Silver linings, amigo.
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The state of America today…
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Brace yourself. Democracy is coming!
It’s coming from the sorrow in the street
The holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in the desert here
And the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the USA
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ha!
/me hat tips
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Not zombies!
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True; as they are not actually dead or reanimated.
But infected with psycho-Rabies on steroids, and highly contagious?
Absolutely.
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Aren’t zombies an expression of the upper class’s fear of revolution? No doubt they see the lower classes as a mindless mob ready to turn on them. Perhaps this is the real appeal of zombie fiction - the desire to be aristocracy! Let’s recognize zombie fiction for what it is, classist propaganda justifying the oppression of the masses by the existing rulers.
Then you probably weren’t aware that there was a character in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic who attempted to start a commune based around equality by eschewing cutie marks and making everyone equal. The parallels to Marxism are weak, though, since the point of the commune is to avoid recognizing special talents and thereby avoid specialization and the efficient division of labour. Obviously in a Marxist society we’d have lots of specialization and labour would be divided even more efficiently than a Capitalist one. If it was a critique of communism then it was a sort of mockery of straw-communism, buying into the idea that Communism is about stifling individuality. The greatest threat to individualism we know today is the idea that individuality is and ought to be expressed through consumption - that an equitably distribution of things (what Communism is about) is the same as stamping out of expression.
On the other hand, the pony who started the commune (Starlight Glimmer) was herself one of the most powerful ponies in the world. In a later episode - after the heroes of the show dismantle her admittedly somewhat stalinesque dystopia - she reappears and reconstructs a Starswirl the Bearded spell to control time. Unwittingly there is more pointed critique of communism here: that it took incredible power to institute it and maintain it.
Ultimately the revolution will come, but not because some great leader deems it is time. The people must choose for themselves.
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Hah! The wiki list of zombie films says this
Zombies are fictional creatures usually portrayed as reanimated corpses or virally infected human beings.
But the Talk page has the most hilarious note on taxonomy
I wish I had me some Pete Thiel money, because if I did I would establish The Frankfurt School for the Critical Analysis of Zombie Nomenclature.
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One way to approach the classification problem is to regard zombie films as revealing different aspects of a universal monomyth,
http://jungstop.com/zombies-in-everyone/
This being a Marxist thread, it’s probably best to judge the zombie literature according to its appeal to alienation.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/zombies-of-immaterial-labor-the-modern-monster-and-the-death-of-death
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I’d happily join that faculty… Can I get a tenure track position, comrade?
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from that article
Is that Slavdoge Žombžek?
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Marxist Dialouge of the Week™
Comrades, let’s discuss how current narratives employ the terms “zombie” and “sheeple.”
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Well, there are a multitude of ways zombie is employed… going back to old films like White Zombie, I think there is evidence to suggest a racial angle to the notion… White male fears about what happens to white women in black majority countries drives the whole thing. And we can turn that on it’s head with George Romero’s classic, Night of the Living Dead:
Which set the tone for modern zombie films.
As for “sheeple”… well, that’s just a term for the lumpenproletariate, yeah?
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Somebody here refuted some of my remarks last year by saying that I might as well have invoked the term “sheeple”. I was left guessing that this was a claim that my position was somehow elitist. I suppose I can see that at its most cynical, government can treat people like cattle to be processed. It appears to be a common anxiety with conservatives and libertarians who imagine themselves to be staunch individualists. Further contrasted by the US mythology of using the term/archetype “cowboy” to refer to rebellious persons.
My criticism of this is that what they usually put forth is a very shallow brand of individualism with deep undercurrents of conformity. If everybody is free to be self-sufficient and be entrepreneurial capitalists, to focus upon their own hoarding and comfort - wouldn’t they all be doing the same thing? If populations “just happen” to live like this, how does anything this homogeneous qualify as being “individualism”? Even deciding to be a collectivist can be construed as being actually more individualistic if it runs counter to what others around one are doing.
As for zombies - I like @anon50609448’s interpretation of them as an aristocratic survival fantasy. But since zombies seem to represent pure id, I see them more as standing in for a false social consciousness, as espoused in strawman arguments against the left. “The point of communism is for an elite to push conformity and make people the same”, sort of thing.
While zombie apocalypse scenarios can superficially resemble “rugged individualist” ideals of conservative libertarianism, I think that they often to outline the limits of such thinking. If humanity becomes an endangered species, then according to market-speak, human life would become greatly more valued than it is now. But this seldom happens in zombie fiction, as bickering and more petty forms of self-interest take hold and obliterate anything but the most primal social frameworks. In practice then, this means limiting human achievement to whatever can be understood and accomplished by one person alone, since there is no room for trust or any larger social agenda.
Also, I feel that I would be remiss to point out that IRL, the lore of zombies has been used as a way to basically enslave troublemakers in Afro-Caribbean culture. In extreme circumstances, somebody would be paralyzed and need to watch their own funeral, and then being buried alive. Then the instigator would let them out and it was understood that the zombie literally owed them their life, and so was compelled to serve them. This kind of internalization/Stockholm syndrome can perhaps be extrapolated to model other sorts of exploitive relationships.
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This is a very good point. In conservative/libertarian economics everything works on the law of supply and demand. But in reality scarcity is just one of many factors we use to determine the value of things. While there are far more humans on the planet than there were a hundred years ago, we also devote far more resources to maintaining individual lives than we did a hundred years ago.
I think this is an example of how the market is bad at reflecting real value. In a zombie apocalypse scenario, when everyone is dying rapidly, your life isn’t worth much. Just like when the plague was wiping out a third of Europe, life was not worth much. From an egotistical point of view someone might say, “I might not have many days left, so I’d better treasure the ones I have” but from a “should we save Jim or save the truck?” point of view, Jim’s might end up in trouble, because to the five remaining people, the truck is just more valuable than another person.
Ultimately the masters of conservative/libertarian economics don’t people as an asset, they see them as a liability. People need upkeep - food, shelter, clothing. The work they do is useful, but the fact that you have to have people around to do it is unfortunate.
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I think quite a few of the problems we see right now are because of a breakdown of the rule of law which is really the principle that all people are equal before the law - that we are ruled by laws as opposed to ruled by monarchs or aristocrats.
But we see that the law is applied completely differently to the poor than to the rich. If we could wave a magic wand and turn that around, we’d see plenty of improvement in a lot of areas by getting rule of law back.
Even with rule of law we can have unjust laws, but rule of law is definitely a thing I think we should strive for.
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It’s possible to write a code of laws that
cannot be avoided by those too impoverished to afford lawyers.
can be carefully negotiated by competent lawyers
can be played like a fiddle by expensive lawyers
In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.
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