Quoting Scripture to support organized labour

From the something-you-don’t-see-every-day files

Having recently read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and blogged about its images of corporate monstrosity, I have worked to identify some of the novel’s other related textual details and references. One reference has proven especially tricky to source – and especially rewarding. In the last scene in which Tom Joad appears, he talks with his Ma about his plans for the future. Tom hints at – but stops short of spelling out – his plans for organizing workers: “why we can’t do that all over. … All work together for our own thing – all farm our own lan’.” (536). Tom also reflects on the lapsed Reverend Casy, whose loss Tom laments, and from whose wisdom he works out his plans. Casy’s wisdom, throughout the novel, is consistently critical, and is crystallized in Tom’s recollection here, via a specific biblical allusion:

Tom went on, “He [Casy] spouted out some Scripture once, an’ it didn’ soun’ like no hell-fire Scripture. He tol’ it twicet, an’ I remember it. Says it’s from the Preacher.”
“How’s it go, Tom?”
“Goes, ‘Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, the one will lif’ up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.’ That’s part of her.”
“Go on,” Ma said. “Go on, Tom.”
“Jus’ a little bit more. ‘Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him, and a three-fold cord is not quickly broken.’”
“An’ that’s Scripture?”
“Casy said it was. Called it the Preacher.” (535-36)

In this exchange, Steinbeck frames a resonant Biblical quotation in a curiously coded gesture: he doesn’t clearly cite the text’s source, he just alludes to it (who is “the Preacher”?); he also repeats this allusion, and has Ma doubt the veracity of the source: “An’ that’s Scripture?” The exchange invites – or provokes – the reader to identify the biblical excerpt in question, given here as if it were both common knowledge, via the folksy figure of “the Preacher,” and hidden wisdom: “that’s Scripture?”

It is Scripture, of course, quoted almost verbatim from the King James version of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: chapter 4, verses 9 to 12. Chapter 4 is a short chapter of meditations on work and hubris, humility and cooperation – and it opens with this suggestive contextualization: “Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun.” According to the way verses 4-9 are placed and discussed in the novel, Steinbeck makes it abundantly clear who the oppressors are.

Language: what’s got you covered

So in this passage we encounter one of the most popular and widely taught American novels quoting Scripture to support organized labour, thereby suggesting labour’s legitimacy in Christian teaching and theology. Perhaps symptomatically, a Google search for biblical allusions and quotations in The Grapes of Wrath nowhere includes this rather remarkable detail. (I don’t think it made it into the 1940 film adaptation, either.) I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a conspiracy – and there is no doubt an extensive research literature documenting the novel’s biblical intertexts – but the omission of this detail (which is important for the novel not only thematically but structurally) from readily available public Internet sources does seem a conspicuous absence.

I should add, too, that – as everybody knows – Scripture is promiscuously available to furnish quotations that support or condemn any number of social practices, as dramatized in a scene from the West Wing TV series that has gone viral. It may simply be valuable to recognize here a biblical passage that features significantly in a canonical American novel, and that lends organized labour some authoritative cultural support from an unexpected quarter, in the plain truth it speaks about the social and economic benefits of organizing, which economic studies confirm and which working people everywhere can recognize.

Works Cited
The New Oxford Annotated Bible. New Revised Standard Version. Ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath (1939). New York: Penguin, 1976.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership: not in Canada’s interests

As Ottawa trade expert Peter Clark observes of the Harper government’s neoliberal agenda, when it comes to international trade – in CETA, FIPPA, and the TPP – “everything is on the table” (69, my emphasis).

Clark has posted a detailed, plain-speaking, and highly critical analysis of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a USA-led, Pacific-rim trade negotiation to which Canada has been admitted … as a “second-tier” participant with no say in whatever the deal ends up demanding. A self-professed advocate of free trade, Clark nevertheless roundly criticizes the TPP here, mainly for its considerable imbalance – in favour of interests that are not Canada’s own (24).

In trade agreements, the devil is always in the details – and when it comes to the TPP, the devils travel in packs.

The TPP has been widely criticized by copyright experts (like Michael Geist) for leaked draft chapters concerning its intellectual property regulations: “The TPP could result in extra-territorial application of U.S. laws, particularly in the Intellectual Property area, including criminalization of non-commercial infringement” (Clark 26). The TPP has also been criticized for its extreme and anti-democratic but all too typical secrecy, and for the uncertainty over what exactly Canada stands to gain at the table here – relative to what it stands to lose.

The TPP is not all about sandals, diapers, detergents and cucumbers. In some ways it is about how we live, our healthcare, access to medicare and our way of life. It is about how we preserve our heritage and culture. And it is about how those whose ideas shape so many things are properly compensated for their achievements. … At this point, participation in the TPP raises more questions for Canada than it answers. As noted, with Japan as a participant there could be real gains. Without it, TPP as currently envisaged would more likely be a gift to Washington with benefits to Canada being marginal and illusory. Fortunately for Canada, Trade Minister Ed Fast has made it clear that Canada will not accept bad or unbalanced trade deals. Break a leg, Minister. (13, 18, my emphasis)

Critiques aside, there are a number of resources to take action against the TPP. There’s a Facebook Stop the TPPA page, and the Stop The Trap website, which focuses on the TPP’s copyright chapters, features a petition that now shows over 120,000 signatures.

As Canada’s neoliberal government ramps up its ecologically hazardous sell-out of Canadian resources, its Orwellian rewriting of Canadian history, its systematic attack on working people, and its dismantling of Canadian sovereignty, Canadians need to do all we can to send the message to Parliament that these are massive political risks it takes at the price, ultimately, of its own credibility and power to govern.

Open letter to #HOC International Trade Committee: The #FIPA Canada-China trade deal needs study and debate

To: House of Commons International Trade Committee – Rob Merrifield (rob.merrifield@parl.gc.ca), Ron Cannan (ron.cannan@parl.gc.ca), Russ Hiebert (russ.hiebert@parl.gc.ca), Ed Holder (ed.holder@parl.gc.ca), Gerald Keddy (gerald.keddy@parl.gc.ca), Bev Shipley (bev.shipley@parl.gc.ca), Devinder Shory (devinder.shory@parl.gc.ca)

Subject: Please support MP Don Davies’ motion to study and debate the Canada-China FIPA treaty

Dear Members of the House of Commons International Trade Committee,

This Thursday, October 25th, NDP International Trade Critic Don Davies will put forward an important motion to conduct a full study of the Canada-China FIPA trade treaty, and to call for postponing its ratification until it gets proper study and parliamentary debate. I am writing to ask you to support that motion.

I understand the House has been debating a trade deal with Panama, worth $213 million, since the spring. This FIPA treaty, worth an estimated $64 billion and to be in force for decades, demands study and debate in its own right.[1] FIPA could compromise the Canadian government’s ability to set policies in the public interest; it exposes taxpayers to expensive litigation and damages; and international investment treaty expert Gus Van Harten suggests that it may even be unconstitutional.[2] A recent Angus-Reid poll shows three of four Canadians oppose foreign governmental control of our resources.[3]

I urge you to support Mr. Davies’ motion, in the interests of Canadian democracy and resource sovereignty.

Thank you for considering this encouragement from a concerned citizen.

Sincerely, [YT]

References:

[1] May, Elizabeth. “The threat to Canada’s sovereignty – what we are giving to China.” Island Tides. 18 Oct. 2012. Web.

[2] Van Harten, Gus. “Canada-China FIPPA agreement may be unconstitutional, treaty law expert says.” Vancouver Observer 17 Oct. 2012. Web.

[3] Beers, David. “Three of four Canadians against ceding control of resources to foreign governments: poll.” The Hook 20 Oct. 2012. Web.

(Thanks to Thomas Mulcair for today’s #FIPA update e-mail, from which I’ve adapted some wording here.)

Open letter to my MP about #FIPA, the un-debated Canada-China trade deal

This is the e-mail I sent to my MP this week about the imminent #FIPA (or #FIPPA) trade pact the government plans to pass by November 1. I have adapted some of the text from a form letter provided by the Council of Canadians.

Subject: Please push for debate on Canada-China corporate rights pact (FIPA)

Dear [MP],
I am opposed to the Canada-China Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA). These investment agreements are nothing but corporate rights pacts that put public policy at risk from costly, secretive lawsuits. They undermine democracy. And the particular interests of parties to this deal stand to gravely extend the corporate extraction industry’s environmental harms too.
At the very least, Parliament should have the opportunity to debate and make changes to the treaty, or to eventually reject it if MPs determine it is not in Canada’s best interests.
Australia has discontinued the practice of including investor protection dispute mechanisms in trade deals like this; that is an approach Canada should consider. (Ideally, I would like to see a plebiscite mechanism implemented to debate and publicly ratify deals like this, but Canada at present is far from an ideal democracy.)
I look forward to your response and thank you for your hard work on behalf of our riding.

Sincerely,
- [YT]

The #FIPA deal compromises Canadian democracy and resource sovereignty, and is arguably unconstitutional. Yet it has received very little media attention, will commit Canada to at least fifteen years, and stands to pass entirely without debate in little over a week. As Elizabeth May writes:

the House has been debating C-42, the Canada-Panama trade agreement since last spring (total volume of trade $213 million.) and we had six days debate in the House and 6 days in Committee before passing C-23, the Canada-Jordan trade agreement (volume of trade $90 million.) This sweeping deal with China is not due for a single hour of debate before passage (trade volume $64 billion.)

If you are concerned – alarmed – about this trade treaty, write to your MP to demand the Opposition make it a debate topic on Opposition Day. There’s also a petition you can sign – as nearly 50,000 Canadians already have done.
Trade deals like this clearly show what Chris Hedges calls “the hollowness of electoral politics”: the neoliberal governments of the (over)developed world today act less to serve and protect the public interest than to facilitate the extractions and exploitations of multinational corporations, the imperial powers that have colonized us. We need to look as closely at trade treaties as we look at formal legislation, as more and more machinations of ruling power retreat into their Byzantine shadows.

For Labour Day: diagnoses of neoliberalism

To observe Labour Day at a time when labour is being aggressively demonized by business and its political enablers, I’ll share this shrewd and concise diagnosis of neoliberalism, and its core contradiction, by David Harvey:

To guard against their greatest fears––fascism, communism, socialism, authoritarian populism, and even majority rule––the neoliberals have to put strong limits on democratic governance, relying instead upon undemocratic and unaccountable institutions (such as the Federal Reserve or the IMF) to make key decisions. This creates the paradox of intense state interventions and government by elites and ‘experts’ in a world where the state is supposed not to be interventionist. [...] Faced with social movements that seek collective interventions, therefore, the neoliberal state is itself forced to intervene, sometimes repressively, thus denying the very freedoms it is supposed to uphold. (A Brief History of Neoliberalism [2007], 69-70)

While I’m at it, I’ll share Roseanne’s diagnosis too:

I’m pleased to say I’m indebted to student work for directing me to these instructive illuminations.

Casino capital’s frontier forays

Discussion with students in this term’s grad course on theory has been educational for instructor and students alike: for the former, in developing a critical vocabulary for contemporary capitalism that foregrounds its postcolonial contexts.

1. Frontiers and futures
In discussing the documentary The Corporation, two students wrote:

As opposed to traditional colonialism … corporate colonizers no longer require the local population to give up their beliefs in order to change their loyalty. They simply have to spend their dollars, pesos, euros etc., and with no value system outside of a growing bottom line, corporations are free to change their identity to adapt to the culture and beliefs of any market. … advancing capitalism pays a special eye to frontier thought, behaviour, and organization as these spaces create new areas to be exploited and appropriated by the system. (my emphasis)

In comparing corporate business to colonialism, the students referred to the work of Andrew Potter, who with Joseph Heath wrote The Rebel Sell, which investigates the frontier prospecting of capitalism, its ability to commoditize even the most resistant counter-cultural forms (e.g. Adbusters): “there is, even amongst the most acute critics of consumerism, a deep-seated misunderstanding of the forces that drive consumerism. Most people think it’s driven by advertising and the corporations … In actual fact it’s driven by competitive consumption amongst consumers.” (Potter qtd. in MacLean)

Potter and Heath’s argument relates to Fisher’s idea of SF capital, mentioned in my last post, in which futuristic speculation in culture becomes a renewable resource for economic exploitation by capital. But if the “rebel sell” thesis reproduces something of the core-periphery model of capitalist growth, in which the imperial core co-opts the “authentic” periphery, it also problematizes this model by assigning some responsibility for co-optation to consumers — the co-opted — themselves.

2. Casino capitalism: wheel of misfortune
After I mentioned “casino capitalism” with reference to a student’s commentary on Max Weber’s idea of the “spirit of capitalism,” the student asked, understandably, what I meant. Which made me realize I didn’t, actually, know precisely what I meant; so I did a bit of digging, then replied:

It’s something I’ve been hearing a lot over the past two years with reference to the US sub-prime mortgage bubble and the ensuing global financial chaos, and it made sense, on a broader historical view, as a characterization of the postwar global economic dispensation of postmodernity … a dispensation characterized by rapidly changing IT in the service of increasingly mobile, flexible, and “financialized” capitalism.
Turns out it dates from 1986, in a book of the same title by Susan Strange:
“The instability and volatility of active markets can devalue the economic base of real lives, or in more macro-scenarios can lead to the collapse of national and regional economies. Susan Strange (1986) calls this instability ‘casino capitalism,’ a phenomenon she links to five trends: innovations in the way in which financial markets work; the sheer size of markets; commercial banks turned into investment banks; the emergence of Asian nations as players; and the shift to self-regulation by banks (pp.9-10). (“Shifting”)
Maybe the term’s been re-circulating with a vengeance in the wake of the global economic turmoil, evoking not just the infrastructural features of the postwar global economy but also, now, the widespread sense that postmodern capital has indeed been running like a casino — meaning that most who go there to play will lose.

In addition to the scholarly literature on the casino capital thesis, it recurs from time to time in popular discourse, like editorials, about actual casinos. A decade ago, Toronto playwright and former Globe & Mail columnist Rick Salutin shared a problematic, provocative postcolonial angle on “lotteries and gambling” as a “sign of the times,”

a symptom of despair over ever improving your lot in life’s normal course. The gambling instinct may be eternal, but we’re seeing its spread as a way of life — and hope. The perfect wedding of these despondent impulses comes in native-run casinos such as Ontario’s Casino Rama, as if to say: The desperation of everyone in this ever more desperate society will help us, most desperate of all, to overcome our centuries of despair. (“Who owes”)

Salutin was writing of casinos as a then-recently legitimized socioeconomic institution; since then casinos have moved from legitimacy to centrality as a staple source of government revenue, and an ever more symptomatic “sign” of neoliberal hegemony’s dominion). Gambling and casinos fund all kinds of public programs in Alberta, and it’s money many see as ill-got from the exploitation of people with addictive disorders. In 2005, Salutin followed up:

Governments of all stripes are hip-deep in promoting and advertising gambling and in effect encouraging addiction to it. Of course, not all gamblers are addicted, though addicts are central, since a huge cut of the revenue comes from a small tranche of heavy gamblers. But the real addiction problem belongs to governments, who’ve grown addicted to the returns, and turned into pimps and pushers. … the job of an institution like government should be to increase the odds — if you’ll pardon the expression — of hard work receiving a fair return, rather than reinforcing the message that you have to be rich or lucky to succeed. (“My gambling problem”)

3. The weirdest Western?
These critical models of late capital, with their disjunctive postcolonial contexts, together start to make the interlocking institutions of global capital seem a lot like a weird Western. As one film critic argues, the globalized culture industry of Hollywood has not shown itself to know how to make this kind of movie well. When it does, in films like Serenity — to say nothing of non-weird, ultra-naturalist Westerns like Deadwood, for that matter — what I’d suggest we encounter is an image of late global capital, in all its frontier freewheeling and monopolizing machinations: “The best Weird Westerns allow the sprawling frontier to organically give up its secrets … in the dark, your mind builds entire cyclopean empires; there’s something out there, but chances are it doesn’t care about the laws which begin and end with your wagon train.”

Just the laws of infinite growth and the bottom line.

Works Cited

Lamar, Cyriaque. “Dear Hollywood, you absolutely suck at making weird Westerns.” io9 19 Jun. 2010 http://io9.com/#!5567908/dear-hollywood-you-absolutely-suck-at-making-weird-westerns?comment=24778688

MacLean, C. “Tall Poppy Interview: Andrew Potter, Author of The Rebel Sell.” Torontoist Nov. 2006 http://torontoist.com/2006/11/tall_poppy_andr.php

MAIS 601 Group Two. “The Group TwoPoration” (group response to The Corporation). MAIS 601, Athabasca U, 23 Mar. 2011.

Salutin, Rick. “My gambling problem, and ours.” Globe & Mail 5 Aug. 2005: A15.

—. “Who owes what in a racist world?” Globe & Mail 24 Aug. 2001: A15.

“The shifting nature of capital: exhilaration and anxiety.” Representations of Global Capital. Lewis & Clark College of Arts & Sciences, Portland. n.d. http://legacy.lclark.edu/~soan370/global/casino.html

Science fiction means business

The US-based Creative Science Foundation is hosting its second annual workshop in the UK this summer. According to the call for papers:

This workshop will explore the use of science fiction as a means to motivate and direct research into new technologies and consumer products. It does this by creating science fiction stories grounded in current science and engineering research that are written for the explicit purpose of acting as prototypes for people to explore a wide variety of futures. [...] In this way fictional prototypes provide a powerful interdisciplinary tool to enhance the traditional practices of research, design and market research.

The relationship between fiction and fact here is familiar enough to science fiction. In popular and fan discourses, this relationship tends to be mystified in terms of “uncanny prediction”: recent popular magazine articles detail “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction” and “11 astounding sci-fi predictions that came true.” In criticism and research, we find demystifications that investigate the material conditions linking science fiction to fact, extrapolation to production. Mark Fisher has helpfully coined the term “SF capital” to describe how science fiction works as a literary laboratory for real-world R&D, a resource for what Henry Jenkins calls “the military-entertainment complex” (75). A generation before Fisher, Marshall McLuhan — who was ambivalent about science fiction, and sometimes criticized for writing it -– had a firm, proleptic grasp on the idea of SF capital, which he well understood in his dual capacities as maverick scholar and corporate consultant:

Big Business has learned to tap the s-f writer. (124)

What’s striking in the CSF is perhaps the boldness of business’ courtship of SF: how frankly SF capital is being recognized and instituted, in a peculiarly Utilitarian program to enlist SF production specifically for “consumer products” and “market research.” The CSF is, in a way, simply spelling out the terms of a long-standing if somewhat asymmetrical partnership. SF’s command of both a popular market and a certain counter-cultural cachet has positioned it, since its inception (in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein), as more commodity than culture, hence its exile to the peripheries of legitimate “Literature,” according to a cultural-economic history provocatively explained by Samuel R. Delany (195). But is its future to be increasingly channeled into and defined by the speculations and futures we associate more with high finance and global capital than with cultural commentary and social progress?

Putting the question this way, of course, oversimplifies the numerous trajectories, formations, allegiances, and even definitions of science fiction; this is perhaps more an issue of science fiction studies, of the genre’s role in and relation to research: will a program like that of the CSF represent a route for delivering SF out of its encampment on the fringes of literary studies, towards more interdisciplinary and more broad-based social engagements, or will it merely transport it from one camp to another?

Works Cited
Creative Science Foundation. Intel Labs, Hillsboro, 2011.
Delany, Samuel R. and Carl Freedman. “A Conversation with Samuel R. Delany about Sex, Gender, Race, Writing — and Science Fiction.” Afro-Future Females: Black Writers Chart Science Fiction’s Newest New-Wave Trajectory. Ed. Marleen S. Barr. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 191-235.
Fisher, Mark. “SF Capital.” Transmat: Resources in Transcendent Materialism (2001).
Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York UP, 2006.
Kessler, Sarah. “11 Astounding Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True.” Mashable 25 Sept. 2011.
McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam, 1967.
Murdock, Colin. “6 eerily specific inventions predicted by science fiction.” Cracked 19 Nov. 2010.

Zombies and the political economy of precarity

The blood-smeared public-radio booth in Pontypool (2008), the great Canadian zombie movie

The zombie has been a tenacious mainstay of popular entertainment for decades. But this soon-turning decade seems more plagued than most, of late, by hordes of zombie pop cultural productions: movies (28 Days Later, Pontypool, Zombieland, as well as remakes like Dawn of the Dead); books, especially in the booming genre of mashed-up “monster classics” (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Jane Slayre, Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter); television (the forthcoming Walking Dead miniseries); pop music (e.g. Major Lazer’s “Zumbi”); new media, teeming with parodies; and “live” performances like the so many big cities now host. And it gets weirder: last year, Ottawa mathematicians published a study using zombie attack to model infectious outbreak. This fall, the U of Baltimore’s “Media genres: Zombies” undergrad course has been getting a degree of press coverage that would seem inordinate…if zombies weren’t the It monster just now. Even my toddler — who, let me assure you, has never watched a zombie movie (although we have read Wake the Dead, come to think of it) — is onto it, battling imaginary zombies at the bedroom window last weekend. (Zombies conveniently vulnerable to pinching, apparently: “Pinch the zombies! Pinch the zombies!”)

Why zombies? Why now? These questions came up recently over breakfast with colleagues at Athabasca U. But none of us had ready answers. Surely some of the blockbuster zombie activity can be attributed to the rejuvenation of pop cultural narratives of the undead that the Twilight franchise catalyzed. (This theory can be reduced to an observation on market trends: “Zombies are the new vampires.”) And some of the DIY material made by consumer-producers (conducers? prosumers) — the fan fiction, the Youtube parodies, the street theatre events — can be attributed to the ubiquity of digital media, and especially social networks, where pop-culture references mix, mutate, go viral, and spin off in all kinds of creative, hyper-mediated and performative directions.

But while watching 28 Weeks Later last weekend, just to get into the Hallowe’en spirit, I noticed some formulaic features of the zombie movie genre that suggested a tentative hypothesis. The zombies usually attack in a horde. The protagonists usually hide in some kind of bunker or fortified space. The zombies can easily smash through boarded windows, and yet they are themselves quite easily smashed. They attack with their hands and mouths; they bite. They want to eat the flesh of the living: preferably brains, the zombie’s delicacy. There’s no arguing with zombies; force is all they understand. Nobody is ultimately guaranteed not to become a zombie. When somebody becomes a zombie, it usually happens very, very fast.

As Susan Tyler Hitchcock observes, in her Cultural History of Frankenstein, the 1931 film adaptation of Frankenstein (like the earlier and successful film version of Dracula) did brisk box-office business not despite but because of the Depression in which it debuted. Desperate economic times made horror and monster movies particularly suitable flights of fancy, allowing those who could afford the tickets to live vicariously through horrific, apocalyptic tragedies that afforded a perverse but fitting escape from their real-world worries and woes.

Last week, too, my AU colleague Paul Kellogg gave a fascinating talk about the use of the Great Depression as an analogy in more recent economic crises. Using Time Magazine as an archival index of the mass-media Zeitgeist, Kellogg pointed out that the most frequent use of comparisons to the Great Depression occurred in the mid-1980s, the height of Reaganomics. And the next most-frequent use of comparisons to the Great Depression is happening, as you may have guessed, right now. But Kellogg sees a contradiction: during the Depression, the statistical drop in real full-time wages plummeted. Now, stats show that real full-time wages are, gradually, climbing. The problem, he maintains, is that the numbers on full-time wages don’t reflect the representative sample of the work force they once did. That is to say, not nearly as many people now have full-time employment. Even if they work forty or more hours per week. Major sectors of the work force have been reconfigured for flexibility and disposability. In Canadian universities, for example, the bulk of undergraduate teaching is no longer done by tenured or tenure-track professors; it’s done by “sessional” or “adjunct” instructors — or, increasingly, by graduate students — who have no job security from one semester to the next, though they may go on teaching at one institution for years or even decades. Such are the norms of labour and its exploitation under the globalized, financialized, and flexibly mobile world-system of neoliberal capital that’s been taking shape since the late 1970s. Such are the labour conditions of the work force we call “the precariat.”

So. What’s this detour into history and political economy got to do with zombies? It occurs to me that the pop-culture zombie today is a figure of the precariat and the poverty-stricken, and the zombie narrative is an allegory of mass impoverishment and middle-class retreat. I don’t mean this as any kind of insult to labourers without job security. I’m trying to sort out the cultural function of the zombie figure in texts that are, for the most part, products of a culture industry and the implicit hegemony of values, norms, and perspectives that it imposes.

"Don't talk": the radio talk-show host tells you so. Pontypool, 2008

The zombies usually attack in a horde; the precariat labours as a fast-growing multitude, simultaneously grouped in social environments and subjectively isolated by the conditions and technologies of work. The protagonists usually hide in some kind of bunker or fortified space; the dwindling middle class retreats to gated communities, rural properties, condominiums, dwellings that maximize architectural and social distance from the multitude. The zombies can easily smash through boarded windows, and yet they are themselves quite easily smashed; in an economic downturn, society becomes more unequal and more unstable: crime escalates, criminals get creative, weary and beaten scapegoats (immigrant workers, ethnic and other minorities) are hauled before a public conditioned by increasingly neoliberal media, and job security becomes a constant concern, easily smashed at any time by any number of instrumentally rationalized management decisions. (As Ed Broadbent discussed at Congress, with reference to the social study The Spirit Level, the more unequal societies become, as social services and safety nets are scaled back or ripped away in favour of “austerity measures,” the more dysfunctional and volatile they become.) They attack with their hands and mouths; they bite. The precariat and the impoverished have no tools or technologies at their disposal, they are reduced to “bare life.” They want to eat the flesh of the living: preferably brains, the zombie’s delicacy. There’s no arguing with zombies; force is all they understand. The precariat and the impoverished not only become demonized themselves but become instruments for demonizing education: the public sector most critically resistant to neoliberal hegemony. The zombie is a middle-class image of the precariat or the poverty-stricken, a figure instrumentalized by the culture industry to represent a certain kind of ideal consumer (fast-acting, unreflective, bent on consuming only other consumers), and weaponized to assault the institutions that raise critical consciousness about labour, exploitation, and ideology today: educational and intellectual institutions. Nobody is ultimately guaranteed not to become a zombie; nobody’s job is secure enough not to get fired. When somebody becomes a zombie, it usually happens very, very fast; just like getting fired.

These are just a few preliminary thoughts, then, on the ways in which the current popularity of all things zombie might be used not just to model infectious outbreaks (the adequacy of which modelling, I have to say, leaves me skeptical), but also to stand (or maybe stagger) as a cultural symptom of the globalized political economy that has dispossessed and continues to dispossess so many, leaving them ravenous, their hands outstretched, grasping at any purchase, crazed with rage and frustration, clamouring at the doors and windows of the dwindling few who survive the layoffs and cutbacks — the embattled few who — just like in the movies — usually harbour, whether knowingly or unwittingly, the selfish and treacherous individuals who are responsible for the plague in the first place.

The multitude outside. Pontypool, 2008.

Works Cited
Agamben, Giogio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (2008)
Adorno, Theodor. “Culture industry reconsidered.” New German Critique 6 (1975): 12-19. Rpt. in Soundscapes 2 (2000) http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/SWA/Culture_industry_reconsidered.shtml
Broadbent, Ed. “The Rise and Fall of Economic and Social Rights — What Next?” Congress, Concordia U, 29 May 2010.
Hardt, Michale and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004).
Hitchcock, Susan Tyler. Frankenstein: A Cultural History (2007).
Kellogg, Paul. “The great recession, the North American workplace, and the 1930’s ‘analogy trap’.” MA-IS Faculty Symposium, 15 Oct. 2010.
Pontypool. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Shadow Show / Maple Pictures, 2008.