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.

Red Kangs Are Best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monsterism

In his famous essay 'The Dialectic of Fear' (published in New Left Review #136, Nov-Dec 1982) Franco Moretti used Marxist and Psychoanalytic criticism to provide a coruscating account of the twin monsters of bourgeois culture: Dracula and Frankenstein.

The entire essay is well worth reading and is findable online if you hunt about.  Here are some of the best bits about Frankenstein (the book):

Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of 'a Ford worker'). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature. He is not found in nature, but built. Frankenstein is a productive inventor-scientist...). Reunited and brought back to life in the monster are the limbs of those - the 'poor' - whom the breakdown of feudal relations has forced into brigandage, poverty and death. Only modern science - this metaphor for the 'dark satanic mills' - can offer them a future. It sews them together again, moulds them according to its will and finally gives them life, But at the moment the monster opens its eyes, its creator
draws back in horror: 'by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; . . . How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe . . . ?'

Between Frankenstein and the monster there is an ambivalent, dialectical relationship, the same as that which, according to Marx, connects capital with wage-labour. On the one hand, the scientist cannot but create the monster: 'often did my human nature turn with loathing from my occupation, whilst, still urged on by an eagerness which perpetually increased, I brought my work near to a conclusion'. On the other hand, he is immediately afraid of it and wants to kill it, because he realizes he has given life to a creature stronger than himself and of which he cannot henceforth be free. ... The fear aroused by the monster, in other words, is the fear of one who is afraid of having 'produced his own gravediggers'.

and...

'Race of devils': this image of the proletariat encapsulates one of the most reactionary elements in Mary Shelley's ideology. The monster is a historical product, an artificial being: but once transformed into a 'race' he re-enters the immutable realm of Nature. He can become the object of an instinctive, elemental hatred; and 'men' need this hatred to counterbalance the force unleashed by the monster. So true is this that racial discrimination is not superimposed on the development of the narrative but springs directly from it: it is not only Mary Shelley who wants to make the monster a creature of another race, but Frankenstein himself. Frankenstein does not in fact want to create a man (as he claims) but a monster, a race. He narrates at length the 'infinite pains and care' with which he had endeavoured to form the creature; he tells us that 'his limbs were in proportion' and that he had 'selected his features as beautiful'. So many lies -- in the same paragraph, three words later, we read: 'His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes. . . . his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.' Even before he begins to live, this new being is already monstrous, already a race apart. He must be so, he is made to be so -- he is created but on these conditions. There is here a clear lament for the feudal sumptuary laws which, by imposing a particular style of dress on each social rank, allowed it to be recognized at a distance and nailed it physically to its social role. Now that clothes have become commodities that anyone can buy, this is no longer possible. Difference in rank must now be inscribed more deeply: in one's skin, one's eyes, one's build. The monster makes us realize how hard it was for the dominant classes to resign themselves to the idea that all human beings are - or ought to be - equal.

I have some issues with Moretti here.  He uses the word 'lies' to describe Victor's supposedly inaccurate descriptions of the monster as beautiful.  But, firstly, we are confusing perception with reality.  Victor perceives his construction as beautiful because he attempts to construct it according to implicitly classical notions of beauty (note the key word "proportion", and remember that original woodcut which depicts the monster as a giganticised and jumbled reiteration of Michaelangelo's newly-created Adam)... but there is no guarantee that things that accord with classical notions of proportion will actually be beautiful.  Rather, beauty is concept we have mapped onto certain stereotypical physicalities which stem from a bastardized and historically re-written version of classicism, recast in terms of 18th and 19th century bourgeois prejudices.  It is profoundly local - historically, geographically, socially and ideologically.  It is implicitly tied in with notions of 'health' which stem from the privileged lives of the rich (smooth skin, for example), and which later get appropriated by reductionist Darwinian ideologies which link beauty with 'fitness'... a set of notions still widely repeated by today's biological determinists.  It would be perfectly possible to construct something according to abstract classical (or pseudo-classical) notions of beauty that turned out hideous and terrifying to the beholder.  Just imagine actually meeting Michaelangelo's David in the street.

But this leads us to another issue.  As stated, we're talking about Victor's perceptions.  What seemed beautiful to him in conception, in theory, during construction, in isolated parts, could well seem ghastly in totality.  Or perhaps the totality of the final creation simply brings home to Victor the ramifications of what he has done.  He has created something which now has seperate existence, seperate power, autonomy and selfhood.  When he looks at it as another person as opposed to a plan or a set of pieces to be assembled, he suddenly finds it frightening.  This actually fits better with Moretti's conception of the monster as a proletariat in singular, as terrifying because the creator perceives it as his potential gravedigger.  Like many creators of actual proletarian populations, Victor the bourgeois looks at what he has created and, in place of the vast reservoir of ready and eager and docile and easily-exploited labour that he planned, he sees something terrifyingly dangerous precisely because of its autonomy.

This in turn leads to another issue.  In the preceding quoted paragraph, Moretti is talking about the bourgeois conception of the lower orders as hideously unequal or inferior.  He implies a relation between this (which found itself expressed in Darwinian reductionist narratives about degraded 'types' or 'natural lower orders') and between the racial narrative of capitalism.  But he seems to be flailing about for a psychological rationale for racism as a response to the horror of the subjected object.  But the process of 'race making', in which the bourgeois social order constructs the ideology of biological race (and thus of biological racism) as a justification for racially-ordered systems of labour exploitation, i.e. slavery and the slave trade, is a fair bit more material than that.  Furthermore, the psychological aspect (which is definitely present) is based not on horror at the subject but on the need to confront a living subject and make it an object that is horrifying, and thus subjectable.  To turn workers who are black into 'negro slaves' for instance, from people who are being exploited into monsters who deserve no better.  Moretti misses the extent to which race is ideologically constructed, and the extent to which it thus filters into perceptions.  He puts it the wrong way round, or seems to.  Having constructed the ideology of racial orders, the system then creates consciousness in people which causes them to perceive racial difference that is not, as we now know, actually existing in nature.  There are no 'races', and we construct them out of ideology which acts upon our perceptions of ethnic variations.  This, it seems to me, is actually directly mirrored in Victor's sudden perception of his new creation as ugly.  He looks at it and called it beautiful, then looks again and perceives it as ugly - which is to say, as Moretti points out, as racially 'other'.  And the only change is a material one.  The creature is now alive.  He made it ugly because it came alive and its disavowal needed an ideological justification.  Victor, in effect, 'makes' a race in two senses.  He runs the risk of creating a 'race of devils' in the sense of creating a new breed among humans.  But this is the diegetic sense that he, the character, perceives and believes.   Beneath that, there is Victor as a textual reification of ideological maneuvres.  In that sense, what he's actually doing is 'race making'.  He is superimposing an ideology of racial difference and hierarchy upon a 'wretch' that he deems inferior because it is both his slave and his potential gravedigger.  Its status as a living thing makes this ideologically necessary.  That other people perceive the monster in essentially the same way only speaks to the universality of the ideology of race once constructed.

Moretti goes on to recognise something of the instability of some of those aforementioned bourgeois conceptions of beauty, and to bring in the artificiality of race, in the following passage - which is also a neat demonstration of the Marxist insight that progress and barbarism are forever intertwined, to the extent that they are essentially the same thing:

But the monster also makes us realize that in an unequal society they are not equal. Not because they belong to different 'races' but because inequality really does score itself into one's skin, one's eyes and one's body. And more so, evidently, in the case of the first industrial workers: the monster is disfigured not only because Frankenstein wants him to be like that, but also because this was how things actually were in the first decades of the industrial revolution. In him, the metaphors of the critics of civil society become real.  The monster incarnates the dialectic of estranged labour described by the young Marx: 'the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless the worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature. . . . It is true that labour produces . . . palaces, but hovels for the worker. . . . It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker.'  Frankenstein's invention is thus a pregnant metaphor of the process of capitalist production, which forms by deforming, civilizes by barbarizing, enriches by impoverishing -- a two-sided process in which each affirmation entails a negation. And indeed the monster - the pedestal on which Frankenstein erects his anguished greatness - is always described by negation: man is well proportioned, the monster is not; man is beautiful, the monster ugly; man is good, the monster evil. The monster is man turned upside-down, negated. He has no autonomous existence; he can never be really free or have a future. He lives only as the other side of that coin which is Frankenstein. When the scientist dies, the monster does not know what to do with his own life and commits suicide.

Mary Shelley became something of a reactionary in later life.  Despite being a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and the dawning Industrial Revolution, Frankenstein is a book with more than a seed of the reactionary nestling within it.  Like many from the early years of capitalism who disapproved of the new system in some measure, she is in many respects essentially a conservative.  Shakespeare, writing at the very dawn of the Early Modern Era, at the fulcrum of the transition from fedualism to capitalism, is highly critical of many aspects of the emergent bourgeois culture (along with being irresistibly attracted to them) but his criticism takes the form of an essentially conservative attachment to pre-bourgeois ideas of social obligation.  Capitalism detaches pre-capitalist people from old and established ties of obligation which constitute the social structure of fedualism.  He sympathises with shepherds leading newly precarious lives in the Forest of Arden after the enclosures, but he also worries about the fickleness of the new urban proles (so like the vicious Roman mob!), and so on.  Timon rages at money the universal whore, the utterly faithless golden metaphor which, in the bourgeois system, breaks down all loyalties and moral certainties... and yet Shakespeare's solution is for the classical virtues to be imposed by martial law in the person of Alcibiades.  In the same way, Mary Shelley frets at the emergence of the new bourgeois product - so powerful, so autonomous - and the newly forming proletariat - so powerful, so autonomous - even as she rails at the failure of social justice contained within the new system.  The book is a critique from a radical position but also from a privileged one.  Shelley sees the ruthless failure of tolerance and compassion and social justice which is contained within these new phenomena.  The Enlightenment project will fail if it is not cared for and nurtured, and justice is the most essential pre-requisite... and that justice is being denied.  But, even as she rails at justice denied, she frets at the revenge of history.  This is perfectly in line with the reservations of Mary's father, Godwin, who wants reform through fireside chats with the educated, and her radical boyfriend-later-husband, Percy Shelley, who flip-flops back-and-forth between foaming revolutionism and elitest worrying about the ignorant mob.

But, in some ways, Mary goes further.  Frankenstein is almost a declaration that the entire project - not just reform but capitalism itself - is doomed to failure.  This is not a categorical judgement.  There are countervailing tendencies in this book and others she wrote.  She was always profoundly ambivalent about Romanticism and the Enlightenment - something that makes her such a fascinating liminal figure in her milieu.  But it seems that, for her, the monstrous nature of the products - be they machines or classes - dooms them to forever be denied justice and responsible use.  Without the perspective of class struggle, she doesn't see the possibility that the new class could remake the world.  She does, however, see 'the common ruination of the contending classes'.  But she lived before capitalism had spread across the globe and taken over.  To her, it's not too late for the world to go back to how it was before, once those warring opposites kill each other.  Frankenstein and the monster destroy each other.  They both die without issue.  The 'race of devils' is never spawned.  As Moretti points out, Frankenstein has no way of utilising the creature because capital is erased from the picture.  There are no factories for it and its kin to work in.  It is never cconceived of as productive, or as having utility.  Mary Shelley turns the two men - and Capital and Labour - into a doomed fable.

These days, the end of the world is now proverbially known to be easier to imagine than the end of capitalism.  To Mary Shelley, it was decidedly the other way round.


(Edited and slightly amended, 18/3/15.)

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.  

A Presumptious Dilettante's Five Belated Eggs

The more I think about it, the more I think a humble, sympathetic, non-domineering, non-entryist engagement with the anti-oppression movements springing up around issues of gender identity (i.e. Trans issues) is going to be absolutely crucial for the Left in the coming years. 

This isn't just a moral imperative.  Sure, the Left must stand with the oppressed.  Always.  By definition.  Otherwise why bother being on the Left?  Otherwise, what does 'The Left' mean?  But it's also a tactical imperative.  The system must be attacked at its weakest points.  The righteous and rightful rage felt by many on the axis of Trans oppression is absolutely one of the system's weakest points.  It hits people where they live: in their bodies.  Bodies are oppressed, disciplined, punished, curtailed, invaded, wounded and even dissected by capitalism... and it behoves the Left to realise that this happens in arenas outside the sites of direct capitalist production.  This is one of those things that everyone formally 'gets' and then puts to one side.  That's not good enough.  Capitalist oppression is total, hegemonic, far-reaching and omnipresent.  It is intimately and demonstrably bound up with oppression along lines of personal identity, bodily autonomy, bodily identity, sexual identity, gender, sexuality, and race.  This is why intersectionality is a crucial concept that's only going to get more crucial.  The task will be to relate all these issues to class.  Not so that they can be subsumed, assimilated and/or digested, but so the analysis wielded by the Left can be enlarged, educated, made stronger and more inclusive.  That is an end in itself - if we know what our ultimate goal really is.

The good news is that class is as intimately bound up with these things as the Left thinks it is.  The bad news is that we have to stress the importance of class without playing 'issue trumps' (i.e. our preferred axis of oppression is more crucial or 'primary' or 'causal' than yours... and, by the way, how dare you stress the issues that hit you where you live before the issues that we think of as theoretically more important???). 

But there is more good news.  We can stress how capitalism, and thus class exploitation along lines of work and wage exploitation (which is basically just another way of saying 'capitalism'), generates and exacerbates such oppression... for the simple reason that it bloody does; it's the currently regnant form of class society, and we can adduce powerful facts to show how the structure of class society generates sexism, female oppression, gender essentialism, the reduction of people to categories, the reification of socially constructed categories into hegemonic 'facts of life', etc. 

That's why this is so good.  There isn't anything in there that constitutes new and startling revelation, but it's a great little summary/primer/starting-point, from the perspective of a totally 'on-side' Marxism.  I found it so anyway - speaking as someone who personally embraces the elderly Goya's maxim "I'm still learning".

One (related) crucial issue to remember... and here I'd proffer the great work of Silvia Federici... is that the oppression of women is not an optional extra with capitalism, nor is it a by-product of capitalism.  It is certainly generated and exacerbated by capitalism (part of the argument the Left needs to make) but is also a precondition of capitalism, intimately bound up with the creation of capitalism, and partly capitalism's parent. 

The oppression of women existed before capitalism, because capitalism is a form of class society built on top of previous forms of class society (in Europe, feudalism)... just as the capitalist states are forms adapted from pre-capitalist states.  And the rise of capitalism in Europe was absolutely and fundamentally bound up with the further domestication, persecution and economic subjugation of women (see Federici, among others).  There really is very little wiggle room here to say that one caused the other.  They are two sides of the same coin.  And 'causality' or 'primary position' loses its meaning in a truly dialectical (i.e. a truly Marxist) analysis.  Besides, its an academic question.

LGBTQIA+ oppression is, once again, related.  (BTW: please forgive my using the long acronym as shorthand if you don't like the 'lumping together' effect, or if you're on the other side and worry that trying to be that inclusive accidentally implies that anything not covered is, by definition, not included... and also, please don't construe my raising of LGBTQIA+ oppression as an afterthought.)  LGBTQIA+ oppression is intimately connected with the issue of women's oppression, and not in the sense of being a 'product' or 'by-product' or 'side effect' of it, but rather as another aspect of the suffocating enforcement and reification of gender that class society entails, relies upon, and by which it is partly produced.

Piece of Cake

Someone nice on tumblr just asked me:

Do you think that it's fair to criticize a work of art for the failings of the culture around it? This is a question I've been mulling over the past few days and I'm sure you have an interesting response.

My answer got a bit long, so I decided - opportunistically - to post it here.


*

I think the terms of the question are worth investigating.

What do we mean by 'failings'?

What do we mean by 'culture around it'?

Failure is, of course, subjectively judged.  Something I think is bad may be seen as good - or neutral, or normal, or inescapable - by others.

It is perfectly possible for something that is a 'failure' with regards to general human wellbeing to be a 'success' for a social system.  (The wellbeing of the working class, in any class society, always being more universal than that of the minority loafing class.)

Indeed, I think that if you look at the vast majority of mainstream media culture as it has existed in modern capitalist society - including and perhaps even especially with reference to narrative culture - then you see that it pretty unambiguously touts and celebrates values and/or activities that are failures when it comes to promoting general human wellbeing but successes when it comes to propping up and reproducing a social order dominated by the class that owns and controls capital.

*phew* long sentence.

This is the 'culture around it'...

BUT...

I think it's really important to realise that art doesn't just sit there surrounded by culture.  It is culture.

We would expect any product to bear the hallmarks of its production, or the materials from which it was produced.  It's just common sense to expect a cultural product to bear such hallmarks... and that's without looking at any of the elaborate processes by which supply, demand, distribution, advertisement, hegemony, etc winnow cultural products out of circulation, or just prevent their production in the first place.

More deeply, just as the self is not a thing that exists in the world but is rather a dialectical process that we individuate from the wider set of processes that we call the world, so is art not a thing in the world but a chosen locus of relations, inter-relations and inter-reactions.

A cultural product is, from one standpoint, an individuated unit... but that standpoint is actually a form of commodity fetishism.  The cultural product as an entity that lives in the world, that says things and thinks things.  Thinking about cultural products that way is inescapable to a large extent, because it's impossible for us to step outside of culture and look in.

The very fetishising of commodities which leads us create cultural products as things, and treat them like entities, is also what makes them very hard to perceive as anything else.

You could say that the entire project of modern criticism has been concerned with attempts to find ways through this maze.

And yet... the analysis which allows us to see the cultural product as a fetishised commodity, produced by a cultural industry which actively perpetuates and reproduces itself, is also the analysis which can provide a way to see the cultural product relatively clearly... and a big part of the method for doing so is also suggested by the same analysis, at least when properly applied.

There's a vulgar Marxist approach which sees the circumstances of production as deterministic of the 'meaning' of a cultural product.  This, ironically enough, fails because it entails a reiteration of the exact same fetishising of commodities, not to mention a fetishising of production at the expense of other sites on the circuit of capital.

This is not a true Marxist approach because true Marxism sees commodities - indeed, capital in general - as relations rather than things (albeit relations fundamentally grounded in the material, which is to say the social).  This is really what is meant by - or is at least a good demonstration of - dialectical materialism (forget about vulgarised state religions). 

Luckily, this kind of vulgar Marxism is more honoured in the breach than the observance, at least outside of phone box cults or rump Stalinist states (their big cousins).

I'd argue for a dialectical-materialist way of looking at texts.  That's the analysis which remembers that the text is a social relation, produced by social relations, and viewed by social relations.

This would involve such basics as:

i) always remembering that they are social products, produced for material reasons,

ii) always remembering that, in a system of generalised commodity production, such cultural products are going to be overwhelmingly produced as commodities, or subject to commodification, etc.

iii) always remembering that, "in any epoch, the dominant ideas will be the ideas of the ruling class" [approximate quote from Marx, from memory]

And:

iv) always remembering that we cannot step outside the current social relations, ideological relations or dominant hierarchies in order to, as it were, see the text and its culture from the outside, from a disengaged and impartial standpoint,

v) that we must, therefore, take sides.  We must take a side simply in order to see the text anything like 'square on'.  Not from an impartial standpoint, but from a standpoint which recognises that no such asocial view is even possible.

Before we can even start judging the cultural product itself, we need to accept that it exists in and as part of a matrix of social relations which are hierarchical, self-perpetuating, fetishised, but also inescapably social.  We need to have a standpoint from which to judge what constitutes a 'failure'. 

This, I think, is an especially pronounced need when we're talking about anything with a story.  Because stories are almost always, on some fundamental level, implicitly posing issues of justice and injustice.  Even if only by negation.  That may not be trans-historically true, but it's at least largely true in the bourgeois West in the modern era (which is understandable when you consider the cultural revolution brought about by the bourgeois revolutions and the subsequent rise of 'morality' as an ideological prop of bourgeois culture - which is always double-edged because of its partly revolutionary and emancipatory origins).

I think the idea of judging a work of art aside from the values of the culture around it is just impossible in real terms.  It's like trying to judge a slice of cake aside from the taste of the rest of the cake.  The slice is something you make, by violence, not a property of the cake itself.  The work of art is like this.  We make it a slice by viewing it out of context.  But we can't then judge it alone.  To taste it and evaluate its flavour is to evaluate the flavour of the entire cake.  Try and do otherwise and you'll fail.  Having said that, rummaging around in the rest of the cake is vital.  The slice you tasted may happen to be the bit with no arsenic in it.  That doesn't put you in a very good position to judge the whole cake.  On the other hand, the slice you cut may happen to have failed to intersect with the file hidden inside the cake... the file which might just contribute (as something that was originally an innocuous commodity, but which your friend on the outside has socially repurposed) to your escape.

Remember, to you, the file is a success.  To the Warden, the file is a failure.

To say that art - or texts, or cultural products, or whatever - are an integral part of bourgeois culture is not necessarily to say that they are useless.  They may have emancipatory promise, much as Duchamp's readymades had promises beyond their origins as commodities, once he assisted them into new contexts.

They may be relations rather than things, but then so are we.

See.  Piece of cake.



ADDENDA:

1.  I don't use Marx's term 'fetishism' with reference to commodification without an awareness that the whole concept of fetishism is Eurocentric and racist.  Marx, I'd argue, utilised the concept and turned it against bourgeois culture, thus making it fight against such Eurocentrism and racism.   See David McNally for a nice little parenthetical discussion of this.

2.  Nothing above is particularly original.  I just can't be bothered to go looking for sources and quotes.  Read the usual suspects.

3.  This post shows me up, because I very often fail to bother with anything like this level of theoretical thinking when I actually tap something about some TV show/film/book I've just consumed into Facebook/twitter/tumblr/Shabgraff.

4.  I'd agree with China Mieville that sometimes there just isn't anything very much to say about a particular cultural product, precisely because its a commodity.  We get over invested in our commodities (this blog is evidence of that) and forget that they sometimes lack even a semblance of semiotic density.  Even when a text can be interpreted against the dominant culture, subjected to detournement, or mined for abuse of bourgeois values, that doesn't always make it significant enough to be worth picking on.

18

Everyone is down a mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He means Adrasta, by the way.

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

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

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

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

To give a very crude illustration:

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

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

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

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

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

Gothic Marxism

For Hallowe'en, here are some talks to enjoy.

Here's David McNally, talking about the ideas in his book Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism, which I mentioned (and cribbed from shamelessly) in this recent post.

Here's Silvia Federici, talking about her book Caliban and the Witch, which links the witchhunt craze to the rise of capitalism.

And here's China Mieville, giving a Marxist view of Hallowe'en (which is more fun than it sounds).

Monsters of the world, unite!

 *

ADDITION 01/11/13:

I didn't know this, but there's a video of the China Mieville talk I linked to above:

Dreams About Unicorns

On 'The Mind Robber'.  A regurgitation of something originally buried in the middle of an old post.


1. The Review

Just one of the best things ever, this story is a gloriously trippy metafictional journey into Doctor Who's own status as a text.

'Robber' picks up the Troughton era handbook for writers, stamps on it, scrawls insulting and anarchistic slogans upon its pages, rips it up and sets fire to the pieces. There is no isolated base, no croaky computer, no catalgue of disposable characters who are laser-beamed to death, no unstable authority figure, no creeping infiltration, no standard fight sequence for Jamie, no scene where someone goes into a bonkers tirade and storms out of a control centre... instead we have a deeply trippy ride through sheer weirdness; a totally unpredictable variation of content, style and pace from episode to episode; an intelligently created elllision of symbolism and literalism; a classic surreal quest narrative drawing on Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland yet beholden to neither.

The Doctor and his friends leave their universe and enter a non-spatial, non-temporal buffer zone... and this buffer zone is a world of fiction. An empty nothingness until imagination works upon it, it soon fills with robots and unicorns and princesses and forests of words.

They've landed in a metaphysical space instead of a physical one, and the threats they encounter are metaphysical too - they run the risk of being translated into other identities, of losing their faces, of being turned into bit players in other people's stories, of being made into fiction themselves (which, as this story constantly reminds us by constantly saying the opposite, they already are).

They are stalked by the ultimate variety of faceless, functional, baddie goons: toy soldiers. As if to swipe at the mechanical nature of so much scriptwriting, these goons have got dirty great wind-up keys sticking out of their backs. In this story, the ultimate threat is to become the functional plaything of the desperate hack writer. The soldiers not only hunt our heroes, they also represent what our heroes are threatened with (both literally and figuratively): being clockwork cyphers who just 'go' when the lazy writer winds them up and sets them off.

And this is the central threat, even of the somewhat contrived Earth-invasion plot that surfaces towards the end. Mankind would become fiction. Ironically enough, via the creative imagination, we'd all be stripped of our free will. We'd be crushed inside the pages of a book by a domineering Master Brain that controls even the writer with a stentorian bark that is channelled through his own mouth. That's what it would be like to be a character in someone else's book, or a fact pushed around by someone else's editor, or a mortal pushed around by a god (which is exactly what a writer looks like from the point-of-view of a character).

This is Doctor Who investigating its own nature as part imagineering stream-of-consciousness fantasy, part lumbering and mechanical genre hack-work. This is Doctor Who investigating its own origins in myth and legend, in children's fiction and historical romance, in satire and allegory. The Doctor wanders around in a pseudo-Narnia. The Doctor solves the kinds of puzzles to be found in kid's annuals. The Doctor becomes Perseus. The Doctor co-writes a face-off between a succession of heroes and villains who are part historical reality and part fictional confabulation (Blackbeard, Cyrano, etc). And the Doctor meets Gulliver.

It cannot be an accident that Gulliver is one of the Doctor's own antecedents in fiction: a restless traveller who finds himself banked on foreign shores where he encounters strange people and uncanny creatures representing human foibles and political follies. Swift's story is often mistaken for pure escapism for kids, but is packed with the bitterest and darkest satirical comments on human politics and behaviour... very much like Doctor Who, though ironically enough not for most of the Troughton era up until this point.

Perhaps, above all, the thing to admire most about 'Robber' is that it triumphantly makes the best of its behind-the-scenes problems. An extra episode needed at the last minute? Just get Derrick to write a new Episode 1 featuring only the regular cast! Result? One of the most unusual and sinister openings of the show's history. Frazer's got the lurgy? No trouble, just write a temporary change of actor into the script! Result? One of the most amusing, memorable and strangely unsettling events ever depicted by the series.

Now that, we must surely all agree, is the sheerest of sheer class.


2.  The Attempt at Marxist Analysis

It occurs to me that 'The Mind Robber' can also be read as being about aliention and reification in the Marxist senses of those words.

The Master of the Land of Fiction is clearly offering the Doctor a job when he asks him to take his place. He even refers to it as a "responsible position". He (the Master) is clearly the servant or employee of the Master Brain. He was also a paid employee of Ensign magazine, churning out thousands and thousands of words for them to print and sell. In other words, he was (and still is) a worker. He toiled to produce a product, was paid a wage and (presumably) watched as others pocketed the profits. Whatever the Master Brain (and the power it represents) gets out of running the Land of Fiction, the Master clearly doesn't see any of the coin.

You can argue about whether writing stories constitutes "socially necessary labour" (I'd say that it does, personally... human culture is in many ways based on stories and it's pretty clear that we need them in order to be fully human... they're part of what the young Marx called our "species-being"... which is something that the Land of Fiction implies by its very existence) but clearly the Master spends much more time than he really needs to churning out all those words. His labour creates a surplus which is pocketed by the publishers... or a profit of some kind that is taken by the Master Brain.

Moreover, the necessities of the market demanded that he write a certain type of story, commercial adventure stories which may not really express his full creativity. (Certainly, the story as a whole strongly hints at a feeling that trite adventures involving handy swords and with-one-bound-he-was-free endings are highly unsatisfactory. It hints at this in an ironic and self-aware way, as it must.) Similarly, in the Land, the Master tries to construct a story about the Doctor and his friends that pleases the power he serves... a story that the Doctor resists being a part of, partly by rejecting handy swords.

On Earth, his stories would have risen up to confront him as a vast block of printed type, as piles of magazines, as things outside of himself or his control... that's what happens when workers make things under capitalism. They are not expressions of his creativity exercised for its own sake; they are not the produce of an unexploited person and a free producer... unless the person happens to be lucky enough to be a financially independent artist or something like that. Similarly, the work he does in the Land is not an expression of his unalienated self-expression. He works for the Master Brain and works to produce the effects it desires. (You could almost see the Master Brain as a personification - thus a reification, in the Marxist sense - of the market itself, which is so often treated or spoken of as a kind of infallible god which should be allowed to rule society for our own good.)

In short, the Master fits (broadly) the Marxist picture of the worker who is alienated from his species-being and from the products of his labour.

He is clearly a slave to the Master Brain. As such, he's really as menaced by the Land of Fiction as the Doctor. He is confronted by products of human intellectual labour in the form of books, characters from books, characters from folklore (the telling and retelling of legends is a human production as much as anything else), wind-up soldiers, etc. In the Land, words (themselves human productions) confront humans as things outside of human control, as trees and forests. Books - commodities produced by labour - attack and threaten to swallow you. If that isn't a way of depicting alienation, of humans estranged and menaced by the products of their own labour, then I don't know what is.

Capitalism materialises the labour of humans into commodities with use-values and exchange values (i.e. books and magazines), thus reifying human labour time. The Land of Fiction takes it further, continuing the process of reification until the characters (themselves commodities and products of labour) are fully materialised, to the point where they walk about and speak for themselves. Again, alienation is depicted when the product of human labour materialised in the form of the Karkus attacks the Doctor and Zoe.

Alienation appears in another way when Zoe and Jamie are "turned into fiction" and appear before the Doctor as blank, empty cyphers who get stuck in the grooves of their dialogue. They've been alienated from their human nature by being made into a commodity (fiction being a commodity, remember). They start behaving like stuck records, like people on an assembly line suffering from line hypnosis.

All this might seem like a helluva stretch... but you have to bear in mind that all the books alluded to, all the legends invoked, all the proverbs cited, all the characters who appear in the story... they're all products of human labour of one form or another.

Private Ownership of the Means of Inhumation

or 

Sex, Death and Rock 'n' Roll - Part 2

(Part 1 can be found here.)


Some disjointed observations about 'Revelation of the Daleks'; fragments of a larger and uncompleted essay that's been in the draft drawer for ages... just so that I can say I've served up more this month than an off-the-cuff whinge about how much I hated P.E. lessons.


Hang the D.J.

He skulks in his private studio. He almost prefigures RTD’s quasi-fan characters. He’s a geek, a dweeby enthusiast. He sits alone, watches TV, greets a visitor very shyly and comes alive when given a chance to enthuse about his pet obsession: the old style D.J.s and music of America. When he learns that Peri is really American, he reacts like… well, like a Who fan meeting Nicola Bryant. You get the feeling that he might ask for her autograph. He’s almost a parody of the nerdacious loner. He has little or no direct contact with any of the other characters. Apart from Peri, he’s only ever seen with Jobel – and they don’t speak to each other. One gets the sense of someone asocial and detached, always watching the goings on around him but never getting personally involved. In a way, he’s like an anti-Davros. Both are holed up in their personal hideaways, watching everything via cameras, commenting on the action like choruses… but from different perspectives. Where Davros schemes and snarls and giggles at the suffering of others, the D.J. takes the piss out of his place of employment and plays around with words, songs and personas.

(There are a lot of these chorus/voyeur characters in 80s Who, from Arak and Etta in ‘Varos’ up to the culmination of the trend in ‘The Trial of a Time Lord’, which sees the Doctor himself become a member of the audience watching his own adventures on television!)

The other thing the D.J. does is play. He plays records, plays at disguise, plays at dressing up, plays at accents and attitudes and styles. This seems to be partly for his audience and partly for his own amusement. He comes over as a childman, an innocent. He’s not unaware of “the humanoid female form” but mentions it to “those of you who appreciate” it. He’s not personally interested, or his desire is submerged, or he’s too shy. His reaction to Peri is appreciative, but the oily, wandering-handed, heavy-breathing, harassing lust of Jobel is a counterpoint that throws the D.J.’s childish reaction into sharp relief.

Mind you, he’s not so innocent that he doesn’t know what’s going on and he clearly has no vociferous loyalty to his employers. He finds the notion of bodysnatchers making away with a cadaver rather funny and makes no effort to report them to his superiors. His off-mic comments to himself about George’s wife show that he’s savvy about the kinds of people his workplace caters for. To him, Tranquil Repose is a job. Okay, it’s a job that he has somehow managed to warp around his own personality and in which he plainly finds some pleasure, but essentially this guy is a working stiff.

In fact, this story is full of working stiffs (who work with stiffs). Almost all the relationships are economic. They are relationships between business partners, between boss and secretary, knight and squire, hitman and client, owner and manager, manager and staff. Even the relationships that are not blatantly exploitative are still tainted by their economic nature. Vogel plainly performs more than secretarial duties for his Sunset Boulevardy dominatrix boss, but her reaction to his death is to complain – albeit sounding shocked - about the difficulty in finding such good help. Apart from Peri and the Doctor, and the friendship that Peri strikes up with the D.J., the only entirely non-economic relationships are between Natasha and Gregory (they talk like dissidents or rebels) and between Natasha and her father.


The Capitalist Way of Death

All these economic relationships (with the exception of Orcini and Bostock, who seem like relics of a feudal order) look like they’re based on wages. Wages are never specifically mentioned (unless you count Orcini’s fees... which I don't because they're payment for services) but it is implicit that Takis, Lilt, Vogel, etc., are all being paid for turning up in the morning. Even Jobel is clearly a senior employee rather than the proprietor. These employment relations, along with the fact that Kara and Davros are both clearly in private business, place the story in a highly capitalist world.

Doctor Who doesn’t always depict the future as capitalistic. Many Who stories set in the future (or on other planets) seem to show a post-economic world in which people just exist in societies which lack forces of production, distribution and exchange (Marinus, Atrios, Karfel); or which achieve such things by a kind of tacit, quasi-magical, hyper-technological advancement (Gallifrey... unless, as I suspect, the unseen Shabogans do all the actual work); or through some dastardly trick which becomes the focus of the plot (Zanak, the Elders); or through the providence of some hidden exploiters (the Krotons, the Macra); or the dirty work is done by a slave class (Inter-Minor, Thoros-Beta, Kaldor City). Of course, this is because the writers are less interested in intricate worldbuilding than in creating drama or developing their big concepts. Who comes from myth, children’s fiction and B-movies: nobody is interested in who manufactures the stirrups for the horses in Narnia, or how much they get paid for doing it. In historicals and present-day stories we occasionally get some sense of economic relationships. We are, at least, more likely to meet characters with jobs (like Anne Chaplet) or with executive positions (Hibbert of Auton Plastics for example).

But sometimes, Doctor Who takes us to future societies with recognisable forms of economic organisation. Sometimes it is feudalism, as on Tara and the planet in E-Space where the Three Who Rule lord it over their peasants. But occasionally we encounter some of the recognisable hallmarks of capitalism: wage labour, industrialised or technological capital in private hands, large scale financial transactions, mass media and conspicuous consumption. Every one of these markers is to be found in 'Revelation of the Daleks'.

Necros is obviously part of a wider interplanetary economy which is based on the capitalist mode. Davros appears to have somehow bought-out the old management of Tranquil Repose. He owns (or at least controls) the means of inhumation. He presumably pays the wages of the people that work and train there, including the D.J. who represents the media, supposedly relays news and current events to his 'listeners' and appears as a selling point in the advert that is played for the Doctor and Peri. Davros is involved in a direct financial partnership with another firm, Kara's food producing company. He funds his work (R&D, one might call it) with investments from Kara alongside the profits that TR presumably makes from selling funerary services. The death business is big money for him, just as it is in our society. Anyone who has read Jessica Mitford's classic The American Way of Death will know that the funeral industry was (and is) rife with abuses and swindling; moreover, it is a mass service industry (no pun intended). It is an emblem of the capitalistic way in which our basic needs and feelings are appropriated by business, reconstituted and then sold back to us. It is thoroughly consumerist. Your average grieving consumer gets stung, in their most desperate and vulnerable hour, for spurious extras like airtight coffins (which often explode owing to a build up of gas within) or velvet pillows upon which the oblivious dead can eternally lay their unfeeling heads. Meanwhile, the financially overloaded - remembering, perhaps, the old dictum "if I can't take it with me, I don't want to go" - can (theoretically) stump up for any bizarre posthumous luxury that their hearts desire. You can have your ashes shot into orbit. You can pay of a private mausoleum. Wanna be frozen in the hope of one day being defrosted, cured and welcomed back to the head of the boardroom table? There are companies that claim to be able to provide this service... well, they can freeze you after you're dead anyway. The rest of it... well, you're gambling on future technology that can both thaw you out and then cure death... and on anybody in the future thinking it would be a good idea to bring back someone stupid and narcissistic enough to have themselves frozen in the first place. And then there's the concern raised in 'Revelation': would the living want their dead/frozen rivals to be resurrected? There's an urban legend that Walt Disney was frozen and stored under Disney World. Imagine how the current President and CEO of the Walt Disney Company would feel if told that Uncle Walt was ready to be defrosted and resume his old position. I imagine he or she'd be quite keen to keep the old man on ice.


Consumer Resistance is Useless

One of the wider points here is to do with the consumerist cycle of representation, which latches on to human needs, commodifies them, rebrands them, turns them into images and ideology, and then feeds them back to the consumer via the media. The strange thing is that, in the process, the needs themselves are lost in all sorts of ways. The human need to take in liquids, the human desire to take in pleasant-tasting liquids... this is the basis of soft drink adverts, but what are soft drink adverts really selling? Anyone who has read Naomi Klein's No Logo - and the literature that followed in its wake - will be familiar with the fact that many corporations do little actual production. The dirty task of actually producing the commodities is farmed out to other companies, often based in Third World countries with no pesky labour regulations, where they can work the local paupers longer and for less money, often at the sharp end of vicious bullying, sometimes corralled in virtual concentration camps. The corporations then buy the products that are produced under conditions of virtual slavery and flog them on the Western market for inflated prices. The process has many advantages for capitalists. The less they personally spend on production, the more surplus value they pocket when their products are sold... the more domestic jobs they destroy (or threaten to destroy) the more they can blackmail their remaining domestic workers to accept lower pay, longer hours, harder work and lower job security... and they can carry on selling their primary product: brand images. That's what corporations tend to produce and market now: brand images and identities. They market the idea that certain brands (and their products) embody and thus confer certain values and philosophies. This is why adverts try to associate their products with desires, aspirations, trends and ideas that are seen as popular. One of the ironies here is that, while the images in adverts are often designed to appeal to our basest urges or our prejudices, they can also reflect values diametrically opposed to the values actually practiced and pursued by the corporations that produce them. Clothes manufactured under ghastly conditions by bullied, repressed, half-starved, overworked, brown-skinned unpeople are marketed to the Western consumer with inspirational images that reflect public concerns like anti-racism, egalitarianism and rebellion against authority. Gorgeous models throw molotov cocktails at menacing riot police while backed by 60s tunes about revolution; hunks rescue innocent Asian children from oncoming fascist tanks... be like these inspiring (sexy) heroes, the ads imply, by wearing the same mass-produced, overpriced jeans.

Okay, I've galloped off on a hobby horse... but there is a point here. In the age of the mass media and branding, consumerism is cannibalistic. It makes us consumers not only of products, but of our own images. It feeds us images of ourselves, altered and doctored to fit a certain agenda, but recognisable as us, or as the kind of people we want to be, or as the kind of people that they want us to think of as normal. They sell us images of beauty and we consume them, internalise them and they become irrational yardsticks by which we measure each other. They sell us ourselves to consume.  Even our anti-corporate sentiments are sold back to us.  Our green sentiments are sold back to us by BP.  And all too often, we gobble them up with relish.  It should not be hard to see where 'Revelation of the Daleks' hooks into this.