Round and Round

Jeremy Corbyn is a decent man, and he’s closer to my viewpoint that just about anybody else in mainstream politics, but he’s still basically just a moderate Social Democrat.  The media buzz about him being “hard Left” is ludicrous nonsense.   It’s a sign of the media’s extreme Right-wing agenda/viewpoint, a centre-ground shifted to the Right beyond anything known since the early 20th century, and the widespread (and very consciously inculcated) political illiteracy that now pervades the UK like a plague.

I think Corbyn’s usefulness lies almost entirely in the opportunity he presents for us to push the conversation in certain ways.  I will push him over the other candidates, and I will support the good stuff he says and does as Labour leader (if elected) because it’d be insane to do anything else.  The opportunity for propaganda is itself reason to do this.  The subsequent opportunity for anti-reformist, anti-Labour propaganda when Corbyn sells out - because he will, make no mistake... they always do, the structural logic of the situation makes that inevitable - will be worth having too, speaking as a revolutionary.

The Labour Party will be relieved to learn that I have no intention of practicing entryism.  I will not be paying them £3 for the chance to vote for Corbyn.  I have no illusions about Corbyn, or the Labour Party, or what Corbyn can do with the Labour Party, or Labour’s chances of winning in 2020 whoever’s leading it.  The last thing Corbyn needs is people joining, voting for him, getting him elected, and then never getting further involved in activism, or in helping him push the party leftwards (which is what will happen with the new members). 

In many ways, Liz Kendall is a much better leadership prospect for the 'really-existing Labour Party'.  Corbyn is the candidate for people like Owen Jones, who have an essentially fantasy-based idea of what the Labour Party is.  It’s a machine for controlling and containing the Left and Social Democracy.  There's an idea out there that the Labour leaders are cowed into abandoning Left-wing principles by the media.  Bollocks.  You don't climb the Labour Party's internal greasy pole unless you are, in real terms, very very Right-wing indeed.  Labour is a thoroughly - even fanatically - neoliberal, atlanticist party which provides a kind of kennel for those elements who would otherwise be dangerously homeless.  Its main purpose it to sidetrack people who want Social Democratic policies, and channel them safely into a reformist project that is, essentially, a neverending roundalay.  Moderate the slogans to get elected.  Get elected.  Play it safe.  Get voted out when playing it safe lays you open to the vagaries of an unchallenged capitalist system.  Then play it safe to get elected again.  'Twas ever thus, to an extent, but especially since the Blair revolution, when the Labour Party was essentially remodelled into a slick, larger-membership, higher-profile version of the SDP.

I am so sick of the Labour Left’s delusions about what can be achieved with this rigged game.  In many ways I have more contempt for the so-called Labour Left than I do for good honest Blairites or Tories.

And I am so sick of the moral blackmail.  “We have to get the Tories out!  Get the Tories out at any cost!  Do anything to get the Tories out!  If you don’t support Labour, and support a moderate [i.e. Right-wing] Labour leader, you’re selling out the vulnerable people who’ll suffer under the Tories!”  Firstly, what about the vulnerable people who did suffer - and would suffer again - under Labour?  Labour pursued Tory policies, often with greater venom, vindictiveness and efficiency than the Tories.  Their specialty, from almost the very beginning.  Secondly, is this eternal fucking roundabout really the best we can do?  I mean, really?

I’ve been an implacable opponent of reformism since I read Rosa Luxemburg at college.  But even this year, at the election, I was saying “for god’s sake, vote against the Coalition, even if it means voting Labour, if you live somewhere where it might make a difference”.  I said it with no illusions, but as a stop-gap, a triage measure.  I was like someone with no faith in homeopathy, grasping at a homeopathic remedy to treat my cancer, because every other option is closed off and, after all, what harm could it do?  But that's the "We've got to do something?" logic of the panicked.  That's the same logic that makes otherwise sensible people think it might be a good idea to support NATO bombing Libya.

I begin to think that, as with what Oscar said about charity, electoral reformism is not only a trap but actually evil.  You perpetuate the disease by offering palliatives for the symptoms.  Lesser-evilism may be the greatest evil of all, even when practiced in the 'no illusions' way that I have sometimes practiced it.  It may sound cold, but maybe what we need is a few decades of undiluted Tory rule.  Maybe that would be an acceptable price to pay, if it meant stepping off that roundabout.  Because that roundabout is kind-of attached to an underground battery, and every time you spin it, you generate more charge that gets stored in the battery, and the battery keeps the whole fucking machine working.

I've never believed that suffering is good for you.  Never.  It's a pernicious lie our culture tells us.  But, y'know... hope isn't working terribly well lately, is it?   Palliatives don't cure diseases.  A vial of homeopathic remedy doesn't make a dent on the cancer cells... and, in any case, with Labour, a better analogy would probably be a vial of acid.

Suffering may not be good for you, but sometimes desperation can make you strong.

The working class movement is now so decimated that it makes less and less sense to think of Labour and the Unions as weapons in a struggle powered from below by working class activity. The old, standard logic used by people like me to justify engagement with reformists is falling apart, leaving us with some very bleak and stark choices to make.

I’m not sure that unremitting Tory rule might not be the only way to reinvigorate resistance from below.  I mean serious resistance by the way, not one-day strikes and marches and clicktivism.  I mean blood on the streets resistance - which is now pretty much the only way Austerity can ever be seriously challenged in the rigged game of the neoliberal millenium.  Even as it weakens the working class, Tory torture fuels their resentment and rage.  Better ten riots than no strikes.

The Tories want to take us back to the 19th century.  Maybe we should let them.  After all, there was no tradition of working class struggle before the working class invented it - and they did that in response to relentless, unaccountable pumelling from a system that represented them not at all, that gave them no outlet, that had no mercy for them, that locked them up for being destitute and let them die for the want of a bed.

Resistance and organisation came from despair, originally.  In the decayed and destroyed ruins of the tradition that used to give Labour any semblance of usefulness, maybe despair is the only thing we have going for us.  Let the fuckers burn it all down.  Then, maybe, we’ll get it together to burn them down in return.  What choice will we have?  You got any better ideas?  Any ideas that don't involve keeping on turning that fucking roundabout forever, charging up their batteries, and never getting anywhere?

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'.

An Ageing System

It's always puzzled me, this thing about people getting right-wing as they get older.  You'd think that the opposite would happen.

I mean, as you get older, you notice that the world keeps having the same problems, and that they tend to have the same underlying causes, and that nothing is ever done about them.  You notice more and more of the same kinds of scandals reoccurring over the years, time and again, and always based upon imbalances of power, and upon powerful people being unaccountable.  You're more likely to have a mortgage and debts, the older you are.  You're more likely to owe lots of money to banks and credit agencies, and to be crippled by these debts.  You're more likely to have health problems, and thus to need medical care, and thus to see that the Health Service is underfunded and overstretched.  You're more likely to realise that your investments and savings (if you have any) don't pay off in anything like the way you're told they will when you're younger.  You're more likely to worry about how you will look after yourself and your partner in old age.  You're more likely to notice your retirement receding into the distance.  You're more likely to find yourself paying through the nose for medications that go with age, medications your parents didn't have to pay through the nose for.  You're more likely to meet more and more people of different 'races' and nationalities, and thus to notice that they're not too different to you.  You're more likely to have been mistreated at work, or sacked, or been forced to find second jobs or third jobs.  You're more likely to have seen talentless people around you rising while you stay still, simply because they were born with advantages you never had.  You're more likely to have lived through several wars and recessions instead of just one or two.  You're more likely to have observed the way the world's weather systems have catastrophically changed even in the last few decades.  You're more likely to have seen friends' lives ruined by discrimination or depression or stress.  You're more likely to have seen your parents face an uncertain and neglected old age.  And you're more likely to have kids and grandkids, and to see all the challenges they face.  A restricted job market, more and more pressure on them to work harder to have a chance of being employed one day, the escalating cost of further and higher education, more debt earlier in life, less chance of being able to afford to buy a house or even move out of their parents' home, spiraling costs of living, less social safety nets, a squeezed education system.  And on and on it goes.

Decades of life means decades of observing the world getting worse, and the so-called solutions never working, and the so-called progressive parties always selling people out, and the persistence of poverty and corruption never being addressed, and inequality and injustice always being at the root of the problems.  And it means becoming more and more vulnerable, as an individual or as part of a family, to the insecurity and hardships capitalism causes and relies upon.

Basically, the saying "you get more right-wing as you get older" is something only applicable to people who are already economically and socially privileged.  Such people can afford to dabble with being left-wing when they're young, if they feel like it.  They can rely on rich parents to bankroll such flirtations with leftiness.  When they're young and cushioned, it costs them nothing.  Principles are always easier if they cost you nothing.  Then, as they get older, they take their place in the system of privilege that was always waiting to welcome them.  They see their savings and investments rising (because, generally, the more you have the more you make from it), their property becoming more and more valuable, their financial situation getting comfier and more secure every day.  At the very least, they see themselves comparatively insulated.  Their parents enjoy a luxurious old-age and then die, leaving them more property and investments and savings.  Their own children and grandchildren don't have to worry about the deficiencies of state education, or the deficiencies of the NHS, or the debts accrued during further and higher education, or the uncertainties of the job market.  Jobs wait for them.  Economic security is built into life for such people and their families.  Like all people with privilege, their primary focus is to hold onto it ferociously.  We all know that privilege causes people to feel aggrieved by the faintest suggestion of a challenge to their privilege.  This is at the root of much misogyny.  Patriarchy causes men think of women as appliances.  How angry would you be if your vacuum cleaner suddenly refused to work?  I dunno about you, but when things like that happen to me I swear at the errant machine and feel pretty damned aggrieved.  Men extend the same logic to women who don't want to be treated as equipment.  And Corey Robin, a historian of ideas, has done some very good work describing how modern conservatism is, at bottom, the ideological expression of the struggle to retain privilege.

This pattern is most pronounced in the very rich, of course.  But it used to hold pretty reliably (if scaled down) for the moderately rich, and down to the middle classes.  (It even used to hold for a certain extent to the working classes during the long post-war boom, which looks like a utopia of economic justice, job security and progressive welfarism compared to where we are now.)  However, like many old cultural certainties of capitalism, this pattern is breaking up - with increasing speed.  (Capitalism does this.)  The middle classes and petty bourgeoisie are more and more squeezed, more and more threatened by uncertainty.  The iron law of neoliberalism is the redistribution of wealth upwards - and this is really just a variation on what always happens in capitalism during its built-in periodic crises.  And, the bottom looking increasingly drained, neoliberalism - especially now in this era of crisis and austerity - is feeding on the middle.

Of course, the people in the middle can't be expected to draw left-wing conclusions from all this.  Such people generally drift to... da daaa!... the populist far-right (i.e. UKIP, BNP, the Tea Party, various European equivalents).  And, in the absence of organised organs of workers' struggle, the people at the bottom will often drift that way too.  Especially when you factor in the massive effort neoliberal capitalism puts into pushing and sustaining ideological disorientation.

Neoliberal capitalism itself is getting more ideologically right-wing as it gets older.  The only sane response is to go in the other direction.

But it's not easy.  Because, with that lifetime of confronting the horrors there also comes a lifetime of getting entangled in the very hard work and stress it takes to navigate them, and the fatalism of seeing nothing ever getting better, and the pessimism of constant defeats, and the confusion sewn by decades of 'There Is No Alternative'.  That's why the only thing that has a chance of fundamentally altering this downward spiral is a resurgence in working class organisation, in the teeth of the longstanding and hugely-successful neoliberal project of destroying the power of unions. 

That's why every success for the left, however compromised, however embedded in reformist politics and parliamentarianism, has to be seized upon. 

Because the dialectic of change has to start somewhere.

Greece is the Word

Yes, yes, Syriza is a bourgeois reformist party which has drifted to the right even in the last few years.  I know.  A Syriza victory will not bring full communism in Greece.  No, true.  A Syriza government will cave in and give up all over the place.  The way all bourgeois reformist parties always do, even quite Lefty ones.  Yes.  I know.

I knows and knows and knows. 

The point is that, as with all Left-wing reformist parties, it will be as strong or as weak as the movement among the working class.  It will be pushed to the Left by a genuine movement on the streets and in the workplaces.  Or to the Right by the absence of such a movement.

The anti-reformist gloom of writing off Syriza before it starts is, paradoxically, the gloom of the reformist.  It is the gloom of those who secretly expect (or want) elected governments to do it all for them.

A Syriza victory would create a space within Austerity neoliberalism for a challenge (however partial and bourgeois and reformist and imperfect) to the prevailing, even suffocating, orthodoxy.  The punishing flow of weath upwards may be slowed, just a bit, just for a change, somewhere.  And, with work and struggle, this could be exploited and built upon.  This would push the government further.  Which would expand the space for resistance, etc etc etc. 

Every victory - however partial - for the working class is to be chased and seized upon and celebrated (yes, critically celebrated, of course) because every victory for the working class, evey improvement in the position and confidence of the working class, strengthens the only force in the world that has the power, ultimately, to fundamentally change it for the better.

This isn't a fully worked out theoretical position.  There are plenty of better places you can go for that.

X

On the ballot paper in my region there are no less than five extremist Right-wing parties.  Six if you include the Conservatives.  Apart from that there are two centrist neoliberal parties: Labour and the Liberal Democrats.  I know a fair few very nice, likeable and principled Lib Dems (online and in real life), but as a national political force the party is part of a coalition with the Tories and, as such, constitutes a de facto Right-wing party.  So that's seven Right-wing parties of various shades running from crypto-fascist to poujadist to centre-Right - none of which has any serious quarrel with the neoliberal consensus - and one centrist neoliberal party, Labour... which is now so degraded and debased that it seperates itself from the Tories and Lib Dems by a few whiskers.  Centrism has itself been shifted so far to the right that the modern Labour party is to the Right of the pre-Thatcher Tories on many issues.

That's democracy for you.  That's apparently the best we can do.  That's the freedom I'm supposed to relish and celebrate.  What a barren wasteland of horror.  What a terrifying landscape of hatred, dishonesty, bigotry and unthinking compromise.  This is politics, supposedly.  This null, anhedonic, empty, contentless, vicious, small-minded, dead, echoing, dreamless nothingness of non-choice.  This is what the best of all possible worlds looks like.

But, I'm going to vote.  Not because I want to.  Not because I like any of the 'options'.  I don't want to.  I don't like any of the 'options'.  I consider the trip to the Polling Station to be a humiliating chore that will drain me of what self-esteem I have, that will degrade and compromise me, that will implicate me.  I feel physically sick at the prospect of ticking a box on that ballot paper.  I feel that I will be signing a contract with a panorama of bullies, agreeing to let them come and kick me in the balls any time they want, agreeing to thank them afterwards, agreeing to sit by and nod and share their guilt when they rob and exploit and lie and torture and kill.  But it has to be done.

I cannot not vote against such an artillery of closed-minded, spiteful, minority-hating, jumped-up, Little Englander swine.  I cannot not vote against the BNP and UKIP and the English Democrats, etc etc etc.  I don't expect my vote against them will change anything.  Ultimately the only thing that will prevent these scum from wreaking any havoc they get a chance to wreak will be the mass mobilisation of activists against them, will be blockades and counter-demos that stop them marching, will be barricades that stop them getting into the BBC where the corporation is drooling to promote their agenda.  Ultimately, they will only be stopped when their empty heads are acquainted with pavements.  Roll on the day.  But, meanwhile, I have to vote against them.

I also cannot not vote against the current government, which is possibly the most evil and wantonly destructive in living memory, a wrecking ball being swung through the last ruins of the social-democratic consensus, through all human decency.  It is a moral obligation - I feel - to vote against the Tories and the Yellow Tories. 

If there were no Green Party candidates in my wretched, squalid, parochial, bigoted little rural shitpit of a region, then I would have to hold my nose, gird my loins, keep a grip on my stomach in the hope of not puking up my soul, and vote Labour.  My hand might wither and drop off.  Luckily, however, there are Greens to vote for.  So I'll do that. 

If I felt for a moment that abstaining from voting would achieve anything worthwhile, I would do so.  But it won't.  I don't believe that 'the vote' is a meaningful way to change society within the smothering death grip of the rotting zombie of capitalist democracy... but my disbelief in the power of the vote is also why I disbelieve in the power of the non-vote, the withheld vote.  Piffle like that is for the likes of privileged simpletons like Russell Brand.

I'm not telling anyone else what to do.  I'm just telling you what I'm going to do.

The Perfect Companion

Yes, the female companions of the Moffat era are smart, strong, capable, multi-talented, capable, prone to saving the day, etc.

But this is just the job of the companion.  Even the worst of the classic series companions - Victoria, Dodo, etc - gets to be smart, strong, capable, etc when required.  They don't tend to save the day in the classic series, but they always do what is needed and expected of them.  It's a tautology: the companions do the companion things more or less successfully.  That's not something that's entirely untroubling, but - for good or ill - it's how this works.  In the revived series, a great deal more is expected of the companions.  It's actually worrying just how much is expected of Martha.  But the point is that they all step up because that's what they're in the text to do.  The ones that don't, fail to be companions (i.e. Adam).

You also have to look at what they do and what happens to them on top of their basic role as companion.  Rose rejects the roles of shop worker, daughter, girlfriend, etc. in favour of gradually becoming a committed social actor.  Sadly, she is reabsorbed into such roles by the end (a major disappointment).  Martha throws herself into the role of social actor to a huge extent, ultimately rejecting the Doctor because he cannot satisfy her level of newly self-created level of self-esteem.  Donna escapes her emotionally unsatisfying family life and work life to, once again, become a social actor.  The theft of this from her is horrific, and is clearly meant to be.  It all goes wrong by the end of the RTD era, with them all married off, etc.  But this, however awful (and it is crushingly awful), is still a relatively late development.

The early-to-mid Moffat-era companions, by contrast, are given the arrangement of their domestic lives as their main extra-curricular activity (so to speak) on top of their 'duties' as a companion, right the way through.

Amy's character - i.e. what she does, says and thinks on top of all the fulfilment of 'companion duties' - is focused upon getting married or not getting married, being a mother or not being a mother, having a domestic home life or not having a domestic home life, being a wife, saving her marriage, etc, etc etc.  The Doctor actually intervenes, several times, to ensure that her personal life runs along the proper lines.  Whereas, in the RTD era, the Doctor was a force that (selfishly) drew the women out of the confines of personal and work life and into the wider arena of social action, in the Moffat era the Doctor actively tries to provide Amy with a perfect, middle-class domestic idyll.  House.  Car.  Marriage.  Etc.

River is ostensibly an archaeologist, or sometimes an assassin, but her character arc (if the random string of things she does can be called a character arc) is all about her assimilation into stability via her romance with, and marriage to, the Doctor.  Far from dragging her out of domesticity into social action, the Doctor saves her by dragging her the other way...and she does the same to him.

Clara, it must be admitted, is a little different.  She's got hardly any personal life at all, and has her duties on top of this absence.  They are initially employment duties which seem to meld strangely with her companion duties (i.e. the kids in 'Nightmare in Silver').

She's interesting actually, because she's an inflection of the true neoliberal ideal of the female as both domestic provider and multi-tasking worker.  Her work is domestic.  But she also plays whatever role is required of her by whatever episode she's in.  She is fractured into multiple selves, all of whom perform necessary tasks.  She's even shown to literally moonlight between two jobs in 'The Snowmen'. 

The objection that she doesn't revolve around the Doctor because she chooses to enter his timelines and save him, and that she is therefore her own woman and the solution to her own riddle, flounders on the realisation that she has, essentially, accepted a job or a duty and the fracturing of self that this entails.

Admittedly, Clara is not depicted without a certain occasional ambivalence towards the idea of absorbtion into the workforce as a multi-tasking, multi-skilled drone with multiple jobs.  In her debut proper, 'The Bells of Saint John', she is caught in a vast corporate machinery of soul-sucking employment.  However, ultimately, the inescapability of neoliberalism is arrived at, once again, as she enters a similar kind of self-fracturing machinery of work by her own choice.  The 'good' machinery rather than the bad.  The ultimate irony here may be that the self-fracturing machinery of work in question, the supposedly good machinery, her ultimate destination, turns out to be the Doctor himself.

No, actually, that's not quite an irony...  because this has always been latent in the companions, to a greater or lesser extent, almost since day one.  Remember above, when I said that it wasn't entirely untroubling that companions had to fulfill certain demands and do certain jobs simply in order to remain functional within the texts as companions?  Clara may be the final and open acceptance, on the part of the show, of one version of what the companion is: a precariously employed worker with great and various demands made upon them because of their (usually) voluntary decision to serve the Doctor.  She is the moment when that troubling, duty-laden, ideologically market-based conception, triumphs over the others.

Does this mean, then, that the pre-Clara Moffat companions are actually the most liberated from this syndrome, given the emphasis placed on their private lives aside from their 'duties'?  Well no, I don't think so.  They are still dragged away from the role of social actor - the potential positive flipside of the 'Doctor's happy worker' model - by their entanglement within extremely gendered conceptions of personal/emotional life.  They are dragged away from being either workers or social actors by also being women.

The better course to have taken would have been to trump RTD's failed (self-betrayed) project to fully embrace the companion as transitioning from the truncation of personal life under neoliberalism into independant - sometimes emancipatory - social action.  Instead, one way or another, Moffat does the exact opposite.

Mandela

Mandela was unquestionably a great man. But he was great because he was once a fierce fighter against oppression, not because he was a saint with a nice line in inspirational aphorisms. He was also a flawed human being whose party, under his leadership, capitulated to capitalism, embraced neoliberalism and perpetuated drastic economic inequality. Let's mourn the passing of a fighter against racial discrimination, who endured decades of suffering (on a level that I can't even conceptualise, let alone imagine myself tolerating) for his principles. But let's not lose ourselves in lachrymose sentimentality and forget the real history of post-Apartheid South Africa.

Pilger: http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/nelson-mandelas-greatness-may-be-assured-not-his-legacy

Klein: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/02/democracy-born-chains

2

"Go on, tell them," says Jacko to Sean. 

"Tell them what? I'll tell them nothing. They're not people like us, they're just a bunch of sardines."

The fish people in the water below do not like this.

"You heard me," jeers Sean, "Cold-blooded fishes. You haven't got a drop of good red blood in your body."

They don't like that either.  They've been surgically altered by the regime of Professor Zaroff, an old Nazi scientist who was employed by the Western powers before he disappeared (it's implicit) and who is now running the underwater city of Atlantis (the Nazis were obsessed with Atlantis).  He has forcibly turned an army of his workers into fish, complete with gills and fins and big round eyes, so that they can do the underwater jobs.  (They just don't make mad scientists like Zaroff any more.)

"A flatfish from Galway would have more guts in them than that bunch!" Sean continues.  Oh yeah, I forgot to say... Sean's Irish, hence his "gift of the gab" (sigh).

The fish people start throwing things at him.

"All right, all right, all right," laughs Sean, "Oh, calm down and listen. Listen, will you?"

The fish people decide to hear him out.  Presumably because he's like them: a man captured and exploited by Zaroff's regime.  He hasn't been surgically mutilated, but he's been put to work in the Atlantean mines.  (By now there should be no need for me to reiterate the connection between surgery and capital, the way the evisceration and infibulation of the human body expresses anxieties about life in capitalism, about how wage labour cuts into your bodily autonomy and your life and your physical freedom, dissecting your time and... oh look, I'm reiterating.)

"Look, you supply all the food for Atlantis, right?" asks Sean rhetorically, "It can't be stored, right? It goes rotten in a couple of hours. That's why Zaroff has you working like slaves night and day, right? Well, has it never occurred to your little fish brains to stop that supply of food? Feed yourselves but starve Atlantis, eh? What do you think would happen then? Well now is your chance. Will you do it, or will you stay fish slaves for the rest of your lives? You're men, aren't you? Well, start the blockade right now!"

Again, this is workplace agitation.  The jokes at the fish people's expense are clearly rhetoric.  Sean whips them up.  But the power is theirs.

I won't attempt to describe what comes next.  The fish people's underwater strike is indescribable.  And that's good.  It must be seen to be believed... and by that I don't mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that there were actually fish people who actually swam around in Atlantis.  I mean 'believed' in the sense of believing that it ever actually got made and broadcast.  To us, now, it looks like a transmission from another planet.  Again, that's good.  The planet we live on now is pretty boring compared this one.

It's a relic of a lost time, when the spectacle could still express material relations of struggle, and express them materially.  These days, there is no struggle, no contestation... or rather, the struggle has been effectively muffled and edited out of the mainstream media continuum, mirroring the way it has been materially suppressed.  These days, you beat the baddies by monologuing about how wonderful you are while the orchestral music goes insane, CGI roars at you, a pretty (white) child cries and the audience cries too (cry damn you, cry!).  Back when 'The Underwater Menace' was made, it was possible for slaves to beat the baddies with collective action, with agitation and unionisation and strikes and blockades, by the class struggle, by the revolt of the oppressed... and it was expressed (in the middle of a kids' tea-time adventure show!) as a weird and wonderful ballet, overlaid with sine waves and defamiliarising dots of electronic sound from the Radiophonic Workshop.  It was expressed as something that broke the boundaries of the everyday, both in narrative terms of workers disrupting the quotidian routine of exploitation, and in aesthetic terms as an explosion of the genuinely, unashamedly, discomfortingly strange and unfamiliar.  The gothic and the surreal and the just plain silly, self-consciously bizarre yet steeped in real history and work and politics, joining the picket line alongside the militant and the collective and the pissed-off.  That really is how its supposed to be.  That really is, ultimately, what is supposed to make Doctor Who good (when it is good) and more than just another cult franchise: its ability to express the struggle in terms of the strange.

Yes, you could see the strings holding the fish people up as they 'swam'.  Yes, you could see they were just actors in silly suits and masks.  Yes, you could see that the bubbles were a light show.  But that in itself was part of a connection to the materially real, to actual history, to the spontaneity of human action... ultimately, to labour, and thus to the essence of humanity.  Now, everything is far more 'convincing' while simultaneously being far more obviously false.  The fish people are evidently not fish people, but they evidently are solid, material, alive.  They are there.  In the plastic, flat, dead, synthetic world of CGI, everything looks more 'real' while also being evidently phantasmic, unreal, unpresent, immaterial.  The gleaming commodity has completely pushed the human hand out of view.

Just as the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the underwater strike ballet (d'ya see what I did there?) is a perfect representation of the imperfect, weird, wonderful, material, human reality of the collective resistance to power that it depicts, so is the smooth and depthless world of CGI a perfect representation of a world slumping into eternal neoliberal lassitude.  It is the visual expression of the glossy, shiny, expensive patina of capitalist realism and neoliberal hegemony.  It is a pretty picture that pretends, apparently with a straight face and an expectation of being believed, to be reality.

Give me the irony, the materiality and the anger of the 'hand-made' anytime.

6

"I have in my hand a piece of paper," says Mr Stevens, CEO of Global Chemicals, echoing Chamberlain in unconscious admission that his promises of a profitable truce in the class war will turn out to be worthless, "which will mean a great deal to all of you. Wealth in our time!"

The ex-miners, crowded around the gates of the closed pit, are unimpressed.

"When the National Coal Board were forced to close the pit last year..." Stevens begins.

"It were a shame, that was!" heckles one of the workers, in Ignorant Yokel Speak.

"No, my friends," says Stevens chummily, presenting himself as one of them, "we must not be bitter. We must face the facts."

Note the 'we'; the most abused word in political discourse.  As in 'we're all in this together'.

"Coal is a dying industry," asserts Stevens.

The miners shout "Rubbish! Rubbish!"

When it happens in reality, the idea that the mines had to shut because they were unprofitable will be rubbish.  Mining was always subsidised.  

"Oil is our future now and the government agrees with me. They have not only given us the go-ahead for our plans, they have promised us money for future expansion!"  So the state is now subsidising a private company instead of nationalised coal and people's jobs.  "I have it here in black and white!"

There is general cheering. This story represents the working class, via the conduit of Welshness, as idiots.  The feckless, changeable, easily-swayed mob - a trope that goes back a long way.

"Money for all of us! More jobs, more housing, more cars!"  The promise of returned prosperity in the depths of the 70s.

In terms of when it was made, this is an odd scene.  Miners were powerful and militant in 1973.  They were unionised and they were winning.  They weren't sacked, helpless, grumbling no-hopers, stuck on the sidelines.

In terms of the future, however, this scene is actually prescient.  By the late-90s, British mining - together with so much manufacturing industry - had been deliberately destroyed by the Tories, partly from a pure ideological objection to the idea of powerful workers and unions, partly as revenge for the miners bringing down Heath in '74 (the year after this story was broadcast).  Huge numbers of traditional working class jobs were annihilated by the Conservatives.  Working class communities were wrecked in the process.  In many ways, the sight of a crowd of workers, made redundant, closed out of their sold-off and shut-down workplace, listening to speeches about how coal is dead, being fraudulently told that their future lies in the trickle-down effect of private profit, is a sight that predicts the result of Thatcherism.

And when Stevens says "oil is the future" he's only telling part of the truth.  The future he really has in mind is one of the corporation as pure post-industrial power structure.  Stevens is an administrator, a manipulator of executive practices, PR, lobbying, influence, delegated tasks, etc.  This is, in its way, strangely prescient of the outward features of neoliberalism... which was, after all, just getting started roundabout 1973. The theory of post-industrialism is pretty specious, to be honest, but a lot of people believe in it, interpreting neoliberalism as a reorganisation of capital along lines of services and pure information, production being relegated to a quaint relic.  This is largely bullshit, but it expresses something that a lot of people - some of them people like Stevens - believe: that capitalism can dispense with old-style workers, and all the dangers inherent in them, in favour of economies based on the shunting around of pure information.  That this is Stevens' dream is expressed by the fact that his company is secretly run by an insane computer that is also his alter ego... or should that be, his 'alter id'.  It's aim is to create "total efficiency" in society (which is explicitly stated to be equivalent to the business dominance of Global Chemicals) by sacking all workers, abandoning coal (i.e. production), turning industry into a 'post-industrial' wasteland, brainwashing all corporate executives and linking all computers in the world into itself, thus unifying all information.

Trouble is, Stevens and his 'B.O.S.S.' have reckoned without the gothic, that eternal bad conscience.  The gothic brings ghosts out of the disused mine... in the form of giant maggots.  They are definitely ghosts.  Ghosts - in the sense of the ghost story as we know it - are modern things.  Gothic Marxism (perhaps most especially in the insights of Christopher Caudwell) has identified the ghost story as a quintessentially modern phenomenon.  It is the worm in the apple of modern rationalism.  And it is a very material genre.  The 'ghosts' of M.R. James - effective founder of what we call the 'ghost story' - are gothic in that they represent the return of the repressed, but also material in that they emerge from modernity (manufactured things like prints and sheets and train tickets and mass-reproduced patterns) and that the tend to be icky and hairy and chitinous.

Giant maggots which signify the repressed dark secrets of capitalist production, erupting out of a closed mine, are ghosts in this sense.  In this story, oddly, they're the ghosts of the future.

9

Wow.  Single figures.  Okay, time for some fun.


"I'm asking you to help yourselves," says the Doctor. 

Revolution isn't about everyone suddenly becoming altruistic and angelic.  It is, as Marx saw it, "the movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority".

"Nothing will change round here unless you change it," says the Doctor.  Here is 'freedom and necessity'.  It must be done, but they can choose to do it or not to do it.

"What will we do with two guns against all those guards?" asks Veet.

"You can't do anything, but there are fifty million people in this city. Think how the guards will react to that number."

"It's crazy talk," says Goudry, "Rebellion? No one would support you."  Capitalist realism.

"Given the chance to breathe clean air for a few hours, they might. Have you thought of that?"

The Company pumps a chemical fug into the air that makes people anxious and weak.  That's how it works on Pluto.  Here we call it ideology, or hegemony.

The Doctor and Bisham discuss ways of knocking out the gas pumps.

"I was a B grade in Main Control," says Mandrell, "The Doctor's right. It could work."

Until now, nobody has been more cynical.  But Mandrell has, in a sense, just been given the chance to breathe clean air.

The Doctor isn't stinting on the revolutionary optimism.  He suggests taking over main control.  Mandrell thinks it could be done.

"What have we got to lose?" he asks.

"Only your claims," says the Doctor.

Everyone is quite impressed by this.  It's a sign of the times that we, the audience, are evidently expected to recognise and relish the reference.  The Doctor knows full well what he's saying - and he's not just punning.  Workers don't usually have to wear chains these days, but they still have nothing compared to the Companies of this world.  They have their 'claims' of course - claims upon democracy and human rights, etc... But the Company never gives refunds unless forced to, so the workers' 'claims' are essentially the same as 'nothing'.

"Anything's worth trying," says Cordo, a man who was trying to kill himself that morning, but who is now frantic with revolutionary confidence, "If only we could win. Just think, if we could beat the Company!"

"There's no 'if' about it, Cordo," says the Doctor, "We will."

There's 'the actuality of the revolution' for you.

Robert Holmes is often called a cynic... but he was at least as much a romantic.  This story is a full-on romantic political drama of revolution.  The cynical and self-seeking drop-outs turn strike-leaders.  The cowed and suicidally-miserable worker is transformed by revolution until he's a whooping, gung-ho, gun-toting freedom fighter.  (Revolution changes people even as they change society - one reason why waiting until we've all changed ourselves for the better is functionally the same as accepting the status quo.  You change yourself by changing society, and vice versa.)  The workers collectively overthrow capitalism and set up a workers' state in about a day.  Much to the blinking incomprehension of many who have tried to understand this story, the Gatherer's final flight is treated unequivocally as a joke and an inspirational achievement.  It's not Robert Holmes being cynical about revolution; it's Robert Holmes getting infected with rebellious fervour.  Even Synge and Hacket, intially forced to aid the revolution at gun-point, gradually get swept along and start helping willingly.  Marn cynically switches sides to save her own skin... but, as with so much Holmesian cynicism, that should make us ask: who and what is this cynicism really about?  This is cynicism about the powerful.  If we just call it, in general terms, 'cynicism', then we're conceding that the actions of the powerful define politics and society.

'The Sun Makers' is often said to be a right-wing 'satire' of the UK tax system.  But I have a question:  how much tax does the Company pay?

It's a sign of how utterly the Right has set the agenda that criticising taxation is seen as an inherently right-wing thing to do.  There is, astonishingly enough, a left-critique of state taxation in capitalist states.  The Right attack taxation because they want, in this neoliberal age, to effectively abolish any penalty or restraint upon big business.  They call this 'liberty'.  They've already managed it to an astonishing degree.  Meanwhile, regressive taxation - combined with deregulation, privatisation and the erosion of the social wage - disproportionately penalises those on lower-incomes.   That is not a concern of the right.  In fact, it's a priority.

This idea that the Right hate tax is related to the idea that the Right hate the state.  But the Right is, essentially, a coalition around the defence of class privilege, and in capitalist society class privilege is defended by the state.  What the Right hates is the idea that the state can be used for any purposes other than their own.  The social-democratic idea that the state should provid services in return for taxation is too much for them.

As Terry Eagleton has written, nobody was more hostile to the state than Marx.  He saw it as an emanation of class society.  It was pure alienation of human 'species-being'.  Engels called it little more than "a body of armed men" tasked with repression.

One of the quintessetial traits of neoliberalism is anti-state rhetoric combined with the heavy use of the state to further the interests of the ruling class.  You 'roll back the state's frontiers' while also using it to fund military imperialism, police repression, bail-outs for banks and corporations during times of crisis, etc.  State funding of the welfare state is restricted and curtailed while largesse flows freely to corporations.  The US government gets taken over by oil-executives who talk about how much they hate the state while using it to plunder oil-rich countries.  Even as the state supposedly gets downgraded, it becomes ever more violent and monomaniacal in its determination to support capitalism.

In 'The Sun Makers', the state has basically been bought out and taken over by a private concern.  The Gatherer's state exists to pour profits into the Collector's Company.  The state gathers and the Company collects.  They call these profits "taxes" but they actually amount to charges for services, i.e. the production of air for breathing, the construction of suns, the provision of time for sleeping.  You have to pay to be euthanased, to be buried, to be employed, to take pills, to go outside.  The social wage and the welfare state have been abolished - privatised in all but name - and every aspect of private and social life has been commodified, marketised.  The state charges you for everything and invades your life and watches everything you do and punishes you when you disobey... but it does all this as a private contractor for a monolithic block of predatory capital.

As so often, Doctor Who expresses anxieties about capitalism in terms of aesthetics that recall Stalinism or 'totalitarianism'... but this isn't just confusion.  The essence of Stalinism was the functioning of the state as capital.  This would have been no surprise to Marx, who wrote primarily of capitalist relations and of the property form as just a social expression of such relations, one form among possible others.  Marx knew how central the state was to supporting the rise of capitalism.  The Soviet bureaucrats were no less directors of capital (or exploiters of workers) for the fact that they didn't formally 'own' any factories.

We only have to look around us today to see how prescient it was for Doctor Who, in 1977, in the early years of neoliberalism, to see the total privatisation of the state leading to pervasive state intrusion, regressive taxation, carrion-feeding austerity and social authoritarianism.

And it's quite breathtaking that, in 1977, as the tide of struggle called 'the 60s' faded into memory, Robert Holmes romantically and unrestrainedly suggested workers' revolution as the solution.



Well, I had fun.

10

"We waited here in the dark space," booms the Dalek Emperor, "damaged but rebuilding. Centuries passed, and we quietly infiltrated the systems of Earth, harvesting the waste of humanity. The prisoners, the refugees, the dispossessed. They all came to us. The bodies were filtered, pulped, sifted. The seed of the human race is perverted. Only one cell in a billion was fit to be nurtured."

So, In Russell's rewrite of 'Revelation of the Daleks' (which would be a better title for this story than it was for Saward's script), the Daleks are no longer harvesting the elite.  Brought to the brink of extinction, they have been forced to resurrect themselves from the 'dregs'... which seems to be synonymous with the contestants who lose game shows.  The Daleks take the people who get knocked out before the finale.  Because the Daleks have become TV producers.  They've become the people who run Big Brother and Trinny & Susannah and The Weakest Link.  They've become the bosses of reality TV.  They've become Simon Cowell.  (Which is kind of an insult to the Daleks, if you ask me.)

Big Brother, in our polity, in our system of media signs, is no longer Orwell's omniscient totalitarian leader; he's now the eternal, ever-watching viewer.  He's us.  Just like the Daleks are now us.

"So you created an army of Daleks out of the dead," says the Doctor.

Again, the gothic, the monopoly, and the zombie labour.

"That makes them half human," mutters Rose... as always, she is straight to the quick.

"Those words are blasphemy!" bellows the Dalek Emperor.

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!  Do not blaspheme!"

"Since when did the Daleks have a concept of blasphemy?" asks the Doctor.

"I reached into the dirt and made new life. I am the God of all Daleks!"

The Daleks chant in unison...

"Worship him!  Worship him!  Worship him!"

Bringing back the Daleks in 2005, four years after 9/11 and the start of the 'War on Terror', two years into the conquest and occupation of Iraq, Russell T. Davies makes them religious fundamentalists.  The world is in the middle of an apparent 'clash of civilisations', with religion as the supposed organising logic.  But are these new fundamentalist Daleks - 'Fundamentaleks' - supposed to be Osama and Al Qaeda?  Are they Bush and the neocon Christian crusaders?  Both?  Two sides of the same coin?

To me, they look more like another kind of fundamentalism, a more prevalent and destructive kind.

They run a massive media system based on ruthless competition.  The housemates who lose the battle for popularity get ejected into nothingness.  The Trinny & Susannah bots encourage people to carve into their own flesh in order to look right.  The weakest links get zapped, and the strongest link is the one who most effectively and ruthlessly competes, who must callously fucks over his competitors.  Society has become "a charnel house" in which people compete in competitions of spectacular triviality which are framed as epic battles.  You have to step on the other poor schlubs in order to win.  This system is publically fronted by celebrities reconfigured as hollow, inhuman monsters.  It is run by ordinary people who do evil things not because they're personally evil, but because they are employed by a systemic evil.  And it's all owned and controlled by Daleks who have absorbed a feverish and callous determination that can best be described, at least as far as RTD is concerned, as fanatical religion.

The Daleks have become neoliberals.  Capitalist crusaders, ruling a resurgent yet insane system, presiding over a world divided between the starving and the obese who "just watch telly", absorbing the working body utterly and assimilating it into themselves.  And the logic behind it all has penetrated human culture to the extent that TV runs the world, and relentlessly pushes an ideology of total competition, total dog-eat-dog.  (That this is, essentially, the world we live in is obvious since RTD uses shows of the present day, projected into the future.)  Survival has finally been formally and openly marketised.  The spectacle is omnipresent and it brazenly expresses the relations at the base of society: compete with each other so that your rulers can profit.

The Daleks have become market fundamentalists.

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.

19

LIN'n'DA has allowed 'Mr Kennedy' into their little circle of friends.  His determination to find the Doctor is the opposite of their desire to socialise & laugh while sharing their ideas & obsessions & histories.  Even if much of what we know about LIN'n'DA is just Elton's garbled wish-fulfillment, it's still a nice story.  Until Kennedy arrives.  It's never the same again.  Hierarchy is introduced, along with work schedules & targets & orders & timetables & a drive for objective 'results'.

"Though we had to admit," recalls Elton, "he was right. His methods were much more rigorous. It felt like we were getting closer & closer to the Doctor."

As if that had ever been the point.

"Umm, Mr Kennedy?" says Elton cautiously, raising his hand as though he's a kid at school trying to attract the attention of his teacher... & actually, LI'n'DA's headquarters now looks like a school room.  The friends are sat at desks, toilng away individually & silently at private work.  Mr Kennedy is every inch the teacher.  He sits at the head of the room, behind a desk, surrounded by the paraphernalia of pedagogy.

"We were wondering..." Elton continues, "...no sign of Bliss. Do you know where she is?"

Bless Bliss.

"Yes," replies Kennedy irritibly, "didn't she tell you? She's getting married. She left a message. It'll never last, stupid girl. Come on, back to work."

Yes, back to work kids...

Thing is though, LI'n'DA doesn't just look like a school room now.  It also looks like an open plan office, or a call centre.  The friends are now workers, arriving on time & working on projects according to the dictats of their new boss.  He watches to make sure they don't slack.  He assesses their results.  He expects to profit from their work.  That's what he's in this for.  LI'n'DA has become a Doctor-finding factory.  LI'n'DA has been enclosed.  Accumulation by dispossession.  The relentless absorbtion of everything into itself: the essence of neoliberalism.

It's no coincidence that the school room also looks like the workplace.  The school system in capitalism is a way of training the future workforce to arrive on time five days a week, to savour the weekend, to obey orders, to work towards output targets, to have your work judged & tracked, & discipline oneself for a lifetime of showing up.

Kennedy is many things (teacher, boss, repressed misanthrope, caricature of the uber-fan...), but among them he is a summation of something the Doctor has found himself facing many times before: he's capital as a monster.

He's a ruthless, pin-striped posho... but it goes deeper than that.  Like the Cybermen, he's a user & utiliser, an employer, an encloser of hopes & dreams & friendship... & even flesh.  Like so many monsters from the Wirrn to the Krynoids, he absorbs people into himself, first figuratively then literally.  He encloses even the bodies of the workers in his factory, adapting them to his purposes, feeding off them & monopolising all life - just like a vampire, that gothic monster of capital.  The Doctor has faced many vampires.  Like one of them, Axos, Kennedy is unstable & protean.

The really scary thing is... if LI'n'DA is a group of Doctor Who fans, & Doctor Who is a commodity that absorbs their time & energy & money... doesn't that also make Kennedy into Doctor Who itself?  One form of commodity fetishism is over-investment in the commodities we love.  This blog is evidence of that.

29

Midge walks into the Gym.  You get the sense that it's not the sort of place the old Midge would've visited.  The old Midge would've been scared of the self-defence crowd.

The new Midge is all swagger, in his shades and his shiny jacket.

"Waiting on the Sarge?" he asks the room full of silent, watching, bemused, singlet-and-sweatpants-wearing blokes.  "He's been held up. He asked me to have a little chat with you."

This is a lie.

"I learned a secret today. The secret of success. Thought I'd share it with you."

Midge has been learning all sorts of things.  He's been quarry in a quarry, hunted through a rocky wilderness on another world, stalked by carnivorous beasts.  He chose to survive at all costs.  He killed... not just to survive but for fun, for revenge, for a feeling of power that - one senses - is entirely new to him, a new experience in a stunted and powerless dead-end life.  Of course, in the process, he adopted the viewpoint of the beasts.  The logic of tooth and claw.  The logic of 'fuck you, I'm all right'.  The logic that makes you escape the lions by feeding them your friends.

"It's common sense, right?  It's just the way of the world, right?  Survival of the fittest."

And he's right, in a way.  It is the way of the world.  Everyone in his sleepy little home town, his pokey little corner of Thatcher's Britain, is obsessed with the survival of the fittest.  It has seeped all the way through society, into every nook and cranny.  It's in the shops, where Hale and Pace are scared of being driven out of business.  It's in the suburbs where the net curtains twitch.  It's in the Territorial Army training sessions where the Sarge says young men have to be taught to fight.  It's in the housing estate where Midge comes from.

It doesn't matter that it's one logic among many in nature, or that sometimes we see it in nature where it isn't because we often mistake mirrors for windows, or that it may be fitting for the beasts but applying it to people is vacuous and specious and destructive.  Truth is: for the purposes of the people who benefit from it, the more vacuous and specious and destructive it is, the better. 

"Get rid of the deadwood, let the wasters go to the wall, and the strong will inherit the earth. You and me."

Why do I suspect that some of the lads in this room used to bully Midge when they were at school with him?

"Do you hear what I'm saying?" he demands, furiously, enraged by their failure to respond to his glib soundbites, "Do you know what I'm talking about?"

He takes off his shades.  Beneath them, his eyes are the yellow, mindless eyes of an animal.  But that's what he chose.

The Master is there.  A stalking, diseased old man, seething with resentment and malice.  Through Midge, his slavering pet, he casts his hypnotic spell over the young men in the room.  They'll do as they're told.

When the Sarge gets back, he'll find plenty of fighters, as ruthless as he always said they should be, none of them unwilling to send the weak to the wall.  He should be proud.

Maximum Utility

The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. 

- Franco Moretti

People often compare the Borg, the cyborg gestalt from the Star Trek franchise, to Doctor Who's Cybermen.  Both races were conceived as humanoids physically augmented with technology, hence a certain superficial visual resemblance, particularly between the Borg and the earliest Cybermen, from 1966's 'The Tenth Planet'... which has just been released on DVD, if you want some way for this post to be halfway relevant to anything.

Borg

Cyberman

But the Cybermen were written by various different writers, under different conditions, with different levels of interest and different levels of knowledge of past depictions, over the course of nearly five decades.  The Borg, by contrast, were written by a small number of tightly associated people, under the aegis of a carefully controlled franchise, over the course of just under 15 years.  The two 'races' differ markedly in the circumstances of their production and in cultural profile.  As noted, the Borg's various appearances weren't separated by the same kinds of time-lags, and weren't a product of the same kind of radical turnover/variety of 'authors'.  Also, the Borg's concentration in time, and their near-immediate claiming of a significant and visible role in global 90s narrative culture (owing to their success and the global success of Star Trek: The Next Generation and its spin-offs), gave them a prominent position within a concentrated historical moment: the 1990s.  The Cybermen, by contrast, disappeared from television during that same historical moment, and before that they had only enjoyed a smaller cultural spotlight in one country - Britain - during the late 1960s.  By 2006, when the Cybermen tried to reclaim their place in culture, and went on to be more globally recognisable than they'd ever been before (owing to the international success of 21st Century Who), the historical moment of the Borg was long over.

Even so, the similarity of the Cybermen and the Borg is real, and rests upon kindred incoherent anxieties about capitalism.


1.

There's a real incoherence at the heart of the Cybermen.  They are definitely communistic monsters, expressing a 'Soviet-version' of the associations between the loss of individuality and collectivism.  They seek the total upgrade of the universe, working towards a chilly utopian telos lacking any inequality or freedom.  But they are also deeply corporate monsters.  They merged or allied themselves with International Electromatics in 'The Invasion'.  IE was an expression of capitalist standardisation and mass production.  Everything they make is the same, from their disposable radios to their CEO's offices.  This is explicitly linked to capitalist production and business practices, and is implicitly linked with the uniformity of the Cybermen.

Someone's not a very efficienct typist.

In many ways, the alliance between Tobias Vaughn and the Cybermen is a business partnership, with the invasion a hostile takeover.  The partnership is possible because, in Vaughn's ultra-streamlined corporate context, there is a synergy with the Cybermen.  In the new series, the alt-world Cybermen actually emerged from a corporation, Cybus Industries.  They were a Cybus product, complete with a corporate logo on their chests.  (With their divided nature, it's fitting that they take over Battersea Power Station, which began life as a venture of a private company, got nationalised and then closed down, and has since been waiting for a private venture to find a use for it.)  The Cybus-Cybermen are linked with the internet, computer software and mobile phone technology, even acquiring the concept of conversion as an "upgrade" which expresses deep ambivalence about the frenetic rush of capitalist technology in the digital age, and the word "delete" (an everyday word now owing to home computing and text messaging) as a euphemism for 'kill'.  Moreover, as Simon Kinnear pointed out in Doctor Who Magazine #410 (June 2009), the Cybermen behave like the psychopathic corporation described by the 2003 documentary film The Corporation, and the accompanying book by Joel Bakan.  More than this, the Cybermen

conform to the lean mentality of business.  Like so many companies, they use aptitude tests to secure the best candidates for Cyber-conversion: what else are the Tombs of Telos but a (somewhat unusual) recruiting station?  The Cybermen's standardised functions sound suspiciously like a corporate hierarchy, with job titles (Controller, Leader) to match.

Yes, I'll go on the record: I quite like this.

(At the time, I told Simon I thought this connection was tenuous; but he was right and I was wrong.)   Also, remember how the Cybermen adapt themselves so well to England during the Industrial Revolution in 'The Next Doctor'.  It's a flawed episode certainly, but it might just be the best televised Cyberman story (which is faint praise, but there you go) because it connects the Cybermen to the innate and submerged unease about industrial capitalism that has always lurked within them... and, in the process, does a much better job of noticing the problems usually glossed over by Steampunk than Moffat managed in 'The Girl in the Fireplace'.  Steampunk fetishizes the commodities of the Industrial Revolution (literally, in the case of cosplayers, etc.) while forgetting the conditions under which they came into being, i.e. the horrors of primitive accumulation, the factory system, imperialism, colonialism, etc.  Moffat has his clockwork men trying to cut the head off a French aristocrat (which doesn't really get at the nub of the problem for me) while Davies has his retro-industrial monster as a rampaging mad god, built by the sweated labour of (mostly) poor children, stomping through Victorian London, driven by the gothic returning-repression of a victim of respectable philanthropy.  This is, of course, the much-maligned Cyber-King... the product of a smooth and fruitful union between the Cybermen and the methods of high Victorian capitalism.  SF has always been very much about the products of capitalist modernity and industry running amok.  The Cyber-King shows us a literal intersection of this with the Cybermen.  It is itself a massive factory, filled with workers, made of chimneys and pipes and dark, satanic mill-wheels.


2.

I've written here about how the Cybermen are a Soviet version of the same set of associations that make the (Nazi) Daleks tick: namelessness, robotic/cyborg nature, collectivism, 'totalitarianism'.  It's intially tempting to simply characterise the Borg as also an expression of the bourgeois liberal horror of collectivism, or of the widespread mainstream idea of collectivism, i.e. of communism.  However, the Borg share much the same ambivalence as that already detected in the Cybermen.  Indeed, in many ways, they express the same ambivalence much more clearly and completely.

You will be assimilated.  Your culture will adapt to service ours.

It's actually rather unconvincing to describe the Borg as collectivist monsters in the Soviet sense.  Apart from anything else, they appear at the precise moment when the Soviet Union had never looked less collectivist or less threatening.  They arose in the immediate post-Cold War era, making their first appearance just before the demolition of the Berlin Wall.  The Borg appeared just as communism was crumbling. Glasnost, perestroika, decay, strife, queues for cabbage, branches of McDonalds opening in Moscow. Walls were about to fall. The Enemy had never looked more wobbly and vulnerable.  The Borg, by contrast, are monolithic, powerful, undefeatable in their first appearance. So, in short, they weren't Russians in 1989.

There is a deep sense of ambivalent confusion embodied within the Borg.  While they undoubtedly speak to the horror of collectivism as widely perceived (loss of individual freedom, political tyranny, etc.) they also represent a lurking horror of capitalist rationality, of rationally self interested utility maximisers  This is the de facto herd of individual rational actors who are supposed to make up the population in mainstream economics, all of them seeking their own rational self interest and thus giving rise to an unstoppable (and, for the late C20th left/liberal, sometimes destructive) market system.  It isn't necessary for us to accept the scandalously absurd descriptions of capitalism offered by mainstream economics to acknowledge that many people do accept them, worry about them, or about what they perceive to be their effects.  If our culture doesn't really run on rational self-interest and maximised utility, that doesn't mean that people can't perceive ruthlessly rational self-interest and utility maximisation in the system... and fear them.

Sometimes people fear the effects of capitalism and perceive then as the effects of what they think of as socialism.  Such people are a constant source of titilated anxiety for liberals, as the obsession of American liberal publications with the Tea Party shows.

I didn't know this, but apparently Barack Obama is a Marxist. 
He's also black, which seems to worry some people.

The fear of such mentalities usually coincides with an idea that they float freely in a society that is split, but not fundamentally divided on lines of class.  Thus, the acceptance of anti-social ideas - or the pushing of rational ideas to anti-social extremes - is something that happens within decentralised pluralities.  This liberal fear is of dangerous ideas spreading virally through society.  The memetic view of religion pushed by Richard Dawkins is an example, albeit an example of dangerous 'irrationality'... but then, for Dawkins, it is the genes or memes which are the selfish rational actors, not the people who carry them... thus making the people a bit like drones.  These kinds of fears are always tied to a fear of the decentralised crowd: the 'mob', in one form or other.  Look at the view of consumerism that sees it as a kind of emotional disease which has infected all of 'us'.  What is that but a fear of the decentralised crowd, mobilised en masse by a dangerously selfish rationale of consumption?  This left/liberal complaint rests upon assumptions based in, or at least supported by, mainstream economics: that the movements of the market are determined on a large scale by the trends created by the small scale rational choices of selfish actors.  This very decentralised crowd - an orderly mob - is the personality of the original Borg.

One essential trait of capitalism is the impulse to turn everything into more capitalism.  It exists to convert all resources into commodities or productive forces, i.e. to turn everything into capital which then dominates further production, to assimilate everything and convert everything into itself.  It is, as Q called the Borg in their debut, "the ultimate user", going after everything it identifies as something it can consume, utilise, transform and make into an image or aspect of itself.  You don't have to be a Marxist to notice the ravenousness of the system.  Indeed, non-Marxist currents of left/liberal thought in the 90s - often very much the same currents that were working out theories of consumerism - developed this idea further than the moribund, disoriented Marxism that was clinging on (at the extreme margins) at the time.  (There is also the left/liberal unease at the Western cultural imperialism, itself piggybacking on neoliberal expansion in new markets... just look at the above image of the McDonalds in Moscow, an emblem of such processes in the 90s.  The worry is about the assimilation and homogenization of other cultures.  The relevance of this is obvious.)

It isn't necessary to accept as true the notion that the market 'works' because of atomised individuals flocking in formations of rational selfishness, or the details of the attendant left/liberal critique of consumerism, in order to see how these ideas - if accepted - might become a source of anxiety to liberals within a triumphant capitalist world.  We can see how such liberal anxities - about an all-conquering capitalism, newly unrestrained, ravenous and consumerist, fueled by a dangerously selfish form of rationality which supposedly permeates society in a decentralised way - might well manifest as something like the Borg... something unstoppable, ruthlessly utilitarian, utterly self-involved, blankly arrogant, destructive, acquisitive and all-consuming, and manifested as a monolithic force composed of an aggregation of atomised individuals.

Liberalism - particulary C20th Liberalism - has always had the divided character that both supports capitalism, and capitalist notions, as liberating or at least optimal, while at the same time fretting over the imbalances, inequalities and injustices which seem - puzzlingly - always to beset the system.  Liberalism in the 90s was uniquely placed to have bad dreams about this contradiction, about the horrors lurking within the best of all possible worlds, precisely because of the seeming final triumph of the 'market system'.

Speaking of liberal bad dreams, just look at the 'Descent' two-parter, which becomes a clunky parable about the rise of fascism (complete with red, white and black banners) by showing the disoriented, individualised Borg spellbound by a charismatic warmonger who offers them unity and purpose.  Hands up anyone who spots the contours of the classic liberal interpretation of the rise of Hitler.  The bewildered people, dizzy after a catastrophe, become mesmerised by the false promises of a demagogue.  Here again, the Borg express liberal anxieties about the faultlines in the capitalist millenium.

The Borg are a nightmare that liberal capitalism had about itself.

This is, of course, why the Borg are a dark mirror held up to the Federation.  If the Federation is the ultimate flowering of liberal hopes for capitalism (or, at least, Western liberal modernity) as a liberating, utopian force, then the Borg are the atavistic 'dark side' of the same system, repressed but - in the classic gothic move - returning with a vengeance.


3.

Gothic is, of course, very much the word.  It can hardly be a coincidence that, as they evolve, the Borg develop features of previous such liberal nightmares about capitalism.... and that these features make them more and more openly gothic.  They acquire the decadence of aristocracy, and with it the traits of vampires.  The Borg gradually became the nomadic nosferatus of the Trek universe, spreading their plague with a bite and an infection of the blood.  From Star Trek: First Contact onwards (i.e. from the moment they are shown to have a Queen), they are shown to shoot tubes into the neck (often leaving two little puncture marks) and assimilate by pumping Borg nanotech into the veins, which are often seen to ripple and turn greyish green beneath the skin as Borgness (i.e evil) flows into them.  They become the Undead, the moment they start being lead by Countess Dracula.

This can hardly be an accident, this confluence of vampirism and aristocratic hierarchy.  The greatest C19th Gothic vampire story - Dracula - traded on the disdainful, fearful, insecure, resentful, supercilious inferiority-complex felt by a rising professional middle class for aristocracy, something that Stoker took from the iconoclastic Byron's 'Lord Ruthven' and which ended up getting taken up by C20th vampire pop-culture.  The vampire is nowadays quite unpicked from his/her previous semiotic entanglement with aristos, when he/she appears in his/her own person (the semiotic entanglement of female vampires with lesbianism is a whole different essay).  Your actual fanged, blood-drinking coffin-sleeper can be an emo youth these days.  But when vampirism is subtextually invoked in a disguised form - as in the later Borg - it also tends to bring its blue-blooded baggage with it, albeit in submerged ways.  Hence, the Borg get a Queen when they get vampiric.  (Of course, the Queen also comes from the bee-hive analogy... which is part of the 'surface level' of the semiotics of the Borg, the thematic miniscus that the writers consciously 'get'.) 

Also, as has long been understood, the vampire is connected to fears of monopoly capital vs free trade.  What can be more monopolistic than the vampire, converting everyone into copies of itself, threatening to infect the race with its bacillus and reconfigure us all in its own image?  The vampire is a nightmarish figure of exponential expansion... to the point where one of the great mid-C20th vampire stories - Richard Matheson's I Am Legend - takes them to their logical extreme and puts them in the majority, their monopoly achieved, the last non-vampire brought to the point where he - the rarest of creatures - will become their folklore.  It isn't hard to see that these vampiric traits and significations fit the Borg like a glove.  The nightmare of capitalism as the great user, the great converter of everything into itself, becomes - in the liberal imagination - the nightmare of monopoly, restriction, control, all configured in terms of a return of the feudal and aristocratic.  The Borg eventually slide perfectly into this set of associations.

"It's 3 for 2 on Dan Brown at Waterstones!"

As they become vampires, so the Borg drones among them also become zombies.  The zombie, initially to do with slavery and imperialism (i.e. as the Haitian black slave reduced to mindless physicality, pure labour), later became transformed by Western horror into being profoundly about things like class and - once again - consumerism.  George Romero's Dawn of the Dead makes the zombies (with their grey faces) into mindless consumers of more than just flesh; they become the shambling and clownish denizens of a shopping mall.  Again, the Borg absorb the gothic category of the zombie, absorbing also the imminent critique of consumerism, which gained traction in the period after 'the 60s' when the global tide of struggle and protest receded, along with the Black Power movement, etc.  The dodgy basis of this critique is, as we've seen, the fear of the decentralised mass of atomised individuals collectively infected with, and ruthlessly acting upon, bad and empty ideas about what will make them happy.  As it fits perfectly onto the zombie, so the zombie - now containing this anti-consumerist anxiety - fits perfectly onto the Borg drone.  Indeed, the reconfiguration of the Borg as vampire/zombie is an almost inevitable development as soon as the idea of 'assimilation' takes shape.  This idea was itself almost inevitable given that the Borg emerged into a world of strong capitalism confronted by weak, disorganised communists... which almost immediately gave way to a post-communist world in which capitalism seemed to have been finally vindicated, to have emerged triumphant, unbeaten and unbeatable, challenged and challengeable no longer.  If Dracula was the nightmare that the liberal bourgeois world had about its own systemic terrors in the 1880s, the vampire-Borg are recognisably a version of the same nightmare reshaped in the global political landscape of the 1990s. If the zombies are the insane consumers of the 70s and 80s, the zombie-Borg are their inheritors in the 90s: organised and unbeatable.


4.

The Borg drive to consume, adapt and utilise all technology they come across is also an echo of primitive accumulation, the process by which capitalism assembles the material and materiel it needs in order to function and expand.  Capitalism achieved this, most drastically, via enclosures, which gradually brought the land out of feudal forms of ownership and control, and into the new bourgeois forms of property.  Attendant on this process was the steady appropriation of the common lands, and the displacement of millions of people, no longer able to make a living from the land and thus forced into cities, into factories.  Proletarianization.  Essentially the same process was repeated in the great colonial empires of the C19th-20th, with mass deracination a constant product.  Primitive accumulation was also built on the ruthless suppression of women, pushing them into new roles that accompanied the atomised bourgeois family, subjugating unpaid female labour to the reproduction of employable workers (both in terms of the creation of new people and the maintenance of already existing workers, ie husbands who needed feeding).  Primitive accumulation reached its horrific apogee in the slave trade, with millions of Africans abducted, traded, bought, sold, dragged in chains to plantations in the 'New World, sold again, and forced into the work upon which the 'New World' was 'opened' to the conquest and expansion of Western capital.  The genocide of native peoples in these 'New Worlds' - as in the gradual expansion of the United States across the American West - was a similarly crucial aspect of the rise of the modern capitalist world.  The shockwaves of these epochal crimes still reverberate today.  Modern sexism and racism are creations of this era, to name only the most obvious such legacies.  Capitalism came into the world "dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" as Marx puts it.  If we decide (as I think we should) to see Stalin's Russia as a 'state-capitalist' form, in which a bureaucratic class of managers takes the place of private capitalists but, essentially, still runs a capitalist economy (with wage labour and surplus value) albeit a heavily state-controlled one, then we can see just the same process of primitive accumulation and disposession taking place when Stalin industrialises Russia.  Ironically, the 'failure' of 'communism' thus helps prove Marx's analysis of the nature of capitalism.  And the very 'mirror-image' aspect in the relation between Western 'free market' capitalism and Soviet state capitalism... especially for those liberals who, like Chomsky, see Western capitalism as also statist in a different way... is part of how figures like the Cybermen and the Borg develop with these incoherences and ambivalences within them, especially their dual capitalist/collectivist (Soviet) nature.

There are problems with relating the Borg to capitalism, partly engendered by such incoherences.  Capitalists are not a collective intelligence, much as they share underlying class interests and allegiances.  They are, as Marx put it in Capital vol.3, "hostile brothers", constantly at each other's throats, compelled to competition.  Indeed, capitalists have personal interests that are at war with the capitalist class as a whole, let alone their direct competitors. But remember, the idea is not that the Borg correspond directly to capitalism, but that they express ways in which capitalism is perceived, particularly by sections of liberalism.  It certainly looks, much of the time, as though capitalists share a single mind, especially when they flock to the same investment opportunities.

But even this hive-minded collectivity can be seen as expressing liberal anxieties about capitalism.  It certainly functions much in the way I described here (as an elision of the nameless, the robotic, the cybernetic and the collectivist... reliant upon the assumption that all alternatives to capitalist freedom lead straight to totalitarianism) but the thing about the collectivism of the Borg is that they collect people as a workforce.  To become part of the collective is to become a drone, a worker.  In this way, assimilation echoes that proletarianization of humans which took place during primitive accumulation.  The Borg appropriate human bodies, acquire an incoherent and heterogenous mass of people, and assemble them into a concentrated mass of drones (i.e. workers), crowded together and co-operating in a factory-like area of technological and industrial production.  A hive of activity.  This collecting of drones can be read as a retelling of the historical process whereby peasants were forced off the land and into the towns and factories, of how complex social and familial ties were destroyed by the coming of a more atomised (and supposedly more rationalised) society, of how human labour was violently reorganised into massively concentrated and complex sites of industrial or intellectual work (i.e. the factory system, the office).  And don't think that the element of compulsion invalidates the analogy.  The story of the creation of the proletariat is the story of centuries of ferociously violent and venemous compulsion.  Even 'free labour' (ie those other than black people dragged to plantations in chains) found that they had to submit to capitalist wage labour or starve... and if they tried to find 'unlawful' ways to avoid starvation, they found themselves liable to be tortured and murdered by the state.  For centuries, anyone considered to be resisting the drive to the assimilation of all workers - ie tramps, bandits, beggers, those who clung to the forest or the land, those who refused in any way the imperatives of working for the new system - were considered objects of terror and evil, whipped and beaten into line, or executed. There was a lot of this, because the transition to wage labour was bitterly resented and resisted.  It still is, in every place where it continues today as neoliberalism restructures the world.  But there is no alternative.  The "archaic culture" (to use Borg phraseology) of the pre-capitalist world was "authority-driven" by God and Church and King, Headman and kin-group, season and harvest and tide... but the new culture smashes all such distinctions, all such old ways.  (Of course, capitalism is authority-driven in different ways... but then so do the Borg prove to be.)  All that is solid melts into air.  The culture of the people must adapt to service the capitalist system.  Freedom is irrelevant.  The worker, separated from the land and thus from any way of producing the means of life for him/herself, has the freedom to work or starve.  Death is irrelevant, since the workers are an amorphous mass of 'hands', each instantly replaceable.  And, as we've seen, capital spread across the globe.  From 1989-onwards, it really looked as if there was no way left for anyone, anywhere to resist it.  Resistance is futile.

Even as some of the anxieties the Borg express rest upon a classless view of society, formed of a decentralised 'mob' (one way of seeing the uniform Borg), so other anxieties they express rest upon a deep awareness of the reality (and potential threat) of the working class.  This shouldn't surprise us.  The gothic has never been internally consistent; indeed, part of its unique power is its ability to allow dialectical oscillations of meaning within single signs.  The 'assembledness' of the Borg, mirroring the same assembledness of the proletariat, is deeply gothic, in that a very similar thing occurs in Frankenstein.  The monster is a proletarian monster, assembled just as surely as the proletariat was assembled, a collective whole constructed from heterogenous parts artificially brought together in the process of production, made from the assembled fragments of the poor (the kinds of people who were dug up by grave robbers and sold, on the C18/19th 'corpse economy' to anatomists).  Maybe some of the paupers who furnished Victor Frankenstein with parts were hanged for 'crimes' that amounted to violations of private property, or refusal to meekly accept entry into the wage labour system (see above).  To quote Moretti:

Like the proletariat, the monster is denied a name and an individuality. He is the Frankenstein monster; he belongs wholly to his creator (just as one can speak of 'a Ford worker'). Like the proletariat, he is a collective and artificial creature.

Denied a name and individuality, the assimilated person is a Borg drone, like 'a Ford worker'.  Collective; in the capitalist workplace, quite different to pre-capitalist forms of collectivity from which the proletariat were drawn.  Literally collective, in the case of the Borg, but also bodily concentrated, like the proletariat, in a totally 'rationalised' space.  Artificial; a new class, surrounded and dominated by machinery (ie capital).  Literally artificial in the case of the Borg; a newly synthesised race, surrounded and penetrated by technology (ie capital).

So, once again, the Borg express liberal anxiety over capitalism.  Once again, the anxiety is ambivalent.  And, once again, the anxiety is both relevant to the 90s context and a reiteration of older liberal anxieties.   The faceless, mindless, collective entity: the mob.  Engulfed in the horror of labour under capitalism.  To be pitied.  Also to be feared.  This ties directly in with the faultlines in the Godwinian liberalism with which Frankenstein is soaked (Godwin was Mary Shelley's father).  Godwin's Political Justice and Caleb Williams demanded democratic reform, and savagely criticised injustice and inequality, but recommended fireside chats with educated people as the only form of agitation.  He begged Shelley not to get drawn into organisation among the proletariat themselves, saying "Shelley, you are preparing a scene of blood!".  Mary's monster is many things, but among these he is the terrifying threat of the monstrous proletariat, back for revenge for the way he has been abused and mistreated.  Also, remember the fear that makes Frankenstein finally and irrevocably reject his creature: the fear that, by making him a mate, he will allow this new race to breed, expand and cover the world.  Conversion and monopoly again.  As noted, there is ambivalence and incoherence embedded in the Borg, and it's deeply gothic.  The liberal terror at capitalist monopoly, expressed by the vampire, has a flipside in the liberal terror at proletarian takeover, expressed by Frankenstein's monster.  The Borg reiterate both.  In so doing, they express perhaps a submerged fear of the 90s liberal: that he faces either the eternal, capitalist 'end of history' (an unstoppable juggernaut) or, in the absence of Soviet style communism as a domineering force on the left, some new and unknown and uncontrollable way in which the disavowed and repressed underlings of the world will return to express their displeasure.  The Borg become the system, and its own internal gravediggers, in one.


5.

Another aspect of both the Cybermen and the Borg is their basis in fears of bodily mutilation.  From the start, the Cybermen threaten to physically invade the humans.  Becoming like them implicitly involves the cutting-up and dismemberment of the human body.  And this dismemberment, this invasion of the body by technology, is linked to work.  Both 'The Tenth Planet' and 'Earthshock' show remnants of the physical body (hands and jaws) still integrated into the machinery.  'Attack of the Cybermen' has Bates and Stratton (and the other rejected subjects the Cybermen use as slave labour, pure working meat), with their arms (the things they work with) replaced with cyber technology.  The Cybermen started with Toberman's arms too.  He was also a slave, remember?  Lytton ends up being the only human we see in the process of conversion in the classic series.  Again, the Cybermen have made the arms a priority.  On the whole, however, the suggestive emphasis on arms notwithstanding, Doctor Who never made as much as it could've done from the horror of Cyber-conversion, despite such things being very much in the wheelhouse of Eric Saward at just the time when SF/Horror cinema started concentrating on the meshing of the body and the machine.

This penetration of the body by the machine is explored far more thoroughly by the Borg in the various Star Trek franchises.  The Borg episodes, and the movie, repeatedly focus on machinery that infibulates and conjoins with the body.  We see cables plugged directly into head sockets (very 90s, via Cyberpunk) and various body parts removed and replaced by technological appendages.  As noted, the Borg insert tubials into their victims and inject their essence, causing the skin to turn zombie-grey.  Indeed, the Borg adopt something that is only obliquely hinted at with regards to the Cybermen: cellular bio-mechanics, ie nanobots that restructure the body on a cellular level, and which allow technology to grow and sprout and breed like an organism.  This is all deeply connected with perennial fears generated by capitalist modernity: the fear of bodily invasion and mutilation.

David McNally's brilliant book - Monsters of the Market - states and explores this topic in greater detail (and if you find what I'm saying here interesting then you should totes go and read McNally because I'm getting tonnes of it from him).  Pared right down to the bone, the idea is that capitalism not only disciplines and punishes the body of the worker (see above), it also breaks up her life experience, dividing labour, subjecting her to the rigours of a new kind of measured and organised time, dissecting her life into sections of work (whether at home or 'at work'... because home isn't a workplace, oh ho no).  There is, for instance, the working day, and then the various subdivisions of the day.  The day is made up of "dead time", when the worker must labour for the capitalist to make her wage.  This is the alienation of life activity from the worker, just as the products of her labour are alienated from her control.  The result is that the workers experience working life as a kind of living death.  The intersection of dissected life and dead time finds literal expression in the "corpse economy", ie the punishment of proletarian bodies even after death in the dissection halls of the ruling class, often via the theft of bodies by 'resurrectionists' and their sale to anatomists.  This was fiercely resisted by the London crowd of the C18/19th (that ever-present mob of bourgeois nightmare) at public executions, when riots would break out as people attempted to stop the bodies of the pauper criminals being handed over for further, posthumous, punishment.  The cultural expression of all this is in tales of evisceration, dismemberment and anatomisation... and in the various nightmares of capitalist modernity which centre upon terror of (and terror of becoming) the living dead.  It stretches right back from that evening in 1816 when Frankenstein and the Vampyre were simultaneously born, right up to today as we swim in a cultural sea of zombies.

Again, it isn't hard to see how the Cybermen and the Borg tie into this.  If, as I've tried to show, both (most explicitly and clearly the Borg) are totally products of liberal anxieties about capitalism (as both unstoppable system and generator of the terrifying mob) then the mutilation fantasy implicit in both can be interpreted in light of McNally's ideas.  Capital not only surrounds and controls the worker, embedding the worker within technology and the factory and the office, etc., it also penetrates the worker physically, looms over the worker as a force that historically and potentially violates/punishes the working body.  The product of this violent interpenetration is the creation of an army of the walking dead.

(By the way, there's a lot more to be said about this issue with relation to other Doctor Who stories and monsters.  I'm getting dizzy just contemplating how to apply these insights to 'Revelation of the Daleks' or 'Parting of the Ways'.  Let alone most of the Hinchcliffe era... which fumbled its one attempt at Cybermen inexcusably.)

Look him in the eye and tell him he's not gothic.

This is all gothic, you see.  It's gothic all the way down.  Listen to the language we're compelled to use.  It's the language of death.  Gravediggers, vampires, Frankenstein's monster, zombies.  The Cybermen are steeped in it too.  Think of their first appearance, wrapped in bandages like mummies, their white faces skull-like with their big round empty eye sockets and their inexpressive straight mouths.  Think of their appropriation of the cursed-Egyptian-tomb narrative in 'Tomb of the Cybermen'.  As I've noted in the past, whatever its flaws, 'Attack of the Cybermen' is probably the best Cyberman tale of the 80s because it remembers that the Cybermen are bodily imperialists who convert you into a zombie... and also because it seems more in tune with wider society than other later-Cyberman tales.  It hooks into the decade of Thatcher, with its smash 'n' grab crooks run by a suave pinstriped businessman (Lytton), and its decidedly more anxious post-Falklands approach to militarism than 'Earthshock' manages (depicting the Cybermen as military conquerors of the Cryons).  It's better, if still pretty weak.  But at least it reconnects the Cybermen with work, bodily mutilation and economic factors.


6.

The Cybermen never quite attain the clarity and force of the Borg, precisely because of the different circumstances of their production (I mean, their TV production) which means that, once they're out of the 60s, they never again hook directly into the anxieties of their age the way the Borg do.  Indeed, the Cybermen have lots more decades to try covering than the Borg did.  Born into the post-Cold War world, the Borg had a field of distinct cultural anxieties to connect with... and, in many ways, they manage it.  The Cybermen are a product of the 60s.  Alongside those left/liberal anxieties about the self-interested rational actor that we mentioned earlier (expressed by the Cybermen as "logic"), they are also born from worries about the "white heat of the technological revolution", about technocratization (not least, of the Labour Party), about computerization, about the ambivalent potentialities of new tech that (50 years on from Wilson's speech) has indeed proved to have deeply ambivalent legacies.  This was the post-war boom world, worrying about exactly what kind of utopia was going to be built, given that it was ostensibly going to be built by exactly the same kind of scientific instrumentalism that also built Auschwitz and Hiroshima.  You might be tempted to bring up the word Luddite... but, of course, the Luddites were fighting the dispossession and disenfranchisement brought by just such ambivalent new technology.  And Luddism is a profound inflection within Frankenstein; not in the crude sense of worry about 'the dangers of science' and 'playing god' (the mainstream philistine view of the book) but in the sense of worry about the failure of the Enlightenment project, of modernity itself, in the face of social injustice.  None of which is to say that the Cybermen don't contain some pretty reactionary anxieties about the future of technology... not least their Soviet inflection.

This incoherence and ambivalence - found within the Cybermen and Borg - expresses the liberal anxiety over the splits in society (fundamentally, we're talking about class), and the desire to heal them, to resolve them.  The splits are forced together into one (splitless; classless) form, a monolithic threat that must be destroyed... and yet, when destroyed, the monolith becomes a great mass of equally-threatening rubble within which totalitarianism will plot against democracy (cf 'Descent').  So even the liberal fear of 'extremism', unleashed by any challenge to the system, finds expression in the Borg.  There is something about the splits that always adapts to any attempt (within Liberalism) to contain or eradicate it.  Parenthetically, this may be way the concept of 'adaptation' is so central to the Borg threat, with their seemingly endless ability to adapt to new assaults (while also, of course, hinting at unease about the constant revolutionising of production... something hinted at in the evolution of the Cybermen and their latter-day concept of the "upgrade").

We know that the years since the recession have produced a slew of zombies.  Indeed, Time Magazine called zombies "the official monster of the recession", and there's been lots of talk about "zombie banks" and "zombie economies" and "zombie capitalism".  The economy continues after its death.  As noted, the zombie has, in the past, stood for rather conceptually dodgy ideas about consumerism run amok... which has an obvious relevance to the credit crunch, if a superficial one that tends to blame the victims.  But, as also noted, the zombie was also an expression of horror at slavery, at the reduction of the worker to labouring meat.  (There is, by the way, a resurgence of zombie tales in those parts of Africa being restructured and socially demolished by neoliberalism... including Nigeria.  Ahem.  See McNally, again, for details.)  In zombie cinema, the zombie runs riot and smashes up the world.  And, if the world as it stands is not to your liking (if, for example, you're not a fan of recession, neoliberalism, imperialism, austerity, corporate rule and drastic inequality), there is pleasure to be taken in this spectacle, this violent carnival.  The zombie is the faceless, mindless, proletarian mob of bourgeois nightmare, in open urban rebellion. Which we could do with, to be honest.  That's why it's a shame that the Borg have disappeared from our age.  In the absence of any apparent desire on the part of present-day Doctor Who to make the Cybermen engage with this crisis, the Borg would be uniquely placed to exploit it and express it.  In many ways, having been born at the moment when capitalism seemed (to many) to have achieved a triumphant 'end of history', the Borg really ought to come back now, at the moment when capitalism-in-crisis seems to have begun a catastrophic version of the same thing.



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It's only fair to acknowledge that this post is deeply indebted to the work of Franco Moretti and David McNally... indeed, any genuine insights here are almost certainly theirs; I've just adapted them to my topic.  It's also necessary to stress that I diverge from them in my own directions, that I fail to do their ideas justice above, and that any consequent errors are entirely my own.

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ADDENDUM: I should've made it clear somewhere above that ambivalence and anxiety were built-in to the idea of the 'end of history' from the start, even in the work of Fukuyama.  That's important. 

CORRECTION 4/12/13: It wasn't Byron who created Lord Ruthven, it was Polidori.  Duh.