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.

50

Lesterson has brought his new toy, his reactivated alien machine, to Governor Hensall's office.  He boasts of how it could revolutionise life in the Colony.  It can end their labour problems, their economic problems... all their problems.

"It can do many things," agrees the Doctor, "but what it does best is exterminate human beings!  It destroys them... without pity..."

He continues.  And the machine speaks too.

"I - AM - YOUR - SER-VANT," it says, an unconscious admission in its strange inflection.  It says this again and again and again.

The two voices overlap, trying to shout each other down.

The tool, the machine, the product, bellows that it is our servant, while one man desperately claims that it's a killer, an apocalypse in waiting.

The two claims merge until they become one contradictory truth.

Later, the Dalek (I choose to believe it's the same one) murders Hensall on Bragen's orders.

It turns to Bragen.

It has a question.  The tool that kills, the dead labour, the mass produced thing, the weapon, the tank, the gothic monster, the repressed thing returning, the fascist principle that mirrors Bragen's own, the social-Darwinist that embraces the idea of the racial struggle for survival against all other competing races... has a question for Bragen.  For humanity.

"WHY - DO - HU-MAN - BE-INGS - KILL - HU-MAN - BE-INGS?"

 Good question.  One of the few genuinely good questions asked by anyone in this story.

Bragen, of course, cannot answer.

He has no idea.



(UPDATED 21/11/13)

Life and Taxes

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

Here's a sample:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Lords Temporal

This is an edited and tweaked version of something I wrote for the old site.


If 'The Deadly Assassin' has a central thesis, it might be this: power is no guaranteur of responsibility. Or even sensibleness. This tale shows us beings like us. Godlike in their technology, they are also childlike in their small-mindedness.

In 'The Deadly Assassin', the Time Lords are senile gerontocrats living on ossified priviledge. They natter, bumble and scheme. The less shot-away amongst them spend their time snapping at each other with haughty contempt or scheming over appearances and expediency. Robert Holmes deliberately strips Power of its outward signs of dignity and virtue and superiority.

They are locked in a rigid class system. They fail to understand their own technology, their own power, their own myths. They "adjust the truth" to suit their agendas. Their outwardly civilised society begins to crumble into anarchy when two of their renegades return and start fighting out their neuroses. The sit on a massive computer lake of information in which nestles a surreal and nightmarish dreamscape filled with elemental terrors. Their Panopticon (literally: place where all can be seen) hides secrets. The biggest secret is a singularity, a piece of cosmic anarchy that they've slaved to their technology and then forgotten about. This is a picture of denial. Like the lies that are "good for public morale" overlaying the sordid truth, their society pretends to be controlled and calm but rests on hidden and deadly knowledge.

As a satire, it isn't subtle. Robert Holmes chucks in random signifiers from various power elites of Western culture: British public schools, Washington DC, the Vatican, Oxbridge, etc. Gallifrey seems to be his scathing picture of an oligarchial and decadent world, run by liars or killers or the senile, reported by snobbish and fautous twitterers content to reel off the official-view of the upper echelons. Trials are manipulated for convenience. Elections are devoid of real democracy. Behind the specious words about "our traditions of fairness and justice", the system's Swiss Guard-style private police use torture and assumption. Hildred is a brutal bungler; Spandrell's intelligence and independence only highlights how unusual he is in his world.

 "Aren't you worried Wikileaks might find out about this?"

Most outragously, the story seems to riff on the Kennedy assassination. 'The Deadly Assassin' isn't an allegory of Dealey Plaza, but it does play with our collective (often confabulated) consciousness of that political slaying. The Doctor is a "patsy", his alleged weapon has misaligned scopes, the real killer is from within the top circle of power, the truth is changed by Borusa's cover-up.

We even have the cheekily named Celestial Intervention Agency, of which the Doctor is assumed to be a member... and, indeed, the Doctor has been involved in Time Lord-sanctioned interventions. Is he a C.I.A. agent? This one throwaway reference muddies the waters (or rather stirs waters that are already muddy). The Time Lords speak of their policy of neutral observation of the universe (Gallifrey is the place where all can be seen) and of their strict non-interventionism... but, like the Western 'democracies' that speak of international law and then organise coups d'etat in places where they feel their interests are threatened, they can always ask their "C.I.A." to intervene on the quiet.

As ever with Holmes, the language is amazing. This story gave the Who-myth so many words and phrases: "High Council", "Matrix", "Rassilon", "Eye of Harmony", "Castellan", "APC net", "Celestial Intervention Agency", "artron energy", "shabogan", etc. etc. And we have Borusa's aloof and suave variety of verbal dexterity. I needn't quote, you know what I'm talking about.

It's heady stuff. It's so mythic that it has firmly buried itself into the subconscious of the whole show, providing Who with its own personal origin-legend. It's also politically complex, witty, cynical, surreal. For all its flaws, you can't help but marvel at it. Apart from everything else, there are those astonishing costumes! Of course, subsequent return trips to Gallifery sullied its reputation... but that isn't Bob Holmes' fault. After this, Gallifrey started looking like every other high-tech alien world, lit and furnished like a Habitat showroom.

RTD's attempts turned Gallifrey into Hogwarts with a bog-standard Bespin-style citadel, and then into Coruscant. The fact that the costumes are all wrong in the new series - the ceremonial circle-based shoulder-display thingies worn by guards! - is a sign of a wider failure to grasp what the Time Lords are supposed to be. Gallifrey, should it ever be seen again, needs to be like the place in 'The Deadly Assassin': a dark, gothic labyrinth of high politics, murky motives, unaccountable power, shadows and oligarchy and cover stories... and, crucially, decadent idiocy. Not a backdrop for an ex-Bond doing a Voldemort.

Admittedly, the plot of 'The Deadly Assassin' makes no sense at all. And the music is naff. As is the make-up. And the title is rubbish. 'The Deadly Assassin' indeed! As opposed to what? 'The Harmless Assassin'?

Nine out of ten, as Borusa would say.