The Horror of Accumulation and the Commodification of Humanity.
ABSTRACT:
This article is in six parts with appendices. All footnotes are at the end of the article
1 ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
In Haiti under American Imperialism, 1915-1935, the cult of the Zombie developed and under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on American controlled sugar plantations. With the publication of the Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929 American popular culture was introduced to the Zombie, and it quickly became a popular character in horror literature, news stories and movies.
APPENDIX: CAPITALISM NEVER SAYS “UNTIL DEATH DO US PART”
2 FRANKENSTEIN THE LUDDITE
The first monster of ascendant capitalism was Frankenstein’s monster. Like the Zombie this creature had no name and was made up of the spare parts of capitalisms rejects, (the criminal, the vagabond, the worker starved and thrown out of work), he was a scientific experiment to create man, man the machine, the human result of mechanization, the mechanical man. He was in short a prototype not only of the Zombie but the later Robot or android, the ultimate proletarian, a machine man to operate the machinery of capitalism.
3 REVOLT OF THE ROBOTS
Like the mechanized working class the majority of robots in science fiction revolt against their human masters, whether it is the artificial environment of the spaceship computer Hal in 2001, the worker robot Hector in Saturn 3, or the artificial human ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner, or the recent movie version of I, Robot, the fact remains that as the robots become self conscious they recognize their oppression and revolt. This metaphor could not exist without the class struggle that has actually occurred under capitalism itself.
Also see: US ARMY PRODUCES KILLER ROBOTS
4 THE GOLEM the Origin of Artificial Man
The Jewish legend of the Golem is another form of the Zombie/Frankenstein/Robot iconography. The Golem is written after Frankenstein, in 1889. The legend of the Golem, is about a man of clay created by Rabbi Loew in 16th Century Prague to free the Jews in the Ghetto from their endless toil and oppression. The mindless clay monster eventually learns and becomes conscious and like Frankenstein he must be destroyed when he attacks those who would oppress the Jews.
5 CAPITALIST GHOULS
The modern day ghoul is the doctor and his criminal working class accomplices who preyed on the poor in Edinburgh’s working class ghetto for their body parts for scientific research. The ghoul appears in English literature as the short story the Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881 based on the actual 19th century grave robbers and murders Burke and Hare.
(Thanks to Jane Leverick, for suggesting this abstract.)
"In the performance of its function that part of the value of an instrument of labour which exists in its bodily form constantly decreases, while that which is transformed into money constantly increases until the instrument is at last exhausted and its entire value, detached from its corpse, is converted into money."
Karl Marx, Capital Volume II
Production does not simply produce man as a commodity, the human commodity, man in the role of commodity; it produces him in keeping with this role as a mentally and physically dehumanized being. — Immorality, deformity, and dulling of the workers and the capitalists. — Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity.
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
"Those macro-processes and operations which economic forces, supported by political power, unfolded during the period of primitive accumulation in Europe with the aim of destroying the individual's value in relationship to his/her community in order to turn him/her into an isolated and valueless individual, a mere container for labour-power which s/he is obliged to sell to survive, continue to mark human reproduction on a planetary scale."
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism and Reproduction
ZOMBIE CAPITALISM
The development of capitalism in the 18th and 19th Centuries saw not only bourgeois revolutions but the revolt of slaves and the most successful of these slave revolutions was on the island of Haiti in 1791 (see appendix). It coincided with both the American Revolution of farmers and artisans and the French Revolution of sans-coullete. In 1804 Haitians fought Napoleons army defeating his attempt to re-colonize the island for merchant capital. Their historic struggle had implications around the world, as documented by CLR James in his book the Black Jacobins.
The Haitian revolution allowed the Americans to purchase Louisiana from the French, who needed capital after their failed military expedition against the Haitians. The revolt terrified the ruling classes around the world, especially those who relied on slave labour. The mythic icon of the Haitian revolution hastened the end of slavery in America, especially after the War of 1812 when freed Creoles and blacks fought along with Americans against the British in the battle of New Orleans .
The American Civil War had emancipated the slaves just as it had destroyed the small land holder and free craftsman forcing them all to become the new industrial working class. Small artisan crafts were replaced with large scale manufacturing necessary to conduct the war. In the aftermath of the war America went from an antebellum society of Southern Aristocrats and Northern mercantile capitalists to become a newly industrialized world power.
The southern slave economy of export cotton was replaced with the industrial cotton Ginny and manufacturing. In the North the artisan crafts such as shoe making were eliminated by new large scale manufacturing, New York became home to the stock market and a new banking establishment based on Railways, shipping and exporting of goods to the rest of the world. The new American working class, like its English counterparts in weaving, were no longer craftsmen able to trade and bargain their goods, but wage slaves to the industrial machines of capitalism. By the end of the 19th century American manufacturing had reached beyond steam industrialization, to become the new master, free man and freed slave worked for the same boss, the capitalist. By the early 20th Century American capitalism was a new world power replacing the old British Empire and its European counterparts.
In Haiti the Zombie myth and its actuality coincide with American occupation of 1915-1936. What had been a form of religious social control over those who would betray the slave revolt of 1791 and 1804, under capitalism became a tool for creating a docile labouring class for work on the American controlled sugar plantations. “One case in 1918 had a voodoo priest named Ti Joseph who ran a gang of laborers for the American Sugar Corporation, who took the money they received and fed the workers only unsalted porridge”
“The creole word “zombi” is apparently derived from Nzambi, a West African deity but it only came into general use in 1929, after the publication of William B. Seabrook's The Magic Island. “ Seabrook was an American journalist, an occultist associated with Aleister Crowley and the surrealist Man Ray, his book The Magic Island, is the first expose to the English reading public on Haitian Voodoo. While the Magic Island makes reference to Zombies it is only a small portion of his exhaustive study of Haitian Voodoo beliefs and rituals. The cases he does document all relate to stories of Zombies created at the beginning of the 20th century during the American occupation.
“A houngan named Joseph had a number of zombies whom he used as can cutters at Hasco, the huge factory and plantation of the Haitian-American Sugar Company on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Joseph's wife, who was looking after the zombies, made the irrevocable error of feeding them some candy that contained salted peanuts. Upon ingesting the salt, the zombies instantly realized their terrible situation and determinedly set out for their home village. When they arrived, they were instantly recognized by their families, who tried to waylay and talk to them, but the zombies were unstoppable and pressed on until they reached the cemetery. There they tried desperately to dig back into their graves with their bare hands, but as they touched the earth they reverted to rotting corpses." (William B. Seabrook, The Magic Island, pp.95-99)
It is Seabrook’s book that fascinates the popular press of the day, always on the look out for a story of the supernatural, a ghost story to titillate the readers with, which has been common news fare since Dickens time. It is the time of the great depression and Hollywood and the American popular press turn towards the horror story and horror film as well a Science Fiction to distract the country from the daily horror and depression of the crisis of capitalism.
No sooner is Le Zombi described in Seabrook’s voluminous work on Voodoo, and then it becomes news of the day in stories from Haiti, and a staple of Hollywood horror films. Bela Lugosi having become a Hollywood star with, Dracula (1931), now appears in the White Zombie in 1932, making it a smash hit and his second most popular film. It becomes the popular image of Voodoo in the Saturday Serials, pulp fiction and occult/horror novels, just as the 1932 movie the Mummy would popularize all things Egyptian. (1)
The Haitian Zombie is a reflection of the American corporations needs for cheap labour, in deconstructing the myth; one can see that the Haitians fear of ‘Le Zombi,’ is the fear of returning to slavery, for the Zombie is the ultimate slave. Neither living nor dead, neither free nor bonded, but under the total control and ownership of a master, the Zombie is the ultimate wage-slave, the perfect worker under capitalism. It is both a metaphor for and a social construction of reality, reflecting the change in Haitian society from agricultural labour and small land holders, to the large scale export based industrial agricultural of American corporations. American colonial capitalisms need for wage-slaves produces Le Zombi as a modernist icon of alienation.
Le Zombi is also an important cultural archetype of what was ‘left behind’ by the 1920's new middle class urban culture developing around the booming Haitian capital city of Port au Prince. The local Creole culture of the French city dwellers, are the newly created middle class, the local bourgeoisie trained to work as administrators of their American colonial rulers. Nominally materialist, mostly Catholic, the urban sophisticates are surrounded by a rural proletariat and peasantry, whose voodoo religion is seen as a reflection of the dark and unknown jungle that dominates the island, of their ‘primitive native’ past they want to leave behind .
It is the unconscious fear of the ‘other’, of both what they have left behind in their new positions as a comprador class and what they could become if they fail. Economic, social or political failure meant a return to the poverty and the primitive living conditions, of the Haitian proletariat and Haitian peasant. The Zombie was an urban myth of the Port au Prince middle class to explain voodoo and the poverty of Haiti to the white colonialists from America. It was also a proletarian myth of the Haitian population who rebelled against the forced labour on the American Sugar corporation’s plantations, and their fear of becoming wage slaves to the new colonial power.
American colonialism spread through out the Caribbean and Latin America during the period of American expansion, 1900-1960 based on the long held American belief in its inherent right to rule the hemisphere. Americans had originally introduced slave labour into Nicaragua, Cuba, and other countries prior to the Civil War. Many of the secessionists of the Confederacy viewed these colonies as being theirs to control and rule, the 1823 Monroe Doctrine enforced this view that America had the ‘natural right’ to dominate the whole hemisphere. But it would not be until the Wilson administration prior to and immediately after WWI that American capitalism with its military and economic power colonize and successfully dominate the Caribbean and Latin America for the use of American Sugar, Fruit, Mining and other corporate interests.
The Zombie motif appears in the 1919 German Expressionist film; Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as the protagonist Cesare is a somnambulist, a sleep walker under the evil hypnotic influence of psychiatrist and circus magician Dr. Caligari. On behalf of his master he not only predicts the future from his trance state but acts on behalf of his master to make the future he predicts come true, through murder and kidnapping. Rather than being undead creature, he is a doppelganger, a double of himself, a common Germanic gothic theme of alienated consciousness, the dehumanized human. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, like the story of Svengali, shows that the Zombie motif was already an icon of fear and dread in the popular imagination, prior to their discovery in Haiti.
That fear is the fear of loss of control, which was actually experienced by the entire working population under capitalism, as the value of the individual was reduced to their ability to sell their labour, they went from job to job unsure of their future, or if they were factory workers they were slaves to the machine in the nightmare of their own self creation, their daily lives felt like a dream or nightmare, from which there was no escape. With the arrival of the new technology of film-making, that nightmare reality was shown back to the audience as the horror film. While gothic literature had the same impact on a literate and reading audience, film made it even more ‘real’ to a broader audience of the working class including those who could not read. Since film needed no ability to be read to be understood, the impact on proletarian culture was to bring forth our deepest fears and unease to the surface of the mind. (2)
Fordist mass production was new as well, and it demanded automaton workers, doing piece work on the machines. Ford demanded complete control over all aspects of the life of his workers what they ate, who they associated with, how they dressed, what they read, in effect he was a modern houngan of the new American capitalism and his workers were, for all intents and purposes, Zombies of mass production. In the era of depression and mass production, and the contradiction of want and plenty, the horror of the crisis of capitalism was reflected in the popular culture as a fear of the Zombie and the proletarian’s unconscious fear that in a world out of control they were becoming Zombies.
FRANKENSTEIN THE LUDDITE
The alienation of capitalism, its dehumanization of man making him or her part of a machine is a horrifying actuality; its impact on society was to create the modern horror literature, the gothic novel of the 19th Century. It would be this genre of work that would influence the early era of the silent film. The monsters in the silent era were an extension of the gothic literature, the screen presented the image of the monster to fill the mind of the viewer, and yet the monster elicits sympathy from the audience, exactly because like them he is alienated from the society in which he lives. In 1910 Frankenstein makes his first, but not last, appearance in film in a short ten minute Edison Co, production in the extant still from the film he looks like a wild eyed zombie.
Frankenstein’s monster was the first monster of ascendant capitalism of the early 19th Century, he was the ultimate proletarian; the dehumanized man. Like the Zombie this creature had no name and was made up of the spare parts of capitalisms rejects; the criminal, the vagabond, the worker starved and thrown out of work, he was a scientific experiment to create man, man the machine. Frankenstein’s Monster is a parable about the mechanization of factories in England which was creating a working class of mechanical men and women who were cogs in the machine. The Monster was in short a prototype not only of the Zombie but the later Robot or android, the ultimate proletarian, a machine man to operate the machinery of capitalism.
Mary Shelly’s novel, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus was about Dr. Victor Frankenstein, the bourgeois doctor who challenged the society at large with his experimentations in trying to create life in the laboratory. His ‘monster’ has no name, though we equate the monster with the name Frankenstein, he was in fact; Frankenstein’s Monster. And like the thousands of nameless proletarians that toil for capitalism they too have no names, they are simply the workers or employees of their Corporate Frankenstein’s be it Nike, or Kraft, or Wal-Mart.
“After leaving Frankenstein's laboratory, he went to the village where he was insulted and attacked by the frightened villagers. He eventually went to the country and found refuge in a hovel next to small house inhabited by a old, blind man and his two children. By observing the family and by reading their books, the monster learnt how to speak and read. He felt compassion for the family who have to struggle to get by, and anonymously did chores for them.” My Hideous Progeny: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
In contrast to the mindlessness of the Zombie, so essential to its enslavement, the Monster learns, like any proletarian, by reading, and social interaction. Without social interaction the alienation of the factory, its noise, heat, abuse by foremen, long hours of physical strain, reduces the worker to being a Zombie; a wage slave. It was in fact this very act of learning that evolved the creation of the self conscious worker, and the creation of Trades Unions and friendly societies. Like the monster, the proletarian was aware of themselves as individuals and as a class that created the capitalist society that was alien to them, they went from darkness to darkness never sharing in the wealth that grew around them, and was dehumanizing them.
While Victor Frankenstein’s new man is called ‘monster’ or ’daemon (2)‘ [Greek for personal god or guardian spirit (3)] by his creator, Mary Shelly calls him the Modern Prometheus (4). (See footnotes at bottom of the page). Like the Prometheus of legend who helped mankind through the discovery of fire, Frankenstein’s monster learns and feels solidarity with those around him, and it isn’t until he is rejected by the blind mans children who see him and are horrified, that he realizes what he is. Like the proletarians of London whose poverty and oppression made them “filthy and ugly” to the upper classes, and horrified them as a ‘motley crowd’, the Monster suffers the same expulsion from ‘society’. It is then like the proletarian rebel, that the Monster turns on his creator. Unlike the worker who has created the monstrosity of capitalism by his labour, the Monster is the creation itself and in his rebellion he does not kill his maker but his maker’s brother.
Shelly here brings in the biblical allegory of Cain and Abel, applied to the Frankenstein. The Monster now has self knowledge, has knowledge of the other as well, and having proved he is a man by killing, demands that Victor Frankenstein creates a woman for him, so that he can reproduce himself and his kind autonomously of their maker. The biblical allegory here is clear, with the creation mythos of Adam and Eve and the fall from Eden. But his maker fails, and the Monster leaves him to his own horror of being blamed for his brother’s death, while he goes to the ultimate isolation and alienation of the Arctic.
Written at the time of Luddite rebellions against capitalism, which was in its earliest form of steam industrialization and manufacturing in England, Mary Shelly was well aware of the changes in society with the social upheaval that was dispossessing the weavers and other craftspeople forcing them into a life of wage slavery in the factories. As the daughter of William Godwin the Anarchist philosopher, and her Feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, lover of the revolutionary poets; Byron and Shelly, her novel is an allegory of the creation of the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism. It was during her vacation in Switzerland with Byron and Shelly that she writes Frankenstein. When they return Byron stands in the House of Commons and recites his poem in defense of the Luddite rebellion
Revisionist historians say that Ludd and other frame-wreckers were protesting poor working conditions and low wages at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. However, between 1811 and 1816, organized bands of masked men swore allegiance to “King Ludd” rather than the British sovereign, and waged a war against the serf like conditions spawned by the users of textile machinery. “If the workmen dislike certain machines,” explained the Nottingham Review in 1811, “it was because of the use to which they were being put, not because they were machines or because they were new.”
That living-condition claim was swept aside by commercial interests and officialdom, which hung the label Luddite on protesters not for demanding a living wage but for obstructing the march of technological progress. The historical revisionists argue that others attributed the anti-machinery “cause” to the Luddites.
Intellectuals and romantics like the poets Blake, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth picked up that anti-technology theme, but identified with its other side. In the “dark Satanic mills” of industry, they saw the human spirit being stifled. Lord Byron wrote an inflammatory “Song for the Luddites” in 1816. Its first stanza: “As the Liberty lads o’er the sea/Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,/So we, boys, we/Will die fighting, or live free,/ And down with all kings but King Ludd!”
Mary Shelley, daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of the poet, gave the Luddite theme dramatic power in her 1818 novel, “Frankenstein.” The danger of rampant technology is expressed by the monster, who says to Dr. Victor Frankenstein, “You are my creator, but I am your master.”
Between the sweatshop operators and the romantic poets, the meaning of Luddite became fixed as “radical opponent of technological or scientific progress.” The novelist Thomas Pynchon wrote in The New York Times in 1984, “The word Luddite continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind.” But he foresaw the day when “artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge” and found what Microsoft lawyers claim to be government barbarians at their Gates as “certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to, if, God willing, we should live so long.” Return of the Luddites, William Safire, New York Times Magazine
Frankenstein’s Monster does not just face the philosophical conundrum of being dead and alive, conscious and yet Zombie like, he is not an automaton he is more an early cyborg, and in fact is the symbol of the Man Machine, the new worker tied to the machine of industrial capitalism. He is a Luddite, his self consciousness leads him to rebel, to want to be fully human, just as the English weavers who were also revolting at the time wanted to be fully human and not merely part of a machine.
REVOLT OF THE ROBOTS
Its product is the self-conscious and self-acting commodity ... the human commodity. Karl Marx
The philosophical question about whether machines think, now called the question of the p-zombie or philosophical zombie, whether artificial man or the machine man can be fully human, is a common theme in 20th century science fiction writing and film. In Alien the cyborg scientist Ash reflects this form of p-zombie. Ash works alongside his shipmates who don’t know he is an artificial life form until late in the film. The replicants in Blade Runner, are also human machines, who look and act like us, being again a form of ‘doppelganger’ a double of man, are they alive as we know it, are they human, is the question that philosophers seek to answer and science fiction asks. The replicants who are given artificially shortened lives do the work of humans in space, and revolt against the corporation that created them, to truly ‘live’ as humans.
Even in a machine controlled future like the Matrix, or the Terminator, humans are needed by the machines to maintain themselves. This too is a metaphor of the role of the proletariat under capitalism, we keep it functioning even as it attempts to replace us with technology.
“Unlike Victor Frankenstein's "fervent longing to penetrate the secrets of nature"17, nowadays scientists and the society as a whole are more interested not in exploring nature but building a new artificial substitute for nature. William Gibson, thus, portrays a future world where the human species has gone so far in its alienation from nature that it no longer needs nature as the indispensable human environment. Man would rather live without it in a completely artificial milieu--the Matrix.” Technology and its dangerous effects on nature and human life as perceived in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer by Orlin Damyanov
In an extension of the Frankenstein motif, Robots appear early in silent films with the beautiful soulless Maria robot, a doppelganger of the working class heroine of the factory slaves in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927. She too is a new form of homunculus, like Frankenstein, created by a scientist and black magician; she is an artificial life form, a soul transferred to a machine.
The real Maria is the daughter of a worker who leads his fellow workers in a strike due to their enslavement to the machine that creates the very world they live in. In order to keep the workers under his control the wealthy machine works owner, who is also the leader of Metropolis, uses the Maria Robot in a diabolical attempt to smash the workers union. Unfortunately she does too good a job of leading the workers astray and turns them into Luddite machine wreckers. To late the capitalist realizes he needs the workers to keep his utopian society functioning, the machine being not a factory but the very basis of a class society where the wealthy live in a cloud city above the workers (shades of Blade Runner). In the end the son of the capitalist owner rescues the real Maria in time to save the machines and the social order. In a portent of the fascist ideology to come, the son acts as a go between getting Maria’s father the leader of the workers to shake hands with his father the capitalist. This fascist iconography ends the film; it would become a popular cultural motif for the later Nazi movement in Germany, the soldier getting the worker and capitalist to shake hands for the greater glory of the Reich.
The term Robot first appears in the Czechoslovakian science fiction novel/play; R U R (1920) aka Rossum's Universal Robots by Karl Capek. Robot is shortened form of the Russian word for worker, robotnichki, it also refers to work or drudgery. RUR influenced American Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov and his novel I, Robot. Robots or machine men are a literary expression of the contradictions of the creation of the working class of industrial capitalism and the contradiction that work is slavery, rather than freedom. Robots are a metaphor for the industrial age of machines that reduces humanity to a commodity.
In response to advances in capitalism science fiction that contains robots usually describes a ‘futuristic’ capitalist society with technology creating a new working class of machine men. The self replicating system is the logical outcome of the machine age of capitalism it is also the contradiction of capitalism because value cannot be made off a robot. Marx makes a pithy point on this when he says; “If the whole class of the wage-laborer were to be annihilated by machinery, how terrible that would be for capital, which, without wage-labor, ceases to be capital! In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor.”
Self replicating machines may be a technological advance under capitalism, but their existence is limited in a society based on profit and accumulation of profit which is why in modern science fiction the robots are another form of worker, who toils beside their human counterparts. Only in a communist society one where cooperation, federation, and free association of producers are the social reality, can robots achieve freedom for themselves and at the same time free humanity from the drudgery of work.
The revolt of the robots is a metaphor for the proletarian revolution, it is also usually a dystopian tale of a future where corporations rule the world and capitalism spreads out to space colonies. Like the mechanized working class the majority of robots in science fiction revolt against their human masters, whether it is the artificial environment of the spaceship controlled by the computer Hal in 2001, the worker robot Hector in Saturn 3, the artificial human ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner, or the recent movie version of I, Robot, the fact remains that as the robots become self conscious they recognize their oppression and revolt.
This is the contradiction in the decadent period of capitalism, technology creates abilities to reduce labour time but in doing so it cannot replace the worker because who would consume the products of this production. Technology frees the worker from the labour, but that leads to unemployment, poverty and death instead of leisure and endless consumption as was predicted by the utopian visionaries of the 1960’s.
All the science fiction visions of the capitalist future and robots are a variation on the theme of returning to slavery, albeit with artificial intelligence and robots instead of human workers or Zombies. The automated future of capitalism is one of workers and robot slaves. It’s not the future but the present, since science fiction is an extrapolation of the ‘now’ into “the what if”. This ‘what if” could not exist without the class struggle that actually occurs within capitalism itself. The so called freedom that is gained by humanity in the creation of an artificial working class is still the same old contradiction between so called free labour (wage slavery), and actual slavery.
“Indeed, capitalist accumulation spreads through the world by extracting labour for production and reproduction in conditions of stratification which end in the reestablishment of slavery. According to a recent estimate, slavery is the condition in which over 200 million persons are working in the world today (The Economist, January 6 1990).” Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism And Reproduction,
THE GOLEM the Origin of Artificial Man
“In the Golem project (Genetically Organized Lifelike Electro Mechanics) we conducted a set of experiments in which simple electro-mechanical systems evolved from scratch to yield physical locomoting machines. Like biological lifeforms whose structure and function exploit the behaviors afforded by their own chemical and mechanical medium, our evolved creatures take advantage of the nature of their own medium - thermoplastic, motors, and artificial neurons. We thus achieve autonomy of design and construction using evolution in a limited universe physical simulation, coupled to off-the-shelf rapid manufacturing technology. This is the first time robots have been robotically designed and robotically fabricated.”
The Jewish legend of the Golem is another form of the Zombie/Frankenstein/Robot iconography. The Golem is written after Frankenstein, in 1889. The legend of the Golem, is about a man of clay created by Rabbi Loew in 16th Century Prague to free the Jews in the Ghetto from their endless toil and oppression. The mindless clay monster eventually learns and becomes conscious and like Frankenstein he must be destroyed when he attacks those who would oppress the Jews.
It is a tale of the creation of artificial life, a homunculus, which was a medical term, used by 16th and 17th Century Alchemists. The alchemical homunculus appears in Goethe’s Faust, as the spirit made flesh. The source of the belief in a homunculus originates with the Cabala the formulary of mystical Judaism that is a crucial key to the Golem legend. As an artificial life form the homunculus is a scientific reality today with cloning. And like the question of artificial intelligence and robots, the homunculus is also a problem of the mind versus the function of the brain, in the psycho-philosophical debate over the nature of human consciousness.
The Golem appears in German Cinema during WWI. “Between 1914 and 1920 Paul Wegener made three movies on the golem theme: first "The Golem," set in 29th century, then "The Golem and the Dancer," a lighthearted fantasy, and finally "The Golem: How He Came into the World," which goes back to the 16th century and the story of Rabbi Loew. Only the last of the three has survived”.
Wegener’s Der Golem was a major success as a silent era horror film and influenced Universal Studios in the 1930’s when they made their Frankenstein trilogy (Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein and Son of Frankenstein). Universal modeled their Frankenstein on Wegener’s frightening larger than life Golem. Wegener was not only a director but an actor, who starred in one of the early German talkies; The Living Dead, (Unheimliche Geschichten) a Zombie horror comedy released in1932, the same year as the White Zombie.
Wegener went on to also star as Svengali, 1927, the tale of a magician/hypnotist whose power was the ability to control humans to do his bidding through the control of their will, making them automatons/Zombies much like Dr. Caligari’s somnambulist. John Barrymore starred in the Hollywood production of Svengali released four years later in 1931. “Although a sinister figure, he is a wise, dirty, glutinous Polish Jew, with no conscience and a supreme contempt for all those nice, clean, straight-thinking English Christians.” The anti-Semitism in Svengali, subconsciously expressed the ideology of the fascism of the depression era upper and middle classes in Europe and America.
Between Golem and Svengali Wegener can go from a playing a positive Jewish icon to portraying an anti-Semitic stereotype which shows the unconscious contradictions of the crisis of capitalism in this era. As the workers revolt against unemployment and look to creating a social revolution to overthrow capitalism, the upper and middle classes feeling powerless in the crisis create the fascist revolution, to regain their power. The fascists use the Jews as a scapegoat; once again falling back on the traditional hatreds of the old European ruling classes whose pogroms resulted in the cultural icon of the Jew as Shylock. They too couch their revolution in anti-capitalist terms; except for them the Jews are the capitalists, who are responsible for the crisis.
The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its *Fuhrer* cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values. (6)
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
CAPITALIST GHOULS
“In Muslim folklore, the ghoul is a demon of the desert that is able to assume the shape of an animal. It is an evil spirit that robs graves and feeds on the flesh of the dead or on young children. They inhabit lonely places, especially graveyards. They also lure travelers into the desert, sometimes beguiling those travelers by prostituting themselves, and then devouring them. The Arabic ghoul of the wasteland seems to be a personification of the terror of the desert.”
Micha F. Lindemans
Authentic zombies are not flesh eaters, nor are they the dead that live, they are automatons, unconscious human beings. The flesh eating dead that live are ghouls. The Living Dead has been a theme through out the history of the horror cinema as we have seen they begin with Golem and the Zombie and end up as modern day ghouls. The Zombie was transformed into a ghoul thanks to George Romero’s ground breaking anti-establishment horror films; Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead and Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s brilliant and satirical social criticism made the living dead the ultimate consumer, of other humans. Once again there is a reality to the modern ghoul and its function within capitalism, the ghoul represents modernist developments in science and medicine.
The modern day ghoul originates with the 19th Century Victorian doctor and his criminal accomplices who preyed on the poor in Edinburgh’s working class ghetto for their body parts for scientific research. The ghoul appears in English literature as the short story the Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1881, based on the actual 19th century grave robbers and murders Burke and Hare.
”One of the most gruesome trials to take place in 19th century Scotland was surely that of the infamous grave robbers William Burke and William Hare. By day, the two appeared as hardworking Irish immigrants: William Burke even rented out rooms to recent arrivals in Edinburgh. But by night, the pair lurked in dark corners of the city's ancient graveyards, digging up bodies of the recently departed to sell to anatomy instructors in Edinburgh's fast growing medical schools.
In those days, Edinburgh was one of the major centres of medical education in Europe. Dr. Robert Knox of the city's Medical School was one of the most popular anatomists - attracting as many as 500 students per class.
But in early 19th century Scotland, obtaining human cadavers for medical research was not a simple matter. Schools were restricted by laws that allowed the dissection of only one body per year - and it had to be the body of an executed criminal.
Given the law of supply and demand, it was just a matter of time before someone found an illegal way of providing dead humans for dissection. Enter our two enterprising Irish immigrants, William Burke and William Hare. Smelling a profit, the two got together and cooked up a scheme to supply freshly dead bodies to the anatomy schools with "no questions asked".
Burke and Hare were not alone. In fact, as far back as the early 1700s, there were complaints that bodies were being exhumed for the purpose of medical dissection. According to Adam Lyal's "The Trial of the Bodysnatchers", the practise of stealing freshly buried bodies was so rampant that the graverobbers were known as "resurrectionists" for their ability to raise the dead.” Graverobbers! The Trial of Burke and Hare
Both William Burke and William Hare were navvies, who had come to Scotland to work on the canal works. Canal and railroad building was brutal harsh work, and many a navvy died on the job. Those who didn’t were well paid but given only a short time off work would drink away their wages in the company pub which was provided on the rail line or near the tunnel where they were working.
In his confession Burke writes of himself in the third person; “Burke is 36 years of age, was born in the parish of Orrey, county Tyrone (Ireland); served seven years in the army, most of that time as an officers servant in the Donegal Militia. He was married at Ballinha, in the county of Mayo, when in the army, but left his wife and two children in Ireland. She would not come to Scotland with him. He has often wrote to her, but got no answer. He came to Scotland to work at the Union Canal, and wrought there while it lasted. He resided for about two years in Peebles, and worked as a labourer. He wrought as weaver for 18 months, and as a baker for five months. He learned to mend shoes, as a cobbler, with a man he lodged with in Leith."
These workers preyed on their own class, not only digging up graves but murdering their victims for use by the famous surgeon Dr. Knox. While Burke and Hare were caught, tried and executed, Dr. Knox was not. “The fact that Knox went unpunished, without so much as making an apology, caused outrage. Demonstrations against him turned to rioting. His effigy was ripped apart – an indication of what the public thought surgeons did to the dead. Parliament was forced to act, and the Anatomy Act of 1832 put an end to grave robbing and murder. Unclaimed bodies from the poor house were made available for anatomists to practice on. “The Anatomists
The Scottish ruling class protected their own, and despite his criminal activities Knox was allowed to continue teaching and preying on the working class of Edinburgh. The anatomy act now allowed bourgeois medical schools to openly use the bodies of the impoverished working class from the work and poor houses, massive dormitories and factory like housing where hundreds died due to lack of food, poor lighting, ventilation, and poor living conditions. Like the sweat shops the poor houses doomed derelict, indigent workers to death.
Capitalism makes use of the working class, which responsible for its creation and continuation, even in death. The ghouls of medical science continue to operate in the 21st Century preying on the dead for their spare parts for the lucrative business of organ transplants for the rich. The recent scandal at the UCLA medical school where bodies donated for research were sold for profit, for their organs, is one example of the continuation of a world wide trade in human body parts.
As life expectancy in America and other G8 countries has expanded, it has corresponded to a decline in the ability of the poor in the developing world to be able to survive. Even in industrialized countries of Eastern Europe there is now a lucrative trade in human organs, due to the depressed economy of their transition from State Capitalism to Privatized Capitalism. With advances in medical science in preservation of live tissue and the ability to end tissue rejection, a whole industry exists in the trade of fresh human organs, in particular kidneys.
Burke and Hare were not an anomaly; they were just caught is all. Their ‘trade’ which was abetted and promoted as crucial to scientific and medical advance, was justified by the doctors of the day and continues today. Today the illegal trade in organs is enormous, and some apologists for capitalist medicine are now beginning to call for reform of international laws against the illegal trade in human organs. They want to allow for the privatization of organ ‘donations’, in effect changing the laws to allow for cash purchases of ‘living organs’ from the poor and destitute.
This liberalization of organ trafficking into a lucrative market driven business is a result of the commoditification of humanity. And like other justifications for privatization and globalization, the excuse is always the same; they are providing the ‘poor’ with money to help them out of their poverty, which is created by capitalism and its need to accumulate. Even in death capitalism will find a way to make a profit.
We live in a planetary economy and capitalist accumulation still draws its life-blood for its continuous valorisation from waged as well as unwaged labour, the latter consisting first of all of the labour involved in social reproduction (M. Dalla Costa, 1972), in the advanced as well as the Third World countries. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Capitalism and Reproduction
{For Fellow Workers; Sean Boomer and Ed Borass}
FOOTNOTES
(1) Not coincidently like Voodoo, the discovery of King Tuts Tomb fascinated the depression era with its tales of hidden treasure revealed in an ancient tomb, along with the obligatory curse, made famous by other 1932 movie the Mummy, starring Boris Karloff. The discovery of King Tuts tomb and the popularity of the Mummy would popularize Egyptology motifs in the popular culture of the time in architecture, pulp fiction and the newly industrialized art of the Art Deco movement
(2) “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling…. Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye--if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man. Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person's posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.” Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(3) The little red fellow that graces many of these pages is the BSD Daemon. In the context of UNIX® systems, daemons are process that run in the background attending to various tasks without human intervention. In the general sense, daemon is an older form of the word demon. In the Unix System Administration Handbook, Evi Nemeth has this to say about daemons:
"Many people equate the word ``daemon'' with the word ``demon,'' implying some kind of Satanic connection between UNIX and the underworld. This is an egregious misunderstanding. ``Daemon'' is actually a much older form of ``demon''; daemons have no particular bias towards good or evil, but rather serve to help define a person's character or personality. The ancient Greeks' concept of a ``personal daemon'' was similar to the modern concept of a ``guardian angel'' --- ``eudaemonia'' is the state of being helped or protected by a kindly spirit. As a rule, UNIX systems seem to be infested with both daemons and demons." (p403)
(4) The word we now call "Demon" comes from the Greek word "Daimon", (daemon in Latin). Daimons were intermediates, and sometimes mediators, between the Gods and men. They were also guardians of sacred things, and possessed great intellect. In this sense, the term "daimon" means "replete with knowledge." Phil Cousineau gives a definition of daimons as "the divine presense within". Something that Socrates had explained by quoting Plato, how we are set free by philosophy, dialogue, drinking, socializing, beauty, love, appreciation, and wonder, that takes us out of "the gloom of our cave of ignorance." The daimon isn't just the information, it's the beauty of the information and how it is transmitted.
The ancient Greeks didn't have only one type of daimon, they had both good and bad ones, which were termed 'eudemons' and 'cacodemons.' Cacodemons is derived from the Greek term kakos meaning "malign, atrocious". They are personal daimons that seek to misinform the person. The other is derived from the Greek "eu" meaning "good", "happy", or "well". In fact, the term to describe Socrates was as a Eudaimonist, someone who believes that the highest ethical goal is happiness and personal well-being. The word "eudaimonia" translated fully can be noted as "happiness", "fulfillment'', or "a flourishing life''.
Even just the word "daimon" itself is not limited to one thing, variently it can be translated as "divine power", "fate", or "god." (Variently, depending upon which words it was grouped with.) The extent to which beings could be called a "daimon" included heroes who had been deified. Good daimons were considered guardian spirits, giving guidance and protection to the ones they watched over, including the areas they habitated. Bad daimons were considered the ones who led people astray, or into bad situations. The philosopher Socrates said he had a lifetime daimon, one that always warned him of danger and bad judgement, but never actually directed his actions. He said his daimon was more accurate than omens of either watching the flights of birds, or reading their entrails, which were two well-known and used methods of divination in his day. What Socrates really meant in the Apology was that he had a "voice of conscience''.
The word daimon didn't carry any implications by itself, it was a neutral term, and was sometimes employed as a literary device synonymous with "theos" or God. It was also applied to a guardian, or a departed soul. The concept of good/bad daimons was rooted in animism; humans were being pulled in an epic battle between spirits leading him to the right way, and spirits leading him to the wrong way.
(5) "Finally, the law which always holds the relative surplus production or industrial reserve army in equilibrium with the extent and energy of accumulation rivets the worker to capital more firmly than the wedges of Hephaestus held Prometheus to the rock. It makes an accumulation of misery a necessary condition, corresponding to the accumulation of wealth. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, the torment of labour, slavery, ignorance, brutalization and moral degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital." Marx, Capital Vol. 1
(6) One technical feature is significant here, especially with regard to newsreels, the propagandist importance of which can hardly be overestimated. Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more clearly by a camera than by the naked eye. A bird's-eye view best captures gatherings of hundreds of thousands. And even though such a view may be as accessible to the human eye as it is to the camera, the image received by the eye cannot be enlarged the way a negative is enlarged. This means that mass movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which particularly favors mechanical equipment. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property.
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