As many capitalists would love to remind you, capitalism is an improvement over feudalism. I’d like to remind them a highly democratic form of socialism would be leaps and bounds ahead of what exists today, but that’s a case for later in the video. First, I’d like to acknowledge we are perhaps a bit freer in a real sense than those who came before us in ways the 2021 movie The White Tiger illustrates.
“The greatest thing to come out of this country in its 10,000 history is the rooster coop. They can see and smell the blood. They know they are next, but they don’t rebel. They don’t try to get out of the coop. Servants here have been raised to behave the same. The furniture on his back is worth at least two years of his salary, and yet he will faithfully pedal the money back to his boss without ever touching a single rupee. No servant does. Why?… Because 99.9% of us are caught in the rooster coop. The trustworthiness of servants is so strong that you can put the key to emancipation in a man’s hand and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”
Feudalism was bad. Like a cage, it was an ideological trap that enslaved much of the world for a time. While it’s hard to imagine, it’s not as dead as the aforementioned capitalist would like you to believe. But this film does something really special; it shows us how inescapable that system must have seemed to be when it was the governing philosophy of the world, because to many in the background of this film, it seems inescapable now.
“The desire to be a servant was bred into me, poured into my blood, hammered into my head.”
Did the 1500’s seem like the end of history? Did it seem like there was no alternative as Maggie Thatcher so famously pronounced?
In The White Tiger we get a glimpse at the conditions of impoverished communities in India, and while it’s a shocking way of life, is it really so different from our own? As our aspiring capitalist hero Balram puts it, “India is two countries in one, an India of light and an India of darkness.” This is meant to describe the rampant income inequality in much of India under capitalism. Balram seeks to live in the India of light, even though he began his life in the servant class, and he will break all the rules to get there, all to escape the rooster cage of the near feudalistic India of darkness.
Was Capitalism a revolution away from feudalism or was it all just rebranding?
The problem is illustrated in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism by comparing capitalism to The Thing from a film of the same name:
“a monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact… When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally.”
Capitalism is most simply defined as an ideology of “Profit makes right,” or as Balram puts it, “Elections’ promises have taught me how important it is not to be a poor man in a free democracy,” as his father dies of a preventable illness because no one is willing to build a hospital near his village simply because it isn’t profitable.”
Even if an action is illegal, as long as it stands to profit more than one could be fined for doing it, typically an agent within a capitalist system would take that action. In this, even oppositional beliefs can be broken down and incorporated into capitalism so long as they produce profit. We see this in the movie, as exorbitant bribes are paid to the government to avoid paying a higher price in taxes. To the wealthy under capitalism, a fine or a bribe is no longer a punishment if it remains more profitable than following the law.
This is why slavery changed form in the 19th century instead of ending in America with the 13th Amendment: it was still profitable, so capitalism gave it a facelift and continued in a way that could be more easily justified to the consumers of the products of slave labor. This same digestion and reorganization happened with these feudalistic systems as well. Little has changed except that now the masters are capitalists and not lords.
For Balram, his landlord is just a feudal lord with a new, capitalist title. He owns the entire village and charges monopolistic rates to squeeze excess wealth from the families living there while his own family lives in luxurious excess. As Balram puts it, “he fed so much on us that there was nothing left to feed on.” From this point on the man is no longer referred to as a landlord, but as his Master.
Less than twenty minutes into the film, Balram begins to explain why Indian servants are so loyal and in doing so, he reveals the nature of the cage he is trapped in. “Every master has to know exactly where their servant’s family live at all times just in case a servant decides to steal from their employer and run. If so [the servant is killed]. Fair enough, I would do the same. But it’s what the masters do to their servant’s families… [gunshots]. This is how the rooster coop works. This is how it traps so many men and women in India.”
The invisible cage of capitalism is much the same. We choose our lords (landlords) and our masters (employers) so that we may be able to eat and survive, and that so that the families who depend on us may eat and survive as well. We can’t even imagine a world where food and housing are a right, even though we produce more of both than there are people to consume them. Much like the rooster cage Balram describes, Fisher describes capitalist realism as, “acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”
“‘Capitalist realism’ is not an original coinage. It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion… What is new about my use of the term is the more expansive – even exorbitant – meaning that I ascribe to it. Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education.”
In the opening pages of his book, Fisher describes his take on the phrase capitalist realism by describing a scene in another movie, Children of Men. In it, the character Theo is taken to a museum and shown the great artistic wonders of their dying world, prompting Theo to ask, “how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?” The alibi can no longer be future generations since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: “I try not to think about it.”
Fisher explains that:
“what is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias … democracy is suspended, and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden… For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)”
“Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”
Likewise, web cafés, shopping malls, and feudal lords can coexist. Even a “Great Socialist” like the folk hero politician in White Tiger can be a capitalist, and have a role within the system, if she’s willing to allow herself and her position to be corrupted by it. Balram discovers that she is taking millions of rupees in bribes from his master’s family to ignore the fact that they pay no taxes on the coal operations she had given to them to privatize. Even a low caste woman, respected and revered by the poor of India would betray her socialism for all the profit they could jam into a red leather bag.
This is the most troubling nature of capitalism: its ability to co-opt anything. As Fisher writes,
“What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously possessed subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture… ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No-one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. …Cobain gave wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought, and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. …like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum.’ Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed.”
Balram’s rags-to-riches journey is a bumpy ride, and these are the bigger spoilers, so skip the next bit if you want to be surprised when you see it. He leaves the tea shop of his poor village to become his landlord’s driver. Though this allows him to make more money than he even thinks he deserves, he is still subjected to living in servant’s quarters like this: (picture for article).
It’s in this line of work he discovers the Great Socialist’s betrayal of the people, and he is asked to do the unthinkable by his master: take responsibility for a hit-and-run murder committed by his daughter-in-law, Pinkie. Balram readily signs over his freedom without a second thought or asking for any payment.
“To think of this again makes me so angry that I might go out and cut the throat of some rich man right now. Not once did I think I had options. Not once did I think I’ll tell the judge the truth or run away. I was trapped in the rooster coop.” Later, speaking to himself after receiving a little under ten thousand rupees from Pinkie he says, “If she thought she owed you 10,000, what she truly owed you ten times more, no, one hundred times more. They made me sign that confession and I asked for nothing in return. Why did I not ask? I did not think to ask.”
These two things weigh on him until he’s convinced, he must leave the cage or lose his freedom. As he drives his master from hotel to hotel paying bribes, he eyes the four million rupees set aside for the Great Socialist and kills his master, taking his name and money and starting over.
“For hundreds of millions of people like me there is only one way to break free. I had to accept what this man’s family would do, not just to me, but to my family.”
Does he do better than his masters in this new life? Yes and no. He uses the money to bribe his way into owning a profitable car service, though he does take pride in treating his employees much better than he was treated. In the end he became everything his masters were, killers, thieves, bribe payers, and employers, and this is his freedom from the rooster cage.
Now with enough money to invest scraped from the labor value of his employees, he has become a master himself, no longer a servant. But he could only accumulate so much money to begin with by grossly underpaying his employees for their labor value. He says in the end of the movie that between his business and his investments, he now has what we can assume to be a little more than 60 million rupees. He’s learned the trick of capitalism: create a monopoly through bribes and hire low wage workers to do high wage work. As Balram said to himself before, “That’s not how rich people think, have you learned nothing? If she thought she owed you 10,000, what she truly owed you ten times more, no, one hundred times more.”
While it’s true he’s changed his station in life from a servant to a master, he’s just shifted to a position where he still enforces the rooster cage on the servants, but a kinder version. An invisible cage that still allows them to feel free as they dutifully continue to carry excesses of money to their employer. So, by the logic of the movie, the way out of capitalist feudalism is to build a better rooster cage and treat your employees with respect while you take the excess value of their labor for yourself.
White Tiger is a story about capitalism granting Balram freedom from feudalism, and while it is indeed an improvement, even the sense of freedom Balram feels is a false one. Balram is no longer a servant, or a rooster. He is now a master, an entrepreneur, a white tiger, but he is no less in an ideological cage.
During the movie, when Balram refers to democracy and freedom, he often speaks of capitalism with the old Cold War associations. Even though Balram prides himself in being an entrepreneur, a more freeing title than driver or servant, he still acts as though he believes bribing politicians and men in power is inherent to how democracy, and through its capitalism, really works. When Balram and his master Ashok refer to democracy, they do so with derision, because they know what a sham it really is.
In his book, Fisher asks “If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from?”
His answer, which I will discuss further in my next video, is that capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be unsustainable as if this might break the mental continuum where it feels as though capitalism has always existed and always will continue to exist.
“To reclaim a real political agency means first accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation.”
As for how this might happen, let me leave you with the last paragraph of his book. “The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
As many capitalists would love to remind you, capitalism is an improvement over feudalism. I’d like to remind them a highly democratic form of socialism would be leaps and bounds ahead of what exists today, but that’s a case for later in the video. First I’d like to acknowledge we are perhaps a bit freer in a real sense than those who came before us in ways the 2021 movie The White Tiger illustrates.
“The greatest thing to come out of this country in it’s 10,000 history is the rooster coop. They can see and smell the blood. They know they are next, but they don’t rebel. They don’t try to get out of the coop. Servants here have been raised to behave the same. The furniture on his back is worth at least two years of his salary, and yet he will faithfully pedal the money back to his boss without ever touching a single rupee. No servant does. Why?… Because 99.9% of us are caught in the rooster coop. The trustworthiness of servants is so strong that you can put the key to emancipation in a man’s hand and he will throw it back at you with a curse.”
Feudalism was bad. Like a cage, it was an ideological trap that enslaved much of the world for a time. While it’s hard to imagine, it’s not as dead as the aforementioned capitalist would like you to believe. But this film does something really special; it shows us how inescapable that system must have seemed to be when it was the governing philosophy of the world, because to many in the background of this film, it seems inescapable now.
“The desire to be a servant was bred into me, poured into my blood, hammered into my head.”
Did the 1500’s seem like the end of history? Did it seem like there was no alternative as Maggie Thatcher so famously pronounced?
In The White Tiger, we get a glimpse at the conditions of impoverished communities in India, and while it’s a shocking way of life, is it really so different from our own? As our aspiring capitalist hero Balram puts it, “India is two countries in one, an India of light and an India of darkness.” This is meant to describe the rampant income inequality in much of India under capitalism. Balram seeks to live in the India of light, even though he began his life in the servant class, and he will break all the rules to get there, all in an effort to escape the rooster cage of the near feudalistic India of darkness.
Was Capitalism a revolution away from feudalism or was it all just rebranding?
The problem is illustrated in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism by comparing capitalism to The Thing from a film of the same name:
“A monstrous, infinitely plastic entity, capable of metabolizing and absorbing anything with which it comes into contact… When it actually arrives, capitalism brings with it a massive desacralization of culture. It is a system which is no longer governed by any transcendent Law; on the contrary, it dismantles all such codes, only to re-install them on an ad hoc basis. The limits of capitalism are not fixed by fiat, but defined (and redefined) pragmatically and improvisationally.”
Capitalism is most simply defined as an ideology of “Profit makes right,” or as Balram puts it, “Elections’ promises have taught me how important it is not to be a poor man in a free democracy,” as his father dies of a preventable illness because no one is willing to build a hospital near his village simply because it isn’t profitable.”
Even if an action is illegal, as long as it stands to profit more than one could be fined for doing it, typically an agent within a capitalist system would take that action. In this, even oppositional beliefs can be broken down and incorporated into capitalism so long as they produce profit. We see this in the movie, as exorbitant bribes are paid to the government to avoid paying a higher price in taxes. To the wealthy under capitalism, a fine or a bribe is no longer a punishment if it remains more profitable than following the law.
This is why slavery changed form in the 19th century instead of ending in America with the 13th Amendment: it was still profitable, so capitalism gave it a facelift and continued in a way that could be more easily justified to the consumers of the products of slave labor. This same digestion and reorganization happened with these feudalistic systems as well. Little has changed except that now the masters are capitalists and not lords.
For Balram, his landlord is just a feudal lord with a new, capitalist title. He owns the entire village and charges monopolistic rates to squeeze excess wealth from the families living there while his own family lives in luxurious excess. As Balram puts it, “he fed so much on us that there was nothing left to feed on.” From this point on the man is no longer referred to as a landlord, but as his Master.
Less than twenty minutes into the film, Balram begins to explain why Indian servants are so loyal and in doing so, he reveals the nature of the cage he is trapped in.
“Every master has to know exactly where their servant’s family live at all times just in case a servant decides to steal from their employer and run. If so, [the servant is killed]. Fair enough, I would do the same. But it’s what the masters do to their servant’s families… [gunshots]. This is how the rooster coop works. This is how it traps so many men and women in India.”
The invisible cage of capitalism is much the same. We choose our lords (landlords) and our masters (employers) so that we may be able to eat and survive, and that so that the families who depend on us may eat and survive as well. We can’t even imagine a world where food and housing are a right, even though we produce more of both than there are people to consume them. Much like the rooster cage Balram describes, Fisher describes capitalist realism as, “acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.”
“‘Capitalist realism’ is not an original coinage. It was used as far back as the 1960s by a group of German pop artists and by Michael Schudson in his 1984 book Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion… What is new about my use of the term is the more expansive – even exorbitant – meaning that I ascribe to it. Capitalist realism as I understand it cannot be confined to art or to the quasi-propagandistic way in which advertising functions. It is more like a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education.”
In the opening pages of his book, Fisher describes his take on the phrase capitalist realism by describing a scene in another movie; Children of Men. In it, the character Theo is taken to a museum and shown the great artistic wonders of their dying world, prompting Theo to ask, “how all this can matter if there will be no-one to see it?” The alibi can no longer be future generations, since there will be none. The response is nihilistic hedonism: “I try not to think about it.”
Fisher explains that:
“what is unique about the dystopia in Children of Men is that it is specific to late capitalism. This isn’t the familiar totalitarian scenario routinely trotted out in cinematic dystopias … democracy is suspended and the country is ruled over by a self-appointed Warden… For all that we know, the authoritarian measures that are everywhere in place could have been implemented within a political structure that remains, notionally, democratic. The War on Terror has prepared us for such a development: the normalization of crisis produces a situation in which the repealing of measures brought in to deal with an emergency becomes unimaginable (when will the war be over?)”
“Watching Children of Men, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination – the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in Children of Men. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”
Likewise, web cafés, shopping malls, and feudal lords can coexist. Even a “Great Socialist” like the folk hero politician in White Tiger can be a capitalist, and have a role within the system, if she’s willing to allow herself and her position to be corrupted by it. Balram discovers that she is taking millions of rupees in bribes from his master’s family to ignore the fact that they pay no taxes on the coal operations she had given to them to privatize. Even a low caste woman, respected and revered by the poor of India would betray her socialism for all the profit they could jam into a red leather bag.
This is the most troubling nature of capitalism: its ability to co-opt anything. As Fisher writes, “What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the preemptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture… ‘Alternative’ and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather, they are styles, in fact the dominant styles, within the mainstream. No one embodied (and struggled with) this deadlock more than Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. …Cobain seemed to give wearied voice to the despondency of the generation that had come after history, whose every move was anticipated, tracked, bought and sold before it had even happened. Cobain knew that he was just another piece of spectacle, that nothing runs better on MTV than a protest against MTV; knew that his every move was a cliché scripted in advance, knew that even realizing it is a cliché. …like postmodern culture in general, Cobain found himself in ‘a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum’. Here, even success meant failure, since to succeed would only mean that you were the new meat on which the system could feed.”
Balram’s rags-to-riches journey is a bumpy ride, and these are the bigger spoilers, so skip the next bit if you want to be surprised when you see it. He leaves the tea shop of his poor village to become his landlord’s driver. Though this allows him to make more money than he even thinks he deserves, he is still subjected to living in servant’s quarters like this: (picture for article).
It’s in this line of work he discovers the Great Socialist’s betrayal of the people, and he is asked to do the unthinkable by his master: take responsibility for a hit-and-run murder committed by his daughter-in-law, Pinkie. Balram readily signs over his freedom without a second thought or asking for any payment.
“To think of this again makes me so angry that I might go out and cut the throat of some rich man right now. Not once did I think I had options. Not once did I think I’ll tell the judge the truth or run away. I was trapped in the rooster coop.” Later, speaking to himself after receiving a little under ten thousand rupees from Pinkie he says, “If she thought she owed you 10,000, what she truly owed you ten times more, no, one hundred times more. They made me sign that confession and I asked for nothing in return. Why did I not ask? I did not think to ask.”
These two things weigh on him until he’s convinced he must leave the cage or lose his freedom. As he drives his master from hotel to hotel paying bribes, he eyes the four million rupees set aside for the Great Socialist and kills his master, taking his name and money and starting over.
“For hundreds of millions of people like me there is only one way to break free. I had to accept what this man’s family would do, not just to me, but to my family.”
Does he do better than his masters in this new life? Yes and no. He uses the money to bribe his way into owning a profitable car service, though he does take pride in treating his employees much better than he was treated. In the end he became everything his masters were, killers, thieves, bribe payers, and employers, and this is his freedom from the rooster cage.
Now with enough money to invest scraped from the labor value of his employees, he has become a master himself, no longer a servant. But he could only accumulate so much money to begin with by grossly underpaying his employees for their labor value. He says in the end of the movie that between his business and his investments, he now has what we can assume to be a little more than 60 million rupees. He’s learned the trick of capitalism: create a monopoly through bribes and hire low wage workers to do high wage work. As Balram said to himself before, “That’s not how rich people think, have you learned nothing? If she thought she owed you 10,000, what she truly owed you ten times more, no, one hundred times more.”
While it’s true he’s changed his station in life from a servant to a master, he’s just shifted to a position where he still enforces the rooster cage on the servants, but a kinder version. An invisible cage that still allows them to feel free as they dutifully continue to carry excesses of money to their employer. So, by the logic of the movie, the way out of capitalist feudalism is to build a better rooster cage and treat your employees with respect while you take the excess value of their labor for yourself.
White Tiger is a story about capitalism granting Balram freedom from feudalism, and while it is indeed an improvement, even the sense of freedom Balram feels is a false one. Balram is no longer a servant, or a rooster. He is now a master, an entrepreneur, a white tiger, but he is no less in an ideological cage.
During the movie, when Balram refers to democracy and freedom, he often speaks of capitalism with the old Cold War associations. Even though Balram prides himself in being an entrepreneur, a more freeing title than driver or servant, he still acts as though he believes bribing politicians and men in power is inherent to how democracy, and through it capitalism, really works. When Balram and his master Ashok refer to democracy, they do so with derision, because they know what a sham it really is.
In his book, Fisher asks “If capitalist realism is so seamless, and if current forms of resistance are so hopeless and impotent, where can an effective challenge come from?”
His answer, which I will discuss further in my next video, is that capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be unsustainable as if this might break the mental continuum where it feels as though capitalism has always existed and always will continue to exist.
“To reclaim a real political agency means first of all accepting our insertion at the level of desire in the remorseless meat-grinder of Capital. What is being disavowed in the abjection of evil and ignorance onto fantasmatic Others is our own complicity in planetary networks of oppression. What needs to be kept in mind is both that capitalism is a hyper-abstract impersonal structure and that it would be nothing without our cooperation.”
As for how this might happen, let me leave you with the last paragraph of his book.
“The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again.”
