14

"I've known many times," says the Doctor, "some of them much more pleasant than others."

"Well, I quite like it here, I must say," interjects Jo to cover the awkward moment, "Everyone's been most kind."

The Controller (what a giveaway that title is) nods in appreciation of her remark.

The Doctor, however, is unimpressed.  He swills more wine.  He looks like an sozzled, opinionated guy at an unsuccessful party, spoiling for a fight.

"Well, I met some people today who were far from kind," he says.  He spent the earlier part of the day taking a forced tour of the Controller's utopia, being subjected to the tender mercies of a surprisingly well-sketched terror state.

"That was a simple mistake, Doctor, I assure you," says the Controller, his voice as smooth and silvery as his strange, quasi-robotic face, "You must not jump to conclusions."

"Better than jumping from the crack of a whip from some security guard," snaps the Doctor, "Do you run all your factories like that, Controller?"

We have been granted an unusual thing earlier in this episode: a glimpse into the productive centres of a Dalek-ruled regime.  It looked like a gulag.  People in rags lugged grain while being monitored at every moment.  At one point, we cut straight from that to the Controller handing Jo a plate full of grapes.

Grapes make wine, of course.  Wine is strangely present in this story.  Back at the start, the Doctor raided Sir Reginald Styles' wine cellar.

"That was not a factory, Doctor," returns the Controller mechanically.

"Oh? Then what was it?"  The Doctor looks still more like a half-cut guy, up for some aggro.

 "A rehabilitation centre.  A rehabilitation centre for hardened criminals."

"Including old men and women, even children?"

"There will always be people who need discipline, Doctor," says the Controller, as though the point is beyond debate... but then, to people like him, it always is.

"Now that's an old fashioned point of view," says the Doctor "even from my standards."

I love that line, but it makes me feel sad.  It dates this story far more than the mullets and flares and glam rock facepaint.  I mourn a long lost time, before neoliberalism got to work on popular culture, when it was a mainstream assumption that we could dispense with crusty, reactionary stuff about some people basically being indolent animals who needed to be forced to work... so much so that even the Third Doctor could come out with it.

"I can assure you that this planet has never been more efficiently, more economically run," says the controller.

Note that.  It's never been more efficient and more "economically run" than when the bloody Daleks are in control.

"People have never been happier or more prosperous," he continues.

"Then why," asks the Doctor, "do you need so many people to keep them under control? Don't they like being happy and prosperous?"

This cuts right to the quick.  It cuts to the delusion - still widespread on the left at that time - that 'really existing socialism' was in some meaningful way an improvement.  But if it was so great, why was there a dirty big wall keeping people in East Germany?  As Mark Steel once put it:

If you had a party, and discovered some of the guests secretly building a hot air balloon in an effort to escape, you wouldn't say, "Well that was a successful night."

In many ways, 'Day of the Daleks' is a story about the failure of socialism or communism in the 20th century, and it confines itself to the predictable liberal assumptions.  The Dalek economy looks like a gulag system.  The terrible new world was brought about by the Chinese and Russians starting World War Three.  Some revolutionary guerillas in fatigues try to change history with bullets and bombs and just make things worse (natch).  Some of these "fanatics" (as the Doctor calls them) even have Che moustaches.  (And let's not even get started on the racefails and politicsfails that come with having stupid, grunting, dark-skinned, low-browed aliens recycled from Planet of the Apes.)

And yet... as has been mentioned on this blog before, 'really existing socialism' or 'communism' were actually authoritarian and bureaucratic variants of state capitalism that arose for complex and contingent historical reasons.  So you can ask the Doctor's question about social control in our society too.

I'm not an anarchist, though I have much sympathy with many anarchist ideas.  One of the founding fathers of anarchism was Joseph Proudhon.  I have my issues with him, but he did say something I love:

To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonoured. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

This is all still pretty much true where I am.  I dunno about you.  I expect the NSA knows you're reading this.  The British government is currently engaged in a concerted effort to make public protest effectively illegal.  And yet we live under capitalism, which we are constantly told is the best of all possible worlds.  Even the recession is getting better, we're told.

What's the matter with us?  Don't we like being happy and prosperous?

15

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they can just clear the smoke...

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

16

The Doctor is confusing an angel to death.

Light came to our world to count and quantify all life, to create a set and definitive catalogue.  Light sent its Survey out into the world to sample each form.  But our world corrupted the Survey with the delicious possibilities of evolution.  Light was locked away so the Survey could inherit the Earth.  It became a Victorian gentleman, a man of property.  It enacted a ruthless Darwinian takeover of the house above Light's ship.  A colonizing mission.  A merger and acquisition.  This being Victorian England, the wife and daughter and maids came with the house like fixtures and fitting.  The Survey locked its secrets away, just like any Victorian gentleman, and set about dreaming of empire.  It adopted the cultural logic of its new society and new position: the ideology of 'the survival of the fittest'... meaning, supposedly, the dominance of the best.  With its inbuilt assumptions about the place of 'lesser races' and 'lower orders' and women, Victorian social-Darwinism was perfect for the Survey's purposes, as it shed its insectile and reptilian skins and became Josiah, the pink of respectability.

But then the Doctor came and let Light out of the cellar.  Just to see what would happen.

Light turned out to be the reductionist ghost in the bourgeois social machine.

To Light, we're merely walking bowls of "sugars, proteins and amino acids".  Light killed and dismembered one of the maids, saying "I wanted to see how it worked, so I dismantled it".  That's just how reductionism works.  To understand something, you take it to pieces.  But what happens when you can't put the pieces back together again?  Do you forget that the original thing was more than just the sum of its bits?  Reductionism can do a lot of heavy lifting as an analytical tool, but it is the map not the territory... and mistaking it for the territory leads to vulgar materialism and determinism.  A river cannot be understood as just an aggregation of water molecules.  Aside from all the other natural and material processes involved, it is also a social phenomenon.  It is something people experience, think about, wade in, swim in, sail upon, fish for food in, divert and ford and dam and befoul.  It is something people name, and build towns around.  Water can be used to quench thirst or drown people.  It can be freely shared or owned and monopolised, or stolen.  Likewise - more so - people are not just aggregations of limbs or genes (selfish or not).  Looking at them that way makes it possible to inherit them and use them like property.  Contrary to the assumptions of bourgeois political economy, societies are not just aggregations of individuals, all acting from their own self-interest. That's part of how you end up saying that some people just have to be left to starve, or be put in the workhouse, or be ruled by a Viceroy, all for the good of the economy and progress.  It's partly how you end up with the idea that people starve or work or serve because they have failed to compete, or because it was their destiny as a unit of inherently inferior stock.  Inspector Mackenzie has imbibed this view of things, sagely pronouncing on how "gypsy blood" makes for "lazy workers".

This view of the world depends upon snapshots of reality at best, all fixed in place like moths displayed behind glass, like catalogued specimens in the Natural History Museum.  There is something about this static view that makes it tesselate perfectly with hierarchy, and thus work for whoever rules.  That's why the classic depiction shows a lowly ape gradually growing up to be a white gentleman.  It depends upon forgetting the revolutionary implications of Natural Selection, which shows us a world of variation in dialectical unity, everything effecting everything else in one great network of feedback loops, all species constantly on their way to being something else, all forms transitional, all races related to each other, no hierarchy of blood, no separation of individuals from each other, no dividing line between individuals and the rest of the world, every tiny alteration in quantity gradually leading to an alteration in quality, all negations ultimated negated, everything containing its own contradictions within it... just as every apple contains the potential to nourish or rot.

In truth, as Light realises to his horror...

"Everything is changing. All in flux. Nothing remains the same."

The mercurial Doctor has reminded Light that even he, Light, changes.  Everything does.  The catalogue can never be complete, by definition.  The Doctor cruelly hammers home the word "change" at every opportunity.  He bamboozles Light with a list of mythical and fictional creatures, human creations, inherently social things that can never be quantified as part of any static, reductionist system.  Even the Gryphon gets a mention, that creature of Victorian lassitude and melancholy, yearning for the old days before everything changed.

Even Nimrod, whose people once worshipped Light, won't help him.  Nimrod has dumped his allegiance to both Josiah and Light, both the new boss and the old.  He can't be fixed in subservient place because he's a social creature who thinks and learns and makes his own history, if not in circumstances of his own choosing.

"I will not change," says Light.  And he turns to stone rather than permit himself to become part of the great flow of fluctuation, contradiction and transformation.  He's that reactionary.

"Subject for catalogue," announces the Doctor with weary contempt, "File under: Imagination, comma, lack of."

17

Ms. Kizlet is using the wi-fi signal to control people in the coffee shop.

 “I do love showing off,” she says through a waitress she has made her puppet. “Just let me show you what control of the wi-fi can do for you,” she adds through the mouth of a young girl.

It’s a tech demo. Here’s what this latest version of the operating system can do. Upgrade now. The iconography is all ruthlessly current. Particularly fitting: Kizlet and her crew are playing around on iPads as they do their little Steve Jobs routine. You almost expect her to reveal that they’ve captured Clara with an “oh, and one more thing.”

Kizlet explains that they’ve “released thousands” of base stations into the world, blanketing the whole of humanity in their Worldwide Web of Fear.

Meanwhile, Clara’s on her laptop. She recognizes the vulnerability in every grand system: people. With just a bit of clicking around she’s figured out where Kizlet is transmitting from. The most obvious spot in London, really. Kizlet's client loves using grand projects for his own purposes. It’s what he did in the Underground, and it’s what he’s doing now. But it’s 2013 now, and London’s grand projects aren’t for the little people anymore. Now they’re for the elite.

So it's the perfect place for Kizlet’s operation. The prestigious tallest building in London, to be filled with high-paying businesses. The metaphor is straightforward: the grand prestige project, like the Olympics and the Jubilee from the same year, is literally eating people alive. Construction is consumption. It even consumes and annexes the protests against it. Its name comes from the complaints about its design - the fear that it would be “a shard of glass through the heart of historic London.” Of course, the objection, like the vision itself, is concerned with the abstract form of London, as opposed to with the lives of those within it. Heritage London or the modern corporate state. It’s all the same: an aesthetic to show off. A system for control.

And yet, architecturally, the building is designed to be invisible - to blend into the clouds around it. Control is always supposed to be invisible, after all. Just something in the air, like the wi-fi signal itself. The spectacle is always showing off and remaining invisible at the same time. As with any demo, it’s not just technology being shown off. It’s ideology. Dressed up, inevitably, in the rhetoric of upper middle class consumption. The Great Intelligence wants “healthy, free-range, human minds.”

 “The farmer tends his flock like a loving parent,” Kizlet says.

“The abbatoir is not a contradiction,” she insists.

“No one loves cattle more than Burger King.”

So the Doctor smashes into the side of the building and tears it all down.

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.

20

For March Against the Mainstream Media Day


The Editor (apparently he edits the whole of human society) has uncovered Suki's true identity.  Instead of being just another inoffensive wannabe employee, she's actually...

"Eva Saint Julienne, last surviving member of the Freedom Fifteen. Hmm, self declared anarchist, is that right?"  His tone is patronising.  Non-mainstream political principles are a quaint and amusing affectation.

"The Freedom Foundation has been monitoring Satellite Five's transmissions," says Suki, pulling a gun on the smug bastard, "We have absolute proof that the facts are being manipulated. You are lying to the people."

"Ooo, I love it," he giggles, still in the same tone of amusement, as though he's listening to hilariously naff dialogue in a period drama, "Say it again."

"This whole system is corrupt. Who do you represent?"

The Editor is self-aware enough to know that, for all his power, he's a slave himself.

"I answer to the Editor in Chief.... If you don't mind, I'm going to have to refer this upwards."

Suki looks up, to see what the Editor is referring to.

"What is that?" she asks.

"Your boss. This has always been your boss, since the day you were born."


Lower down Satellite 5, the Doctor is quizzing Cathica, who has lived all her life on one level.

"I don't know anything," she says proudly.

"Don't you even ask?"

"Why would I?"

"You're a journalist."

"What's that got to do with anything?"

She genuinely doesn't understand him.  She doesn't know what is on the floors above her... except that on the executive level, the place she's been trained to yearn for, "the walls are made of gold".  She doesn't know why "immigration has tightened up".  Forced to guess, she flails around and suggests some vague notions, all based on the random 'shit happens' model, none of which point any blame at anybody powerful or any powerful structures.  And this is a member of society in which people are surrounded by 'News', in which they have holes carved into their own heads so information can be beamed directly into their brains.  For all the 'news' and 'information', they don't know what's going on or why.

"This society's the wrong shape..." says the Doctor.


When the Doctor and Rose reach the top floors, the walls aren't made of gold, they're made of frosted steel, and the workstations are manned by zombies - including Suki.

"I think she's dead," says the Doctor.

"She's working," says Rose.

In capitalism, mindless labour transforms you into the walking dead... or, in this case, the sitting at a desk dead.

"It may interest you to know," smarms the Editor, "that this is not the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire. In fact, it's not actually human at all. It's merely a place where humans happen to live..."

There is an angry snarl from the ceiling.

"...yeah, sorry..." the Editor corrects himself, jumping at the growl of his boss, "It's a place where humans are allowed to live by kind permission of my client."

His client (he's a banker) is a gigantic slab of meat.  The whole system of Satellite 5 is set up to keep it cool and fresh, to stop it turning and rotting.  The Empire is system of air conditioning; designed to stop zombie meat from spoiling.  But the creature is also a huge, roaring, slavering mouth.  At the centre of the Empire, yet again, there is consumption, insatiable hunger... but this mouth also speaks.  It speaks its version of truth directly into the brains of the human race. 

"Create a climate of fear and it's easy to keep the borders closed,"explains the Editor, "It's just a matter of emphasis. The right word in the right broadcast repeated often enough can destabilise an economy, invent an enemy..." (it seems redundant, but I'll mention the word: Iraq) "... or change a vote."

"So all the people on Earth are like, slaves," says Rose, cutting straight to the quick as usual.

"Well, now, there's an interesting point..." returns the Editor, "Is a slave a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?"

"Yes," says the Doctor simply.  He won't debate the issue, despite the Editor's more-grown-up-than-thou goading.  If you just concede that it's even up for debate, the Editors of this world have already won.  It becomes Question Time.  It becomes safe.

Perhaps a slave is even more a slave if he just takes it for granted that he's free.