but the stupid creeper-execution thing and loads of conversations about “viscosity levels”… but hey, it’s got Philip Madoc in it, for chrissakes!

And its heart and brain are both in the right places. It has possibly the most fair and unprejudiced portrayal of native, tribal people that I've ever seen in sci-fi. It attacks racism, capitalism, environmental destruction and religion... and from a radical challenge position rather than just a hand-wringing liberal critique. It contains none of the sentimentalised patronising attitude to be found in, say, Avatar (yeurch), while also containing ten times the anger.


I'm planning to post something seperate and self-contained on the subject of 'City of Death'.

The Megropolis 1 Budget - at a glance:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Workers of the Whoniverse

(This was originally written for May Day.)


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

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

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

Given all this, and given the variety of writers who contributed to it over the years, it would be amazing if Doctor Who hadn’t occasionally aligned itself with workers – especially during times of heightened class struggle. After all, there were times during its original production run when even sobre and pessimistic people thought that youngsters, workers and radicals might change the world a very fundamental way. As it was, the struggles of such people heavily influenced mainstream culture, if slowly and unconsciously. In a time during which being a Maoist was to be mainstream in most universities, it’s no more surprising that the (presumably non-Maoist) makers of Doctor Who should have their hero claim friendship with Mao than it is that they should have him tripping through psychedelic surrealism (as in ‘The Time Monster’) despite not themselves being LSD users. Memes are bullshit, but ideas can be viral. When counter culture is strong and insurgent, it effects the mainstream… if only because the mainstream is heavily influenced by what is commercial and therefore tries to sell counter culture back to people when it becomes popular.

Frequently, Who will point out the corruption, callousness and brutality of masters, but they tend to be masters of slaves rather than of labour. Frequently, economic relationships are not depicted at all. When workers do appear, they tend to be stick figures in the background who are either irrelevant or need the Doctor to help them. Or they are ignorant, semi-comedy oafs. The best example of this is probably ‘The Green Death’, the culmination of the Letts/Dicks tendency towards right-on, tree-hugging, soft liberal/lefty polemics. The workers are portrayed as “funny little Welshm[e]n” who can be quite nice and kind at times, and who grumble at the nasty boss, but who also sneer ignorantly at the people with the real solutions: the middle class, University-educated, scientifically-trained, semi-hippy, right-on, soya-munching kids in the cute little commune. The other representation of workers to turn up like a bad penny is the “hotheads” thing. The Peladonian miners have legitimate grievances (the show is lefty enough to admit as much) but their sensible, moderate leader is the good guy while the radical amongst them is a “hothead” who descends into homicidal madness because he suspects that his comrades are being sold out. Meanwhile, the Doctor notes approvingly how the moderate miners’ leader stands shoulder to shoulder with the Queen and the High Priest (who have been oppressing his fellows) once they are threatened from outside. Yeurch.

When not being patronised and/or pitied, workers tend to be ignored. They just get left out, even when the show is at its most bolshy. We get a brief mention of “plebeian classes” on Gallifrey but we never see them. (This blog is named for these disdained, policed, strangely absent, seemingly vandalism-prone proles of the Doctor’s home world.) The show harps on about the evil of militarism, imperialism, fascism, racism and slavery. The show has some criticisms of organised religion. It frequently lashes out at the rich and the powerful. Sometimes it even takes on capitalism itself, situating evil forces within the context of business and corporate power. The show often seems to be sympathetic to revolution. The show has many nasty oligarchies felled by rebellion. All well and good. Inspiring even. But the rebels tend to be cookie-cutter resistance fighters rather than ordinary working people driven to revolt. Once in a while you get mention of a strike… with fish people on the picket line. There is a stripping away of wider context, even in some of the series’ most powerfully political episodes. You get sub-textual attacks on fascism… but you don’t, for instance, find any hint of it as a counter-revolutionary reaction against high levels of working class struggle (fair enough really – the Trotskyist analysis of fascism isn’t the kind of thing that keeps viewers glued to the screen between Grandstand and Juke Box Jury). Even some of the most angry attacks on capitalism lack any portrayal of workers, i.e. ‘The Caves of Androzani’.

But, as I said, occasionally a story comes along in which the workers are strongly present, in which they seem to be real people, to have a chance of winning (by themselves as much as with the Doctor’s help) and to have a chance of being a positive force, of changing the world. And it even happens occasionally in our dreary present. The series is today made by people who grew up watching it and loving it. Once in a while, even a New Labour-supporting writer with an O.B.E. and a future career in Hollywood will find himself writing a script in which an ordinary working woman stands up to the soldiers who are taking the immigrants away. Maybe it’s the influence of the old show working on his soul. Who knows?

And so… here it is, the Shabogan Graffiti guide to the three best Doctor Who stories that show the people who create all the wealth of society throwing off their (mental and/or physical) chains and fighting back.


'The War Games'

Soldiers are workers too. The guys at the front, bearing the brunt, are usually not (for the most part) the sons of privilege. The cannon fodder is drawn from the ranks of the poor and propertyless. On the ground, the Iraq war was kids from American urban wastelands devastated by domestic neoliberalism vs. reluctant Shia and Kurd conscripts. ‘Twas ever thus. And the soldiers we meet in ‘The War Games’ are clearly workers (or peasants). Okay, Carstairs and Lady Jennifer are posh, but the rest of them are common as muck.

From bluff Yorkshireman Russell to the defiant black Northern soldier Harper, the kidnapped soldiers are the workers of the world. They’ve been duped and brainwashed by their cynical leaders. They’re pawns on the chessboard of the ‘Great Game’.

And the players of the game? The English General Smyth (“the Butcher”), the German von Weich, the Confederate (also von Weich – are they clones? ...well, the Generals are all the same!) who sneeringly calls Harper “boy”… The commanders on all sides are actually allies in a conspiratorial abuse of the workers who are fooled and forced into fighting each other for no reason but to further imperialist ambitions. The real war is the war waged by the rulers against the people.

But the people see through the conditioning (or some of them do – Lenin would’ve probably called them a vanguard) and form the Resistance. Black and white, all nationalities… even Arturo Villa joins his bandits to the cause. Scared kid Private Moor saves the day by fragging the officer. Jamie and the Redcoat with whom he’s imprisoned join forces despite their natural mistrust and escape together. In the end, the War Games are stopped by this international union of soldiers in revolt.

And when was this made and shown? 1969. The year that the worldwide anti-Vietnam protests reached a crescendo.


'The Mutants'

Two words: Stubbs and Cotton. They’re a cut above yer usual sci-fi guards. Why? Because they behave like real people. Well, they behave a bit like real people (this is still Doctor Who after all). They call their boss “his nibs” when he’s not about. They grumble when the alarm goes off because they’ve got to cut short their tea break. They’re not idealised. Stubbs is prepared (though obviously not eager) to kill “Mutts” before he gets savvy to what’s really going on in the system he serves. For ages they’ve carried on standing their posts, despite casually saying that the Solonians should’ve been given their independence years ago when anybody bothers to ask them.

These are clearly meant to be normal working stiffs. Stubbs has a regional accent (a rarer and therefore more pointed detail back then) and Cotton is a black man with a Caribbean accent (again, a rare and pointed detail). The choice of a Caribbean actor (albeit a very bad one) to play Cotton is indicative (I don’t know if it’s specified in the script that Cotton should be a black man but it hardly matters). The Caribbean was a nexus point of empire – the natives were all but annihilated by Westerners and the islands were subsequently used as a crucial staging post of the slave trade. (Also, in the context of black slavery, the word “cotton” is itself redolent of many pertinent associations.) And it had to be a conscious anti-racist statement, in the early-70s context of racial strife and a resurgent National Front. Stubbs and Cotton are best mates, despite their ethnic difference. The sci-fi context makes them both “Overlords”, i.e. both defined by their common humanity… but they go on to redefine themselves as being against some of their fellow humans, i.e. the Marshal and what he represents. This is the key thing about them: in the course of a struggle against the forces of reaction, they undergo a change. They see and hear things that bring about their political awakening. They shrug off “false consciousness” as they fight alongside Ky and the other Solonians. Just as white and black workers can join forces, so can they join forces with colonial people that their own nation has subjugated.

Everybody knows that ‘The Mutants’ has things to say about apartheid, but mostly we nowadays think of apartheid in connection with the old South Africa. But Rhodesia was an apartheid state too. It had only been a self-declared independent republic since 1965 and, in 1972 was still run by the racist white-minority government of Ian Smith. It would not be until 1979 that pressure from nationalist resistance fighters and revolutionary guerrillas would force Smith to come to terms and hold proper elections, in effect granting “majority rule”. The Marshal is very reminiscent of Smith. He refuses to go along with the official policy of peaceful relinquishment devised by a crumbling system. He dreams of doing what Smith did, declaring independence from the Empire while retaining the minority rule of the “Overlords”.

In 1972, people could still see the turmoil in Britain’s colonies (or former colonies) on the TV news. A generation had lived through a process of imperial divestment, during which the British Empire dismantled itself because the Second World War had left Britain economically bankrupt. The Earth Empire in ‘The Mutants’ is clearly the British Empire (rather than the French or Portugese) because it is taking itself apart. Britain had little choice but to peacefully grant independence to her former colonies once they achieved non-communist “stability” because empire had become too expensive. France, by contrast, squandered lives and treasure trying to hold onto her possessions, only to be defeated at length… but in France in ’68, many students and workers and ordinary people had expressed their solidarity with those brutalised by their own country’s empire, which had once included what the French called Indochina… which had since become the target of another empire, and the focus of more protest.


'The Sun Makers'

Some idiot once wrote that, in this story, the rebels are worse than the baddies. I dunno what story he was watching, but it ain’t the one I know as ‘The Sun Makers’. The Others might be a motley and even unsavoury lot but they’re hardly as bad as the planet-enslaving Collector and his pet Gatherer. Mandrel makes nasty threats that he doesn’t try very hard to make good on. The Doctor, ever a keen judge of character, doesn’t seen worried by Mandrel even when he’s waving a red hot poker in his face. Leela has some choice words for them that are very pertinent. She calls them cowards and that, essentially, is the trouble with them. Mind you, you can’t blame them for running away from life in Megropolis 1.

Some other idiots have occasionally argued that ‘The Sun Makers’ is a right-wing allegory because it depicts a tyrannical state and rails against taxes. Well, that’s fine if you’re dumb enough to buy the bullshit lie that conservative politics really is all about defending personal liberty from big government and punitive taxation. In fact, ‘The Sun Makers’ couldn’t be clearer about its political sympathies (even if you stick your fingers in your ears during the playful misquoting of Marx). The tyrannical state in this story is the Company. They are effectively one, or the Company exercises such control that they might as well be. This isn’t a big state stifling the liberty of free enterprise and free consumers. This is a big state as a vehicle for corporate domination. The Company is a private concern, engaged in “commercial imperialism”. The Company has, essentially, carried out a hostile takeover of the government. This is one big state that’s been privatised.

The icons of modern conservatism (i.e. Reagan, Thatcher, Bush, Bush II) are usually, for all their populist anti-government rhetoric, ultra-statists. They might reduce bureaucracy here and there (usually by cutting public services, etc.) and deregulate business, but they always strengthen the state’s machinery of enforcement, regulation, control and surveillance of its citizens, i.e. the poor schmoes who do all the work get spied on and arrested more. Meanwhile, we have de facto economic planning in the hands of radically undemocratic and monolithic organisations. We just call them corporations, but they act like states within states. And they get more and more powerful all the time.

Was the Iraq war a state affair? Well, the costs were pretty much covered by the state (i.e. by the American taxpayer) but the opportunities and profits were tendered out to the companies that swarmed in like vultures. Neoliberalism wants to turn the state into a heavily armed enforcement service that monitors and controls and taxes the population while acting as a munificent pimp for corporations, farming out every other task of the state to them, garnished with massive subsidies (i.e. corporate welfare).

The state gathers and the Company collects.

This is pretty much what Bob Holmes wrote about in ‘The Sun Makers’. His income tax bill seems to have got him thinking about the future of neoliberalism. Strange but true. Maybe he was looking at Chile and General Pinochet’s great experiment in merciless Chicago school ultra-monetarism, which he inflicted on his people via brutal repression. How else did he manage to write a Doctor Who story in 1977 that can be read as a companion text to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein?

But the key thing for the purposes of this little essay is the way the workers are portrayed as changing in the course of the struggle. The Others are clearly former workers who’ve opted out. Mandrel’s grade status and former workplace even become plot points. Cordo is the lowest of the low; a timid, despairing and bankrupt drudge, the son of a lifelong corridor sweeper. But they end up uniting across the grade barriers, across their former differences. The Others go from cowardly hiding and petty criminality to leading a general strike. Cordo goes from contemplating suicide to jubilantly leading a revolution. Bisham is an executive grade whose moment of curiosity lands him in detention; initially, he lies back and accepts his doom.. but he ends up uniting with B and D Grades to topple the government. The workers with hand and brain.

Okay, they need the Doctor to get them started, but in this story the Doctor is almost like a personification of Information itself. He tells them things. He makes them curious. He makes them angry. He poses the right questions. He turns off the gas that makes them anxious and passive (surely this is thematically linked to his taking over the TV station and the news service?) and thus gets the ball rolling. It isn't long before he wanders off with Leela and leaves the united workers to pursue the revolution on their own.

The Doctor’s role as catalyst notwithstanding, this is a full scale workers’ revolution. Moreover, it’s explicitly linked to industrial action in the scene where Goudry and Veet incite the strike. It’s idealised, sure, but the portrayal is not without sceptical irony or some healthy moral ambiguity. Mandrel’s former colleagues Synge and Hackett obviously join the revolution from fear rather than immediate enthusiasm (though they seem to end up happy enough to help), and Marn simply switches sides when she sees which way the wind is blowing.

And then we have the matter of the Gatherer and his little tumble... Well, you can wring your hands about him if you like. I have to do my own tax return so, frankly, I’m not feeling merciful.