Capitalism: the Mind Robber

I've just had the unmitigated gall to submit this to an editor.  It's about a 60s Doctor Who story.  It's on Dailymotion if you don't know it and want to know what the hell I'm on about.

‘The Mind Robber’ is a Marxist allegory.  No, seriously.

Everything and everyone in the Land of Fiction was created by humans; yet it is a trap.  How is it that this expression of human creativity is a hell from which the Doctor and his friends wish to escape?  It is because all the fictional characters, all the figures from novels and legends and fairytales and comic strips, are under the control of a Master.  The Land of Fiction, filled with centuries of human imagination and invention and amusement, is a prison, dominated by something hostile and alien.

“Hostile and alien” is the phrase Karl Marx used to describe the commodity’s relationship to humanity.  For Marx, capitalism generates alienation by separating humans from social control over our own labour.  He saw labour - conscious, creative life activity by which we produce our world - as central to humanity.  But capitalism organises production, and thus our labour, for the profit of private interests instead of public need.  We don’t control what we make, or why.  Those who do wield that control take the profits of our work.  So our life activity is alienated from us and confronts us as an enemy.  Our relationships become relationships with things.  He called this the “fetishism of commodities”.  The things we make seem to have a life of their own, and to threaten us. The market can devastate our lives when, seemingly out of our control, it suddenly contracts.

Culture is a human production.  Stories are our creative labour.  They are part of what Marx called our “species being”.  The Land of Fiction implies this by its very existence.  But in the Land of Fiction our stories, and the characters in them, rise up to confront us as autonomous things that can hurt us or imprison us, because they are under the domination of a machine - thus a produced, industrial artefact - that has risen up as a hostile, alien power.  The machine rules, and rules through, its control over the products of human intellectual labour in the form of books, characters from books and folklore.

The telling and retelling of legends is a human production as much as anything else, and in our age we are very familiar with how capitalist culture ‘encloses’ ancient legends, copyrights them, and turns them into profit.  One of the biggest media franchises of our time, owned by a massive concentration of capital called Disney, ‘owns’ Thor, Odin, and Loki.

In the Land of Fiction, the guards are wind-up soldiers.  The system is literally policed by toys, physical commodities, shaped as redcoats, which also represent the indoctrination of 19th and 20th century English children into the ideology of empire.

In the Land of Fiction, even words - themselves human productions - confront humans as things outside of human control.  You can get lost in a forest of words. Books – again, commodities produced by human wage labour – attack you and swallow you.  Once swallowed by the book that is under the control of the boss you become his mindless puppet.

This is a picture of human alienation, and of commodity fetishism.

Even the Master of the Land of Fiction turns out to be a servant, an employee, of a greater power: the Master Brain.  Before he was headhunted, the old writer at the heart of the web of the Land of Fiction was a paid employee of Ensign magazine, churning out thousands and thousands of words for them to print and sell. He toiled to produce a product, was paid a wage, watched as others pocketed the profits, and watched the products of his labour pile up around him. Similarly, he toils to produce the Land of Fiction for the Master Brain.  Like the owners of the magazine, it can do little without his creative powers, yet rules him and exploits him.  He spent his life on Earth speed-writing commercial adventure stories.  ‘The Mind Robber’ as a whole strongly hints at a feeling that trite adventures involving handy swords and with-one-bound-he-was-free endings are highly unsatisfactory. It hints at this in an ironic and self-aware way, as it must, being a Doctor Who story.  Doctor Who is itself directly descended from the ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and ‘Boys Weeklies’ in which Jack Harkaway was an actual character.  Similarly, in the Land of Fiction, the Master tries to construct a story about the Doctor and his friends that pleases the power he serves; a story that the Doctor resists, partly by rejecting handy swords.

And the Doctor has a choice.  The story is a job interview, and the Doctor is being assessed for suitability.  The Master is pleased to see him “learning the rules”.  At the end, the Master offers him his own job.  This is the “responsible position” the Doctor is being offered.

He has to accept the job before he can be assimilated into the system that is the Land of Fiction.  He can’t just be enslaved.  His labour is free.  True, if he declines then his alternatives are bleak.  But that’s the essence of labour in capitalism, according to Marx.  The worker, no longer bound to the land in the manner of the feudal peasant, is free to take the job or starve.  A contract must be made.  The worker is compelled to sell their labour power by necessity rather than the sword of a lord’s knight.

Even so, once the worker has accepted the contract, their entire self is at the disposal of the capitalist, and their labour and its produce are no longer theirs to control.  And whatever the worker gets back, the boss gets more - otherwise the boss wouldn’t take the deal.  Bound by just such a deal, the old writer does as the machine tells him.  He attends when it sounds a siren.  It even takes him over and speaks through him.  It hollows him out, the same way it hollows out Jamie and Zoe when it turns them into fiction.

Being turned into fiction is the existential horror that the Master Brain wields as a weapon, because being ‘fiction’ means being made totally inhuman, part of the owned story, a commodity under the domination of capital.  Just as the fetishized commodity seems to live - even though it is what Marx called “dead labour”, congealed work - so the worker under capitalism can be alienated to inner death.  This is the robbing of minds to which the title refers.

And the ultimate goal of the machine/system that is the Master Brain is to ‘invade Earth’, to launch the ultimate global takeover - as capital has indeed done since Marx’s time.  The goal is to alienate all mankind, to take control of humanity’s creative power and, to use the Doctor’s phrase, turn us into a “string of sausages” - an image of industrial mass-production, of standardisation, of humans as dead meat that can be endlessly bought and sold.

And the funny thing is that, for all its superficial unconventionality, ‘The Mind Robber’ is consistent with a lot of Doctor Who.  The classic show - especially in the 60s, the era of post-war radical struggle - keeps coming back to the threat to human freedom posed by machines.  Every robot or cyborg that menaces people, from the Cybermen to the Yeti to the Quarks, is a product that has escaped human control and is now trying to dominate us.  This anxiety is central to science fiction, because science fiction is the quintessential genre of modernity, and modernity is the age of capital.  It’s ironic that Doctor Who brings this most sharply into focus when it slips down a rabbit hole right out of science fiction into literature and folklore.