Political Economy Goes to the Movies

Satyananda J. Gabriel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351580908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Political Economy Goes to the Movies provides an introduction to political economy using a wide range of popular films and documentaries as the objects of analysis. The work helps readers to understand and analyze the economic and related political, cultural, and ecological relationships depicted in selected films. This is achieved through the lens of past and present economic theories and in the context of debates over the dynamic influence of economics on individual life chances.

Film may have more to teach us about the real world than the abstractions of certain economic theories. A world of income inequality, child labor in mills and mines, local rebellions against land seizures, and wars triggered by economic conflicts provide the context for many films mirroring real world events. Some films depict the interacting and intersecting political, economic, cultural, and ecological contexts within and between variant economic relationships, whereas other films show "catastrophes" such as economic depressions, disruptive social transitions, violent revolutions, and existential environmental degradation – a world in disequilibrium. Films allow us to see a panoply of human social relationships and related problems, even to explore cataclysmic moments in our species life, but not to necessarily see the why of these relationships and problems. Simultaneously, mainstream economics has severe constraints on what can be analyzed. Film exposes this weakness of the mainstream model. Twelve Years a Slave, Trumbo, The Big Short and others are analyzed for their realism by referencing documented historical social events, and behavioral economics provides further data for analyzing the realism of social interaction within the films.

Exploring events and contexts absent from the typical economics text or the basic level economics classes, this work is essential reading for students and scholars of political economy in both economics and politics departments, as well as those of pluralist economics and Marxist economics.

1 MARX, CRITICAL POLITICAL ECONOMY, AND CLASSICAL ECONOMICS

DOI: 10.4324/9781351580915-2

In the 1840s Europe was experiencing unrest. Revolutionary rhetoric was accelerating. Enter Karl Marx and his partner Friedrich Engels, twenty-somethings destined for intellectual immortality. The Young Marx (directed by Raoul Peck, co-written by Peck, Pascal Bonitzer, and Bertina Henrichs) is an exploration of the dynamic interaction of these young men, and their relationship with their intellectually engaged and politically progressive wives, and with various colleagues.

Perhaps the most important collaborative interaction explored in the film is that between the men, each other, and their wives, a collaborative circle unusual for the times. This exploration takes place in multiple and interacting contexts: absolute monarchs sending out agents to repress oppositional political movements, expulsions, exiles, and forced impoverishment (this was clearly a problem for the Marx family). It was a time of fierce theoretical conflicts between contending critical political economists, broken at times by concords and collaboration, between such men as Pierre Joseph Proudhon ((1840) 1993), Wilhelm Weitling, and Mikhail Bakunin. More than any other chapter, this one explores explicitly the first order impact of spreading critical political economy. This triggered harsh intervention of state apparatchiks to eliminate the threat to the status quo ante from criticisms of authority and public protests, no matter the human toll. The dualistic conceit of “good” versus “evil” from the authorities obstructed Marx’s theoretical productions and ultimately his freedom to live in Prussia and his family’s subsequent exile from France to Britain.

The counter-struggle against anti-capitalist protest movements included an effort to coopt Adam Smith and appropriate him as a leading advocate of capitalism. In particular, there was the mythologizing of Smith’s popular (and only once used by him) phrase “the invisible hand” which was interpreted as an argument for deregulated “free market” capitalism. This was quite self-serving for executives and owners of capitalist firms, including the booming textile mills and mines focused on in the next chapter. Adam Smith’s theoretical productions, like other theoretical productions, like film, are all the product of the social dynamics, social relationships, and cultural memes of the time and place where they are born. Adam Smith came to prominence during a time when mercantilism was the dominant economic form. In human developmental terms, capitalism was still a very young child, boisterous and on the verge of becoming a teenager. Marx, however, was dealing with a capitalism closer to his age or Engel’s age, not really mature, in any sense, but aggressive and self-regarding. Did Smith write in advocacy of capitalism, as most people believe in the current period, or write in opposition to mercantilism with capitalism as a foil or do both? And what is ultimately the relationship between the theoretical productions of Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx?

These theorists shared an understanding that the distribution of value/wealth was an important underpinning of society. They recognized an ongoing struggle over that value distribution. During Marx’s lifetime, this intellectual triumvirate would be joined by John Stuart Mill (Adam Smith died in 1790 and Ricardo died in 1823; Marx was the only survivor, so they are a triumvirate only as three interlaced theoretical frameworks). Mill also posited value/wealth distribution as a central economic process. All four theorists agreed that at the foundation of value was labor. Thus, all four had variant forms of a labor theory of value.

Rather than some anti-regulation meme, Smith countered the asymmetric market power of the oligopolistic/mercantilist norm of the 18th century underpinned by state-supported global merchanting firms, like the British East India Company, with powers to manipulate prices, exert market power over consumers and smaller-scale competitors, extract favorable contracts from manufacturers, and expand the hegemonic power of the home country, often by deploying officially sanctioned mercenaries. Thus, one can interpret Smith as more anti-mercantilist than pro-capitalist. His call for free markets was less a cry for releasing a nascent capitalist order from a then non-existent regulatory regime than for overturning the mercantilist order.

Marx, however, had more affinity for Smith than is typically recognized, even borrowing from his and David Ricardo’s labor theories of value. Both Marx and Smith were philosophers turned into political economists. Both were radical in the context of the societies they critiqued. Smith opposed mercantilism and the elite order upon which it existed. Marx described, analyzed, and critiqued the capitalist mode of production upon which a new industrial elite was growing. Neither of these progressives accepted the status quo. Nor did David Ricardo, whose opposition to the economic and political power of the landed elite put him squarely in the ranks of critical political economy. Again, context matters. There is and always has been a schism between critical and non-critical political economies.

The Young Marx explores the early efforts of Karl Marx (August Diehl) and Friedrich Engels (Stefan Konarski) to understand the dynamics of capitalism as a unique but expanding mode of production based on the exploitation of free wage labor and related value appropriation and distribution. Marx became a prominent figure in critical political economy. He learned from, celebrated, and critiqued classical political economists, most notably Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who shared with Marx a critique of their respective status quo antes and promotion of variant forms of a labor theory of value. He also critiqued other critical political economists, in particular Pierre Joseph Proudhon and Wilhelm Weitling.

The Young Marx artfully portrays multiple manifestations of Marx: the critical Marx was not the only Marx. Intellectually, Marx believed that there was a great deal to learn from Smith and Ricardo. Indeed, his labor theory of value was a modification of Smith and Ricardo’s labor theories of value, although constructed in support of different theoretical arguments. The entry point of Marx’s theoretical productions was a focus on the systematic exploitation of wage laborers and resultant social inequality. Marx went beyond critiquing others to forging a new theoretical framework based on value appropriation and distribution originating in a revolutionary new system of exploiting “voluntary” productive wage laborers and using their value creation as fuel for economic growth, capital accumulation, and the extraordinary growth in the wealth of an unproductive elite. In ontological terms, Marx rejected reductionist, static explanations of capitalism, no matter their paradigmatic origins, in favor of a dynamic view of capitalism. Marx’s writings imply multiple possible conditions of existence of capitalist exploitation (and other forms of exploitation) such that the U.K. version is not the only version of capitalism. Capitalist exploitation was a growing feature of Europe under different types of authoritarian rule, including both absolute and parliamentary monarchies, and a stew of other political formations. A thief can come in a tux, a leather vest, or a wool sweater but still be a thief. The idea that capitalist exploitation can appear cloaked in a wide range of conditions of existence belies the notion held by some political economists that capitalist exploitation requires democratic institutions or it will fail. That simply is not the history of capitalism. Marx challenges the reductionist view of capitalism early on. Historically, many countries provide evidence for variant forms of capitalism. In the current period, China provides the most dramatic and unambiguous evidence against the reductionist view that national, regional, and local democratic conditions are necessary for capitalism to exist and to thrive. We should not be surprised that during, before, and after Marx’s lifetime, there was abundant evidence of the existence and spread of capitalism in a wide variety of political, cultural, ecological, and economic processes and institutions. Just as a thief is a thief no matter their garb – the relevant definition has to do with stealing, not attire – the same is true for capitalism as an economic system. As long as there are free wage laborers voluntarily working for a capitalist individual or corporation and accepting the capitalist’s ownership of the products of their labor, we have an example of capitalism. The voluntary aspect of capitalist wage labor is often challenged by critical political economists. For example, Michael Perelman, in The Invention of Capitalism (2000), writes:

… the incontestable fact remains that most people in Britain did not enthusiastically engage in wage labor – at least so long as they had an alternative.

To make sure that people accepted wage labor, the classical political economists actively advocated measures to deprive people of their traditional means of support. The brutal acts associated with the process of stripping the majority of people of the means of producing for themselves might seem far removed from the laissez-faire reputation of classical political economy. In reality, the dispossession of the majority of small-scale producers and the construction of laissez-faire are closely connected, so much so that Marx … labeled this exploitation of the masses as “primitive accumulation.”

The very sound of the expression, primitive accumulation, drips with poignant echoes of human consequences.

(2)

The opening scene of The Young Marx exposes the detritus of the enclosure movement, echoing the brutality of that movement. The scene opens in a verdant forest. Sunlight streams through the trees. Birds are singing. It is early morning. The untended forest floor is littered with wet rotting leaves, broken branches, and twigs. The narrator, 26-year-old Karl Marx (August Diehl), is reading from an article he has written for the Rheinische Zeitung, a collectively produced newspaper for which Marx is a popular contributor and editor. Reading out loud to his colleagues, “To gather greenwood one must rip it violently from the living tree.” Such an act would be a violation of nature. As Marx continues reading the visual turns to impoverished people: homeless women, men, and children in unwashed, bedraggled clothing. They are gathering deadwood, not living branches, to use for firewood. Their hands, fingernails, and faces are caked with dirt. They are hungry and desperate. They have no source of income or livelihood, save for what little they can gather. These are the flotsam and jetsam of rural life in a changing countryside where formerly common lands were now verboten to former tenants.

“Yet gathering deadwood removes nothing from the property. The deadwood is already separated from the trees, yet is considered property. Despite this essential difference, you call both acts theft and punish them as such.” Harvesting deadwood is as much a crime as ripping branches from a living tree. Despite the passivity of their gatherings, these homeless peasants are now violators. This was not always “private” land. The enclosure movement was a centuries-long intervention by manor lords, the church, and the monarchical state that transformed tenant farmland and common use land (“the commons”) into private, exclusionary land, the use rights for which belonged solely to the manor lord. The enclosure movement ripped away traditional use rights of tenant farmers forcing many into vagrancy and illicit gathering. They lost familial use rights that served as a basic condition of family life for many generations. Tenant farmers expelled from the manors were transformed into a human version of deadwood. In a sense, these humans had long been racialized into a caste from whence it was assumed that they could never escape, never transcend.

One of the women feels the ground vibrating and hears the thudding of hooves approaching. She shifts from gathering to panicking. Where to run? Where to hide? They’re coming for us! Mounted police in top hats come galloping through the forest, armed with wooden truncheons and swords. They appear eager to carry out their task of protecting this once common land from tenant farmers turned landless vagrants. As they come upon the scattering peasants, a woman screams as she is hit with a truncheon. Women with small children try to shield them from the blows. A man is struck by a sword; yet, another is slammed into a tree. The landless are treated as expendable rubbish, as if their lives do not matter. And from the standpoint of the policemen and the manor lords, these vagrants do not matter. The scene ends with some vagrants captured, many on the ground. The last peasant observed in the scene lies next to a rotting, diseased tree. Dead eyes look out at nothingness.

Marx continues: “You have erased the difference between theft and gathering. But you are wrong to believe it is in your interest. The people see the punishment but not the crime.”

Marx focused on the dialectic between exploitation by an elite and those exploited by the elite. The conditions for the existence of exploitation included dispossession of farmers, artisans, and other productive laborers from the means of production, such as described above. Marx’s moral outrage at official violence, by the government or sanctioned by the government, against the dispossessed leads him to conclude that a revolution must come, that people can only take so much abuse. Marx recognized the pitiable condition of the landless, as much as he recognized the plight of ordinary wage laborers.

According to Perelman, classical political economists laid out the path for rural communities to make the transition to capitalism by advocating laws and restrictions that made traditional occupations in rural communities less viable. The purpose was to coerce people into participating in capitalist wage labor markets, abandoning both independent production models, e.g., productive self-employment or partnerships of equals, and tenant farming. The enclosure movement was just one aspect of this strategy deemed a requirement for more efficient wealth creation. In the utopia of early classical political economy, the poor would work every hour of the day for the owners of capital. In addition, workers were subjected to harsh disciplinary command structures within the work sphere supposedly to create a new disciplined and civilized labor force, thereby stamping out the so-called “sloth and indolence.” As Perelman (2000, 15) goes on to note:

…[C]apital required these measures to conquer the household economy in order to be able to extract a greater mass of surplus value. In fact, almost everyone close to the process of primitive accumulation, whether a friend or foe of labor, agreed with Charles Hall’s ((1805)1965, 144) verdict that ‘if they were not poor they would not submit to employments’ – at least so long as their remuneration were held low enough to create substantial profits.

The film shifts to the room where Marx is facing his colleagues who collectively publish the Rheinische Zeitung, the paper for which the article is to be published. It is April of 1843 in a building in Cologne, Prussia. There is an all too typical dispute between Marx and his colleagues, particularly those who believe his writing to be so incendiary as to likely trigger a crackdown by the Prussian state. In a few moments, Marx and his colleagues will experience the beginning of that crackdown. They will be carted off to jail for subversive activities against the Prussian crown.

But before the police can get into the building to carry out the arrests, Marx, fully aware that the police are on their way, closes out his article with the following prophecy related to the exper...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Marx, critical political economy, and classical economics
• 2 Industrial revolution: mills, mines
• 3 300 years enslaved
• 4 Colonialism: the bloodied invisible hand
• 5 Internal colonialism: the Milagro Beanfield War
• 6 Greasing the gears: oil and natural gas
• 7 Economic + ecological crisis: metabolic rift
• 8 Financial crises, derivatives, and the market for corporate control
• Filmography
• Index