Turning the Tables

“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a use-value, there is nothing mysterious about it, whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it first takes on these properties as the product of human labour. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.”

- Karl Marx, Capital vol.1


Consciously or not, a lion’s share of SF/Fantasy is concerned with just this.  Almost to the point of running with Marx’s ‘great idea for a story!’.

It’s also a great illustration that the best Marxism is Gothic Marxism.  A Marxism which recognises the uncanny, the weird, the surreal, the fantastic, as both truthful expression and invaluable heuristic.  The real world is made so strange, so bass-ackwards, so haunted and haunting, so alien by capitalism, that only historical materialism informed by the uncanny and the dreamlike can truly capture it.

Random Thing #3

And one more.  Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.


Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature.  He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”.  The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures. 

Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society.  Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’.  It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”  This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands. 

It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror. 

Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule.  And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect.  It is the result of struggle from below.  And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses.  Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers.  Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods.  And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest.  At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering.  Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people.  Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history.  But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.

Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello.  He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society.  Would it all have been worth it, to get us there?

Force Decides

Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don't want peace.  Give them everything they've ever wanted, and it still isn't enough - because what they say they want isn't what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it's become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn't do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious - that 'what happened' to the Native Americans was terrible - doesn't seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you're talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it - rightly - in the context of the Native American's fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people - the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted - with a sigh and a tear - by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes 'we' are even allowed to be the baddies - as long as it was a long time ago, and we're all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.

Generally speaking, I'm very much against killing people.  Why?  Well, aside from the fact that it simply doesn't appeal to me, I'd be tempted to invoke a somewhat traditional ethical idea going back to Aristotle, which is that morality is about the good and enjoyable and fulfilling life... with the added Socialist wrinkle that everyone should have such a life, and no good life that is dependant upon the curtailment of the lives of others is ultimately justifiable, because the fundamentally social nature of humanity means that the more socially involved we are, the better.  Killing someone is pretty much the ultimate way of curtailing their potential for development, self-creation, enjoyment, and the leading of a good life... which is, by definition, a social life, in society, in which one's contact with others helps them to also lead such a 'good life'.  We end up at the basic question: why is 'good' good?  And we might get somewhere by re-framing the question slightly, making it: why do we want 'happiness'?  And, while I don't pretend that it's a perfect answer, we can probably fall back on a tautology (sometimes tautologies are allowed, via a materialist version of the ontological argument): 'happiness' is what we call that state of being that humans seek.

However, occupied and tyrannised people - like people who are refugees inside the tiny bits of their own country left to them, held under constant siege inside a massive concentration camp, subject to racist laws and persecutions, economically subjugated and constantly harassed, and periodically massacred - have the right to organise their own defence.  Not that many of the rockets do much damage in Israel, certainly when compared to the wholesale slaughter and destruction rained down on Gaza.  Israel, you see, has some pretty effective warning and defence systems against the rockets (unlike people in Gaza), partly owing to that pesky $3 Billion of 'aid' the Americans send them every year, despite the fact that they are an Apartheid state in clear breach of international law.

Ah yes, international law.

Bourgeois morality rests upon the polar twins of consequentialism and universalism, waxing and waning, and combining.  At the crudest level, consequentialism is invoked when we need to justify something horrible; universalism when we want to condemn the evil of those we are attacking.  China Mieville, in his work of theory Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law, has adapted the ideas of the Bolshevik legal theorist Pashukanis and various postmodern writers.  For Mieville, international law is a never-ending oscillation between consequentialist and universalist arguments (Mieville adapts the categories of 'Apology' and 'Utopia' developed by Koskenniemi), with imperial force always lurking in the background as a way of enforcing whichever kind of politico-legal-ethical argument is currently being employed.  This gets at something built-in to bourgeois morality, in all its legalistic nebulousness.  Such principles - consequentialist or universalist - tend to get cloaked either in mystical obscurantism, or somewhat impoverished (i.e. market-based) notions of 'rights', or universal 'maxims' (whether encoded as 'categorical imperatives' or whatnot) that are not really all that universal.  The bourgeois revolutions undoubtedly had their virtues (or should that be 'Virtue'?), but their ethics tended to be universal in letter rather than in spirit, and consequentialist to the extent of considering the consequences for national bourgeois class formations.

Even so, bourgeois civilisation has offered some laudable moral insights and principles, and certainly improved - if only at a rhetorical level - upon the morality of, say, the Roman Empire, or the automatically inherited dictatorship of certain inbred families.  As Terry Eagleton has observed (following Benjamin), the task of the historical materialist is always to ask, again and again, "with a kind of faux naïveté" why such laudable bourgeois ethical ideals must seemingly always be deferred, compromised and betrayed, why bourgeois civilisation can never make good on them in practice.  Bourgeois morality, we might puckishly suggest, is always very nice in theory but can't work in practice because of... well, we wouldn't want to say (following the high-handed transhistoricalism of the parrot-talking anti-communist) because of 'human nature'.  We'd want to suggest that there is something in the very structure of bourgeois civilisation that generates universalising ethical ideals that can never be met, precisely because of that same structure.

As Marx pointed out, it is the nature of the bourgeois mode of production that it must always be based upon exploitation (directly or indirectly coerced wage labour, extraction of surplus value... and he's clear that this is wrong, even if - as Norman Geras observed - he doesn't always know that he is), and thus the curtailment of freedom for the many.

But, as an initially revolutionary movement overthrowing older forms of class society, the bourgeois revolutions depend upon offering freedom as an achievable goal, and even - so to speak - believing this promise itself.  This is a perennial feature, but we see it begun and demonstrated perhaps most dramatically at those moments of bourgeois revolution, when the rising middle class enlists the much-needed numbers, sinew, passion, energy, grievance and courage of the poor and the peasantry, and does this by espousing the great universalising bourgeois promises of Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité.  (As I say, we might puckishly want to add Naïveté to that list.)  Or when they declare "all men are created equal", very much meaning the 'men' and very much not meaning the 'all'.

This is an interesting issue in itself.  The contradictions - and the attempts to resolve the contradictions - give rise, dialectically, to new material and ideological forces.  Modern biological racism, for example, is partly a response to the fact that the bourgeois revolution in America rested upon both universalising promises (i.e. the Declaration of Independence, etc) and upon slavery.  The inescapable, in-born, auto-segregating factor of skin colour can be used - when integrated into a new theory: modern racism - as a 'get out clause', a codicil of the promises of the new society.  Pre-bourgeois societies in which slavery obtains - pre-C20th Tsarist Russia, for instance - don't need to explain why some are serfs and some are not.  That's just the way it is.  There's no document, signed by people who extol 'Liberty', which says "all men are created equal".  So there is no need to wriggle off that hook.  The hook simply isn't there.

And here we see the fundamental nature of bourgeois morality.  It is self-righteous and self-exclupatory.  And it is based on the assertion of power and, ultimately, force.  This is the wider meaning of Marx's comment (adapted for the title of Mieville's book) that "between equal rights, force decides".  Marx isn't offering that as a 'maxim', but as a critique.

Marx saw - even if he never developed this in a book of his own called Ethics, the way proper philosophers are supposed to do - that the constant oscillation in bourgeois morality between universal mysticism and pragmatic consequentialism is directly bound up with the nature of the system.  It relies upon relative freedom for the majority, because the freedom of the boss to hire and fire is the flip side of the worker's relative freedom to buy, move, pursue a career, seek higher wages elsewhere, etc...  so a universal declaration of rights is always useful.  At the start, it helps to define emergent bourgeois culture in opposition to feudalism, to rally the support of the masses to the libertarian cause of the new middle classes, to open society for job markets and commodity markets, etc.  At the same time, real human freedom is limited by the bourgeois conception of liberty as being the liberty to enjoy ones 'rights' in the market of life, by the conjuring trick that allows bourgeois culture to pretend that it has few enforced relations between people by relying upon the enforced relations between people and property (which is actually a social relation between people).  This is why the whole idea of 'universal human rights', while undoubtedly a great improvement on previous ways of looking at life and worth defending on its own terms, nevertheless seems designed to limit the idea of freedom.  Similarly, the corrective consequentialism comes in to limit the scope of such universal principles within the bounds of brutal pragmatism and 'realpolitik'.  It must happen that way, because the actual consequences of the bourgeois ideas of inborn freedom (and natural rights and universal liberty, etc...) would, if actually and sincerely pursued to their logical conclusions, make the oppression built into capitalism untenable.  If you really believe the declarations of universal liberty, it becomes hard not only to justify owning people with different coloured skin and using them as farm machinery, but also to justify forcing huge numbers of people to work for the profit of others, or to justify the unpaid domestic labour of women, the nature of education as preparation for the job market, the exploitation of less-developed economies for the benefit of imperialist powers, homelessness, unemployment, and sundry other moral obscenities that bourgeois civilisation rests upon as normal, everyday practice.

The oscillating employment of universal and consequentialist justifications is not rigid, even or schematic.  The forms of argumentation (or should I say, of ideology) are not mutually exclusive.  Ideology simply doesn't need to make sense, as long as it seems to be sense.  You get the two styles blended, or employed simultaneously by the same - or different - people, ignoring the fact that they clash.  Or you will get one bourgeois employing a universalist argument against another bourgeois who wields a consequentialist one, or vice versa.  Or one issue gets argued about, or agreed upon, using different versions of one type of argument, or two types, or whatever.  An Abolitionist might condemn slavery on the universal grounds that the slave "is a man and a brother" (negating the existence of the female slaves, by the way) against an upholder of slavery who offers a consequentialist argument, i.e. "if we free them, the slaves will slaughter us in our beds".  Or an Abolitionist might employ a consequentialist argument - "if we don't free them, they will slaughter us in our beds" - against a proponent who offers the universal word of the Bible, in which God explicitly tolerates the keeping of slaves.  The rise of biological racism offers a fusion of the two styles.  The idea that black people are inherently 'inferior' can be seen as universalist, because it is ostensibly based on eternal and fixed patterns of human nature.  But it can be developed in a consequentialist way, via the claim that because the black people are incapable of anything much besides labouring for their white superiors, to free them would thus be to condemn them to useless starvation... which would, of course, be terribly wrong.  This is an argument still to be occasionally heard today in new inflections (c.f. Fox News' hero Cliven Bundy and his views on "the negro" having been ruined by being taken out of the cotton fields and given welfare dependency as a substitute).  

The same argument was the ideological basis for colonialism because it supplied a rationale that was brutally pragmatic and realistic, while also seeming to be attenuatedly altruistic.  We all know the contours of the argument.  "Give them independence and they'll starve out of sheer stupidity," says the Marshal of Solos.  It's basically a rearguard re-tooling of the argument from the start of the colonial project, that the 'natives' are not entitled to their own lands and resources because they're not able to make proper use of them.  You can give this a universalist spin in various ways - i.e. "they're inherently inferior" and the related claim that "the superior have the right to dominate the inferior" - alongside the basically consequentialist argument - i.e. "if we don't step in, loads of land and resources will go to waste".  (You can "make the desert bloom" for instance.)  Or you can modify the basis of the argument using a consequentialist logic of stages, development and progress.  "We happen to be more advanced than them..." (whatever that means coming from colonialists and conquerors) "...so it's our duty to teach them and help them, and bring them civilisation".  The boons you supposedly bring can be consequentialist - i.e. "trade, technology, a better life" etc - or universalist - i.e. Christianity, or whatever.  Pretty much all these arguments have been used against the Palestinians at one time or another, by the way.

You see the point?  The merry-go-round goes on and on, with infinitely possible permutations.  Every developing need of bourgeois civilisation can be met by some ingenious fusion or opposition of these two obliging moral styles.  That's the whole point: that the merry-go-round need never end.  There will always be a moral point to debate, a moral claim to evaluate, a justification to ponder.  Debate can be eternally contained and assimilated.  Meanwhile, nobody ever has to admit that they're doing anything wrong.  There is always a point-of-view.  It works like international law - or like bourgeois law in general - in Mieville's conception.  The debate never ends.  It isn't supposed to.  The process of constant interpretation and reinterpretation of the law is an industry in itself.  And the basis of legality is the idea of the market actors debating their competing 'rights'... until, of course, between equal rights, force decides.

We're often told that terrorism is a weapon of the powerless.  Actually, as Chomsky has said, most terrorism is perpetrated by the powerful, as long as we don't two-facedly redefine terrorism to mean something other than 'violence against civilians in the pursuit of a political objective'.  By that definition, Israel's actions in Gaza are clearly terrorism, which makes the United States into the aiders and abetters of a 'rogue state'... if not a 'rogue state' itself... though I dislike the term 'rogue state' because it implies an otherwise hunkydory international order from which a state deviates.  But that old oscillation of universalist and consequentialist moralising can be brought into play.  Israel (an explicitly racist state) is "the only democracy in the Middle East" (never mind the Apartheid).  Israel must defend itself.  In Gaza, civilians supposedly have rockets in their bomb shelters.  And so on.  

The problem isn't that there are no universally applicable moral principles.  I think there probably are, as long as we limit 'universal' to mean something like 'transhistorical to human cultures'.  I'm not personally one to discount that, though we have to be very careful about what we identify as transhistorical or universal.  Neither is the problem that there are no good arguments to be made about morality based on consequences.  Of course there are.  Trotsky said "the ends can justify the means as long as something justifies the ends".  Nor is the problem even that you can't mix the two.  You can.  The universal right to resist occupation (formally recognised by the UN) presumably entails consequentialist justifications for violent acts in the cause of liberation.  And the idea that liberation is an inherently good thing may trace back to one of those permissible transhistorical principles.  Freedom from exterior domination is a pre-requisite for any society to allow all its citizens to achieve the 'good life'... even if that doesn't always follow from such freedom.  The problem is that bourgeois civilisation rests upon either mystical ideas of the universal or employs the most cynical form of brutally pragmatic consequentialism.  Universal arguments become so decoupled from society that they can be mustered for either side by appeal to mystical entities.  Consequentialist arguments can be mustered by either side too, with 'good' defined by the needs of whichever powerful person is currently speaking, and with the violent force of nation states always lurking in the background, ready to decide the issue.  The UN recognises the universal right to resistance, and the impermissability of acquiring territory by war, and then permits Israel to go about its nasty business for decades, while states such as Iraq or Iran get held to more urgent account because of the priorities of the United States.  The problem crystallises in that phrase: 'humanitarian intervention'.  A perfect illustration of the cynical, opportunistic marrying of spurious universal and consequentialist arguments, ultimately nullified by the priorities of Empire, and the brute reality of imperial force

The moral question of intervention in Iraq was 'settled' by force.  The universalists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "we have a moral duty to help the Iraqis!" vs. "it's wrong and illegal to invade without provocation!" - and the consequentialists on both sides squabbled back and forth - "it'll be good for the Middle East!" vs. "it'll be bad for the Middle East... and for us!".  Pretty much the only people saying anything like "Iraqis should be given the chance to free themselves and create their own new society!" were the far Left.  Of course, the turn of history made mincemeat of such hopes, though the Arab Spring showed the essential correctness of the argument...  But, of course, as we know, that all went wrong too.  But why?  Because imperial force was allowed to decide.  In Egypt, a popular rebellion ended the decade-long tyranny of a US-backed dictator... until a US-backed coup overthrew the resulting new government, instituted a junta, and started executing people wholesale.  A familiar story to anyone who knows the history of American foreign policy.

This is an important issue because the key to the fate of Palestine lies in the working class of Egypt, the largest (and most recently radicalised) working class in the Middle East.  The military junta in Egypt has redoubled the siege of Gaza by re-tightening the border - a border the Egyptian revolution threatened to weaken, thus weakening Israeli control over the besieged Palestinians, and thus also American-imposed 'stability' in the whole Middle East.  As I write this it is being reported that Egypt is trying to broker a peace deal or ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.  Hamas has supposedly 'rejected' the deal.  As usual, the media reports within the ideologically-policed parameters of the thinkable.  Apparently you can have a 'truce' or 'ceasefire' or 'deal' between a massively powerful military power and the hostages they're dropping bombs on.  Quite apart from anything else, the 'deal' being offered will inevitably mean nothing to the Palestinians beyond 'more of the same'.  The deal will allow the Israelis to step back a bit (thus hopefully allowing the protests - which make them look bad - to die down).  Hideous normality will resume.  They can carry on attacking the Palestinians a bit, keep on holding the population of Gaza hostage and under siege, keep on with the Apartheid, keep on with the blockade, keep on with the economic subjugation, keep on with the relentless theft of land for new Jewish 'settlers', keep on with the control of water, keep on with the relentless and humiliating inspections at checkpoints, keep on arresting people for protest... etc etc etc.  The 'deal', as far as the Palestinians are concerned, will just mean 'more of the same'.  It always does.  It will mean ' back to how things were last week... apart from the hundreds of us that are now dead, or bereaved, or maimed'.  It always does.

And the consequentialists and universalists on both sides can go back to the debate.

Meanwhile, the only thing that will ever break this endless, genocidal situation will be the resistance that the Palestinians are condemned and demonised for ever daring to show... joined by the organised, militant resistance of millions of workers all across the Middle East.  We saw it start in Egypt, and get suppressed.  We saw it start in Libya, and the 'humanitarian interventionists' of NATO jumped in to co-opt and control it (odd how we never hear the humanitarians advocating NATO airstrikes on Tel Aviv on the grounds that "we've got to do something!!!").  

It will, ultimately, come down to force.  The force of resistance.  We in the imperialist countries need to actively work to prevent our rulers from intervening.  A decade of protest, activism and agitation led to widespread public anti-war sentiment that finally penetrated the Commons to the point where that vote about intervening in Syria was defeated.  We forced them to back down.  (This, incidentally, is why we have to fight through these centenary years to stop the Tories rewriting the history of World War I until it becomes a narrative of patriotic glory and heroism in the name of a noble cause.  If many of us have failed to see the ideological utility of such a rewrite, the staunchly neo-con Tories certainly haven't.  The connection is more then just general.  WWI was partly an imperialist scramble for the Middle East.)  One of the reasons Israel wants to descale its most recent murderous attack is probably the worldwide protests, part of the growing public revulsion at their antics, visible despite the near-blackout in the mainstream (corporate) media. Combined with popular resistance in the Middle East, popular resistance in the West to empire and 'humanitarian intervention' will be key.

Force will decide, one way or another.  But not, in the end, between equal rights.  Because the desire of the many to lead good lives, uncurtailed, self-creating, happy, with the free development of each being a prerequisite for the free development of all (and vice versa) should trump the desire of the few to rule, plunder and kill.


ADDENDUM, 20/07/14: Far from backing down, Israel has since launched a ground assault on Gaza.  

Toy Stories

From the reminiscences of Eleanor Marx:

To my sisters — I was then too small — he told tales as they went for walks, and these tales were measured by miles not chapters. “Tell us another mile,” was the cry of the two girls. For my own part, of the many wonderful tales Mohr [Marx] told me, the most wonderful, the most delightful one, was “Hans Röckle.” It went on for months and months; it was a whole series of stories. The pity no one was there to write down these tales so full of poetry, of wit, of humour! Hans Röckle himself was a Hoffmann-like magician, who kept a toyshop, and who was always “hard up.” His shop was full of the most wonderful things — of wooden men and women, giants and dwarfs, kings and queens, workmen and masters, animals and birds as numerous as Noah got into the Arc, tables and chairs, carriages, boxes of all sorts and sizes. And though he was a magician, Hans could never meet his obligations either to the devil or the butcher, and was therefore — much against the grain — constantly obliged to sell his toys to the devil. These then went through wonderful adventures — always ending in a return to Hans Röckle’s shop. Some of these adventures were as grim, as terrible, as any of Hoffmann’s; some were comic; all were told with inexhaustible verve, wit and humour.

And Mohr would also read to his children. Thus to me, as to my sisters before me, he read the whole of Homer, the whole Nibelungen Lied, Gudrun, Don Quixote, the Arabian Nights, etc. As to Shakespeare he was the Bible of our house, seldom out of our hands or mouths. By the time I was six I knew scene upon scene of Shakespeare by heart.

On my sixth birthday Mohr presented me with my first novel — the immortal Peter Simple [adventure novel by the English writer Frederick Marryat]. This was followed by a whole course of Marryat and Cooper. And my father actually read every one of the tales as I read them, and gravely discussed them with his little girl. And when that little girl, fired by Marryat’s tales of the sea, declared she would become a “Post-Captain” (whatever that may be) and consulted her father as to whether it would not be possible for her “to dress up as a boy” and “run away to join a man-of-war,” he assured her he thought it might very well be done, only they must say nothing about it to anyone until all plans were well matured.

15

"What if there's no one out there?" asks the Doctor.  He's inside the Brannigans' floating car, stuck in gridlock.

What if the world ended when you weren't looking?

"Someone's got to ask, because you might not talk about it, but it's there in your eyes. What if the traffic jam never stops?"

"There's a whole city above us," says Brannigan, "The mighty city state of New New York. They wouldn't just leave us."

"In that case, where are they?" counters the Doctor.  "What if there's no help coming, not ever? What if there's nothing? Just the motorway, with the cars going round and round and round and round, never stopping. Forever."

What if the whole system is an utterly insane roundalay, going nowhere, getting noplace, just leaving everyone stranded, doing nothing but belching out endless clouds of toxic smoke?  What if the crisis is permanent.  What if normality is the crisis?  What if everyday life is the end of the world?

Walter Benjamin said that history was a train crash, and revolution was when the passengers pulled the communication cord.  The people of New New York left it too late to pull the cord.  Capitalism crashed around them, shattering as one of their products ran out of control (a bit like, say, a stock market or a credit system).  In the story, the product was a patch that managed mood.  It was a palliative against the horror, which only intensified the horror.  The Heaven of the state was depopulated, leaving lofty council chambers full of skeletons.  The Hell of the lower levels filled up with fumes, and monsters of the repressed started to breed within them.  And Limbo filled up with the survivors.

"Shut up! Just shut up!" cries Valerie, Brannigan's wife.

Sally Calypso appears on the screen.  "This is Sally Calypso, and it's that time again. The sun is blazing high in the sky over the New Atlantic, the perfect setting for the daily contemplation."

"You think you know us so well, Doctor," says Brannigan, "But we're not abandoned. Not while we have each other."

Contrary to what most pop-culture will tell you, ordinary people are generally pretty damned good to each other in the aftermaths of disasters.

There's a sense in which the amazing co-operation to be found, for the most part, in Tahrir Square and Occupy, was something akin to mutual aid in the aftermath of a disaster.  Under capitalism as it stands (or tries to stand) every single day is the aftermath of a disaster.  Prescient in so many ways, this episode.

The people of the gridlock are all locked away from each other in their seperate boxes, the way capitalism locks us away... but in the aftermath of the ongoing disaster of modernity, they're also making lives and friendships and networks of support.

"This is for all of you out there on the roads," says Sally, "We're so sorry. Drive safe."

And everyone in gridlock starts to sing in unison.  This may be another patch, another mood stabiliser... but it is also a real and material act, an act of solidarity.  The BLISS patches were just commodities.  The songs are communal, social acts.

Marx wrote that religion was "at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering."

One thing we can't do is think of religion, in some abstract and ahistorical way, as The Problem.  You end up like Dawkins or Hitchens, sniping at a symptom while tolerating and enabling the illness.  'Gridlock' was broadcast during the heydey of 'New Atheism'.  In his blustering attack on religion, God is Not Great, published the same year 'Gridlock' aired, Christopher Hitchens decorated his prose with erudition ransacked from a dictionary of quotations, but never once mentioned Shelley, co-author of the very first atheist pamphlet published in English.  You'd think that'd warrant a mention in a book that finds space to blither on about Mel Gibson and make tasteless jokes about child abuse.  But Shelley wasn't just an atheist, he was a leveller too.  He criticised religion, as Marx would one day put it, "not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower."  Hitchens, by contrast, wanted religion to fall so that the offices of Vanity Fair were never likely to be bombed by Islamists, no matter how many Arab children the US government slaughtered.

What is noticeable about the hymns sung by the gridlockers is that the comfort comes not from the songs themselves, but rather from the unity found in singing them.  The congregation does not exist to sing the hymns, the hymns exist to unite the congregation.  The congregation comforts itself and it protests against the need for comfort.

These people accidentally created a post-hierarchy world without realising it.  They survived the fall of capitalism, and now live in its ruins.

If they can just think their way out of their boxes.

If they can just clear the smoke...

"What if there's no one out there?" the Doctor asked.  But there is.  Probably not God, as far as I can tell.  Probably not the government, not when the crunch comes anyway.  But there are lots of people out there.  You are not alone.

Monkey Business

On 'Ghost Light'.


Let's leave aside the aesthetic beauty of the production, with its pattern of oppositions - light and dark, day and night, madness and sanity, stone and wood, feminine and masculine, dead and alive - which alternate until they start to bleed into each other and mingle until we are left with no certainties.

Let's leave aside the willfully abstruse script; the wonderful way it is deliberately constructed as a jewelled puzzle box; something to be studied and pondered and interpreted rather than just passively enjoyed.

Let's leave aside the scrumptious bevy of literary references, sly self-referencing jokes, puns, double meanings, allusions... all of which show an intense and highly self-conscious (though not glib) awareness and playfulness with language, text, genre and storytelling tradition.  You want an example?  How about the use of the word "wicked", which - with wonderful irony - appears in both the Victorian usage and as 80s teenspeak.  It's the last word of the story - the last word spoken by the Doctor in the last-filmed story of the classic series.  And when the Doctor uses it to describe Ace, he sounds like a Victorian moralist (of times past or present) scolding a disobedient child... but, by Ace's usage, and by his own sly wink, he's giving his approval to her pyromaniacal aversion to the house haunted by evil Victoriana.

Let's look instead at what this story says about evolution.

Firstly, it gets things technically wrong by depicting evolution as working teleologically, so that the human is the 'final' stage when the process is finished.

Or does it?

Secondly, it's about homo victorianus ineptus (and his spiritual descendants) railing against a theory they don't understand because it offends their bigoted prejudices. It's about Soapy Sam Wilberforce and our latter day creationists, terrified by the theological and cultural and social and political ramifications of a scientific discourse which emphasizes mutability and materialism.

Or is it?

Let me suggest that, while there's some truth in the above, there's also a lot more to it than that.

I don't think it gets evolution wrong so much as it gets people's ideas of evolution right. It understands that a certain kind of vulgar, reactionary, bourgeois idea of evolution pictures a ladder with the strongest, most ruthless at the top... and the weak at the bottom. It seems to depict evolution as a succession of 'rungs' which are climbed through mutation, achieving progress and reaching a final goal embodied in a human male... but, in its strategy as a text, it represents this as the process (progress?) of exactly the kind of reactionary, bourgeois mind that would view the Victorian gentleman as the pinnacle of evolutionary ascent.

That's why the ultimate punishment for Josiah seems to come from within him. It's his own idea of successive stages that makes it possible for him to fall back down through them; it's his own idea of the superior keeping the inferior as pets that makes it possible for Control to put him on a leash.


"The Ever-Changing Moral Zeitgeist"

I referred to the reactionary 'ladder' version of Darwinism as "vulgar" just now, but this is not quite right.  It is not really a vulgarisation, in the sense of being a popular misstatement overlaid upon the ideas of the original Darwinians.  Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Galton... these were respectable, wealthy, middle-class Victorian gentlemen. Progressive for their time, they were also products of their time, as were their ideas.

Hey, have some quotes.

Here's the young Darwin, in his Beagle diary:

Of individual objects, perhaps nothing is more certain to create astonishment than the first sight in his native haunt of a barbarian -- of man in his lowest and most savage state. One's mind hurries back over past centuries, and then asks, could our progenitors have been men like these? -- men, whose very signs and expressions are less intelligible to us than those of the domesticated animals; men, who do not possess the instinct of those animals, nor yet appear to boast of human reason, or at least of arts consequent on that reason. I do not believe it is possible to describe or paint the difference between savage and civilized man. It is the difference between a wild and tame animal: and part of the interest in beholding a savage, is the same which would lead every one to desire to see the lion in his desert, the tiger tearing his prey in the jungle, or the rhinoceros wandering over the wild plains of Africa.

This next one is from The Descent of Man, Chapter 6:

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes... will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.

Here's Darwin, writing to the philosopher and economist William Graham in 1881:

Remember what risks the nations of Europe ran, not so many centuries ago of being overwhelmed by the Turks, and how ridiculous such an idea now is. The more civilised so-called Caucasian races have beaten the Turkish hollow in the struggle for existence. Looking to the world at no very distant date, what an endless number of the lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.

Here's Darwin on gender, from The Descent of Man, Chapter 19:

The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman- whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman. 

This next one is from T.H. Huxley ('Darwin's Bulldog'), writing in an essay called 'Emancipation, Black and White' in 1865:

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

Here's Francis Galton - Darwin's polymath cousin - in his Preface to the 1892 edition of his book Hereditary Genius:

The natural ability of which this book mainly treats ['genius'], is such as a modern European possesses in a much greater average share than men of the lower races. There is nothing either in the history of domestic animals or in that of evolution to make us doubt that a race of sane men may be formed, who shall be as much superior mentally and morally to the modern European, as the modern European is to the lowest of the Negro races.

Even today, the wackier fringes of sociobiology, Evolutionary Psychology and other forms of biological reductionism continue to lend support to reactionary views on race, gender and economics.

Richard Dawkins' idea of natural selection working mostly at the level of individual genes (which get into cartels) lends itself implicitly to concord with bourgeois ideology. Dawkins is no biological racist (though his animus towards Islam has now tipped over into culturalist racism) but his outlook implicitly supports our economic status quo. Each individual gene becomes a utility maximiser engaged in rational self-interest, each genome is a genetic economy in equilibrium. It's quite a startling resonance. Dawkins himself even uses free market metaphors in his descriptions, explicitly saying that genomes are not "command economies". These are metaphors, but they also turn upon him and start to power his logic.

It's tempting to say that there's a connection between this and his liberalism, which is individual-centred and worries about memetic cartels that threaten the equilibrium in which all the individuals supposedly live, i.e. scary old Islam. Memes may be the connective skein here. They provide an idealist cultural logic (of a very unoriginal kind, actually...) that makes human society work in an analogous way to the gene's-eye-view of biology. Individual people get themselves into cartels via the natural selection of memes. Memes, like genes, are amoral. They succeed if they work. Religion 'works' in some ways that Dawkins attempts to delineate in The God Delusion, hence it reproduces. I think, by the meme logic, religions would be seen as predators. We can see the Darwinian logic whereby their fearsome features accreted, but we still have to defend ourselves from them when they attack.

So Dawkins, like so many liberals before him, ends up enmeshed (albeit by a more circuitous route than many) in the kind of idealist, culturalist thinking that has always made liberalism into the perfect... well, the perfect 'meme' for bourgeois ideology. Herbert Spencer's notions of inherited genius tesselated perfectly with his libertarianism. The individual must be at liberty to succeed and rise according to his inborn talents and his own capacity to advance himself. Charity is fine, as long as it doesn't hinder the gifted or artificially raise the useless. This is where social Darwinism and libertarianism meet, and provide a perfect cultural logic for capitalism.


Evolving to Fit a Niche

This shouldn't surprise us.  Ideas have a social basis.  It's only to be expected that ideas generated by the enormous industrial, technical, scientific and social revolutions of capitalism should bear traces of it, should fit the niches of the social ecosystem.

Natural selection was born from studying Malthus - who worried about the limits to human progress, since, as he saw it, the poor were reproducing faster than society could feed them, whereas the more continent upper classes were allowing themselves to be outbred.

Natural selection - with its niches into which species have to fit - comes from an awareness of things like specialised tasks and the division of labour: products of the new, industrial, factory society.  As Marx wrote:

It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’.

 
This, to generalise, is why natural selection is an idea that popped into the heads of two guys, roughly simultaneously, both of whom were from the middle-to-upper classes of mid-Victorian Britain... and not to, say, Democritus.  Darwin and Wallace both lived in a society that was the product of the Industrial Revolution (roughly a century old by the time On the Origin of Species was published), a society where all the manifestations of capitalism adumbrated by Marx above had arisen and changed life radically.  Darwin and Wallace both read Malthus, both explicitly naming his Essay on Population as providing them with eureka moments.  Like most educated men of his time, Darwin was highly influenced by Political Economists like Adam Smith, who provided the theoretical basis of laissez-faire capitalism (though to associate Smith simplistically with today's ultra-free-marketeers - who fatuously profess to venerate him - is to do him a great disservice).

On this matter, it's worth quoting (at length) from Darwin's finest biographers, Adrian Desmond and James Moore.  Writing about Darwin's thinking in the late 1830s, they say:

Malthus had rarely been more topical. In the depth of the depression, with unprecedented distress, the poor law and pauper riots were on everybody's lips. Workhouses were still being attacked, commissioners still being pelted. Malthus had denounced charity, and the rioters abominated anything Malthusian that propped up the New Poor Law. By now the dissident groups had come together under an umbrella organization known as Chartism: they supported the People's Charter, a list of demands for universal suffrage, annual elections, and salaried MPs. This was a countrywide mass movement, and the New Poor Law was one of its prime targets. Christian Chartists denounced a system that would deny 'the distressed poor their God-given right to a dignified support on their native soil.’ They were marching under banners in September that proclaimed with the Psalmist, 'Dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.’ Chartist speeches, lambasting the 'cruel and detestable doctrines of the Malthusians,' were heard by tens of thousands in the manufacturing towns, and reported in The Times. Love him or loathe him. Malthus could not be ignored.

Darwin knew the theory. With Martineau his dinner guest, how could he not? Getting the poor off welfare increased competition among working men and reduced taxes. Competition was paramount, making Malthus a Whig free trader's godsend in the 1830s. But it was Malthus's statistics that struck Darwin with a vengeance in his primed state. Malthus calculated that, with the brakes off, humanity could double in a mere twenty-five years. But it did not double; if it did the planet would be overrun. A struggle for resources slowed growth, and a horrifying catalogue of death, disease, wars, and famine checked the population. Darwin saw that an identical struggle took place throughout nature, and he realized that it could be turned into a truly creative force.

He had thought that only enough individuals were born to keep a species stable. Now he accepted that wild populations, too, bred beyond their means. Like the architects of the poor law, nature showed no charity; individuals had to scrimp and struggle, like the growing gangs of scavengers on London's refuse heaps, with starvation staring them in the face. Darwin gained a unique understanding from Malthus.

...

In Darwin's nature, the many fall that the few might progress. Death acquired a new meaning, and there was enough of it around: with rising joblessness and homelessness, medical statisticians were compiling their 'ledgers of death' (mortality statistics) among the slum dwellers. Nature's ledgers were always open; the Reaper sat, draped in black, with scratch pen permanently in hand. Progress was not so much a hymn to divine beneficence as a dirge accompanying the savage struggle. Both Darwinian science and poor law society were now reformed along competitive Malthusian lines. Ruthless competition was the norm; it guaranteed the progress of life and a low-wage, high-profit capitalist society.

...

Emigration might solve the pauper problem at home, but others saw these boatloads of rejects wreaking havoc abroad. Dire predictions accompanied this tidal wave of flotsam. European settlers had always been 'harbingers of extermination to the native tribes,' and it was prophesied that all the 'aboriginal nations' would be wiped out within a century. At every outpost the Beagle crew had witnessed the destruction: the Tasmanians were all but exterminated, the aborigines were dying from European diseases, General Rosas's policy was deliberate genocide. But Darwin believed that colonial warfare was necessary 'to make the destroyers vary' and adapt to the new terrain. Destruction was becoming integral to his Malthusian view of humanity:

When two races of men meet, they act precisely like two species of animals. — they fight, eat each other, bring diseases to each other &c, but then comes the more deadly struggle, namely which have the best fitted organization, or instincts (ie intellect in man) to gain the day.

The 'stronger [are] always extirpating the weaker,' and the British were beating the lot. This imperial expansion ended the isolation of the indigenous races, and thwarted their development in other ways. As whites spread out from the Cape, the black tribes were pushed together in the interior, blending races and ending their species-making isolation. Had this not happened, Darwin speculated, 'in 10,000 years [the] Negro [would] probably [have become] a distinct species.'

With emigration in the headlines, Lyell was convinced that animals too are driven by overpopulation to migrate. He agreed with Darwin that burgeoning species become colonizers, invading new terrain and defeating the natives. But Darwin's population pressure was pushing species to the limit in other ways. The crush was a creative force. The overcrowding that sent boatloads to the colonies meant that only animals with a competitive edge survived.

Darwin's biological initiative matched advanced Whig social thinking. This is what made it compelling. At last he had a mechanism that was compatible with the competitive, free-trading ideals of the ultra-Whigs. The transmutation at the base of his theory would still be loathed by many. But the Malthusian superstructure struck an emotionally satisfying chord; an open struggle with no hand-outs to the losers was the Whig way, and no poor-law commissioner could have bettered Darwin's view. He had broken with the radical hooligans who loathed Malthus. Like the Whig grandees - safe, immune, their own world characterized by noblesse oblige — Darwin was living on a family fortune, and thrusting a bitter competition on a starving world for its own good. From now on he could appeal to a better class of audience — to the rising industrialists, free-traders, and Dissenting professionals.

So you see, nothing I'm saying is original or controversial. Moreover, none of this casts any doubt upon the empirical truths of Natural Selection. To locate the intellectual roots of a scientific theory in the political and economic context of its time... or, indeed, in the Political Economy of its time... is not necessarily to cast the slightest doubt upon its truth value (nor do I). Furthermore, a theory that arises even in the direct context of another theory need not be permanently bound to it. As Engels wrathfully wrote, defending Darwin from idiot reproaches:

However great the blunder made by Darwin in accepting the Malthusian theory so naively and uncritically, nevertheless anyone can see at the first glance that no Malthusian spectacles are required to perceive the struggle for existence in nature...

(My italics.)

Darwin delayed publishing his thesis partly because he dreaded the prospect of bolstering the radical sectors of society who might use evolution as ammunition against church and state. He was a thoroughly respectable gentleman, terrified of the mob and of radicals.

Galton pioneered eugenics, and ideas about hereditary genius or greatness.  He considered 'greatness' to be a heritable trait, advocating financial incentives to 'great' people to marry and procreate.

Spencer, often unfairly maligned as a "social-Darwinist" was actually more a pioneer of what we today would call libertarianism... which, in the hands of the ideologues of capitalism, has become an ideology of free market freedom at all costs.

Of course, all these progressive, liberal, forward-thinking, modern-minded men were pioneers of the new world that was coming to replace the old, the new world of free trade and mass capitalism.


Victorian Veneer

That's what Josiah is. He's the new man. He's the forward-thinking, liberal, progressive, modern Victorian scientist. He's the guy who wants to "restore the blighted British Empire to its former power and vigour" by doing away with the obsolete old aristocratic figurehead (the Crowned Saxe-Coburg) and replace it with himself, the ultimate self-made "man of property"... whose advancement is built on keeping the poor down and helpless, locked away in the darkness.

He manifests a seemingly sincere horror and terror of Control.  He calls her "a depraved monstrosity", "quintessence of wickdness, corruption incarnate", "a foul and base creature pitted against me".

Like the men of progress who herded workers into the new urban hell holes of industrialisation, crammed them into infested hovels so they could slave in factories, sweated their children on production lines, etc., Josiah must neutralise the reality of this oppression - to himself as much as to anyone else - by demonising the people he is oppressing.  If the person you've consigned to a dark hole is evil and threatening, then why be ashamed of cheating them of their lives, of their chance to progress and advance?

Of course, like Josiah, the men who built wealth and power on the factory system and the slum were also terrified of the people they crammed into those factories and slums.  Their ideology was that of enterprise, of ruthless competition, of the Malthusian struggle, of the rightful victory of the most effective self-seeker and self-maker... and they were only too aware that these ideas cut both ways.

Remember that Control tries to rise through social mobility. She also becomes a ruthless self-seeking dealer and eventually becomes Josiah's mirror image and even takes over from him. Fashioned by Josiah's system, educated by reading The Times, she is a product of the hierarchy she was trapped under. Control was left behind, but she became integrated into the power structure by being dominated by it. She taught herself using the imperial paper of record, learning to aspire to upward social mobility, wanting to "be a ladylike", wanting to steal Josiah's power and take his place.

The people in the dark holes could just as easily seek for themselves and ruthlessly compete.  Most avenues to escape were closed to them by poverty and prejudice and religion, or thwarted by drink and oblivion... but, lurking at the corner of the eye, there was always the escape offered by the mob, the riot, the rebellion, the revolution.

Those modern, progressive, liberal, forward thinking Josiahs were all perpetually haunted by spectral tumbrils and baskets, by the downward whooshing sounds of slanted blades. The English had achieved their bourgeois revolution without any unfortunate eruptions as in France... but they all knew how close they'd come.  They all remembered Tom Paine.  Hell, like Sir Leicester Dedlock, they all remembered Wat Tyler.  They trembled and sobbed (literally, in the case of Spencer Walpole) when the Chartists took over Hyde Park.  And, much as they resented the aristocracy and the relics of the old ways, they hated the common people more.  Even as they sympathized over poverty, they hated the idea of the poor unifying to remedy their own situation.  The memory of the guillotine was, for the respectable Victorian gentlemen, a symbol of the mob slaughtering their proper rulers.  The new men of the Victorian industrial era didn't want that kind of thing happening again, any more than did the old aristos. They wanted the poor to stay poor (maybe less poor but still poor) and the workers to stay acquiescent as they - the new men - gently ousted the old landowners and Lords and Tories from the top spot. At best, there would be some reforms and alleviation of the worst suffering... but it should come from above or not at all.

Darwin, for instance, wanted Tories to die out. He wanted slavery done away with. But he wanted these remnants replaced with the Liberal 'poor laws' and 'reform acts': measures to squash the poor still further into industrial servitude, to create a kind of charitable penal system for paupers and placate the Chartists with compromises that simply extended the property qualification for the franchise. These were the modern ideas of the modern men. Meanwhile, the people were to be protected from dangerous ideas that might chip away at the ideological power of church and state... while the modern men used these dangerous ideas as the ideology of ruthless competition, free trade and industrial exploitation.

Josiah is a great reformer. A modern, Whiggish, propertied imperialist. He is the Survey and he has taken such good stock of the world he was sent to assimilate and copy that he has become a part of it. He is Victorian England, with all his rotten hypocrisy, his callous disregard, his arrogant self-promotion. He poses as an enemy of the stuffy, out-of-touch clerical backwardness of the old order. The natural laws of evolution are turned, by him, into an ideology of ruthless self-advancement. If Darwin's scientific inquiries lead him to understand that natural selection worked as 'reproduction of the best adaptation' then the society which quickly embraced his ideas comprehended them as an ideology of 'survival of the fittest', with fittest always meaning strongest and richest and harshest. Darwin himself was not, as we've seen, averse to seeing the hierarchies of his own time and place as being buttressed by the theory he had developed. That's Josiah. He's the man who still uses evolution as apologia or acceptance of the unjust, imperial, neoliberal status quo (either in crude ways like every market raider or in superficially more sophisticated ways like the sociobiologists).


Fitter, Happier, More Productive

'Ghost Light' shows the society mirrored in the system set up by an entity that has shaped itself according to this society and its new ideology.

The commercial nature of the society that has perverted this alien experiment into a miniaturised and essentialised portrait of Victorian bourgeois society shows in the way the Doctor is offered money to be an assassin, and how he eventually has to make a "deal" with Control.

The racist nature of this society shows in the imperialist ramblings of the Rider-Haggardian lunatic Redvers... in the bigotry of Inspector Mackenzie, whose diatribe about gypsies also refers to the essential idea of social-Darwinism, that it's "in the blood".

The sexist nature of this society shows in the way Josiah is served by a houseful of women, including the wife and daughter of the man he murdered, two women that he has simply inherited or appropriated in a ruthlessly Darwinian property takeover. They are literally part of the household, they come with it like the fixtures and fittings.

And the Victorian science which runs rampant and insane within Gabriel Chase is the perfect picture of a bourgeois society... a discourse of totalising taxonomy that wanted to collect, name, label, categorize, quantify every part of nature; arranging them all on hierarchical tables that mirrored its own conception of itself as a pyramid of power, desert and worth; anatomising specimens as though itemising the components of industrial machines; explaining the functioning of living things as though constructing them anew from cogs and pistons; killing and silencing and stilling and transfixing everything natural and chaotic with the pin of authority, displaying them all under the glass of respectability; crystallising knowledge of nature into the ideology of power; reserving such knowledge into cultural capital, to be distributed by gentlemen of largesse to the extent that they thought good for the multitude.


Cleansing Fire

Meanwhile, Light is a perversion and denial of both the Christian angel and the evolutionist scientist. He is the drag factor that pulls everything back. He is the worst aspect of the science that has to disrupt and destroy in order to understand things. He stands over the dead, dismembered body of a maid and says "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it". If he's religion holding back science, he's also science taking things apart and being unable to reassemble them. Reductionism run mad.  Unable to cope with a barrage of change, flux, imagination, fiction and nonsense, he seizes up until he becomes a stone idol. A statue of an angel, or of one of the DWEMs that line the inside of the Nat Hist. Doesn't matter. He reveals their fundamental similarity. It is impossible for him to cope with reality as an immensely complex web of dialectical inter-reactions.  He can travel at the speed of thought but he can't think.

(The irony being that Natural Selection ultimately supports this - to use a risky phrase - 'dialectic of nature', at least to an extent, by revealing that all species are transitional, snapshots taken from an endless chain of change, isolatable only in theory from the relationships in which they nestle, always influencing and being influenced by their environment and their contact with each other. The little changes imperceptibly become massive alterations, thus transforming quantity into quality. The apparent opposites actually exist in unity. And so on.)

The Doctor, meanwhile, sides with the anarchy of teenage emotional and political anger. He can't be a scientist in the Josiah or Light sort of way. He loathes bus stations, with all their timetables and categories and delineated waiting areas... with their hierarchies and schedules and zones and order. He sides with those who want to blow up the Victorian edifice for what it shares with the kind of thinking that leads racists to firebomb the flats of Asian families.

(While we're on the subject, lets dispense with this notion that the line "white kids firebombed it" is an embarrassing clunker. I lived near Southall in the early-to-mid 80s. I remember, as a child, hearing discussions about what some of my fellow "white kids" were getting up to in the area often called "Little India". I remember the racism of the "white kids" in the dark blue uniforms, protecting National Front "white kids" while arresting Indian youths on the assumption that their bikes were stolen.  I was aware of the "white kid" coppers who'd killed anti-racist protesters with impunity. I found out, as an adult, about the riots and protests that were the inevitable result of such racism. So, basically, if you cringe at the line "white kids firebombed it" then I submit that you have missed the point.)

The Doctor sides with those who just want to explore the catalogue rather than fix everything into place and create a static tyranny of categories and labels and authority. That's why the story concentrates on the binaries that bleed into each other, on the transgression of categories. Ace and Gwendoline put on male clothes and it causes a hell of a stir, but it demonstrates that such fixed categories are just snapshots of evolution. And, of course, people can change because they exist in a social context rather than just a biological one. Humans self-create meaning. Meaning self-creates meaning. Dialectically.

This is what really bugs Light, I think, just as it bugs Josiah and Matthews in different ways.  Light, of course, is the apocalyptic intensification of their joint horror at the transgression of categories... particularly by those who had no part in drawing them up and making them law.  That's the deep reason for the apparently over-the-top description of Light and his Survey as "an evil older than time itself".  Light is evil in the senses that Terry Eagleton identified.  We ask in vain what his survey was supposed to achieve.  There was no purpose.  It had the "lethal purity" of pointlessness.  Light is against 'Being' because he doesn't understand that Being is all about change.  Ultimately this was always going to lead to an attempt at negation, at annihilation.  Meaningless in himself - because he does not change... or at least doesn't think that he does - Light wishes to expunge all meaning.  He's the angelic cleanser.  All information that is not him must be burned away.

As that eminent Victorian Gerard Manley Hopkins put it (quoted by Eagleton):  "Flaws, loose ends, and rough approximations are what evil cannot endure. This is one reason why it has an affinity with the bureaucratic mind. Goodness, by contrast, is in love with the dappled, unfinished nature of things."

The irony with which the Doctor defeats Light is that very "unfinished nature" of all 'Being', even his own.  Light ("Imagination, comma, lack of") cannot conceive that any information can be invented, reworked, recreated by people.  The very dialectic of change within himself is enough to ossify him from within.  He is literally out-evolved by himself.

Wicked.

Gallifrey Base and Superstructure

Grinding Engines

The mechanical sciences attained to a degree of perfection which, though obscurely foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted madness to have prophesied in a preceding age. Commerce was pursued with a perpetually increasing vigour, and the same area of the Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish more and more subsistence. The means and sources of knowledge were thus increased together with knowledge itself, and the instruments of knowledge. The benefit of this increase of the powers of man became, in consequence of the inartificial forms into which mankind was distributed, an instrument of his additional evil. The capabilities of happiness were increased, and applied to the augmentation of misery. Modern society is thus an engine assumed to be for useful purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle mechanism augmented to the highest pitch, but which, instead of grinding corn or raising water acts against itself and is perpetually wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels of which it is composed.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Philosophical View of Reform, 1819-1820 

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn't worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it — the silence meant to supplant all things tangible. Hence it assailed not only his ears but his eyes; as he stood by the inert TV set he experienced the silence as visible and, in its own way, alive. Alive! He had often felt its austere approach before; when it came it burst in without subtlety, evidently unable to wait. The silence of the world could not rein back its greed. Not any longer. Not when it had virtually won. 

He wondered, then, if the others who had remained on Earth experienced the void this way. Or was it peculiar to his peculiar biological identity, a freak generated by his inept sensory apparatus? Interesting question, Isidore thought. But whom could he compare notes with? He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments, which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin.  Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding-like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. By then, naturally, he himself would be dead, another interesting event to anticipate as he stood here in his stricken living room atone with the lungless, all-penetrating, masterful world-silence.

- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Entropy is a concern of science-fiction as a whole.

SF - with its concentration upon imagined future history, the elision of past technology with future technology, encounters with alien species further down the road of technological advancement than us and, last but not least, time travel - seems especially concerned with historical transformation, particularly with regards to technology.

Humans seem to have a tendency to imagine future disaster, or at least future decay, as a way of expressing our perception that our own world is winding down and wobbling on the brink.  This may be an inherent human feeling (like the seemingly inevitable perception that younger generations are worse than our own, which Plato was banging on about thousands of years ago).

We’re all time travellers, in a way. We all travel from ‘the old days’ into uncertain futures. This feeling has become especially acute for humans living in the modern era, when the forces of production unleashed by the capitalist mode have achieved things which previous generations would have considered to be impossible except through sorcery. As Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, as they attempted to express the way the emerging capitalist system was changing all human experience:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.

Capitalism began to revolutionise human life to an unprecedented degree, in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented speed, through the arrival of mass production, the factory system, technology, etc. The level and speed at which things changed massively increased.  Technology is a platform from which more sophisticated levels of technology may be attained, just as every scientific advance stems from earlier discoveries… moreover, since the economic basis of the technological revolution was industry, i.e. capitalism, the constant need to revolutionise the system was built into the system. Capitalists must always increase production, invest in new techniques and methods of production, pioneer new products, lower production costs, expand into new markets, etc. Capital breeds capital… and capital must be fed back into the process of expanding the productive forces. Every capitalist does this, for fear of being outstripped and put out of business.

Nevertheless, despite the dynamism of the system and the incredible material progress that it has brought, capitalism is inherently entropic.

Capitalism gave rise to the concept of entropy in the first place.   Thermodynamics (of which entropy is, as we know, the 'second law') - and with it much of modern physics -  was a scientific notion arrived at because of the Industrial Revolution, because the engineers wanted to know how their engines worked, why they didn't work, why they wound down, how they could be stopped from winding down and how they could be made to work better, stronger, faster, harder, longer. The connection continues: the application of entropy to Information Theory came from within the Rand Corporation.

Capitalism generates technological commodities which gradually run down, either in relative terms (i.e. becoming less efficient than new technology) or in absolute terms (i.e. in that they gradually get worn and used and tired) or in both.

This process generates wastage of technology. We’ve all been to the tip and seen those piles of old TVs, cookers, microwaves, freezers, etc. These are phenomena of modernity. I don’t mean that nothing decayed or fell apart in the Middle Ages or the Ancient world (of course it did), but the speed at which we produce more and more technology also increases the speed at which our world fills with technology that has become obsolete, decrepit, malfunctioning and abandoned.  The lives of humans in pre-modern, pre-technological societies are/were fundamentally dominated by endlessly repeating cycles embedded in nature.  The lives of humans in modern, technological society have many of the same cycles, but are increasingly dominated by the onward rush of change that comes with the continual revolutionizing of the productive forces.

Modernity has fundamentally reversed the old relationship humanity used to have with its creations, tools and machines.  For most of human history, the technological creations outlived the creators, both in general and often in particular.  The concept of the waterwheel would outlive the miller; often the particular wheel with which he worked would outlast him.  Now, humans outlive almost all their technological creations, except the most basic and/or monumental, like buildings... and even they have been changed, in both design practices and materials, almost beyond recognition.  The surgeon outlives successive generations of up-to-the-minute surgical tools, the web-designer outlives the most advanced hardware and software every year or so.  They even live to see the fundamental principles revolutionised.

The world that Plato died in was more or less the world he was born in, at least in terms of technology, and at least compared to us. To him, computers would have seemed like magic.  In 1980, Christopher H. Bidmead was able to write a script in which the Doctor expresses surprise that a computer retains information even when switched off. When the people who watched that episode as children (i.e. people like me) die… well, who knows?  Computers themselves may be obsolete by then.  But the undreamt-of advances of the future will leave the increasingly rickety state-of-the-art-circa-2012 standing... or more likely rotting.  Every new mp3 player or mobile phone or digital camera entails older models thrown in the scrap. DVD and Blu-Ray entailed piles of discarded old VHS tapes.  Every newly-purchased gadget means another of those little plastic-coated wire things that tie the brand new cables and leads into a neat bow.  Every DVD or CD bought means adding to the mountains of cellophane in which they come wrapped.

This is just the tip of the shitberg. From the earliest days of the industrial revolution – long before what we know as the green movement - people had been noticing the way that industrial technology generates wastage, pollution and rubbish as by-products. The railways were themselves the result of a staggering development of the productive forces of society, and their effects fed dialectically back into the system, contributing to yet more staggering development. But the combustion engine produced an enormous need to tear energy from the earth in the form of coal, it belched smoke, produced grease and dirt… and all its component parts were subject to all the wear and tear of shoe leather or flint hammers or any other tool. The gears and wheels and tracks wore away, stopped functioning properly, needed replacing, were torn out and discarded when superior innovations came along.

Time has always been, as Ovid put it, “the devourer of all things”, but it is only in the modern era – the era of capitalist industry and mass technology – that we humans have seen such impermeable and ubiquitous evidence of decay, wear and tear, abrasion, clutter and accelerating obsolescence. It surrounds us now. It demonstrates the impermanence of the things we make.  It lurks behind the latest innovations, waiting for their time to come.  And it is our creation.

It was one thing to see the natural world wither every autumn and regenerate itself every spring… these days we watch our own wondrous creations fall apart all around us, all the time, everywhere, no matter what we do. And unlike dead leaves, spent batteries don’t pass back into the soil from which they came. They sit on rubbish heaps. They engorge landfills. They float in canals. If we don’t trouble to do anything about it, they fill our drawers. And every time we open the drawer, they’re still there. Pooled in entropic uselessness. Production and consumption culminating in static malfunction. Recycling is an attempt to fend off industrial entropy as well as environmental devastation… but even the recycling collection vans belch out fumes; even the engines and crushers and pulpers and sievers of the recycling plant eventually run down.

That other great product of the modern age - world-scale, technological, industrial warfare - also creates entropy in massive doses.  All the machinery of modern war is industrially produced and industrially used.  The tanks, the machine guns, the planes, the bombs, the drones, the smart missiles, the body armour, the computer guidance systems, the depleted uranium-coated shells, the armour piercing rounds... they're all subject to the same pressures as all other industrial commodities.  Just like the mp3 players, the war machines are mass produced for profit.  Just like all machines, the military hardware wears down.  The newer model is designed and produced and sold.  A new missile system is bought by a government and all the old warheads are obsolete.  The unused weapons degrade and become useless.  The weapons that are used get bashed and battered, get sprayed with bullets or blown up (like the men who are sent to fire them).  Either that, or their gears grind and shread as the desert sand gets into their innards.  War is often said to lead to technological innovation, what with necessity being the mother of invention.  We might want to wonder how we define "necessity" in this context.

 And we might want to remember, alongside all the innovation, how much destruction war creates.  It leaves not only piles of expended and exhausted weapons, but cities reduced to rubble, the technological commodities that filled them turned to so many smithereens.  The wars that smash the wonders of the modern age to fragments are themselves products of the modern age.

The system that created the drive for hegemony, control of resources and markets which lead to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, also created the materiel which made the invasion possible... much of which was smashed, pulverised and incinerated in the process (to say nothing of the people who were turned to mincemeat or vapour).

But the loss of materiel simply refreshed the market for their products.  The debris piles grow, constantly refreshed by the engines of modernity.  In this sense, warfare is just the fastest, most extreme manifestation of the tendency inherent in capitalism towards the creation, circulation and consumption of commodities.

Modern warfare is industrial, technological... and it is like a frenzied, violent dramatization of the boom and slump cycle - the irresolvable and unreformable contradiction at the heart of capitalism.

This is where we loop back to the start and find the most basic reasons and ways in which capitalism is entropic.

It is the very necessity of accumulation to capitalists that causes crises.  In order to win in the market, the capitalist must invest in productivity.  He must produce his goods or services better, faster, cheaper.  He must drive down prices.  The primary way he can do this while continuing to turn a profit is to make workers more productive by investing in the machinery and techniques they use in the workplace.  But, in doing this, the capitalist changes the ratios.  The worker becomes more and more swamped by, integrated in and subordinate to machinery and systems.

The labour power of the worker is the source of exchange value, which appears in the market as price.  Human labour power is the only commodity that creates new value.  A worker spends only part of each working day creating the amount of value needed to perpetuate their own existence, the rest of the day is spent producing surplus value which goes to the capitalist.  The machinery used in the production process transmits some of the value embedded in it to the products, but cannot produce new value.  By itself, it can do nothing.  It must be set in motion and controlled by human labour power.  And even the value that the machinery does transmit (depreciating all the while) was itself created by the human labour power that created the machine.  When the capitalist pours surplus value back into the system, when he invests in machinery, he invests in that part of the production process that cannot create new value.  This is, ultimately, why prices drop: because the value (i.e. labour time) embedded in the product decreases.  This is all fine and dandy for the first capitalist to make the technical innovation, buy the better machine, automate more of the factory, develop the new and better software, etc... and, in the first instance, it helps him succeed against his competition.  But, over time, more capitalists invest in the same or better innovations, techniques and machines... they must, in order to accumulate in order to compete... and the level of profit across the entire system falls.

This is a tendency that asserts itself over time.  There are, as Marx readily allowed, countervailing tendencies than can retard or offset the falling rate of profit.  But, overall and over time, the tendency shows.  This analysis has been controversial but is readily and convincingly defencible.  Moreover, empirical data bears it out.  The current global recession was caused, at the most fundamental level, by just such a long term decline and stagnation of profitability.

Capitalism drives itself into chaos and crisis even as it accumulates.... because it accumulates.  It’s an inherent aspect of the system, to grind the engines until they burst apart.

Crisis leads to the wastage and destruction of excess capital.  Firms go bust.  Factories and offices close.  People are laid off.  Warehouses stagnate filled with unsold and unsaleable goods.  Town centres empty of going concerns.  Increasingly penurious ex-consumers walk past vacated shops and stare through the dirty windows - the 'Everything Must Go' posters growing faded and tatty; the sellotape holding them up turning yellow and dry - into haunted rooms occupied by nothing but worn carpet and unopened mail.  Empty facilities sit rusting in stasis.  This decay and waste reduces the amount of capital in the system, thus opening up the possibility of a restoration of profit to the average.  It was the accumulation of capital that lead to the fall, remember.

Eventually, the limping casualties that are still viable are gobbled up by the predators big enough to survive the recession.  These leviathans heave the system back out of crisis and the cycle begins again.  But capital becomes ever more concentrated and centralized into the hands of the great predators.  Their power becomes so great that their interests merge with that of the nation state.  Competition and accumulation are played out at the level of global imperialist competition.  Nation states squabble over access to, shares of, control over resources and markets.  They squabble because their existence is ever more bound up with increasingly concentrated and centralized capital.

The system generates entropy at every level.

It even generates entropy of different kinds at different levels of the concept.

Slump generates stasis and dereliction.

Boom generates depreciation and the proliferation of technological clutter and decay.

War generates massive destruction and wastage.

Peace generates the hegemony of huge capitals that standardize and homogenize everything into a vast stream of indistinguishable, banal, bland cultural porridge.  Even without the hyper-consumerism in which we now live, photography and mass production created the stripping away of the aura of the individual work of art, the vertigo of endless reproduction.

If capitalism manages to raise the productive forces as far as some think it will... if it one day creates nanotechnology that will alter matter at the ceullular, or even molecular level... there is a mooted possibility that such technology will result in the reduction of all matter into an undifferentiated mass of shuffled, randomized, unpredictable, informationless, apocalyptic unstuff.

This is the ecophagic apocalypse of the 'grey goo' scenario.  It has fascinated writers of science fiction more than it has genuinely worried scientists.  This is because it ties directly into something that we all know and feel and see about the world of technology, industry and modernity (of capitalism): that it has entropy woven into its fabric.

The world of the machine is - from certain angles - a world of monsters; monsters that champ and chew and digest and excrete human experience.

We live in the shit of Moloch.  And nothing is more entropic than shit.

*

To recap:

Modernity, which is the age of mass industrial technology, is thus also the age of science, whence comes the concept of entropy.  The scientific concept of entropy, besides addressing concerns of industry and science, also expresses - or lends itself to analogies which express - longstanding human anxieties about time, decay, death, etc.  In the modern age, which is the age of capitalism (and hence of mass production and overproduction of commodities), such anxieties are ramped up beyond any level before known in human culture because the modern age is an age of omnipresent wastage, rubbish, obsolescence, clutter, malfunction and destruction.

To expand a bit:

In the past, anxieties about time and decay were not exacerbated by technology and industrial production (for the simple reason that they did not yet exist, or predominate).  Such anxieties were about age and illness and death.  They were treated in myths, legends, fairytales, etc., with their seemingly endless concern with young girls and crones, fertility of land linked to human fertility, death and rebirth, imprisonment, eternal guardianship, etc.  Myths and legends and fairytales endlessly riff on order turned to chaos, chaos turned to order, potential wasted, youth lost, age consuming youth, youth banishing age, fertility banishing barrenness, and so on.

Science fiction is, I think, the reiteration of myth and legend in the age of modernity, hence in the idioms of technology.  There's a definition of sci-fi as being "about the relationship between man and his tools"... yet the "tools" that concern sci-fi are robots, spaceships, computers, etc... all of which are recognisably projections of trends or possibilities within modern industrial technology.  That's why it isn't sci-fi when ancient legends tell of magic swords, but it is sci-fi when writers in the 19th-21st centuries tell of advanced machines that can fly people between the stars.

Therefore, the preoccupation of science fiction - or at least certain strands of science fiction - with entropy is hardly surprising.  SF is the literary/cultural form that is more a product of modernity than any other.  It might be the said to be the adaptation of the most basic forms of storytelling to the landscape (or culturescape) of a world dominated by modern capitalism.  SF is the mythic expression of frenzied technological innovation, general commodity production, overproduction, overaccumulation, obsolescence, re-investment and re-innovation, more production, more obsolescence, more rubbish tips, and so on.

Entropy might just be a key link in this chain.  It is an idea that arose from, and is of great utility to, modernity.  It is an idea expressed in and by the industrial machine, the technologeme.  It expresses something inherent and unavoidable within all technology.  It refers to something that is more visible and intense in all our lives because of mass production.  It also provides a link to older forms of discourse that express ancient human concerns.  After all, anxieties about age, illness, infertility and death have not gone away... they have just been supplemented by anxieties about the aging, malfunctioning, failure and threatening behaviour of technology and industrial products.

Entropy might just be the missing link between myth and science-fiction.

It might just be why the quintessential modern literary/cultural genre of the machine age also became - so often and on so many levels - a reiteration of myth.