Tag: Nature

  • Marx and Shakespeare: The Brave New World of The Tempest

    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. ↩︎
  • We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    We Are Ruled by a Lord of the Flies

    “Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill! You knew, didn’t you? I’m part of you? Close, close! I’m the reason why things are what they are.”

    —William Golding, Lord of the Flies.

    For anyone thinking that Putin had overstepped boundaries when he invaded Ukraine, it turns out he was only ahead of the curve. Since that time we’ve had genocidal warfare visit Palestine, a president kidnapped from Venezuela, a starvation blockade imposed on Cuba and a criminal aerial bombardment come to Iran. Multiple crimes, in other words, and committed by successive presidential administrations of the West’s flagship state. No wonder the United Nations Secretary-General recently denounced international relations as a “law of the jungle.”

    The Jungle Book

    It must be a vestige of colonial history that conjures images of undulating spear tips and blood-stained fur whenever the jungle is invoked. This sort of iconography probably accounts for the jungle island setting of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, the story about a group of schoolboys who get marooned during a military evacuation amidst a nuclear war. Initially, the boys are quite “civilized.” They elect a chief, hold orderly assemblies using a conch shell and maintain a signal fire to attract rescuers. But it doesn’t take long for these trappings of civilization to melt away under the tropical heat. Conflict divides the boys when the signal fire goes out and the hunting of a pig arouses primitive instincts, culminating in a spree of orgiastic violence. The aggressive faction of boys consumes the other by way of floggings and outright murder, and they eventually set the island on fire in an effort to flush out their first elected chief. 

    The great pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus wrote: “Fire of all things is the judge and ravisher.” We see this in Lord of the Flies, with the signal fire representing civilized order and the brush fire representing the desperate plunge into chaos and savagery. Golding possessed a cynical view of human nature that sees people animated by sadistic impulses in the service of selfish interests and power. This is a common position on human nature, also articulated by Chinese legalist philosophy and Thomas Hobbes’ “war of all against all” that characterizes life in a state of nature. Sigmund Freud adopted this position in his later writings as well, asserting the existence of a “primary mutual hostility of human beings” which civilization must tame by setting “limits to man’s aggressive instincts.”1

    One commonality between Golding, Hobbes, Freud and the Chinese legalists is that they were all heavily influenced by the demoniacal experience of warfare.2 Witnessing first-hand the human capacity for violence leaves scars on the human psyche that are well documented. Through allegory, Golding asserts that Satan’s captain, Beelzebub—the Lord of the Flies—is not an external supernatural force, but is actually a force inside us, a force within. Freud appeals to the death instinct in order to explain human aggression, similar to Hobbes and the legalists who view aggression as a simple fact of our nature. 

    Human Nature?

    Once that view of human nature is accepted, it is explained that human beings enter a social contract and form civilization as a refuge from our own terrifying base instincts. Violence and corruption in the world can be chalked up to inherently brutal instincts that inevitably infect all of our carefully designed social institutions and best laid plans. Although civilization can never be perfect, it remains the thin red line between orderly society and the violent anarchy of nature.

    The only problem with that argument is that it isn’t true. There is real world evidence that rejects the cynics and supports a view that humans are naturally cooperative rather than hostile: in 1965 a group of six teenage boys from Tonga found themselves stranded on a remote Pacific island. Far from descending into an orgy of violence, they built shelter and divided chores. They worked together and planted a garden, hunted feral chickens, collected rainwater in deadwood and rotated cooking duties. They maintained a fire and strummed a makeshift guitar and sang songs in the evenings to lift their mood. 

    The experience of the Tongan castaways gels with Raymond Kelly’s “Prehistoric warlessness” hypothesis, asserting that conflict and violence between human groups was virtually non-existent up until the Neolithic Revolution.3 That does not mean that there were no instances of homicide or executions within groups—nobody has that answer—but systematic warfare was simply not a feature of the Paleolithic economy that dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years. This is because incredibly low population densities, combined with relatively high natural abundance, provided no incentive for humans to engage in inter-tribal violence.

    In our actual state of nature, warfare offered little gain in terms of resources but had the potential to destroy both warring parties with only a few casualties on both sides. It was therefore preferential to seek new territories on which to hunt and gather rather than fight over them. This is what explains human migrations out of Africa and our species’ rapid spread around the globe. 

    In a footnote, Karl Marx argues that philosophers “must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.”4 Our human nature in general demands that we eat, drink, breathe, shelter, reproduce, etc. Modern human behaviour, such as language, art, music, abstract thought, planning and tool making arose to meet those needs. We can recognize that the universal behavioural traits of humans could not have been achievable in a Hobbesian “war of all against all” state of nature—every one of them required positive social intercourse in order to become characteristic of our species. It follows that cooperation in the context of low population density and relative natural abundance was the state of nature that defined our prehistoric evolution and are suggestive of “human nature in general.”

    Civilization of Corruption

    On the other side of the ledger is “human nature as modified in each historical epoch.” While our general characteristics concretized during the epoch of primitive communism, the expression of human behaviour began to vary wildly as environmental changes led to sedentary living, resource scarcity and class divisions that gradually permeating the social structure. The biological demands on human beings led us to developing a potential for many behavioural expressions—including turning our hunting spears on one another. But this potential for warfare and organized violence went unfulfilled until population growth and sedentism made it an economic necessity for one group to defend territory against another. From the Neolithic Revolution onward, a technological arms race and complex division of labour emerged to satisfy our biological needs. The resulting base and superstructure is history.

    Jean-Jacques Rousseau rightly scolded Hobbes for taking modern, “civilized” people and ascribing their flaws to nature.5 The philosophical question is this: does human nature corrupt civilization or does civilization corrupt human nature? Marx and Rousseau affirmed the latter, and that is also where the preponderance of anthropological evidence lies. It is not our nature that commands a world plagued by corruption, greed, ecological destruction and warfare. Indeed, our ability to recognize these things as defects affirms a natural revulsion towards them. Although we have the capacity for greed and violence, we also have instincts that lead us toward love, generosity and cooperation. 

    Resource scarcity has prodded human beings into unleashing some of their worst potentialities. The good news about our current capitalist mode of production is that scarcity has become largely artificial by way of tremendous leaps in productive technology. It is entirely possible to defeat scarcity with a new, cooperative mode of production that finally unleashes our best potentialities. Until then, we are ruled by a Lord of the Flies, but not in the way that Golding imagined. The Lord of the Flies is not an internal, but an external force; an alien process of capital accumulation and rigged market forces that determines our class standing and incentivizes our worst behaviours.

    Thanks for reading!

    Footnotes:

    1. Sigmund Freud, The Freud Reader edited by Peter Gay (W.W. Norton, 1989): 750. ↩︎

    2. Specifically World War II, the English Civil War, World War I and the Warring States period of China, respectively. ↩︎

    3. Raymond C. Kelly, “The evolution of lethal intergroup violence,” in PNASVol. 102, No. 43: 15294-15298. ↩︎

    4. Karl Marx, “Conversion of Surplus-Value into Capital” in Capital, Vol. One. He is specifically critical of utilitarians here, pointing out the utility of human behaviour can vary wildly depending on the mode of production available. ↩︎

    5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (Online Library, 2008): 23. ↩︎