The Political Economy of Superman

This text contains segments that were left out of the video for time and pacing reasons.

Superman, defender of private property, defender of capital. In this film we see him in his common role of defending the banking class from threats to their institution of usury.

Again the theme of machines taking over. [It's a dystopian theme directly bound up in our experience of capitalism. Constant innovations in machinery are ever revolutionizing our experience of space and time, propelling us into a dizzying world of mechanization seemingly out of our control.] Why is this theme so prevalent in fiction? Because our experience of capitalism is one in which machines are constantly replacing human labor in an effort to make labor more productive. Machines are constantly taking on more and more of the tasks that people used to do. And so our own productive labor is objectified outside of ourselves as evil machines that threaten to dominate and destroy us. The catch is that without human labor an economy can produce no value.

[Most obviously, capitalism needs to sell us more and more stuff. Because capitalists are in business to constantly be making a profit they need to be constantly turning over and selling new products. Thus is capital tied up in the construction of social wants and needs. And much of this means the development of ever new gadgets to sell to us.]

[Most important is the role of robots in increasing labor productivity. By replacing humans with machines capitalists create more value per worker. It also eliminates jobs, drives down wages and degrades work. But this also creates some problems for capitalism.. as we'll see. Because human labor is the sole source of real value in an economy, the replacement of humans with machines also threatens to undermine capitalist profit as a whole.]

Our archetypal tale starts with a basic violation- the violation of the holy sanctum of private property. The capitalist’s worst nightmare. And who is this invisible hand behind the machine? What is this mysterious force threatening accumulation? This sinister shadow?

[Of course we aren't meant to question whether the wealth of banks is a type of stealing even though banks make their profits through usury. Stealing is probably the simplest way of getting rich, but also a method which threatens other forms of capitalist accumulation. The mechanical monster here is robbing a bank. The banking class accumulates wealth through usury- in effect skimming money off of the value created by productive workers elsewhere in the economy.]

Just as a shadow is an inverted image of a real thing, we discover the monster is a robot in the image of a man. Indeed that’s what robot’s are here to do- replace man. Capitalists introduce robots into the work process to replace humans thereby increasing the output per remaining worker. This increases the rate of exploitation.

Here the puzzle is that, instead of this robot doing productive labor for a capitalist he is stealing from other capitalists out there in the economy who are actually creating real values. Values that have been stored in a bank. Why?

Well we discover that this capitalist has completely mechanized his work force. He only has robots. In his drive to increase productivity through mechanization he eventually rid himself of workers altogether. The problem is, once we eliminate labor from a task, that task ceases to have economic value. This is the source of capitalist crisis. Without a source of profit in production this capitalist-gone-wrong has turned to theft. refer to example

[The thefts involve the theft of capital in its money and commodity form. In its monetary form capital isn't capable of creating more value. Value can only be created in the production process by living labor. As money, capital can only circulate values through equal exchange.]

The mechanical monster shows us here how easy it is to replace human labor. He is really a type of superhuman here that can do anything a human can do better- much like superman. This threatens the worker directly because it destroys jobs and lowers wages. Managers meticulously micromanage work until it is routinized enough to be given to a robot. Then the robots are taught the exact motions of the worker. That’s why the monster is so scary. It can be human way better than us. That’s the source of its invincibility.

This is great because now we have a double theft. The theft of private property is also a theft of female purity, of virginity. But I think we should take this one step further. This also an attack on the woman as a representation of the motherland. Defense of capital is often bound up in defense of country, family, womanhood. This is the basis of fascism.

Of course the Clark Kent/ superman duality illustrates the way man has to suppress his true greatness in order to participate in bourgeois society. Work here is shown as essentially emasculating. The phone booth is the proverbial closet that clark kent is in.

With Louis in belly of the robot we the ultimate fascist parable: a robot manned by this mad foreign scientist is violating the motherland. At the same time the defense of capitalist private property is conflated with defense of the motherland.

Here’s our first encounter between the superman and the super robot man. It looks strangely like sex. When superman pulls open the robot there is this strange mid-air birth with Lois and the money spilling out of the robot. And for some reason this temporarily depletes superman’s libido. I’ll leave that one for Zizek to figure out.

Now the wealth of the banking class has been directly turned into the motherland itself. And it’s here that the bad guy really starts displaying his classic foreigner facial ticks.

This motif- of being in the bad guys lair, the only human, surrounded by evil machines seems to be a universal nightmare. We always have to sneak into the castle or the hideout or the compound and then be discovered and then saved at the last minute. Again, I’ll leave that one for Zizek.

This I love. It reminds me of some Alex Jones movie where we find out that some corporate leader is actually a satanist who engages in baby-eating rituals. Here, the capitalist-gone-bad, underneath his robot factory, has a satanic cave with cauldrons of molten metal. His lust for the accumulation of wealth seems to be underscored by a subconscious fascination with the occult, witchcraft- general old school evil motifs. This puts capitalist greed outside the sphere of accepted social motivations- it is the evil force lurking below the surface of society.

This is a great scene. Why is the bad guy wearing a tux by the way? We are suppose he has just come from some sort of foreigner dinner party?

The robots “coming to life” is erie because they look like humans. Here man comes face to face with his own productive powers that have been totally objectified in an external machine. The robot is merely man’s intellectual ingenuity and mans capacity to do work totally alienated from man.

We get then a classic John Henry scene of man versus machine. Of course, ordinary workers can never out do a machine so we always need these parables of super men like John Henry, or Neo or superman so we can fantasize about beating the machine.

This is so fantastic. It actually looks like an assembly line in which what is being hammered on, what is being produced is man himself.

Where in John Henry we have this ironic tragedy that the machines can be beat but at the cost of the super hero dying, in Superman we have this less complex fantasy of an unbeatable man.

The numbers on the machines add a nice touch- making them the embodiment of cold, calculating rational forces.
Superman becomes a super-luddite, smashing the machines to bits. It seems the only way to save capitalism from itself is to devalue capital.

And now we are in the world of the subconscious again, with Lois hanging over a void. This time superman makes up for his earlier impotence by saving her from the giant cauldron/vagina. The foreigner runs like a wimp- he is the ultimate intellectual, only able to fight with his inventions- not able to put up a real physical fight. There is a lot of anti-intellectualism in superman, and this is typical of fascist/reactionary ideology.

And we end with this reminder of modern man’s emasculation as a wage laborer.