Tag: Historical Materialism

Marx and Shakespeare: The Brave New World of The Tempest
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in’t!

—Miranda, Act 5, Scene 1.

What is gratifying in looking back at four hundred-plus year old stage plays is the transmission of culture, language and custom—captured in a frozen moment of time and thawed by present consciousness. One can only imagine the interpretations that Karl Marx and his family would have had when reciting the works of Shakespeare from their Victorian-era London flat. It is a reminder that all of us are born into frozen moments along the march of history and, although our lives occupy only a sliver along the time–space continuum, it is the mountain of the past that we live and die upon.

The Tempest is a remarkable work. From the vantage point of today, with settler-states dominating the global community of nations, it is easy to forget that it was not so long ago when the United States and Canada and Israel and Brazil and Australia did not exist. Although the story takes place within a single day, The Tempest opens a window to that time. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, The Tempest foregrounds the accounts of New World voyagers that imbue vivid colour onto the setting.¹

The Island

Prospero’s island is nominally in the Mediterranean but references to Bermuda, South American deities and West “Indians” signal a New World inspiration.² The supernatural is strong here, as the island is meant to invoke a mythical space in the minds of the audience. The island is inhabited by the former Duke of Milan, Prospero, who was overthrown at home by his brother. He is there with his daughter Miranda, an airy spirit named Ariel and a “savage and deformed slave” named Caliban.³

We learn that Prospero and Miranda had themselves washed up on this island in the wake of his overthrow in Milan. With magic, Prospero is able to put Caliban in bondage and impress the powerful native spirit Ariel into his service. The play begins when a boat carrying Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio passes by the island. Also aboard is the King of Naples and his son, along with a small coterie of servicemen, lesser lords and councillors. With Ariel’s help, Prospero kicks up a storm—a tempest—in order to maroon the ship and exact a long-awaited revenge over his deposal.

It is this mystical, vaguely New World premise of The Tempest that gathers the most interest from a Marxist perspective. Large economic and cultural changes were well-underway during Renaissance England, as New World discovery and plunder began filling merchant coffers. Accustomed to filthy cities, rampant disease, backbreaking rural labour, a stifling social hierarchy and the pervasive threat of war, the European imagination was full of awe by accounts of voyagers trickling back: empty, far-away lands overgrown with verdant leaves, soils with rippling veins of gold, oceans teeming with fish and small communities of peaceful people living half-naked.

The abundance of nature and the freedom afforded by open spaces posed a radically unique situation for Europeans settlers in the New World—namely, the complete absence of Old World class relations. This was the primary differentiation that Marx flagged in Capital when discussing the trajectories of capitalist development in the Old World and the New. For example, he relates the story of one Mr. Peel:

Mr. Peel, he moans, took with him from England to Swan River, West Australia, means of subsistence and of production to the amount of £50,000. Mr. Peel had the foresight to bring with him, besides, 300 persons of the working class, men, women and children. Once arrived at his destination, ‘Mr. Peel was left without a servant to make his bed or fetch him water from the river.’ Unhappy Mr. Peel, who provided for everything except the export of the English relations of production to Swan River!⁴

The abundance of readily-available means of subsistence meant that feudal and capitalist relations were simply not compatible with the newly broken lands of the New World. Because almost all European land was titled and cities were crowded, they transitioned to wage labour quickly and en masse once industrial technology was developed. But these conditions could not be exported to the New World and the colonies leaned much more heavily on forced labour in the form of race-based slavery and indentured servitude.⁵ As far as free labour was concerned, it was generally much more palatable to become a yeoman farmer than it was to toil for a wage.

The Powerful Illusion of Class

Shakespeare was writing from pre-revolutionary England, decades before the bourgeois Glorious Revolution. As such, his work largely reflects the ruling class attitudes of his time, relegating working people to secondary roles and ignoring the peasantry altogether. The theoretical framework of economic relations and forces of production were obscured in his era and he hewed the line of social expectations. Shakespeare was thus presented with a problem: if Prospero was a righteous duke in Italy, how can this dignified standing be duplicated in the context of largely uninhabited island?

Shakespeare devises a clever workaround to a setting absent class relations by granting Prospero magical powers. Practicing magic was suppressed in Europe and outlawed in the England of Shakespeare’s day, but the unexplored island setting grants Prospero an unbridled freedom to practice sorcery. With these powers he proceeds to repeat a rather typical colonial pattern by ruthlessly exploiting nature and indigenous slave labour.

Nature is represented in the play by Ariel, who is able to clap thunder, command winds and soothe men to sleep with susurrating blows of air to the ear. These powers are harnessed by Prospero who uses sorcery to release Ariel from the oak tree where the spirit had been imprisoned. With magic as a substitute for advanced European technology and command of labour, the “free gifts of nature” open up to the “civilized” man when his instruments meet the bountiful oceans and lands of the New World.

Then there is the “savage and deformed” Caliban, whose physical grotesqueness attaches a heavy stigma to his being throughout the play.⁶ He was discovered on the island by Prospero and he stands in as a native inhabitant. He says to Prospero in the opening act:

And then I loved thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’ th’ isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile.
Cursed be that I do so!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king; and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’ th’ island.

This recalls the many accounts of indigenous assistance provided to alien settlers only for it to blow back on the native population time and time again. Shakespeare had demonstrated sensitivity to slavery throughout his work, in particular during Shylock’s courtroom speech in The Merchant of Venice. Caliban was enslaved specifically as punishment for attempting to violate Prospero’s daughter Miranda and people “this isle with Calibans.”

This plot device morally justifies Prospero’s enslaving of Caliban, retaining audience sympathy for the main protagonist. But Shakespeare relies on serious stereotypes to accomplish this, drawing on differing sexual mores between “primitive” and “civilized” cultures set by the standards of Christian Europe: Caliban’s “attempt to ‘violate the honour’ of Miranda may have seemed, from his point of view, less like an attempted rape than the response of a natural sexuality that cannot comprehend the concern with sexual honour so dear to Prospero and his culture.”⁷

Whereas Europeans enslaved by way of cargo ships and the bullwhip, Prospero does it with sorcery—threatening to deliver cramps and stinging pinches to Caliban should he refuse an order. Unwittingly, Shakespeare upholds a Marxian standard of productive relations throughout the play by substituting magic for the means of production.

Liberation at Last?

The final characters to note in the play are that of Trinculo and Stephano. A jester and a butler, respectively, they recognize a newfound freedom from Milanese class relations upon their stranding on the island. Resorting to another trope, Shakespeare has his butler and jester win Caliban’s favour with a drink of “celestial liquor.” The trio then decide they no longer have to toil in the service of a king, as their new circumstances afford them the chance to shed their masters and become rulers themselves.

As we saw in Marx’s anecdote about Mr. Peel, Stephano and Trinculo were transported to the island as servicemen. But once landed on this uninhabited terrain, they were suddenly free of their Old World bonds and underwent a revolution of consciousness. This situation obviously could not be endured by Shakespeare’s Renaissance English audience and so the social hierarchy is restored by the discipline of Prospero’s magic at the play’s end.

The Tempest is a terrific historical product that helps to backtest historical materialism. Shakespeare himself was not a revolutionary in any modern sense of the word. But with his incredible talent, he captured the social relations of the proto-capitalist mode of production, providing dramatic examples of Marx’s bold proclamation: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”⁸

Thanks for reading!
1. See Charles Frey, “The Tempest and the New World,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 1: 29–41 for more on this subject. In particular, the island of Bermuda is a notable influence. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 29. ↩︎
3. This is the description of Caliban given to us in the dramatis personae. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, Capital Vol. One (Ancient Wisdom Publishing, 2019): 543. ↩︎
5. Further explored in the following pages of ibid, 544-5. ↩︎
6. Jeffrey Wilson compares Caliban’s state to a variety of disability and racial stigmas in “‘Savage and Deformed’: Stigma as Drama in The Tempest,” Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Vol. 31: 146–177. ↩︎
7. Peter Holland in The Tempest (The Pelican Shakespeare, 2016): xxxiv. ↩︎
8. From the preface to Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. ↩︎
14 Sep 26
In Brief: China’s Marxian Paradigm
In China today, the fingerprints of American capitalist excess are hard to miss, as the golden arches and the KFCs stand lined up next to Walmart stores. The history of China’s economic development is a pretty simple story as told in the West: Mao’s Soviet-style economy was abandoned by Deng who swung open the doors to western capitalism and everything we see in China today is the mere culmination of decades of market magic. With this story lodged into our heads by so many western journalists, whose understanding of Marx is even less than their understanding of China, it is no wonder why Beijing’s trajectory is wide open to interpretation.

The sequence of human history is one of modes of production. Societies organize around productive forces and, as these forces evolve, so does a new social formation eventually sublate the previous one existing. The Greek polis represents a sublation of Neolithic communal society, just as Medieval Europe represents a sublation of the Roman Empire.¹

The process is not mechanical and it has varied wildly depending on the region in question. For example, the capitalist mode of production was concretized only after a significant period of violent primitive accumulation driven by erstwhile feudal merchants who amassed vast sums of wealth at the expense of European peasants, African slaves and New World Indigenous clans. What capitalism has allowed us to do by way of revolutions in technology, science and philosophy, is gain a self-awareness of this historical process and ask the question: if capitalism is a sublation of the feudal mode, what might represent a sublation of the capitalist mode?

The capitalist mode of production has brought with it a material abundance previously unknown to humanity. This helps to explain widespread resistance against any effort toward revolutionary change. On the other hand, capitalism has also carried over imperial tendencies toward warfare, environmental destruction and the deracination of the community. It is these noxious aspects of capitalism that have formed the basis of western populist demands and global revolutionary politics.

Marxism-Leninism emerged from an impoverished Russian Empire long-mismanaged by Tsars wielding absolute power. For the Soviet Union, it expressed the post-revolutionary desire for rapid modernization without the capitalist hallmarks of colonial extraction and working class exploitation. With near-universal public ownership of production, these two aims were largely successful and the USSR experienced an improbable rise to superpower status, all the while providing housing, healthcare, free education and employment to all.

Mao Zedong was obviously heavily influenced by the Soviet experience but he recognized that his China of 1949 was even less developed than 1917 Russia, thanks to the compounded effects of Japanese invasion, civil war and a century of humiliation at the hands of European colonial powers. At its founding, the People’s Republic of China was almost an entirely illiterate, agrarian economy suffering from a massive drug addiction epidemic and in a state of chronic famine.

Mao set his modernization program along the lines of mass literacy campaigns, accessible medicine and large-scale irrigation projects. He recognized the feudal landlord class as a vestige of feudalism and a barrier to progress. That class was eliminated with land reforms. But, as a historical materialist, Mao also saw the bourgeoisie as an important ingredient to Chinese modernization. Adopted in 1949, the Chinese flag even includes a star each for the national and petit bourgeoisie, against a red background representing the revolution.

Soviet socialism was a sublation of Russian feudalism that practically skipped the capitalist mode altogether. But it collapsed under a heavy burden of economic embargoes and repeated military confrontations against combined capitalist powers that had centuries of wealth accumulation under their feet.

Relieved of sanctions in 1979, China has been determined to build socialism in the East along the timescale of how capitalism was built in the West: a period of wealth accumulation and technological advancement that will make it possible to transcend the global capitalist economy. Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, rejected western capitalism and he modelled his own reforms on Lenin’s New Economic Policy.

China has not engaged in foreign colonization or the subjugation of other lands. As a Global South country long-preyed upon by the West, they have recognized that their path to modernization must necessarily be different than it was for imperial states. With particular attention to Volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Capital, Beijing has instead constructed a public sector designed to capture the surplus value of their capitalist workforce and channel it toward the development of new productive forces.

As Marx described liberal states, the surplus value produced by workers is claimed as rent, interest and profit. In liberal states, the disposal of this enormous surplus is decided by the private whims of financial firms, landlords and corporations—leading to the socially disruptive practice of outsourced labour and the curious phenomena of “dead money.” In addition, the circulation of surplus value in the form of loans, banking fees and debt-financing are tallied as part of the national gross domestic product—despite producing no value whatsoever. This has led the economist Michael Hudson to decry GDP accounting in the United States as “a travesty that credits the financial sector with producing a product, not as imposing zero-sum transfer payments.”²

As a Marxist state, China treats surplus value as a social product rather than a private gain. Because much of the banking, resource, construction and manufacturing sectors are under state ownership, they are able to convert surplus value that is captured in the form of interest and profits and push a dramatic material transformation of the entire country. Where private ownership exists, party cadres operate within the enterprise to ensure compliance with national planning. China’s ability to build at breakneck speed is also facilitated by maintaining an extremely low cost of goods and services through strategic deflation and the “purging of rent-seeking profits” from the economy.³ This conscious suppression of price and profit are virtually unthinkable for a liberal country.

The fault line between China and the West is therefore not one of “capitalism vs. socialism” but “liberalism vs. Marxism.” At this point in history, every country on Earth contains elements of both socialism and capitalism. In liberalism, capital accumulation is treated as an end in itself—and the result is a sprawling financial services sector that cannibalizes national industry in exchange for abstract financial products. In Marxism, capital accumulation is treated as an evolutionary step between industrial capitalism and socialist transformation. The result of this treatment is a country that looks like China.

By compressing surplus value formation into material production rather than financialization, China is betting on a transformation of productive quantity into social quality, one that will eventually lead to a sublation of private capitalism by public socialism. This is not meant as an explicit endorsement of vanguardism, nor is it meant to praise each aspect of Chinese governance or policy decision made by Beijing. We should take lessons from China and adapt them to our own national circumstances. But that can only be done with recognition that their meteoric rise is resultant from the application of Marxist theory at the commanding heights of the economy.

Thanks for reading!
1. John Bellamy Foster explores the communal aspects of antiquity in “Marx and Communal Society,” Monthly Review, Vol. 77, No. 3: 47-64. ↩︎
2. Michael Hudson, “Finance Capitalism versus Industrial Capitalism: The Rentier Resurgence and Takeover” in Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021: 12. ↩︎
3. See: Kevin Walmsley, “Top China execs forecast more deflation and falling profits ahead,” Substack, Nov. 2025. ↩︎
11 Jun 26
Marx and Shakespeare: Hamlet’s Alienation
But orderly to end where I begun,
Our wills and fates do so contrary run
That our devices still are overthrown
Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

—Player King, Act 3, Scene 2.

Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s most studied play, owing to its layered themes and rich rhetorical devices. It is a literary work drawn on by John Milton for Paradise Lost, it helped Sigmund Freud to develop his theory of Oedipus complex and inspired and two compositions from Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Karl Marx’s deep appreciation of Shakespeare is well known, and Hamlet is a work that he directly references in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.¹

The Play’s the Thing

Hamlet almost exclusively takes place at Elsinore Castle in Denmark, which is a real place and one of the Renaissance era’s most prominent. Shakespeare was a product of the Renaissance era, and this setting is crucial to contextualizing many of Shakespeare’s plays because it sits on the demarcation line between the Middle Ages and modernity, between superstition and reason, between feudalism and liberalism, between religion and science, between the aristocracy and commerce. The tensions of this era are very important to understanding Hamlet’s inner conflict, just as it is important to understanding the romance between Romeo and Juliet or the racial attitudes embedded in Othello.

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels wrote:

Thus it is quite obvious from the start that there exists a materialistic connection of men with one another, which is determined by their needs and their mode of production, and which is as old as men themselves. this connection is ever taking on new forms, and thus presents a “history” independently of the existence of any political or religious nonsense which would hold men together on its own.²

In most of Renaissance Europe, the aristocracy maintained a monopoly on political power, derived from ownership over lands worked by a large peasantry. The rise of an urban merchant class figures heavily in some of Shakespeare’s plays, but in Hamlet we are concerned only with the palace intrigue at the top of the Danish royal hierarchy. There is a multiplicity of love triangles, petty schemes from palace courtiers, eavesdroppers and personal grievances that must constitute trivial drama in comparison to the hardship of life for many of the era. In the grand movement of history, palace intrigue is little more than the “political nonsense” that Marx identified.

The Apparition Comes

At the outset, the story establishes that Prince Hamlet’s father has died and his Queen mother had hastily remarried with his uncle Claudius who then consolidated the Danish nobility behind his rule. This turn of events has Hamlet already deeply unsettled and melancholy, exacerbated by a visit from his father’s ghost who wanders the Earth while in spiritual Purgatory. The ghost reveals to Hamlet that he was victim of a “murder most foul, strange and unnatural” by the poison of his brother Claudius.³

Apparitions, witches, potions and magic were accepted forces of nature in Shakespeare’s time and come regularly into his plays as plot devices guiding a character’s arc. Whereas today uncertainty over someone’s cause of death could be resolved by a medical autopsy or forensic crime scene investigation, Hamlet could only shelter under his suspicions until he was contacted from beyond the grave.

But the ghost’s revelation confronts Hamlet with demands on his position. In the aristocratic world of hereditary privilege—so far from modern law and commerce—kinship largely determined one’s station in life. Notions attached to honour and nobility depended heavily on defence of kin, and there was no legal authority that Hamlet could appeal to; indeed, his corrupted family was the legal authority.

Hamlet understands what is expected from the son of a slain father but revenge is complicated by the aristocratic hierarchy of which he is merely a component part. With a murdered father, a mother joined in marriage with the killer and childhood friends in the service of his usurping uncle, Hamlet finds himself completely alienated from the social relations that grant him his identity as a prince.

The ensuing conflict of the play is an internal struggle to overcome this experienced alienation, immortalized by Hamlet’s famous speech:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin?

This speech could be rephrased “to live or not to live?” If Hamlet chooses to live as his father’s son by seeking revenge against King Claudius he will certainly perish in the process. On the other hand, he cannot bear an existence as an obedient prince under these circumstances. To live his proper life is a death sentence but to avoid death he must surrender life.

The Readiness is All

There is a duality that opens up here between Hamlet’s blood instincts and his social status as a prince. Marx described alienation as characteristic to humanity’s estrangement from productive activity and the reduction of social relations to class standing, when “man feels that he is acting freely only in his animal functions—eating, drinking, and procreating—while in his human functions, he is nothing more than an animal.”⁴

As he is estranged from his family and friends by the revelation of his uncle’s homicide and arrogation of the throne, Hamlet ponders his alienated state:
“What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.”

It is Ophelia that bears the brunt of Hamlet’s dislocation, his rage against the animalistic propensity toward violence and sex. While they had been engaged in a genuine courtship prior to the events of the play, she becomes “the focus of his disgust with the whole sexual process.”⁵

Seeing the characteristics of his being stripped of all virtue, Hamlet dismisses any love he once had for Ophelia as brutish lust and he condemns her to a lifetime of abstinence: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery. Go, farewell.”

For Marx, alienation will ultimately be resolved when we take conscious control of our circumstances, when we reconcile our productive activity with both our individual selves and species-being. Hamlet’s internal conflict is resolved when he encounters the army of the crown prince of Norway, Fortinbras, on the march through Danish territory. Hamlet’s father had killed Fortinbras’ father in a duel decades earlier and the Norwegian prince had finally arrived to seek his just revenge.

Hamlet then grasps the unity of opposing forces; to be an obedient prince is the same as to be his father’s son; to be in love is to be lustful; to live is the same as to die; to be is not to be.⁶ Before throwing himself, his mother and his uncle to their doom, he says: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Let be.”

Thanks for reading!
1. For more on Marx’s personal interest in Shakespeare, see Erich Fromm, “Marx’s Concept of Socialism” in Marx’s Concept of Man (Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1961). ↩︎
2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Martino Publishing, 2011): 18-19. ↩︎
3. The “most foul” and “unnatural” aspects of the murder lie in it being committed by Claudius against his own flesh and blood. ↩︎
4. Karl Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in Essential Writings of Karl Marx (Red and Black Publishers, 2010): 91. ↩︎
5. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet (Arden Shakespeare, 1982):151. ↩︎
6. This is an observation in advace of the famous thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat. ↩︎
16 Apr 26
The Dialectics of Dune
“Is the dialectic wicked, or just incomprehensible?”¹ Fredric Jameson’s punchy interrogation of the dialectic could also be turned onto Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the classic space opera, Dune: is it wicked, or just incomprehensible? The answer is “both” and in the best possible way. It is “wicked” in the full double entendre, presenting a cruel universe lavished with gladiatorial death matches, atomic weapons, titanic sandworms—and it looks really fucking cool under Villeneuve’s masterful direction. Its incomprehensibility derives from a power structure that portends a stark future for humanity, even with flags planted across thousands of planets. But anything is possible in a sci-fi future and book author Frank Herbert took pains with his imaginary universe to have it all make narrative sense. What we should pay attention to is how he does this. The best science fiction is great because of what it says about our world in the present and Dune is no exception.

Throughout the novels and film adaptations, much of Dune’s plot revolves around the desert planet of Arrakis. Arrakis was long ago a water world covered by oceans and its transformation into a vast desert of sand dunes expresses the tendency of things to change into their opposites. This tendency is a staple of Heraclitus’ ancient Greek philosophy, it is an ancient Chinese principle of the I Ching, of yin and yang and was popularized by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung who had a tremendous influence on Herbert. The transformation of things into their opposites is also articulated by concepts like “only the living may be dead” or “the Sun at its zenith must turn toward its setting.”² These simple articulations are true but omit the key ingredient of dialectical conception which is the countervailing force, the contradiction.

Dialectics

The unity of opposites is foundational to modern dialectical thinking but it is the strength of contradictory energies that determine the transformation. The living being will struggle against its environment and degenerating cellular metabolism before death comes, just as the force of a rotating Earth is what brings the Sun into view each day. On Arrakis, it was the introduction of sandworm larvae to the planet which made it a desert, as the spawning larvae enclosed the existing water in their bodies until it was all gone. With the larvae, this simple contradiction turned a water world into sand but, without it, the oceans would have remained forever. It is the contradiction which provides friction—the energy necessary to break up stasis, create change and propel matter.

Dialectical reversals leave their fingerprints all over the story of Dune. For example, when the Baron of the powerful House Harkonnen orders the annihilation of House Atreides and the genocide of Arrakis’ Fremen people, he sets in motion the forces which would destroy his own house and the imperial order writ large: the Fremen give shelter to the surviving Atreides’ son who then guides them on a violent quest to destroy the oppressive imperial order, beginning with the assassination of the Baron and his heir. In sequels, the Fremen army overruns the galactic Imperium and realize their long-standing ambition of terraforming Arrakis into a greener, more habitable planet. But their success is what renders them extinct; when they disperse and lose their customs attached to the desert planet, they cease to exist as a distinct people. The dialectical reversal occurs here at the moment of victory, when their success amounts to their demise.

In Dune, as on Earth, “history puts its worst foot forward.”³ From an attempted genocide of the Fremen by House Harkonnen, both are ultimately destroyed—the Fremen being victims of success, the Harkonnens victims of failure. But Jameson reminds us that “these conditions of possibility are what you work back to, after the fact.” We cannot know in advance the consequences of an action taken, whether the existing conditions will lead to success or what contradictions remain to run us over in reverse.⁴ This is true whether we are talking about a fictional jihad in Dune, the legacy of the Treaty of Versailles or the genocide in Gaza. Temporality is an important aspect of dialectical thinking as the present represents yet another unity of opposites: that moment when knowledge of the past meets everything unknown about the future.

The Bene Gesserit are a matriarchal order whose ultimate goal is to obliterate this opposition of known past and unknown future by producing a superhuman who can presently know both at once. At the point where Villeneuve’s films pick up, their plan was to have the Harkonnen heir reproduce with Paul Atreides’ unborn sister after reaching an appropriate age, giving birth to an all-seeing messiah. This plan did not materialize because, despite their superior access to ancient memories, the future is shrouded to them as it is for anyone.

There is a caution to dialecticians here, that even the best-laid plans will always find complications and contradiction beyond the simple cause-and-effect equation. When evaluating the future state of things, such as the consequences of the Trump presidency or the social implications of environmental ruination, it is important to guard against the myopic scope that searches for the path to a preferred outcome. Rather, we must consider the prior contradictions brought us to the present momentum before considering the future oppositions which are inevitably aroused within a spiralling capitalist juggernaut. Every future is preceded by a past and the task of the dialectician is to try and locate these “future anteriors” before submitting a range of possible outcomes.

Implausibilities

Although the Bene Gesserit were unable to foresee the dramatic reversal of fortunes experienced by the Fremen people and great houses of Dune, their general goal of maintaining stability in the galaxy can be judged positively. In the universe of Dune, imperial dynasties last millennia, the Spacing Guild, Bene Gesserit and Mentats mirror medieval-style guilds and monastic orders, aristocratic bloodlines trace to prehistory and antique weaponry like swords experience revivals. While the political dramas and fight scenes make for a rapturous story, the “feudalism in space” that Dune showcases feels impossible for a few reasons.

Every social organization carries with it processes that both uphold and undermine the system simultaneously. These supporting and undermining processes are things like class division, use of resources, technology, environmental conditions, religious movements, political organization and so on. In Dance of the Dialectic, Bertell Ollman points out that “over time, it is the undermining aspects that prevail.”⁵

For most of human existence, human beings organized along tribal lines, in hunter-gatherer societies that were primitive communist. The reason why this system endured for well over 100,000 years is because it embedded almost no undermining processes for much of its existence; low population density, strong communal cooperation, plenty of land to roam and natural resources to harvest. What undermined the communal system was a warming climate and the mass extinction of megafauna at the end of the ice age. The nomadic tribe then found itself at a material disadvantage to the permanent settlement and it was here when class society emerged, as both land and people became property.

The feudal system in the West appeared much later, a synthesis between monotheistic Christian religion, successive Germanic assaults on the Western Roman Empire and a collapse of the urban economy. It was a system sustained by the suppression of usury, the ideological monopoly of the Catholic Church, control of land by warlords and aristocrats and the extraction of rents from the peasantry. Since feudalism crumbled upon the discovery of the Americas and the exploitation of its vast landmass, it is difficult to imagine how such a system could assert itself in the context of a spacefaring, multi-planetary civilization. Socialists generally believe that unlocking the technological capability for cheap and efficient space travel would duplicate the conditions of primitive communism, in a higher form: low population density relative to the stars, abundant natural resources, strong communal cooperation amongst starship crews and the ability to relocate in the galaxy should undesirable circumstances arise.

Reconciliation

Herbert understood the relationship between class-power and scarcity, with his character Liet-Kynes of the Fremen remarking, “beyond a critical point within finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase.” This is a matter of history on Earth, as the advent of nutrient-dense agriculture increased humanity’s numbers, shrank the quantity of available land and ripened the conditions needed for slavery, feudalism and then capitalism. The Fremen are oriented toward a more nomadic, communal society because the harsh conditions of Arrakis requires mutual cooperation and low population density in order for them to survive.

With the historical experience of Earth in mind, we must assume Arrakis is an outlier in the Imperium. Herbert gave his fictional universe a feudal structure which implies a few characteristics: that the planets of the Imperium became crowded over the centuries; there is little upward social mobility; the economic strength of the ruling houses derives from rents; technology is restricted; religion is uniform. This is explicitly evidenced in a few areas of the story. First, there is the Spacing Guild that holds a monopoly on interstellar space travel, effectively making it impossible for the average person in the Imperium to escape the tyrant ruling their planet. Second, there is the Bene Gesserit and a standardized “Orange Catholic Bible” which confers a degree of religious conformity to the galactic feudal empire. Third, there is a prohibition on certain technologies, including “thinking machines,” which may otherwise provide the basis for revolution.

Because Dune focuses so closely on those at the top of the social pyramid, the processes that either support or undermine the centralized authority of the galactic empire are obscured. It isn’t the political intrigue or battles on the ramparts that make any human society tick; it is the people at the economic base with boring and ordinary lives. The ones who feel anxious during a commute and go to work for a living and play with their kids at home—they are the ones that make their rulers possible.

Frank Herbert once described himself as a “techno-peasant” and since it is a peasantry that supports monastic orders and aristocratic titles, this label must apply to the average resident of the Imperium as well. It is incredibly pessimistic to think that humanity could achieve technological mastery over the stars only to replicate the oppression of the Dark Ages. But class systems are inherently unstable—as the existential problems which press us today attest. But if the Dark Ages lasted one thousand years on Earth there is no reason to think it could last tens of thousands of years across space. A fictional universe can send us to the stars and wave away class struggle with a pen stroke. But in the real universe we would have to abolish this primary contradiction long before taking such a grand evolutionary leap.

Thanks for reading!

Footnotes:
1. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (Verso, 2010), 102. ↩︎
2. The first quotation is from Heraclitus, Fragments (Penguin, 2003), 49 and the second quotation from The I Ching or Book of Changes (Princeton University Press, 1967), 63. ↩︎
3. Henri Lefebvre cited in Jameson, Valences, 287. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 280. ↩︎
5. Bertell Ollman, Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx’s Method (University of Illinois Press, 2003), 163-4. ↩︎
21 Jan 26