18

Everyone is down a mine.

(Incidentally, it's funny how often Doctor Who in the 70s and 80s keeps coming back to mines.  I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that coal mining was a key industry in British economic life during these decades, miners were among the most powerful unionised workers in the 70s, and the 80s saw the calculated destruction of the miners' unions and their industry by the Tory government.  Oh ho no.)

Anyway.  As I say, everyone - the Doctor, Romana, K9, Adrasta, Organon and a giant green blob called Erato - is down a mine.  And things are coming to a head.  (Head.  Pit-head.  Geddit?  Never mind.  It doesn't really work anyway.)

Yes, so anyway...  Erato is, as I say, a giant green blob.

"Erato came here fifteen years ago to propose a trading agreement," says the Doctor, while everyone else still reels from the revelation that the blob has a name, a mind and the ability to talk. "Tythonus is a planet rich in metallic ores and minerals...."

There's an interlude here where the Doctor and Adrasta have a little argument about the fact that the Doctor is checking his facts by asking an electric dog.

"...the Tythonions exist on ingesting chlorophyll," the Doctor continues, "Large quantities of it, judging by their size. Now, there's a superabundance of planet life on Chloris, so..."

"So Erato came here to offer you metal in return for chlorophyll!" finishes Romana.

"Right. But who was the first person he met?"

"The person who held the monopoly of metal here," supplies Organon in response to the Doctor's rhetorical question.

He means Adrasta, by the way.

"Right," agrees the Doctor, "And did she put the welfare of her struggling people above her own petty power? No. She tipped the ambassador into a pit and threw astrologers at him."

If you don't know what that last bit means, well I'm sorry... I have limited space and no inclination to explain.  What are you doing reading this blog anyway, if you're not the sort of person who has already seen the DVD at least 412 times?

What Erato didn't reckon on was the fact that he was a character in a story being written in Britain in the late 70s, when British society was laying to rest the last vestiges of the leftover radicalism of the 60s and just starting to be transformed by the crumbling of the post-war social democratic consensus and the rise of neoliberalism...  By coming to a feudal society that existed in such a story, Erato was coming to a place where feudalism was a stand-in for protectionism and backwardness and all sorts of other Bad Things that hindered free trade. So Bad Things were likely to happen to him.

The funny thing is... this story actually sort-of tallies with the Marxist view of history.  Marxism thinks historical change happens for all sorts of reasons, but one fundamental reason is the moment when the developing forces of production (how societies reproduce themselves by making what they need) come into conflict with the social superstructure (how relationships in society are arranged). Revolutions happen when the existing social relationships become a drag factor holding back the development of the productive forces.

To give a very crude illustration:

An opportunity comes along for a society short on metal to get lots more metal (I mean LOTS more) by entering into a trading agreement with someone who has lots of metal.  If that metal-short society gets lots more metal, it can have more of the things it needs to produce stuff (like, say, farming implements... and perhaps even more complex machinery).  But the society is dominated by a powerful person or layer of people - say, a feudal ruling class - whose power depends upon their near-monopoly on metal, i.e upon their ownership of the only mine.  That person - let's imagine it's one person and she's a woman - is, as stated, very powerful, and is thus in a position to stymie the deal.  Sometimes such a person will actually retard their own economic interests in order to cling on to older social structures that benefit them.

Adrasta - and, by extension, the whole of feudal system on Chloris - is caught in such a contradiction. The 'free trade monster' comes to develop the productive forces and she has to lock him away in her mine.  This is like the decadent feudal aristocracy fighting the oncoming revolution to a bourgeois mode of production. Look also at how the story associates the downfall of Adrasta with the end of the "dark ages". Everyone will be happier once the new social order changes the economic base!

The final proof that this story is about the rise of capitalism can be found in the fact that everyone on Chloris is deperate to get their hands on metal... and yet, it doesn't seem to be valuable to them in itself.  Presumably, they want to trade the metal to those who have none.  Metal has become a commodity, the ur-commodity, the commodity that signifies all others and realises their value.  The universal equivalent.  It has become, in short, capitalist money.

Of course, as I say, this is also a story from and about the rise of neoliberalism.  So it's about the road out of serfdom in two senses: the sense of the original historical transition to capitalism and the rising ideology of neoliberalism.  Hayekian class war, in the form of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, was (in rhetoric if not always in practice) about supposedly liberating money and trade from the protectionism and monopoly of an old system.

From that semi-rational but increasingly hegemonic standpoint, Adrasta isn't a fedual seigneur... she's Jim Callaghan.

30

"My goodness..." says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, "You live like kings."

"We are kings," says Biroc impassively.  He merely states it as a fact.  He is both part of this feast and an observer of it.  He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline.  He can travel along his own trajectory.  He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat.  He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either.  His tone is neutral.  Truthful.


Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men - who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use - are sitting down for their lunch break.  They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.

Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is.  He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them. 


Back in the 'past', back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils' luxury and variety comes from.

"The universe is our garden," says Biroc simply.  Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.

"Ah. So this is what it was all like."

"At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men."

The mention of slaves turns the Doctor's mind instantly to the servants moving around the table.  He responds to Biroc's barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.

"I notice you don't do too badly for staff," says the Doctor.  "This garden of yours, the universe... how do you manage it"

"We use our power.  For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle."  The Tharils have the power to travel where they will - the basic requirement of any imperial project.  "Everything is ours."

The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet.  The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly.  The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.

"Including her?" he asks.

"They're only people."  Again, Biroc's tone is flat.  He does not endorse or condemn... except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation.  He simply recites the truth of how this system operated.  To the Tharils, their slaves were only people... just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils.  But there is no self-justification from Biroc.  He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses.  Rorvik is losing control of his present.  Biroc owns his past. 

"So you're the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?"

"The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that."  It would be a callous statement if it were intended straightforwardly... but how can it be intended that way by a former slaver who is now himself a slave?

All the same, the Doctor is disgusted by the aspect of the statement which reflects the ideas of a slaveocracy, the aspect that blames the slaves for their weakness.

"Yes," he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm, "yes..."

And then he picks up the servant girl's pitcher and fills the Tharil's goblet to the brim and beyond until the red wine flows across the table like blood.  Surfeit.  Surplus.  Gluttony.  Greed.  Waste.  The fruit of the garden, guzzled by the masters.  Haemoglobin spilt in torrents.

"This is no way to run an empire."

Sadly, this implies that there is a good way to run an empire... but we know what he means.

But, as Rorvik says later: "Everything breaks eventually."  Biroc hasn't brought the Doctor to the feast to gloat or boast.  He's showing him the moment when the Tharil Empire broke.  The Gundan robots storm into the feasting hall.  The Only People built them to face the time winds that they couldn't traverse.  They are History itself, coming for the Tharils.  

The Tharils are feudal things.  They are King's Beasts.  They dwell in castles, eat in feasting halls and are served by serfs.  They are of the old world. 

Rorvik is a thoroughly modern man.  He's a privateer in a "bulk freighter".  A pirate, but a businessman too.  His world is a mercantile, technological world.  The slavery he practices is one of shipping and trade.  His ship carries a bulk cargo of living beings, wracked and stacked in storage bays in the hold. 

The analogy isn't perfect.  In reality, the old kings didn't become tomorrow's chained commodities.  But the trajectory of European history is right.  The feudal world fell to revolution and crisis and the rise of new machines, and out of it arose the capitalist world with promises of freedom while building itself on different kinds of slavery.  The warriors' gate (which was bad enough) became the trader's waystation, with the new system built on the ruins and wreckage of the old.  And the new system, like all 'progress', creates only more and greater horror, more and worse wreckage. 

43

In an opulent throne room, the Doctor and Romana are being entertained by Zargo and Camilla, two of the Three Who Rule.  Plates are loaded with meat.  Glasses are filled with dark red wine.  The Lords are draped in fine fabrics and smeared in make-up to mask their strangely pallid faces.

"Well, you certainly do very well for yourselves here," observes the Doctor.

"We struggle to retain some remnants of civilisation," says Zargo, who evidently considers himself civilised.

"Well, you do better than the peasants," remarks the Doctor.  He and Romana have recently been in a peasant hovel, where the half-starved, over-worked, rag-clad people reacted in terror at their aristocratic confidence.

"The peasants are simple folk," observes Camilla drily, "Richer fare would only distress them."

"Quite right," says the Doctor.  (His pronunciation makes it sound more like 'Quite trite.')  "Probably give them indigestion," he continues, "There's nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion. Makes them quite rebellious. I hear you've been having trouble that way."

"There are always a few ungrateful ones who do not appreciate all that we do for them," agrees Camilla, without a trace of irony.

"And what do you do for them, apart from saving them from gluttony?" asks Romana, with more than a trace of irony.

The Lords claim to "protect" their people; they are unspecific about how, or from what.  It turns out that they protect their people from "the Wasting".  But the Lords - a gang of literal vampires - are the Wasting.  They are what sucks all opportunity for progress out of the system, making their world (in Romana's phrase) "a society that evolves backwards".  All wealth, all that is farmed and harvested, is appropriated by them from the people who farm and harvest it.  The lifeblood of society flows upwards to them where they consume it, wear it, sit comfortably upon it.  They store the literal blood of the peasants in their giant fuel tanks, like the stolen surplus that it is. 

There was nothing progressive about Roman aquaducts (the water went to the fountains of the rich) or pyramids (they were the tombs of kings, stuffed with the wealth they wanted to take with them), or any of the other monuments that ruling classes throughout history have built to themselves.  Such rulers have always claimed to be protecting the people they leech off.  But every last ruling class in history has been a great vampire, feeding upon a wasting disease of which they are themselves the primary symptom.

Skulltopus 11: Changing States

Before the Skulltopus series moves on to the Baker years (and beyond), I feel the need to settle accounts with the Pertwee era, particularly with Peladon.  Also, I need to clarify something about the way capitalism is portrayed and perceived in - and by - Doctor Who.


The maggots in 'The Green Death' are the Pertwee era's last gasp of the Weirdesque.  'Green Death' is also the last Pertwee story to properly notice capitalism.

Admittedly, there is some riffing on 'greed' in 'Invasion of the Dinosaurs'; and 'Monster of Peladon' regurgitates (in a reduced form) the political semiotics of its parent story.  However, in these stories, while class is in evidence... class struggle even!... there is no tracing it back to anything recognisable as capitalist social relations.

I'll get to this, but first I want to loop back to address something about 'Carnival of Monsters' that I should've mentioned previously: Vorg as an entrepreneur and how this relates to the society in which he finds himself.  Firstly, Inter-Minor isn't recognisably capitalist.  The latent revolution in 'Carnival' - the imminent revolt of the Functionaries that President Zarb (the panicky social democrat) is trying to placate and Kalik (the fascist) wants to crush - tracks back to race (the story does some heavy riffing on race) but stops there.  It comes close... at one point mentioning a strike... but we get no sense of particularly capitalist relations.  There are no wages, no profits, no recognisable industrial workplaces and only the barest suggestion of a market at the very end.  Vorg, like other Robert Holmes creations, can be read as an embodiment of a more likeable version of free enterprise.  Like Milo Clancy or Garron, Vorg is a private operator, a colourful chancer, an individualist, a guy on the make who seems vital and amusing when stood next to grey statist authoritarians.  But Vorg's polari version of laissez faire is ultimately judged harmless, or even constructive.  He gets some stick for keeping "livestock" in the scope... and it's possible to read the scope itself as a metaphor for commodity fetishism, displaying how commodification of living people involves their compartmentalisation and alienation from proper awareness of the endless rut in which they circle.  However, I think this is far more about race as an artificial construct than it is about commodification (I'll try to address this in another post some time).  And, ultimately, Vorg's carny capitalism seems to be a potential force for change, progress and reform in the insular, ultra-statist backwater of Inter-Minor.  He ends the story fleecing Pletrac... but the tone the story takes with this implies that a dose of Vorg is just what the Inter-Minorans need.  To the extent that capitalism appears in 'Carnival', it does so through the rosy lens of Vorg.

Now, back to the post-'Green Death' Pertwee era.

'Invasion of the Dinosaurs' is a densely political text, hugely ambivalent and needing a great deal of unpacking.  There is, as I say, some harping on about the evils of 'greed' and an implied anxiety about industrial pollution... but, ultimately, the story essentializes the social dystrophies of capitalism into malformations in human nature, which are (it is implied) exacerbated when people go around believing things.  This is in line with Hulke's liberalism - he really was a liberal, you know, rather than a communist - though the sheer pessimism on display is a new development, probably related to the ebbing of protest and struggle in the mid-70s.  Hulke is at his most radical ('The War Games' in '68) when protest and struggle are at their highest, so its no surprise to see him slump into despondency and disillusion as social struggle does the same.  (I went into this, in brief, in the January 2012 issue of Panic Moon.)

Now, 'Monster of Peladon'.  Hmm, what can I say about this story?  Dear god, I hate it.  Going into why in detail would take an entire post by itself.  Or an entire series of posts, more likely.  (Yes, yes, okay, I'll get around to it one day - I know you love it when I trash stuff, you mean-spirited people.)

Suffice it to say, 'Monster' is aware of the exploitation of workers but doesn't think this bad in and of itself.  It's just that the workers should be treated well and get a seat at the table of government... or rather, an ex-worker should.  After all, there's nothing "only" about being a miner... just as long as a miner doesn't become aware of the class struggle, whereupon he becomes nothing but a violent, callous, fanatical, looney-left agitator type, who needs to die so the sane miners can come to an equitable understanding with the people who live off them.  There are also callous fanatics in government, of course.  The reactionaries.  Thus, the clash of the fundamental interests of rulers and ruled becomes an unhinged pathology in the minds of extremists - be they raving Scargills or misguided Thatchers - to be solved by all parties pulling together in the national interest against a foreign foe.  The imperialism of a great power is almost depicted when the Ice Warriors turn up, ostensibly to ensure the continuation of a smooth flow of resources from the client state to the empire... but they turn out to be members of a subversive group working for a foreign power.  This is like representing the 1954 coup in Guatemala as the work of American communists who wanted to send all the bananas to Russia, rather than a CIA operation on behalf of the United Fruit Company.

More fundamentally, there is a very much reduced consciousness of capitalism in this story.

The original Peladon tale heavily implied capitalist trade and development as something positive, as progress that was coming to sweep away the 'old ways'... but, in its liberalism, it saw a certain dark potentiality which it manifested in the person of Arcturus.  He was a quasi-skulltopus because 'Curse of Peladon' was using two clashing system of signs: the gothic, to represent the 'backwardness' of fedualism, and the Who-version of the tentacular Weird, which had come (in 'Spearhead from Space' and 'Claws of Axos') to be furtively associated with capital.  Arcturus merges the two systems because he's a representative of the capitalist future but he's also a reactionary protectionist who wants to restrict Peladon's access to markets (he wants their minerals for his people alone) and who allies himself with Hepesh, the figurehead of the old, feudal values.  Centauri, meanwhile, is the 'nice' form of the capitalist tentacular, offering free and unfettered access to trade, etc. This was a reflection of the liberal view of the UK's imminent entry into the Common Market.  (I go into this matter here.)

'Monster', however, was broadcast after miners' strikes had brought down a Tory government.  Miners were by far the most powerful and organised group of militant workers in the country and were winning inspiring (or terrifying, depending on your place in the class struggle) victories.  Accordingly, in its liberalism, 'Monster' flees from the whole issue of capitalism, even as it deals with the subject of labour unrest.  This is its key tactic: stripping the unrest of its economic context.  It transforms the Federation into less an implied trade and development grouping and more a military power in conflict with a machiavellian rival.  It notices that 'progress' has done little for the miners but blames this on the enemy, on the war, and on the truculence and superstition of the miners themselves.

Unavoidably, people at the time of broadcast would've been reminded of real-world miners' struggles of the day, but within the text itself the Peladonian miners seem like generic sci-fi rebels crossed with Mummerset yokels.  Their objections are not about working conditions or wages but are instead focused on resentment of authority and backward fear of technology.

And, crucially, their masters (local and federal) seem like military statists rather than a private company.  They are mining for a combination of the feudal Peladonian state and the representatives of the Federation, itself apparently an interplanetary 'state of states' which is demanding their minerals for defensive war rather than for trade per se, and certainly not for profit.

This matters to the tentacles.  This is why they don't erupt again, except in the recycled figure of Centauri.  'Curse' used tentacles to signify capitalism, as had previous stories... but it does so happily, seeing capitalism as bringing progress both economic and social.  'Monster' was made at a time when this view was already harder to sustain, so it evades capitalism almost entirely.  Having already used tentacles to signify capitalism in 'Curse', Hayles can't reverse this dialectic and then use them to evade capitalism in 'Monster'.  He must edit out both capitalism and, as a result, the tentacular.  That's why 'Monster' is so careful to make the miners into the subjects of states, to make their product into a military necessity rather than something to trade.  In the widespread cultural understanding of capitalism, this tactic is all that is needed to all-but remove capitalism from the text, even by implication.  Even the Federation aliens have become not delegates vying for trade but mining engineers, technicians, enforcers, etc.

Now, in the real world, there is no reason why capitalism can't function as a state system rather than through private enterprise.  Indeed, to a large extent, it does... and always has.  The essence of capitalism is not private property but rather the generalisation of commodity production through wage labour, leading to the accumulation and reinvestment of capital.  Capital can take the form of the state.  To be crude: workers can be paid to make commodities by the state.  States, whole economies, can - and do - work this way.  The old 'communist' states - and even some that cling to life - worked this way.  Most economies today are 'mixed' in that they have a private and a public sector, though neoliberalism has greatly undermined the scope and power of the public sector globally, at least outside the realms of military and police power, which it has increased.  Even in largely 'free market' economies there are vast sectors in which the state employs masses of people, directs labour, pays wages and, through this process, extracts surplus in the form of products and/or services, surplus which generates revenue which goes into accumulation and reinvestment.  The essence of capitalism.  The failure to understand this simple issue - which, in fairness, has been systematically obscured with propaganda and misprision from virtually all corners (the mainstream liberals, the free-marketeers and the reformist or authoritarian variants of the left) - has lead to a fundamental and widespread misunderstanding of what capitalism is and, consequently, what socialism should be.  This is a digression, but a necessary one.

The point that needs to be made here is that capitalism is generally misunderstood as being quintessentially about private enterprise... so when you leave private companies out of texts, as they are left out of 'Monster of Peladon' and much of the rest of Doctor Who, you seem to leave out capitalism itself.  My central idea in these 'Skulltopus' posts is that Doctor Who flees to a version of 'the Weird' when it needs to obscure capitalism as a systemic generator of the modern nightmares with which the show is obsessed.  This is a rather clumsy way of talking about actual writers, actually resorting to certain strategies in their writing (albeit unconsciously) when they feel that what they are writing is veering towards something unsayable within the Who context (unsayable because we are trained to think of children's entertainment as needing to be non-ideological, and critiques of capitalism seem ideological whereas tacit acceptance of capitalism seems ideologically neutral).  In a social context in which few people fully understand that capitalism can and does function economically within political forms of statism, even forms which legally prohibit private companies, a writer is not going to feel this 'veering towards the unsayable' about a text which leaves out private companies.  He or she will not feel capitalism looming as a presence within the text, no more than will most of the texts readers and/or viewers.

This is one major reason why the exploitation of wage labour seen in, say, 'Doctor Who and the Silurians' causes no unease which sends Doctor Who into a hunt for tactical incomprehensibility.  The employees in the background are less subject to hierarchical pressure than those in, say, 'Spearhead from Space'; they do not seem to connect with any social or technological nightmares of modernity since the story concentrates instead upon putatively biological moral flaws in 'Man'; and, most especially, they are employees of the state rather than of a private firm.  Their work seems geared towards the utilitarian aims of the state rather than to the profit of a private capitalist.  It is the same with 'Monster of Peladon'.  The Peladonian miners may have made viewers think of present-day miners' struggles, but within the text they seemed not to relate to capitalism precisely because they are the paid subjects of a state system rather than a private company.

What this misses, of course, is that the state as we know it is a capitalist state, an emanation of the capitalist system, fused with capitalism, a form of capitalist social relation, a form of alienation, etc. But, fascinating as this subject may be, it is way outside both my expertise and my remit here.  It is, for instance, fascinating that the Peladon stories (unwittingly) depict a fedual state evolving to fit capitalist social relations... since the modern European state system arose under fedualism and adapted to fit capitalism as the new system grew within it.  But you don't want to read my amateur musings on this.  Still less, in my view, do you want to take any notice of what Brian Hayles says.