Avatar: A Critic of Capitalism?
A Fiction, Certainly Strange
A small distant planet with an exotic name – Pandora. Reminds us of the Pandora’s Jar of Grecian Mythology fame. The film starts at a rather arbitrary date in the future. A jungle tribe with a primitive close-to-nature civilization is fighting against the invaders from Earth to save themselves and their planet from extinction. Quite curiously, the invaders from the Earth, propelled by the giant terrestrial corporate organizations, are also committed to this brutal act of galactic invasion to save their own, supposedly advanced, terrestrial civilization from extinction. On earth, unbridled capitalism, driven by the giant multinationals’ unflinching preoccupation to drive up profit and hence speeding up accumulation of capital, has pushed the mineral and energy resources of the earth to exhaustion. Hence to survive as it is, terrestrial capitalism needs another planet as fodder. The scientists have discovered a distant planet just fit for that – Pandora, a forest-covered small planet, with a mineral resource called Unobtainium buried under its crust, enough to meet the terrestrial capitalism’s need for quite a long time hence. The fictional metal Unobtainable with suffix -iam reminds us, in this context, perhaps a trans-uranium material and also tells the viewers about the long development since the U235 days, since the nuclear energy dominated years. The terrestrial multinational companies want this deposit of Unobtainium for themselves. For that, they have to mow down the forests of Pandora, scrape off its upper surface, and more importantly drive off its native residents to oblivion. But aren’t all these mere collateral damage, trivial when compared to Earth’s [better to say capitalism’s] urgent need to expand production and survive? Hadn’t in the early terrestrial days of capitalism the native population and their civilization of the entire American continent been similarly brutalized for the primitive accumulation of capital? Hadn’t Iraq been savagely crushed in the dawn of the terrestrial twenty-first century so that the capitalist powers could dictate the flow of petroleum?
Alas! The natives of Pandora, the Na’vis, are not capitalistically developed enough to appreciate these logics of capital! Hence, they decided to resist, they decided to fight back for their existence. Terrestrial capitalism’s most brutal and most savagely efficient war machine, the American Air Force led a multinational terrestrial army to unleash ‘shock and awe’ galactic strikes on Pandora, while the American military intelligence led a mission to infiltrate the Na’vis and weaken their resistance from within. As the two races stand poised on the brink of war, a diplomatic program is founded upon the use of avatars, Na'vi bodies grown in giant test tubes that are physically and mentally linked to human controllers. The success of this diplomacy rests on the shoulders of a disabled U.S. marine named Jake Sully, who must ingratiate himself among the Na'vis – as a Na'vi – and convince them to leave their territory before the military destroys it.
Yet capitalism couldn’t have the last laugh. As in a queer past instance of terrestrial history, capitalist Goliath America was humbled by insurgent Vietcongs, here also the intergalactic capitalist mission suffers defeat in the hands of the humble Navi’s. Na’vis establish the right of existence of themselves and Pandora’s nature to be dearer than capitalism!
A story like this coming in the pack of a Hollywood blockbuster (‘Titanic’-maker James Cameron’s latest 3-D extravaganza ‘Avatar’ from the stable of Twentieth Century Fox) is something which you don’t expect. A film on whose making Hollywood industry has invested 200 million $, which is slated to rake in many times that amount as return from world-wide box-office, which has been tied in to product advertisements for McDonald's Big Mac, LG cell phones, and Coke Zero — that is certainly itself a commodity entrenched in big capital’s drive for accumulation at any cost. But what about its painting a brutal face of capitalism? Is not it a problem for capitalism as long as it sells profitably from the world’s multiplexes? Let us try to find an answer by going in some details into some of the issues raised by Avatar.
Capitalism and Earth’s Resources
Avatar’s futuristic fiction of a world-encompassing resource crisis is the reflection of a very real crisis reaching critical proportions at the very present. What is that reality? Some specialists on this subject have commented thus in July 2008:
“Available evidence now strongly suggests that under a regime of business as usual we could be facing an irrevocable ‘tipping point’ with respect to climate change within a mere decade. Other crises such as species extinction (percentage of bird, mammal and fish species ‘valuable or in immediate danger of extinction’ are ‘now measured in double digits’); the rapid depletion of the oceans’ bounty; desertification; deforestation; air pollution; water shortages/pollution; soil degradation; the imminent peaking of world oil production (creating new geopolitical tensions); and a chronic world food crisis --- all point to the fact that the planet as we know it and its ecosystems are stretched to the breaking point. The moment of truth for the earth and human civilization has arrived.” [1]
The inherent drive of the capitalist economy to accumulate capital at any cost has resulted in systematic robbing of earth’s natural resources and thus subsidizing its accumulation process. The environment has been treated as a bounty from which resources can be extracted indiscriminately and a toilet-flush into which any wastes, however toxic, can be irresponsibly dumped. How this character is genetically interwoven in the capitalist system has been described by Marx in his Grundrisse in the following way:
“Just as production founded on capital creates universal industriousness on one side --- i.e. surplus labour, value-creating labour --- so does it create on the other side a system of general exploitation of the natural and human qualities, a system of general utility, utilising science itself just as much as all the physical and mental qualities, while there appears nothing higher in itself, nothing legitimate for itself, outside this circle of social production and exchange. Thus capital creates the bourgeois society, and the universal appropriation of nature as well as of the social bond itself by the members of society. Hence the great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry. For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility; ceases to be recognized as a power in itself; and the theoretical discovery of its autonomous laws appears merely as a ruse so as to subjugate it under human needs, whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production. In accord with this tendency, capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices as much as beyond nature worship, as well as all traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life. It is destructive towards all this, and constantly revolutionizes it, tearing down all the barriers which hem in the development of the forces of production, the expansion of needs, the all-sided development of production, and the exploitation and exchange of natural and mental forces. But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and since every such barrier contradicts its character its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore. The universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.”[2]
The above passage was written about one and a half century ago, when capitalist agriculture in the industrialized nations of Europe has aggravated severe depletion of fertility of soil. The argument here can’t be better illustrated by anything but the history of capitalism since then. Capitalism’s answer to the problem of depletion of soil-fertility was the emergence of synthetic fertilizer and, later on, the high-yield variety synthetic seeds, which led to the burgeoning of the giant chemical sector of the capitalist industry. But in the long run, over dependence on synthetic fertilizer and synthetic seeds have led to further depletion of soil fertility and the problem has assumed worldwide proportions pushed by the ever-expanding reaches of capitalism. Also the giant chemical industry has emerged as the prime polluter of the world’s environment and capitalism can think of nothing to mitigate it except treat the less-developed countries of the world as a sink where all these polluting industries will be exported and thus the problem aggravated more on the world scale. Similarly, spreading the use of plastic and fossil fuel was hailed as important steps to decrease dependence on wood and thus solving the problem of deforestation. But now, plastic has become infamous as a prime agent of environmental degradation, and carbon-emission related to the use of fossil fuel is aggravating global warming to the scale of changing the world’s climate irrevocably to the disadvantage of all terrestrial life-forms. Another basic industry of capitalism, the mining industry, in accordance with the present imperialist world order, is on the prowl to convert any mineral resources at any nook or corner of the world into private property of a few multinational corporations, to be plundered for the furtherance of their profits; thus preparing scripts of further barbarism on world’s environment on the one hand, and stripping billions of people of their access to necessities of life on the other. Thus, it is historically evident “that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and since every such barrier contradicts its character its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited.” Also, by the intensity and the global nature of the contradictions, in which they are now posited, the final argument of Marx in the above passage is an urgent reality now. Even a mainstream bourgeois commentator can’t help remarking:
“We are crossing natural thresholds that we cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. Nature is the time keeper, but we cannot see the clock. .... We are in a race between tipping points in the earth’s natural systems and those in the world’s political systems. Which will tip first?” [3]
Capitalism as a system has to be superseded by another system which will not treat the natural resources as booty or the natural environment as an unimportant externality. But here also, Marx’s insight as expressed in the previously-quoted passage is invaluable. “.... (T) he great civilizing influence of capital; its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity and as nature-idolatry.” Hence, trying to impose any primitive form of society, however harmonious a relation that may have with nature, will not work; and any such effort is bound to disintegrate to utopian idealistic tree-hugging nature-worship. Such efforts are not dangerous to capitalism and indeed can be internalized by the system as safety valves necessary to vent away the anti-capitalism ire produced within the system. The urgent need to supersede capitalism by a system in harmony with nature can only be served by abolishing private property over means of production, hence abolishing capital and building a higher society on the basis of social ownership, i.e. in one word, by building socialism. Only a world socialist movement has the capacity to pose mortal threat to capitalism, to really transcend it and further human civilization.
Back to Avatar
In the backdrop of the reality outlined above, let us now consider the criticism of capitalism offered by “Avatar”. The predominant refrain of that criticism is the superficial condemnation of the savagery with which capitalism plunders nature (whose metaphor is Pandora) and brutalizes backward local societies (whose metaphor is Na’vi society) in its ever-expansive quest for profit. The underlying truth that capitalism is genetically encoded to behave thus has not been approached. This criticism is very much partial and hence incomplete in the sense that it leaves the ground open for fantasizing the utopia of a humane nature-friendly capitalism or poses an idealistic back-trip to some primitive form of society as the solution. With the allegorical victory of the Na’vis at the end, the second tendency is particularly encouraged. Thus the capitalist system need not have any qualms in internalizing this criticism.
The cinematic form and the genre of film-making through which the above message is communicated is also endearing to capitalism. Since the worldwide telecast of the strikes of Patriotic missiles during the first Iraq war, bourgeois media is perfecting the method of presenting the savagery related to brutal imperialist war as a visual magnificence to be consumed (with dumb minds), perhaps over a cup of coffee, as an adrenalin-pumping nicety. Avatar, in its way of dealing the war scenes has marked further technological perfection in that direction, which will be lapped up, no doubt very soon, by the video-game-making industry in releasing gory video war games chewing up the sensibility of the young minds.
So, after all, “Avatar” is very much an insider of the capitalist order. So, at maximum, Avatar can be described as A Costly and Cosmetic Criric[!] of Capitalism.
Sources of the citations
John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark & Richard York in the Introduction to “Ecology: The Moment Of Truth”, Monthly Review July-August 2008 issue.
Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Vintage edition), pg.-409-410.
Lester Brown in his book Plan B 3.0, Pg.4-5.
Comments:
No Comments for View